This was due to something that happened between (roughly, very roughly) 2005 and 2015. Games went from being made by a bunch of nerds who really wanted to make games, to a more corporate setting, to a marketing setting.
Fifteen years ago QA would declare Alpha, Beta, etc, in that the build fit the criteria for each state. Then, marketing would set a date, and on that date, Alpha, Beta, etc would be ‘ready.’
This lead to huge problems. There was a time where Alpha meant Feature Complete, and that there were only a few major crashes. Beta meant you had no, or virtually no, reproable crashes, game ending bugs, etc. (Then later) once marketing took over, it didn’t matter. Instead of Beta being a checklist, it was just ‘March 10th.’
In addition to this, innovative and cool game design ideas are harder to sell visually than ‘we doubled the poly’s!’ So more and more focus was put on visuals to the point where marketing would assign things to the design team, IE. “It has to have battlefield COD tarkov CSGO TF2 Popular Game-like mechanics, gameplay, etc.”
So now you get games shipped with incredible graphics and garbage stability. I’ve been on projects where crashes later in the campaign were changed from P1 to P2 because reviewers likely wouldn’t make it to the point where those would come up. (This is called ‘punting’.) In addition, having arbitrary dates decide major milestones means that builds are constantly broken, all through the process of creating them. You know how people get that ‘beta’ build of a game and ask why it’s so crash happy, why it runs like shit, etc? It’s because the game has literally never been stable. It’s been assigned Alpha and Beta based on a calendar, and time is never allowed to delay to fix issues. Add to that that the owners of game companies will give publishers absolutely asinine claims about how long a game will take. Most franchise games, ‘AAA’-wise, are made in 18 months. However, they often also had six months of pre-production before that. Marketing took that out, and focused on a game every 12 months. They used a secondary studio for the ‘B-Team’ and thus every second game in the series was made by said ‘B-Team’. B-Teams were given even less time, and often no pre-production, so the entire game would effectively be made in 12 months.
Then they lay off 50-70% of the staff, and start all over.
So if I may end this way, do not go into games. If you like them make them in your free time. You will be treated like an animal and be unemployed about 1/4 of the time if you choose the industry. Of all the people who I worked with in my first company, maybe six are still in games.
No worries. I see a lot of posts about what’s happening that are close, but don’t quite understand this is a managerial issue. The devs themselves are (mostly) good people who want to make games. The owners of smaller companies don’t get called out enough though, in my opinion. Every time you see ‘EA just bought and closed another…’ keep in mind the vast majority of the time the company didn’t need to be sold. Some guy who inherited a bunch of money created a company of people who do the actual work, then waited till the worth of the company was high enough for them to sell. It happens constantly and it’s easily the most disheartening part of game development.
Imagine spending 80 hour weeks and 30-90 days without a single day off, making a breakout game that is beloved… and realising you’re not going to make it to 5 years at a company, because they’re selling it to Activision.
Meanwhile in the east you have companies like FromSoftware and Capcom who are just laughing all the way to the bank, because their competition is all run by idiots.
The worst part is the CEO’s/whatever of each company know each other, too. You’ll get C-suites come into game companies who not only have never played a game before, but don’t even remotely understand how software development works. I worked for a company where the owner made himself Project Manager and ran that project straight into the ground. Tens of millions on worthless overtime while we sat around waiting for another build that would fail, on a weekend, for months.
Larian sounds like some sort of a bizarro-world company. They even have awful investors but managed to keep creative/overall control.
They were throwing temper tantrums over the owner of Kotaku telling them that they needed to write more gaming guides/articles instead of the social culture outrage garbage they had been spewing that tarnished their reputation.
I get journalists hate Xbox, but Xbox needs to exist as a consumer option.
I don’t understand, is this a thing? “All journalists hate Xbox” I mean. I’ve never heard this before. Like there’s a mandate that journalists have to hate the Xbox?
EDIT: I’ll eat the downvotes, I just want to understand what the fuck they’re talking about
Yeah the comment felt like bizarre astroturfing – Why would ‘gaming journalists’ specifically not want Xbox to succeed, but want Playstation to? Like somehow a Sony monopoly is great for… journalists? A very strange take.
XBOX has been underwhelming for a while and journalists will report on that, and they will focus on those bad parts and certainly also sometimes make it sound worse than it really is, because it brings in clicks.
I worked at Microsoft and I can assure you, they deserve every bit of hate they get. And it really is that bad. There was a point with the Xbox One where Sony was beating ‘us’ in every single market we were actively tracking except specific parts of the US. Yet we had directive after directive for clearly nonsensical ideas like targeting Japan for console sales.
I also worked (third party) with Sony and they aren’t much better, but they at least understand how to get their consoles bought. Microsoft hasn’t known how to do that since the 360.
I don’t think big companies know how to make a good FPS campaign anymore, let alone hone in on classic deathmatch multiplayer. The last FPS I bought was Half-Life: Alyx four years ago, and the first one to come along and interest me since then was Phantom Fury, but I’m letting that one iron out bugs for a few weeks before I...
As someone with an avatar of the Q from Quake 1, I can avidly say that writing was not better in the past.
Just off the top of my head from the last decade:
-Baldurs gate 3 -Firewatch -Return of the Obra Dinn -Disco Elysium -Tyranny -Shadowrun Dragonfall -Red Dead Redemption 2 -Witcher 3 -Hellblade Senuas Sacrifice -Life is Strange -Prey (2017) -The Red Strings Club
Seriously, go check the story to Perfect Dark. Hilarious? Yes. A “good story”? No.
There are myriad issues in gaming now that weren’t there in the past, but good writing is (thankfully) still around.
Yes, they have the data that shows a few whales will make those transactions worth it, at the same time they are counting on catching the occasional non-whale slacking. Trick enough minnows into a net and you have the same mass as a whale.
You’re actually thinking much more intelligently than they do. I was in games for almost two decades, left a couple years ago. The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of money made is from whales, it’s not even close. I’ve worked on games where we had to speak to banks in both Canada and the UAE to allow a man to make six figure purchases per week. He and one other whale were over 75% of our revenue.
Now the intelligent thing to do to make money here would be, as you said, getting minnows to spend – but that takes too long and the people who run these things want it now.
So rather than selling each armour colour or whatever for 50 cents each, they’ll charge 20 bucks for all of it, pricing out 90% of users*, and barely making money on it, instead of a million people buying it making them a tonne of money. (*this is a personal experience tale, this did happen, these numbers are unaltered.)
To be 100% fair here, that anecdote I used was a mobile game, but the same thing does happen in larger PC/Console game titles, it’s just not 75% of (player) paid revenue.
This is especially so in games that have battlepasses – far fewer people buy those every time thank you’d think, and the ones who do are a small percentage of total players, but make up a lions share of the total revenue earned from said battlepass. Those are also the people (the every pass ones) who buy everything in the shop. 50 dollar cape or whatever, they buy it on release.
I highly recommend Amid Evil. I wasn’t even a big Hexen/Heretic fan, but it’s fantastic. It has the record for highest screenshots->playtime of any game I’ve played on steam.
I refuse to spoil anything, but I think I took a screenshot every 30 seconds on the last map. It helps you manage to traverse every single square foot of space in the map over the course of completing it.
Yeah exactly, my first thought was “Doom is still in the public discourse.”
Not to mention, oh what’s that game that broke earnings numbers on steam, oh yeah, Cyberpunk 2077? Rough launch aside, the game literally printed money, and is a great RPG and a great FPS.
The terms have changed a bit over time, but generally “AAA” now means (in the industry) a large studio makes a game with a large marketing budget. If you think of those games that are published by EA, but made by one of their smaller studios and has a smaller marketing budget, that’s “AA”.
Much like “alpha” and “beta”, the meanings are changing so quickly it’s hard to keep up with what the industry means and what players mean.
I’m so old when I started in games “alpha” meant a feature complete game with a few crash bugs, and beta meant no (25% repro, or whatever the studio chose) crash bugs and all assets added and working.
Now it’s basically “alpha” means a demo, and “beta” means they’re buying time for GM release.
This started happening when studios got bigger and marketing controlled release dates. By the 2010s or so, the actual devs had zero say. So some idiot owner would promise a game in 18 months, half the ideas would be removed due to time, and a rushed product went out.
“Games as a service” was just corporate speak for how to streamline putting out a game with less components and then adding them over time.
I appreciate what you’re getting at, but I also think you forget how grey Duke 3d was.
I agree Quake was too brown and grey, but the idea it was ‘visually hot garbage’ is definitely an outside take. We finally had 3d models that weren’t sprites, not to mention how impressive prerendered Lightmaps were for the time.
I will agree that GLQuake was when the graphics really were at their best.
I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished.
I remember doing this Battle of Britain and TIE Fighter! Man, memories.
My takeaway is that it’s only original Rogue fans that care about the delineation of the terms. Is there a modern (i.e. post 2000s game) that matches the definition of a roguelike as given in the article?
One thing I read (a lot, oddly) is that GamePass is ‘really popular’/the most popular ‘subscription’ service, but I have never met anyone who uses it.
I checked the numbers of people using GamePass, and it seems the numbers have gone:
2021 - 23 million
2022 - 25 million
2023 - there was a brief post on linkedin saying 30 million, but it was removed.
If even the most popular service is struggling to pass 30 million users, how exactly is Ubisoft going to compete? There’s what, 120 million people with Xbox subscriptions, and they can barely get 1/4 of them to use GamePass?
It’s interesting to watch ‘AAA’ studios absolutely faceplanting every year now, hopefully we can make a full indie-sweep soon.
The reason people I know tend to give for not using GamePass is you’re essentially paying for demos (which still exist on PC pretty often. I just bought Roboquest because of the demo.)
EDIT: Also, $12/month is a huge amount of money for me to spend on something like that. Just shy of 150/year for games that aren’t good enough to own, but are good enough to play, doesn’t strike me as valuable.
If the games stayed I’d check it out, but having a game for a few months isn’t something I find value in, which tends to be what people I’ve spoken with about it. Especially since you don’t choose the games.
Also, seriously the PC app is absolutely awful. The games work worse on it than on steam. It crashes, has terrible performance, and break installs constantly.
You also can’t mod a lot of these games, which particularly on PC is a pretty large missing piece.
That’s also not to mention the cost has doubled in two years.
You’re allowed to enjoy it, but I think it’s also clear why it isn’t taking off.
I just go by reviews, usually from people I know. The only real difference between AA/A and Indie titles now really is marketing budget and size of team. Not much else is different. You also run into issues about what counts as indie now: it used to mean without a publisher, but it seems to have morphed into ‘a smaller company.’
But yeah, just look up reviews. Games like FTL, Hades, and so on tend to become known by word of mouth.
These could be games that left a lasting impression on you, games that had stellar gameplay mechanics, characters that captivated you, games that you played tons of hours on, etc.
Think Quick! immediately comes to mind as the an early one I played a lot of, followed by Mines of Titan.
I am not sure I could go through the 90’s games that left lasting impressions on me. I guess Homeworld, Sacrifice, Marathon, Alpha Centauri, and Chrono Trigger have occupied a massive amount of my mind for ages now, haha.
I love tribes - I even still have the same mousepad from when I played it last - but I want to warn people this is being made by Prophecy Games, who have straight up abandoned their last game. Starsiege Deadzone, put out in July, is already dead. Take a look at the steam charts for proof. I want Tribes more than most other old IPs, but we have to be real cautious with our hype, so to speak.
While Take-Two is riding high on their announcement that a GTA 6 trailer is coming, its CEO has some…interesting ideas on how much video games could cost, part of a contingent of executives that believe games are underpriced, given their cost, length or some combination of the two.
The problem is an hour of what. Me wandering around trying to find something described vaguely and being frustrated, is not the same as an hour of well written and interesting dialogue.
Morrowind has good writing in it too, though. I think we can all agree nobody should be paying ‘dollars per hour’ while wandering completely lost and annoyed ;)
I can deflect the doxxing slightly by saying it’s more than one. The first rhymes with Wicrosoft and the other is too small and would definitely doxx me. However I have friends all over the industry, and can confirm identical reactions from places with names similar to Acti… mizion, Sledge…wammer Ztudios, 434… endustries, Pioware… Grames?
They probably spend fractions of a percent of their profits on moderation. We’re talking like 0.01%. Half the time it’s cycling college grads through 18 month contracts that they terminate so they can pay them less and less each time (Source: Worked at Microsoft, and they’re infamous for this. Hell, QA for Microsoft’s game division make about 50 cents above minimum wage in BC.)
SPOILERS - Please bear in mind some of the entries below might contain spoilers, proceed at your own risk
But it doesn’t separate them, or have any cover whatsoever. So if I want to find out if a quest that’s bugged for me is fixed, or other issues, I do have to read it at some point.
This is why I think they meant to spoiler tag it and didn’t (I edited it to remove actual spoiler content):
The ‘(GOAL)’ background goal for Soldiers will now unlock correctly after you spoiler kill (ENEMY) and escape the (AREA).
I’ve worked for those (sized) companies and employee pay is not as much as you’d think. Not to mention higher sales don’t equal more pay (for the actual workers.)
Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a mammoth-sized update, titled Update 2.0, tomorrow, September 21, and it promises to be a bit of a game changer. A police revamp, a progression overhaul, a new cybernetics system, vehicular combat, DLSS 3.5—it's vast, and thankfully separate from the Phantom Liberty expansion due next week, so you'll...
I’m really excited to play with all these changes. I have just shy of 200 hours for 2 playthroughs, and virtually every change they’ve made here seems like it’ll improve things a lot.
Some of Steam’s oldest user accounts are turning 20-years old this week, and Valve is celebrating the anniversary by handing out special digital badges featuring the original Steam colour scheme to the gaming veterans....
Half-Life 2 is currently 100% off for its 20th anniversary, plus a major update (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Bonus: it also seems that the episodes have been rolled into the base game. Full details of the anniversary update....
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Perfect Dark Reboot Is Allegedly In Bad Shape (www.gamespot.com) angielski
I don’t think big companies know how to make a good FPS campaign anymore, let alone hone in on classic deathmatch multiplayer. The last FPS I bought was Half-Life: Alyx four years ago, and the first one to come along and interest me since then was Phantom Fury, but I’m letting that one iron out bugs for a few weeks before I...
Microsoft Closes Redfall Developer Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush Developer Tango Gameworks, and More in Devastating Cuts at Bethesda (www.ign.com) angielski
Affected devs:...
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Let’s share some good deals!...
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EA flop Immortals of Aveum reportedly cost around $125 million, former dev says "a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Personally I would not call Immortals of Aveum an AAA game. 😅...
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Then vs Now (startrek.website) angielski
Roguelike vs Roguelite - what's the difference? (whatnerd.com) angielski
My takeaway is that it’s only original Rogue fans that care about the delineation of the terms. Is there a modern (i.e. post 2000s game) that matches the definition of a roguelike as given in the article?
Ubisoft Wants You To Be Comfortable Not Owning Your Games (kotaku.com) angielski
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These could be games that left a lasting impression on you, games that had stellar gameplay mechanics, characters that captivated you, games that you played tons of hours on, etc.
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While Take-Two is riding high on their announcement that a GTA 6 trailer is coming, its CEO has some…interesting ideas on how much video games could cost, part of a contingent of executives that believe games are underpriced, given their cost, length or some combination of the two.
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Invasive ants are a huge problem in Australia, but a classic computer game could help solve it (Age of Empires 2) (www.abc.net.au) angielski
CD Projekt recommends starting a new game when Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 drops: 'starting fresh will enhance your overall gameplay experience' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a mammoth-sized update, titled Update 2.0, tomorrow, September 21, and it promises to be a bit of a game changer. A police revamp, a progression overhaul, a new cybernetics system, vehicular combat, DLSS 3.5—it's vast, and thankfully separate from the Phantom Liberty expansion due next week, so you'll...
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Some of Steam’s oldest user accounts are turning 20-years old this week, and Valve is celebrating the anniversary by handing out special digital badges featuring the original Steam colour scheme to the gaming veterans....
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Activision said it brought the 2009-released game offline while it investigates "an issue."