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!).
I hate fighting games. I especially despise melee action games. I don't love 3rd person perspective. I haven't really played JRPGs.
Nier:Automata jumped at the top of my list and kept getting better. Even my (non-gaming) wife watched me playing because she was curious and the art and story were fantastic.
A unique experience that is difficult to put into a review. FWIW, my other favourites are Mass Effect, Deus Ex, lots of Sierra & Lucasarts point & click games, etc.
Story telling and surprises (and style) in NieR:Automata were just top notch.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
[2]: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-slow-death-of-hollywo...
It showed what kind of profits you could make off yearly refreshes of software, while minimizing development costs.
Why would an MBA take a chance on new IP when they have the above as an option?
But again: Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Nintendo have always been vertically integrated. This is not new.
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.
Same deal with games, many previously good IPs are now stuffed with gambling mechanics as the producers controlling it push for it.
I too dislike gambling elements in computer games. I simply choose not to buy such games. If there was a shortage of good games without gambling mechanics, I could see your point. But clearly there's not.
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.
Minus the slavery, have we really expended that much human effort and equivalent wealth and time on something in the modern era? The only thing I can think of is Free software products, shit like Linux.
[citation needed]
The 10th-tallest pyramid was built in Memphis, TN 30 years ago [0] and it's now used as a Bass Pro shop. Say what you will about working conditions in the US in the 90s, but I don't think it'd be fair to call it "a super-feudal economy and society".
That said, pyramids seem to have been built with hired labor so the point is pretty muddy regardless.
You know what's today's 4000yr long monument to vanity? Elon Musk's orbiting Tesla
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.
Furthermore, I know some gamedevs personally who release an early access level title with exclusivity deal on epic's playform just so that they gain access to further funding to finish the game and release on Steam for the actual shot at success. They take advantage of the money to fund their work, but have said that the numbers do not compare to that of Steam.
I know technically they're doing it to make money, but I can't help like feel it's also something of a labor of love as well. It would have been much easier to leave people in my (our?) position behind, so I appreciate the heck out of Valve for putting in the effort. I imagine they're going to have my goodwill for a long time as a result.
When it proved hard to bootstrap that and seeing that the Steam Machine itself they started looking for options. Wine was already pretty good but DX11 support was bad. I do not know if it was serendipity that DXVK started showing promises around they same time they started looking into wine or whether it was the reason for them focusing into wine in the first place.
The rest is history, although the side effect is that it pretty much killed native ports for AAA games on Linux [2].
[1] for some values of native. Many, most, ports are based on internal close source equivalent of wine.
[2] I do not really care about native vs proton, but it would be nice if game companies did officially support proton.
It speaks more to me that they released Proton rather than shelving it after losing the original motive.
Personally I think at the very least the developers deserve equal blame for accepting the bag of money from Epic.
Money is a strong motivator but the Phoenix Point devs chose to break promises from crowdfunding to accept it. I think that reflects worse on them than it does Epic personally.
Reminder: Valve was forced to double-down on SteamOS/Linux by Microsoft's then-intention to shutdown 3rd-party storefronts on Windows. I have a complicated relationship with both Steam (as a Proton user) and Epic (for pulling Linux support on a multiplayer game I already own!), but I still appreciate more competition in the arena: GOG alone won't cut it.
Well steam runs on and is actively supported on linux, Epic takes games that used to support linux then removes linux support and makes the games exclusive to their store.
So for me personally, a steam monopoly would be better. The epic game store's existence has actually caused games to be removed from the platform I use. It's taken away choice from me. If it stopped existing, I'd be happy.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/23/21078989/rocket-league-ma...
The customer has no benefit from the lower cut epic charges.
Epic doesn't treat everyone equally. Big games like Cyberpunk 2077 are allowed to also sell on other platforms, while smaller games either go exclusive or go with everyone else.
Competition is good, but I'd rather have GOG be that competition to Steam than Epic purely based on their anti-DRM stance.
There isn't a conspiracy here. Epic pays developers to make certain games (like Control) temporarily exclusive to EGS. Other developers, like CD Project RED, have not made such a deal, and thus Cyberpunk 2077 is available on many different PC game clients.
There are plenty of games on EGS--large and small--which are not and have never been exclusive. Examples include The Unfinished Swan, SuperHot, and Axiom Verge just to pick three off the top of my head.
[1] https://www.dsogaming.com/news/epic-games-wanted-darq-as-an-...
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_that_treat_gog_custo...
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/metro-exodus-pulled-from-s...
A significantly large part of why Ubisoft started cozying up to Epic was not because of the 5% stake tencent has in it.
It was because Steam pulls all kinds of nasty shenanigans but ubisoft will not state any of it publicly because it would hurt their relationship.
Steam has outright pulled all ubisoft games before, and ubisoft took the blame. People assumed it was because ubi wanted to push uplay; but it was all about someone at valve deciding that we'd violated some rule about content distribution.
We gave UK players of AC:Syndicate a country specific hat which wouldn't have made sense to the global market.
They didn't warn, we woke up to see that kotaku[0] had run an article about it before we even knew ourselves.
This is not an isolated incident, just a dramatic one that I remember as my own personal shifting point w.r.t. steam, because I'd only just started working at Ubisoft and was hating on uplay and was quite fond of steam.
[0]: https://kotaku.com/ubisoft-pulls-big-games-from-steam-165567...
> We gave UK players of AC:Syndicate a country specific hat which wouldn't have made sense to the global market.
So Valve makes sure that players from different countries get the same content? As a UK expat that's something I'm glad of.
I wonder how they compare to Apple.
What yearly developer fees do you need to pay to keep a macOS game on Steam? Is it to Valve?
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.
I bet, if nvidia wanted to, they could publish geforce now there, for example.
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.
When the same IP gets passed to a dozen different studios who each create vastly different experiences, that's milking and I generally don't like it. The whole point of an IP is that you know what to expect, and having different studios working on the same IP is contrary to that goal.
Nintendo does not milk IPs, IMHO. They actually put a lot of though into their games and ensuring the the experience is top-notch. Compare Nintendo Zelda games to the few non-Nintendo variants: they've all been trash. Which is exactly why Nintendo rarely outsources games.
I think a distinction is if the Publisher treats the individual development studies as functionally equivalent black boxes. With Activision's brutal management of Call of Duty as maybe the key example. Where CoD assigned studios often go bankrupt after a couple games, and several have spun off after great hardship and will presumably never work with Activision again given the choice.
One fun exception from the more "indy" side of things that comes to mind is the playfulness that resulted when Croteam and publisher Devolver let a bunch of indy developers play with the Serious Sam franchise and created some fun games in a variety of styles outside of the FPS the series is known for.
That's an overstatement: Nintendo co-develops a lot of titles with other studios, outsource a lot of their smaller IPs (mostly to Japanese studios), _and_ is being rather friendly to letting people do smaller spinoffs of their big properties.
Examples of third-party colaboration, in no particular order:
- Koei Tecmo co-developed Fire Emblem: Three Houses, did both Fire Emblem Warriors and Hyrule Warriors, which are franchise spin-offs using their Dynasty Warriors engine and gameplay, and Nintendo trust them so much that their next canon Zelda game will be a Breath of the Wild prequel developed by them, using the Hyrule Warriors label.
- Bandai Namco is more or less the main developer of Super Smash Bros since the Wii U/3DS iterations, with Sora Ltd being essentially just a consulting company run by Masahiro Sakurai. Bandai Namco is also co-developing the new Pokemon Snap, and developed Metroid: Other M.
- Capcom developed both Oracle of Ages/Oracle of Seasons and Minish Cap, two portable and very well regarded entries in the Zelda Franchise.
- On the Mario side, pretty much all of their Mario sport titles are handled by Camelot, with the exception of the Mario & Sonic Olympic series, which are published by Sega direcly, and their highly praised portable RPG series Mario & Luigi was developed by (sadly defunct) Alpha Dream.
- Then there was that time when they gave the Mario franchise to Ubisoft and they made a Rabbids-crossover, XCom-like game, which is just too goddamn funny to not put in here separately (especially since it was also fairly well received by critics).
- Good-Feel, another Japanese developer, made entries to both Kirby (Epic Yarn), WarioLand and more recently, Yoshi franchises (Wooly World/Crafted World).
- There is a metric shitton of Pokemon spinoffs (that's probably where you will find the worst offenders of bad outsourced games, to be quite honest, but even then there are series like Pokemon Mistery Dungeon, by Spike-Chunsoft, which are very well regarded).
- And as a another Zelda example, Cadence of Hyrule, made by the Crypt of the Necrodancer developers.
There are more examples, but overall a large part of their output nowadays is made by third-parties, with of course a lot of their projects - big and small - being handled by their in-house studios. That's not even counting the fact that some studios readily associated with Nintendo, like Intelligent Systems and HAL Laboratory, are actually independent (they just like working with Nintendo).
Sorry for the large response, I was bored.
Is that actually the point of an IP? I would argue that an IP is more like Star Wars where the games that can come from it can vary in format and mechanics. And less like Battlefront where the expectation is a specific set of mechanics and game modes. I would argue that if someone where to make a non RPG Mass Effect that would still be within the IP and wouldn’t go against the core concept of IP.
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.
I worked there for 6-7 years and the CEO fought off vivendis acquisition. Which was not the first.
He has even gone so far as to decentralise the Canadian studios so that if the company was somehow acquired the aquirer could not close down studios without heavy fines from the Canadian government.
The way it was described to me was that there's two major types of fine that the canadian government will levy against large companies that dump lots of workers at once.
1) More than 50 people within a 4week period.
Usually this means that the company must continue paying employment benefits on behalf of the company for a period of a year (iirc).
2) More than x% of your company being closed down.
You can get around #2 by claiming redundancies or claiming that you've moved the job to another canadian state (or, centralised a position), but once you give the studio its own legal entity and place an MD in charge (who is legally responsible for the studio) you can't do that any longer because the parent company continues to have a legal presence in the country, but operations are considered separate/independent.
Thus, if you close down the studio you've effectively terminated 100% of employment there which will garner super heavy fines.
Also also: Ubisoft doesn't want to piss of the canadian government either because nearly their entire profit exists in the tax break that montreal gives game companies.
.. but, like I said, this was told to me only a few times by a few high level directors and it was when we were talking about Vivendi trying to buy us, and they were also not laywers, so it could be a lot of chinese whispers.
But I've spoken to Yves, and while he's a really genuinely nice person... he will salt the earth before he sells the company.
But you knew what I meant and are being pedantic.
What I am repeating is a "fact" I've heard multiple times from multiple executives and I live half a world away, I've never been truly interested in what the various political systems are in Canada (or the US, or Mexico, or wherever) but I am acutely aware of different laws in those countries too.
For instance in some states in the US it is legal to turn right on red.
If I use the wrong terminology when referencing county or region then it has little bearing on the things I've actually heard.
I never claimed to be an expert on Canadian law, just that I had heard this anecdote and I'm trying to say as often as I can that I'm not an expert in law or Canada itself.
I understand your point, but it _is_ rather pedantic as it doesn't actually change anything about what I said to get it wrong.
I'm sure you know very little about how Switzerland is segmented but you are aware of the direct democracy antics of the country.
Ignorance of one thing does not preclude knowledge of another.
example tech subsidy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Research_and_Experi...
Tangentially, open-source game engine Godot keeps getting better and better, and it's just a matter of time before a significant game is made using its tools: https://godotengine.org/
It is also the tier1 engine sponsored by Google and Microsoft for their 3D offerings, Godot needs to grow a bit more to reach that level of relevance for game studios, AR/VR companies and Hollywood now looking at Unity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Un...
The underlying C++ source code is available for both commercial engines, but Unity charges high fees for source access, and only on a direct per-studio basis, whereas Unreal 4's source is available on GitHub if you pay $20/mo. The vast majority of Unity developers work within its IDE and C# API. There are definitely strong network effects from the sheer number of developers using Unity, such as the amount of documentation, tutorials, and C# code available online.
But again, Godot is fully open source and getting consistently better as it evolves. It's C++ based, closing in on competitive rendering, ported to every relevant architecture, and has a full IDE and scripting system. It reminds me a lot of the Blender project. At some point, some significant video game IP will be built using it and shake things up. It's just a matter of time.
Unreal 4's source has been free to access for a while now. The $20/month thing was just when it first came out.
Most developers don't work with them, and their customers represent a tiny less "gaming educated" population. It's like using cellphone games as a gauge on the greater market.
That's a bit insulting. Mario and Zelda are a few of the consistently best game franchises. Smash Bros gamers aren't "uneducated"
> It's like using cellphone games as a gauge on the greater market.
The mobile game market is bigger than the console and PC market.
The whole 'Nintendo is a thing unto itself' narrative is fading quickly.
I mean, a part of the reason why indie titles work there is that Nintendo is refusing to offer a AAA gamepass, is using underpowered hardware and is charging a price premium for it. They very much are resisting trends and are their own thing, and it's kind of hard to really use them as a long term market barometer because it can and will backfire as often as it works.
They also kind of are in uncharted waters too. This is now the first time I think they don't have a dedicated handheld and home console, and just have one platform. A lot of why they were able to survive mistakes was having the handheld market as an evergreen to fall back on.
I fully agree with you, but that narrative has started changing only in recent times. Not that long ago, I would have mostly agreed with the premise that "Nintendo is a thing unto itself."
If my memory serves right, Nintendo was dipping feet into it since at least GameCube/Wii era, but only with Switch they started seriously being, in my eyes, a not "unto itself" kind of an entity.
By the numbers, mobile gaming is the greater market. It's traditional gaming that's becoming the niche.
IMO Bethesda decided to sell to MS because their recent games cannot generate enough popularity. They can only hoped for skyrim and are struggling with their old engine.
Truly mystifying why they'd want to create an MMO. It's as if they hadn't been following the news. The success of WoW is incredibly hard to repeat, and most studios who try fail, no matter how much money they throw at it.
The MMO space has been, WoW aside, a money bonfire for one and a half decade at this point.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjagneaux/2020/03/30/elder-...
I'd guess that the article has it wrong and they're mainly on the free tier and that's not the subscriber count though.
In May 2016, 5 years after Skyrim was released, it was valued at $2.5 billion, now it's being bought 4 years later for $7.5 billion.
I appreciate some Bethesda fans have a weird agenda, but you are wrong. Also, Starfield has been written in an overhauled engine, so again, wrong[1]. Although to be honest, it's probably the same engine with updates and they're just saying that to try and stop the small minority of rabid fans that keep on harping about their imagined deficiencies of the creation engine with every new Bethesda game. That's then always a massive hit.
[1]https://bethesda.net/en/article/4IwKWIj174Cb2QNTTtBAEb/todd-... - paragraph 9 "[The new console cycle has] led to our largest engine overhaul since Oblivion, with all new technologies powering our first new IP in 25 years, Starfield"
Adding the back catalogue to gamepass (and probably taking it all off steam), is part of the price too.
Hell, if the price was $7.5 billion even after the FO76 flop, what would it have been if they'd pulled it off? Making a whole new type of MMO.
So yeah, a failed multiplayer/mmo game is a bigger failure imo, because it is hard/impossible to recover from
Seeing as there are still some ancient problems with CreationKit (physics over 60fps, widescreen support, etc), I'll be interested to see how much they will overhaul it and how many old bugs will have to be fixed by the community (see nexusmods "Universal Patch" for any CK Bethesda game).
Similarly with widescreen support, there isn't really an issue with it, you can use any resolution by modifying configuration files but they just... do not bother to polish it up.
(note that any bug that can be fixed with normal mods isn't really an engine bug but a content bug - though some mods do work by hooking the engine executable)
It's easy to have no fixes, when it can't be fixed.
> small minority of rabid fans that keep on harping about their imagined deficiencies of the creation engine
You post comes across a bit aggressive and insulting.
Mind you, Minecraft's income comes from a lot of merchandise and spinoffs, whereas GTA is mainly from the game itself.
I was curious; RDR 2, also a Rockstar game, is the #14 best selling game of all time apparently; I didn't know it did that good. The other GTA games are also in the top 50.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
[1]: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-06-26-minecrafts-con...
Virtually every release Rockstar does sells millions. And from my point of view their games are fun too.
The performance is good enough for any of my purposes. I don't doubt it could be better.
The security thing sounds like a real problem. I didn't know about any of that.
I wouldn't be so sure. Sure, they are not GTA or CoD, but Prey, Dishonored or Doom have all sold rather good.
The hardware-is-sold-at-a-loss argument that people like to use to defend closed console stores isn't as convincing when the console makers also own the biggest money making game studios as well.
Go Epic, go!
Kind of ironic how bad an argument that is when discussing anti-trust. It's a form of dumping to distort the market. It prevents new competitors becoming viable purely by selling hardware.
https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/us-submi...
I would love the game industry to fully embrace Linux. If cloud gaming gains more traction, the industry might just do that. Why develop games to run on custom-built blades in a data center when generic blades exist?
That's been a dream for a long time:
Take a look at what all linux games are lacking and what nearly all AAA game that aren't on linux have.
...
DRM and Anti-Cheat.
Let's forget that DRM is trash. Publishers want to have it, and they don't care about our opinion of it. You can't really "port" DRM, you have to develop a whole new one for Linux and figure how to prevent easy-peasy eBPF programs to make cracking it easy.
Anti-Cheat is another story. Valve and Easy Anti-Cheat are currently working on bringing it to Linux. You need that and you want that for any online game. Probably not as hard as DRM, but still requires a lot of linux specific work.
From the outside, all we see is very few games being produced. From the inside, its far more complex; something like a Dark Decade for Valve where even they weren't sure what they should be working on. Hundreds of failed prototypes and ideas. Major technical issues with Source 2 that took years to fix. L4D3 was under development, but ran into huge scope creep (full open world with variable length days depending on time of year and hemisphere, variable tides based on moon cycle, crazy stuff like that). They were working on a tech showcase codenamed ARTI/Artifact using a brand new voxel-based game engine separate from Source (and after the game was canceled, the name was taken and used for the now-released Dota 2 Card Game).
Sure they could have pushed out a VR game every year for the last 5 years to maybe get to the same level of interaction fluidity but they would all feel subpar, not quite there, like the vast majority of other VR games.
Valves strength is that they a have a structure that allows experimentation without a hard deadline, they can afford to throw millions at the wall and see what sticks. This allows themw to take a decade between large, ground breaking projects. They're not beholden to YoY or QoQ growth.
They've had what? Two duds in 20+ years? Not bad when you consider the rest of their output are beloved classics.
Granted they have a good few money printing machines to help them work like this but I would argue that they have these money printing machines because they have the ability to experiment, because of their structure.
Can't think of a Valve game that doesn't fit this description.
It's a heck of a "demo". It's about the size of Half Life 2.
But that is not its sole purpose.
The only debate is whether is a game first, or a demo of how full games work in the framework/hardware first and a full game because that was deemed the best way to showcase the what is possible.
It's weird, they've got some seriously good franchises that they haven't done anything with; Half-Life could use a sequel every few years; Portal could become a massive franchise; Team Fortress 2, CS:GO and DOTA 2 are huge money makers but I think they're reluctant to make sequels to those because of balancing and pissing off the existing, invested player bases. (I think that may have happened when they went from CS:S to CS:Go, where the latter had very lucrative monetization options, lucrative but morally dubious because of off-site trading and gambling)
the only thing I see that they could really change in a new title would be the graphics, but I don't think that's much of a selling point to the audience. cs players care more about getting >100fps on their potato computer than pretty graphics.
And Dota 2 is by far their biggest game.
I'm old enough that I remember people saying this in 2014. Actual data on active users - https://steamcharts.com/app/570#All. This indicates that it's far from it's peak of 1.2M active players but 700k active is still respectable.
> Dota 2 is by far their biggest game.
Not by players. That would be CS:GO (https://steamcharts.com/app/730) with 900k active players.
Both of us created new account to so that noobie wouldn't be thrown into deep water right away. Note that me and my friend were 'baby sitting' - playing neutrally not trying to win vs lower rated opponents.
Out of 10 games 7 had hardcore smurfs in them. People in stack dominating their lanes. I don't see how anyone new and without any friends could possibly survived through such acid pool.
Imagine you are starting to play chess and 7/10 opponents are rated master and will crush you. And its kind of crush that you can't really learn from either.
I really don't see how dota can grow when there are so many alternatives.
Then in the harder ranks you can dial back those mechanics and make the game more skill based.
Just a little tip for Valve there. I'm sure they're reading.
Only after that should they be allowed multiplayer.
On a side note, the bots are not working since the latest patch.
It's interesting to see there seems to be some evolutionary pressures at play as a couple of new routines are being used, not just 'rotate on the spot', one or two shoot now (yes, I got shot by an XP farming zombie) and one does epicycles which makes them surprisingly hard to shoot.
We may get to a point where there are practically no "medium-large" developers and only "massive" ones like Microsoft, but I'm confident we'll still get great games from outside the massive groups.
They had only $4.3 billion cash on hand as of 2018 (surely more by now thanks to the success and maturation of the Switch.) But Microsoft just dropped a little less than double that on ZeniMax.
I wish Nintendo were in such a rock-solid place where I'd feel confident about them existing forever like Disney but I don't think that's ever been the case.
Edit- The people downvoting me have apparently already forgotten about the Wii U. Imagine if they had two such systems in a row, without the DS/3DS line as a profitable fallback. Such are the possibilities of the future.
When Nintendo's doing well, they're doing great, and everyone seems to forget the bad times. The GameCube era wasn't much better, but at least the GameCube and GBA were profitable/break even from their launches, as opposed to the Wii U and especially 3DS post-Ambassador price cut.
Would be interested in a discussion or any kind of rebuttal from others who are actually familiar with Nintendo's financial history.
To be clear: Nintendo as a company operated a loss from 2012-2015. An incompetent CEO could easily exacerbate that into a death spiral. Don't take Nintendo for granted, is all I'm saying.
It's a possibility but pivoting to software isn't easy by any stretch, and it wasn't something Sega should have even been able to do (financially.) The only reason it happened is because Sega's biggest debtor, Isao Okawa, forgave that debt on his deathbed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/17/business/isao-okawa-74-ch...
In a slightly altered timeline where Okawa didn't do this, Sega would have went under and its IP's would have been sold piecemeal to the highest bidders.
"It eventually became one of the most prominent figures in today's video game industry, being the world's largest video game company by revenue"
i.e. on the verge of bankruptcy according to ^
And there you have a key difference between Microsoft and Nintendo.
As a Nintendo baby, it'd be a dark day if some conglomerate bought them.
I was just thinking though, if they needed money they could easily raise crazy amounts of cash from their fanbase via crowdfunding.
It's frustrating because there's a lot of untapped potential.
I feel Apple Arcade sucks. I recently subscribed, cause I thought maybe my daughter would enjoy it. But most of the games are still too hard for her. So then I tried to play some games on Arcade for myself, but can't say I enjoyed it. Played a few games for 15 - 30 minutes then got bored. There just seems to be very few -if any- really quality games on Apple Arcade, at least from my point of view.
A few days ago I ordered the Retroid Pocket 2 [0], I hope this device will help me get my gaming fix.
If the Retroid Pocket 2 provides me and my daughter with a fun experience, then later I'll order a 2nd one for my daughter. I believe old NES/SNES games are probably easier to play for a 3.5 year old child compared to most of Apple Arcade's offerings. My daughter can already handle a simple gamepad, so as long as the game doesn't use too many buttons (4 directions + A/B/X/Y), a game should be playable for her.
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[0]: https://www.goretroid.com/products/retroid-pocket-2-handheld...
It's fine for extremely casual or touch based games but doesn't work for anything serious.
NES games might be hard. I never really had a NES while I was young. But I do know for sure some SNES games that will be easy to play. E.g. Mario Kart & Unirally. There's some videos on YouTube that shows other games that are playable by young children [0]. Super Double Dragon isn't too complicated either I think and the Retroid Pocket 2 can be connected to a tv using HDMI cable and can use BLE to connect controllers. So that way I can play together with my daughter at the same time, to make it even easier for her.
Here's a video that suggests some NES games for children [1].
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Like, that's a lot of money, even for Apple, and then I'm not sure Nintendo would want to sell?
Nintendo definitely wouldn't want to sell but it's publicly traded so a hostile takeover is always in the cards
> Valve will quietly exit software development altogether, and pivot to building custom vanity knives using their hardware manufacturing experience.
At least indoe games still have a chance. (among us for example)
Among Us is just really cheap (free to play on its original mobile platforms, I believe, but that's not really the source of its current moment of popularity).
Plus is a strange case because you need it for online play and some other PS features like cloud saves, so many people have it regardless of what games are on offer. Let's just say that a large number of PS4 players got it at no marginal cost.
Miss Ukraine 1996 married Bobby Kotick's dad, Charles Kotick (for 2 years, before he passed away).
And, you know, all the other independent developers. Of which there are a legion.