My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. Honorable mentions go to Spelunky and Stellaris. It's to everyone's great regret that a single one of these titles was purchased by one of the shitty publishers you mentioned, fortunately it's the one that's on its last legs.
There seems to be an overall issue now where the quality of the good produced and the benefit to the consumer is divorced from the value extracted by the producer.
For instance, you can make a mobile game company that aggressively monetizes re-hashed bubble-poppers or match three games. With that, you focus not on innovation of pleasing the customer but on making the most money per customer so that you can feed it back into your marketing. The most exploitative game wins.
This is a more profitable strategy than simply trying to make a fun game that people want to play.
With most consumer markets, we find similar stories of customer exploitation being a better play than simply making a great product. This is not as much the case in B2B.
How do we reign back in the markets? It doesn't seem like consumer choice is working out very well.
Maybe marketing is at the core of all of this malignment.
I wish it was true, at least for my favorite genre. Technically speaking, a small team of developers can create excellent games when it comes to creativity, design, playability etc. but for some titles there is need for a good story, then turning it into acceptable animations, large worlds, complex graphics etc. that's where probably only a major game house can deliver because of the number of writers, developers, designers, actors needed. My favorite games of all time were the Mass Effect trilogy; they were technically great, but the writing, character development, voicing and direction was their point of excellence. I would take ME1-3 story arc over most recent titles. Unfortunately many game studios think only in terms of FPS and technical trivialities that cannot turn a dull story plastered with FPS scenes into something that one still remembers after 10 years. Not been a gamer for a while, so I may have missed a lot lately and would love to be proven wrong (details welcome!).
When publishers were publishers and developers were developers (80s and 90s), it seemed like there was healthier competition. Even if there were a lot of abusive deals struck.
Now that we have giant, integrated publisher + development conglomerates, there's zero incentive to step out of that structure to publish a popular indie game.
It feels like news sites prohibiting links to external sites, and the world's the poorer.
That success and the fortune they now had to protect seemed to hemorrhage their creativity or vision or concern. After that, we got Oblivion and Skyrim. Nice but very safe and uninspired games. And the best Fallout was the one from Obsidian Entertainment, not Bethesda Game Studios.
Success kills? Money kills?
With limitless resources, all ideas are valid.
How do we reign back in the markets? It doesn't seem like consumer choice is working out very well.
Even without the mobile market, The story isn't much different. You either throw yourself out there in a sea of indie games, or you find a publisher to pitch and give your IP rights to in exchange for stability. The latter is just harder to do nowadays
There was great optimism 20+ years ago that the Internet would change this with music, artists would have direct access to their fans, the middle man would be eliminated, and the major labels would crumble. That's not what we got, we just ended up with a new group of megacorps like Apple and Google and Spotify duking it out with the old majors for control of distribution.
To have watched these dreams die in the music industry and see a very similar dynamic unfolding in the digital native industry of games makes me think that maybe this isn't a technology issue, maybe it's something that runs deeper in society and the way people are wired. Then again if we go way back we can argue that the problem was created by technology in the first place (monopolies on music distribution were impossible back when everything was live, they only emerged once we devised technology for recording and copying audio!).
Some Indie games are great, but there are still lot of really great big budget story based games being made that an Indie studio just couldn't produce.
>This is a more profitable strategy than simply trying to make a fun game that people want to play.
Still loads of high quality, very profitable, games being made e.g. RDR2, TLoU2, HZD, Ghost of Tsushima, Uncharted, Spiderman, Doom, Gears, Halo, Ratchet & Clank, Cyberpunk2077 (CDPR can't be considered indie anymore), Forza, Gran Turismo etc.
Sony in particular is really delivering with their single player story based, big budget games.
Just a thought: You got these big "movie budget" games. They need to make that budget back, so they use (a large part of the budget for) marketing, in order to sell way more games. This then consumes a very large part of the market. Problem now is that a large chunk of the money made in the majority of the market is spent on marketing. And this chunk of money is locked in with the industry giants, the indies and smaller devs can never get to it. Marketing ate part of the gaming industry.
That's a highly subjective statement, and a blanket one at that.
You could also say that the worst games are made by independent developers and that would also be true at the same time, because "independent developers" is far from being a consistent group.
....yayy?
For these big conglomerates, the trendy thing is to have your own games store. Complete with exclusivity deals, privacy concerns, and plenty more.
That's not to say that every game on a store has these issues. However, I think the lesson from mobile app stores is: don't discount the impact that a storefront can have on what's allowed to succeed. Stores can exert their control with more than just removals.
Indies can't escape this. Even if they wanted to sell their game independently, not being on one of the big stores hurts visibility. Not all of them get the luxury to be able to expect their users to follow them to their own site/store/etc.
Right now, Steam is still the leader and obvious home for a lot of these otherwise-independent developers. Again, if the big conglomerates get what they want, this won't always be the case.
How else are they going to get people to use these stores?
People complain about the loss of functionality like screenshots or the in-game browser when using Epic. And there are exclusivity deals. Complaints against those things are valid, and the actual implementation of the storefront needs a lot of improvement, but I'm wondering if a Steam monopoly would have been any better for consumers and developers.
To me it sounds like a lot of consumers were happy with the monopoly and saw the exclusivity deals as disruptive as they had to migrate their friends list and set up a lot of things just to play that one hyped title. But when it comes down to the hard issue of staying afloat I can see how the money Epic offers to game studios is enticing.
I wonder how they compare to Apple.
HN: TEAR DOWN THE APPLE STORE MONOPOLY! Also HN: Steam is cool and pulls 30% from developers.
Steam being the de facto choice is another issue entirely, and yet another discussion for their fee structure.
But granted, the indie game market (and mid-sized publishers like Paradox) are super important right now to fight against the AAA / massive budget game devs and publishers.
Mind you, ID has been a bit of an underdog for a long while; their games are / were good, but did not become crazy big like their EA / Activision counterparts; the 2009 Wolfenstein sold poorly ("only" 100K units in the first month); The New Order, its sequel, did a lot better (400K sold in about a month and a half), and Doom 2016 was a hit.
MachineGames also has (uncredited?) work on Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal.
New Order - not at all, maybe as engine developers. Right for that IP were transferred to MachineGames in 2010 right after ZeniMax got hold of them.
As for Doom 2016 - they enlisted a lot of outside help after Doom 4 was scraped. Bethesda's game directors helped them a lot because they already figured how to make "old ip" to sell well with modern gamers (see Fallout 3).
side note:
I don't think id managed to get deliver a lot of good games since John Romero left. (just like John Romero didn't deliver many good games since the separation)
John Romero and John Carmack were like a dream team, but without each other it was meh.
Small team makes innovative and interesting game. Gets bought, makes a good sequel, then milks IP forever.
It's up to you to move on.
I know from experience. The “I’ll write my own engine” bug bit me in 2005. I wrote Reactor3D on XNA in 2007. Worked with Bill Reiss while he masterminded XNASilverlight which eventually would become the basis for MonoGame, which we all love and adore.
What’s interesting is the non-mention of itch.io
I think if enough people want new and interesting games, it will get done. Dev’s are surprisingly open to ideas, it’s the publishers (money people) who have a problem with change.
If you want to build new IP and there isn’t established funding you can go start a Kickstarter campaign to raise money from gamers to go build the game.
Look at Destiny, there was originally planned for Destiny 3, but now the plan is just to make Destiny 2 the only game for the next 10 years with constant content updates. Even now, Destiny 2 of today is a significantly different than Destiny 2 at release.
Microsoft/343 have indicated that "Halo: Infinite" is planned to be this way as well, a living game.
Even indie games like Astroneer and Don't Starve are going down this route of updating a single game over a long period of time.
I'm not sure if that should be considering "milking", but it's definitely a change from how things used to be done.
This probably works better for indies than DLC because I do think people have developed an aversion to DLC due to the big publishers abusing it for cosmetic updates. Personally, I'm very likely to pick up something like Factorio at full price, knowing that the devs are going to be adding "free" content to the base game over the years. But I'll skip over games with "season passes" and just wait for the complete edition to be released.
Destiny seems to have gone through a lot of different plans. The plan before Activision was seemingly to stop after 1 and make that the live service game, though the 1/2 break helped them hurdle a console generation gap so Activision might not have been wrong to push for 2 at least (but yeah was definitely trying to milk it with 3).
This is a significant step down from the old phsical media distribution model where any changes from the initial master were optional.
This allows the studio to make money on the game based on the continued DLC which needs less development investment.
It isn't so much "milking" but rather "acknowledging a change in the way games are monetized because the price of the initial game isn't changing."
That was Activision's plan. Bungie never wanted pop new destiny titles likes CoD. D2 also designed with content being constantly added in mind - main story is super short. It's easier to sell cosmetics to fund "big" dlcs with small seasons in between. At least, compared to convincing people to buy an entire $60(70?) new game and wait for all of your friends buy it as well.
Check it out if you can - it' "Dark Quiet Death" from Season one
oddly enough, call of duty seems like a pretty good example of how to do a AAA franchise. they hit a winning formula with cod4, and they haven't really changed anything since. I'm not a huge fan of the series, but if you loved cod4, you'll love pretty much every game after that.
or an even better example: counterstrike. hardcore cs players will complain about subtle differences in the engine/hitboxes/netcode over time, but the core mechanics are exactly the same as in 1999. if it ain't broke...
Obviously everyone has their opinions, but I thought Andromeda the strongest sequel to ME1 story content wise. Andromeda's failings weren't in the story or the content (ME "B-Team" or not, thanks to Anthem's black hole, they wrote most of the strongest story content in all four games), they were technical. EA absolutely should not have pushed BioWare to Frostbite without properly productionizing Frostbite as if it were Unreal/Unity with a dedicated team and possibly an honest attempt to sell it as a product outside of EA's walls, instead of leaving it as DICE's in house with BioWare struggling to keep up with forked changes. Almost all of the technical problems in DAI, MEA, and especially Anthem seem clearly the fault of this broken engine relationship between DICE and BioWare. If EA wants Frostbite to be the next Unreal (or even just an okay competitor to Unreal) it needs to learn (five years ago) the lessons from Unreal that you treat even first and second party games as if they were third party customers to get the best results.
It'd be better for the industry if we all recognized that the job of a guy like Bobby Kotick is to eat a steak every so often, and then vomit it up for the next 25 years. Someone has to drive a garbage truck and there's nothing wrong with paying him for it.
If you're looking for a good indie shooter, look at Diabotical[0]. It's more Quake than Quake Champions was, or even Rocket Arena for that matter. There's plenty of pro-level gameplay on Zoot's stream[1] as well.
Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 came out of CDProject Red. My favorite FPS of the last few years (Hunt: Showdown) came out of Crytek.
I can't think of a good reason though that there aren't a few very successful indie shooters though.
And they're making a new World of Darkness RPG for the first time in forever.
Instead, I prefer realistic-looking graphics, with moving trees and clouds. I've more often than not spent too much money on new AAA just to look at the graphics and barely play. Unfortunately, games with AAA-graphics with a good story and great original gameplay (no sequels!) seem to get rarer, and the disappearance of independent top-notch game studios could be a reason for that.
I've loved a lot of Devolver's stuff. The Red String Club, Hotline Miami I/II, Katana ZERO .. all super incredible games with gameplay and story that's just as fun as the any of the big AAA shops.
Brilliantly put.
All fantastic games better than most major studio titles.
I had a similar experience with Cosmoteer. And the darn thing is not even released yet! :)
Plenty of games out there, no reason to keep buying the same 3d-action RPG formula from the AAA-studios unless that's a thing you like.
It's a garbage money grab.
The idea that there is a huge nostalgia fueled demand for the original experience doesn't absolve a multi-billion dollar developer from a complete lack of support or quality of life improvements to the game.
There is just too much overlap with the fact that they can literally re-release a game with practically zero development costs.
1) Costs were not zero for the re-release. The only version of the game data (stats, items, enemy spawns etc.) was in the form of an original database backup (from an old employee's personal stash!). Classic runs on the modern WOW engine, so work was required to shoehorn the old data in and reimplement systems and interfaces which don't exist in the current WOW engine.
2) Before Classic's release, by far the most vocal crowd making demands of Blizzard were shouting their slogan "NO CHANGES". I really don't find it surprising that Blizzard has not made major changes since the majority of the player base requested as such...
In terms of audience demographics, I've experienced nostalgia, but frankly I think the president had a point when he made his infamous comment. But I haven't seen any data to support any claims, beyond the existence of private servers.
The company invested significant development into Classic. The project started as a fork of Legion, in order to benefit from a decade of anti-bot measures, compatibility fixes, and Battle.net integration (auth and chat). They then ported the original game forward and added "layering" to avoid crashes that plagued the original game in 2004 and 2005.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, in my experience a massive chunk of the players don't play 'retail'. So the cost is just that, $15 a month.
Beyond that, do you have a source? It's not clear that any of these things they've been developing had significant costs in replicating for Classic.