Avera adds another factor: consumers are buying fewer games and spending more time with select franchises, a trend likely to accelerate as the market continues to shift towards live service titles.
Well, given who the layoffs are hitting, perhaps we're done shifting that way and can start to shift back.
The author then goes on to mention game length, and yeah, I agree. Halo and Gears of War used to be 10 hour linear campaigns, and now they're open world. Assassin's Creed games used to be shy of 30 hours, and now they're over 60 hours. Baldur's Gate 3 is as long or longer than Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 put together; quite frankly, if the game was only Act 1, it would have more than enough content to justify its asking price, and it feels a lot like I just played through an entire trilogy rather than a single game.
People spending more time with fewer games is not a reason, in publishers' minds, to reverse course. It's the intended outcome.
Having the same number of people (or near the same number) playing fewer games, and filling those games with monetization features is cheaper and easier to maintain than having a broad and growing library of titles.
Remember, the ideal for publishers is to have one game that everyone plays that has no content outside of a "spend money" button that players hit over and over again. That's the cheapest product they can put out, and it gives them all the money. They're all seeking everything-for-nothing relationships with customers.
But in a world where we assume that they achieved that, ignoring the long games without microtransactions like Baldur's Gate and Zelda, there are industry-wide effects at a macro level.
I was going to consider Assassin’s Creed Mirage on PC instead of PS5. Then they announced it wouldn’t be available on Steam. Now I won’t consider it on PC and likely won’t get it at all in any format.
There are reasons PC gaming is still stupid, and it’s mostly various companies fault.
Yeah that’s on Ubisoft. Third party launchers are always stupid. I bought Splinter Cell Blacklist a while ago and couldn’t get it to act right with their stupid Ubisoft connect or Uplay or whatever so I just returned it.
But the worst is how I bought splinter cell conviction years ago via steam, and can’t even play it anymore because of how they shittily implemented their DRM/launcher. Not buying any more games from them. Used to be my favorite dev back in the day.
This article made a damn good point about how much gaming websites depend on guides now. It hasn’t really clicked until now with me. I follow a bot on Mastodon that posts new articles from a bunch of different gaming sites, and it seems like half of them are for guides and walkthroughs. That’s where they get their ad bucks from, so that and SEO are the big focus.
Yeah, after Reddit died (as far as I’m concerned) I set up a tracker for a load of RSS feeds. A lot of them are, as you say, updates concerning walkthroughs and guides. Predominantly Baldurs Gate 3 at the moment.
Which is fine I guess, but it is very obvious what they’re pushing…I’d rather just have news.
yeah, it sucks and I just stick with the wiki source and proper sites I know. I am a hoarder so I don’t want to miss some good items I can get by accidentally wiping a area or block myself from them because of a wrong decision. Some of the generated sites are still refer to old early access stuff.
Games as a service could work. The issue is that making money isn’t enough. You need to be making more money every year and bean counters have hijacked games as a way to squeeze as much money as possible from players.
Why hasn’t the board already fired the CEO? Or is the board just full of family members?
Remember when everyone was on the Guillemots side when they fought to prevent a hostile takeover from Vivendi. The Guillemots became what they feared what Vivendi would have done to the company.
Only time I watch something is to see how to get past a part or get a tricky achievement. I’d be curious if its a generational thing. I started with the Commodore64 and would rather play the games.
It’s now been eight months since SAG-AFTRA members voted in favour of a strike authorisation in the games industry… While SAG-AFTRA has not moved forward with its strike as of yet…
I wonder if there’s a limit to how long the authorization is valid for?
A strike authorization is a powerful tool that gives your Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee added leverage at the bargaining table by demonstrating to the video game companies that SAG-AFTRA members support their committee and are willing to fight for a fair deal. It does not automatically mean there will be a strike. If 75% or more of eligible members casting ballots vote YES, a strike authorization passes and gives your National Board the authority to call a strike after the contract expires. In the case of SAG-AFTRA’s Interactive Media Agreement, assuming a strike authorization is approved by members, that means the National Board can call a strike anytime after September 26, 2023.
It expires when they ink a new contract, as far as I can tell. I think they hold off on the strike for as long as negotiations are ongoing. I think jumping to a strike can poison the well in negotiations like this, so they try to get as far as they can amicably before going scorched earth.
It grinds my gears that sony software locked the ability to backup saves locally on the PS5 making a PS plus subscription the only way to have a backup of save games. I don’t play multiplayer and don’t play the monthly free games either so I have to pay a premium for the rest of my life to get a basic functionality that was present in ps4 but got nerfed for some dubious reasons in ps5. The recent ps plus price hike was the last straw so I ditched my PS and got into PC gaming and loving it so far.
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