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That’s true, and it’s a subset of another reality: execs are ruining life.
What’s happening to games in this gen is just what happened to the larger tech industry before, MBAs that pretend to be human are put in charge of a product after creators already made it successful.
Execs and the late stage capitalism game they play is ruining everything.
Seriously. They’re actually betting against their own long term survival and it’s baffling.
if capitalism was designed in a way that long term was relevant, we would have this conversation…
They don’t care about their own long term survival. Their goal is to boost the next quarter and collect their bonuses, and when things go south, they jump ship with their golden parachutes and head to their next executive job.
Believe it or not, video games are art, and art is no longer for art’s sake. It’s for shareholders. That’s when these decisions happen.
Return to Obra Dinn is some quality piece of art. There are still people making art instead of marketing.
AI making art while humans turn the gears, sounds like the future we all wanted.
You say that, but not all art is made solely for money. Just take a look at the indie scene (games, music, film, TV, etc) as an example.
Right! Can you imagine if Rembrandt had an executive committee behind him dictating what to paint a picture of, then micromanaging brush strokes? That’s the games-for-shareholders model, and it’s fucked. Games are best when made by people who are passionate about the project, not solely about the profit. My big hope now is the publishers learn from the Sony debacle and simply publish the game, be happy with their profit cut, and shut the fuck up.
Can you imagine if Rembrandt had an executive committee behind him dictating what to paint a picture of
I get what you’re saying, but you realise all the great renaissance painters worked on commission, right? So yes that’s exactly what happened.
When someone comissions a painting, they choose the subject and that’s about it. Sure if they didn’t like it they might not pay, but that’s probably already more hands off than any publisher in the games industry.
Stop
Buying
AAA
Games
Stop
And don’t confuse high budget indie studios with AAA game developers
And don’t confuse high budget indie studios with AAA game developers
On the other hand, there are a lot of publishers out there who really shouldn’t have things called indie when they’re involved.
The ones who have struck gold (perhaps multiple times) and are already worth multiple millions, publicly traded or even owned largely by investment firms. Some like this still footing everything on the players (crowdfunding and then early access) and on top of all of that going onto places like Imgur and Reddit and doing unpaid marketing there (doesn’t seem great for the actual devs, and then there are things like multiple accounts/sockpuppets/deleting+reposting etc).
And even without the unpaid marketing stuff, a publisher has a lot of ways to screw over developers and/or players usually with the goal of money in some form.
Are you going to be brave enough to name and shame?
Are you challenging me?
For the most part, it’s not hard to find them if they’re doing the things I said and you pay attention while they do it. Look at how many titles a publisher has on Steam, see if they have a wikipedia page and if so if there’s monetary info involved. Recognizing a dev/publisher might also be part of it.
Also with self-publishing never being easier, some of my skepticism starts there. Another is games seeming somewhat shovelware-esque or like they’re trying to ride the wave of some other successful game/trend and that’s why targeting consoles early-on is likely important to them for the money.
I originally wasn’t, but off the top of my head some of the stronger examples:
Just because something is cute pixels that does not mean it’s indie. A good introduction to this is the existing discussion of Dave the Diver and its ties to Nexon. EDIT: Also, lootbox controversy with Nexon and Maplestory
One involving unpaid marketing and crowdfunding/early-access: tinyBuild. ~$473m IPO. Publisher of Hello Neighbor, which also has some controversy around it on quality (also mobile games with micro-transactions, because kid audience). While searching on this, I also saw someone angry about them doing testing on Steam and then a post-launch Epic exclusivity. EDIT: Also one of their games not having all content available on GOG.
The game Roots of Pacha had a license dispute (I do not know the cause, but the dev did end up getting the Steam rights) their original publisher had at least 6 different accounts on Imgur (and they also did the crowdfunding/EA thing too, and no it was not like 1 game per account either and some of those accounts are mysteriously gone now). Same publisher was in the news about controversy over boob physics, and I don’t doubt it was either suggested by the CEO for the headlines or just marketing clicks if controversy hadn’t have happened.
Even if people don’t care about stuff like this enough to stop buying the games, I hope they at least try to not enable or reward blatant self-promotion (particularly the more dipping and questionable practices involved) on the fediverse
Indie games are the best!
I think I’m doing my part as a patient gamer.
I recently played RDR2 and Witcher 3. They’re very good AAA
Man this is the way… I just started fo4. Got the bundle with all dlc for like $30.
2 days later got the massive patch.
And if runs on Linux… patient gaming is the best way
patient gaming is the best way
I think being a patient gamer makes more sense nowadays (or at least since PS3/PS4 days) than it did before.
Many games are unfinished, unoptimized or need patches, and all this annoying experience is done by the users which I like to call “unpaid beta testers” then when all the needed fixes arrive we can fully enjoy the best experience, at the best price.
Same, bonus points if you don’t even buy the AAA game when it’s on sale, instead buy an indie game with that money.
That’s what I tell myself mostly, though I want to get better at buying indie games new.
If you are gonna play them right away, I don’t see why you should not!
This is a nonsense take.
The Last of Us, Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, God of War, Doom. There are plenty of AAA games worth your time and money. Every bit as lovingly crafted as your precious indie darlings.
Maybe stop buying them blindly because you’ve seen a flashy ad for them on TV. There’s plenty of bad AAA games that do all the gameplay competently but have literally nothing to say. Where you can’t feel the touch of the designer at all, and all you can hear in it’s place is a hubbub of design-by-committee noise. The only thing those games have to say is “give me your money”.
I would argue elden ring (haven’t played, not my style but heard many good things about it) and bg3 are not AAA studios, they don’t release high budget games frequently, they focus on one genre, and don’t have much (especially large budget titles) outside of that area of focus.
That list is also staggeringly small compared to The list it’s derived from, and I would say whatever list includes those games has a much larger “awful titles” section to go along with it. If anything I would say the games you listed (that are from multi title developers) are the exceptions that proves the “don’t buy AAA titles” rule.
He’s referring to the working conditions.
Larian Studios who made Baldur’s Gate 3 could technichally be called an Indie dev despite the big budget and employee count. The company is privately owned by its founder and the games are self published.
Notice that other than Baldur’s Gate and Elden Ring, those are pretty old titles at this point. The AAA studios are doing everything they can to make sure those nightmares never happen again.
Best I can do is preorder day 1 DLC.
🏴☠️
I wonder… does anyone know how many shares in a company you have to own before you can call-in during shareholder meetings to ask questions? I’m wondering if we could push back against this by “”“asking questions”“” that make majority shareholders aware of the damage companies are doing to their own brands. I know modern capitalism is all about “money today, fuck tomorrow”, but I wonder how many shareholders would be happy knowing that companies would probably make more money if they’d stop cannibalizing studios and franchises.
You know, play into their greed and make convincing arguments about how their decisions are ultimately robbing them of money.
There was a guy a few years ago who spent $40k on Nintendo stock in order to ask about a new F-Zero in a shareholder meeting. They said no at the time but we did get F-Zero 99 last year so maybe he did make an impact.
You’re assuming that they don’t know that, lol. They do. It does not matter because people keep shoving money up their ass and number goes up.
They have a term for that type of shareholder… that I can’t think of right now, sorry. A lot of big companies have things in place so ‘disruptive’ shareholders don’t ruin their plans.
Exxon just sued its shareholders for crying about climate change.
That sounds too absurd to be true. Source?
https://kbin.earth/m/nottheonion@lemmy.ml/t/97603/Exxon-Mobil-is-suing-its-shareholders-to-silence-them-about
Original: https://lemmy.ml/post/15690226
World version: https://lemmy.world/post/15452272
Damn. Thanks for sharing, friend.
Same as it ever was.
It’s the unchecked capitalism.
Better labor protection and antitrust laws would help, but the fundamental push is towards maximum exploitation of worker and customer. Power consolidates and then abuse for profit becomes easy.
Whereas in a communist economy where people didn’t have to struggle to survive, game developers could focus on improving their craft and telling whatever the funnest story they can think of is. We can already see this on a small scale with the difference between indie passion projects like Hades, and AAAA cash grabs like suicide squad. Imagine if everyone could afford to chase their passion instead of money.
Don’t understand why you’re being downvoted. The only thing there I disagree with is the use of the word “economy” 😂
Probably because leftists use “communism” like it’s an immediate and obvious goal, but dismiss any criticism of past efforts to actually get there. It effectively becomes an unquestionable fantasy.
You could also probably get there with universal basic income
It’s unchecked because customers don’t really care. When is the last time there was a boycott of a game due to how the developers are treated?
Capitalism doesn’t get checked by consumers, there are a billion things too much to properly pay attention to and no viable alternatives.
It gets checked by either regulations and laws or replacing it with something else.
There are so many viable alternatives. I’ve got an increasingly long list of things I won’t tolerate in games anymore, and I’m nowhere near running out of games to play. The big problem is being able to identify which of those checkboxes are checked or not; PC Gaming Wiki is working for this purpose lately, though it shouldn’t be necessary.
Boycotts are only one tool in the box. Legislation should be addressing things like consolidation of power and anti consumer practices.
Unfortunately, the US has one far right party that has many lunatics that don’t believe in government (along with other insanities), and one center-at-best party that does that wield power effectively.
Ruining franchises. Games are the best they’ve ever been.
No, that’s very short sighted. In the long run, they are ruining innovation, which will ultimately ruin the industry.
It was hard to not mimick your shitty arrogant emphasis to shame your awful take.
True, play animal well.
Capitalistic motives is incompatible with any art form. Executives are the harbingers of the mindless greed of it.
The good art we see under capitalism is in spite of it, not because of it.
Activision has fucked Warzone 3 so badly, and it’s actually so incredibly improved from what it was during the disaster that was WZ2 but still a far cry from the peak that was WZ1.
Thanks Todd
“Even when you believe you’ve found yourself the right job, it can evaporate in an instant, and then you are suddenly competing against hundreds or thousands of people for every job position,” Kai said.
Well that aint news
It’s related to the bonus system. Execs are rewarded for share price increases instead of making good games. They’ll alienate the whole playerbase and ruin 30% of future sales for 5% increase in revenue for current sales. The 5% is enough to increase the share price so that CEO’s are entitled to compensation. So to min-max as a CEO it’s best to alienate the playerbase.
Also spending more money on marketing than on the game will result in more games sold at the cost of next games sales in the same franchise.
The games industry is well overdue for a more product focused approach for brand building. Diablo 5 will probably never be made since polling will suggest no interest. It was a major cash cow and Diablo 3 sold like crazy because Diablo 2 was great. It’s the enshittification of video games in full swing.
The entrenched Blizzard Activision is getting out competed by Paradox but Paradox is starting to screw up in the same ways by releasing Cities Skylines 2 without mod support. Cities Skylines 1 was good because of mods and Cities Skylines 2 is good, but not as good as 1 with mods.
Big companies should take a lesson from the indie book and do more closed betas, more early access and more mod support. Sell DLCs that improve a complete game instead of it being the last 10% of the unfinished game. Adding a map section like in Horizon Zero Dawn is great.
