this is a wake-up call to this industry and any other industry enjoying a glut of "free" (as in beer) proprietary tools owned entirely by private (or worse: public!) organizations.
this will always be the result. every single time. if you think you and your industry are immune to getting bait & switched, you are very wrong.
chaining your livelihood to a for-profit organization is begging to eventually be extorted in this manner. greed is inevitable.
Ok so firstly it’s not free, people pay for it, and secondly you act like there’s an alternative. You use the products that are available, if there isn’t a free product available or the free product that is available isn’t very good you don’t have a choice.
For a long time Unity was basically the only game in town other the Source but that was very old no one really used it.
Hulst is CEO of the newly named Studio Business Group, which includes all of PlayStation’s first-party teams, plus covers the development of PlayStation IP onto other mediums, such as TV and film. Hulst was already head of PlayStation Studios. He was previously the co-founder of Horizon and Killzone developer Guerrilla Games, which was acquired by Sony in 2005.
Hideaki Nishino will lead the Platform Business Group, which includes console hardware, technology, accessories, PlayStation Network and third-party relations (covering major publishers and indie studios). He was already SVP of Platform Experiences. He’s been part of the Sony business since 2006, holding numerous roles at Sony Network Entertainment, Sony Corporation and SIE.
And this is why indie games have been having such a good time of it. Sure, we might get the decade long “Early Access” of 7 Days to Die, or “We resemble but are legally distinct from Pokemon” Palworld, but we get fun games with a lot of obvious passion behind them. I do wish we would see more Baldur’s Gate 3 style large productions which aren’t designed around micro-transactions. But, I also realize that big name studios are run by folks with business degrees and not gamers; so, I should expect major games to be after my wallet like a meth addict.
Man, it’s insane how Larian has set up their business model to be so pro-consumer. Everyone needs to be looking at how they’re doing things as a case study.
N64 and earlier consoles emulate really well on smartphones. In terms of storage, those games are tiny, so you could probably fit Nintendo’s entire library from the first Gameboy through the N64 on your phone if you wanted to.
Way higher quality than pretty much every mobile game, free, no micro transactions, no ads (assuming your emulator isn’t shit).
If you want to game on your phone, this is the way.
Every console and handheld from N64 backwards is about 62.67 gigabytes. So definitely. If we add PlayStation 1, it jumps to 643 GB. So still possible, just more expensive.
They absolutely play better with a controller, but you’d be surprised how not-terrible the touch screen interface is after just a bit of getting used to it.
I break out Mario 64 or the two Zelda 64’s occasionally and outside of just a few wonky parts (aiming the bow… ugh…) the play quality is alright on touch screen alone (+ binding one of the volume keys to Z).
Sticking on a streamer who you can just listen to chat while they happen to be playing a game is just a newer version of having the TV or radio on in the background while you do other stuff. Sometimes we just want to chill and not have to focus!
Painful for who? I highly doubt any of the CEOs and investors interviewed are going to suffer all that much compared to the artists, programmers, and other employees that are going to be laid off because their company wants to be leaner, more dynamic, or whatever the latest buzzword is.
What they need is to make a completely different game.
Destiny was successful because it was the first real fps service game, it didnt push mtx, and had competent pve, pvp and a story(debatably). Bungie cant chase that dragon anymore. Its been done a million times now.
Players know all service games want is to milk them with mtx. No player wants to get into a new service game especially when its nothing unique.
Just make a good single and multiplayer shooter with a somewhat interesting story, then people will buy and play it.
It seems so easy, but AAA pubs and devs cant pull their heads out of their own asses to see what players want. They just see what investors want.
Agreed. I would love it if they took all the assets and the engine and made a great campaign actually grounded in the marathon universe. Thats what i would pay for.
Tbh, its probably too late for bungie. All that company is, is a name.
They seemed to be acquiring and funding good things for a while there, and then out of the blue went “oops, spent a bit too much there lol, gotta melt some of these down for cash” and then threw some seriously good shit right into the crucible.
They acquired far too much as they expected a $2B deal with Saudi Arabia. That fell through and they’ve been shedding everything but the CEOs (at least from what I can find)
“Out of the blue”. They were gobbling up studios as nothing more than assets. Any “good” that came of that process was purely incidental and this sandbag dumping when they started to sink was inevitable.
They are in a no-win situation. If they aren't making enough from subscriptions they can pull their games, but then they lose a massive amount of marketing and visibility. Much like Spotify and other streaming services, smaller artists just aren't making much from these. And with the way that contracts and subscription fatigue works, it's unlikely a competitor is going to be able to offer better deals while also attracting sufficient customers.
The win comes later once gamepass gets netflix’d. It’ll only go on like this for so long before there’s UbiPass and EAccess and Sony Prime and so on and so forth. Then a few years after that, when the services finally get pushed back against and die, everyone who just kept buying games on steam/gog/itch/whatever (or pirating) just keeps on not paying sub fees. Like nothing ever happened.
Subscriptions and those that use them are a worse deal for indie devs, and it only becomes an even worse deal as big name publishers put their new AAA games in the subscription and demand a proportionate slice of the pie.
My opinion / analysis of the situation is that it’s only going to get worse for non-AAA and non-backed indies as “$180 a year gets me aaaaallll thiiiiiis, why would I spend a whole month’s of gamepass on your one game” becomes more and more common.
Furthermore, there was never a world where Netflix stayed as “$15/mo for everything”. Other corps want their own Netflixes. So they pull their content and put out another subscription. There’s no world where MS Gamepass stays the only subscription-based game service in town, and when users are paying for three gamepasses, they’re even less likely to buy a cool game that’s lacking AAA polish for $10.
However, unlike movies and TV, no game has really become exclusive to Gamepass (some tried with Stadia, which thankfully died). There are shows that were exclusive to HBO Max that cannot be legally acquired anymore. Players that want some degree of ownership of their games can buy them on Steam/Epic, or if they want full ownership of their games they can buy them DRM-Free like on GOG. Those guys can keep on doing that through the rise of the “wow it’s genuinely a good deal” gamepass, the “more corporations want their own gamepass” phase, the “prices go up and quality goes down now that we’ve got an audience” phase, and the “service is going away forever” phase.
It’s game buyers that’ll keep indie games alive. Subscription models are a poisoned treat that benefit indie games right now but are already shifting to be a huge blow to the indie game scene.
I see your points, which I mostly agree. I think at one point, but there are also Indies games that may hardly see any penny without the exposition of the subscription as well. There are games like Chain of Echoes that I bought after playing it on GP just because I like it so much that I want to support the devs and wouldn’t have buy it in the first place had it not included with GP, but this may be a rare case or just a matter of releasing a demo.
Rockstar had their games on GP for a short period then pull them from the platform repeatedly for a while, I guess they intended for people to use GP to demo their game. Not sure how that work out for them.
I think the games generaly wont go into subscription only simply beacuse of how much time they take. You speak as if 180$ is a good deal but a lot of pepole do not play enough to justify spending 180$ on gamepass ( of course if you play online on consoles the equation works a little diffrent beacuse of their shitty practice of paid online but thats another matter ). Its not music that is consumed repetivly in massive amounts or to a lesser extent tv and film industry. Games take an awful lot of time amd many of the best ones are free to play already( Path of Exile )
This we will own nothing and be happy for it is exactly what got the world into it’s current mess and it really makes to many investor groups salvate at the thought of it.
He has a point where eventually these companies that have merged and want to run their own subscription is gonna kill this and people’s wallet for most of the money to go to the major players and devs anyways.
I’m sure Epic would love to have a subscription bundle and it would absolutely dry up money for indie studios unless they have private cash flow
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