A strong, cogent argument can be made for having a wide variety of game developers. I don’t see ANYONE saying, “we need more companies like EA, Activision or UbiSoft.”
I wish we lived in a universe, where these platforms can exist on their own, without falling into the trap of needing financial support from literal satan, in companies like Fandom
that universe requires people to pay money for content rather than having advertiser funded content that people will just block anyway. which in 2023 isn’t going to happen
If these were all getting financial support from a large company, why did they all switch on more ads, newsletters, anti-adblockers, and subscription prompts at basically the same time? Must’ve been only crumbs, I think they will move on and be better off. A few less click-bait titles in the aggregators are all that is lost I suppose.
The games “news” coverage system is a-changin’ again, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Large companies are driven by one thing and only one thing. Shareholder value. So they and their subsidiaries will implement policies that drive shareholder value at the cost of everything else.
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.
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