Gamestop has been a meme stock since covid when it jumped from a few dollars a share to $50 a share. Since 2020 it has fluctuated quite a bit but has overall trended downwards. Now it’s gone from $10 up to $30 each. A fool and his money are soon parted.
As with most AAA-games, the people that view entertainment as a mere tool for money extraction got involved.
Support developers that are actually passionate about entertainment. The ghouls that make games as a means of profit seeking (and who exploit the people who are passionate) can wither away.
I guess it’s nice to have confirmation, but I’m not an ounce surprised that the story of Suicide Squad is “big publisher pushed developer to make live-service trash.” I’d be hopeful that the Rocksteady single-player title could come back, but Zaslav has committed to making more live-service flops. Absolutely wild that they couldn’t learn their lesson from Hogwarts Legacy, you don’t even have to make a single-player openworldathon that good and people will still praise it if you have a popular enough IP.
$200M ain’t no pocket change. One would hope such high-profile failures as this or Avengers would curb execs enthusiasm for live service games, but I’m not holding my breath.
The article even cites all of the similar flops prior to Suicide Squad not deterring leadership on their plan for Suicide Squad. Someone else out there is still making that same mistake. Like Bungie with Marathon, for example.
They should probably be more wary of the likelier—and grimmer—alternative: becoming something closer to most of the other casinos in America, where no parent would ever dream of throwing their kid’s birthday party.
I haven’t been to a Dave & Busters in ages, but I’d guess that their existing business model may not be in great shape. What did they offer? A restaurant with an attached arcade aimed at adults.
Generally, arcades have not done terribly well. There used to be a lot of video arcades all over out there in the 1980s. Video game hardware has gotten a lot cheaper, and a lot of people just have it at home now.
Last I looked (which was not recent), the kid-oriented Chuck-E-Cheese and the adult-oriented Dave & Busters tried to compensate with hardware that had a high hardware cost and couldn’t readily economically be brought home, like light guns, enclosures that enhance immersion (e.g simulated motorcycle seats to ride on on motorcycle games). But for at least some of that, VR setups are probably a partial competitor, and they’re a lot more available.
Many of the setups are aimed at letting multiple people play games together, but wide availability of broadband and VoIP and good headsets has made it easier to play games remotely. That won’t replace all of the experience of playing against someone else in person, but it is a partial substitute.
According to the NRA, on-premises traffic hasn’t returned to its pre-pandemic highs. But drive-through and delivery orders have grown so much that together they now account for a higher share of customer traffic than on-premises dining, for the first time ever. Meanwhile, the only parts of the day with growing foot traffic are the morning and late night, when customers are likely to be on the go.
Like, they may not be able to keep doing what they had been doing.
That’s a really good point about their business model potentially being unsustainable, but I still question if adding gambling is the answer.
Things that get me to go out (and I know that is anecdotal at best) are things like trivia nights, theme nights, stand up comedy, etc. I don’t think I would be very tempted to go out by the opportunity to be hustled in Angry Birds.
I agree that Dave & Buster’s needs to develop a more novel niche to not get erased by home entertainment, but I would be shocked if this was the best way to do it.
Generally, arcades have not done terribly well. There used to be a lot of video arcades all over out there in the 1980s. Video game hardware has gotten a lot cheaper, and a lot of people just have it at home now.
Why bother with going to an arcade when you could go to a cozy place with a Steam Deck? Why pay to play old games on an arcade cabinet when there’s countless handheld emulators out there?
It worked when people had to go to a mall or arcade to play things, but nostalgia can only attract so many people, anymore. The market is no longer captive, and the people who played in arcades have grown up, gotten jobs, families, Steam Decks, and beefy gaming PCs of their own.
The only demo left is the hobbyists, and even they can now build their own arcade cabinets to get some of the experience.
I mean, there’s probably still some niche, but the niche can get pretty small.
Movie theaters kinda did this before the arcades did. Used to be that it wasn’t normal to be able to watch movies at home, but once that happened, the space for movie theaters got a lot smaller.
One reason for the decline in ticket sales in the 2000s is that “home-entertainment options [are] improving all the time— whether streamed movies and television, video games, or mobile apps—and studios releasing fewer movies”, which means that “people are less likely to head to their local multiplex”. This decline is not something that is recent. It has been observed since the 1950s when television became widespread among working-class homes. As the years went on, home media became more popular, and the decline continued. This decline continues until this day. A Pew Media survey from 2006 found that the relationship between movies watched at home versus at the movie theater was in a five to one ratio and 75% of respondents said their preferred way of watching a movie was at home, versus 21% who said they preferred to go to a theater. In 2014, it was reported that the practice of releasing a film in theaters and via on-demand streaming on the same day (for selected films) and the rise in popularity of the Netflix streaming service has led to concerns in the movie theater industry. Another source of competition is television, which has “…stolen a lot of cinema’s best tricks – like good production values and top tier actors – and brought them into people’s living rooms”. Since the 2010s, one of the increasing sources of competition for movie theaters is the increasing ownership by people of home theater systems which can display high-resolution Blu-ray disks of movies on large, widescreen flat-screen TVs, with 5.1 surround sound and a powerful subwoofer for low-pitched sounds.
Several factors contributed to the decline of the drive-in movie industry. Beginning in the late 1960s, drive-in attendance began to decline as the result of improvements and changes to home entertainment, from color television and cable TV to VCRs and video rental in the early 1980s. Additionally, the 1970s energy crisis led to the widespread adoption of daylight saving time (which caused drive-in movies to start an hour later) and lower use of automobiles, making it increasingly difficult for drive-ins to remain profitable.
Mainly following the advent of cable television and video cassette recorder (VCR), then with the arrival of DVD and streaming systems, families were able to enjoy movies in the comfort of their homes. The new entertainment technology increased the options and the movie watching experience.
And, they apparently did a similar-to-D&B’s, more-adult-oriented shift to try to mitigate losses:
While exploitation films had been a drive-in staple since the 1950s, helped by relatively limited oversight compared to downtown theaters, by the 1970s, several venues switched from showing family-friendly fare to R-rated and X-rated films as a way to offset declining patronage and revenue, while other venues that still catered to families, began to show R-rated or pornographic movies in late-night time slots to bring in extra income.[citation needed] This allowed censored materials to be viewed by a wider audience, including those for whom viewing was still illegal in some states, and it was also reliant upon varying local ordinances controlling such material. It also required a relatively remote location away from the heavier populated areas of towns and cities.
I remember when this news first leaked, people online were joking about getting into fights over a 200 dollar bet on a kid’s game if skeeball.
While I’m not sure how common that type of phenomenon would be, I have to agree with the author of this article that I would certainly think twice before bringing a child to a location where gambling is encouraged (especially in conjunction with drinking).
Some interesting info in this article. If game pass hasn’t really paid off (in maintaining growth of new or recurring users), this may be an indication that they will make some changes to it.
Mat Piscatella, executive director of analysis firm Circana, said that monthly, non-mobile, video-game subscription spending in the US “has been flat to low single-digit growth” since the middle of 2021.
Good. Now that we’ve established that the subscription-based videogame market is pretty much saturated with very little potential for growth, can we please stop shoveling out all this live service crap? It didn’t work for Bioware, it didn’t work for Rocksteady Studios and it didn’t work for Arkane Austin. Stop it.
For what? They can’t even use a lot of these IPs anymore. Fallout is now associated with 76 unless you’re thinking of Obsidian. Bethesda as a whole is not trusted for big RPGs after Starfield. Blizzard is a shell of its old self, cutting interest in Warcraft, Starcraft, and Overwatch. Id has been doing okay, but has had a lot of brain drain, and they definitely don’t produce the “live service hits” MS appears to be looking for - just things people would love to see on Game Pass and discard. There’s rumors even Call of Duty is struggling to retain relevance in new releases.
…We about to see Crash vs Spyro Autobattle Royale?
That’s the thing though. Gamers have a special kind of amnesia that gets triggered every time BIG_IP_OF_THEIR_LIKING releases a new sequel or edition. The communities on Lemmy and reddit are unfortunately not indicative of how the wider audience actually perceives games. We’re a fringe group, and the publishers/studios bank hard on that. The uneducated and apathetic masses are their target audience. If the gaming world listened to the likes of Lemmy and reddit users, micro/macrotransactions, early-access hell, and half-finished releases wouldn’t have become common practice. But here we are.
Fallout is now associated with 76 unless you’re thinking of Obsidian.
You may be right. Fallout 76 has however seen a record number of players since the show aired. That’s commonplace with most gaming franchises when a film or TV series comes out. See also: The Last of Us, and SWTOR when The Mandalorian came out.
(I personally think of Neverwinter Nights 2 when thinking of Obsidian. t’was peak gaming)
Blizzard is a shell of its old self, cutting interest in Warcraft, Starcraft, and Overwatch.
I agree with you here. In reality, Blizzard still consistently has queue issues when releasing a new WoW expansion or game, even after all this time. They know it happens, and won’t scale up for launch day on WoW retail AND Classic. Their target audience eats that shit up and I’m saying this as a former player that quit during Battle for Azeroth. No comment on Starcraft as I quit when the OG Starcraft scene died down on aus-1 back in the day. Overwatch 1 was seeing incredible numbers when I played from launch until Moria was released. OW2 being a pay-to-win shit show ate into their numbers until they gave up the pay-to-win bullshit. I see more and more of my friends and streamers playing it again now that Bobby Kotick is gone. I’m quite disappointed in some of them, but it is what it is.
There’s rumors even Call of Duty is struggling to retain relevance in new releases.
Good thing they’re just rumours until the earnings report comes. Sony has poorly-redacted court documents stating that CoD is their bread and butter on the playstation. There’s no way that’s changing in the forseeable future (at least not in the billions of dollars range), even with the absolute shit-show that was MW3. When MW4 comes out, the diehard fans will forget it even happened, as they have with every single release since its inception.
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