Fan was originally short for fanatic, but language changes over time and now it means someone who likes something or someone. These “people” do not like, they hate. They are not fans, they are fanatics. And even that term feels too kind.
I feel like articles like this promote more psychopaths. If they know that their threats are working and effecting their target they are going to keep doing it.
Yoko Taro is a dude who straight up says he’ll do anything if you pay him. I wonder if he’d do like a youtube style lore analysis of Reincarnation if we hit him with a kickstarter.
In the past for things like Kingdom Hearts, people have made compilation YouTube videos of the story pieces. I haven’t looked yet - does it exist for this?
A lot of companies overhired during COVID, Trump basically turned the Federal Reserve into an unlimited money hack for banks and other companies, the tech sector is particularly sensitive to boom and bust cycles of mass hiring/layoffs every few years, there’s been Fed rate hikes recently, and other factors. Your more conspiratorially minded would say it’s a concerted effort to make people too afraid to unionize by making them think their jobs are in danger.
Seems like a good time to go indie. Big game companies are bloated and unhealthy. Specialization is so niche that there clearly isn’t the kind of interdepartmental communication there ought to be, and it’s pretty obvious that the money people have their hands in way too much.
That doesn’t seem to me like an environment that’s conducive to art.
How much good attention it’s gotten. No microtransactions, season passes etc. It’s called a ton of attention to all the AAA enshitification since it’s released.
So, I’d imagine those studios are scrambling to shift gears.
Nah. I remain hopeful that this is a market correction against live service investment. Devs will be hurt in the interim, but think about how something like Redfall happened. The suits said they had to make a live service game at Arkane. Arkane devs had no passion for that. 70% of the studio left, leaving Redfall's development to inexperienced new hires that replaced them, and they essentially set those development funds on fire making that game that no one wanted to spend money on. Sega made Hyenas for $70M, their most expensive project to date, and decided it was better to just not release it than to continue to run infrastructure to enable it. A similar story to Hyenas over at Sony, where they cut their live service portfolio down from 12 games to 6, seeing that the well had run dry. There have been a lot of these bets made, and they've been big bets, with the assumption that they'd see all the success that their predecessors in live service games had, without realizing that there aren't enough customers out there for you to be lucky enough to capture that success from when they're busy playing other games.
So what do all of these devs make instead? Video games that people actually want to play and spend money on, that can be made with budgets they can afford.
Sure, the death of the live service hype plays a role, too, but in my view it is mostly due to the gravy train of cheap money coming to a halt: Lots of companies are scaling back because they had funded themselves with loans while laundering profits through tax havens. Gaming companies are not much different from tech companies and media companies in this regard. Those are also in hot water ATM and fire people in order to stabilize their cash flow.
At the end of the day, gaming companies are going to invest far less in the future. Games such as “Spider-Man 2” and other AAA titles with exorbitant budgets will become rare. This has been a trend for years.
Thus I am rather certain that 2023 was one of the last years where we have seen a strong line-up of high quality, high budget titles alongside indie success stories.
It has been a trend that we see fewer AAA games per year, for a very long time. I think that can easily stabilize at a number of AAA games similar to what we saw last year, when we stop designing games that take up infinite time to play. Likewise, a great year for games doesn't mean that so many of them are concentrated in the AAA space. Hollow Knight Silksong, Mina the Hollower, and Penny's Big Breakaway could, potentially, all be some of the best games we've ever played, and not one of them will have come close to a $100M budget. (I don't think this year will top last year, but my point is that it doesn't require massive budgets to do so.)
There’s also the AA scene to consider. Nacon did a fantastic job with the RoboCop game - it doesn’t break any new ground, but it’s a simple, solid game that captures the tone of the RoboCop franchise well.
Nah, video games are and will always be at their best when a small team is bringing a new and unique, or a fresh and refined, perspective on something.
Rimworld, Kenshi, Stardew Valley, Grim Dawn, Project Zomboid, Palworld… none of those needed big budgets and large parent companies. My Steam wishlist has over 100 games on it currently, and maybe 5 of those are AAA titles. There’s plenty of great stuff still coming.
Gaming, like all software development, becomes plagued by popularized anti-patterns every so often. Remember back in like 2010 and every. single. fucking. game. had unskippable, frustratingly difficult, often instantly fatal should you fail them, quicktime events? Because I fucking remember. And now those are nowhere, because they’re terrible. And, yes, the use of AI is not a game design pattern so much as it is a development tool that will be used to fastforward development and decrease costs around, presumably, asset generation, but to some extent that was always going to happen. Any time a tool comes about that fundamentally reduces human labor, it always sees widespread adoption. Eventually it’ll be industry standard, and it’ll be…fine. It’ll suck for people with aspirations around graphic design and 3D modeling, but those are just the first places there will be cuts. Eventually you’ll have the physics engines, game systems, state management, etc. and other core components of game design automated via AI processes, which will kill a shitload of dev jobs. And eventually the people who make these AI game engines will, instead of selling to a studio who will parameterize the AI with prompts, will automate the prompting process with AI itself, so instead of selling to studios, they’ll just have an AI service that will take your description for a game that you want, run it through a bunch of canned AI subroutines and it’ll crap out a boutique game of your design that they technically own and have full copyright over and which is just incredibly derivative of a ton of other IP - imagine every single game being Palworld, “like X crossed with Y with a bit of A and B thrown in.” That’s right: eventually the end user will design the games themselves. A world in which you never have to consume any game, or probably eventually any media of any kind, beyond the one you already liked and wanted. You’ll never have to be challenged more than you would like or experiment with different forms of media. It’ll be a brave new world, filled with brave new games.
Well, for some realism I do understand you can’t think forever. Imagine someone asking you a question and you stay frozen for 1 minute. That would be weird 🤭
But the time in CyberPunk 2077 is too short yes.
PS: I wish I could reload my save game in real life 😂
Maybe. But multiplayer games exist. And people have a very high standard for what population a game must have for it to be worth playing. People will consolidate into singular pre-made titles, compromising on their desires like they do now, in order to have many other humans to play with.
Maybe AI can be convincing NPCs eventually, but people will want to play games with their friends. They'll find out eventually if another character is an NPC or human, and they will care.
Even singleplayer games will be subject to this, to a degree. People enjoy playing what their friends play - they like having the same experiences, they like having something in common to discuss, they like the shared experience that brings a sense of community to the fans of a single title or series.
Sure, people could make any game they desire, but it will be isolating. You're underselling the social desires and needs we all have. Maybe we'll end up with something similar to Garry's Mod and Roblox: connected gaming hubs where people can load up any number of experiences - but still being able to include their friends somehow. I think that is much more likely than the concept of a person sitting in the corner of a room with their VR headset, wilting away in a world of their own creation, having lost all connections that would otherwise surround them. Humans naturally fight against that. We'll experience things we're not familiar with, as long as we're experiencing them with other people.
i think it’s very clear now that the lack of unionization in the gaming industry will need to change, or every year or two or whatever arbitrary interval we’ll see an astronomical number of people losing their jobs all at once in this way.
This is true across tech workers. Having a nice salary kept unionization at bay, but there are no assurances during hard times.
These coordinated layoffs are almost certainly intended drive down labor costs in the long run by flooding the labor pool. Sure in a year we’ll get “not enough developers” stories forgetting to mention the drastically smaller salary…
And a broken clock is right twice a day. Sure this one is legit, it’s still Nintendo’s legal department. Just because they’re right this time doesn’t change anything.
I saw some comparisons of unrigged models from pal world overlayed with Pokemon models and they had nearly the exact same pose and proportions with some geometry tweaked. The chances of them matching up that closely by chance is practically impossible, and there were several examples. One rip off model is not enough to win a case, but if there’s a lot of them I think there’s a pretty good case that can be built. Gameplay and concept wise, I don’t think there’s a case, but with the model infringement there may be enough to show a deliberate pattern of ripping their model files.
Slow news day for games journalism and writers trying to justify their paychecks. Plus, I’d imagine it helps those who were running bets not on if Nintendo would crush it, but how long before they did.
One of these days I want to see it go to court just so that the judge and jury has to discuss the legitimacy of sexualized cartoon animals, with the defence forced to keep a straight face as they try to explain why a person banging a goodra with giant jugs in a wedding dress isn’t infringing copyright. Just a bunch of professional adults in a room forced to dance around the elephant in the room because it’s irrelevant to the case.
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