For those of us that don't care for the latest FPS or Battle Royale, the games industry is going perfectly fine.
Never before has it been so easy for someone to get their game into the hands of millions. Games like Factorio, made by people who are passionate about games. With modern distribution platforms, companies like Paradox Interactive find it viable to continue adding content to their games many years after they were released.
Couldn't give two hoots about what EA and Activision are up to. They don't make games for me.
> "For those of us that don't care for the latest FPS or Battle Royale, the games industry is going perfectly fine."
As players, for those who care about these AAA games, it is perfectly fine too. Better than fine, it is great.
The argument of the OP is that the industry is not fine. And I think that includes indie developers. It is not an easy industry to be in. Lots of stress, uncertainty, and failure for indie developers. Take a look at how hard is to make a good game after a successful Kickstarter campaign.
If you, as a player, only care about the couple of indie games that are great and don't care what's going on behind the scenes with the thousand of indie developers that are struggling, that's fine. But that's not the point of the OP
If you, as a player, only care about the couple of indie games that are great and don't care what's going on behind the scenes with the thousand of indie developers that are struggling, that's fine
Can't this be said of any art form, really? If you look at people who tried to make indie comics in the '90's or 'zines I guess... whatever the title you wanted to give them. Painters, failed and prominent, from the 1200's to the present who had to trudge along and get jobs in coffee shops. Art is hard and people line up to take advantage of them (I say this as an art school graduate who now sits at a computer desk because, quite frankly, it's easier to make a living with code than art and I have a family who I love more than art). To be quite blunt, the gaming industry is a multiBILLION (with a B) dollar industry built on passion and artistry (and yes, coders can be artists, as well) which is being fed upon like any art industry gets fed upon.
Yes! The hard realization, which pulled me into more normal programming despite a passion for games, was that game development is a passion career. I already had enough dealings with that with considering being an orchestral performer. Anything in entertainment is always highly boom or bust, and highly intense and stressful even for those who make it.
Edit: of course that doesn't justify the terrible conditions or the way people leverage the situation because they know these people would do this kind of work for free if they had to. I think the answer, as musicians always bring up, is friends don't let friends work for free. It's not okay to work for less than your talent is worth just because you love it.
Most art forms don't require skills that could be commanding 6-figure salaries in an easy 9-5 job. (I am, of course, speaking for the programmers here.)
This is correct. You can apply your highly-valued skills to something you don't find as interesting and make a lot of money, or you can apply them to something you're passionate about and make less money.
But if it's a multibillion dollar industry similar to other multibillion dollar tech industries outside of gaming, why are game developers making so little in comparison to the rest of us? Something is not making sense here, and I don't think passion has anything to do with it.
It's very simple: because the companies don't need to pay high salaries to their developers. Why should they? There's countless developers lining up for these jobs, so if one person gets burnt out and quits, there's 5 more ready to take his place. This is simple supply-and-demand.
Tell me, why should companies pay top dollar for that talent when people are so happy to work their asses off for less? It doesn't make any business sense.
And no, we shouldn't have any sympathy for these developers (not the ones who have easily transferable skills). They're choosing this career path out of their own free will, at a time when there's tons of very boring software jobs out there practically begging them to come to work there, and offering huge salaries and good work hours too. These people just don't want those jobs because they aren't "fun", and don't involve games.
It's really simple: you have highly-sought-after software development skills, so you can either be abused and work in a game sweatshop, or you can go to work making boring CRUD apps in a nice company where the pay is high and the stress is low. If you choose the former, I have zero sympathy for you.
The part that doesn't make sense to me is how people find this hard to understand. It's purely supply and demand. Game developers are willing to work for less than their peers in other industries, and game companies will do everything they can do minimise input costs, as all companies do.
You don't need a conspiracy to explain this effect.
So because of that, we should just blindly accept that the work conditions are extremely shitty, because "well it was their fault for trying to follow their dreams!"
We should accept that people have agency and are in charge of their own well-being unless they have diminished capacities. If they accept unfavorable working conditions because they like the stuff they work on, that's their business. I think a lot of people get exploited when they try to make a career out of their interests (it's harder to get into vet school than medical school for instance and vets are paid less than doctors), but I have to believe that it's worth it. It does bother me when people act as though they expect me to subsidize their hobbies, doubly so when they could pay for their own hobbies by making the small sacrifice of doing work that's compensated better but less appealing.
Every video game dev who's unsatisfied with being a game dev is welcome to explore other opportunities.
We should accept it in cases where the employees are easily able to leave (e.g. software developers). For people who have less mobility (e.g. minimum-wage factory workers), we have more of a responsibility as a society to ensure that they're protected. But if you choose to work in an environment that sucks even though you have the ability to leave, why should anyone worry about you suffering because of your own choice to stay?
> Artists who work on gory cinematics integral to games like Mortal Kombat suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Is it really someone else's fault if someone chooses to work on a game like Mortal Kombat and then complains about having to create graphics like this?
Can we please introduce some agency into people's lives and stop constantly blaming society for issues?
If you have a successful kickstarter campaign and you fail to deliver, that's on you. There's no Big Gaming conspiracy that caused you to fail. You did that all on your own. And people who continue to throw good money after bad ala Star Citizen deserve the outcome they get IMO.
But hey, chin up, Microsoft just threw $1B at OpenAI to make "I am Mother" into a documentary because "we can't discount the possibility of a near-term AGI." And that's some serious #DukeNukemForever optimism IMO.
> It is not an easy industry to be in. Lots of stress, uncertainty, and failure for indie developers.
Yes, probably because it's a very competitive market (why many smaller studios have such a hard time surviving) and there are lots of people out there who are passionate about making games (why so many individuals choose to tolerate crappy work environments). Given that, I have no idea what a "solution" would even look like.
There is no solution. Game devs are doing this to themselves, and have no one to blame but themselves. If they want to make themselves suffer, instead of just getting a low-stress high-pay job in another industry with their valuable skills, that's their problem.
Factorio is a marvel of an example of a game made by people who are genuinely very skilled and care a lot about what they're making.
The networking code, the in-depth blog posts, even the attention to things like preserving mod contracts when introducing breaking changes. The team running Factorio is a great example of a well done gaming project.
Beware of survivor bias. Factorio is a great game built by skilled people with care and devotion, I'm not knocking it. But how many other great games, built by skilled people with care and devotion, didn't get the audience that Factorio did, for whatever reason?
There tends to be an automatic assumption that if you didn't succeed then you did something wrong, and that if you did succeed than you did it all right. These two things are less connected than that. There is "luck" involved here (in quotes because it's more complex than the phrase "I got lucky" implies).
To draw any kind of conclusion about whether Factorio was a success because of its execution as a gaming project, we would need to examine a range of other games, successful and unsuccessful, to see how well they executed and whether that caused a matching amount of success.
Seems like most Zachtronics games are like this too. I'll be deep into a puzzle and then I'll stop and realize I just basically spent an hour optimizing the critical path of a virtual program
> Factorio is a marvel of an example of a game made by people who are genuinely very skilled and care a lot about what they're making.
I'm have more admiration for the fact that they don't have sales. The only way to get a discount is to use a third party discount system like humble monthly.
> In this 2019 GDC talk, independent developer Jason Rohrer digs into the financial data behind the 2014-2018 "indiepocalypse" to help indie devs figure out how not to waste four years of their life on the next high-profile flop.
(Though this might also be subject to survivor bias, probably a hopeful talk on it had a better chance of getting selected for GDC)
I think it happens more in games because it's what many people really want to do. A bit like music bands. Except bands are a lot more side gig friendly and consequently can work without salaries and risk of personal bankruptcy.
Also for other types of ventures it's easier to get bootstrap funding. And you can get to cash flow or fail faster. Etc.
If someone blows all their money on a long-shot chasing the dream of video game success-story, that's their prerogative. I wish them good luck and hope they're able to at least turn out something innovative.
It sort of reminds me of the music industry. I used to DJ in a college radio station, and remember the boxes upon boxes of dreck we used to get from record labels. For every successful pop-band, rapper, alt-rock, or electronic-music act you can think of there are dozens of dullard derivative wannabe copycats who utterly lack the imagination to put out something novel and stimulating.
I think the same dynamic applies to computer games. The good news is that the truly innovative stuff will never die, regardless of how many AAAA games flop. People want to do this stuff. It's OK if most fail, it's OK if most can't make a living out of it.
A music minimum viable product is much more accessible than a video game. It's just as ruthless to get ahead, but at least getting started isn't so hard. My friends who are hobbyist musicians regularly play at pubs or small concerts.
Most people who jump into indie development are gamers themselves, and as gamers their product ideas are not always possible even with years of full time solo development. Realistically what one person with 2 years savings can make is very very small.
So it is a pipe dream. After spending some years in corporate hating it, thinking about your game designs every night, you have the capital, you have the motivation, you jump, and you sink. It's very sad.
> A music minimum viable product is much more accessible than a video game.
This kind of depends on your expectations. I knew a guy who spent more than a year recording a single song. He poured hundred of hours into this, and he did the entire thing: vocals, every instrument, the mixing, everything. It was a labor of love for him, and the result sounded as good as anything on Spotify, at least to my untrained ear.
On the other hand, you have people pumping out soundtracks for their podcast every couple of weeks, using nothing more than GarageBand and a bunch of samples. A lot of these are good enough for people to purchase, too.
Same thing with game dev. You can spend years of your life, and/or thousands of dollars, tweaking Unity and developing game assets. On the other hand, Dong Nguyen developed Flappy Birds in three days.
> Most people who jump into indie development are gamers themselves, and as gamers their product ideas are not always possible even with years of full time solo development.
Business sense trumps passion here. You're right, it's totally unrealistic to expect one guy sitting in his apartment to pump out the next Breath of the Wild. But you could produce a reasonable Candy Crush type game in a few days, and polish it in a few weeks, probably even working nights and weekends.
And yet you're referring to flappy bird by name. Exactly how many flappy birds are there?
Most people who make games aren't trying to make connect3-like games, but rather something more fun/interesting. There isn't much point competing with medium to large studios that churn out games like candy crush anyway.
Stardew Valley, a 2D pixel art farming rpg-lite, was made over the course of ~4 years, by a solo developer who learned how to program in the process.
Undertale, a 2d pixel rpg-like, took ~2.7 years to make according to Toby Fox, the sole developer afaik.
Terraria 1.0, a 2d pixel art mining/building/fighting game, was made by a small team over ~4-5 months. After ~7 months, 1.1. After another ~9 months, 1.2. (They were big content updates).
Starbound, a 2d pixel art mining/building/fighting game, took ~1.5-2 years and launched in beta, with a small team.
Cuphead took 7 years with two brothers and a part time animator iirc, because they were absolute madmen and wanted to make a game with 60fps watercolor animation. Did they end up making a lot of money? probably, but that was quite the gamble.
Making games is tough when you consider it can require programming, storywriting, composing music, designing art, etc. And that's not including the business/marketing side. It -is- true that a lot of beginner indie devs spend way too much time polishing their games and end up not publishing them, but that doesn't mean compelling games are necessarily easy to make.
It seems to me that the parent comment blithely assumes most indie devs are trying to make games solely to earn income. A lot of indie devs are trying to make games they wish existed or just seem like a cool/fun idea that other people might be interested in, too. SWORDY is one such indie game that doesn't seem like it was thought up purely to earn cash, Gang Beasts* is another, and so on.
* Gang Beasts is actually made by Doublefine Studios but it sure feels like an indie game.
No I don't think money is the point. I think money is a resource you need to make more games. I think anyone that truly only wants to get cash can use their skillset in more profitable places. But game devs still need the money to make their dream sustainable and execute on their grander visions. A 20 year studio instead of 2 years as solo.
> A music minimum viable product is much more accessible than a video game.
I don't think that's true. There are a lot of games out there that are small single-person side projects and are interesting and fun. You don't need to quit your job to make a marketable game unless you're targeting a market with much higher expectations than you're likely to be able to deliver.
It's like if you've got a garage band, but instead of playing at house parties and dive bars you mortgage your house for a bunch of expensive lightshow kit and a tour bus or something.
But this is the thing that Lean Startup was built to solve.
I keep talking to indie game devs about Lean, basically telling them to identify the core hook in their game and develop a minimal version of this that they can test on an audience with, and then grow from there. I point to Minecraft, that did exactly this.
They never get it. They always think the game has to be complete and perfect before anyone will like it. They never playtest until they're waaaaay down the line with the game, and then usually get defensive if the testers don't like it or understand it.
It's exactly the same as startup. Build an MVP, get it in front of people, adapt it using their feedback, and you have a better chance of building something that people want. Time for the games industry to start doing the same.
It seems, though, that it's even worse than that for games. Every so often you see an article to the effect of, "Authors of that indie game everyone was talking about this summer ended up netting $not_very_much_at_all apiece."
The economics are just really, really bad. It's not just all the competition driving prices down so low that people will literally consider the price of a coffee to be too much to pay for several hours of entertainment. It's not just that a musician can hold down a day job and do what they love on evenings and weekends. It's also that the the potential payoff on your invested time is really, really crappy. To become a musician, you have to practice a lot when you're a kid, but, once you're there, the time it takes to produce new work is really quite low, especially considering how much replayability it has, especially if you're mostly playing standards and other traditional stuff. And, if people like it, they'll come see you perform it repeatedly.
Indie games, no matter how much I liked that game, I'm gonna play it once, and then, if you want me to be your audience again, you've got to basically go back to square one and start over.
dozens of dullard derivative wannabe copycats who utterly lack the imagination to put out something novel and stimulating.
This is true, and describes one of the huge failings of the music industry. But there's more. At the same time the record labels are pumping out this dreck, there are plenty of truly fantastic artists that just aren't getting lucky. Even those that make it to what they believe is the holy grail - a record contract - aren't getting a real break because they're hard to find in the rest of the crap.
I'm a developer in real life, but a serious photography amateur as a hobby. I happen to have fallen into a lot of music stuff, being the official photographer for an annual musical in my town, and some other stuff. I've developed relationships with a bunch of musicians through this. A few that are clearly a cut above the rest have gotten signed (and I think the labels have shown pretty good judgment at this level). But even of these, I haven't seen anybody break through into real success.
One band whose album actually charted recently called it quits because they couldn't sustain it with the day jobs necessary to survive. Another guy quit his job to pursue music full time. But what supports him (and his family) is primarily sales of his paintings, plus a little income from merch and "house concerts".
I think that the awfulness of the industry is part of the problem. But it's also that we've got an embarrassment of riches. The ability to make music - and to record it professionally - is within the reach of nearly anyone who has that dream. So it's become too competitive, and the available choices for consumers is too large to cut through the noise effectively. This is where the failures of the industry hit, I think - their business model is geared toward finding the next giant star, rather than serving an incredibly diverse range of tastes, helping each of us find what we'd individually prefer.
>And you can get to cash flow or fail faster. Etc.
I think this right here is the key. Game development takes forever, especially if you're starting from scratch. Shovel Knight took 2 years to make, and that was a seasoned team with lots of professional game dev experience between them.
Compare that to another typical business venture that people with limited experience might to go out on a limb with, like opening a bar/restaurant. You can go from concept to having butts in seats in way less time than that. You'll have an idea about how well you're doing early, and it's also something you'll be able to iterate on to improve and keep working at for little additional cost.
If your game goes out the door and is a dud, though, you're kind of fucked. If it has "good bones" you can put in some extra work and get it to good, like "No Man's Sky" or "Warframe" managed to do. But if it's just fundamentally not very fun, then you're back to square one. You can't even sell your codebase and recoup some of the sunk-cost the way you could sell your space and decor.
You bring up a good point that some kinds of projects simply take a great deal of time and resources to advance the industry. Millions of token indie games aren’t going to change AAA gaming any more than millions of screenplays will change Hollywood. However, innovation has a stronger chance somewhere in between with a struggling studio like Digital Extremes was 8 years ago when it comes to new business models and the dynamic between developers and players. I’m not convinced that actual gameplay innovation can happen in a AAA kind of situation though (Valve in 2005 vs Valve in 2015 are pretty different right?) no different than Hollywood coming up with original IP, but the gems are what make paying attention to any of this worthwhile to me. I over-load my investments in mid-cap stocks for this reason similarly.
>no different than Hollywood coming up with original IP, but the gems are what make paying attention to any of this worthwhile to me.
Hollywood used to come up with tons of original IP. One of the problems is that we just don't really have many "B movies" anymore. It's either AAA or not worth bothering with. They used to front a decent amount of cash towards experimental stuff in the hopes that one of the bets would take off. Nowadays you'll be lucky to pull that off unless you have an EXTREMELY bankable name, like Chris Nolan, who has enough of a following to get some money down.
So it is with gaming. Not much in the way of "B games" out of the major studios. They seem to put all their eggs in a few baskets and hope for the best.
FWIW though, after reading "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" I'm starting to feel like where the real innovation needs to happen is in the toolkits around making the games. Seems like tons of work goes into just setting things up to where you can start doing work that's recognizably related to a final product.
The only "big studio" I pay any attention to is Nintendo, because they make games like a midsize to indie firm: Fun gameplay
Otherwise, I think all of the things a "big studio" does now, primarily the backend for online and p2p services is going to have it's open source / platform killer app soon. Valve almost did it with HL/Garry's Mod/ etc but they've stalled out recently.
Whomever develops a truly plug and play infrastructure module, handling networking, server config, deployment, etc will own a big boat by 2029.
As will the guy who figures out distributed PnP microtransactions.
AI and ML will likely be capable of full service character design and modeling in the next 5 years.
So things will change, and democratize like almost all of the rest of tech has as things become less human capital intensive.
I spend maybe $25 a year on games for myself, maybe seeing something at a re-seller at the mall. I spend hundreds on my son who just recently figured out why Garry's Mod is fun, and is finally able to play Mario by himself and not just operate the hat while I play Mario. I still don't think he can appreciate why the latest Zelda was amazing. But I've shelled out a lot to Nintendo, and he has to have the new Mario Maker. I don't know what the cool kids are into, but Steam and Nintendo are friends with my PayPal.
Even Nintendo has been willing to lean back on its cash-cows lately -- Mario (platformers, Party, and Kart) and Pokemon get minimal-change frequent-releases, Kirby's been static even by its own standards for the last few years, lots of their other first-party stuff hasn't seen a release in ages.
Zelda's looking good between BotW and an upcoming remake of a relatively-small and especially old game, Fire Emblem has something that looks like an interesting shift coming up, and Metroid... well, Metroid's been a mixed bag since Other M, but if they were willing to scrap and start over on Prime 4 then there's room to hope. So it's not all bad.
Nintendo always moves slowly (except for wacky-ass hardware ideas). It's a bit painful at times, but the alternative is that they crash and burn explosively.
Pokemon not making the jump to a real time open world is disappointing. But I suspect they'll do it for the next generation. Now that the consumer is finally feeling burnt out on when they're offering.
They probably didn't think they could get open world right this go around.
My one big hangup is that they're so reluctant to develop a proper, system agnostic platform for their retro content. If they weren't the sworn enemy of emulator developers, I could see them in-housing a few to jumpstart the retro platform. But they won't. Though Disney got it's ass into gear about opening up the vault, so maybe Nintendo will too.
More of the same is definitely something people want sometimes -- but other people want something new (or more-of-the-same of something else that hasn't been done as much, e.g. a sequel in a smaller series). The article is about (among other things) the stagnation and general tendency of big developers towards increasingly-stale safe bets.
Mario Kart is an example of that: Nintendo is perfectly willing to make more-of-the-same for Mario Kart, but when asked in interviews about the possibility of a new F-Zero, the answer has generally been "we don't want to just release more of the same, we want to come up with some new twist on it". It's not about novelty (or if it is, their standards for novelty are inconsistent), it's about one being a cash cow and the other not.
The fracturing of video games is really interesting.
I used to game...a lot... constantly. But times have changed and a career, family, and I now play with my kids.
I'm quite happy to just be limited to the Nintendo Switch and for the most part Nintendo first party games, and some indie games.
I don't even know if old devs and gaming companies I used to follow religiously are any good anymore, or exist. The gaming news outlets stink at providing information that isn't a hype train about what is next... that I can't play now.. and if you're not reading them all the time so I'm just out of the loop.
Meanwhile Nintendo does a pretty good job telling me what is up in their ecosystem...
Kotaku to me is doing a pretty good job at discussing released and older games as well. This year I played Bloodborne which was released several years ago because they do frequently discussed it on their podcast and I'm glad I did.
While I do like a good FPS the only thing I've really played in the last year on my stupidly expensive gaming machine (and super high spec monitor) is Rimworld, a £25 indie game.
Hundreds of hours vs. maybe a dozen in games that might actually need that power.
Eh, Breath of the Wild notwithstanding, I haven't found a game, indie or AAA, that scratched that old itch in years. There is a glut of games, for sure, with no easy way to filter them and no promise of a game I will actually enjoy.
Sure enough (and I've wondered how much of this is just getting older), over time I find fewer and fewer games to be worth my time. BotW has indeed been an exception; but I still can't get into it quite as deeply as some of my friends who are a little younger. It's a great game, but I cannot find myself compelled to try to find every Korok seed, or beat every shrine. I think I started gaming before there was the idea of being a "completionist"
The only game I've found in the past few years that made me really feel like I did when I was 8-17 is Divinity Original Sin 2. It's Baldur's Gate, but honestly better (BG hasn't aged amazingly if you really go back and play it. It's good, but we've learned a lot in 20 years). And the multiplayer is amazing, and lets you feel like you're playing AD&D with friends.
There are wonderful games being made and I even found new titles to call my favorites as the years go by. I do not at all believe games are getting worse.
That being said, there are a lot more games now and there's less hard curation, and some genres have shifted (RTS and classic style MMORPGs are both dormant atm).
Katamari and Portal are the last games that really had me thinking about playing even when I wasn't playing them. I wish those games had additional levels to buy.
The Talos Principle — Basically Portal but... different. Physics, timing, & world-affecting-zappy-device puzzles. No actual portals but it's pretty similar. A "there's more going on" story. Quite good.
The Witness — Myst-like I guess? In that you're exploring an island and solving puzzles and piecing together a story, kinda. But the puzzles are all variations on one sort. Elements get added, things get weird, lateral thinking becomes necessary. It's good.
The Talos Principle really had me thinking about it when not playing. I halfway thought I was going to hear a voice when I got on the elevator at work.
Puzzle games, especially good ones, are relatively rare, that's the problem. They're one shot, easy to spoil... And then there is a risk that the puzzle will turn out too hard.
Stephen's Sausage Roll is great little puzzle game I've spent hours playing. Not an easy game by any means, but it's easy to get lost in it & kill a few hours. The puzzles have no time component, which is great, I'm not a fast thinker so timers just annoy me.
There is a glut of games, for sure, with no easy way to filter them and no promise of a game I will actually enjoy.
Has there ever been a time of the "promise of a game I will actually enjoy"?
Back in the day all you had was rare magazine articles, and one wall of a Toys R Us with flaps consisting of the front of the box on one side and the back of the box on the other.
I'm not sure I see that as preferable to the modern situation.
It wasn't so much a promise however long ago as much as a lot of MBA-style thought had yet to be put into the monetization strategy. The games that were made tended to be made for artistic and entertainment motivations over a boardroom identified market niche that is somehow the exact same niche filled by every other game.
Steam has scratched my itch. I too used to game a lot but growing a family takes time and resources. Steam allows me to play on my time and play with my kids. There is a lot to offer from the Indie community.
The VR space is really interesting in that it's almost entirely populated by small studios and indie developers. Most games (including many very highly rated games) seem to be made by teams of 1 - 10 people.
It does show in the production values, you don't get the same level of polish in the artwork, presentation and quantity of content. But it also shows in the creativeness of many titles, which you just don't get from big studios.
I do care what Blizzard does. I want to see new features and balance updates and maps in starcraft 1 and 2, and I also want an SC3. Unless there are indie RTS games worthy of hundreds of hours of deep play, I'll stick with blizzard.
* A theme park MMO they've been milking for years, World of Warcraft.
* A space theme RTS, SC2. If you're not into sci-fi, it ain't good, and to be honest for me the RTS genre is dead (I'm too old and it isn't cooperative enough).
* A coop FPS with loot boxes, Overwatch.
* A P2W (pay 2 win) CCG, Hearthstone.
* A failed MOBA, called Heroes of the Storm.
With the latest developments being:
* A reskin on SC, for kids. Already existed from what I heard.
* A reskin of an existing game, Diablo mobile. Fanbase of Diablo isn't waiting for this. They want Diablo 4.
* A refurbish on Warcraft 3 with higher quality graphics coming end of year. The playerbase wants Warcraft 4, and are wondering why they need to pay for a game they already paid for.
Furthermore they had their best profit year last year, yet they laid off tons of staff. Nah, I'm not betting money on Blizzard.
Good for you, don't bet your money. Doesn't mean there aren't hundreds of thousands of players who want the company to do well. RTS are only "dead" to those who don't play them, believe it or not people have been claiming the games will die for years. And yet we still have thousands of very serious players who barely get any new features or maps.
Dead is a relative term in this context. The momentum is long gone, and the trend is downhill because the genre got rehashed to death.
I want Blizzard to do well. They proved in the past they were able to make quality games for a fair price. At this point, I don't believe they will. Not anymore.
Diablo 3 at release was disappointing. Titan was cancelled. Warcraft and Diablo fanbase sorely desire not new content for their current games but a new, innovative game (the Diablo Mobile game is not that, nor are the WoW bandaid). My observation is that people want Diablo 4, World of Warcraft 2, Warcraft 4. They're not getting anything remotely like that.
Consider the Warcraft movie. It was only good enough for the die-hard fans.
Do any of those actually have a competitive scene? I think the thing I have missed most in the recent RTS was the lack of place to bump into people like you used to be able to. It's the same criticism I give to most of the modern FPS which have replaced the tools to allow a community to be born (lobby mostly) with matchmaking. While I follow SCR/SC2 fairly closely I haven't heard of any ladder/informal competitive arrangements for any of those other games.
The problem with many RTS games from a longevity standpoint is that most RTS fans do find them at some point, they play through the single player campaign, and multiplayer is either stagnant/busted/a mere shadow of the actual singleplayer campaign/has lousy game cycle/no useful replay system. I feel like too many of the recent generation of RTS games have fallen down these paths. People always need to keep in mind when thinking about SCR/BW one of the tricks to making it competitive was running the game on the fastest speed to make it interesting and fix the game cycle. Most of the newer RTS's often do not expose such interesting knobs to help find the competitive mode in the stock game, or are missing map editors and other tools to help create new content for a game and fix perceived problems for multiplayer within the confines of the shipped game.
The actual problem with RTS games from a longevity standpoint are actually the same problems fighting games have:
1. It's a 1v1 game, so you either are playing alone, or if you want to play with a friend, you have to fight each other. That's fun for awhile, but typically one person will be better, and the other person will get tired of losing.
2. They are really hard to be good at. On paper, RTS games are really hard because you are managing a lot of things at once (simplified by saying macro and micro game), and you need to be good at everything. The difficulty of a game is magnified when it's 1v1 because you only have yourself to rely on. So if you are having an off day, you are going to keep losing.
The reason MOBA games are popular is because they fix these issues by being a team game (very easy to play with a group of friends, and if you are not good or having a bad day, you can lean on your teammates to pick up the slack), and reducing your general focus to managing 1 hero (obviously, MOBAs have many layers and systems that make them more complicated, but at anytime you just need to focus on one hero).
Well this is why I point out the community prospects. Most of these new RTS do a really bad job of finding people to play with and especially when you are new and figuring out how to play competitively in a new game you can have extremely high variance of success. If you are just playing with a small group, sure eventually a few will rise to the top but that's not the criticism I have. In older RTS like BW or Homeworld there was chat/clans/reasons to bump into new people for casual or ladder play. In newer ones that sort of community building tool rarely exists at the peak of interest. The competitive community creates other resources to play against other than known friends (the friend aspect for me was always the compare notes/develop new strategies/test things against each other sort of thing).
You comment that in RTS 1v1 and if you are having an off day you are going to keep losing. That's true, but I find MOBA worse in overall enjoyment if you keep losing. I don't mind losing 1v1 and can stop anytime because it's just me. With a MOBA one player playing exceptionally rarely pulls the odds in your favour where one player playing exceptionally poorly swings the game entirely in the other direction. You are actively incentivized to not abandon the game (socially and mechanically) so even if a game starts going south you can't just reset the pieces on the board and start again. If I am playing an RTS I can just gg out at any time without causing a problem, with a MOBA I'm stuck with one or more player's bad decisions for the entirety of the game which could stretch to 50 minutes or more. I also find that unless you 5-man it's really a terrible experience for hours in/enjoyment out. This is more a criticism of the current generation of MOBAs than anything. As a team game there are other kinds of games others can carry the game harder in competition and make up for a player's skill/bad streak (MMO, FPS). MOBAs also don't really have any lack of complexity in being successful it just is mostly an exchange of active skills for passive/booklearned skills so it is my opinion that it is not a good defining line between the two since if you take the net skill(active+passive) from both I find most RTS and MOBAs to be comparably equivalent levels of complexity.
I would rather lose a 100 times and be responsible for 100% of it than lose 5 times and be responsible for 15% of it but be hitched to the burning wagon the entire time it falls off the cliff (and have little agency in stopping it). I do agree that there is a certain kind of player that can't handle losing 100 times in a row and learning from their mistakes, and that's probably why there are less RTS games recently than there used to be.
I think that this is because MOBAs are (unintentionally?) more like a sport with positions, teamwork, etc. I think that leads to MOBAs being more exciting for a mainstream audience and we see huge hits[1], where RTS is more for the niche audience that you saw for PC games 20 years ago-people who are more excited with honing computer skills than communication skills. I fall firmly in the latter camp, but I see why the market favors the former.
I totally agree about the 'being able to play again at will' part. That's what drove me away from LoL when I tried it-it was my very first game, I wanted to walk away, and the interface told me I was hurting the community by leaving early. I took the hint and decided to quit playing entirely. I don't want that kind of responsibility-the whole point of a hobby is that there aren't consequences for failure (or at least I've seen it formulated as such.)
I honestly think that the biggest problem with launching an RTS is that BW already exists. People aren't clamoring for something better, it's just plain good enough. That takes the air out of any possibilty of a competitive RTS and I believe the 'not enough people to play with' is a symptom of this. If there is a remedy I would suggest that an engaging singleplayer campaign can at least sell the title without the promise of PVP-I bought DOW3, for example, knowing I'd probably just play the campaign. Grey Goo's (great) campaign was (according to the devs iirc) an afterthought and as a result some of it's huge potential was squandered.
"Mortal Kombat 11 proceeded to be the best selling video game software in North America for the following month of May, for both Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The sales of the game is nearly doubled comparably to previous entries of the series."
This baffles me. Who are these people that buy games like MK11, a new FIFA game every year(?), go watch obviously purely commercial 'blockbusters' at the cinema, etc.?
Do some people genuinely find these things really enjoyable?
>> This baffles me. Who are these people that buy games like MK11, a new FIFA game every year(?)
I see your point, but Mortal Kombat is not really the best example of a cash-cow franchise that keeps selling the same game over and over. The successive games in this series have huge differences, especially since the reboot a few years back. If you like this style of fighting games, there are plenty of reasons to buy the latest version every few years.
FIFA on the other hand is terrible in this regard. I can say with confidence because I've been buying each entry since FIFA'09, and while there have been a few major changes in 10 years that are worthwhile improvements, you are indeed more or less buying the same game every year. I sometimes wonder why I even keep doing it, I guess it's just because it's become a tradition I cannot get away from, getting the game on release date and inviting my brother to play it until deep in the night.
Isn't part of the draw of FIFA and other sports games that the players change every year, since they're based on real players? I figured sports fans enjoy playing avatars of the players they follow.
>a tradition I cannot get away from, getting the game on release date and inviting my brother to play it until deep in the night
Probably well worth the cost just to spend the time with your brother. I wish I lived close enough to my brother to do a yearly video game night with him--and wouldn't care what the video game was or how much it cost (within sane reason of course).
>Do some people genuinely find these things really enjoyable?
Yes. Why is it difficult to understand that other people can like things that you don't like? Is your ego truly so ingrained you can't even imagine the experiences of someone just a little bit different from you?
the question was not about why people like such games, but why they keep buying the latest ones for full price, when they are just slight reskin with updated player stats. I don't get it either, but it ain't my money being spent so couldn't care less.
There are much worse ways to spend your money, ie cigarettes.
It probably is a humblebrag. But since I have no interest in many of these things that appear to be very popular, I am also genuinely curious about what is it that people find enjoyable about these things.
Is it the fact that these things are a 'common denominator' and as such are a 'neutral' choice of something to enjoy with friends that may have otherwise diverse interests? Or do people genuinely prefer these things, even if they were the only person left on Earth?
I can talk about some blockbusters. I like the Marvel's MCU movies (though each one progressively less, my favorite still being Iron Man 1). For me, they have a near-optimal composition of plot cadence, special effects, music and cliches. They're usually pretty polished. I find them good for light enjoyment, and since they also appeal to a very wide audience, it's something I'll immediately get to talk about with a lot of people, or something I can watch with my SO without worrying it'll bore her out of her mind.
It's fast food of entertainment. A composition optimized to appeal to senses, even though it's of questionable nutritional value. I think it's fine from time to time.
Assuming the Marvel movies fall into the category you're talking about... I adore the Marvel movies, as does everyone else I talk to about them. They're fun to watch, I'm fully vested in the characters (which, to some extent, is based on my reading of comic books so many decades ago), and the shared storyline/world is great.
They're pretty much everyone else. New releases of these "same games" bring better graphics, or animations, or gameplay, or story, or any combination of the previous. FIFA, in addition I assume they also include the new players and trades that happened since the last version (but I don't play FIFA so I could be wrong here).
Nostalgia is also a big factor, with so many reboots and adaptations of source material to new media, today's adults will pay to see all the Marvel blockbusters because they read the comics or saw the TV show as kids. I'd bet many people that bought MK9 - which rebooted the saga - did it for nostalgia. The same probably happened with the new Tomb Raiders, also a reboot of the series. Have you heard of the new The Lion King? Or Dumbo? Or Aladdin? Or any of the 500 new remakes Disney wants to make? Same thing.
If one is a fan of football, and video games, buying FIFA every year isn't that baffling. I actually do it every year - till 2009 it was new PES every year, and since 2010 it was FIFA every year (as fifa got greatly improved on that year and PES is still exactly where it was 10 years ago)
It is the best football game on the market, and every year there are some new features, to which I look forward to. It's always cool to see what changed, what is better than it was, what was fixed, what was broken.
I am lucky enough to not care about spending $60 per year on a single video game. So yeah, I will happily do it and play with my friends for a year. But is it honestly worth it? I can list feature breaking bugs that have been in the game for 3+ years, never touched. I can list features which got broken by new features, never fixed, for years. Considering how much money the product makes, for me it just shows what matters for EA.
And EA's focus seem to be solely Ultimate team, on making sure that they will resell the same shitty game with minimal improvement and people will spend buttloads of money on packs, which they have to do from scratch every year (Personally I do not touch microtransactions, too easy to pay few bucks here and there and this is never worth it in the long run).
(IMO the fact that they release new version every year shows how predatory their business model is)
So yeah, you can find some enjoyment out of it, but I would say that in case of FIFA it is despite EAs best efforts.
And re MK11, I do not beleive it is released every year. I think the first 4 games were came out in quick(ish) succession, than it was quiet for few years, than several others...? So it's a different case from 'I'm a footbal fan and this way I can play with my current team'
People find comfort in franchises, especially characters they've grown up with. Instead of investing time in making new intellectual property, some fans would rather make expansions and sequels despite the risk of cease-and-desist orders.
I don't blame this mentality – it's the kind of loyalty that creative and loved stories naturally engender. It's really hard to imagine Super Smash Bros. having a fraction of its appeal if it had the same mechanics but completely new non-Nintendo characters. Or even the original Super Mario Kart for that matter.
Mortal Kombat games are coming out at a clip of about every 4 years now. People get fighting games to play competitively. You'll find thousands of these people at the EVO tournament next weekend.
I imagine the competitive aspect holds water for FIFA as well.
Yeah, the sequel sneering in other posts in this tree is not a great look. Mortal Kombat changes significantly between iterations and while 2D fighters are not my cup of tea the depth and intricacy of the way MK11 plays is really well done (even separate from the self-aware and campy story stuff, which is good for a couple evenings of fun--we popped when the final boss threw a dang dinosaur at me!). Ed Boon and crew do good work and writing it off as "psh, sequels" is just not smart.
Some people just don't like sequels, or they don't like a genre and then all the hype about the sequels is for nothing (for that person). For example, I got nothing with MOBAs. Never had. Doesn't interest me. If I was younger back when these got popular I might've enjoyed them thoroughly but I grew up with Dune 2 and Command & Conquer.
I played MK2 and MK3 on the arcade back in the days. Looked it up, there were 2 years between those 2 versions (1993 and 1995). MK3 and MK4 I also played on PC, and MK4 is from 1997 (2 years again after MK3). So yeah, back in the 90s there were 2 years between each MK2/3/4. And MK (MK1) was from 1992...
I used to buy Call of Duty every year. I love playing FPS games, and getting the newest game meant new guns, new maps, and just new ways to enjoy an FPS. Sure, you could argue that it is just a reskin, but I really enjoy playing FPS games and I'm okay with paying the retail price.
It baffles me that you are gatekeeping the concept of fun.
>Do some people genuinely find these things really enjoyable?
Well it's not like there hasn't been any changes between Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat 11. If you developed original IP that continued to be popular after decades, would you toss it in the garbage on some principle of "being original"? They continue to innovate.
The comment at the top of this chain mentioned Paradox. They sell DLC for their games every year, which the players for the most part buy. This seems basically the same?
fighting games are basically cartels: you have a couple strong sets of IP, outside of which it's insanely hard to get traction - uber small community to start with and new titles often need bootstrapping and refining [no tournaments/scenes/bad or no online experience, etc.])
it also works backwards: since everyone moves to the latest and greatest, the community evaporates when a new version comes out: nobody still plays street fighter (version - 1) basically as soon as the latest comes out, as tournaments pick it up (=> you need to learn it)
the one dark horse was smash, which had insane longevity but nintendo didn't want that IP associated with the fighting game community/streams for a long while - not sure what current state is
> Do some people genuinely find these things really enjoyable?
The "masses" go consume what they are told to. The (n)th remake of some series is about to come up, the marketing ramps up, adverts, product placement, discussions, reviews, interviews. It all drives demand.
Do you really not notice this? Even if it is a "here we go again, groundhog day" type of noticing?
People (on the whole - in before 'not me I spent hours searching / reviewing my next purchase') don't put effort into their consumption, they just buy / spend how they are told. Why do you think advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry.
> The "masses" go consume what they are told to. The (n)th remake of some series is about to come up, the marketing ramps up, adverts, product placement, discussions, reviews, interviews. It all drives demand.
>Do you really not notice this? Even if it is a "here we go again, groundhog day" type of noticing?
Except not all titles are like this. Smash Bros., Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are not franchise re-skins. There are major balance updates, character updates, game mode updates, and sometimes an entirely new mechanic to address balance issues.
Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars was the predecessor to Rocket League, but they don't play alike at all.
World of Warcraft is on it's 8th iteration. No matter if you like the the current version, each expansion brings lots of new content, balance, and class overhauls.
Are they worth it? Some people say no. Are they Madden-like re-skins? Definitely not.
> Is your implication that only garbage products sold to the "masses" advertise?
That's not the logical corollary to the parent's statement; it's that some of the sellers of non-garbage products are interested in having "the masses" buying their stuff too.
Why would you stop if people like it? I would continue to buy new version of Mario Kart, I still enjoy playing new Pokémon games and hope they will continue to release new ones.
How many westerns are there? Star Wars films? After the second Star Wars films they all sucked and were essentially the same movie. If you like westerns or Star Wars films you're (probably) going to see a lot of them. They'll stop making them when people realise they're getting predictable; when it's too obvious that the differences between releases are extremely small. This isn't art, it's business, no matter what you might read.
>>This isn't art, it's business, no matter what you might read.
Bad art, derivative art, and boring art are all still art. Those terrible paintings in hotel rooms and office lobbies still had to be created by someone. There's always a complex balance between the creative expression vs business side of art (especially in something like film or music).
Some people just genuinely like "safe" or "boring" art, be it music, games or films.
If they had just release MK1 11 times then sure, you could class that as "beating a dead horse".
But that is ignoring the fact that these games evolve. Sure 1 to 2 might not be a huge step or evolution, but 1 to 11? To assume they are the same is ridiculous.
That is partly due to fragmentation in my opinon. There are just so many games I want to play but there just isn't enough time. Even games that are a perfect fit for my personal tastes can go unnoticed this way. And the amount of games being released is so astonishing that even fans have difficulties to keep up with major releases.
That said, I don't consume many AAA-titles, I think game developer conferences are boring because they are 98% marketing vehicles and I just look up some streamers to get to the good stuff.
Factorio just offers more than call of mortal combat fantasy 85. If this market and especially the mobile segment has problems, I wouldn't really mind.
Sure, there are indie developers with good games that will feel this fragmentation. But I don't think anything can be done about it. Developing games is just a popular idea right now.
Since gamers started to finance development themselves, the result has mostly been awesome.
Many of them aren't, especially the smaller ones. You can always pop into their chats and ask them. You can also just look at the gameplay and determine whether you like it or not.
That's all very well to be uninterested in AAA games, but they're the largest segment of games produced and on the back of this growth, the games industry has grown larger than music and movies combined revenue [1].
The indie portion of the games industry that will be 'perfectly fine' is a tiny fraction of the overall landscape. It's wonderful to live in an age where independent games projects can flourish, but the vast majority of people involved in the industry are going to be working in gruelling conditions on AAA titles that are largely responsible for the enormous growth the industry is seeing.
At least for the genre I've been following (indie horror) it seems like the recently-released games are all low budget one-man-studio cash grabs or else quick Game Jam games that have been polished up a bit. There don't seem to be a lot of medium-sized indie studios doing games anymore.
It would be interesting to see some statistics on firm sizes or game budgets.
why does is being low-budget and "one-man-studio" mean it's a cash grab? I would say it's actually more likely these are a fruit of the developer's passion than something made by a larger studio.
Jim Sterling coined the term "asset flip" to describe cheap, rushed, barely-playable games cobbled together with Unity and pre-bought art assets. These games are a shameless attempt to cash in on the latest fad with an absolute minimum of effort. A substantial proportion of indie releases on Steam (and a majority on Android) fall into this category.
If you've seen some of the videos of people playing these "asset flips" you would have seen that they have very little in terms of gameplay. They are also full of bugs and appear mostly unfinished.
I think the medium-sized studios just tends to either get bought by a big publisher (InXile and Obsidian, for a pair of recent example) or just crash after a game that just didn't work well enough
Maybe we're the minority. Still, wube (factorio developers) seem to be living comfortably, they don't seem to be hurting for cash. There is enough money in niche communities if your product is good
Getting there is more challenging than it used to be. Plenty of non-AAA hits seem to come with tales of development almost breaking them, or running out of Kickstarter funds. Including two of my favourites: Pillars of Eternity and Divinity Original Sin.
Survivor bias. How many great indie games never got the exposure and died on steam making basically nothing. The fact that some people can do alright is not evidence of a healthy market.
It's about the reduction of single player games, nevermind it's about the the move to cloud gaming, surprise it's about Google's data center energy production, just kidding it about developer work environments, nope just the environment.
It's the abject desperation of a media group in full tail-spin. Not only is their journalism constantly in the mud but their jobs are in constant peril. They're projecting the tanking of their own industry onto the industry they cover.
The Gizmodo media group, including Gizmodo, Jezebel, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Splinter, The Root, Kotaku, Earther, and Jalopnik, were all bought for $135 million in 2016 and were recently purchased again for "much less" [0]. A generous assumption is that Kotaku is worth around $15 million back then and around $8 million now.
Yeah it reads like a clumsy hit piece - not that the industry doesn't have problems but it falls so short of professional writing standards you have to ask if they get paid for it.
I'd say the standards of gaming "journalism" are even lower than current journalism standards. But there are still a few exception, including at Kotaku.
When I said exceptions, I mean there are articles which were actually coherent, well-researched and well-written pieces. But that's not the majority, in any publication.
I think the issue with gaming "journalism" is that it's supposed to be for the consumers so that they can do informed purchases, but since it's ad-funded by the industry they are reporting on, it tends to become a corporate mouth-piece.
The reactionary movement that grew out of GamerGate has largely knee-jerked about Kotaku since its inception; they named their favorite subreddit after the site. And they straight-up make a lot of stuff up about anything they don't like. There are plenty of actually-real things to criticize about the games journalism industry but hen you see somebody spittle-flecking about Kotaku or any of the other publications with the gosh-darn temerity to hire women or black people or trans people it's striking how little you must go down the rabbit hole you to SJW conspiracies and the like.
This article kinda sucks, but the groups taking shots at Kotaku/Polygon/etc. at this point tend towards a default-chud stance.
You didn’t answer the question - what does this slur “chud” mean? Is it a catch-all slur for those critical of journalism? Or only those who are proven to be motivated by your laundry list of regressive attitudes?
I think it's fair to watch the watchmen. Journalists and outside observers shouldn't be demonized for being critical of media, and likewise people shouldn't be demonized for being critical of journalists who err in their duty in some way.
> the groups taking shots at Kotaku/Polygon/etc. at this point tend towards a default-chud stance
Too bad they tend to make more noise than those who criticize Kotaku/Polygon/RPS/etc. for reviews for friends. Hum I suspect the journalists are even happy that their loudest critics are besides the point.
Thinking about the energy consumption of a data center is absurd. Printing out paper forms and keeping them forever is far more energy intensive and requires more man power which in turn means more energy consumption. There are some exceptions like bitcoin mining which is inefficient by design but they are a minority and the article isn't talking about them.
I'm not sure why this bothers you. It's clearly an overview of many the challenges the game industry is facing going forward. Discussing multiple things is not an error!
Discussing them is not, but creating an understandable narrative seems like a step in the right direction.
Clearly the step here was taken somewhere else...
> In 2008, those three publishers released 98 games; in 2018 they released just 28, not including expansions. In short, the single-player game was not sustainable. So why should we think the current model is?
The single player game was 'dead' because video game companies decided they were dead, not because of any market forces. They realized that games with multiplayer features sold a bit better, so they decided to focus on those, to the point of (mostly) abandoning single player games.
Big publishers decided to make fewer, bigger games. But indies (and other mid-tier devs) filled a huge market gap (Kickstarter, anyone?), so nothing really changed much.
Also because multiplayer games are easy to implement dodgy monetisation methods in. Few people would consider paying for lootboxes/microtransactions/whatever in a single player game, whereas a decent percentage (unfortunately) would for a multiplayer one. By comparison, DLC for a single player game is often more effort and a one off deal.
For instance, you could buy things like XP boosters, unique-appearance gear, map unlocks, etc. Though if I remember correctly, you could pretty easily use Cheat Engine to give yourself as much of the microtransaction currency as you wanted—after all, it was a single-player game.
They tried their damnedest with Middle-earth: Shadow of War! Critics didn't seem to mind very much but the Metacritic user score tells you what the community thought about being coerced into buying lootboxes to finish a single-player game.
Multiplayer is a shortcut to replayability. Developers saw games like Counterstrike get played literally for decades due to compelling multiplayer and wondered why they were spending millions of dollars implementing single player campaigns.
Right. If anything, as a gamer, I feel like there are in fact too many games that I can't keep up. It seems like it would be better for a slow down rather than to have even more large overly chalked full games.
Well one doesn’t have to play _all_ the games out there right :)
I used to stay on top of new games and at least try all the top grossers, but as time went on I started playing fewer and fewer ones because of a lot of factors.
Less time in general, and I’m also more demanding, meaning I’ll skip obviously sub-par ones since I’ve already tried ones like them didn’t enjoy it. And my tasted have sharpened - I know better beforehand what I would like exploring.
So yeah all in all I think instead of partying hard and drinking whole bottles of cheap vodka, I know prefer a glass of good brandy in agreeable company now and then. To be honest I think its a good thing.
1. Keeping up with latest technology (graphics) is important for games, as those create the first impression. It is difficult to market a game built on outdated technology.
2. The above means that making games gets more and more expensive, probably faster than the market expands (if it is still expanding).
3. Multiplayer games are more profitable than single-player games.
This means that getting funding to make a single-player game gets more difficult, as it may provide a very poor return on investment, if at all. Only exceptions are low-risk existing franchises, which is why we mostly see those in the single-player scene. The original Deus Ex, System Shock 2 or even Metal Gear Solid would be nearly impossible today as those projects would be considered to be too high risk / low reward.
> Keeping up with latest technology (graphics) is important for games, as those create the first impression. It is difficult to market a game built on outdated technology.
This only applies to some genres. There's a whole category or games trying to replicate retro feel. Cadence of Hyrule could come out at least 5 years ago. (reskinned necrodancer with new mechanics) Same for crosscode.
Another category are games where the impression comes from esthetics, not from tech improvement: Ori and blind forest, Hollow Knight, Rayman, ...
Then on an intersection of that are things like Katana zero. Sure, most fps games will chug as much power out of GPUs as possible, but that's not the whole world.
Pretty is a design choice (or should be). Minecraft's low resolution works well with people who appreciate low resolution worlds, aka kids. Minecraft's true genius, intended or not, is being a game that grows up with the kid as they play.
You start off singleplayer by yourself just getting by in survival mode and you end up building massive city sized projects in multiplayer learning to co-operate on a grand scale. That learning process can cover 5yr old to 16yr olds.
Photoreal is going to become cheaper and cheaper so making an artist aesthetic is going to be more important for standing out than 'better' graphics.
These are the assumptions but I think there’s room for interpretation on that. Nintendo hardware is not particularly cutting edge and while multiplayer is a focus of the switch it’s local multiplayer they are focusing on. Nintendo has been doubling down on great gameplay and polish which is making bank for them while other people are chasing poly count and expensive networking infrastructure.
They know there's a market for single player games. They also know that single player games are trivial to pirate, unlike multiplayer games where the company controls the server.
Single player games are often protected by Denuvo, which sometimes takes weeks or months to crack. Except that the duration during which the game stay protected doesn't seem to have any impact on the sales.
> Single player games are often protected by Denuvo, which sometimes takes weeks or months to crack.
The first Denuvo game was in 2014, more than a decade after the trend towards multiplayer games got rolling.
> Except that the duration during which the game stay protected doesn't seem to have any impact on the sales.
The game publishers who continue to pay to use Denuvo indicate otherwise. In a hit-or-miss industry like video games, publishers are not in the habit of being stupid with their money.
> The game publishers who continue to pay to use Denuvo indicate otherwise. In a hit-or-miss industry like video games, publishers are not in the habit of being stupid with their money.
I could say that the game publishers who continue to release games without additional protections indicate exactly this, as publishers are not in the habit of being stupid with their money.
That doesn’t seem like a good argument, does it?
The only reason, at least the one I could think of, why some publishers still push aggressive DRMs into their products is that someone is selling them this solution and management believes that they protect themselves from “bad pirates”.
If someone wants to buy the game, he will buy it. If someone wants to pirate it, he will do just that.
The only 100% working way around it are multiplayer games.
The other almost as successful method seem to be just making good games, as Nintendo, From Software, CD Projekt etc show again and again.
People have been saying this for about 35 years. Back in the 80s Imagine hyped two games called Psyclapse and Bandersnatch saying they were groundbreaking, huge, and really expensive to make. They were never released and stories of the devs working long hours and sleeping under desks came out. There have been similar games and stories every year since then.
The story of the Bandersnatch game is the basis of the Black Mirror episode of the same name. The writer, Charlie Brooker, is a big gaming fan.
It's really convenient that you picked your start date to be right after the Video Game Crash of 1983.
I'm not sure we would ever see anything like that again. The fact of the matter is that the big names like EA and Ubisoft make boatloads of money and aren't in danger of losing it. Mass appeal games and the audiences they cater to are surprisingly un-finicky
I think the next major crash in video games will be e-sports. And I love e-sports (three time TI attendee). As Peter Dager (ppd), ex-CEO of Evil Genius and industry professional says best:
>Esports is a phenomenon brought on by the introduction of the internet, it does not have to be run the same way that professional sports operate. Many professional sports do not expect to fill a stadium. 99% of our audience is online and prefer to sit in their rooms on their PCs so lets please focus our resources on improving the broadcast and player/talent treatment. Too many irresponsible “businessmen” have latched on to esports over the past couple of years and have convinced billionaires that they are sitting on top of a golden egg. Yes esports is new, yes it is exciting to be at the front of an emerging industry but you are setting everyone else who is to follow up for failure by creating unrealistic standards and expectations.
>The [e-sports] audience is not going to grow immensely, let’s build sustainable events so we can continue to enjoy the game we love so much.
I think if investor expectations are not well-managed, this is going to cause an e-sports 'winter' if you will. If this happens, it's definitely going to affect some major game-changing genres like MOBAs and some FPSs. I genuinely feel like it could cause a huge stumble for AAA companies.
> It's really convenient that you picked your start date to be right after the Video Game Crash of 1983.
The examples given were UK companies who had a thriving industry at the time, the video game crash was mostly an American thing. The globalization of the industry has been important to it's success.
Hey, it worked out OK though. Hmm, better than OK. Shovelware Imagine went bust, someone bought the rights, and they were part of the team that formed Psygnosis. So we got much better software, and more Roger Dean cover art.
Bandersnatch eventually came out from Psygnosis, Psyclapse was, IIRC, total vapourware - just an advert.
I can only hope shovelware EA et al go the same way. :)
The game industry is probably in better health than book publishing, music, film or TV. For consumer the plethora of things available has never been greater.
I think a sizable chunk[1] of that revenue may be coming from mechanics that are more properly classified as gambling. If/when regulators catch on, things might change very quickly.
[1] Mobile seems to be the fastest growing segment and it’s dominated by gambling and psychologically manipulative micro transactions.
The only game I've bothered to put on my new phone since buying it 6 months ago is an open source Scrabble clone I found on F-droid called "Crossword". Every so often I'll look on the Play Store for a game, but I find nothing but pay-to-win advertising-flooded lookalikes and abandon the search.
I'm perfectly happy to pay a one-time price for a fun game that includes all content and is playable offline. Unfortunately they seem to be in rather short supply.
Agreed, but revenue is the clearest indicator of consumer interest. As long as the revenue is growing, there's no real risk that companies would stop making games.
Unless, as is probably the case here, most of that revenue comes from preying on people with gambling addiction through lootboxes, psychological manipulation, peer pressure, etc.
When that stuff gets banned, revenue will tank and any developer completely reliant on that will be in big trouble.
Is it really inevitable that these things will one day be banned? If anything the USA is moving more and more toward liberalizing gambling. Casinos and card rooms are no longer limited to just Atlantic City and Vegas, online poker is slowly marching toward legalization state-by-state. Sports betting is opening up. If anything, I see video games and casino gambling industries slowly merging over the next ten years or so, borrowing profitable ideas from each other and overlapping their audiences.
Ultima IV had a street price of $50-55; in 1985. That's ~$130 in 2019. Teams were far far smaller then. Of course a "successful" game was also a far different standard; as within 4 years of release it had sold only 400,000 copies; despite being a pretty great game.
Whenever people talk about how expensive games are I feel very very old, because games (and the systems) used to actually be expensive.
The C64 was an amazing budget system, and was originally $595. That's like $1600 today. Yes it was a "computer" as well, but people balk at the price of $300 systems today and call $1000 computers too expensive.
what people miss is that the audience is far FAR larger than it used to be, so studios make up it up in volume. Game studios today make more than game studios 10 and 20 years ago.
Kotaku has been publishing this kind of article for years. Most video game journalism is about creating enough content to keep an audience with a microsecond attention span. Doing so requires creating hype, controversy, and doubt.
I am probably not the standard gamer so all this is personal opinion. I am still playing Skyrim. I don't like FPS games, I don't like multi-player games and I don't like sports games.
The $60 soft-cap makes sense. That is normally for the core game- Skyrim had three official add-ons, I think $5 each. Game developers have created bad reputations for themselves- you expect new games to be sold unfinished requiring huge updates right after release and to still be buggy for months afterwards. I tried Assassins Creed but within the first week I had multiple ~10GB updates, never made it further than the first 10 minutes of the game. Micro-transactions and in-game advertising are probably subconsciously factored into a games prices by customers now. I stopped buying EA games because every loading screen or background object had "EA" written on it (golf). $60 used to be the purchase price of a disc you bought and you owned the game, pop it in and it works. $60 is now the price for a download link to "rent" the game until the publisher or host decides to no longer keep it up and running.
I hate "cloud" gaming. Friday night at 8pm and you decide to play some videos- forced 12GB update means the game will be ready to play sometime Monday morning, assuming the update didn't mess things up. If your Internet is down, sorry, can't play the games you bought and downloaded.
Of course customers aren't going to spend more than $60 for a broken buggy game filled with ads that they don't truly own. Bethesda had moved on from Skyrim but fans have not. (Hopefully TES6 stays similar to the series) 8 years after release people are still playing the game. New mods and full add-ons created by fans are still coming out. The market is there for quality single-player games.
I stopped reading when the article started talking about energy.
That‘s an environmentalism article luring you in with how single player games have developed in the last 10 years. Nothing against environmentalism but I was hoping to read more about how actual game development will change and not the same topics that every other technology company faces equally due to climate change and the resulting policies to mitigate it.
To be honest, if one is concerned with environmentalism, addressing automobile dependency will do a lot more for the environment than addressing data center[1] electricity usage's contribution to GHG's which has, ironically, lessened over the last decade[0].
[1] EDIT: Total electricity usage(for both industry AND commercial/residential) is actually a big contributor to GHG's still, but it's declining and a lot of things, like the reply points out, contribute to it, chiefly things like air conditioning and heating during the winter.
Not to mention it sounds like he's arguing against data center driven games. Which seems like the wrong thing to argue against. Add up all the energy used by the consoles and TVs and I'd imagine it dwarfs the data center energy.
The transmission and encoding/decoding is probably significant however even if the processing may be more efficient in bulk- look at streaming vs downloaded energy useage for one.
But it is still probably a win over retail distribution.
And that said, talking energy to entertainment ratio, I'd think the proliferation of giant screen televisions that are just on all the time would be an even larger concern.
Individual mobility is something extremely great. I think to make a point about honesty, it has to hurt latte-macchiato drinking city hipsters first. Disallowing overnight shipping would save a vast amount of flights.
The article makes two points, one centered around the profitability of making games under current business models, the other one centered around the environmental impact of the newer games-as-a-sevice models.
The point that the traditional games publishing model is bad for profits holds, but the point about environmentalism is ridiculous.
First, high environmental impact would mean nothing for the ability for the GaasS models to draw a profit.
Secondly, GaaS should actually be good for the environment. The alternative to computing in data centers is computing in personal computers and consoles, which leads to worse environmental outcomes both in the hardware itself and in their lower efficiency. Besides, computing in data centers leads to more opportunities for efficiency since redundant computations among different devices and users can be parallelized.
The main environmental impact here is one the author completely misses: the energy required for the bandwidth of streaming videos.
You mention the bandwidth for streaming video, and I am wondering if the efficiencies of scale for running the game in a data center is wiped out by the need to then shoot the video over the internet and also run the client. Anybody know a good way to estimate that trade off?
Also shipping. You only need to ship the platform in a GaaS model once, and you build a data center once. From there you're just uploading/transferring code. With physical games you need to produce the games and ship them each time a new one comes out. Not to mention packaging etc.
Well, but most games are delivered digitally now (https://www.statista.com/statistics/190225/digital-and-physi...). I wonder how the bandwidth to deliver the full game compares to the bandwidth to stream video of the game if you're playing it 100% over the internet.
I think we can consider the devices where the content is accessed as thin clients. There is some literature supporting the thin client architecture (e.g. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/55689271.pdf) and it seems that the power consumption can reduce significantly (3x). These studies do not take in account this particular case but I think they can give you an idea of the scale.
It would also reduce the ratio players:console. A personal console stays most of the time off, in a data-center you can increase usage by an order of magnitude. So at the end, even if they buy new hardware every year it would cost less physical resources overall.
I don't think the tangent off into the topic of cloud-based computing makes a lot of sense.
PUE is a measure of efficiency for the data centre itself — how much power is going into computing vs the data centre. It says nothing about the efficiency of the hardware itself, which can easily beat the efficiency of consumer hardware by enough of a margin that it burns overall less energy.
One obvious place for such savings is storage — there's no reason you need a separate copy of a game for each compute node that's running it!
Then they run into the problem of e-waste, which is precisely the sort of thing that cloud-based/streaming consoles would actually make better!
> When you adjust for inflation, the retail cost of video games has never been cheaper, and it’s been this way for some time. The $60 price point for a standard big-budget release has held steady for nearly 15 years...
I guess the constantly growing addressable market just doesn't matter? The human cost has nothing to do with price points or gamer expectations and everything to do with supply and demand. Lots of people want to make games. Developers/publishers take advantage.
> you’ll get a stark—if unscientific—picture of how each big publisher’s release slate has thinned out in the last five years, relying on recurring cash cows like sports games and annualized franchises and little else. In 2008, those three publishers released 98 games; in 2018 they released just 28, not including expansions.
Yeah, because the big publishers _aren't needed_. The tooling a platform like Steam provides has made it much easier to self-publish, or use a small-time publisher instead - your game doesn't need to be on retail shelves to be successful anymore, there's tons of free marking channels available today, all of which combine to make publishers less necessary.
> The foremost takeaway is that while data centers are growing in number, their energy consumption is starting to plateau out of necessity, as the dramatic increase in cloud computing has actually forced tech companies to become more efficient.
This has literally nothing to do with gaming or its sustainability. As the computing/electronics industry moves in more efficient or green directions, gaming hardware (not even the game industry) will follow.
There's problems with the game industry - gambling mechanics, exploitation of "whales", discovery/marketing/shovelwear, how to handle growing international audiences, and so on, but I don't see any of these mentioned in the article.
I'd honestly prefer the games industry collapsed and maybe started over. This whole concept of massive thousand people teams working on huge scale games that take many years to finish only manages to produce games devoid of passion. Back when games were made by small teams where every individual was able to contribute significantly to the game did it feel right.
Obviously that is just my personal opinion, but despite games getting more graphically impressive they have been getting worse overall.
I wonder what if video games can be contrasted against data we know for book publishing. There was a time books were a huge novelty. Now we only talk about the ones that a REALLY good. When I was younger almost ANY video game impressed me. Nowadays not so much.
Funny thing is to the industry is doubling down on graphics graphics graphics. But damn it if I'm the only one who thinks they're just not fun anymore. I mean have you guys tried Anthem? It's awful.
Where is the goofiness that is battle toads. The narrative that is FFVI. The precision that is a flight sim. There are obviously exceptions and some amazing games. (Witcher III, BOTW, anything Mario, Stardew) But it feels like the big publishers still think it's 2003.
"Where is the goofiness that is battle toads. The narrative that is FFVI. The precision that is a flight sim. There are obviously exceptions and some amazing games. (Witcher III, BOTW, anything Mario, Stardew) But it feels like the big publishers still think it's 2003."
The indie scene, man. I've been following Failbetter Games, and they've got so much narrative over three games that are essentially about exploring a big crazy world and all the people living in it, fully fleshing out the people you meet, their pasts and presents, and what their lives say about the world they live in.
I've never been so mildly horrified with my own unintended consequences and revelations in that 'world' since I dropped the companion cube into the incinerator in Portal.
> I've never been so mildly horrified with my own unintended consequences and revelations in that 'world' since I dropped the companion cube into the incinerator in Portal.
For me, dropping the companion cube just meant that the door opened and I could continue to move forward.
The future isn't about "buying games" or "cloud gaming subscriptions". It will be a form of mobile/casual gaming overtaking interest of mainstream gaming culture by providing similar quality of expirience in the browser, for free.
Its likely will look like self-contained web games, utilizing WebGL+WebAssembly and procedurally generated assets on the client side. It would be powered by ads, microtransactions and donations, without "sale" or "subscription" paradigm - just load the webpage and play.
If mobile games were going to replace traditional games, they already would have, the cellphone market is already nearing replacement purchase rates.
Gaming is a huge market, there is room for lots of niches, and the quality of even a typical native indie game is way way above what a browser is capable of delivering.
Show me even one web game that is close to the quality of a mediocre graphics, reasonably expansive indie game
The web sucks horribly as a platform if you care about performance, which even relatively low power indie games do.
Well, when the game is designed around microtransactions free to play means more free to pay, as playing without paying is not enjoyable at all. Look at EAs mobile offerings.
I wonder what another Great Games Crash would even look like. Publishers go out of business but platforms like Steam prosper as they already have more superb games that anyone can play in a lifetime? And what would be the resurrection of the industry? Who knows, but I sort of agree with the sentiment that something is about to give.
In a hypothetical scenario where all publishers go out of business, it would be hard to see how much the sales decline overall - i.e. how much sales was driven purely by marketing and how much is people really wanting to buy and play video games.
I only play single player games, and I have more games than I have time. I've completed Horizon Zero Dawn 5 times. Just finished Days Gone. My kid finished indie classic Celeste earlier this year and is grinding through Dead Cells. I didn't like Last of Us, personally (too depressing), but it did quite well, I'm told. I've got Monster Hunter and Sekiro downloaded and waiting for me to get bored of Days Gone.
I read that HZD has made a profit (after development and marketing costs) of over $300m, having sold 10m copies.
Finally played an Assassins Creed game this year. Microtransactioned to death. Never buying one of those again.
> Let’s run down the Big Three. We’re more than halfway through 2019, and Electronic Arts has only published one single-player game, the indie Sea of Solitude. Last year was much the same, with two indies as its only single-player releases: Fe and Unraveled 2. Activision’s portfolio of single-player games looks even thinner: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the only exclusively single-player, non-remake game that the publisher has released
Right, but, isn't that ok? I don't want to go FIFA on games like Sekiro. I like it better when a team is given 3-5 years to churn out a dank single player experience.
studios shuttered, developers burned out, and toxic work culture fostered environments hostile to marginalized people
People have been banging on about this for quite some time. One would figure that someone would put together a team that isn't toxic, then succeed. There must be some kind of outside force which makes the whole industry toxic. Probably the same market pressures which turn people into frenemies in other media industries.
The argument about the $60 price point seems specious to me. Video games have massive economies of scale and the market has been growing steadily faster than inflation, meaning that while the price point has been the same, the volume of sales have increased with a low marginal cost for each unit sold.
Along with sheer sales volume, digital distribution has lowered publishing costs, created after-markets for DLC, and reduced the secondary market. Digital distribution also allows for much greater price elasticity.
If anything, you could argue that digital publishers like Steam, PlayStation Store, etc, should lower their cut, but it seems like that's starting to happen on the PC with increased competition in the space from Epic, Origin, etc.
I think the real problem with the industry is that video games are a hit business where a handful of games make almost all the profit. The best way to profit in a space like this is to crank out content as cheaply as possible.
This is evidenced by the fact that game developers have been working crunch since back in the 90s when a $50 game was worth $80 in 2018 dollars.
Edit: Why not comment instead of censoring with downvotes?
Even though volume has gone up, the cost of making a triple AAA game is much higher than it use to be. Current day triple AAA titles are way more complex; they feature a ton of professional acting, highly detailed artwork, etc.
Also, as you point out, inflation has gone up so that accounts in part why the unit price has not changed much.
Even taking all that into account, perhaps it still doesn't justify the price they sell at. In that case, they may be selling it much higher than they need to because they can. People still buy games prices at $60.
Amount of electronic waste and low percentage of recycling seems quite big issue, much bigger than problems in gaming.
How many phones, laptops, tvs, desktop pcs, consoles, music devices, cameras and other related devices have you stopped using lets say past 10 years? How many have you recycled?
once the race to the bottom ends someday we'll have companies making good games again. there's 1 or 2 big studios who still take time for stuff, but most large ones are pretty much hitting the bottom now and people are stopping to buy their games and content. once people are fed up enough and sales take a big enough dive they will wake up. - so in reality, gamers, it's in your hands to change the industry. not in the developers hands. they just make what sells. so buy what's good and they will focus on that.
> In short, the single-player game was not sustainable. So why should we think the current model is?
The single-player game is very sustainable. It's just not as lucrative unless you double-down on in-game monetization like Ubisoft does. Devolver Digital is plenty stable, even though it makes a tiny fraction of the revenue we see from "AAA" publishers.
> In 2008, those three publishers released 98 games; in 2018 they released just 28, not including expansions.
Well there's the problem. If you focus all of your effort on a few large-scale projects, you will have to milk those projects for all you can. There's still a huge market for small and medium-scale projects, though. The indie market is thriving.
> Independent developers, meanwhile, continue to fight for the smallest slice of an impossibly crowded market.
How is this an indication of a struggling industry? This just tells me that the market is easy to break into, which should be hailed as a positive. Of course "indie" studios aren't going to individually be responsible for a large slice of the market. They don't have the budgets to fund massive projects with a ton of marketing.
However, I'd be pretty interested in seeing just how much money "indie" titles as a whole bring in and how that has compared to the rest of the market over time. I'd guess it's grown significantly over time and that's the real reason why "AAA" publishers struggle with smaller scale games. There's a reason "AAA" publishers like EA want to be associated with some of these games.
> And Sony already offers a streaming service, PlayStation Now, which is likely to expand in the next generation.
If PlayStation Now is anything to go by, I wouldn't put a lot of stock in xCloud or Stadia. There's a lot of buzz around it now, but I doubt game streaming will get any mainstream traction for a long time.
> [a bunch of talk about data center power efficiency and climate change]
And how does this compare to the amount of energy spent running games natively? I'm sure Microsoft's, Sony's, and Google's servers are configured to utilize hardware much more efficiently than my gaming PC.
This seems like an out-of-nowhere tangent to me and the article doesn't provide enough information about it to really go anywhere so it devolves into lamenting the "current political climate".
I think this article makes the mistake of conflating the state of several large "AAA" publishers with the state of the games industry as a whole. I've long-since stopped caring about almost anything the "Big Three" (EA, Activision, and Ubisoft) have a hand in, and most other "AAA" publishers have damaged their reputation so much that I have practically zero anticipation for new games.
There are many things companies in the gaming industry should do better, but I don't think the industry as a whole is in near as dire a state as the author describes. I wouldn't shed a tear if most of the "AAA" publishers disappeared tomorrow. There's still plenty of great games coming out from developers and publishers with much cleaner reputations.
For "regular occurrences" I think surgeons just abstract it (as it's part of their job) but as the sibling comment, them, and first responders can get PTSD in some occasions.
Medical School does some job of filtering those who can abstract it from the ones who can't (I'm sure I wouldn't be a good fit)
Kotaku's content is so heavily editorialized that it's hard to take seriously. Every time I read an article it seems that I'm being told how to feel about something rather than being informed about it.
You know that this is explicitly and intentionally an editorial piece, right? I'm not sure what you're criticizing other than something completely fundamental about how all journalism works.
I find a 2000 word article more interesting than a few sentences of vague, partially tautological, and non-constructive criticisms from an account created an hour ago only for that purpose.
I am going to be downvoted, but this needs to be said.
The problem with the indie developers is that many of them are driven by greed and only greed. But that is hidden behind a veil of "we are the underdogs, passionate people, like you!". In reality, it's just a job like any other, and the "we are passionate", is the equivalent of "we are changing the world by... uhh disrupting!" that startup kool-aid drinkers say.
Let me give you an example. I dated a twitter semi-famous indie dev a while ago. She has a day job but makes games on the side. I have a day job and I make music on the side. I remember I was in a room with her, and was looking in ordering Aztec death whistles (it's a whistle that sounds like a human scream), to use into my music. She asked me "oh and how many people will like that?" To which I answered, "Right now I have 10 listeners. After the death whistles maybe I will have 5" and grinned. I make music for me, not for anyone else. If somebody happens to like it, that's fine. It's a hobby and a form of self-expression, like people cook for themselves or practice archery for themselves. I am not looking into becoming famous. In a sense, I am free to create what i want, and I am limited only but my skills and what I can do, not by what I must do.
She looked troubled... So I stopped and observed. She was looking at how many copies a game sold, and was chatting on FB with another on-twitter-all-day indie dev, about how many copies his game sold. Then she proclaimed that the next title would be different, way more appealing to the masses. I put my guitar down, stopped trying to sing "love will tear us apart" but in tuvan throat singing! And proclaimed, wait you 're selling out? How can you be selling out, the game doesn't even exist yet!!
She replied "So what? There is no same in wanting to make a good living from your art. Not everybody is like you and is happy with just... playing. Never advancing to the next stage. Never making something meaningful.".
I WAS SHOCKED. I still am. No wonder it didn't work out in the end. But... she told me, she had started making games because the game industry was full of stereotypes. Boys are the space marine, and girls play barbie's mini games, barbie pets her horse, barbie goes on a date with Ken, bullshit. That she wanted to make a difference, it was her passion, she wanted to prove that there can be fun games that are not gender-biased and that everyone can enjoy. I thought it was a noble, experimentation, passion project, like music is for me.
No. No, making games is not the end itself. Making games is means to an end. Indie devs are greed-driven. Not passion driven.
I hanged out with a few of them in GDC this year. They all care about money. I felt like I was at a dinner with C* level people that just like gossiping about IPOs and how much money some friends, or friends of friends of friends raised. All about money. "This game sold 700k copies!!! It uses unity assets". "That guy from romania made X million dollars!?!?".
There was a guy, who put a game on early access, then delayed the game's release for 10 years, because he made enough money to buy a house in San Francisco, and just did... nothing afterwards. Just talks to people with a "holier than thou" attitude. Meanwhile the game aged so bad, it went from a 7/10 to a 3/10 when it finally got out 9 years late!!!! How dare you! All these people who paid you because they believed in you, and you just shit on them when you hit a certain $$$ in your savings account. But I guess... why wouldn't he. He already accomplished his end goal of MONEY.
Early access, what a shitty thing. No self-respecting musician would say; Here are the first 2 tracks of the album. And some drum tracks from the 3rd and 4th piece. Maybe in 5 years you will get the bass track for the 3rd piece too! No movie director would say; we released the green screen version, and when we raise enough money you will get to see the dragons and the elves. Only game devs do that.
The inherent problem I see with indie devs, is that they lie to their audience as much as themselves as well. When I see the new GTA V game, I know what I am getting into. I will pay $60 to run over some people. But with indie devs I am being schooled about the exploration and experimentation. About feelings, about difficult subjects that noone dared to mention in game medium before. I am intrigued, I am captivated, I am in love! And then... you find out that that indie-game, scooby-do-esque pulling the mask off it was Michael Bay, and Michael Bay's 30th transfomers film all along! All about money, all about making investors happy!
Music has forever changed. We musicians accepted that we won't be rich from our music, so we are liberated to scavenge for a few bucks to rent a van and go touring playing in 20-people shows. Usually when I hang out with musicians, we end up smoking weed and committing to jam sessions that may never happen. And then everyone gets really really excited when I pull the death whistle out.
This is drivel that doesn't warrant a comprehensive critique, so I must be really bored.
>At about this time next year, we’ll have a pretty good idea of what the next generation of video games will look like.
The current Sony and Microsoft consoles seemed to have few games worth owning and then released incompatible versions recently, yet a new version is warranted?
>as studios shuttered, developers burned out, and toxic work culture fostered environments hostile to marginalized people.
The only one of these that's valid is the developer overworking. A studio closing and ''sexism'' don't even come close, but anything to conflate the real issues, I suppose.
>When you adjust for inflation, the retail cost of video games has never been cheaper, and it’s been this way for some time. The $60 price point for a standard big-budget release has held steady for nearly 15 years, unadjusted for inflation even as the cost to make big-budget video games has risen astronomically with player expectations.
Sixty dollars is already high enough for a game and yet the next few paragraphs discuss ways companies increase the price by selling an incomplete product. Well, if the price ever rises, these companies would have no reason to stop, so you'd have higher prices and the same garbage. Anyone who tells you the price of a product such as this really isn't enough is likely a mindless drone.
>In short, the single-player game was not sustainable. So why should we think the current model is?
Why should I care if a type of video game is deemed ''sustainable''; what makes this claim valid, anyway? If there are games that don't appeal to me, I won't purchase them. Why would I ever think ''Gee, there aren't any new games that appeal to me; I guess I'll buy one that doesn't.'' when there is such a breadth of video games over several decades? That would be like buying a fashion magazine because the book store didn't have any programming books you wanted. If only ''Indie'' groups are releasing games I want, why would that be an issue?
>In short, the single-player game was not sustainable. So why should we think the current model is?
If you're a capitalist, you can only figure the market will eventually correct itself, on its own, so why care? The article then spends several paragraphs discussing climate issues, which are irrelevant.
>Video games cannot do this forever. If any of these things were to collapse—the people who make them, the economy they’re sold in, the ecosystem we’re all a part of—it would be catastrophic. All of them at once? That’s a disaster we need to talk about, openly. Because there are solutions to these problems.
Again, why should anyone care, considering the breadth of current games available? Should I give a damn if a publisher is struggling, considering there are more books, and about topics I like at that, than I could ever read in my lifetime?
The article then suggests all of the children and men with nothing better to do who regularly read Kotaku call their politicians about climate issues. The last few paragraphs of this article are a mess.
>It’s unlikely that video games will ever truly go extinct. We’ll probably always have something called “video games,” but what those games will look like is still very much in flux. There’s no guarantee that the way games are currently made will remain viable for another 10 years—games aren’t even made today the same way they were 10 years ago.
This is such a stupid paragraph. This is clearly written for a lowbrow audience they expect to easily manipulate.
>They will look different. They will change because they can, and because they must. Hopefully, all the ways games change will be on our terms—otherwise disaster will change them for us.
This is an entertainment medium, one that has a lot of garbage in it, at that. This is about video games and some idiot was paid to write this.
In closing, this isn't a great critique, but the article was garbage. I dislike there were enough cretins to put this on the front page, while interesting material written by interesting people goes entirely ignored. Those are my thoughts.
Never before has it been so easy for someone to get their game into the hands of millions. Games like Factorio, made by people who are passionate about games. With modern distribution platforms, companies like Paradox Interactive find it viable to continue adding content to their games many years after they were released.
Couldn't give two hoots about what EA and Activision are up to. They don't make games for me.