I know people like the originals more than the newer ones, but I really enjoyed those too, I really love Adam Jensen and all the stereotypes on him, and Mankind Divided ended in a huge cliffhanger. I guess I'll never know how it ends =/
I’m not sure there’s any solution to this problem. Returning to the era of gatekeepers would be a regression, and the increased democratization of game development has led to more creative and interesting products all around. This glut may be intimidating for players, but it also presents them with more choices than ever before, so long as they can ignore the FOMO of not jumping on every new release as soon as it hits.
But for the companies investing hundreds of millions of dollars into games that need to move huge numbers to break even, this is no small challenge. And it’s just getting harder every year.
Solution is simple, stop spending millions of dollars on the same bloody IP and cash grabs and give your devs some freedom.
Going to need a global wave of union organization to at least get royalties on sales determined for contribution levels. That’s unlikely to be incredible money but anything is better than nothing as you age towards their elder years
Besides that, no real solution. It’s happened to every art industry. It turns out there’s probably been an incredible amount of artistic talent every year throughout the millenniums but it’s just the last couple decades where it didn’t require super levels of luck and financial backing to make it
I believe Gearbox has always done this royalty situation union-less. But that doesn’t spread out sales to other games that need customers. There are still going to be plenty of games that just don’t move a lot of copies because other games suck the oxygen out of the room.
Let’s not toot Gearbox’s horn. While Borderlands 3 was their biggest success when it launched the people working on it got less royalties (per person) than they got for Borderlands 2. Meanwhile Pitchford bargained himself a 12 million bonus before the game was even released. Oh and when people complained about getting less royalties Pitchford said, like the asshole he is, they’re free to quit. Gearbox does royalty situation union-less (as I know 40% of the royalties are split between the employees), but that comes at the cost of having to put to with one the biggest assholes in the industry who will tell you to eat shit if you don’t like something.
It also comes at the cost of being paid less than the industry average, which isn’t high. But it wasn’t so much tooting Gearbox’s horn as it was pointing out that it doesn’t solve the problem stated in the article. It wasn’t about how well the employees at a successful studio are paid but rather how many studios are unsuccessful because of how much competition there is. The industry might generate absurd amounts of money, but a large percentage of that is still just going to a handful of games that gather all the attention rather than being spread around more uniformly, and I don’t think there’s really a way to spread it around.
Absolutely. I agree that royalties aren’t the solution here and I agree with what the problem is. Your previous comment just kinda came across (at least to me) like giving some praise to Gearbox for giving out royalties when IMO it doesn’t really deserve praise when those royalties don’t meet the expectations of the people actually doing the work. Especially when the owners get to set their own special deals with guaranteed payouts.
I’m sure it looked great when they made Borderlands 2, but they also made Battleborne. Borderlands 2 devs still get royalties to this day. And hey, Gearbox still gets some stuff right sometimes. The entire Borderlands series still supports LAN, which even the people who manage the Steam pages don’t seem to care about. They can be good in some ways and shitty in others. Life is rarely so simple.
Veilguard was…okay. But coming out after Baldur’s Gate 3, the series that DA was inspired by, really showed the massive gap in storytelling and character quality. I pirated it and was glad I did, as it was NOT worth anything close to $70.
I’ve only bought one $80 game thus far (And that was during a 30% steam sale so only $55) and from my years of experience of buying games, I can confidently say that my enjoyment in games goes down as price goes up.
Although weirdly all of the $80 games that released so far have been pretty bad so that’s strange.
I predicted KSP2 was going to be eventually abandoned and IG closed around the time of the launch, when the first industry layoffs were starting to happen. The mildest thing I was called for suggesting this was pessimist and it only got worse from that term. I suppose I was half right…so far.
So if I read this correctly, big changes means doubling down on breaking the pve promise and (finally!) decoupling the available characters pool from mtx.
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