It’s always been a race to gobble up the handful of whales that keep the mobile game industry alive. Now add hundreds more desktop and console games to that list. Sure, there are lots of people that will happily spend thousands of dollars on any shitty game, but once you’ve got the entire industry spending billions fighting over those players, the well runs dry eventually.
Underrated comment honestly. That’s nailed on the head, greed drove billions in investments to compete for whales and now it looks like a wasteland…compounded by the fact that the whales were always unsustainable users in the first place. Sometimes rich people were whales but the majority of the time they were users who didn’t have a pot to piss in, in the first place.
There was an article from years back, I want to say around 2019 or so on then-Gamasutra, about how it was already too late to stop the bubble from bursting because all of these games are trying to get everyone’s attention (I’m having trouble finding it now). Now the bubble is bursting, and big games these days have dev cycles of about 5 years, putting us right here in 2024. Get dev cycles to 3 years or less so that you can actually react to changing market conditions, and charge a fair price for a good product. Maybe sequel it or otherwise make regular old expansion DLC. That was sustainable. No one even makes a multiplayer game anymore unless it’s intended to be rigorously competitively balanced or suck up all of your time and money through grinding.
Get dev cycles to 3 years or less so that you can actually react to changing market conditions, and charge a fair price for a good product.
This industry’s already killing people with overwork and stress. Increasing the time pressure isn’t going to improve the quality or bring the price down.
We don’t need faster game development, there are already more games out there than anyone could play. We (the market) need to encourage quality over quantity.
The industry kept making games bigger that would have been better off if they’d stayed smaller. I’m not saying to make the games they make now in less time. I’m saying stop making games that take 5 years to make and instead make games that take 3 years to make.
You’ve described the AA/indie scene which took the chunk of the market big publishers abandoned including whole genres of games.
The problem is investors saw the line go way up, passing even Hollywood so to keep it riding forever they apply Hollywood-sized solutions.
Except you can’t just shuffle live services a few weeks around another so you can milk the box office. They want us to spend all our time in their game services so people will pick one game for a time so they are cannibalizing each other and eroding trust as games fail and abandon the players that did buy into them.
And what you’re describing is the economic realities of a bubble bursting, which means they have to pivot to making something sustainable that the market actually wants. That doesn’t mean AA or indie exclusively. It does mean smaller scope. Halo and Gears of War could be created much faster when they were linear games, and now they’re both open world and arguably worse off for it.
Lol! yeah! What sort of nerd do you have to be to enjoy card games? And sports games? Like, go outside, brah. When I get my game on, it’s usually CoD on my Xbox. Headshot after headshot, teabag after teabag. It’s just something else, you know? Not something you can get by playing a card game or some rts or something where someone else is doing the shooting for you… Like… Get some skill brah.
/s … Pfew… That was hard to get through… sorry about that, couldn’t help myself
What I love most about Godot is that it doesn’t give a fuck whether you want to use python-like code or write your own libraries in C#/C++. 10 minutes and you’ve got something working.
I can’t even imagine how that backend must look, 🤣 I work 100% in GDscript, but it’s really cool to hear : “Yeah it’s about 30% GDscript and 70% C++”
Coming from Java, I personally love how signals work between classes. Friggin hated my getters and setters, and the way signals work in Godot is just like how my brain thinks about that problem, so very easy to use and understandable.
As much as I like to shit on Epic, but UE 5.x is pretty much innovative with each minor release. Watching the release videos of what the engine can do in realtime is always impressive. They are used as realtime backgrounds for movie sets.
I think it’s funny you try to show how good the game engine is by saying it’s used in movies. Like sure it’s impressive, but graphics don’t make a game. Give me one good game with simple graphics built in Godot, rather than 100 fancy locking $80 micro-transaction infested always online games.
Your argument has nothing to do with UE5‘s or Godot‘s strengths and weaknesses. You could literally flip it and it would make just as much (or little) sense: Give me one good asset library game in UE5, rather than 100 custom asset containing $80 micro-transaction infested always online Godot games. See? The argument doesn‘t actually say much about the engines, just about monetization which you can handle completely independently from the software. If your project makes a million or less, UE5 is free to use for anyone. That makes it pretty good for tiny indie devs and hobbyists actually.
Do you mix game development with engine? Of course an engine doesn’t make an innovative game by itself. An engine is - hence the name - only the means to an end to help develop a game. Innovative games are all over the place in regards to the engines they use; from in-house/custom to products like unity, unreal, etc.
That you have the impression that engines like UE and Unity are “less innovative” by judging released games just shows how many games are developed using these engines - especially Unity. It’s so damn easy to build games with it, that many people do, even when they only build something simple. And that’s fine … it means that more people can channel their creativity into game development, even when it doesn’t yield anything ground breaking.
It also shows, though, that developers can focus more on the game development and have to deal less with engine development and now even asset creation, since these engines also bring asset catalogs. So it’s really quite a good time to dive into game development, which fosters creativity and in the end there will also be innovative games among them.
Yes but at the same time Unreal doesn’t really compete with Unity at all when it comes to 2D games. Unreal is primarily meant for 3D games and maybe you could make a 2D one work in it but Unity has a lot more resources for 2D games. That’s why games like this switched to Godot instead of Unreal cause Unreal wasn’t really an option. I could be wrong but when Ive made some projects in Unreal it didn’t really seem to have any options for 2D games like Unity has.
It’s got all of the functionality you need but nothing in UE is “boilerplate” for 2D, meaning they don’t have the functions built for you to use out of the box. Godot has all the boilerplate for a complete novice to use after a few tutorials videos. Haven’t used Unity for maybe a decade so idk about them.
Unity’s modus operandi is to develop a feature halfway and then deprecate it and replace it with something that’s not yet released. Such a mess of a product.
Whitehurst and chief product and technology officer Marc Whitten discuss Unity’s plans to rebuild trust with developers after the 2023 Runtime Fee fiasco.
Here’s a hint, it’s gone. You’re not going to get that trust back for 10-20 years, if you ever get it back.
What do you expect them to say, “it’s all fucked, let’s shut up shop”? They’ve fired JR, undone most of his wild spending, gutted the company to desperately undo his mismanagement and make the company profitable. Saying “were trying to go back to how it was” seems like a non-insane risk-averse business way to try and keep the Unity users who haven’t been able to jump ship already.
If you look at other games published by Sega, like Yakuza Like a Dragon, Persona 3 Reload, Two Point Hospital, Total War games, it becomes clear Sega’s the one responsible for that
gamedeveloper.com
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