"There is indeed pressure from the market because the standards in terms of production values, length of experience and knowledge of our medium from customers are going up," Clerc says.
This is another important piece. Games that used to be linear and 8-15 hours are now open world and 60-80 hours long (often to their detriment). Most of the biggest games are designed to be played forever, which means it's coming at the expense of buying or playing new games. And development cycles are exceeding 5 years when they probably ought to be aiming for under 3 years.
The industry is making games with riskier development cycles, adding features that arguably don't make them any better or more marketable, and they're designed to make it actively hostile to the next person trying to sell a game to the same customer. It's no wonder it can't sustain the current trajectory.
Back in the day, so many studios tried to unseat wow with a fantasy mmo of their own. Seems an unwise strategy when playing an mmo is nearly a full time occupation. Very few players will have the time for more than one. Bad strategy. Which is why nearly every wow killer died.
Its clear the industry learned nothing when they started pushing perpetual live service games. Why would anyone play EA’s destiny clone when they could instead play destiny, especially when the time investment makes it infeasible to play both?
Now the big thing is the battle pass, that demand tens of hours to complete. Same issue there. Can most players justify more than one battle pass subscription? Probably not.
Why would anyone play EA’s destiny clone when they could instead play destiny, especially when the time investment makes it infeasible to play both?
There's a big reward for being second or third to market, but not too much beyond that. A few MMOs saw plenty of success despite WoW. League of Legends and Dota are massively successful, but Smite did well too. Minecraft is huge, but so is Terraria and Starbound. PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Warzone are huge, but Hyperscape couldn't cut it.
There is always a market for smaller more focussed experiences. They are cheaper to make, so easy to make profit on. But, they want to turn every game into open world, microtransaction laden shit fest. A good example is Diablo 4, which literally removed genre standard features to make the game more tedious. Throwing hundreds of millions on a single massive game shouldn’t be a standard.
I love open world games, but I wouldn’t mind playing smaller games like older CoD campaigns too.
I'm not fluent in Diablo parlance, but essentially it makes it harder to work toward the gear you want because they don't give you as much storage for the items you can't fit on your person?
I had no idea they were doing this but it doesn’t much surprise me. My PS4 will be my last Sony purchase because honestly the system gets progressively worse with every update. I can no longer navigate between screens or in apps without experiencing massive lag. I understand it’s not supposed to last forever but the damn thing is near unusable at this point whereas my PS2 is still running.
Yeah IMO the more famous and respected Kojima has gotten, the worse his writing has been. And I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, he badly needs editors. I think it’s kind of like George Lucas in that they have a lot of ideas, some of which are really good and some of which are absolutely batshit. Sometimes those types of writers need someone who can ground them and tell them that they don’t have to put all of their ideas in.
Exactly, and its a shame because his ideas are really good. Even his earlier campy writing ( Ocelot encounters in MGS3 were so over the top but so good ) had its charm.
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Aktywne