There could have been games where there was just a brilliant idea for a game that keeps having engaging content on an ongoing basis with passionate devs.
But live service so an exec could check a box for their quarterly shareholder call was always going to be DOA.
The game they killed 3 days after release might have been good but i haven’t seen a single gameplay video or have any idea of what the game was about. Are they that scared of releasing a shit game and keeping it playable but dead for a while?
I mean, they spent what 400 millions on developing it and they won’t spend 10k - 100k to keep that game running for a while? Like “NO NOT A SINGLE CENT MORE SPENT ON THAT SHIT GAME!” XD
Well, yeah. If it’s clearly never going to recover, why keep spending money on it? They already took it as a total loss by refunding everyone, so that was probably cheaper than holding out for a recovery that wasn’t going to happen.
I don’t know what the market at large wants, but I suspect its failure is based at least in part on the fact that the purchase has zero value if other people don’t also value it, so the customer is now more reserved with their time and money unless a game seems like it’s going to take off, which would theoretically make nearly every a game a huge success or total failure. What I want is for a scalable multiplayer shooter that gracefully handles 1-X players, and I hardly care what X is as long as it’s more than 3. Let me host it on a LAN and play split-screen, and give me a deathmatch mode, among other things. We used to get this kind of shooter all the time, and now I’m starving for one, to the point that I’d happily have picked up Concord if it was that game, even with its wonky-ass character designs.
I played a dead MMO where i was the only person in the game. They where shutting down the servers soon and it was an interesting experience. The game wasn’t bad honestly. As a single player experience at least. Maybe that was the issue.
It had matchmaking so if there weren’t enough players it would take a long time and you’d end up in the same lobbies with the same players every time, if you could even get in apparently. Not like you could play solo even if you wanted to.
Keeping engaging content on an ongoing basis seems to be such an unreachable target for most devs and game designs that it’s undoing large swaths of the industry.
Yeah live service anything was going to land like a dead fish in my area where whether or not you can get a ping through to fucking Google depends on how many people in the neighborhood are off work.
Finally the live service bubble is popping.
I hope the developers working on these projects get put on to something else, instead of shown the door as is so often the case.
Sony specifically had to learn many harsh lessons recently.
The Bungie acquisition brought them nothing but issues. Concord being shutdown immediately after launch was a huge was of money too. Other titles under the Sony umbrella are either struggling, or gaining poor reputation due to their completely numbskull decision to enforce PSN account usage, even for single player offline games.
Had to check what movies you’re talking about because the spiderman movies have all been successful. Didn’t know that Venom, Morbius, Madam Webb and Kraven were actually Sony spiderman universe (SSMU) garbage and not MCU garbage.
It’s because they want to measure the creative process.
Which is impossible to do before it has happened.
So they try, and try, and try, and end up with a complex system where everything is measured, especially any kind of risk which is promptly eliminated and then the result is an expensive nothingburger they sell with extraordinary publicity budgets.
Some times they get a little bit creative and buys up a studio that has made a hit, but then they only try to capitalise on the brand name, not the creativity, while compressing costs, and monitor and remove the risks and thus the creativity.
To me, what I dislike the most about the direction the industry is going is that consolidating more resources into fewer megagames means there's less room for experimental side projects and spinoffs. I especially miss all the kinds of B-games that used to go straight to handheld. Of course part of the reason they disappeared because we don't have handhelds to put them on, but I think that half the reason handhelds died was because publishers weren't going to make handheld games for much longer anyway.
Of course there's still a lot of cool stuff coming from indies, but there's a wide spectrum between indie with no budget and AAAA with $10 trillion budget. We're losing everything that was once in between.
Also, spinoffs. I do like seeing alternate takes on IPs and characters I like, but those are rare now because all the resources go into developing one main project. Like I've always wondered, if Splatoon had debuted a generation earlier, what kind of DS companion piece would have accompanied it?
Of course the companies pin the graphics as a culprit. Otherwise they would have to admit the mismanagement is the reason they burn through millions of dollars. Mismanagement brings with it another aspect the author did not mention: stress and burnout. Either working too hard, or spinning wheels doing nothing is pure poison to a creative person. Constant direction changes, lack of clear communication, never knowing whether you did well or are on the verge of being laid off - all these make people work harder but output less/worse quality assets.
I think the data shows that advertisement is super effective, not that people prefer to be advertised. If people preferred advertising over a better product then games like Balatro, Vampire Survivors etc. literally couldn’t be successful, because those games had effectively zero marketing budget. Their success came from word-of-mouth because the game itself was great.
TLDR Bloated staff sizes and poor workflow management means salary costs skyrocket while a lot of people on staff are left waiting for things to do. The article keeps saying the costs aren’t just about better graphical fidelity, but I think this issue is somewhat related because a big chunk of staff are going to be artists of some variety, and the reason there are so many is to pump up the fidelity.
Not that it much matters to me personally. I’ve said before that games have long ago hit diminishing returns when it comes to technical presentation and fidelity. I’d rather have a solid game with a vision, and preferably a good visual style rather than overproduced megastudio visuals. Those kinds of games are still coming out from solo developers and small studios, so it doesn’t affect me one bit if big studios want to pour half a billion into every new assemblyline FPS they make.
Youll probably be waiting for a while since most indies are solo devs. Its hard to make 3D models and textures of the PS2/GameCube/Xbox era quality as a solo dev in a reasonable amount of time, especially for every object a game would need.
The programming isn’t even the hard part. Its mostly the amount of time and work required for making art assets that take the longest in game developmemt.
Games of that era were frequently made a dozen or so people in 18 months. Whether that passes some arbitrary line in the sand for what counts as “indie” or not, I don’t much care; it’s just a market segment that’s been left behind by AAA that I’m waiting for someone to pick up the mantle on. Most genres that AAA have left behind have been filled by now, but FPS games that fit the mold of what we got between ~1998 and ~2016 are still an itch I need scratched. From what I can see on the horizon, there’s Fallen Aces in early access that I’d like to see once it’s 1.0, Core Decay going for a Deus Ex sort of thing, and then Mouse: P.I. for Hire, but I’d still like to see the full package with co-op and deathmatch modes like we got back in the day.
The new C&C is Tempest Rising. The new Neverwinter Nights has a variety of answers, from Baldur’s Gate 3 to Solasta to Pillars of Eternity, depending on what you’re looking for. Commandos has spawned an entire genre at this point; not only is there a new Commandos coming soon that looks good, we just had a series of three and a half games from the sadly-now-defunct Mimimi that all fit the bill, as well as that game Sumerian Six just last year.
No worries. There are lots of kinds of games we used to get a lot of back in the day, but their successors or spiritual successors don’t get the kind of attention or marketing that the industry giants do. Often times, if you miss a certain kind of game, just start searching for “modern games like X”, and you’ll probably find it.
Zortch is a neat one, less Quake and more early 2000s FPS feel. Pre-Doom 3, pre-HL2 in gameplay, but with the style of comedy and charm you’d get out of a Shiny Entertainment game. Very much a solo labor of love, and it’s only like $5 if memory serves me right.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll check it out. I’ve got Phantom Fury from this past year, and even with a ton of criticism heaped toward it, it was still in the ballpark of what I wanted to scratch this itch.
As someone who works in corporate America this is 10000% true. Giant corporations are hugely bloated, inefficient, slow, and stupid. I honestly can’t believe they are somehow the best way to do things in groups of people. I have never had less work to do than working in a huge corporation.
It’s no surprise that indie games can compete with them. Working in startups compared to huge corporations, I did more code and we got more done in shorter amounts of time vs big corps. There’s no red tape, there’s no committees or directors or people you have to please. There’s no political games, you just do your work. As simple as that. You come in, you code for 7-8 hours, you push your feature, and you go home.
In a megacorp you come in, you get 5 minutes for coffee before 3 people are pinging you on slack for some stupid downstream thing they didn’t read the manual on or was never documented, and then you have 5 hours of meetings, lunch, 2 hours of ad hoc meetings, and then Shirley has to swing by to ask you to take another HR training. So you get maybe 20 minutes of coding done in a day.
For you engineers who have never coded in a megacorp - As an example, most megacorps have an ID service (usually named after a comic book character). This is usually a real service deployed somewhere that nobody maintains anymore, but it’s where you get your… IDs from. Really wrap your head around that. It’s a microservice who is in charge of returning Guid.NewGuid(). Then they get pulled into meetings because the ID service doesn’t support this or that, they never thought of this case or that case, how can we upgrade off the old ID service to the new one. In a startup, you’re calling Guid.NewGuid()
The main issue corporations run into that cause this bloat is a situation like the following: Project A needs 500 people to meet schedule and workload. Project B begins spinning up and will need the same 500 at it’s peak. Project A ends and the workload is really only for 200 people on Project B. Do you lay off Project A folks you know you will need in a year? No, that’s a waste of all the talent/training/know how that was built. So you bloat and carry them until you actually need them. Still have to pay them though
Studios are subcontracting so much shit nowadays that I’m more interested in seeing what comes out of non AAA outfits than anything else. US games are mostly shit presently, the lion’s share of the work is done by low income workers and the peeps stateside get all the money and easy well paid consultant gigs and just enough to cash in on the DEI state subsidies and gov support. It’s absolutely 0 surprise the games are shit, it’s basically sweatshop game making. The funny part is Neil Druckman playing the saviour super woke evolved writer (after stepping on Hennig) but then subcontracts sweatshop work to make his assets. You couldn’t make this shit up.
DEI for Americans but not if you’re from overseas. Only US BIPOC count, the rest are shithole fodder.
Tax credits from WOTC are quite steep and consultancy can be offset in the R&D tax credit. That’s before mentioning local state incentives.
Typical US companies playing dirty and acting high and mighty. Neoliberalism at its best! And, ofc, the useful idiots that believe in the myth of US exceptionalism being terminally offended at reality checks.
Several people who have worked for Naughty Dog say Druckmann and Straley stopped seeing eye-to-eye with Hennig, and that they had fundamental disagreements on where to take the Uncharted series. When Hennig left, she signed a non-disparagement agreement with the studio that would prevent both her and Naughty Dog from making negative public comments about what had happened, according to people familiar with the arrangement.
From “blood, sweat and pixels” which I own. I guess Schreier is also an unreliable source…
You reply like the typical reddit chud: Find something to latch on to, ignore the wider message, ad hominem, leave feeling victorious. Use vote manipulation to feel good about their chud selves with fake internet points.
At the end of the day, Mr woke Druckman doesn’t care for equality, if he did, he wouldn’t hire slavers.
Perhaps you should have started with that source, then. I just pointed out your other source meant nill.
As for the rest, I haven’t downvoted you at all, but my guess on what your personality was like seems to be correct with all the choice buzzwords you spout. Not really a good look for the crusade you’re trying to expose, friend.
Can you believe this headline? I have this weird feeling where the video game industry now only presents itself as former of former of… Everyone is referred to as their past roles, there’s no present or future anymore, just looking back at what we had and pretending to offer something similar
How else can you judge what direction they might go in? If you like the projects they worked on in the past does it not make it more likely that you’ll like their next project? Effectively we are getting a merger of two of the better publishers that are going independent from more corporate overlords? Maybe I’m being overly optimistic…
It’s not you, I’m probably on the opposite spectrum, being overly pessimistic. I’m not criticising this acquisition in particular and you’re right, we can’t know how this will go ; it’s more of a jab at the industry as a whole : a lot of new releases are advertised as being made by ex devs of whatever studio was once praised, and turn out to be ersatz of the original material (Back 4 Blood, Stormgate, Kerbal Space Program…). This kind of marketing is super disingenuous!
Rebirth is already out, but it’s still exclusive to the PS5. The PC port was announced for early 2025 I think. so OP is either making a jab at Rebirth not being available on PC because PC players hate exclusives, or they’re just saying they’re waiting for the 3rd part of the remake trilogy (probably to be expected some time in 2027), which is what a number of players are doing.
Personally, I started on the first part of the remake trilogy, then stopped when I realized how annoyed I would be about waiting for the sequels. So now I’m waiting for all of it to be out on Steam before I start again.
bloomberg.com
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