Live service garbage has costed the industry billions in losses and costed tens of thousands of devs their jobs. Fad chasing in general.
Everyone wants to make the fortnite killer or overwatch killer. They set billions of dollars on fire and get nothing for it. And it’s the devs who pay the price. Not the c-suite dipshits who threw all that money in the fire pit.
I mean they also created a ton of jobs and it‘s not like devs working on single player games don‘t face layoffs and bonuses fraud. Besides Overwatch 2 killed Overwatch already.
Way to make a truly bad faith argument or perhaps you are lost or something. To clarify: Are you implying it‘s any different for AAA SP games? Because that’s the discussion here.
Yes, imo live service games are very bad for the people who buy them and the people making it.
They are only there to make cash. And they make this cash through terrible predatory monetization - loot boxes, microtransactions, season passes. These companies actually want to run casinos that target the most vulnerable and children. You can argue that people wouldn’t want to work on this if they had a choice.
There’s almost always very little artistic value.
At least with sp AAA, you can gain a cult following if you have an interesting gameplay, or story. what are you doing with a live service one? Nothing, just offering the same thing that someone else has already created in another flavour, just to chase a trend. What this means is that they’re more likely to fail and not for the fault of the devs for sure.
They’re also bad for preservation of games. All live service games die, you can’t play them once support ends. You paid 60 dollars to rent a game? (Though I suppose that’s true with sp always online games as well and it’s not directly a bad thing for the dev)
Though… you maybe sort of right, the Industry is so bad right now that it doesn’t even matter whether you are working on sp or live service, you are in some sort of hell regardless…
I‘m just going to say that the distinctions between the two you‘re laying out here seem irrelevant to the discussion to me. I am not arguing about a season pass or preservation of games. Again, that is not what this discussion is about. This is about the developing side of games where these things don‘t mean anything. To give an example of what I mean: World of Warcraft employed and paid more people over a longer period of time than most AAA games.
I don’t know of the statistics, so yes, I can’t say for sure sp employs more people than live service. But in my opinion live service games are more risky and harmful to the industry as a hole.
But my original comment was about how it doesn’t matter if they created jobs or not because they are trying to replace everyone with AI. Coders, designers, artists… So it doesn’t matter sp or live service. They want to not employ anyone and run casinos
From what I know Sweet Baby Inc. is involved. Which is a studio that focuses a lot on DEI when it comes to narratives/story in games.
They already did not have the greatest track record, some good games, but a lot of mediocre and even bad games. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the game scores are related to DEI, but the fact it keeps happening to games they’re involved with says at least something.
The good games they’ve worked on have included some of the most praised games in recent years. If you want to ask why this keeps happening, you have to have massive blinders on to ignore the likes of God of War: Ragnarok and Alan Wake II, both firmly in recent memory, and also realize that basically no writer on earth could save something like Suicide Squad from its criticisms.
Like I said, some good games. Which by the way still received criticism from people about certain DEI related involvements, whether you agree or disagree with that is different thing, but the criticism was there too.
Anything not about straight white men will have people complaining about DEI bullshit. It’s never a reason a game has failed. They fail because they’re bad games. They might also include DEI stuff, but it’s not the cause.
Edit: correction, those games listed are about straight white men. Anything that includes a character that is not a straight white man will have those people complaining. They’re the most fragile people in the world.
They are contract writers for hire, and you have been misled, either intentionally or unintentionally, by the YouTubers you follow. Both Sweet Baby and their clients have denied this interpretation of what they do.
Not sure what I’m being misled over? It literally says on Wikipedia as well:
Sweet Baby Inc. is a Canadian narrative development and consultation studio based in Montreal. Founded by former Ubisoft developers, including scriptwriter Kim Belair and product manager David Bédard, the company consults on video game narratives during development to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within game narratives and studios.
Also, in every game they’ve worked on it’s quite obvious which part they’ve been involved with, based on the above.
But people on this sub really just like to keep shooting the messenger huh 🙄
You know that in the wake of Suicide Squad and Saga from Alan Wake II, they stated quite clearly that what was “obviously” their contributions were totally wrong, with Remedy confirming on their end? It may not be inaccurate to state that sensitivity reading or consulting for authenticity when writing diverse characters are services that they offer, but their contributions to each game are not itemized. It’s like when a bad port happens and people see Iron Galaxy in the credits, they want to see this pattern of Iron Galaxy being responsible rather than <beloved creator of game you like> and then throw out any evidence of Iron Galaxy actually being a really good port studio. I get that you want to form patterns of why something you perceive to be wrong is happening, but the truth is that these companies’ contributions are not itemized, because video games work more like a traditional business than Hollywood, and it’s no one’s policy to break out which work was done by a contractor versus in-house, so you’ll actually never know. Instead, Endymion, or whoever it is you watch that picked up on the week’s trending rage bait topic, cosplays as a journalist and infers a whole lot of what Sweet Baby does that they just didn’t do, whereas an actual journalist would get quotes from sources to confirm that it’s true.
Did you know about this game? Did you buy and play this game? Did you actually like this game?
Are you one of the ~220 people who bought this game and didn’t spread the word to their friends.
It sounds to me like this game sucks. Maybe it was rotten from the start. Maybe they were forced to hire a bunch of mentally ill people with a massive chip on their shoulder to ‘advise’ and change the game to tick some boxes on a list. ( don’t you just love having fun according to a list of prescribed requirements? ) I bet the people working on it like that. Talk about a soul sucking job without passion. We will probably never know the truth.
You’re parroting the line of dumb conspiracy theories known as Gamergate 2 pushed by a bunch of grifters farming engagement on YouTube.
Narrative consultancy companies like SBI don’t force you to hire them, and if you choose to hire them, you don’t have to follow all of their advice.
If you’re interesting in curing yourself of the mindworms the YouTube algorithm has planted in your brain, please check this out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGmESJM6BFQ
If video games were priced by hours of dev time, I could kind of agree (with the theory, in practice it doesn’t really make sense). But let’s be honest here - that’s not what he means at all.
Not only is it not what he means but this same asshole would probably force devs to add padded objectives just so he could claim it takes more hours to finish. The new GTA will have 1000 missions where you have to walk across the whole map to retrieve some object that needs to be walked back to the other side if this dick gets his way. It’ll be the first game in history where it takes 2 years to 100% it and costs $200 so it’s a steal - only $100 per year of gameplay!
For some reason I can’t see your answer on the post: despite us being both from lemmy.world and me being able to otherwise access your profile and see your posts and comments, the only way I can see it is in my notifications, not as an answer to my post. Anyway.
That’s why the original argument is inherently flawed: for the same price, I’d rather have 20 hours of carefully crafted content than 500 hours of AI generated fetch quests in a basic, procedurally generated open world from the latest version of the Ubisoft game framework. As a customer, I’m not buying playtime, I’m also buying the quality of that playtime.
This is also why we don’t pay for a movie, an album, or even a show or an exhibition by their duration.
They literally included a screenshot of valve asking to not share information about the game with a little quip about how they pressed escape instead of ok. Blantant disrespect to valves wishes even if it’s not a legally binding agreement.
They chose getting clicks over doing right by valve. Shame on them.
20,000 people are playing it at a time. Not exactly a secret. The way they’re testing this game is radical and newsworthy in itself. I’m glad Verge reported on it, and they don’t seem mad they they were banned
That’s why live services games needs to incorporate micro transactions. The studio needs to have a constant revenue stream to maintain the development and the infrastructure cost.
Game companies make profits unrivaled by any other industry and all we hear is “it’s not economic to sell a game for 60 bucks.” Now there are microtransactions and those profits skyrocketet. Now even that is still not enough. It’s just Ridiculous.
 I have a series S and even I think it’s unreasonable to expect full parity with a PS5/XSX after three or four years. It’s a $300 piece of hardware - it is remarkable what it does at its price point. It will be useful for a good 10 years, but it will not be able to keep up with new games after 5 at most in my opinion. It’ll be great for Indies or back catalogs.
They need to stop trying to make it functionally a series X and focus more on making it a gamepass/xcloud machine. As it is, it’s just an albatross around their neck.
Edit: Everything signaled that they were going to make it into a xcloud machine essentially. I’m not sure why they haven’t really pushed that harder.
I feel like their planning for it was really shortsighted - like they were hoping to get a as many people to buy the console as possible so they could “win” the console war early by having more people adopt it by putting out a cheap console people who didn’t want to spend so much would be drawn to, and weren’t really thinking beyond the first few years of the generation. Maybe they figured once they had the lead, they cold get people up upgrade or something. By they didn’t get the early lead and now the cheaper console means devs can’t really fully develop for Xbox. This will only get worse as more games start getting developed.
Microsoft is terrible at Gaming. I fear how everyone seems to be ok with them buying companies up and putting games on GamePass. It’s not going to end well. It’s not even going well if you really take notice.
It’s going great for me as the consumer with Game Pass. I have had over two years of essentially free games, because Microsoft rewards is too generous and easy to exploit. But I have no illusions about whether or not this consolidation is good for the industry. It simply isn’t. Yeah I guess y’all can call me out or whatever for using it anyway, but the series S with nearly free GamePass has just been too good for me as a dad with a full-time job and children. I’m still against the merger lol
I vote with my dollar where I can, but sorry, sometimes I make compromises just like anybody else. That being said, if I have to start actually paying for it, even at the current price, I’m out. So basically it depends on when they decide they don’t want rewards to stay around.
Some people can be pretty dogmatic about this stuff but yeah, I feel like it’s better than cash. Especially because the stuff I do for rewards gives them pretty useless data and I have all kinds of privacy stuff running in the background protecting my data
Its going great now. The monopoly they want is to increase charges on you and you have to pay forever to keep access. This is specifically the point of gamepass.
It may workout for you in the short rub, but you are still losing choice and value (you only rent access) in the process.
As many people already boycott sony consoles due to them paying extra to game studios to never release certain games on xbox, there’s literally no alternative currently.
And Game Pass is great, if they pump the price too much, it will just seize to be relevant and life goes on. AAA games are pretty dirt cheap considering prices have increased way slower than inflation and average game complexity.
But Microsoft is doing exactly the same thing, only instead of paying for exclusivity of one title, they’re buying developers so not just their next title, but all future releases will be exclusive, up until MS decides they’re not worth it and dumps them.
Sony absolutely participates in anti-consumer practices, but let’s not pretend that MS is any better.
What games have Sony bought exclusively too? I’ve seen them pay for development of several. Microsoft has taken away sequels from PlayStation in the past. That’s worse imo.
I think the problem they’ve given themselves is that they pushed it as a cheaper alternative to the X whilst also maintaining that it’ll be able to play the same games.
How do they go about messaging that can’t be the case going forward without pissing off those that spent the money on the S in the first place.
As I said in another comment, I own a series S, and I think it’s pretty ridiculous of me to expect a $300 piece of hardware to be able to play the latest games past five years. Even with what they have said, I just kind of assumed it can’t be true. 
I imagine in two or three years I will switch to dev mode and boot retro arch on it. 
Right but you’re probably a little more clued up to this sort of stuff than the average consumer who’s seen the marketing and thought ‘oh lovely, I don’t need a disk drive’ in this thing.
Both my brothers own the S. It’s an incredible little machine, but imo they screwed the proverbial pooch when they pushed this as a 1080p alternative to the more powerful Series X.
Only takes one though. As soon as someone looking at buying a console sees there’s a chance they’ll miss out, they’ll potentially make the decision to go with the Sony machine instead.
Microsoft already has an exclusive issue, this isn’t doing anything but compounding that issue.
Because they offer thousands of hours of play time? Like seriously, all the things you could say against this idea and you choose to go go with “But GTA, one of the games with the most lively open worlds, where you can do so much exploring and random stuff, doesnt have much play time”
I don’t think he said that… I think he meant playtime is overpriced which considering the amount of people worldwide that play gta and the profit ratios it definitely is
That’s your body suffering from whiplash as we’re once again back in the era where you never know whether someone is telling the truth or not when they make a wild claim about the president like that.
I watched some videos for the game and I’m genuinely baffled by how bad the writing in this game is. The rest of the game looks fine but most of the dialogue really is Forespoken territory. I think SkillUp put it best when he said “It’s written like the HR is in the room”
forbes.com
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