Part of this article just feels like the capitalistic notion that profits should only increase and anything but that is failing:
"Expectations for Devolver this financial year were $115 million to $120 million, and they’ve had to go back to $90 million. The majority of that is the delay of big releases into 2024. I think those are decision for the right reasons, although investors won’t like it in the short term.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if the subscription model WAS actually hurting smaller developers. I remember hearing people hypothesizing that would be the case for a long time.
If you have Gamepass or PlayStation Plus Ultra, you can play almost any small publisher game for free. With that set up, there’s a very large incentive to only play the games on the subscription service, instead of buying a full priced game to try out.
The problem is that once a small game is on the service, a large number of potential sales are going to be cannibalized by people playing on the subscription service instead of buying the game.
This leads to a scenario where your game needs to be on the subscription service and you have less sales because of it. This means that Microsoft and Sony have a large amount of power over the small publishers’ vitality, since a lot of money now needs to come from deals with them.
As Microsoft starts tightening its purse strings trying to make Gamepass profitable, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more small publishers suffering as a result.
Honestly, I would hope for that as well; but it seems very similar to the enshittification of Amazon (Wired link, archive link):
Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.
This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon. That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing more than 45 percent of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees.
Basically the notion is once a storefront has captured the bulk of potential customers, they are able to extort their suppliers however they want, since it’s the only way the suppliers can reasonably reach the customers.
Hopefully in this case, the publishers can explore other sales avenues; but it all depends on the reach of the subscription service.
The ways those two businesses function are dramatically different. Microsoft has a near monopoly of the operating system that powers gaming PCs, and they couldn't turn their store into the Amazon of PC gaming, not for lack of trying, because Steam already offers customers what they want in a far better way and any attempt to close off their operating system is met with market resistance. There's also the fact that the games market is so broad and diverse that Game Pass and Microsoft's stores are nowhere close to being the one-stop shop that an Amazon or a Walmart have historically been, and it's why they're nowhere close to capturing "the bulk of potential customers". They've got about 25-30M subscribers last I checked, which is substantial, but it doesn't even come close to the 100M+ monthly active users on Steam, let alone the wider games market. (Steam is easy to cite, because they make more of their data public, but obviously there are substantial pieces of the market on PlayStation and elsewhere.)
What developers and publishers get from Game Pass and PS+ is a lump sum that devs/pubs project will make up for the potential of lost sales, and if it doesn't, that the word of mouth from offering the game with those services will make up for it in sales outside of those subscription services. If the offer is too low, they don't take the deal. So the subscription service is either a subsidy or marketing or both, but that's only if the figure they're offered is high enough. Saying that Devolver or TinyBuild benefited from that boon in ramping up subscription offerings is one thing; in fact, it may have ripple effects that help them out long-term, as people are more familiar with their brands through subscription services now than they would have been otherwise. But if they're truly "suffering" from those deals being less generous, that's just going back to the old investing adage of "When the tide goes out, you can always tell who was skinny dipping", or to put it another way, they weren't adequately gauging their risk alongside a good deal that was never going to last forever. Judging by the article, Devolver will likely be just fine and TinyBuild is more of a question mark. I honestly had no idea TinyBuild was publicly traded. Both are making sensible long-term bets, at least for the most part...in TinyBuild's case, I hope they didn't invest too much into the likes of RawMen. Both companies were contrasted against Team17, who kept more consistently conservative projections.
A class action lawsuit has been filed against Roblox Corporation, accusing the developer of facilitating "an illegal gambling ecosystem" and violating a federal law.
The complaint was signed by Chief Inspector Slowpoke
I would like to see more games where the draw is novel and interesting gameplay concepts and proportionally more effort is put into that than standing out visually etc. Hopefully this brings things more in that sort of direction.
You won’t get that from AAA studios: that’s largely indie territory today.
The issue with creating novel and interesting gameplay is that it’s not a straight-line process. It takes a lot of experimentation and failure. That doesn’t match with the large teams and assembly-line process of AAA game development.
An indie game developer, especially one who just works on the game in their free time but otherwise has a day job, is 100% free to experiment and redo their game design hundreds of times. Often this doesn’t mean throwing the game away but instead making lots of small games for game jams or just to build a portfolio of projects.
Couple that with the fact there aren’t nearly as many AAA studios as there are indie game developers working on hobby projects and you can see why AAAs are at such a disadvantage when it comes to experimenting with novel and innovative game designs. Indie game don’t need to all be successful to make it hard on AAAs: out of thousands of indie games only one needs to be successful.
If the company has to lose people to remain profitable, that sounds like the executive leadership didnt know what they were doing and should be replaced.
Yeah i see some defense of the studios in the comments but Devolver hasn’t released something I’ve heard of since the first Good Neighbor outside of potion craft and I only know that one because an off-handed recommendation from a friend l. Not to say I’m some penultimate opinion on games, but if your stuff doesn’t make waves I’m assuming you won’t get money.
Like, everyone wants a Stardew Valley, but only 1/10000000 indie games will receive that kind of love and only 1/100000 indie games would even deserve it. Some are legitimately awesome and present unique gameplay you can’t find anywhere else, and the rest, is shit. It’s poorly designed or implemented, it’s dated, or it’s another super generic RPG Maker level of game and those were NOT going to sell well anyway.
I dont know what the alternative is, but what it is now is shit.
Devolver has their hands on a ton of indie games. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of Loop Hero, Deaths Door, Trek to Yomi, or Cult of the Lamb. Out of the Indie studios, they seem like the most likely to be able to push pass this.
The vibes on this game were on point. Great game and I really really really hope they’re making another one. Preferably with workshop and mod support! And DLCs! I wanna tear more ships apart! RIP AND TEAR UNTIL IT IS DONE
I think greater access to game development tools has been a very good thing for the industry. These days, I’m generally much more interested in what’s coming from indie developers than any of the big companies, with a few exceptions. I think that’s the best way to increase the diversity of games and game developers. Greater access to game development resources will help to democratize the gaming industry.
Yep, the vast majority of the games I buy at this point are coming from indies.
The main issue is large studios want to make a safe game that does everything and appeals to everyone. Meanwhile, indies are making games that are fun-first and targeted at specific audiences, rather than just the mean.
Games like Factorio could be made by a big studio, but it wasn’t, because it don’t have mass appeal. Meanwhile, if you are in it’s target audience, it is a 10/10 game. And it isn’t like the studio had to shovel $200m into a pit to make this 10/10 game.
CEOs are fricking pests/viruses. They don’t know what they do or what the companies values are but get bonus payments even when they are running a company into the ground. then they just move on to another company and do the same again.
finally hated the escapist loved zero punctuation but it’s so annoying how it flooded my sub feed with a million videos I didn’t care about and never would I literally only watched the solo yahtzee stuff
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