Yeah, but have you considered the fact that this gives Saudi Arabia &/or Jared Kushner “anti-cheat” level access to millions & millions of PCs in the USA?
That is reason enough to never buy another EA game.
Mentioned it in one of the other threads about this but it bears repeating:
BG3 did not come out of nowhere. It wasn’t a case of Wizards of the Coast giving money to a random studio and getting a masterpiece out.
Baldurs Gate 3, as a product, was officially in development since approximately 2019. It released into early access on Steam in 2020 and 1.0 in 2023. It received repeated injections of cash through things like fricking google stadia over that period.
But also? Baldurs Gate 3 didn’t begin development in 2019. Larian had been pestering/pitching the Wizards since freaking 2014 when they were still working on the kickstarted Divinity Original Sin 1. And Larian, as a studio, had been making CRPGs since 2002’s Divine Divinity.
BG3 was agame with 3 years of active development and 21 years of experience and expertise.
When studios get shuttered because they aren’t immediately profitable? You inherently have people who decide “I am done with this shit” and either were successful enough to enter early retirement or transition to related industries. You lose the experience that makes a “three year game” possible. Sometimes that is a high profile creative lead. But more often that is the people who don’t get to go on stage at the keighleys but who are interpreting said creative leads and actually making the mechanics and story beats we all love.
Fuck EA. They are a horrible company that has mismanaged so many IPs and engaged in decades of worker abuse. But understand that we are also likely losing hundreds, if not thousands, of experienced game developers which will make future games from other studios worse.
And before people say “fuck that, I like indie games”: Clair Obscur is the poster child of that and for very good reason. Maybe do some research as to who those core 30 people are (hint: They mostly were head hunted from Ubi et al) and where their money came from. And then think about what happens when there aren’t major studios to head hunt from.
One of the biggest parts of the problem is that corporate management types can’t quantify experience and skill. This leads to them thinking of projects purely in terms of man-hours, and they cannot comprehend that not all man-hours are equal. It’s an issue that plagues a lot of industries.
I mean… if we want to talk about mismanagement, budgeting and delivery dates are barely a factor in game dev. With even a halfway decent publisher/stakeholder, the system of deliverables means that you tend to get into a case where the game is “done” by the time it was supposed to be and you are “just” focused on bugfixing and polishing. So you crunch until your staff are suicidal and then ship it and people criticize the “unfinished” area while loving the rest of it.
The bigger issue is that the entire industry is more or less run in a start-up mindset. The competent project managers are mostly ignored in favor of the rockstar devs. MBA who spent hundreds of hours firming up jira tasks and translating between gitlab issues and said tasks? Get bent you stupid stooge, you are trying to ruin games. In a quick video blurb because you worked on the foliage in one of the boss arenas? How would you like a dump truck of money to run your own studio?
And that is why we constantly see shit like Blizzard (when we actually look) where “locker room culture” is so prevalent and people just want to hire other people like them. They have no idea how to lead a project or deal with any kind of friction. But they are a genius Auteur until they crash and burn.
Corporate management types are not organically recruited from experienced labour, they are from the “brahmin” echelons of society. Not only do they not understand that not all man hours are different, they have no clue of what is going on since they are recruited because of their pedigree and not competence.
For a prime example of this, look no further than EA’s former CEO John Riccitiello, who keeps getting executive positions despite being objectively bad at his job.
He was hired as EA’s COO (and later CEO) despite having zero experience in the video game industry (his prior work was at places like Pepsi and Clorox). EA under Riccitiello tried to squeeze every cent possible out of customers through aggressive microtransactions (he infamously stated in a stockholder meeting that he’d like to charge Battlefield players a dollar per reload), pushed to make every game always-online to prevent piracy (a decision that lead to the disastrous SimCity reboot, and the Sims 4 only escaped the same fate due to SimCity’s dire reception [though it’s theorized its vastly simplified gameplay compared to earlier Sims titles is a remnant of this time]), was a major proponent of the worst sorts of anti-consumer DRM such as SecuROM, and treated employees like trash leading to an exodus of talent. EA was voted the worst company in America twice during his tenure, and people online celebrated when the stock price plummeted and he was finally pushed out.
His post-EA career was also a disaster. After leaving EA (with a golden parachute, naturally), he was hired as the CEO of Unity Technologies - the company behind the Unity game engine - due to his “industry expertise”. Over the next few years he ran the company into the ground with awful monetization strategies (he’s the one behind the “runtime fee” fiasco, where Unity wanted to charge game developers by how many times their games were installed), wasted billions of dollars acquiring middleware vendors (mainly ad and analytics companies), and set engine development priorities that chased mobile game fads over what the actual users of their product wanted. He “resigned” when the stock price dropped by over 60% in a year due to his mistakes, and the engine’s reputation hasn’t come close to recovering from the damage his leadership caused.
One thing I love about the original rogue legacy is that it has shoutouts to the dev’s previous games. None of them look great but it makes it clear that even this game that feels like their first isn’t, it’s the product of years of smaller games. RL1 is a great game, and it gave them the skills and money to do RL2 which was a masterpiece.
I love indie games, but they aren’t popping up with noobs designing a masterpiece on a shoestring budget except in very rare instances and that involves the budget not accounting for their time.
Also I miss the era of flash games, especially as it proved a good way for everyday people to learn these skills as a hobby and the best could move to professionalize.
Larian also had to sell 30% of their company to Tencent to raise more money during development after they already raised money on Kickstarter. If it was a case of WotC just giving money they probably wouldn‘t have had to do that. Good games take time but also a lot of money. Let‘s hope they‘re not selling more of their company any time soon because they could end up being the one being pointed at.
The fuck he talking about? Obviously it has worked before. How else can you explain yearly COD releases making billions in revenue?
That it’s a losing strategy in the long term was always obvious, but get this: whomever’s in charge only cares about the numbers of the following quarter. That the company will go under in 10 years is literally not his problem, that’s the next schmoe’s problem.
Yearly CoD releases are taking longer to make and costing more to produce though; the most recent CoD we have numbers for, which was a number of years ago at this point, cost $700M to make, and that was the most expensive one at the time. They used to have two studios alternating releases every other year. Now there are three studios on a rotation with about a dozen support studios that all used to make other games, and now they just make CoD.
“Charging more” is where this gets ambiguous though. A game like Assassin’s Creed charges less these days than it used to, relative to how much content they put in the box. I’m long since checked out of Assassin’s Creed, but I think the average game could stand to be leaner and cost the same in the interest of coming out faster and for less money to produce. That would be called shrinkflation in any other industry, which is the same as charging more.
You cannot convince me it cost $700M to make any of the recent CoD games. They are rehashes of each other. That has to include literally every dollar spent during the games development lifecycle across all studios and the publisher, right? Otherwise they are just pissing money away.
It is development spend + marketing spend + post-launch DLC spend. Even forking the same code base, you can see where the money goes. The campaigns are original each time, new map design requires time and money, etc. In the past 5 years, there has probably been a CoD game that cost $1B to make, as this data is from 2020.
If it includes marketing then yeah, it's mostly that. $700M is an absolutely absurd astronomical amount for what CoD is, on a purely development basis.
I usually hear of marketing spend matching development cost, so it’s probably closer to 50/50. The documents that these figures came from didn’t itemize them, but it’s notable that 2020 is when current gen consoles came out, and more fidelity usually correlates to more time and money to make the assets.
I don’t think this is quite right. CoD titles do take a long time to develop. They‘re just rotating studios, so they can achieve a yearly release cadence (the last six entries in the series had five different studios working on them). Also, they are by no means getting cheaper. According to court documents development costs rose from $450 million to over $700 million from 2015 to 2020 alone.
Aren’t the cod games made by 3 different studios that take turns with their releases? Or did they stop doing that? I remember infinity ward, Treyarchand I can’t recall the 3rd
Sledgehammer Games. They never really kept the cycle, they kept fucking up and others had to come in to help etc. There's got to be disatrous management at the studios.
Borderlands really didnt deserve another chance after the shit games theyve released but it seems people fell for.the marketing and gave it one anyway. Now the same thing is happening the game is shit and was sold at a ridiculous price and while you’re sitting there trying to scrap together some enjoyment youve got this asshole Randy hitting headlines daily.
So it’s been reported that the PS 5 suffers from performance issues, especially during long play periods due to being perfectly optimized and this is his latest response:
“Known issue of perf dropping on PS5 pro after several hours of continuous play,” he said. “Workaround until we patch: Quit game and restart. Sorry for the friction!”
I mean, he’s an airheaded out-of-touch fellow-kids piece of shit, but he’s not entirely wrong about restarting a game if it starts getting fucky after several hours of continuous play.
Also, I’d suggest to just about anyone that they should probably at least get up and walk around, maybe get some fresh air, if you’re gonna be gaming all day. Your devices need breaks too.
Honestly for a new game three or for hours sessions on a game like this is pretty normal and people are saying that it’s a constant drop in performance after just an hour or two and continues to get worse until your running like your in a 1070.
And no these consoles and computers are not expected to need a break after just a two hours of running, that’s not how good applications work.
The only games I know of that need to restart every once in awhile are Paradox games and ultra modded Bethesda games. Paradox because sometimes the game needs a restart to let the AI reprioritize and for Bethesda it’s because of memory leaks that become a problem after too many mods. The fact that Borderlands 4 is that bad out of the box is fucking sad.
Man I don’t know how the board of directors is going to feel about the CEO telling people to refund their game. That seems like it would be on the list of things you don’t want your CEO telling people.
Yes. It’s a clip from the show/meme where the other guy in the elevator says, “I feel sorry for you”. Then the guy in the picture above says, “I don’t even think about you.”
They care because people that haven’t bought it should know that these issues don’t seem to be getting better. They should know that their money would be going to that asshole’s pockets. This shit matters and you wanting to plug your ears to discomfort doesn’t change that.
gamesradar.com
Gorące