He’s not wrong. Focusing on getting out large established titles is what Microsoft was doing during the 2010s, and they have fallen because of that. They have moved towards having more smaller titles, but it hasn’t paid off quite yet.
Over the past 5-7 years, the AAA publishers have tried to use production scale as their new moat. Very few companies can afford to spend the $200M an Activision or Take 2 spend to put a title like Call of Duty or Red Dead Redemption on the shelf. These AAA publishers have, mostly, used this production scale to keep their top franchises in the top selling games each year. The issue these publishers have run into is these same production scale/cost approach hurts their ability to create new IP. The hurdle rate on new IP at these high production levels have led to risk aversion by big publishers on new IP. You’ve seen a rise of AAA publishers using rented IP to try to offset the risk (Star Wars with EA, Spiderman with Sony, Avatar with Ubisoft etc). This same dynamic has obviously played out in Hollywood as well with Netflix creating more new IP than any of the movie studios.
Specifically, the AAA game publishers, starting from a position of strength driven from physical retail have failed to create any real platform effect for themselves. They effectively continue to build their scale through aggregated per game P&Ls hoping to maximize each new release of their existing IP.
In the new world where a AAA publisher don’t have real distribution leverage with consumers, they don’t have production efficiencies and their new IP hit rate is not disproportionately higher than the industry average we see that the top franchises today were mostly not created by AAA game publishers. Games like Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, Candy Crush, Clash Royale, DOTA2 etc. were all created by independent studios with full access to distribution. Overall this, imo, is a good thing for the industry but does put AAA publishers, in a precarious spot moving forward. AAA publishers are milking their top franchises but struggling to refill their portfolio of hit franchises, most AAA publishers are riding the success of franchises created 10+ years ago.
The suggestion here is that the type of game that can thrive on a subscription service is either a small one that benefits from better curation and visibility or a live-service one that can make up revenue on the backend by charging all the new players microtransactions (the new store shelves are inside the games themselves).
I’ve been saying this since Game Pass launched: it encourages scummy monetization. The kind of games that come to it are going to have more and more content locked away behind microtransactions to make up the money lost by not selling copies. It’s going to gradually become full of “free” to play garbage, and people will accept it because they didn’t pay for an individual game outright.
Of the two options that Phil says Game Pass encourages (and I agree with his analysis), one is the opposite of scummy and something the market could use more of.
It’s a noble stance, but literally everything is digital these days. Even disk based games are requiring day 1 updates (or aren’t coming with the content on the disk in the first place), meaning you’re at the behest of the platform to keep your content available.
Most games come on the disk and don't require an internet connection (unlike some Xbox titles like Halo Infinite). Day 1 updates only matter for PC because performance can be hit or miss. On consoles, it's not such a painful prospect. My PS4 has been offline since I bought it and every game has run fine after installation. I'm aware that Cyberpunk doesn't run well but it never should've been on PS4 in the first place.
Digital storefronts like GoG do allow you to own your game by giving you the ability to download DRM free versions of games. It's possible to do but publishers like EA have primarily live service games which means DRM is their bread and butter.
Game preservation is important to me so GoG is a godsend for the work they do.
All those games may run fine for you, but you’re still missing day one patches for most games. Maybe even some content you wanted and didn’t realize was even there without being online to download patches and hot fixes. Also more and more reports of console discs not having any data on them and just being a code to allow you to download the game.
I’m not saying this is a good thing, but it is the reality of gaming today.
It sucks. I've been backing up PS3 games on my hard drive for a while now and I'd like to be able to do that for the PS4 too.
My contention is why we need day one patches in the first place. Surely, if games were properly tested, they wouldn't need to be patched as soon as they release. Just seems weird to me that they release a patch immediately following release when that could've been done before release?
I don’t disagree. But these days going gold doesn’t mean the same. They all seem to take the last month or two to still iron things out before it really releases.
Yeah, cloud versions (which are stupid) require an internet connection… do they even sell the cloud version as a cart? If they do and it’s not advertised as such, that’s obviously a problem.
I won’t argue that the eshop isn’t full of shovelware because it is - but even shovelware needs to be preserved.
The problem with this line of debate is that there are some games worth having that are only on the eshop and it’s still a digital barrier to you truly owning the software. Saying most games are available on a physical medium doesn’t help those that aren’t and it’s a situation that’s only going to get worse.
Essentially what I am saying is that none of the big 3 are innocent here and just because some are slightly better than others doesn’t make it okay.
Agreed on all points but there’s some nuance I feel you’re neglecting.
I never said Nintendo was blameless or beyond reproach (they suck in lots of ways) only that they do have physical carts that work out of the box. This is something that continues to benefit me. For example, I picked up Advance Wars reboot on the way to the airport and was able to pop in the cart and start playing at the gate. Credit where it’s due, you know? I harass everyone I know with a Switch to buy physical because that’s the only way we’ll continue to have this shred of ownership… at least that’s still on the table as a possibility compared to the other two.
Digital is not the problem. Lack of true ownership is the problem. GoG is DRM free. Steam isn’t great on this, but it’s better than other alternatives for now. Sailing the high seas is the best option in many cases.
It’s not all or nothing, you can take small steps to stop supporting the worst offenses. First step, don’t use any game streaming services where you just subscribe to a rolling catalogue each month/year. PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass are examples of this.
Nintendo is awful too, their games should be ripped from physical media if possible and emulated, or otherwise aquired on the seven seas and emulated. It’s a great way to play their games without supporting their evil practices.
Support FOSS games and FOSS-friendly companies. Valve is a good example. Although not perfect by any means, they have proven to be far friendlier to FOSS apps, games, and platforms than most other companies. If you have to get DRM-locked games, get them through Steam. At least they have offline mode and allow full access to all your game files so you can save them to a separate location for archives/backups.
It starts with small things, but if lots of people start doing this, it will have a noticable effect.
Well I don’t know how long the GTAV script is, but A Girl Who Chants Love At the Bound Of This World: YU-NO came out in like, 1996 and its script has ~1,300,000 words in it.
That’s more words than Mass Effect 1-3’s scripts combined.
That’s about 100,000 words less than the combined scripts of the entire Metal Gear Solid series excluding MGS5.
And YUNO was made by like, 25 or less people I think. At a time when making computer games was not so easy. They didn’t have the tools that make game development easy like we do these days, they mostly had to write their own software and had to deal with a lot of hardware limitations.
Effort to make good games these days has actually gone down a lot. There is really no excuse to have such a massive budget and still release a bug ridden, unfinished mess.
Even if it does, thats still too much money. How much money did Hollow Knight spend on marketing? Or what about Terraria? Or Minecraft pre-buyout? How much was spent on marketing for games like Deep Rock Galactic? I can guess probably less than $100 million each. Maybe even less than $10 million.
You’re listing outliers that did well despite their smaller marketing budget. There are tons of great games from smaller studios that get buried because nobody knows about them.
The budget is also a marketing ploy. The average person hears about a game costing hundreds of millions to make and they think “well then, it MUST be good”. It’s more or a pissing contest among publishers. Most of that budget does indeed go to marketing and executive wages/bonuses.
And from the publisher’s perspectives, that’s really a good investment of the budget, because it doesn’t just drive up sales. It also cultivates customer loyalty and fanboyism (e.g. “we are spending all that money because we believe in the game, and we want to give our loyal fans the best experience possible” is a very common line in pre-release interviews).
For example, there’s a false equivalency among gamers, propagated by this kind of propaganda: “I have to pay the high prices and engage in microtransactions/DLC, because that supports the game developers and their high budgets”. In reality, the people who actually make the game see very little of that money. Their wages, in most instances, are shit and do not reflect the hours they put in. However, gamers rarely want to understand that, and instead extend the publisher pissing contest among themselves (“the game I’m playing now spent more money than the game you are playing, therefore it’s the superior product”).
Seriously, I worked in media creation and like looking at movie budgets is painful for me cause so much of it is to pay people already at the top and overpaid more than enough.
Production and material costs haven’t grown as much as marvel movies would make you think so it is all going to executives lawyers and heads of the sweat shops of special effects houses.
Over the past 5-7 years, the AAA publishers have tried to use production scale as their new moat. Very few companies can afford to spend the $200M an Activision or Take 2 spend to put a title like Call of Duty or Red Dead Redemption on the shelf. These AAA publishers have, mostly, used this production scale to keep their top franchises in the top selling games each year. The issue these publishers have run into is these same production scale/cost approach hurts their ability to create new IP.
We don’t need super high quality graphics for every AAA production. Sometimes, Just good enough graphics, but with better interactivity with the environment like ToTK and Baldurs Gate 3. I mean , I love RDR2, but honestly, shrinking horse testicles is a bit too much attention to detail.
As an example, cell shading of ToTK still looks amazing and far more enduring as a graphics style. Also, Elden Ring, arguably has worse graphics than RDR2 or the latest CoD. But, because of it’s amazing art direction it will age pretty well.
I’m done giving developers a pass for not even putting in the minimum. Larian and Bethesda didn’t even put horses in their games because they’re so afraid of rendering the sack.
Everyone says Phantom Liberty will finally redeem Cyberpunk, so I can only assume CD Projekt has spent the past three years creating a perfect horse with the most dazzling balls we’ve ever seen. Can’t wait for those RTX and DLSS 3.5 rendered oysters.
They can still have similar production value and not be open world games that take 80 hours to finish. It just makes far more sense to me to bet small with tons of projects than to bet big with only a few, because then you'll find the PUBGs and the DOTAs that Phil is talking about eventually.
Spencer’s analysis is just an overview of the current symptom.
This is the real disease:
because it sees a new platform it can scale to feed the financial growth demanded by investors.
Investors/shareholders demand infinite growth, but there’s finite space to grow (millions of games, few customers). This is why, in the past 2 decades we’ve been seeing the scummiest of practices being employed again and again, as well as a 300% hike in base prices. Capitalism has eaten gaming.
But we’ve been observing this trend in AAA and AA publishers/developers mostly. Indie gaming is alive and well and evolving towards being better and better. Why? Because indie developers are not usually beholden to investors.
Once you hear a gaming company you used to like has gone public, say your condolences and then run away.
It’s the same shit across every industry. Successful company goes public, investors demand yearly double digit growth, and after a few years they are imploding.
Investors do not care about the future, sustainability, or anything except immediate profitability. What you described is exactly what happens, in gaming and everywhere else. It sucks.
This is why, in the past 2 decades we’ve been seeing the scummiest of practices being employed again and again, as well as a 300% hike in base prices.
Two decades ago, games were $50 which, due to switching to discs, was a price reduction over cartridges, so this point in time is a bit cherry picked. But even rolling from there, a 300% hike in base prices would mean games cost $200, and that's just not true.
That wouldn't be the base price; the base price is $70 for the biggest games. I think people are also a bit liberal with labeling games as "incomplete", when really they mean, "this game will have DLC after the fact because it's the best way to make games that take years to make without laying people off". And just to take a brief look along some games in my library, Cyberpunk 2077 would cost a maximum of $100 with DLC, by the time Guilty Gear Strive is sunset (if it runs for 5 years) it will still be shy of $200 in a worst case, and I'm seeing far more games without DLC than with DLC.
So don't play those games. The only way that's "almost all games" is if you're looking at the mobile market. Once again, still not included in the base price.
50 dollars were console games. On PC you’d often find the same game at 30 dollars (disk) or 20 dollars (steam) on release. The difference was due to console makers taking a standard fee cut from every sale.
The first AAA games back then to be released at 40 and 50 dollars on PC were COD MW1 and BF3, which set the trend for all other games since then. This was pure profit for the publishers, since there was no cut for console makers on PC. And before you say it, no, the Steam cut back then wasn’t even comparable (much less since it was a % cut and not a standard fee). In fact Steam hiked their cut because of the price hike triggered by EA and Activision, which is what then made EA pull their games off Steam and create Origin.
I don't know where your information came from, but a lot of it is very wrong. I thought maybe you might be from some other country, but that would mean it's a country that uses dollars that are stronger than US dollars, which I don't think is a thing.
$50 was the standard set by PlayStation for its biggest games, which N64 couldn't match due to cartridge costs, but this standard carried over to the next generation and continued very, very briefly into the life of the Xbox 360. By 2006, all 360 and PS3 games were $60.
I bought many PC games on disc back in the day. Call of Duty 2 (not Modern Warfare 2; Call of Duty 2) was $50. You can see here via the wayback machine that a week after its release, Modern Warfare 1 is $50. Here's the PC version of Flight Simulator 2004 and the first Knights of the Old Republic for PC at $50 in December 2003. I remember there was a push to make those $50 games into $60, and the likes of Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 could sort of get away with it back when others couldn't. After buying Call of Duty 2 on disc for $50, I got the $60 version of (original) Prey, because the $60 version came on a DVD instead of several CDs, and installing games from 5 or 6 CDs was a pain that I was willing to pay $10 to not deal with back then (it also came with other collector's edition stuff).
Steam still does, and always has, taken a percent cut from game sales and not a flat fee. They priced it at 30%, because that was better than brick and mortar retail. These days it starts at 30% and follows a sort of regressive tax system once your game is super successful so that you're not as tempted to leave Steam for other platforms.
EA pulled their games off of Steam because 30% of a lot of sales is a lot of money, and they wagered they'd stand to do better if they made their own storefront, but after the first couple of years, they stopped trying to make a platform to compete with Steam and really only cared about keeping their own releases there for that 30% cut that they no longer had to pay to someone else.
That last sentence is so spot on. After reading a topic yesterday, I was trying to think of one time a game company went public, and it ending up a good thing for the gamers in the long run. If anyone knows of one, I’d love to hear it.
Check back in on Devolver, Paradox, and TinyBuild in 10 years. They're scaling up to cover the market that Ubisoft, Activision, EA, and Take Two abandoned.
If the primary objective here is to engage in constructive dialogue, then name-calling and overgeneralization serve no purpose and only fuel the fire. The issue at hand has been conflated to be about political affiliations like Republican vs. Democrat, when that’s not the core point of discussion at all. We’re here to debate the merits and drawbacks of mod removal, not to stereotype one another based on our political leanings or otherwise.
I must point out, albeit reluctantly, that much of the stereotyping and overgeneralizing in this thread seems to be coming from those who are in favor of the mod’s removal. This does little to advance a constructive conversation and only serves to deepen divisions.
If we’re truly interested in finding common ground or at least understanding the other side of the argument, we need to stop dismissing each other’s viewpoints out of hand. Only through respectful and open discussion can we hope to reach a resolution that considers the full complexity of the issue.
Are people seriously bitching that a handhelds performance doesn’t match current PlayStation or Xbox specs which are ten times it’s size?
If the switch 2 is a handheld, it has so many more physical, power, and heat constraints and I am impressed that it even matches the previous gens consoles.
I‘m legit happy as long as it can do 720p60fps for stuff like TotK in portable without any upsampling and whatnot.
I‘m not playing Nintendo cause of cutting edge graphics but because of cutting edge gameplay and entertainment. Doesn‘t matter how realistic a game looks when Mario Odyssey runs laps around it in terms of the fun it provides.
Just… provide backwards compatability, please. And as a bonus I‘d love a way for „old“ games to get better resolution and fps ideally without patches (cause we know the majority of games would never get patched).
It better be, because I’m tired of having so many games running like molasses on the baseline Switch - it’s literally just an overclocked, slightly improved Ouya in the inside, and it shows
So stop playing games that are more graphics than gameplay. It is strange when Nintendo actually decides that graphics shouldn’t matter and releases a good, baseline system that has broad appeal with a lot of simpler games then suddenly they get scared that some ELITE GAMERS need ultramegasuperHD graphics and everything goes out the window.
It’s really pathetic. It’s what’s holding back PC gaming, the idea that its “top” games (style over substance trash) need $2000+ computers to run acceptably.
The gaming industry as a whole is on a downward spiral with how it’s headed, I would definitely be much more inclined to buy a much more artistically styled fun game than the new COD 52 NOW WITH REALISTIC GRAPHICS ONLY AT 3TB OF SPACE!!! PRE ORDER AND GET HALF OF THE GAME!!! type of bs were getting to. It really seems that indie is almost the only way to go
The Switch is, in literal actual factuality, an underclocked Nvidia Shield and if you have an older one you can hack it, then restore the clocks to their spec. ToTK runs really well when the CPU, GPU and RAM run at the Shield’s stock speeds.
It’s because Nintendo knows that portables sell massively higher than consoles for them, and that’s the reality of making a portable. Nintendo cares massively about the hardware and put a lot of effort into making something that fits their ambitions and audience.
A simplified Legion Go looks like something we can probably expect the next device to be then. Most people have compared the Rog Ally power with the Z1 extreme as being similar to PS4/X1 .
What they could do is a true “docked” mode where it can connect to a GPU to have it output 4K. Highly doubt as the cost would become exorbitant.
That's true, but also we rarely use the switch as a portable in our house and my kid could care less. We don't need Mario Kart to be 4k 120 and Breath of the Wild is designed to look great with lower graphics quality. We have a PS5 and a 4k TV with VRR and we switch between the two all the time.
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