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.
Hollywood went from a vertically integrated system that handled production, distribution, and exhibition by a single entity to a system where production, distribution, and exhibition were done by separate entities.
It feels like game development went the reverse way.
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
Gambling ruined games like porn ruined movies -- it didn't. It's just a different partially similar thing.
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?