They are. The games industry is releasing a lot of hits in recent times, and there’s a lot of money flowing in. Just not as much as covid times and interest rates are high.
This has nothing to so with the actual industry and the people making games.
A fair point, but I do want to highlight that we’ve had plenty of companies like Bethesda releasing crap like Starfield, using tactics that specifically turned on their artist employees, and then scratching their heads on why it didn’t sell as well as Skyrim or Doom. I’m also seeing a lot of C-class laziness here.
dang i had not heard about this unlicensed controllers thing. I find this move very baffling, given Microsoft’s current position in the gaming market. This is the kind of move you make when you are in first place, because you have market dominance to shield your company from the effects of bad publicity. Yet in spite of two massive acquisitions, Xbox is still the third-place console. And after 3 years of the Xbox SeX and PS5, it’s kind of looking like they’re going to stay in last place unless they start packing their release calendar with A-tier exclusives.
So if Xbox is still in last place, why are they going out of their way to burn the goodwill they’ve been building up over the last 6 years?
Those were the days when paid Xbox Live service was way better than the free PS network. If you wanted to play online, the experience was much better on Xbox. Sony’s online experience has vastly improved since then, and their first-party games are generally considered much higher quality than Microsoft’s alternatives.
This explains how Sony clawed back market share in the second half of the PS3 gen, but you’re missing one crucial detail: the Xbox One. One cannot overstate how badly Microsoft misread the room and flubbed the reveal of the XbOne. The all-digital announcement in a time when physical games were still king, the required Kinect, the always-online requirement…they basically wrote the playbook on how to piss off reddit gamers. Sony had built up good will by becoming more pro-consumer over the PS3 gen, so then all they had to do in 2013 was say “the PS4 is just like the PS3 but better” and they were heralded as the saviors of gaming.
Quake world engine. Huh, wasn’t aware of that one! Speaking of which, you can do all sorts of silly stuff with Doom sourceports, so that’s also a valid alternative.
Non-endemic companies such as Google and Amazon are among the biggest threats to the games industry.
That’s according to former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden, who shared his thoughts on the future of games during the keynote at last week’s GamesIndustry.biz Investment Summit in Seattle.
The irony is palpable throughout this entire article.
They only feel it would be dangerous because they have the capital to drain talents to do experimental things while not care about the fall outs of closing subsidiaries or abandoning projects. It could also drive up developer cost and make the business more risky.(IMO, the developers are getting paid in peanuts compare to what the big publishers made. Even after considering flopped projects.)
The danger lies in once people get used to the new payscale, if big capital consider it’s not that profitable, then the better talents may not keep staying or heading toward this industry. Also less loan/venture awarded to companies doing projects not passing the “market research” phase.
Yes, and lastly Tencents also don’t like competitions bidding their potential acquisition targets.
Even ignoring he’s now working for freaking Tencent, how far are we supposed to go? Even his former company Sony was technically “non-endemic” for video games before the 90s. So was Microsoft.
Nintendo was selling playing cards long before video games, and Namco was building mall coin-op rides before arcade machines. Though I guess those two and Sony were at least in the entertainment business. But in any case they weren’t created as video game companies (of course given when they were created, they couldn’t).
There’s the advantage, too, that quickly made games can be adapted to suit current trends, avoiding the pain of, say, launching a live-service shooter years after the genre has been saturated.
All that to say that adapting to trends creates genres and results in honing in on better versions of the original idea. There will be bad versions along the way, but it’s good to get that much iteration. We used to get that much iteration.
I don’t think corporate is able to follow the idea. It’s politics. If they follow the idea the idea must come from their boss. It’s just buzzwords to me.
Fortnite is a still-very-visible version of this exact concept. They were able to iterate quickly. Mostly because they just adapted their dud of a horde mode game into a completely new genre using the same mechanics, but they still did it quickly and found that success. We’re also seeing it in the likes of Getting Over It, Lethal Company, Vampire Survivors, and plenty of other games that spawned imitators.
Sorry but my brain is shutting down after iterate quickly. To much corporate bullshit, you can repeat those words 1000 times and they don’t mean anything because with all respect you’re saying some bullshit. Trends don’t make money. Shaping trends make money. Actually shaping trends and exposure but despite the huge exposure look how hard is to shape trends. With AI they can shape shit somebody already created and nobody likes to see same shit 1000 times.
“Iterate quickly” isn’t corporate bullshit. It’s just English. There are always those that tag along to something successful and find success themselves, like Terraria and Starbound to Minecraft; or Apex Legends and Fortnite to PUBG. But if you spend 4 years chasing an idea that came out in 2017, you end up with Hyperscape or Concord, unless there’s truly such an insatiable appetite that customers can’t get enough. In a world of live service games, they look to retain those players for years. Decades ago, they didn’t. We had so many first person shooters coming out every year, single and multiplayer, that it would be a full time job to count them all. Most of them brought new ideas to the table, and across many releases it would take years of iteration trying things that are slightly different than the last idea that would eventually lead to things like aim down sights becoming a fairly standard feature of the genre.
So you’re saying people can change ? Stop chasing ideas ? I don’t believe. Nobody can change people ego. Not on this planet. It’s PR bullshit and then they go to business as usual. It takes generations of people to change mindset. Look at history, when I was born there was war on middle east and it will be there when I will die, because there is always war there since like 2000-5000 years, and you’re expecting miracles.
I think I’m saying that what we changed from is better than what it changed into. Chasing ideas being the desired goal, because it leads to permutations of those ideas. So it has changed. It can change again.
If they drop marketing departments and go to core by showing game plays, giving away demos, publishing game dev diaries and articles about what they do, being open about development process there is chance and the market will open wide. I want to believe but I can’t. Why ? Because of AI, now it means less money for people because you need to pay computer their cut.
Games that are paid for with cosmetics are fine imo. I will never, ever, not once buy a virtual hat for any amount of money. That said, if a game wants to be free and provide consistent updates, and morons riding the meme-train want to subsidise me, that’s just gravy.
Im shocked and appalled that game companies think people are stupid enough to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on pretend clothes and I’m exactly as shocked and appalled that they’re right.
If games want to be free to play, but suddenly im coming up against a guy thats basically invincible because he spent real money, im out.
There are two games in which I have spent money on cosmetics. Path of Exile and Vermintide 2 and in both of them I wasn’t not even interested in the cosmetics. I just wantwd to support the developers further
It does seem a lot of games pivoted from cheap enough so everyone will buy it, to whale hunting. They had people run numbers and found whale hunting paid off more, and how much $ they could charge for a skin combined with FOMO before driving the whales away.
Honestly, I’m not even a fan of this take. This essentially boils down to “I don’t care if a company has shitty business practices as long as only people dumber than me fall for them.”
Cosmetic and P2W MTX needs to go in all cases. The only thing people should be asked to pay for is additional game content (actual gameplay content, not just cosmetics) developed after launch.
Im not happy about it either, its forced development to stop looking at how to make a game fun and start looking at how to maximise player retention. Which means hijacking weaknesses in our psyche.
I like to think Im immune to it, but I still get turned off a game pretty quick when you load it up and you have to make it past 4 or 5 popups telling you what’s new in the store.
How many years of development has this game had? I wonder if it’s another case of Microsoft Mismanagement™ or if it’s actually so huge and detailed that it’s actually worth all of this time spent in the works.
Mumblings originally in 2017, job openings at the studio in 2018, officially announced in 2020. October 2022 Andrew Walsh, a senior writer from the Horizon Forbidden West team joined the Fable team. June of 2023 had an in-game trailer.
To be honest, that seems to be a reasonable timeframe, especially given the pandemic in the middle, if you aren’t following the “rush it out the door ASAP, fix it after release, if you ever do” approach.
To be fair, I don’t think any of the MS releases ever suffered from bugs at launch. At least from my experience, they always worked pretty consistently on release, aside from maybe a few exceptions - I remember ReCore having excruciatingly long respawn times, Redfall suffering from stuttering and inconsistent framerate, and Ori 2 not being as fluid as the predecessor on console when it released, but all these were still perfectly playable at launch.
I feel like their problem is always the quality and quantity of the content. I wonder if the middling reception of Avowed convinced them that the game requires a bit more work to compete in the crowded and very competitive landscape of open world RPGs.
The Master Chief Collection is the single reason that I will never ever preorder another game no matter what bonuses it comes with or how confident I am with the developer.
In general though, Microsoft Games is pretty good about not pushing bugs out the door.
I honestly don’t understand the middle reception to Avowed, it’s been truly fantastic so far, and completely rock solid.
Very likely mismanagement. We can look at recent releases like Avowed, 6y in development and extremely simple mechanically and with a very narrow breadth. The world is incredibly static. I truly hope that’s not the case for FABLE.
They pivoted after two unsuccessful prototypes, and they’re a multi project studio. In that time frame, they put out Grounded and Pentiment while assisting on State of Decay 3. That’s about as good as management gets.
It’s a 300 strong studio, Pentiment and Grounded are simple side projects (pentiment was great, grounded too) that have a minute scope and could well be developed by a handful of people (see Valheim, Stardew, etc) that leaves an entire studio to develop their overpromised and underdelivered AAA shovelware to boost the ranks of Gamepass while charging 70€ on steam to milk the fans of PoE. In 6y a 300 people strong studio backed by one of the richest companies on earth and charging AAA sales price, is manifestly little and woeful mismanagement. Luckily, most people didn’t fall for the culture war BS from the US and the game hasn’t sold (or was returned) for shit, which means they will likely do a better job with outer worlds 2, hopefully…
It’s a 300 person studio that is basically never all allocated to a single project. That’s extremely efficient with the resources they have. And remember that Outer Worlds 2 has also been in ongoing development for the better part of that same 6 years.
Can we please stop pretending Obsidian post acquisition is a dinghy independent studio rather that the real cog in the metastatic tumor that is the Microsoft machine? The game credits ~1.2k people, that’s 4x the studio size. There’s 0 excuses for how mediocre Avowed is, especially when they charge 70€ for it! BG3 in contrast has a bigger professional credit while costing the consumer less 10€ and being an excellent game. Good management is not churning out mediocre shovelware while charging AAA prices.
I’m not excusing Avowed for anything, because it’s excellent. BG3 is a better game, true, but it’s a better game than almost every other game ever made too, and it was built reusing a ton of work that the studio had already done over the decade that came before it. There’s a very, very good chance that lots of work on Avowed was done knowing that it would be used in Outer Worlds 2 also, reducing the risk of spending money on both projects. Making great games isn’t a function of how much money was spent on them, or Balatro wouldn’t have been nominated for game of the year. I’m not saying they’re some scrappy indie studio, but it sure seems like they know the answer to the question, “How much money can we spend making this relative to how much money it needs to make?” Spending more money on Avowed wouldn’t have made it more financially successful. It’s why there was that headline about wanting to make a Pillars tactics game and evaluating how big that game could feasibly be for that market. I got more value out of Baldur’s Gate 3, but that doesn’t make Avowed not worth $70 to me.
Good management is getting a working product out the door and keeping your people happy and employed. This game reviewed well; not phenomenally, but well. And Obsidian is spoken of in high regard when it comes to employee satisfaction. All that while getting several other projects moving along too. It’s impressive. And I’m sorry Avowed wasn’t what you wanted to play.
As for Fable, this is a genre that its developer hasn’t built before. Even in a best case scenario, it’s going to take a lot more time for them to build it than it is another racing game. If you want to claim potential mismanagement, it might be the possibility that Microsoft assigned this project to the wrong developer, but we don’t know how this Fable came to be, and maybe they do have the experience to make it work.
Avowed is a success in which planet? Grounded, which is a pretty good game for what it costs, has a 33% higher player peak and gigantic tail compared to avowed’s player drop off… This is a game, from the same studio, that cost a fraction of what avowed cost (1/4 people credited) to make. MS pulled all the stops for people to engage with avowed but ultimately failed because the game is just mediocre.
Regarding management, MS are the paragons of good management and would never put a team on a game they don’t want to make, resulting in several delays and ultimately a poor quality product. This never happened at Microsoft… EVER!
Any given game being more successful does not make Avowed unsuccessful. Grounded has a 33% higher peak and also cost 57% of what Avowed cost for the audience to buy; they may have sold more copies and made less revenue. A more repetitive multiplayer focused game will retain players longer than a single player game with an ending. But ultimately, we have no idea if the game was successful outside of the team saying publicly that they’re happy with its performance. That will never mean raw sales anymore, since they are a part of Game Pass. Game Pass pulls in, in all likelihood, 3-4x Avowed’s budget in revenue every month. Even with the overhead they have of running the service and licensing third party games for it, they can probably afford at least one Avowed on their books every month and justify it as long as they feel like the presence of a flashy new game is what’s keeping people subscribed. No one knows how many people on Game Pass need to play a given game for Microsoft to consider it a success, but perhaps the worst way to evaluate the game’s success is to look at Steam charts and compare it to some other game arbitrarily, much like what’s happening with Assassin’s Creed right now. The Steam forums are full of armchair quarterbacks that are sure that Shadows has flopped by doing the same nonsense comparisons to Steam charts even though this is a series that handily sold tens of millions copies on non-Steam platforms for years.
Mismanagement has and will continue to happen at Microsoft. The first iteration of Avowed was aiming at being “Microsoft’s Elder Scrolls”…but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no need for that design anymore once they bought Elder Scrolls itself in the next couple of years after that. I’m not too concerned about how long Fable has taken to develop thus far considering when their last Forza Horizon game came out and that full development on Fable probably didn’t start until that game shipped. What I did hear was that when Microsoft originally announced it for 2025, the development team laughed at the idea.
Any given game being more successful does not make Avowed unsuccessful.
This premise is flat out wrong. A cheaper game, from the same studio, captured more return customers than a flagship with a massive ad campaign and significantly more effort behind it. That’s an epic blunder, so much so, Patel had to do the rounds in the press to appeal to the stock holders and paint a pretty picture, lest MS dissolve the studio before Outer worlds 2 is done.
This level of reality distortion field is almost as the one from the people (and some subhuman racists) saying AC Shadows flopped. AC Shadows delivered (according to reviews) exactly what was promised to its customers, an AC game in Japan with shinobi. I haven’t touched AC since Black Flag, but if I were a fan of Ubisoft open worlds, I’d be ecstatic right now. A Ubisoft game delivering on what was promised without game breaking bugs is actually remarkable. It’s still a mediocre game, but for its niche, it’s a solid release. It’s diametrically opposite to Avowed, which advertised a deep RPG and sold a fantasy action game with no depth or interactivity.
If someone would have told me, a year ago, Avowed would review worse and, have lower user score than AC Shadows, I would have laughed in their face. That game has suffered controversy over controversy just because they decided to have an afro samurai and the conservative anglophones lost their shit.
A cheaper game captures more customers, yes. It doesn’t mean that Avowed didn’t make its money back. Retention as a metric doesn’t matter at all for an offline game you play and finish, and depending on how Grounded is monetized, it might not matter for that game either, if the intention is that you just play with your friends. The profit or loss of Avowed, next to the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Microsoft brings in in a year, hardly matters to investors, and I don’t know where you got it in your head that these media appearances are a plea to investors. Microsoft is an enormous behemoth operating at much larger scales than any one video game. Their strategy is Game Pass. They’re all in on that strategy. If Avowed seems to provide value for Game Pass and keep people subscribed, then they and their investors are happy. For everyone who isn’t interested in Game Pass, they’re happy to sell it to you for $70. You’re just making shit up as you go instead of admitting what you do and do not know.
The profit or loss of Avowed, next to the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Microsoft brings in in a year, hardly matters to investors
*Looks at tango, arkane and the rest of the cemetery.
Yes, every time anyone at MS said the engagement and GP users was amazing it was totally true. Lets believe that and appreciate how normal it is to give interviews to bloomberg saying, “we totally didn’t fail our objectives with this mediocre piece of media”.
Time is on my side, I’ll just save this interaction.
Then if and when you revisit it, you can see a reminder here that the problem here all along is that you’re assuming you know it failed off of bonkers reasoning, not that you may have guessed right. You just criticized those dummies over AC Shadows, and here you are doing the same thing.
You calling something bonkers doesn’t void the fact that a demonstrably cheaper game from the same developer was far more reaching and generated more engagement than the halo product from the same stable that got a 3D ad in times square. Everything else is cope.
I find it amusing that you’re using the Conway “alternative facts” defense in the same breath you compare me to the AC shadows detractors. Projection for the win I guess.
I think Kojima said it best in the Resetera review, and I think it applies here too. Avowed is basically a shooter with fantasy trappings and it does appeal to a certain demographic. I’m not it.
Of course you have. If you mean picking the mobs one by one from a distance because they reset after x amount of m from origin just like in an MMO (mobs are leashed), I have bad news for you. Already in Far Cry 4’s release that was rightfully pointed out as shit design, several years later is just unacceptable. Again, Kojima was right, pearls to pigs.
Sounds like the author has a skill issue with Stealth.
Mobs are leashed? Cool, that doesn’t matter cause I play the game like a high fantasy battle mage, and don’t run from fights.
Also, mobs are leashed in most games to some extent or another. Avowed is well written, well voice acted, tells an interesting story, and is fun to play through.
Really just feels like people were expecting Skyrim and are upset they got something more focused.
I’d be willing to give Grounded a try, but last I checked, you can’t host your own server offline, which is my line in the sand. I haven’t gotten around to Pentiment yet, but I just rolled credits on Avowed this afternoon, and it was awesome.
100%, had they spent the money on the game that they wasted on marketing they may have released something good.
Instead they prefer to feed a bunch of sock puppets on reddit and here to show up every time one of the MS studios games are mentioned. The cope is real. I can’t believe that Avowed cost as much as BG3 to make, it’s insane the mammoth gap between the quality of both games in every aspect. And BG3 was sold on PC for 10€ less than Avowed on launch…
Plus $95 for a “physical edition” with no disc. :(
I was willing to buy the game… for $60. But not a digital code. I get that they want to push people to Gamepass, but $60 is 3 months and at the end I actually own nothing?
The whole piece is worth a read but to me this paragraph sums it all up:
“Who even knows what would please these people? They say they’re focusing their resources on bigger games, then they say they need smaller games. They say they love your games, then they shut your studio down. They make more money than they’ve ever made before, then they cut costs repeatedly, drastically, and cruelly. They buy more studios than they can manage, so the answer is not to use that aforementioned money to hire more (or perhaps better) managers, but to have fewer studios so management’s job can be easier.”
And I am saying that even though I have zero love for the mobile gaming market, while I do own and like consoles. There is just no reason to consider they’re doing things any differently on this matter.
30% seems quite a lot, no matter the platform, especially for small indie studios. I’d care more about these than whatever the Fortnite machine has to pay.
Honest question: how is it possibly “complete” bullshit, when we know for a fact that console makers are taking like a hundred dollar wash on every console sold whereas Apple and Google make substantial profit on every device sold?
I mean I would love to see consoles forced to allow sideloading and alternate app stores too, but I can’t fathom how you cant see the difference in business models…
I’ve been developing mobile apps since before the iPhone was a thing. I remember when the App Store was announced, including the 30% cut for Apple. There was a lot of excitement around the fact that developers could keep 70%.
Before app stores, this is how you distributed and charged for a mobile app: customers would send a text message with a keyword to a so called shortcode, depending on country this was a 4 or 5 digit phone number. For example, you would send ‘NAMEOFGAME’ to 12345. The user would then get a text message back with a link to download the game. The message they got back was a so called reverse-billing SMS (also known as premium SMS). This message would be billed to the customer, at a certain rate that you as the sender of the SMS could configure. This basically meant customers paid for games through their phone bill.
How this worked from the developer’s side:
You generally didn’t own the short code, it was shared with many users, you had to pay a monthly fee for the use of that keyword. Companies who owned a ‘nice’ shortcode (like e.g. 12345) would charge more for it than those who owned a more difficult to remember one. This would cost you at least €100 a month per keyword (the same as you pay for an app store account per year, for an unlimited number of apps)
For this amount all the operator did was forward the message to you, you had to have your own server to process the messages. Your server then had to call an API at the telco to send an premium SMS back with the link. (a so called WAP push message). The telco would usually keep 50% of the total cost to the customer. Send a €3.00 SMS , you get €1.50, the telco gets €1.50. For sending 140 bytes to a phone.
The link you sent pointed to your own server, where you had to host the files for the game for the user to download.
Note that there was no store, no way for users to discover your game, so you had to advertise it as well. The telco’s took 50% for billing the customer, while you had to everything else. Of course the development tools for mobile apps were absolute shit as well.
So when Apple announced that they would let you keep 70%, would take care of hosting, payments, would provide a nice user friendly app store where people could actually find your app and provide decent development tools for you to build apps in, that was a fucking huge win.
Were all phones this way? I was thinking on Windows CE phones (like the iPAQ) you could just get paid via Paypal or similar and then send the customer an installer file / unlock key.
Was there a rule that you had to bill through the Telco?
There was no rule, but it was basically the only convenient way. Receiving e-mail on a phone was not at all common, typing a long URL on phone was a PITA and paying for stuff online was not something a lot of people were familiar with.
WIndows CE phones and the like were so niche there was no point in even developing apps specifically for them.
Also note that the above would usually only work in one country, if you wanted to sell internationally you’d have to make arrangements for a shortcode and RB-SMS for each country you wanted to sell in. Never mind the advertising campaigns. Apple taking care of that, with basically global reach and different kinds of payment methods without you having to worry about any of it was quite revolutionary.
Ahh, you must be talking about dumb / feature phones, I guess? I remember a lot of people who had smartphones early on getting / sending emails on their Symbian devices or Windows Mobile devices. In around 2003 (years prior to the iPhone launch), Windows Mobile actually had something like a quarter of the smartphone market. So, in terms of smartphones, it was sizable. But, a lot of people didn’t have smartphones at the time, so that whole market was niche in a way. Most of the smartphone market at that time was Symbian, but Windows was big, and then there was also PalmOS.
I still kinda wish smartphones now had the option to work more like those old ones. They were much less locked down. It’s fine for the vendor to offer a store, but the early phones would just let me install apps any way I wanted. Hell, you could buy some PalmOS apps at physical retailers!
The more I read about this the more baffling the move seems. It's not going to end cheating. It might inconvenience cheaters, if even that and it's only going to create negative PR for Microsoft, especially since this is impacting people who use modified controllers for accessibility issues. It's especially weird given how carefully Microsoft has tried to craft an image of being "pro-consumer" this console generation. Then again I imagine the executives who make these decisions rarely think these things through. At the very least it is a good reminder that there is no such thing as a pro-consumer for-profit corporation.
At first, I was somewhat surprised that this was even a question - then I reminded myself that they’re asking how the merger will affect the industry, not the players.
I don’t care how it affects the industry. I’m not a high-level executive with a gaming company. Are you?
For the players, I don’t think it’ll be that great. Whatever savings are made due to the merger won’t be passed on to us. They never are. What’s good for players is competition between many companies, all doing their best to attract customers. An enormous, monolithic conglomerate will do us no favors.
There are too many articles posted in gaming communities which are actually just business articles which happen to be about companies involved in making games. Obviously it affects everything, but like you I don’t care about business bullshit!
Yeah, that’s what the last two sentences are about.
A big company will take fewer creative risks and be more likely to limit investments to proven formulas. They’d rather just churn out sequels to huge moneymakers. On the other hand, more competition means more incentive to try something new and interesting in the hope of hitting it big.
Yeah, but the big company that the bigger company just bought refused to make smaller games and constrained their catalogue over the past 20 years to make fewer and fewer games. This bigger company, via Game Pass, has an incentive to put out more games than Activision has been. Microsoft has an incentive to try to compete with Sony in a way that Activision hasn't had competition for Call of Duty since...when was the last good Battlefield game?
The most aggravating thing for me personally as a PC gamer with an obsession with fidelity/graphics, is any Microsoft acquisition becomes focused on console first (to sell Xbox) which leaves every game as a neutered PC port that had to be made shitty enough to run on consoles… It’s very irritating.
…for now. This is actually why I don’t like that this merger has gone through. My guess is the strategy will be spending the next few years making GamePass such a value that it’s basically a must-have and dominates the market. Then they start jacking prices up and ruining the service.
We’re literally watching that happen to just about every tech company right now. My Lemmy front page right now is “YouTube/amazon/netflix/disney+ are all jacking prices and ruining the services.” Although modern MS has a lot going for it, they have a long, long history of this exact behavior. And aside from that, it’s just a feature of unregulated or poorly regulated capitalism. All consolidation eventually leads to negative outcomes for consumers.
gamesindustry.biz
Ważne