The industry is starting 2024 in much the same way as it spent most of 2023, with news of layoffs and "for sale" signs …
  • tacosanonymous@lemm.ee
    0·
    8 months ago

    He has some points but the main one, mentioned in the headline, is shite.

    There are plenty of gamers to go around for just about any game, if it’s worth playing.

    If we wanna talk about soulless AAA bullshit like live service, or making trash out of a popular existing IP, that’s a different convo. Taking shareholders out of gaming would benefit everyone.

    • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      What’s wrong with live service games? Soulless AAA games tend to be live service, but so are good games. All of MMO’s are a live service and many are good games (if MMO’s are your thing).

      • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        8 months ago

        what would you day a good live service game is?

        I got slowly beaten out of Destiny by their live service model.

        I play Hearthstone, but I’ve had a full collection for 4+ years now and I recognize spending ~$300/year on a single game isn’t for everyone, I also recognize in 5 or 6 years they’ll close the game down and nothing will remain, and then in 20 or so years even websites and YouTube videos mentioning it will become scarse.

        The same is not true for games like Mario 64, Goldeneye, Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, even Tetris.

        • dev_null@lemmy.ml
          0·
          8 months ago

          Elite: Dangerous is all right. Buy once, no subscription or other crap, really cool in VR. Or World of Warcraft (I played it over 10 years ago, so not sure about now), had a really good time, don’t remember any bullshit from the devs.

      • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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        8 months ago

        All of live service games are designed to disappear once they stop making money, which is a nightmare for preservation that doesn’t have to be that way. Also, their incentives are to keep you playing for longer, which is not the same as making sure you have a good time. If you find a player base absolutely angry at the developer behind a game they play, it’s going to be live service, because of these incentives.

        • dev_null@lemmy.ml
          0·
          8 months ago

          Or they don’t disappear, servers are released or reverse engineered and the community takes over. Yeah, in many cases it doesn’t happen and companies often try to prevent that, but then that’s the shitty thing. The fact the game was live service didn’t prevent preservation in itself or require the developer to make a bad game. It often goes together, yes, but it’s not an inherent property of it.

          • ampersandrew@kbin.social
            0·
            8 months ago

            I’d be curious to know what percentage of dead live service games have had pirate or reverse engineered servers come in to save the day, but my gut feeling is that it’s a very, very low number.

  • ampersandrew@kbin.social
    0·
    8 months ago

    “There is indeed pressure from the market because the standards in terms of production values, length of experience and knowledge of our medium from customers are going up,” Clerc says.

    This is another important piece. Games that used to be linear and 8-15 hours are now open world and 60-80 hours long (often to their detriment). Most of the biggest games are designed to be played forever, which means it’s coming at the expense of buying or playing new games. And development cycles are exceeding 5 years when they probably ought to be aiming for under 3 years.

    The industry is making games with riskier development cycles, adding features that arguably don’t make them any better or more marketable, and they’re designed to make it actively hostile to the next person trying to sell a game to the same customer. It’s no wonder it can’t sustain the current trajectory.

    • fckreddit@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      There is always a market for smaller more focussed experiences. They are cheaper to make, so easy to make profit on. But, they want to turn every game into open world, microtransaction laden shit fest. A good example is Diablo 4, which literally removed genre standard features to make the game more tedious. Throwing hundreds of millions on a single massive game shouldn’t be a standard.

      I love open world games, but I wouldn’t mind playing smaller games like older CoD campaigns too.

  • Phanatik@kbin.social
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    8 months ago

    And I say that Nacon’s problem is fucking over Frogwares over the Sinking City game. How about you pay the developers you scum

  • NutWrench@lemmy.zipEnglish
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    8 months ago

    A strong, cogent argument can be made for having a wide variety of game developers. I don’t see ANYONE saying, “we need more companies like EA, Activision or UbiSoft.”