r/gaming • u/CiabattaKatsuie Console • 4d ago
The games industry is undergoing a 'generational change,' says Epic CEO Tim Sweeney: 'A lot of games are released with high budgets, and they're not selling'
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/the-games-industry-is-undergoing-a-generational-change-says-epic-ceo-tim-sweeney-a-lot-of-games-are-released-with-high-budgets-and-theyre-not-selling/Tim Sweeney apparently thinks big budget games fail because... They aren't social enough? I personally feel that this is BS, but what do you guys think? Is there a trend to support his comments?
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u/Sharktoothdecay 4d ago
maybe don't do live service/micro-transactions laden/empty open world games
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u/Largofarburn 4d ago
My god it’s so frustrating not being able to play games I bought just because my internet sucks. I’ve been playing black ops 3 zombies lately and it’s immensely frustrating to loose all my progress and have none of it count because my internet cuts out for a few seconds.
And micro transaction can go suck a fat one. I’m fine with dlc, even some of the more questionable ones. But as soon as they start selling an alt currency that you need to buy stuff in game and time gating normal progression I’m out. Fuck that and fuck them. There’s hundreds of games to choose from these days. I’ve been going back and playing a lot of older games lately just because I’m so sick of all the bullshit.
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u/SuperKamiTabby 4d ago
I remember a few years ago complaining about a single player game dropping connection due to the shit internet I had at the time.
I was told "Why don't you move somewhere else then?"
Fucking WHAT.
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u/meowtiger 4d ago
a few years back when ms was attempting the greatest fumble in the history of fumbles, they announced that the xbox one would require constant internet connectivity even for single player games, to verify licensing
some people said "hey what about people who have no or limited internet?"
and ms said "we have a console for those people it's called the xbox 360"
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u/chaos-rose17 4d ago
And then they retracted that after seeing universal hate
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u/milkywayer 4d ago
And fired the guy who tried to push that non sense.
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u/No1_4Now 4d ago
I'm guessing they fired the fall guy, not the entire C-suite and board of directors who are the real people behind these terrible decisions.
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u/HappyHarry-HardOn 4d ago edited 4d ago
They kinda did - Phil Spencer took over soon after.
(& look how great that worked out for them - Xbox are on top of the world!)
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u/chipmunk_supervisor 3d ago
Yep it was a clever trick to let Don Mattrick take the heat but the Xbox One debacle was a team effort and most of that team stayed. In hindsight even the last years of the Xbox 360's life wasn't so great either with the excessive Kinnect push and random unwanted/unimaginative sequels (Crackdown 2, Fable 3, Halo 4). Whats-his-name Peter Moore was such a driving force behind the Xbox 360's initial success and when he left the Xbox execs coasted on his momentum until it came to a stop.
Now they're addicted to the Game Pass bar chart and keep shooting themselves in the foot to make numbers go up at the expense of everything else.
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u/Urdar 4d ago
some people said "hey what about people who have no or limited internet?"
and ms said "we have a console for those people it's called the xbox 360"
IIRC it was not even "some people" that asked that it was MS themselves in their marketing matertial saying 2Dont have internat all the time? dont worry, we have a console for that, its called the xbox 360" making it even worse.
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u/Colonel_Panix 4d ago
I remember that fucking shit! A lot of military members were going to boycott that shit seeing we are usually deployed in locations with shitty or no Internet.
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u/SharkMilk44 4d ago
I’ve been going back and playing a lot of older games lately just because I’m so sick of all the bullshit.
It's so nice loading up a PS2 game and the main menu isn't asking you for more money.
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u/polski8bit 4d ago
When I brought my PC for a week long "vacation" at a friend's place to chill with some games, I stared in disbelief when I saw that I couldn't launch AC Odyssey without hooking the internet up, because it had to validate the license. Like... I bought it, I installed it, their crappy launcher even loaded up my library after that week+ of not launching anything or the launcher itself, had the game marked as installed and ready to play, yet I couldn't launch it.
This was the moment I realized that modern gaming can truly suck massive balls.
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u/Iokua_CDN 4d ago
Honestly, I'm tempted to just start pirating all the Assassins Creed games. No uplay, no internet, no expensive dlc
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u/Spire_Citron 4d ago
Because all that money isn't going towards making the best games they can make, plain and simple. They're just trying to scientifically concoct the most efficient money extraction machines, and that isn't very fun.
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u/matlynar 4d ago
This.
It's less "people don't want high budget games" and more "you can't throw money at a shitty game and expect it to become good only because of that".
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u/reddit_turned_on_us 4d ago
I think the "scientific" part is copying the latest successful core gameplay loop OR recycling the last successful core gameplay loop your company experienced.
Should be a sure thing, doesn't always work, because once something is stale it's no longer interesting.
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u/DuntadaMan 4d ago
Well that and several companies hired behavioral psychologists to turn games into skinner boxes rather than games.
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u/amalgam_reynolds 4d ago
This is the real answer. Shitty games aren't shitty because they're chasing trends; they're shitty because they're C-suite wet dreams, thin veneers of a game plastered on top of a cash shop with seasons and microtransactions and skins and FOMO and loot boxes. The amount of money that they'll let you spend without giving an iota of gameplay is disgusting.
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u/WarzonePacketLoss 4d ago
I don't remember how many buggy messes I've seen in the last 10 years where the store works flawlessly. That really says almost everything you need to know.
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u/Alarming_Bar_8921 4d ago
Happened early in OW2 release, game was a mess balance wise, servers kept disconnecting, some big bugs that ruined gameplay.. devs slow as hell to patch any of it. A couple weeks in the shop bugged and it was fixed in hours.
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u/MIC4eva 4d ago
This is why mobile gaming is kind of a small tragedy. We could have amazing experiences with the super powerful computers in our pockets but no, almost all mobile games are just looking for whales. There’s semblances of a game here and there but they mostly just want you to pay truly insane prices to become more powerful, they’ll let you feel good about that for a little while and then you move up and start playing against people who spent even more and the cycle repeats. It’s not criminal but it almost feels like it.
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u/spoopypoptartz 4d ago
*cough *cough Ubisoft
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u/sickhippie 4d ago
It's pretty impressive to see a company create that successful core gameplay loop and over the next decade or so distill all the fun out of it while also oversaturating the market for it with their own variations, then be surprised when gamers who've wrung every bit of dopamine out of their IP-branded skinner boxes don't want to keep buying another one.
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u/DesertRatYT 4d ago
Making it harder to level up in an RPG only to sell normal XP rates in their single player microtransaction shop.
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u/QueerAvocadoFriend 4d ago
Or have xp boosts that are impossible to turn off, bundled with the "gold edition" that break progression by making you level too fast.
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u/JunkyMonkeyTwo 4d ago
Lol, that's pretty awful. I could totally see that happening. Who did that?
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u/spoopypoptartz 4d ago
i don’t think any major video game studio other than ubisoft has done it to the point where it affects 100% of their output at this point.
insane
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u/JustWingIt0707 4d ago
The problem is that the video gaming industry has gotten away from the "video gaming" and taken a hard turn into "industry."
I think we all get it here. If you put out a product you want to get paid for it. The execs are just thoroughly disconnected from the consumer base. We want good games. We want worlds you can immerse yourself into. We want gameplay mechanics that are easy to learn and difficult to master. We want turn-based games and lightweight games for when we don't have time or a lot of energy. We want shooters for killing things. We want strategy for when we're thinking. We want racing for when we have a need for speed. We want games we can play with friends and family.
We don't want to be treated like ATMs that pay out for the latest shitty alpha project that has a huge CGI budget, voice-acting by big names, and repetitive maps and missions. Build a world. Give us choices. Above all, don't treat the games we buy like you still own them once we pay.
Fuck you Ubisoft. Fuck you Bobby Kotick.
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u/Clear-Vacation-9913 4d ago
It's easy for private companies right now to let the artists and developers cook and create stable products, as long as they are generating revenue. With public corporate it's no longer enough to generate profit; you have to generate more and more. For this reason public companies will always have pressure to (although won't always) hyper capitalize every aspect of the gaming experience.
A recent example is frostpunk 2 which generated a revenue almost instantly, but stock for the company fell b/c it didn't perform well enough in a profitability lens for the stockholders. Who the fuck cares, as a gamer? Well when a company is public there is pressure to "have" to care.
A classic example is the subscription model of famous MMOs shifting quickly to hyper monetization once companies went public, Runescape and Wow are big examples here. They are also good examples of how consumers will accept incremental increased fees and charges and the normalization of them.
What we want to pay attention to at this time are small developers, private companies with focus on sustainability and revenue, and to a less extent very grounded public companies of which some exist but understand that with this model of business you as the consumer are not the actual target audience, you are rather being leveraged financially to satisfy the demand for infinite profit. That means infinitely more complex ways to generate $$$ out of you.
In conclusion: since everything boils down to money, no amount of appeals will change things. These companies have a legal obligation to take as much profit from players as is possible, and the players aren't truly the focus. I know it sucks but it's actually best to stay away or at least not get invested in these companies, cause they aren't invested in you.
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u/BrassUnicorn87 4d ago
The stock market is the ruination of everything and the death of mankind.
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u/CosmicSpaghetti 4d ago
They've literally been making Far Cry 3 for 14 years.
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u/wzns_ai 4d ago
holy shit
it was a good game tho
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u/bigcaulkcharisma 4d ago
It’s funny cause once every half decade or so I’ll go back and play Far Cry 2 or Far Cry 3. I don’t think I’ve played through any of the other ones more than once (I do remember liking 4 tho).
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u/Lanster27 4d ago
The fact that a lot of popular indie games on steam is made by devs consisting of one or two people just proves budget =/= good game.
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u/Shamanalah 4d ago
Also AAA games nowaday are an amalgamation of multiple mini genre and subgenre. Like those stealth portion of games, the escort part of the game, the assassin creed movement up building, driving point A to point B for exposition and plot movement
There's no creativity and not a single good direction in those games. You can't feel the passion in it cause there's none. It's a project from a business point of view not a passion project like Terraria or Stardew Valley which still gets updated for free.
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u/Cruxis87 4d ago
Also AAA games nowaday are an amalgamation of multiple mini genre and subgenre. Like those stealth portion of games, the escort part of the game, the assassin creed movement up building, driving point A to point B for exposition and plot movement
Games have had all those aspects for decades. How many mini games did the original FF7 have that was completely different to the main game. Riding in a car when escaping Midgar. Snowboarding. Sneaking into Shinra HQ. Halo had driving missions, escort missions, and you could stealth for a lot of parts. It's been a staple in gaming for decades to have some completely different gameplay mechanics sprinkled in.
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u/dotablitzpickerapp 4d ago edited 4d ago
The other problem is the more money that goes towards a project, the less risk it can take, which means the more boring/stale/repetitive it feels.
Turns out games are largely about novelty, seeing and doing something you haven't done before. (especially big high profit low investment successes like Minecraft, Amongus, PUBG, Dota1)
But business seems to be about dumping as much money as possible into a formula you've seen work before in the hopes of replicating it's success.
It's kind of a catch-22, I suppose video games are a lot like Art. You can't hire Leonardo Da Vinci and ask him to make a yearly release of Mona Lisa sequels hoping that there won't be diminishing returns.
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u/Reboared 4d ago
The worst thing to happen to gaming (and the rest of the entertainment industry) is the idea that every product needs to appeal to everyone.
You just end up with the most bland, generic, lowest common denominator shit.
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u/Zealotstim 4d ago
Not just gaming either. Movies and television also become worse as they try to appeal to as wide audiences as possible. Honestly any number of products made to entertain people are like that. It's the lack of passion. The people who make it stop caring about the product because there is too much direction coming from the people up top who aren't actually making it.
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u/Spire_Citron 4d ago
I agree. You see this in TV and movies a lot too. So much of it feels so generic that I just can't get into it. There's no soul.
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u/gorillamutila 4d ago
Which is funny because something doesn't add up. You'd think there'd be a min/max mentality towards game-making, trying to extract as much game out of the smallest budget possible.
Yet Concord, a damn shooter, with mechanics that have been around for a decade, costs as much as the annual budget of a small country.
I really can't understand how they spent so much money on such a project. There has to be some tax-evasion wizardry or something of the sort behind these ludicrous amounts.
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u/iSavedtheGalaxy 4d ago
Your comment made me look up the game's budget and.... almost half a BILLION dollars?? What a joke.
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u/God_Among_Rats 4d ago
And they didn't market it at all.
Meanwhile the next week, Sony also release Astro Bot. A game made by a 65 person team, certainly costing much much less than Concord, and it's one of their most successful PS5 releases.
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u/Apprehensive_Ad3731 4d ago
The thing is Astros world and maybe Astro bot (haven’t played it yet) are very clever games. Especially for first time gamers. My four year old loves it and I don’t mind playing parts for him so that’s a massive win.
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u/sherbodude 4d ago
That's speculation/rumor and was never confirmed. they say it took 8 years but it was only 4 years of active development. Only sony knows how much it cost
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u/Capt_Skyhawk 4d ago
This is the correct analysis. Games used to be made out of passion of playing them and now they’re mostly about profit. That’s why indie games are the ones with the overwhelmingly positive reviews. Triple A 50Gb monsters are pretty but my favorite games are from no name devs.
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u/DPlusShoeMaker 4d ago edited 4d ago
Baldurs Gate 3. That’s all that needs to be said.
When other studios and Devs were complaining that BG3 set the bar too high, it was truly a facepalm moment.
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u/VPN__FTW 4d ago
Because BG3 should be the standard for AAA games and these company's DO NOT want that. They want to shit out the same generic ass game year after year and have gamers stumbling over themselves to buy it, w/ all the premium skins and shit, of course.
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u/Iokua_CDN 4d ago
Lol Balders Gate 3 is just about everything I want from a modern AAA game. Like Damm they hit it out of the park, and I hope they stay in the Limelight for years to hopefully show gaming companies how to make a great game.
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u/ImTooOldForSchool 4d ago edited 4d ago
Lies of P was one of my favorite games of the past year, but I couldn’t tell you who published it TBH. All I know is it wasn’t one of the usual suspects, they’d never take such a risk.
Running around this Victorian horror hellscape as a cyborg Pinocchio slaying all the evil machine puppets and learning that your lies have consequences was soo fucking cool. By the end of the game, I really wanted my character to become human!
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u/tirius99 4d ago
When I play Wukong, I can tell the devs were passionate about the project and it was hella fun to play.
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u/kingmanic 4d ago
The effort difference between "I made this game because I love games like it" and "I made this game because 14 senior product managers had a meeting and laid out a rough outline of what a GAS cash cow would look like".
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u/Cruxis87 4d ago
When you hire psychologists to find the best ways to make people spend money, then design a game around it, the game isn't very fun. Like Diablo 4.
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u/spotty15 4d ago
Maybe don't make high budget shitty games?
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u/Akrevics 4d ago
no one asked for a cartoony shooter/team game (overwatch clone) in a market already saturated with them. just because Fortnite is big doesn't mean we need 50 more, especially not with battle passes, f**k off.
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u/Lord-Norse 4d ago
Exactly, and that’s the problem with executives making the big decisions, they don’t actually know what people want. They see a graph saying Fortnite made 70 bajillion dollars and think “ah yes if we make a slightly different clone of this we will also make 70 bakillion dollars”, which isn’t how the video game market works.
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u/Golden_Hour1 4d ago
It's mind boggling these companies even survive. They don't even understand the market
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u/theKetoBear 4d ago
The thing is in the past these companies were often started by passionate creatives hwo just wanted to make cool shit and were rewarded handsomely for making something quality.
Then the big money got into games and saw how much money they made but they want to do what big money does to EVERYTHING .
they want to water down the core product ( less interesting gameplay ) , chop it up and serve it piece meal with extra costs ( micro transactions , battle passes, unimpressive DLC) , and mass produce it and hope the masses swallow the drivel .
People have said for ages traditional tech doesn't work when it gets involved with games because they are a fundamentally different business... same should be said of traditional business people ... running a game company the same way you'd run chipotle , or Apple is a terrible idea and that's what we're seeing Big money making shit-tier games choices.
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u/Alicenchainsfan 4d ago
That’s why seeing all these failures is so delicious
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u/icantswing 4d ago
my heart warms with each 400 zagillion dollar budget flop
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u/Internal-Flamingo455 4d ago
My doesn’t cause they never fucking learn anything then blame us
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u/Flyingsheep___ 4d ago
They will outwardly blame and deflect, because it looks REALLY bad to shareholders to admit you fucked up, but I guarantee you the people in charge of approving Concord, Skull and Bones, those big flops, are getting absolutely demolished in the corporate world for failure.
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u/TheImplic4tion 4d ago
Ubisoft is imploding right now due to years of failed or underperforming big budget games.
Shareholders see that happening.
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u/Princess_Of_Thieves 4d ago
Pity said flops just result in mass lay offs for the ground level work offs whilst the fucks up top just write shit off as business expenses or what tricks they have and never face real consequences for their shit judgement. Even though the failures of their products are entirely their fault.
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u/WhereIsTheInternet 4d ago
Don't forget huge payouts when they leave the company they ran into the ground.
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u/HighFoxy 4d ago
yep and people say shit like “ceos take all the risk of the company” to justify how much they earn, even though when things do fall through the higher ups get massive pay packages and a lovely golden parachute to go fuck over some other place. doesn’t sound very ‘risky’ to me
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u/dig_dude 4d ago
I revel in the Schadenfrude too, but then I remember the hundreds of workers who get laid off and dozens of studios closed when these games fail. I wish we could have good games and workers' rights.
I know the money has to come from somewhere. I know developers need a deadline otherwise they'll bloat the game to death. I just wish I worked a little differently. I've recently finished Psychodyssey and Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. Great insight in the game industry for those who haven't experienced them.
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u/UnnamedStaplesDrone 4d ago
a lot of them get laid off anyway even if their game is successful once the game is done
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u/hiddencamela 4d ago
Another thing that's happening is wearing out customer Loyalty.
Once its gone, people don't come back easily or not at all.
There's only so much watering down and bullshit a loyal customer will handle before they just stop and walk away. Going back a step doesn't immediately bring back those loyal customers either because their patience and loyalty has already been expended.
They've gotta go back to what the original passionate folks created and re-earn it from scratch, but good luck after shitting on those customers and catering to the shareholders.→ More replies (6)77
u/WingerRules 4d ago
Its to the point that when I see a title from some of the major publishers like Ubisoft or EA I automatically have a negative perception of the title before I even look at it, due to stuff like loot boxing, building grind into their games, and just an overall hyper corporate feel to their games.
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u/qwerty_ca 4d ago
Lmao, I was thinking of the exact same two companies when I read the title of this post.
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u/jonistaken 4d ago
Companies are started by product designers, then taken over by finance people to manage growth, then managed by accountants after they hit peak market share and focus from growth to cost cutting until they collapse for good.
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u/Mordador 4d ago
Videogames are art.
Market research does not make good art, just uninspired, same-old same-old slop.
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u/QouthTheCorvus 4d ago
Yeah, it's a creative industry, you need people with passion that are driving it. People who actually love games have a natural instinct to find what people like.
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u/mysmellysausage 4d ago
Actually market research is exactly what they’re not doing.
If they did proper research they would actually learn what people like from successful games and dislikes about non-successful ones, then use that data to design a product to fulfill a role in the market.
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u/tree_squid 4d ago
Bean counters buy successful companies and then make them do unsuccessful things and refuse to do successful things because those don't have the potential to become infinite money-printers like Fortnite.
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u/Bloodcloud079 4d ago
It’s the history of an industry that never learns anything teeheehee hee
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u/throwaway387190 4d ago
It's utterly insane they don't understand this
I have Fortnite. I like Fortnite. If you make a game like Fortnite, why would I play your game over Fortnite? How can you offer me an experience that is better than Fortnite, when I just want to play Fortnite?
(I don't actually play Fortnite, but it's the game Sweeney mentioned)
The exact same shit happened with WoW and MMO's too. So many games were released trying to pull gamers away from WoW by trying to be like WoW, when gamers already had and liked WoW
You might not ever be able to have the market capture of WoW, but if you offer an entirely different experience than WoW, you at least won't be competing with a game that has insane inertia
Why didn't they learn from the lessons of what, 20 years ago?
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u/BbyJ39 4d ago
We remember how many “WoW killers” came out and flopped hard or just sputtered on supported by a small handful of whales.
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u/LongJohnSelenium 4d ago
WoW was the Everquest killer though. Overnight just destroyed it. Though granted SOE shot itself in the foot at the same time and taught the MMO industry to never release a sequel to your cash cow.
Everyone thought if it could happen once, it could happen again, and kept trying for like ten years.
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u/XsStreamMonsterX 4d ago
The problem is that they're still thinking like they did back in the 90s and 2000s. Remember when Street Fighter II came out and suddenly everyone started making their own fighting games (and companies would often have multiple ones) resulting in a golden age for the genre? Same with C&C and WarCraft starting an RTS arms race. While that worked back then, it doesn't work now due to the high cost and long development times for games.
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u/Geeseareawesome PlayStation 4d ago
Ease of access and prices also play a factor.
Why should I buy the knockoff when all my online friends are playing the other one? They're both available for similar price on the same online store as well.
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u/manav907 4d ago
Yeah. In the arcade days you play whatever machine is available. In the console days you play whatever your parents buy or let you buy. Then it was just availablity and word of mouth but Now with internet people know how and where to get the "best" so anything half baked doesn't fly for long.
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u/Geeseareawesome PlayStation 4d ago
They only fly when there's a market for it.
New genre? Look at PUBG for an example
Other games neglecting the playerbase or untapped markets? New one comes in and takes over, like Fortnite on console
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u/Neemoman 4d ago
Add to that, the culture changed. Back then, you wanted to play what everyone else was playing. Who was everyone else? People you knew personally. So if your circle played Street Fighter, guess what you played? Then a totally different circle wants to play what everyone else is playing, but their "everyone else" is playing Tekken.
Today, playing what everyone else is playing means the one single game the steamers and YouTube people are playing. Why? Because everyone else is playing what they're playing. And everyone else is almost literally everyone.
The diversity within genres from back then have stayed (the handful of fighting games instead of one or two), but new games and IPs are "this is the one" and all others are rendered irrelevant.
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u/JarlaxleForPresident 4d ago
The golf game I just got has a fuckin battle pass
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u/SqeeSqee 4d ago
For me it's not even the cartoony part that bugs me. I simply hate playing online games. I want a game I can pop in and enjoy a story or long single player campaign for a while and immerse myself. instead of .... run 'n gun then loot bs.
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u/owa00 4d ago
Meanwhile, here I am loading up my 10000 Terraria playthrough.
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u/TacoTaconoMi 4d ago
That's exactly it. The market is already saturated with exceptional games that people spend most of their time in.
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u/dreamwinder 4d ago
I don’t just miss the 90s-00s because there were quality games that didn’t demand 5000 hours of my time, I miss them because developers did weird shit.
That era got us stuff like Animal Crossing, Rez, Katamari, Mirror’s Edge. A little later on we got Noby Noby Boy, Portal and Patapon. (Obviously this isn’t remotely an exhaustive list.)
Gaming is currently at a level of generic I didn’t think possible. We used to mock stuff that “looked like mobile games.” And now every large title is just devoid of any aesthetic imagination, much less gameplay innovation.
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u/gr00grams 4d ago
Gaming is currently at a level of generic I didn’t think possible.
Important to note, it's pretty much just triple A / large studios.
I have had some of the best gaming years in my life, in the past 5-10, and I'm a geezer by reddit pushin 40+
Is a good example.
Whether it's your type of game or not, the point is there is nothing truly like it at all, which is quite the feat when there's thousands upon thousands of games out at this point. It's one of Steams' most positively reviewed games, etc. And for weird shit, hoy boy, you have no idea all the weird shit in it.
If you look on something like Steam DB, you'll notice most of all the highest rated games, aren't triple A's.
https://steamdb.info/stats/gameratings/
Gaming has never been better, it's really just the triple A's struggling now.
They're too big, too profit driven, playing it too safe.
That's really all it is.
You'd never get a game like Kenshi even if it had the best graphics ever from a triple A.
(I could've used a lot more examples, but didn't feel the need to)
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u/Rich-Pomegranate1679 4d ago
Oh, you must mean that you want another game as a service with a built-in battle pass and paid DLC that we've already been working on instead of finishing the beta version that we're going to shamelessly sell you for $70 (but don't worry, we'll probably have the base game finished sometime within the first year).
--way too many CEOs
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u/AntonioS3 4d ago
They are too dense and will only realize it too late when they start to go bankrupt.
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u/Reach-Nirvana 4d ago
Even then, they won’t realize it. They’ll just blame somebody else.
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u/MisterGoo 4d ago
And they will lay off the devs. You know, the people who actually MAKE the games.
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u/JWAdvocate83 4d ago
looks at you blankly
Who keeps letting this crazy talk in our board meetings?!
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u/kdebones 4d ago
Welp, he was right in the first half, a lot of high budget games aren't selling. Tho because "they're not social enough" is a level of brain rot that's indicative of the overarching real issue.
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u/worldDev 4d ago
Saying this right after a single player game sold 20M copies in like 2 weeks is crazy, too. How out of touch can this guy be?
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u/Boring_Isopod_3007 4d ago
That's because for game execs, a 20m sales single player its not "success". What they want is a chicken farm of golden eggs like Fortnite or gta online.
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u/Shadowarriorx 4d ago edited 4d ago
Then they can continue to go out of business. Nobody is happy with a decent year or minimal growth year. They all want a super high profit year and line must always go up. It's what has rotted the entire american economy from the inside.
Edit: I'm salty because I saw my dad as a small business owner be happy to keep his 2 guys employed at an autobody shop. Not concerned with growth, just constant work and good quality. Business was sustainable, which was enough to raise us and put food on the table. Insurance companies basically put him out of business. He couldn't do the work without losing money on some jobs.
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u/cecily_harvey 4d ago
My econ classes in college really underscored how detrimentally consumptive and unsustainable our current model of capitalism is.
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u/xSlippyFistx 4d ago
I don’t even think you have to learn it in an Econ class to understand it’s unsustainable. Just have a job that discusses financial goals and just experience it for yourself. I work for a consulting firm I just look at how my company will have projected revenue and profits for the business. It’s always an increase in profits. Even if we miss by a few million which is still an improvement from last year but NOT QUITE the projected value, we get a round of layoffs. It’s absolutely unsustainable. You’d think when if we were to smash the projected values we all get nice raises or bonuses right? Naw but the big wigs at top sure do. We get raises that don’t even keep up with inflation. The jobs are going to campus hires and offshores like India to squeeze that extra bit of profit every year so forget about quality of service at that point.
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u/LuckyPlaze 4d ago
Hogwarts Legacy was one of the best selling games last year. No multiplayer, no online and microtransactions. Just a solid game.
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u/cardonator 4d ago
Can we just admit, too, that this game was just fun? It had a bunch of nonsense in it with a pretty silly storyline, but it didn't matter because it was simply fun to play. I don't know what has made game devs think people want to play tedious games with chores in them constantly, yet that seems to be so much of what is released these days.
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u/Hauptmann_Gruetze 4d ago
"devs think people want to play tedious games with chores in them constantly" my brother in Christ, have you seen how much money mobile games make? its obvious that they would try this for PC and Console games too, and it fails hard as we can currently see.
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u/Scrofulla 4d ago
The problem that they don't seem to be able to see there is that mobile games are time wastes for when you are on transport and the like. Whereas when you are at home you kind of want and have access to better and more rewarding forms of entertainment.
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u/Drolb 4d ago
Yeah I don’t want to play anything that needs a control pad or keyboard on my phone, touchscreens are too small, fiddly and insensitive for that. So for the best experience I’m limited to the established phone game stuff since that’s all optimised for the control format.
When I’m at home and wanting to game, I’m on my PC or my console and never my phone, and I don’t really want anything that could be on a phone gameplay wise because those games suck compared to good console/pc games.
It’s not fucking rocket science is it?
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u/foreveraloneasianmen 4d ago
I'll gonna be honest .
I bought the game day 1 and dropped half way .
The quest and rewards are awful , it's just numbers. Very repetitive
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u/vordaq 4d ago
I would go so far as to say, forcing social features into games is actively making them less enjoyable.
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u/Brido-20 4d ago
This. Gaming is a great way to get away from people for some alone time when you have to interact with them every other occasion.
Compulsory multiplayer just sucks the joy out of it.
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u/yeezusKeroro 4d ago
The perceived value of a game, he continued, "grows in proportion to the number of your friends that you can connect to," for everything from playing games together to chatting by voice, watching virtual concerts, or "doing other kinds of cool, virtual things online."
He's so close yet so far. The social aspect of a game is extremely important, but being online and multiplayer doesn't necessarily equate to this. Zelda Breath of the Wild was a very "social" game because the world was interactive in unexpected ways and there were people talking about new cool things they found for months. We need more fun interactive games. They're devoting too much money toward graphics, IP/franchises, and big open worlds when they should be focusing on gameplay first and visuals second. Maybe adding multiplayer last.
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u/LongJohnSelenium 4d ago
Maybe adding multiplayer last.
Multiplayer focus is fine, its just got to be multiplayer for the benefit of the player and gameplay, not an afterthought that mostly exists to force people online and create monetization paths.
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u/ReactionJifs 4d ago
I love all of the social aspects of (checks notes) Elden Ring?
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u/Tillustrate 4d ago
Elden Ring has social aspects, like the messages and invading. But yeah, it's not the reason why it became so popular.
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u/given2fly_ 4d ago
Games like that are "social" in that people will talk about it online, watch streams of people playing it etc.
Surely that's got to be the goal? Make something that takes over the social conversation amongst gamers, without necessarily having to be a "social" game with online play?
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u/redfoobar 4d ago
Yes, but I think this is confusing causation with correlation.
Arguably any really good game that gets a big user base has people talking about it regardless of genre or mechanics. So at that point is more a result of the succes rather than the source of the succes.
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u/Reuniclus_exe 4d ago
I don't understand why anyone would buy any AAA game at launch. I have too large of a backlog to drop $60 on a game that won't be finished for another year.
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u/TanTanExtreme2 4d ago
Bud you nickle and dime us with bug ridden games, shove a battlepass down our throats and riddle the games with micro transactions. The Fuck do you expect? Give us quality games with those budgets instead of games as step away from mobile games.
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u/JorginJargin 4d ago
Its called "rent seeking" and its the final form of any publicly traded company regardless of what they make from insurance, to movies, to auto parts to videogames ( see: insurance, movie pass, heated seat subscriptions, seasons and passes respectively).
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u/Bauser99 4d ago
I can't wait til I have to pay a subscription for each bolt and screw in my car
"AutoSecure, the revolution in vehicle assembly fastener solutions... Now only $14.99 per month! (per unit, fees apply)"
News tomorrow morning: 3 killed in unavoidable one-in-a-million freak accident when automated vehicle screws unfasten at highway speeds, driver negligence suspected
Reddit comments tomorrow afternoon: Wake up, sheeple! The driver agreed to waive liability in the Terms&Conditions when he decided to have a car to get to the job he needed in order to not die, so it's his own fault if you think about it Logically.
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u/JohnnyJayce 4d ago
Game studios should take note from Hollywood. Eventually you are putting too much money into your project. Money that doesn't even need to be put into it.
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u/TheWuffyCat 4d ago
The money isn't the issue. The people spending the money thinking that means they understand what makes a game good, is the issue. Corporate heads and finance people should not be dictating what's in a game, but they are, in part because they're investing a lot of money.
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u/Difficult-Celery-891 4d ago
I think developing a good team of developers and not firing them right after a game is launched is pretty important too. I don't believe it's just a gaming industry issue but companies don't put enough money into staff training and retention. They should treat good developers and managers like star athletes and work on their bullpens.
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u/Golden-Owl Switch 4d ago
“If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.”
- Satoru Iwata, CEO of Nintendo, 2013
Note that this was during their worse years of the Wii U era
It’s important to have corporate leaders who understand both the business AND game development aspects of their company and industry. Without that experience and personal investment, a company will not achieve meaningful long term growth
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u/Princess_Of_Thieves 4d ago edited 4d ago
I want to add that, during same said era, Iwata and other high level employees at Nintendo took large pay cuts. I believe Iwata himself saw a paycut of 50% personally. There are a lot of lessons other companies could take from Iwata and his leadership style.
I'm willing to get had it been anyone else, the Wii U may well have been the end of Nintendo in the console race. Dumber corpo shitheads would just axe the console division to save money and move on. Say what you will about Nintendo as a company, but that would have been a tragedy. Thank goodness they had someone who could appreciate the art as well as the business.
EDIT: Another good quote;
— Iwata speaking at GDC
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u/SuperSaiyanIR 4d ago
Nintendo maybe a piece of shit company to consumers and customers alike, but they know how to make games. Unfortunately, Pokemon isn't one of them, but hopefully that changes.
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u/Golden-Owl Switch 4d ago edited 4d ago
Personally speaking, as both a consumer and (former) developer, that’s the most important thing
I buy a game because I want a good game, and Nintendo, to this day, consistently makes good games
Not every project they make is maximally profitable, but every bit adds to their total portfolio, which pays serious dividends in the long term thanks to remakes and remasters
Too many other big game companies nowadays are too busy floundering around with other nonsense and aren’t focusing on that most basic of principles
I personally feel that Nintendo still understands the core values of the craft, and definitely are NOT a “piece of shit company to customers and consumers”. But we’ll agree to disagree there
Also they aren’t in charge of Pokemon. They only have a partial ownership over TPCi
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u/The4th88 4d ago
I buy a game because I want a good game, and Nintendo, to this day, consistently makes good games
Holy shit, this.
It doesn't matter what console gen in history you're talking about. You could walk into a shop at any time since the release of the N64, buy a brand new console and any random Nintendo IP launch title blind and you're guaranteed of a few things:
The game will be good.
The game will be finished.
The game will be playable on your hardware.
It's a sad indictment of the rest of the gaming industry that at least points 2 and 3 aren't the standard, but that's the current gaming environment.
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u/Synthetic_Thought 4d ago
To be fair, Gamefreak makes Pokemon, and the IP is shared between them, Nintendo, and Creatures Inc, who mainly handle merchandise and the TCG. The games are simply a means to make and sell merchandise, which as far as I'm aware, is the real moneymaker for Pokemon. Unfortunately, this means the games will never have the time needed to be really fleshed out experiences, as they're moreso excuses to get 100+ new potential toy designs into the public consciousness.
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u/TheWuffyCat 4d ago
Right, that's a part of what I'm saying. The Execs go "We're <insert long-standing studio name here> we make good products." and then forget that the reason that studio makes good products is it's team. They don't trust the team, so they don't attribute their success to the team, so they don't care about the team, and so the team doesn't perform for them.
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u/xenoriddley 4d ago
no, I'd argue the money is also an issue. Didn't one of the new Tomb Raider games, I think the 2nd one, sell like 5 million copies, but it didn't meet sales expectations due to how much it cost to make?
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u/the_nin_collector 4d ago
the last 4 years of cinema history saw 30% of the worst flops out of 100 years of cinema.
Let that sink in.
If you take a list of the 100 worst flops from the last 100 years. 30 come from the last FOUR years.
We are pretty much seeing the exact same thing in the AAA game industry right now as well.
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u/domiran 4d ago edited 4d ago
There are plenty of single player games that sell extremely well that aren't social at all, though?
Complain all you want about Valve. As long as they stay a private company, I'm happy with them effectively holding the reigns of PC gaming.
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u/JingleJangleJin 4d ago
It's been almost fifteen years since EA boldly stated 'single player games are finished'.
These corpo fucks are choosing to be ignorant.
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u/domiran 4d ago edited 4d ago
Final Fantasy 16, Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, Black Myth Wukong, God of War, and like every Zelda game says hi. 🙄
[Edit]
Added a few more obvious games.
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u/Sharktoothdecay 4d ago
pokemon the most profitable thing ever is a single player experience first for most of the games before you can trade and battle
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u/Akrevics 4d ago
and they're still getting lazy with that. there's so much they could do to make that experience richer for the billions of fans they have, yet they're churning out weird mechanics for another 100 more Pokémon or variations in another bs region and oops ran out of time, here's a half-assed rendered world to plop them into, we'll take your $€60 and no sales 5 years after release.
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u/Golden-Owl Switch 4d ago
Because that’s where the money is.
Pokemon is an oddball among game franchises because the actual game sales only comprise a minority of their profits
The bulk of the franchise’s income stems from the ludicrous volume of merchandise and licensing they do based on the Pokemon designs. It’s like 4-5 times the game sales
It’s no exaggeration to say that the 100+ new designs per game they make generate far more profit that the game they were made in
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u/Sharktoothdecay 4d ago
ever since they graduated from the 3ds these games have gotten bad and i say this as a life long pokemon fan
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u/Grievuuz 4d ago
Elden Ring, Wukong etc.
The single player statement is from a time when the RTS was on the way out and the MMORPG was in its prime and MOBA exploding in popularity for sure, but its still funny because Skyrim released like the year after, and hit like 60m combined sales last year.
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u/TheUrPigeon 4d ago
BG3 being the most recent--and arguably most fervent--argument against this "games have to be social" thing. Just make a good game.
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u/Neotokyon7 4d ago
There are some multiplayer games that are doing well. Warframe is seeing a surge in players right now. Turns out if you listen to player feedback and make the game FOR the players instead of for profit, people actually like it.
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u/thegreatbrah 4d ago
Elden ring is the first single player game i played in a long long looooong time. I loved it. Baldurs gate, while capable of multi-player, but solo play was more convenient, so I'd count it as a single player game. Both are great.
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u/Agentkeenan78 4d ago
My brother in christ I do not want to be social. I want a rich and rewarding gaming experience. The market is saturated with multiplayer games if that's your thing. People don't love live service. People have had enough battle Royale shooters. When a game is good, you're not gonna believe this, but it sells.
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u/EastCoastBen 4d ago
I honestly miss the old fashioned one player game. The reason The Last of Us, Bioshock, Red Dead Redemption, etc do so well is because you get to focus on the game as you purchased it. There’s no pressure to buy your way through it to defeat other players or to look cool in front of other people.
It’s not a social pressure environment.
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u/DarkR124 4d ago
God these CEOs and high level execs are so fucking dense.
There are tons of games with obscenely high budgets that sell very well. Want good sales? Make good games.
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u/petesapai 4d ago
Sweeney is just being a salesman here and so many people don't see it. He purposesly doesn't mention WuKong, Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate.
And purposely doens't mention concord. And he seems to think Suicide Squad is not a live service game.
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u/Numerous-Cicada3841 4d ago
What’s funny is WuKong was built on Unreal Engine so they made a pretty penny off of that game.
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u/Chit569 4d ago
He is literally only fluffing up Fortnite and jerking off because it still prints money for them.
If he wants to put his money where his mouth is he would make a new IP that has all those features and see if it survives in the market place. It wouldn't because people don't buy video games because they can "talk to their friends in voice chat" in them.
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u/TheUrPigeon 4d ago
Yeah the games are high budget, but that isn't reflected in the final product. That's the problem. You don't see anybody complaining about BG3, and there is zero social interaction with other humans in that game.
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u/AnIcedMilk 4d ago edited 4d ago
Also, if we wanna use BG3 as a good example, looking at the game of the year every year sonce 2017, only one required you to play multiplayer.
The rest were all single play games. Zelda: BOTW, God of War, Sekiro, TLOU2, (It Takes Two), Elden Ring, BG3
Social interaction has nothing to do with this. It's that the ones in control know nothing about game design and similar, and force those below them to trace trends which ends up with games made with little actual passion behind them. Amongst other things.
Also, as far as I am aware, none of these games have microtransactions (Though I didn't check, so I may be wrong, but I doubt it)
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u/Significant_Fox_160 4d ago
This was my thought exactly. The truly great games I can think of in the last decade were primarily single player. Sure some have multiplayer/online components, but that’s not the driving point of the game.
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u/flacdada 4d ago
Yeah you put 100 million into a game.
Features are missing, it’s buggy, incomplete, hollow and shallow.
Of course it’s not selling.
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u/Odd-Zebra-5833 4d ago
Technically you can do coop. It’s just not forced on you which is nice.
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u/Cless_Aurion 4d ago
The game has also - surprise surprise-.... NO microtransactions! Such a coincidence!
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u/Big-Routine222 4d ago
"We keep spending obscene amounts of money to make shitty games with no soul or creativity while shoving micro-transactions into them. Why are the games selling badly??"
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u/OrganikOranges 4d ago
Games are now:
80$ for the base game
40-50$ for DLC
60$/year for battle passes
Nearly unplayable at release due to glitches
Mediocre gameplay/story with too many cut scenes
But it’s probably because they aren’t social enough
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u/PixelPirates420 4d ago
Oh man I have a CRAZY industry idea - focus on making fun games, not slot machines
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u/Background_NPC666 4d ago
"High budget" most spent on looks, gameplay is just copy pasted from other games. No wonder they fail, you play one, you've played them all.
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u/Hefty-Marzipan 4d ago edited 4d ago
I guess Concord and BG3 were just anomalies then?
Edit: first is an example of an expensive multiplayer game that failed, and BG3 is a single player game that was super successful. Both contradicting his thesis
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u/InspiredNitemares 4d ago
Concord should have been f2p. I honestly thought it was a borderlands style game from the first trailer I saw and I was excited about that. The characters and world could easily be re worked
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u/Superfragger 4d ago
games are obviously costing way too much, have too many people working on them, and are taking forever to make. the original world of warcraft was created by less than 100 people, cost $63 million (more or less $100m today adjusted for inflation), and was made in 5 years even though they completely wrote the engine from scratch.
the reality is that a game like that would probably have 3-400 people working on it nowadays, cost half a billion dollars, and take 10 years to make. imo profit-driven corporate bloat is the biggest reason why we now have so many shitty titles that cost way too much to make.
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u/RGJ587 4d ago
High development cost used to signal quality. It no longer does, and gamers know it.
The fact is, AAA gaming has been largely unimaginative, soulless, and boring over the past decade. And in that time, developers continued to milk every last drop of cash from a generation of gamers who grew up during a period where gamers were the opposite. They were inventive, creative, and mind blowing. That time has long past.
If the gaming industry is gonna survive, its gonna have to return to its roots. Smaller dev teams, longer incubation times, less overhead, more freedom to break boundaries. Bring in better writing. Bring in new ideas. New dynamics. gaming in the 2020s is defined by the "genre", limited by it, handcuffed.
Every developer making a game right now should step back, and look objectively at their project, and ask "does this game need to be made?" It's a simple question, but deeply informative in the dialectic.
No we don't need another reskinned battle royale, or moba, or hero shooter. We don't need another wow clone, or open world checklist simulator. We don't need more of the same. we need more of the different. We don't need more "games as a service" when all that "service" entails is different ways to squeeze the player into forking over cash.
To be fair, gaming is not alone in this unimaginative black hole. Entertainment in general is in a serious gully. Movies, Television, and even books have been far less impressive and captivating than in years past.
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u/ThisNameDoesntCount 4d ago
Probably shouldn’t have raised the prices and also have the games run like ass on release
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u/Surfugo PlayStation 4d ago
If they want to keep upping the prices of games, fine. But the quality better reflect that. I see no reason to spend X amount on a brand new release when it's going to be buggy as fuck and not playable until weeks, if not a month after release.
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u/Cheap_Professional32 4d ago
Where is all the money going anyway? So many games used to be made with budgets a fraction of the size and were superior by almost every metric. Surely 80% of the budget doesn't go to paying mocap actors
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u/BrokenFlatScreenTV PC 4d ago
Oh look it's Tim Sweeney.
The guy who...
claims Steam is a monopoly while he pays publishers to not sell games on other store fronts, claims Apple is a monopoly while at the same time making excuses why it's okay for consoles to use an Apple like ecosystem, claims he is fighting for "consumer freedom" on mobile while his store front doesn't natively support Linux, and who pushes for side loading on Apple, but won't push for the same on console.
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u/Xipher 4d ago
On the Linux topic, UT2004 shipped with the Linux installer on the disc. Now when they buy studios they make them remove native Linux builds, for example Rocket League. Tim can fuck off, he is a rotten waste of oxygen.
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u/JMDeutsch 4d ago
Just👏🏻make👏🏻finished👏🏻single👏🏻player👏🏻games
Most of us aren’t looking for Fortnite, COD, Battlefield, etc
Stopping trying to setup the ability to milk the corpse of a game.
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u/CrawlerSiegfriend 4d ago
The problem is that making a good game is no longer the top priority.
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u/Oregonrider2014 4d ago
Big games with big prices don't sell because they big suck.
People don't want to pay premium to beta test a game advertised as complete.
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u/Skastrik 4d ago
Most high budget games these days are the 5th or 7th iteration in a series. Because investors wanted a safe bet on something that worked before. Or they are a clone of something that worked for another big company to compete.
They just haven't innovated enough or been creative.
Meanwhile budget indie games are blossoming because they try out new concepts, some fail but others work beautifully.
So maybe take risks with smaller budgets?
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u/ahamling27 4d ago
It’s funny. When it’s a passion project, we see huge success. Minecraft, Terraria, Stardew Valley, Shovel Knight, etc., are all examples of gamers making the game they want. Sure, you can argue they’re just indie devs being indie devs, but they all just started making a game they wanted to see. They didn’t start to appease shareholders. We need to get back to supporting developers who make games that gamers actually want to see.
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u/InvalidFate404 4d ago
For every indie dev developing their passion project that succeed there are hundreds, if not thousands of others that doesn't succeed. The game industry as a whole is infamous for relying on passionate developers who love the medium to compensate for the relatively lackluster pay.
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u/sherk_lives_in_mybum 4d ago
false equivalency though. You dont see all the indie devs that fail because why would you? They had no money for marketing. You see every triple AAA failure because they spend so much on marketing. This makes it seem like AAA games fail more than indie games, but they are just more visible.
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u/mechanab 4d ago
High budget isn’t a replacement for creativity or knowing your audience.