"There is indeed pressure from the market because the standards in terms of production values, length of experience and knowledge of our medium from customers are going up," Clerc says.
This is another important piece. Games that used to be linear and 8-15 hours are now open world and 60-80 hours long (often to their detriment). Most of the biggest games are designed to be played forever, which means it's coming at the expense of buying or playing new games. And development cycles are exceeding 5 years when they probably ought to be aiming for under 3 years.
The industry is making games with riskier development cycles, adding features that arguably don't make them any better or more marketable, and they're designed to make it actively hostile to the next person trying to sell a game to the same customer. It's no wonder it can't sustain the current trajectory.
Back in the day, so many studios tried to unseat wow with a fantasy mmo of their own. Seems an unwise strategy when playing an mmo is nearly a full time occupation. Very few players will have the time for more than one. Bad strategy. Which is why nearly every wow killer died.
Its clear the industry learned nothing when they started pushing perpetual live service games. Why would anyone play EA’s destiny clone when they could instead play destiny, especially when the time investment makes it infeasible to play both?
Now the big thing is the battle pass, that demand tens of hours to complete. Same issue there. Can most players justify more than one battle pass subscription? Probably not.
Why would anyone play EA’s destiny clone when they could instead play destiny, especially when the time investment makes it infeasible to play both?
There's a big reward for being second or third to market, but not too much beyond that. A few MMOs saw plenty of success despite WoW. League of Legends and Dota are massively successful, but Smite did well too. Minecraft is huge, but so is Terraria and Starbound. PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Warzone are huge, but Hyperscape couldn't cut it.
There is always a market for smaller more focussed experiences. They are cheaper to make, so easy to make profit on. But, they want to turn every game into open world, microtransaction laden shit fest. A good example is Diablo 4, which literally removed genre standard features to make the game more tedious. Throwing hundreds of millions on a single massive game shouldn’t be a standard.
I love open world games, but I wouldn’t mind playing smaller games like older CoD campaigns too.
I'm not fluent in Diablo parlance, but essentially it makes it harder to work toward the gear you want because they don't give you as much storage for the items you can't fit on your person?
I mean, nowadays I assume almost all C-suite execs (which make these decisiones) to be conservative (or “apoliticals”/“insert other tag” that act like conservatives)
Review summary: “If you see Carmageddon 64 in the shops, take it off the shelves, rip up the box and throw the cart repeatedly against the wall until it breaks”.
Classic
Edit: fuck me, fourty fucking quid for that game back then. That’s £70 with inflation!!!
Edit edit: I’m looking at the prices of the games I got in the 90s…fucking hell, we have it good nowadays. Of course literally everything else is more expensive but eh
I still look to Yahtzee when I'm curious about a game that's either new or I'm too broke to buy at the time.
Fuck a * out of * score. Tell me what annoyed you about the game, or what you enjoyed. So much more worth my time than seeing numbers and not looking into why those numbers exist.
Too many reviews just go through talking points from the publisher/dev anyway so they're useless.
At least Yahtzee gets to the fucking point of it all and in short time.
I’m down for uh… one tiny part of this. I certainly think we could do to make games smaller, I’m sick of massive open worlds and colossal play times, which seem like an astounding amount of developer time to make swathes of stuff that ends up so soulless that I don’t want to play it.
More focus on fundamentals, shorter, more meaningful campaigns with well executed gameplay and ideas would be wonderful, because we’re rapidly finding the limits of every studio on earth trying to make the “forever” game. Players only have so much time.
The best recent example I have is Mario Kart World. It’s a marvellous game, wall and rail grinding are amazing, the tracks are some of the best in the franchise, it’s fantastic. But you can tell a massive amount of effort and years went into the open world, which uh… actively makes the game worse? Free roam is fun for an hour or so, but I have no idea why I’d want to do it with friends, and the game shoves its 200+ “intermission” tracks down your throat constantly. Time trials are the best mode in the game, because it’s the only real way to consistently play the excellent tracks enough to actually unpack and learn the shortcuts and tricks that are afforded by the game’s deep new mechanics. I feel bad that the team wasted so much time on something the community begs for better ways to avoid.
I definitely want to see more publisher-driven “game experiments”. Imagine a studio putting out a 3-hour vertical slice of a PS2-era-style experimental game idea for $5. Now imagine, a publisher puts out about 20 of these such games a year (and mostly loses money on them - since $5 isn’t a lot and those 3-hour segments need polish) but then, occasionally one of them hits it big - and then the publisher grants them a greenlight to make a trilogy of 14-hour games after figuring out that people enjoy it.
To clarify, the idea would be to have smaller studios each independently making games. So for half a year, one studio may only have the responsibility of a single 3-hour demo.
Please don’t forget that even when this company made “better” games and was more profitable, their management and executives were wilful participants in rampant sexual abuse of their workers. Ubisoft is, always has been, and always will be a pile of festering shit and bankruptcy would be too good for them.
The data suggests some gamers are partially treating the service to trial or even rent a game they might be interested in, before unsubscribing.
This is me. I often subscribe when there’s a discount, go through some games I’m not interested in buying but want to play anyways. Xbox game pass specifically has a lot of great indies that can be finished relatively quickly.
I subscribed earlier this year for a month, might resubscribe for a month again later this year.
Same here. Game pass is a pretty good deal even at full price for playing AAA single player games that you won’t touch after a single play through. Plus, there’s a lot of games that I wouldn’t have given a shot if I didn’t happen to have Game Pass at the time.
Same here. I use GamePass and PS Plus to play games I’m interested in but not enough to buy right out the gate. I enjoy finding games that I’ve never heard of and enjoy. If I like it enough, I’ll buy it.
(edit: crash course for the uninitiated: Fortnite was a great game, until it launched it’s Battle Royale mode - Fortnite then effectively became this game mode, whereas the base game was left to die as Save The World.)
It’s a mode that people paid money for, and Epic treat it as a second rate game even though without it, there wouldn’t even be this behemoth that Fortnite has become.
Epic have come a long way from Epic MegaGames, and it isn’t always a fairytale story I suppose.
Epic have come a long way from Epic MegaGames, and it isn’t always a fairytale story I suppose.
Someone here on Lemmy highlighted that quite nicely when Valve dropped their Half Life documentary. Valve embraces their past. They cherish it. They still maintain their old games to honor their success.
Epic on the other hand completely wiped old Unreal titles from the relevant stores and don’t give a fuck about supporting any of them. Which is a shame. Also I admire the tech behind of modern Unreal engines, so there are still geniuses at work who are likely passionate. Too bad they essentially only ride the Fortnite train outside their engine development.
That’s a shame. I can sort of understand taking Unreal and RtNP from the storefronts from a financial perspective as a remaster is rumoured to be in the works, but UT99 - along with Quake III Arena - was probably influential in taking online multiplayer from the discrete deathmatch or capture the flag maps into what would be eSports and games as a service… as much as that makes me almost barf to say.
I’ve always quite liked Sweeney for being “old school” in his approach to game design and company direction, even if I didn’t necessarily like how he went about it, but it has really pulled a hair out of my arse how he’s gone off the rails in the last 6-12 months - complaining about needing more linux devs one month, and binning off hundreds off staff a few weeks later even though they’re proper rinsing the Fortnite cash cow.
Great nod to the Valve documentary though, I enjoyed that far more than I should have.
Just in response to your edit, Fortnite was interesting on release but was likely never going to see vast popularity. The release of BR was really the only reason sales picked up, and at that point it makes sense to focus on the mode that’s vastly more popular.
I get that it sucks, but if it wasn’t for the pivot to BR full time, STW would likely still be where it is now, only in a dying game.
I’m still jealous about the content, support and update they get
I know what you mean. I play rocket league and they sidelined our devs from working on updates for a whole year (without communication) which left the community thinking it was a UE5 sequel in the works… and then it turned out they were just making a kart style racing game to add to fortnite.
In the mean time, smurfs and bugs are rampant and they’ve started removing game modes and other features like item trading. -_-
But hey, at least I can make my car look like the mandalorian… if I pay for it.
I don't even know which specific part MT went on to do. All I know is Epic decided to nuke nearly 3/4 of our levels because they couldn't fix playstation bugs or something (proceeds to fire 3/4 of mediatonic, including the guy who made the acclaimed promotional renders) and then canceled seasons. at least they're still working on creative and cosmetics
Iirc they did make changes to the engine, which would have required paying an external developer to port it again. It’s sad to see but it’s the reality of native games without a Linux dev in-house.
What I’m more angry about is how they didn’t make the proton version default, instead they kept the useless offline Linux native port. I’ve read too many comments thinking Rocket League online doesn’t work on Linux.
Yes, but especially for 3D games this often leads to worse performance and bugs, since the developer still has to be able to test the build. The big reason proton is so great is that Valve is responsible for fixing games on proton, while the dev just has to support a single (Windows) build.
Obviously some devs also fix a bug only found with proton, but it’s something they optionally do, without taking responsibility for fixing all bugs.
If it was so simple for a game studio to release on all platforms, we’d have macOS x86 & macOS ARM builds too.
I get your point but at the same time it would also be easy for Epic to turn on AntiCheat support for Linux in Fortnite but they still don’t for whatever reason
Iirc they also use BattleEye in addition to EAC, so depending on their implementation it might not be as simple (unless they put in some work).
Epic talks about anti-cheat on Linux not being good enough for them since they aren’t kernel level. Which might be fair since Fortnite is big, altough most people probably won’t change their OS while cheats are also available on Windows anyway. At the end of the day Fortnite is only one of many games which don’t support anti cheat on Linux for whatever reason.
Unchecked “free market” capitalism, if I had to guess.
Companies should never have been able to run outside of a very tight yoke. Yeah sure, capitalism. But not unchecked and especially not unchecked-across-borders so they can start escaping shit by moving legal entities around. Oh and speaking of that, maybe “corporations as entities” is another really really big one we fucked up, allowing the people who make the truly shitty decisions to shirk responsibility for them.
TL;DR: the way it was supposed to work is that entities that wanted limited liability were granted corporate charters in exchange for providing some large, tangible public benefit (and very much not just “shareholder value”, BTW). This post-Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. world where corporations are essentially mandated to be sociopathic is an absolute 100% perversion of what incorporation was meant to be for!
In case you are wondering this because it seems children actually prefer subscriptions to owning games, they don’t. Out of what is offered to them, the most desired choices happen to be subscription models of some form. If those games were something you just bought then the desire would be for games that were purchased in full.
This type of games are free to play. So a bunch of kids who are friends can start playing at any time even without money. If some of them like the game, they’ll stay as a group for the social aspect.
I don’t see any wrong in it. Its just different of what I did 30 years ago.
I’m gonna have to disagree. As somebody who was an Overwatch addict, these games are designed to effectively be like drugs. They are not meant for children and shouldn’t be purported as such.
These are casinos playing in simple.
In fact, it’s much less incentivized for a game that is one and done, even multiplayer titles if they are a paid game.
Not teaching kids thr value of money imo is the main one. They dont understand the cost of subs because its not their money they are spending.
I have a half brother whose on the sensible side of buying games. He doesnt get a lot of money, hell he got a 20$ steam card from a friend, and hes saving it for an indie game that doesnt even release till 2025.
Godot, definitely. Or GDevelop, if you want an experience akin to Construct3 and an end product that’s entirely javascript+html, but with a FOSS alternative
depends on your platform and your level of experience. Both unreal and godot have steep learning curves depending on where you come from. GDevelop is very accessible but also caps out quite fast. Great for making prototypes and getting simple games out there but depending on your level of ambition you will probably outgrow it sooner or later.
So… If the Unity’s secret spyware and algorithm suddenly decides to count an update as a new installation, you suddenly get slapped with a huge bill. Especially if you release multiple small patches and your whole player base is counted multiple times.
Yeah as petty as some people are over games I can see a developer pissing them off and a bunch of players banding together to uninstall and reinstall games over and over. They could even script it. Bad idea all around.
Except that that is a back pedal on their part and their FAQ plainly says they actually have no way of tracking what is a new install versus a re-install; which is why they decided to count all installs to begin with.
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