yep, ‘tis the way of the ceo. being so delightfully out of touch that you make the shittiest decisions possible just for your quarterly profits to be marginally higher
In general, he made decisions to attempt to buy the market rather than have the best services/console.
I'm not sure if MS is going to go the good route, but they have said that their acquisitions won't be console exclusives. I've understood that consoles lose money. Selling games is where you make it. Why limit your games to a single console? We're unlikely to see incredible dominance of a console in the future. You'd just be limiting your consumer base
MS has indicated that they will honor contracts and some promises were made to get their acquisitions through.
But everything has either been vague or outright said will be console exclusive. Bethesda is the earliest example of this, and we’ll probably see more later.
PS mostly makes their console exclusives in house. Even Spider-Man (the prime example people point to) was always intended to be console exclusive by Marvel and is only as good as it is because of Playstation funding.
The point of first party exclusives is to make money from your store long term. If they make their first party titles available on other platforms, fewer people would buy a PlayStation, which means less long term royalties from store sales.
So you limit the customer base for your first party titles, but ideally you make a ton more on your store fees. That’s the same reason Valve makes first party titles, to get people on Steam, not to make money from game sales.
What they should do is make a handheld that can play PS4 titles. That attracts a different demographic and keeps control of the store royalties. But they really need to make sure it works well, since it’ll be competing with the Switch and Steam Deck (and similar handheld PCs).
Uncharted 2, from Sony Group Corp’s Naughty Dog, was released in 2009 and had a budget of $20 million. The studio’s latest game, The Last of Us: Part 2, cost more than $200 million.
So, uh…why can’t we do that anymore? Even if you account for salary increases and avoiding crunch and such, $40M-$50M for a game as good as Uncharted 2 sounds great!
Because graphics still sell games. You can do simplified graphics like Nintendo and still sell games, but lots of people want the photo realistic experience and the bar for that has gone way way up incrementally over the years.
I think we’re seeing that that’s no longer true. Minecraft is the best-selling game ever, for instance. If you want to build the photo realistic experience, maybe aim for a smaller scope of video game, like the more linear action games we used to get, because otherwise, the industry ends up in the state it’s in.
Yeah, maybe I’m just wrong in general … The above doesn’t look that different from say black ops 6 footage.
I definitely wish for a return to the linear format (or simi linear where there are a few concurrent linear quests going on). I think straight up open world just lends itself to making a lot of walking simulators.
Halo Infinity was one of the most boring games I ever played between the weapons sounding like toys and the spread out objectives with no clear central mission.
I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong on this. Part of the problem is new IPs are risky, and I’m sure market research is telling the big publishers that you’d better not suddenly downgrade your graphics on an established property. Nintendo’s very comfortable in this space because they haven’t really gone this route with first party. They’ve even managed to thread the needle on Mario, Metroid, and Zelda by having both 2D and 3D offerings.
Nintendo is in a very envious spot in general. Hell, I think Nintendo makes some great games, I just wish they wouldn’t force me to buy yet another computer solely for the purpose of playing their games. I haven’t owned a Mario Kart or Zelda game in years but I’d love to play if I could do so on PC/Linux.
Uncharted and Last of Us are first party Sony games. If they were to say that a game can still be enjoyable without cutting edge graphics no one would want to buy the latest PlayStation iteration.
I think they’re already running out of people who want to buy the latest PlayStation, and Sony clearly can’t afford to throw hundreds of millions of dollars after this level of graphics anymore, because it’s not resulting in equivalent growth of console sales to make up for it.
I am a pc gamer and I have the latest-ish video card. I got an expensive card so that I can play any game, but really don’t consider graphics much anymore. You are correct, some people still chase that aspect of video gaming. I think if you have been around for a while, that desire fades. I have lots of low res games these days.
Also a PC gamer and I’ve discovered as I’ve aged, CPU has been more of a bottleneck for me than GPU. Games like Factorio or Path of Exile need a powerful CPU, but their graphics are secondary at best.
Same here. My favorite game is Kerbal Space Program, and the graphics look like they are straight out of the early 2000s, but even with a 12 core CPU I still get crazy lag during explosions, staging, and other physics interactions. Transitioning from "on rails" flight to actually modelling physics when within a few km of something else has also not ever been smooth.
There are plenty of games that don’t do high-end graphics and are still very good, even games that look intentionally low res/quality like Valheim did very well.
Graphics are only really a thing for games that aim for realistic visuals in the first place, but even then it doesn’t need to be so overly high in visual fidelity and pushing better graphics every time. The average gamer isn’t going to care about being able to see reflected objects in windows that you can see in the reflections of puddles, or that a leaf from a tree has a diffused shadow 300 meters away. Yet a lot of these big studios are pushing this tech and stuffing it in their games.
Not saying that’s a bad development, but they’re creating a lot of these budget problems for themselves by setting bars so insanely high and focusing on side-stuff that only increase the scope of the project. Where small indi developers create masterpieces on a budget barely a percentage of what those corporations are throwing at their projects.
They likely had some outlandish request or policy that was anathema to the department’s mission, and just assumed that they would cave. Seems like good leadership stuck to their principles, and the good leaders were followed by teams who weren’t willing to lose that.
If the owner is smart, they’ll backtrack, make concessions when hiring everyone back, and learn from their fuckup. In reality, I hope the new company that forms from the exodus finds fast success.
The overabundance of games is killing great games.
Can’t tell you how many fantastic multiplayer games I’ve bought only to find out they’re ghost towns or become ghost towns soon after purchasing. And it’s because players are so spread out over so many games. 20 years ago these games would have been major successes with a huge player base for years, but they’re dead on arrival or within a few months. It’s a real bummer.
That being said, I’m going to plug Mycopunk. Just got it and it’s great. Like Deep Rock Galactic and Risk of Rain 2 had a baby. We need more players though. Came out in July. Currently on sale. But base price is cheap.
Multiplayer games 20 years ago were also built to be more scalable to different numbers of players, and they mostly had bots and such, too. I might push back on how long they sustained huge player bases though. Those games were often sequeled very quickly, and most of the players would move to the next one, leaving behind a small percentage. At least the old game was always still playable for those who bought it, though.
There are multiplayer games from 30 years ago that still have 30 people who play on the first Friday night of each month, and they will put that in their calendar and keep the game alive.
The idea that multiplayer games need huge communities of players otherwise they are “dead” is what is killing multiplayer games.
I mean I get what you’re saying. I’ve been playing Sven-Coop for 26 years and counting. People are still playing. People are still making new levels for it.
But it’s mostly people on the older side and it’s because it was a mod for a HUGELY popular game and the mod itself used to have a ton of players.
But a lot of these new, good games never get that big following that allow for a small fan base decades later. Or even months later. Because there’s so many other options spreading gamers out.
Active enough that I can queue at any time of day and find opponents close to my skill level with good ping
Active enough that I can queue at peak hours and find opponents
Need to schedule games via Discord matchmaking
If I really love the game enough, I'll put up with jumping through hoops to play it, but it does get frustrating when the games I like are a lot more convenient to play than the games I love.
It’s great. It’s early access, so it needs some polishing, but it’s already pretty solid. It can be a little overwhelming at first, so make sure you’re doing one of the easier difficulties. Get your weapons and character leveled up and it starts becoming more engaging. Try out different weapons too. I was struggling until I started branching out. And keep in mind that the enemies are made up of various parts and you can blow those parts off and then other enemies can pick those parts up and use them. So learning how to take off limbs and then make sure the limbs are destroyed so they can’t be re-used is important.
Oh, and it allows gifs in the in-game chat. Something I’ve never seen in a game before. Type “/gif” followed by any keyword and it tosses an appropriate gif into the chat. It’s a lot of fun to mess around with.
Love it so far. My only complaint is that I’ve accidentals melted several mods I wanted to keep because I forget which key does what. Wish there was an unlock button and trash you could drag to instead of just two keys. Other than that its great.
I’m not surprised over 80% were men. That aligns squarely with video gaming as a whole, as a mostly male dominated marked. But at the same time, I couldn’t help but notice that Nintendo forgot to ask this men between 20 and 40 years old whether they had children or were married. Just to put an anecdote out there, me and my cousins are all video game fans. We account as the ones who buy the most games in our family, but the entire family plays. I buy games for nieces and nephews. My cousins buy games and consoles for their own kids and for his wife. This is a big oversight to confound who buys the games with who is playing said games.
LOL, they say they’ll replace the staff and honor existing contracts. It’s gonna be shit quality. All their partners will be better off severing ties, reclaiming paid funds, and going with the new company that inevitably forms from the department previously known as Annapurna Interactive.
Company was ‘spending way more than we earn,’ CEO said in memo
It needs a genius to see that. All those contracts for timed exclusivity, all those games given for free. Most people just play free to play games on the platform and get the games for free. I thought the idea was to eat the cost and spend more money than to earn, so they can build a loyal customer base. If that wasn't the entire goal, what was it then? Why punish the staff (holy cow its 870 employees!) by cutting them off the company now? The store and launcher of Epic games already struggle to get better.
Unfortunately I can't read the article on Bloomberg, as it requires an account.
I’m guessing it was the goal but it didn’t work as well as they’d hoped. I’ve got a couple of the freebies but I’ve stuck mostly with Valve because most of my games are already on Steam and they haven’t seriously fucked up yet.
They made enticing incentives for developers and publishers, but what incentive would I have as a customer to buy a game from EGS rather than Steam or GOG or even Humble?
I’m guessing here because I don’t sit on Epic’s board of directors, but I would imagine their angle for consumers was mostly to grab new markets with the appeal of free games, which would also establish a library that would be a pain point if they ever wanted to move away, coupled with some of those one-year exclusives that would peel people away from Valve if they wanted to play them day-of.
But there are so many features built in to Steam that if even one or two of them are important to you, there's less of a reason to ever default to someone else doing the same thing but less so. Like with GOG, they don't match Steam feature for feature, but DRM-free and easy preservation of previous versions of games are good selling points that matter to people.
Epic would need to have a “import your games and achievements and saves from Steam” feature AND THEN ALSO have a much better performing app than they currently do, for me to convert. But years later and EGS is still a pretty awful user experience compared to Steam. There’s just no way.
For me, it’d also need a Linux compatibility layer on par with (or exceeding that of) Steam. On paper, I’m not a fan of Valve’s exclusive hold on that market, but in practice nothing has come close for me so far (that I know of, at least).
I tried Lutris and Wine, but I had difficulties getting stuff to run, and the fixes required patience and some level of technical understanding (of Wine, specifically, not just Linux in general). They just don’t have the same (comparatively simple) convenience of “check ProtonDB before you buy it, download game, run it, and usually it’ll work fine”.
The more advanced fixes usually involve nothing more than a few well-documented steps like copy/pasting a launch command, selecting something in a dropdown or downloading and extracting a file into some directory. It’s not a universal “It Just Works”, but I feel like it’s been getting better and better, and that’s just a headstart any competitor would have to work really hard to catch up with.
All these companies that are suddenly having layoffs and/or enshittifying everything at once all shared the same basic business model (pardon the Bronze Age meme format from Slashdot…):
Give goods or services away for free
Attract customers on the basis of getting goods or services for free
???
Profit!
Years of basically free debt service and stupid VC money let them kick the can down the road for a long time in terms of figuring out what Step 3 was gonna be, up to the point that many such services didn’t even bother, replacing both Steps 3 and 4 with “Sell to whichever FAANG is sucker enough to think they can leverage our userbase for their own product.” High interest rates have suddenly put a stop to the money party, though, and now they’re all scrambling to find ways of aggressively monetizing their services.
In their suit, the founders said that Krafton was aware of their new roles and that Cleveland had spent a large amount of time working on a Subnautica film, which Krafton had asked the studio to develop.
The moment they put someone who oversee the development of Calisto Protocol as CEO, it already smell like a seamoth full of dead peeper. Now this one? This one takes the cake.
There’s plenty of jrpgs half that price point with twice the length though. Heck, even the previous GTAs have at least that length for a cheaper price, and are occasionally even cheaper now. Be patient and you’ll likely even get the game given away for free.
I’m lucky enough to own literally thousands of games. Most of which I get at a deep discount. Games like GTA and Red Dead are usually an exception where I’ll play on day one. Even though Rockstar tends to milk a title long after a release, the attention to detail is worth the price to me. I’ll still check reviews first however.
I’m trying to point out that i don’t think that the length of a game shouldn’t really be indicative of the price. I have no issue with him enjoying the game or buying it.
He was saying that £80 was worth it cause of the amount of hours. So i brought up games with similar or more hours that are cheaper. Including prior gta games…
I’m not saying that the game would’ve been kept off Eidos was still at SE, but I’m so tired of big corporations acquiring companies just for their IP while killing their projects and laying off their staff.
Embracer has a long history of acquisitions, and I am kind of wondering how long it will take until they decide to just “loan” out the IP they’ve bought instead of putting out any games at all.
The IP they bought was largely neglected in the first place, so I'm not sure there's much of a market for it. More likely they cast a large net with the properties they own, and the winners are the ones that survive the current economic conditions.
the thing is, cyberpunk 2077 released and did gangbusters (after perhaps the rockiest launch cycle in recent memory, but still. game sold well). Deus Ex taps into a lot of the same themes and aesthetics that got cyberpunk 2077 to sell well, it just seems like embracer doesn’t see it as a safe bet, and their definition of safe is informed heavily by their recent fuck-up with their sauid acquisition gambit. It’s a function of a bunch of executives with eyes bigger than their stomach and then having to ballast every possible IP they can manage in order to not ruin the shareholder value they’re working so hard to not shunt into the atmosphere.
Cyberpunk 2077 had the expectations of the Witcher 3 that a Deus Ex never had a prayer of catching, because at a macro level, those two games are not structured the same despite the shared DNA. Embracer probably doesn't see it as a safe bet, because it's not a safe bet in the current economic climate. Tomb Raider probably is. Gunfire Games is probably plenty safe in the wake of Remnant II, and I'm sure the developers of Titan Quest II, Alone in the Dark, Outcast: A New Beginning, and Tempest Rising are all hoping that fans of those genres are as hungry for the games they're making as possible, because it will likely take a Remnant-sized success to keep them safe from layoffs. In the meantime, they seem to be spared, because it's all hands on deck to make those games great before they release.
I am honestly not super sure about this strategy of buying your way into being a major publisher by vacuuming up IP nobody else was bidding for. What did they think would happen? Did they think the old majors were leaving a ton of money on the table and then realized too late that these really weren't that profitable? Or was it just a bid that the low interest rates would last forever and the portfolion would just pay for itself if they bundled it large enough?
I don't know what the business plan was meant to be, and it's kinda killing me that I don't fully grasp it.
Did they think the old majors were leaving a ton of money on the table and then realized too late that these really weren't that profitable?
It always struck me as Moneyball. That yes, the big publishers were leaving a ton of money on the table by not catering to customers that are there but have been long abandoned in favor of the true goliaths like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed. The way the big publishers used to operate was by making a lot of bets and then building on what worked while making other new bets. Instead, AAA portfolios went from dozens of games per year down to single digits. When you make a lot of bets, some of them inevitably won't work.
Or was it just a bid that the low interest rates would last forever and the portfolion would just pay for itself if they bundled it large enough?
Yes, not mutually exclusive with the above strategy, lol.
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