The main problem I see is that creators and all of the people involved in creating games get a smaller share than they would have in the generations before and games aren’t getting cheaper to make. It’s the same with movies and music and everything. There’s only so much capital and the pool of people fighting over it keeps getting bigger. It would be nice if people could make shit just for the sake of making it but instead every market has become a cutthroat competitive wasteland of bland bullshit and half assed or unfinished projects.
I buy tons of games. I hardly play most of them. So many have potential, but stay in early access or fizzle out and the developers abandon it. It really sucks, because I do see a lot of creativity and really awesome ideas that go to waste. Unfortunately, people have to make money to survive and can’t just create art for art’s sake.
Hmm… newest game in my library is Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes from last year, which is a re-release anyway.
I bought 13 old-ish (pre-2022) games this year for less than $100. I have no reason to spend %60-80 of that on 1 game I probably won’t even like, and that’s if it clears the seemingly impossible “playable” hurdle.
Let me count upcoming games I look forward to playing/am curious about:
Ninja Gaiden 4 (Happy to wait for a deep sale)
Onimusha (Happy to wait for a deep sale and may even refund if I don’t enjoy it)
Okami 2 (Happy to wait for a deep sale)
Marvel: Tokon (Will definitely wait for a deep sale—$10 base game)
That’s it.
I definitely went to see more new movies at the cinema this year than I played new games. IDK where the industry is headed and I feel for all the underpaid, overworked developers at risk, but there isn’t much I can do if publishers collectively decided to abandon my favorite genres.
And, much like it is always shown, that is a problem of management at the publisher level. Visceral Games is generally one of the most well documented but every major studio with a similar “uh derr, how they not have game after five years. They deserve to die” story is a similar tale:
The studio heads and the publisher could never agree. Often there are mandates for specific technology (Visceral was forced to use Frostbite which even the Battlefield devs hate) and publisher level management can never be bothered to actually look at anything other than a full pitch level vertical slice… which they then say is not good enough or “Continue but make massive non-specific changes”.
The end result is that game dev, which already takes years, gets stretched out because so much work gets thrown out and completely redone whenever the managers actually communicate. And then the studio is gutted, jackasses online talk about how it was obviously the answer, and said managers get to move on to hopefully work with devs who can deliver products in spite of them.
So… maybe don’t just parrot the bullshit for the companies mismanaging the industry and destroying the livelihoods of the people who actually make the games we claim to like?
It shouldn’t take 6 years to demo a basic gameplay loop. If you don’t have a demonstrable gameplay loop after 6 years, yes, that’s a management problem, but it’s also a dev problem.
All we got to saw of Everwild was pretty, but it was never clear what the game actually was and the developer wasn’t clear either.
It doesn’t take “6 years to demo a basic gameplay loop”. They are pushing vertical slices, proofs of concepts, etc internally near constantly. The issue is when you get told “no, not like that. We want it to be more… you know?” and so much of that work gets scrapped. ESPECIALLY as time moves on and those vertical slices are also being done alongside levels, weapons, cutscenes, etc all while never knowing what the gameplay even will be.
Is there an issue at multiple levels of management? Yeah. But when you have a single “boss” you tend to actually have something. It might not be great but you have a vision you can work towards and release. Rather than five new visions every time you get a new contact at HQ.
But hey, keep on leaping to defend the mega corporations.
Another “great” example is the bad CGI in most modern Marvel-Disney movies. And that is because the VFX studios don’t even get the actual full scene until VERY late in the cycle. And they might not even get the final costumes until literally days before it is due (because “leaks”). When you are completely redoing the entire scene because now Cap shoulder tackles the helicopter instead of dodges around it AND don’t even know what colors he is wearing it is REALLY hard to get the lighting and dust to look right. And your team is completely over-stretched because you are not just doing one scene: You are doing five. Even though you agreed to four.
And you can bet countless clowns are out there talking about how the VFX studios suck and blah blah blah/
I get it, it LOOKED great, but as a potential player I need to know what the actual fuck I’m doing. What’s the goal? What am I supposed to do? What are the tools I have to do that?
Everwild Devs: 🤷♂️
If the suits were screwing around and changing things, we STILL should have seen what the actual game was before and after the changes. We never did. Never will.
That’s not a corporate problem, it’s a development problem.
Compare that to a teaser for a game that actually released:
You DO realize that you aren’t their bosses, right? That was Microsoft. Microsoft almost assuredly saw a LOT of internal content. It just didn’t get packaged up into sizzle reels to be shown at the keighleys for 50k for a few seconds in between kojima appearances.
At the end of the day, game development is a business. You only see what is deemed worth publishing. Take Night Dive for example. They have a ridiculously solid portfolio and, outside of System Shock (which was kickstarted?), don’t talk about ANYTHING until it is ready to release. Does that mean they are in a constant state of doing nothing and deserving to get fired up until that brief window where we all see Hexen and Heretic being pulled from store shelves a few hours before a (funny enough) Microsoft press conference?
… Actually I could very much see Microsoft take that route if they owned Night Dive. “They haven’t uploaded anything to youtube. Let’s fire their asses. Oh, shit. Danny O’Dwyer just skeeted that he is driving up to Washington again. Okay, give them a week and we’ll probably get a few million bucks out of them”
Pugstorm’s new game is going to be just 20 bucks. (It’s being published by Chucklefish so I’ll still be pirating it, but it’s nice that they’re still keeoing it indie)
They are run by some if the worst bigots and transphobes. Who also exploited their “workforce” of volunteers. Just some all around shitsacks, and they don’t deserve any of my money.
Holy shit what an article. Reading this made me rethink a few interactions I had growing up… Thankfully nothing bad ever happened, but this has been going on for over 10years!
bloomberg.com
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