I mean, gaming exploded over the pandemic. Anyone who thought that was going to become some kind of norm was an idiot. Have we shrunk below pre-pandemic levels? Or is this just idiots who thought they could keep skimming free oil off the surface once the leak was fixed?
Also, I disagree with the idea that AAA games are performing poorly. Bad ideas in AAA games and chasing “easy money” in AAA is performing poorly. Helldivers 2 seems to be doing well, whereas Suicide Squad isn’t. Baldir’s Gate 3 killed it while Starfield kind of flopped. Final Fantasy 16 didn’t meet expectations, but we know Square Enix regularly sets expectations too high anyway.
Are people tired of the same Call of Duty games over and over? Are people full up on live service games and looter shooters? Yes and yes. But are people crazy excited for the new Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth? From the communities I’m in, very much yes. Did Alan Wake 2 release and sell faster than any other game from that studio? Pretty sure I saw that headline recently, yeah.
So when Diablo 4 dies on impact, was that the fault of the gaming landscape? Or was it because Blizzard execs pushed the team to maximize systems and balance they thought would bring in easy money but actually ended up alienating their core audience and reviewers?
I’ve seen this before when working in mobile. Execs want to chase the whales so badly that they don’t allow designers and devs to make the game actually fun to play. Doesn’t matter how “well” you monetize your shitty game if nobody wants to stick around to play it.
Yes. They thought they could keep skimming. The problem is that their (and everyones, really) business model is predicated on YOY growth and when it doesn’t happen, they fire people to try and recapture funds.
AAA is a title that is applied to studios not games. Larian is an independent studio, a big independent studio but still no where near the big giant companies. Compare them to insomniac, who is behind spiderman 2. Their budget was 3x larians, they are also part of a much larger conglomerate (sony), and they usually are creating several games with the scope of spiderman at once, leading to a release schedule every 1-2 years. Larian is releasing on a much longer schedule closer to 3-6yrs, they are less able to multitask. Larian studios have only produced 9 games across 2 franchises (baulders gate and divinity) while insomniac has ~40 games across 4+ franchises. BG3 was also a much riskier project than spiderman2, it was larian really betting the farm on something big compared to a pretty typical cash in from insomniac. They also don’t waste money on stuff like buying a kpop group (like blizzard, epic or riot), running cons etc etc.
I think larian fits in with CD project red and other AA studios than with AAA studios like activision and insomniac. At the end of the day it’s a fuzzy term though without a strict definition.
And to be clear this is not at all a knock on larian studios, or BG3.
CD Projekt Red is owned by a public parent company, and their last game was probably in the top 50 of most expensive ever made, with some of the highest production values we've ever seen, at least with the latest 2.0 update. Valve wouldn't count as a AAA developer by your definition, but it's difficult to call Half-Life: Alyx anything but a AAA game. I don't think most people would follow your definition.
Meh, this is something that is hitting all industries, not just games. The raising of interest rates to combat inflation is making it more expensive to borrow money. The car industry is on the verge of calamity because they’ve priced cars too expensive to go with the new borrowing rates. Dealers (new and used) can’t lower their costs because they bought cars under the old interest rates and now can’t move them because borrowing got more expensive. Lowering prices too much more means taking a loss. It is hitting every industry. At some point the idiots out there have to realize that 3% inflation isn’t the boogeyman they think it is.
The rising costs of developing blockbuster games has also raised the stakes. “When you’re talking about a budget that’s $100mn plus, even for a big company, if you miss with two or three of those then commercially you’re on the ropes,” Harding-Rolls said.
Oh boo hoo, is the only type of game you can think of to release is a"blockbuster" type game?
Because last I checked, small titles regularly do quite well, like Hi-Fi Rush did so well compared to the fucking bomb that is Starfield. Same company, small game vs. big game. Small game did well, big game tanked.
Hi Fi Rush had 3 million players, including Game Pass. Starfield had over 12 million players, including Game Pass. It was one of the most successful releases last year, the single best selling game in the US the month it came out. That’s not what tanking looks like.
Did Starfield only cost 4x as much to make as HiFi? Doubt it. I'd bet the marketing budget of Starfield alone dwarfed the lifetime cost of HiFi. I agree that "bombed" is maybe too harsh but the problem that the article is talking about is ROI. As I continues to balloon, R needs to keep up and it's not.
IMO the industry as a whole has breached the “trust thermocline” by consistently releasing broken unfinished games. There aren’t as many people that will buy a game at release, and would rather wait for the bugs to fixed and buy it at a discount a year or so later; or, it’s realized the bugs will never be fixed and no one buys it.
Also with the realization that digital copies (that aren’t installed on your own HDD) can be taken from you at a whim. I think most people are fed up with it, and are sticking to games they already have or just not playing at all.
Quality reference. Also, in reverse, companies such as Larian prove that trust works.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the buggiest messes I’ve ever played. In that, it gives me warm fuzzy memories of the originals, which were similarly buggy monstrosities.
Despite the bugginess, the deep involvement of Larian with the community at every step of the games development and release proves that trust can get you nothing but accolades, even when your game is a buggy mess for six months post-release.
I’m okay with the post-release bugginess because I can trust that Larian actually cares about resolving those things.
I’ve also stopped buying early access games. They may not be bad, but they’re not finished, and I don’t want to be bored with a game before I even get to see its finished form.
I noticed yesterday on Steam that a game I was interested in had a much higher percentage of negative reviews from its Early Access days. Since there weren’t enough votes overall to offset these negatives, it really hurt the game’s overall score.
Pretty sure I have never bought an item in game. I buy dlcs if I really enjoy the game and want to continue.
Maybe govt needs to crack down on in game purchases.
Or people need to be less dumb. Dunno. Is buying video game crap any worse than pints at the pub cigs at the shop. If I fill my house with figurines vs skins in a game.
Is this is the reason why game companies are charging $70 and add microtransactions and battle passes to every game. If you’re shitting on it and still buying it, you’re part of the problem.
Best thing to do, is not buy the game at all. Whales don’t like spending money in empty games, they have no one to show off to. Simply avoiding the mtx isn’t good enough.
The big two are whales, which they actively target and exploit the addiction to the games, and kids. A surprisingly high amount of parents just leave their credit cards in the console and let the kids buy.
Funny, everything is about protect the kids now but nothing is being done about predatory micro transactions
I’m saddened by the phenomenon because there’s plenty of evidence that the audiences for these most of these games hate the experience, but they can’t stop playing because they’ve become victims of predatory psychological tactics designed to keep them addicted and their wallets wide open. These publishers and studios literally hire psychologists who specialize in generating this addiction, using models optimized to prey on their own users as much as humanly possible. It’s sickening. The sports games are especially shameless about this. Ruining people’s finances and their core sense of financial responsibility to fatten their pockets. I don’t know how they sleep at night. Sociopaths, the lot of them.
So nothing backing up your claim. 1 lawyer claimed psychologist had been hired but with zero proof. I think you are taking rumors and running with them.
Psychs don’t have anything specific to add to gambling. Gambling is easy enough to replicate without any special traits psychs could add.
Try to refrain from calling into disrepute the psychological profession. It’s bad enough without this shit
This is such an absurd distortion of the evidence I have provided that you surely have a vested interest in trying to gaslight people about a standard business operation.
Spoiler: The gaslighting isn’t working. That was actually pretty embarrassing.
Fuck are you on about. Is gaslighting when you can’t back up your claims so you spout nonsense.
Neither of your claims example 1 nor 2 show psychologist have been employed.
Example 2 is a statement from a lawyer claiming they have been used. That’s the same as you saying psychologist have been used. It’s a rumour at best it’s slander at worst. Hop off
Problem with games as a service is that it’s really difficult to make a working model out of it. Many have tried, but few have succeeded. Even SE failed with Avengers. For every Fortnite there are also multiple failures. It’s a risky model.
Those few who succeed usually make these large sums of money.
The big problem is that a company will look at something like World of Warcraft/Destiny at the height of their popularity and think "We want that!"
Then they'll put out a (we're being optimistic here) serviceable, good game with a respectable amount of content... but it won't be able to hold a candle to something that: already has that much content + more AND players who are already 'stuck' with the game (sunk cost, friends/family/community, etc).
So you put out a game, get a brief spurt of attention from people who are a bit bored of the same ol' same ol', but then once they breakneck through all the content you have in less than a month they turn around and head back to their comfort food game and never look back. Congratulations, you can now put out a master class on how to waste millions of dollars.
In order to make a game as a service now you need either an extremely good hook, or you need to not only be comparable to an existing game but also EXCEED what that game offers and continue to provide content at a staggering speed until you've coerced people to have invested enough in the game to then be their comfort food/sunk cost game of choice.
Not really considering the vast majority of people don’t use micro transactions. These companies make money by farming whales who have mental health/addiction issues.
I see this take a lot, and while I don't disagree... I think it downplays the number of people who DO make 'sensible' purchases in a lot of these games.
I personally don't bother with in-game purchases (I also rarely buy DLC... but I also sub to FFXIV regularly, and have all the content for Destiny 2, so sometimes I can be got) for cosmetics or especially boosts. I'd rather earn the items in game, or a step down, earn in-game currency to purchase those items instead because I'm, at the end of the day, paying for a game to play it and while I want to look good in game while doing so, I'm not gonna drop $15 on digital t-shirts.
But there are plenty of people who don't mind tossing down $60 additionally a year into a game like Destiny 2 for sparkly new transmog outfits from the Eververse store, and they'll see it as any sort of reason to do so ('because I have the money', 'because I want to support the developer', 'because I have to collect everything', 'because because because'), and we can't just pretend like its a handful of dudes dropping thousands of dollars while everyone else nobly boycotts the practice.
You are correct, but as someone who has worked in F2P mobile for a decade, it is true that most profitability comes from whales, at least in this market. You might have hundreds of thousands who spend as you mention (dolphins or minnows), but as a percentage of revenue, that aggregate is considerably smaller than the aggregate of whales: I’ve seen that ratio as high as 5:95 on a financially successful mobile F2P 4X strategy game, meaning 5% of total revenue coming from players with a lifetime spend of less than $250, 95% of total revenue coming from those above that. The populations of those groups is usually the opposite (very few whales vs. many dolphins and minnows).
Not all F2P models swing heavily into “whale-based”, but the traditional wisdom is similar to the casino industry. Large corporate companies often have small teams dedicated to servicing VIP players, ensuring they come back to the game through attractive offers or other gifts (gamesindustry.biz/how-does-zynga-hunt-for-whales-…).
Another component that people don’t understand is that often these aren’t “normal people” in terms of their income. We had geo-tagged data, so when you’re looking at your high level VIPs north of a million in lifetime spend, you’re talking about someone in UAE, someone in Petersburg, someone in Hong Kong, or someone in the Texas oil fields. That’s not to provide moral ammunition, but it is a different viewpoint from these games preying on people who don’t have money. A lot of whales have so much money, they just don’t care about spending $100s or $1,000s at a time.
Finally, I personally know at least 1 divorce caused by a game I worked on: the husband couldn’t stop spending, and it led to a separation. There are likely more. By the same token, I also know marriages caused by that same game.
If people are having issues with spending, please stop playing, stop spending, get help. If people don’t want this to be the dominate model, they need to support with their wallets. Having said that, there’s more free games to play than when I grew up. I do think that is pretty cool.
It’s time for people to vote with their wallets and stop purchasing and playing games with predatory monetization models.
But saying that people complaining about MTX are like old man yelling at cloud is wrong. There will always be room for criticizing MTX like there will always be room for criticizing capitalism.
I definitely agree with you on this. It’s possible to vote with your wallet and still lose the vote. But I simply mean to suggest that those of us who won’t stand for MTX filled games ought to embrace the games that don’t have them (or at least don’t compromise the experience for them) like god of war, or red dead 2 etc. and that we should reach back into our backlogs and find games that we missed and look to purchase and play those rather than get the latest full price games that are still filled with MTX
Yes. But if they're predatory then they are abusing mental quirks. Similar to gambling there needs to be regulation. Especially on loot boxes and gatcha which are gambling.
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