r/gaming • u/CiabattaKatsuie Console • Oct 01 '24

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/kdebones Oct 02 '24

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/yeezusKeroro Oct 02 '24

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 Oct 02 '24

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/Iokua_CDN Oct 02 '24

I likes the way Balders Gate did multi-player. I can play the game by myself, or I can have my wife plug in another controller into  my PC and play the game with me.  Like love being able to do that

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u/ArchinaTGL Joystick Oct 02 '24

From a developer standpoint, adding multiplayer last sounds like a nightmare. Unless a game is designed with multiplayer in mind from the beginning you're going to have to rewrite so much code to accommodate for everything that may happen simultaneously. It's magnitudes worse if you're thinking about adding netcode as an afterthought as suddenly you've also got to accommodate for latency between players which would require pretty much every core mechanic to be uprooted entirely.

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u/Jaspador Oct 02 '24

Mass Effect 3 multiplayer felt like it was added at the last kinute and it was a blast! ;)

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u/Uxium-the-Nocturnal Oct 02 '24

The thing that really has me dumbfounded is that you have guys like the exec in the OP who are clearly out of touch, but if they would just listen they would actually get what they want. But instead they just live with their heads up their rears. I am not convinced that employees from any of these companies don't come across threads like this online at some point in their life. So where's the disconnect?

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u/CaptainBayouBilly Oct 02 '24

Multiplayer also appeals to those that want that experience. For those that do not, you won’t capture their attention by making it even more social and online. 

There isn’t a formula that ensures success in gaming other than fun. Sometimes developers and management lose that concept because they’re only focused on numbers. 

The investments that back the humongous releases are choking the industry. Game development is inundated with bean counters and stockholders that don’t care about products, only profits. They will happily release a garbage product if they can make the numbers work. 

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u/WarzonePacketLoss Oct 02 '24

I feel like Baldur's Gate 3 only missed the mark in multiplayer because of the opposite of this. They knew we would all demand it, so they put it in during early access and it was wonderful. In act 1. Act 3 feels like you got tossed into Baikal with cement shoes on if you're trying to play with your friends.

Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled with literally everything Larian did with that game, it deserves all the praise it got and I'll boldly say it is the best game of the last decade, but man I lose all steam in the first zone of A3 in multiplayer.

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u/teh_drewski Oct 02 '24

You have a pretty dedicated friend group to get to A3 in MP tbh

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u/WarzonePacketLoss Oct 02 '24

It's been out over a year, you can grab a couple dudes by the dick and drag them through the stuff you've done 20 times in a few sessions then let them take the lead in A2, which is short. But yeah, we've been on and off. One of them is like "let's finish!" but he doesn't realize how much stuff is left to do and I'm exhausted thinking about it.

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u/Elissiaro Oct 02 '24

I mean... I think at least part of the issue there is probably you having done all that stuff 20 times already.

Especially if you're taking a backseat so your friend can take their time having a good experience, instead of speedrunning the best route like you might have on your own.

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u/Berstich Oct 02 '24

makes me think of Dark Souls/Elden Ring.

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u/Vytral Oct 02 '24

He might mean that word to word marketing is crucial to the explosion of a game, which is true (palworld, Helldivers etc.). Problem is: he sounds like you have to engineer the social marketing, rather than focusing on making a good game that will be talked about by people

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u/BingpotStudio PC Oct 02 '24

I agree. Just a note on your suggestion of adding multiplayer last - games have to actually be built multiplayer first. It’s a coding nightmare to do it any other way.

Any game where execs have suddenly decided to include multiplayer will have forced that game into development hell with substantial refactoring and likely a huge amount of bugs and jank.

Perhaps this gives some insight into their motivations.

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u/pelpotronic Oct 02 '24

Yes, social media, YouTube and various other avenues can be where the social buzz (which companies are interested in) can happen.

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u/SaveReset Oct 02 '24

The social aspect of a game is extremely important, but being online and multiplayer doesn't necessarily equate to this.

Not even social aspect, the game simply has to be good and find it's market. A good game that those who like that sort of game heard of will sell well.

Social aspect is just a form of marketing. Bad game that's all over social media won't sell well, because it's a double edged sword. It doesn't cost as much money as regular marketing, but it's harder to control the message.

It can act as a sort of a multiplier. A good game nobody heard of will start getting players if social media posts about it are positive, but if it's a game marketed to high heavens and the social media posts all talk about how shit it is, that marketing gets thrown in the trash.

If the reason a game is highly sociable is how bad it is, that's not going to help much. It might boost a game with zero marketing, but no matter how much people shit talk it online, it won't make it a popular game.

Great recent example of this is Concord. A bad game that got SIGNIFICANTLY more hate than it deserved, but it was still a bad game and didn't exactly deserve positive posts about it either, so it died in weeks. Hundreds of millions down the drain, because the game was bad, even if it's presence on social media was extremely high compared to it's player numbers.

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u/ChloeHammer Oct 02 '24

My son and his friends make games social by playing completely different single player games but all being on discord together. They’ll occasionally stream their game if something fun is happening. They don’t need publishers to shoe-horn social into a game that should be single player.

And then they also play co-op and multiplayer games. But sometimes you just want the single player experience.

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u/AnnoyedOwlbear Oct 02 '24

BG3 is similar - absolutely gripping game with massive social reactions.

But while you can play it multiplayer and the shipping content on Tumblr could choke a moose, it's awesome because of the storyline and gameplay.

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u/Total_Wanker Oct 02 '24

I genuinely cannot believe how out of touch these weirdos are

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u/L1A1 Oct 02 '24

That quote basically covers everything I hate about a large part of the current gaming scene.

I have zero friends on my Steam or PSN accounts by choice. I simply do not want to play games with other people (friends or strangers), don't want to talk to them or do 'cool virtual things online' with them. Currently that means that a fair proportion of most current gen games are off limits to me, so I just don't buy them.

I'll happily buy and play the shit out of single player games, as examples, I've played through GTA5 and RDR2 repeatedly, but found the online versions to be basically unplayable due to, well other people. I've still no idea why they didn't make the online content playable offline with computer controlled opponents.

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u/recctyl Oct 02 '24

"The social aspect of a game is extremely important," only to those that actually prioritize those things. and it also depends what kind of game it is.

theres a helluva lot of gamers out there that couldnt give a rats ass about any social aspects of a game.

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u/No-Feedback8635 Oct 02 '24

I'll bring up 2 pretty good examples too,

RDR2 is one of the most 'social' games I've seen because your actions kinda shape the world, NPCs will react for weeks after your crimes, lawmen will be actively searching for you, newspapers exists and so on. One of my favorite moments was when you help someone by sucking snake venom out of their leg after they were bit, and after sometime if you go to the town/city nearest to that encounter you'll find them outside a shop, which then you could talk to them and they said they'd let you buy something on their tab. That's for a single player social aspect.

Death Stranding (for the multi-player aspect) does it fantastically, (spoilers) in lore after central knot city gets destroyed in a voidout, there aren't that many Porters left, so it makes sense you aren't able to see them, but what you can see are things they build, generators, bridges, ladders, climbing ropes, those boxes where you can store things in for other porters to deliver. And have I mentioned the signs? They are every where and they range from warning you of either time fall or BTs to signs encouraging you to keep on going and even signs that make your BB happy.

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u/EjunX Oct 02 '24

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment, but to be clear from a game dev perspective, adding multiplayer at any time except at the beginning is a huge disaster.

If you meant that having multiplayer at all is low on the priority list, I'd agree with that.

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u/CovidWarriorForLife Oct 02 '24

I'd say Skyrim was like that as well, the NPC interactions were awesome