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.
One extra thing a lot of articles haven’t pointed out is that the mod was locked behind a patreon paywall. Sticking mods behind paywalls has been a hot subject (to put it gently) in the community for a while now. Not to rush to the defense of the most profitable franchise in the world, but yeah that’s absolutely gonna get you shut down.
My guess is Palworld has done their homework on how to be “legally distinct” enough. It’s quite a different gameplay loop, after all and Nintendo can’t copyright “cute little animals that do the manual labour for the humies” otherwise things like Digimon already wouldn’t exist.
This kinda flies in the face of what I heard the Palworld devs are: a rag-tag handful of nobodies on a budget of $0 making a Steam game in their free time.
I heard they didn’t even use a version control system because they didn’t know how to use one, they just put a copy of the code repo on a flash drive once a day, and when they ran out of drives, they went to the store to buy more.
If even a slightly less embellished version of half of what I’ve heard is true, I wager none of these people got anywhere near a lawyer before putting this game out.
Life has taught me a zillion times over to never buy into the story of the scrappy underdog. 9/10 it’s completely fabricated where it turned out actually no they were a multiberyllionaire oil baron who had everything they needed to succeed 30 times over. Even that other 1/10 times it’s still a massive stretch of the truth where the person in question was more than prepared for what was ahead of them. People naturally embellish their opposition and downplay their capacities; and underdog narratives crank that natural tendency up to 11.
You don’t necessarily need a lawyer on-hand to figure out “legally distinct”. Everything that Nintendo has taken down before has blatantly used the name and existing characters in both name and likeness. Even if the core idea when they started the game was “pokemon but with guns” - which I doubt - it’s still a good start in the vein of “inspired by” instead of “ripping off” and I bet Nintendo knows this otherwise Palworld would have been hit just as quickly as the mod was considering this is a company who made themselves infamous for going after youtubers making let’s plays of a basic racing game. They’re famously litigious so they’re going to be watching Pocketpair and Palworld like vultures after their next meal but either Pocketpair are more careful than they’d like the public to believe or their idea is different enough from the get-go that Nintendo will never get anything on them.
As someone with minimal pokemon knowledge, only played two due to being older and not having Nintendo consoles really, I thought this game was a spin off till I realized no big pokemon or Nintendo logo anywhere. They must have threaded the needle to avoid that copyright infringment.
They’ve done a great job and nailing the art style modern Pokemon games should have had, while being distinct enough to avoid any serious chances of a lawsuit winning.
Modders will be the ones running afoul of Nintendos lawyers.
Nah, once you start distributing the mod, be it free or not, it’s copyright infringement. They can’t sue you for the profits made, but they can still force you to take it down and pay reparations for any potential damage to their IP, as stupid as that may sound.
I can’t say I agree with the approach. Someone like Sony can perhaps get away with this knowing that even with routine mechanics, they can reliably sell a good story.
But Square is sort of discovering their niche for modern Japanese RPGs; if their singular high budget games are going to be like Final Fantasy 16, there’s definitely some risk of overinvestment in stories people are “meh” about. Meanwhile, if people were asked to name their favorite JRPG stories, I imagine a lot of them were not ridiculously high budget.
This article was a wild ride. I have not been keeping up with Square Enix so I had no idea they were all in on the web3 hype and now AI, too. I am wondering what is going on with the title “Infinity Strash: Dragon Quest The Adventure of Dai”, did AI come up with that wordy name? What even is a Strash?
Someone needs to teach this company about sunk costs. Just because they invested in blockchain and AI doesn’t mean they need to keep throwing money and resources at it. Maybe they would have a better marketing budget and better market research into the new trends in their field if they weren’t so busy constantly salivating over all the latest tech bro hype.
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