This is absolutely right. The best games now are from independent developers who are themselves barely making it. The games you listed were some of the breakout successes of indie games but there are a ton of fun, interesting indie games out there that are dying from lack of revenue.

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.

> The best games now are from independent developers who are themselves barely making it.

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!).

take a look at Nier: Automata or Dragon Age (1-2, and/or Inquisition). Both easily enjoyable if you like ME.

These are all great games with huge art budgets. Nothing remotely indie about them.

yeah, GP kinda made it clear that they weren’t looking for indie games

It's like when people considered "Star Citizen" an indie game

Seconding Nier: Automata. Rarely have I been as blown away by a game as I was with that one.

Thirding (?) this. The integration of gameplay elements into the story and the story itself are simply amazing. It is similar to Undertale, in that the gameplay is relatively shallow, but is paced perfectly with the story.

Fourthing.

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.

Platinum Games is not an indie studio.

Artistism gap between indie and AAA isn't as big in Japan as in USA, AAA gets more polygons but that's about the only difference.

This, weeb games for the win.

Many indie developers are barely making it. Some are killing it. New ideas come from indies, but sometimes from big companies too. Big companies depend on distribution and marketing, small companies depend on innovation. I have been in video games for twenty five years. It has always been like that.

Where it seems to have broken down is via vertical integration.

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.

I strongly disagree. No publisher or developer conglomerate dominates today more than Sega, Nintendo, or EA did at different times 25- 30 years ago. The past always looks great in retrospect. Today's ecosystem is so much more diverse.

It feels like the video games industry has done the reverse of Hollywood.

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.

It's important to note that the only reason that Hollywood went from a vertically integrated system to a disaggregated one is because the US Government filed an antitrust suit that forced the disaggregation [1]. And now that that antitrust pressure is gone, we see Hollywood slowly returning to a vertically integrated system, where studios, distribution networks and theaters are all operating in close conjunction to push movies that "ought" to be profitable [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

[2]: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-slow-death-of-hollywo...

Someone can correct me, but I'd put blame for the trend on EA / Madden NFL (~1990?).

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?

Yes and no. Big companies do development, but they don't necessarily do more development than they used to. EA and Activision actually probably develop fewer titles than they did twenty years ago. They just spend a lot more on each title.

But again: Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Nintendo have always been vertically integrated. This is not new.

Might be apocryphal, but legend has it Bethesda escaped bankruptcy by taking massive chances with Morrowind. They wanted to go out with a bang, and, creatively, the result was amazing.

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?

Squaresoft did the same thing. Their big creative "here goes the company" game was to be their final project. Final Fantasy.

Sixteen FF titles, a dozen spin offs, and two feature films later...

Sounds like one of these word documents. Fantasy_v3_4\ shared\ final\ alpha\ no-really-this-time\ beta5.docx

With limited resources, bad ideas are ruthlessly trashed.

With limitless resources, all ideas are valid.

That's not it. When you have a profitable IP, the expected value is so high that variance offers you nothing, and hurts. When you have nothing, expected value is so low that high variance ideas are the best -- bankruptcy takes away the sting of negative income.

  How do we reign back in the markets? It doesn't seem like consumer choice is working out very well.

consumer choice is working as intended. They are fine playing "free" games supported by the 1%, and many nowadays won't pay >5-10 dollars for a game unless it's from a very established IP.

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

If we're willing to regulate gambling (which we are, because we do regulate it), then I don't think we can simply wave our hands at mobile games and say "bah, consumer choice. They play the games, don't they?"

For what it's worth, the "Free to Play" sector that dominates a lot of market share isn't just the gambling-lite, pay-to-win mobile sector anymore. We're talking about major titles like Fortnite, League of Legends, DOTA2, Rocket League, Hearthstone, and Valorant, which have millions of concurrent players, dominate streaming services, and often have high-production e-sports events. Even the latest title in the Call of Duty franchise offers a Free to Play Battleground mode.

The issues with gambling are nothing to do with the arcana of business structures and everything to do with gambling itself.

Gambling ruined games like porn ruined movies -- it didn't. It's just a different partially similar thing.

However gambling did ruin many areas of entertainment. E.g. Live music suffered immensely in my home country as pubs preferred to fill the stages with pokies as they made more money from gambling addicts then they did from having a live band around.

Same deal with games, many previously good IPs are now stuffed with gambling mechanics as the producers controlling it push for it.

Some people enjoy gambling, I guess? That doesn't necessarily mean that they're being exploited or that they're "ruining" games.

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.

You're spot on and I wish we knew what to do about it. I think there's a very good parallel between music and games, in both industries it's possible to create great works with innovation, creativity and not much capital. Unfortunately the greatest works don't necessarily bubble up to the top, because the money isn't in producing them, it's in controlling the channels of distribution.

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!).

> The best games now are from independent developers

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.

To use cyberpunk as an example because it's one of my favorite genres, I wonder how many of the people who buy Cyberpunk2077 will have ever even heard of Shadowrun Dragonfall by Harebrained Schemes, or Technobabylon by Wadjet Eye Games. I'm pretty sure that while CP2077 has a vastly larger budget for art, code and Keanu Reeves, it won't even come close to these games in terms of narrative, atmosphere etc.

> Maybe marketing is at the core of all of this malignment.

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.

> The best games now are from independent developers who are themselves barely making it.

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.

> The best games now are from independent developers who are themselves barely making it.

....yayy?

You make a good point to bring up indie development (WoW excluded), but I think looking at the storefronts is also important.

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.

I also quite like a lot of the blockbuster games as well as the indie games. An indie dev will never release a game like Red Dead 2, for one example. I definitely play more indie games, but I would rather the blockbuster market be healthy too.

I feel the same about the movie business. Indie films can be awesome, but some kinds of movies are hard to do without a large budget.

Pyramids are hard to build without a super-feudal economy and society. But we got rid of that, losing the practical ability to make pyramids in the process, because we value other things like democracy higher.

Uhh we still build things like pyramids all the time - Three Gorges Dam, Burj Khalifa, One World Trade Center - it's just we don't build pyramids themselves anymore.

The Burj Khalifa was notoriously built with more or less slave labour, so maybe not the best example.

Or maybe that was part of the point, that unfortunately some large structures are still built by people working under slave-like conditions.

I don't think the Three Gorges Dam was built by something most would call a democracy.

Hm. The pyramids were an architectural and supply chain genius stroke considering when they were made. It also took fantastic human sacrifice to achieve that. One world trade center was built with the assistance of trains and semi trucks brining ore to smelters and steel to the construction site, electricity, cranes etc.

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.

This is only tangentially related, but because you are all leaning on this pyramid analogy so hard, I thought I would mention that many scholars now believe the pyramids to have been built by some type of salaried (and very skilled) labor. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_constructio...

Pretty sure Appolo or Space Shuttle both were more expensive projects than the pyramids, even adjusted for inflation.

The Large Hadron Supercollider?

> Pyramids are hard to build without a super-feudal economy and society

[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".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Pyramid

Call me skeptic, but I’m not really sure that pyramid would be able to stand in place 4500 years. Same shape, way less durability.

Yea building a pyramid is easy, you just need to invent the internal combustion engine first.

That said, pyramids seem to have been built with hired labor so the point is pretty muddy regardless.

Huh? Pyramids exist because they are the easiest comparably thing to make. no one makes them because they have better skyscraper designs now and no one cares about making a 4000yr old tomb.

You know what's today's 4000yr long monument to vanity? Elon Musk's orbiting Tesla

> For these big conglomerates, the trendy thing is to have your own games store. Complete with exclusivity deals

How else are they going to get people to use these stores?

Also the fact that the Epic Games Store exists is a step towards countering Steam's monopoly on mainstream titles.

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.

Steam has been good to me with their native Linux client, Linux client support, proton compatibility tools and community tool support (glorious eggroll proton version). Epic has nothing to offer me.

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 began gaming for the first time (unless you count playing on my roommates' XBox in college) this past week, mostly for The Witcher 2/3--both on Linux. The Witcher 3 was never supposed to run on my platform, but somehow Steam and Proton/Wine made that not only possible but actually enjoyable.

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.

If you want to be cynical, Proton was made from the scraps of a contingency plan that was the Steam Machine. When they realized that Microsoft wasn't going to force their platform onto users, they gave up on Steam Machines and I guess they leveraged the tech to something else.

I think that it is a bit more complex than that. Their original plan was for native[1] gaming on Linux.

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.

That's not being cynical - that's just facts on how and why SteamOS was conceived and developed

Yep, and Post-Its were made from the scraps of what was supposed to be a really strong adhesive.

It speaks more to me that they released Proton rather than shelving it after losing the original motive.

... and unrelatedly, on the other side, the latest appeasing thing called WSL was made from leftovers of a plan to run Android on Windows Phones, which was dropped when Google refused to allow Play Services run there.

Phoenix Point was a game I cared about a lot. Then one day, they announced they would not be making a Linux version. Not long after they announced it will be Epic exclusive for a year.

Is it fair to blame the developers or blame Epic?

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.

I feel ya, I dropped it so hard I even forgot the game until reading your post.

> Steam has been good to me with their native Linux client, Linux client support, proton compatibility tools and community tool support (glorious eggroll proton version)

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.

Yes, but they have been owning that decision ever since. If that ever changes, I will reconsider. Until then they have me as a customer.

>if a Steam monopoly would have been any better for consumers and developers.

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.

Now I'm curious, what title previously destined to have linux support and distribution on multiple storefronts did Epic do this to?

This was the high profile one a few months ago.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/23/21078989/rocket-league-ma...

The exclusivity deals were disruptive because they took games that were promised to come to steam and made them exclusive.

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.

I don't much care for EGS, but Epic is paying small developers a lot for that exclusivity. In the current indie market, that chunk of change can be the difference between profitability and failure.

Or, as the above user put it, the difference between making a creative masterpiece or a clone made to exploit the system.

> 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.

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.

I meant the case of DARQ, where the developer was specifically told to either go exclusive or every other store with no possibility of selling on EGS and other stores. [1] According to the article other indie games got similar offers, while the big budget ones can go to multiple stores.

[1] https://www.dsogaming.com/news/epic-games-wanted-darq-as-an-...

To me, asking smaller games for exclusivity is just asking for commitment. One of the reason I don't buy games on GoG anymore is that the developers don't commit to updating their GoG version to keep parity with other versions of the game.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_that_treat_gog_custo...

I didn't know that. Thanks for that list.

Should we also rail against Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo for paying developers to make games exclusive to their platforms?

No, because it's clear from the beginning what platforms their games will support. That wasn't the case with Metro Exodus [1] for example and one other indie game I can't remember the name off.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/metro-exodus-pulled-from-s...

Yes

I have one particular example of this I love since it happened right on the borderline. I own Anno 1800 on steam, but if you don't you can't (at least for the foreseeable and likely future) - Ubisoft pulled Anno from the steam storefront shortly after launch but! Probably due to some contract shinnanegans with steam, they continue to offer expansions + DLC to users who own Anno already on steam while new users remain locked out from buying it anywhere except UPlay + EGS. Ubisoft has moved a few things over to EGS but I love the Anno example because it landed just as EGS was gaining fame so it sits in the weird middle ground of technically being on steam but not really.

Be a bit mindful blaming ubisoft for stuff vanishing from Steam.

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...

Having bought a Ubisoft game on Steam and having to sit there for minutes while uplay updates itself when I just wanted to play for 10 minutes or so, I have very little sympathy for you.

> 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.

Better customer service, user experience, and game selection. All these various online game stores should be required, by law, to allow any publisher to put their games on the platform for a standard publishing rate. No exclusivity, no special rate setting. Those are classic anti-competitive tactics, and this is yet another front to fight that battle on.

> Right now, Steam is still the leader

I wonder how they compare to Apple.

Apple probably doesn't have much revenue from the OS X desktop store, but if we're talking about total gaming revenue, Steam is around $5 billion/year and Apple is around $20 billion/year. Although I'm pretty sure Apple's # represents gross sales, not their 30% cut. I don't know if Steam's # is the revenue they receive after their cut, or if it's gross sales. If their # is the cut they take, they'd be far ahead of the App Store in terms of gross profit.

From a gamedev friend, there is no money on macOS. iOS and apple arcade is a viable option, but on Steam, the macOS sales are not worth the headache support and development gives you. Lots of quirks to work around with macOS, and more to come with the ARM transition as apple will surely blame developers for performance problems with x86 titles. Not to mention that the yearly developer fees that you have to pay to keep a game's long tail on the store. It eats into profits for Indies.

> but on Steam, the macOS sales are not worth the headache support and development gives you. [...] Not to mention that the yearly developer fees that you have to pay to keep a game's long tail on the store.

What yearly developer fees do you need to pay to keep a macOS game on Steam? Is it to Valve?

Nothing yearly for Steam, it's a one-off fee, I think about 100 USD these days (it changed over the years). For the macOS store it is a 100 USD a year or so, and of course they take their cut from your sales. I prefer Valve's way of doing business.

Oh, okay. You started talking about whether it’s worth releasing a Mac game on steam, and then brought up a yearly fee, so I was having trouble following where you transitioned.

The mobile gaming market and PC/console gaming are basically two distinct markets with very little overlap though.

> Right now, Steam is still the leader and obvious home for a lot of these otherwise-independent developers.

HN: TEAR DOWN THE APPLE STORE MONOPOLY! Also HN: Steam is cool and pulls 30% from developers.

It's worth drawing the distinction that Steam, as opposed to Apple and their app store, does not hold an exclusive monopoly and cannot dictate where users can install software from. If a Dev doesn't like Steam, there are other publishers and store fronts that they can peddle their wares through. Similarly users can go elsewhere to buy and install, even direct from the manufacturer.

Steam being the de facto choice is another issue entirely, and yet another discussion for their fee structure.

Also, steam is not as controlled as the apple store.

I bet, if nvidia wanted to, they could publish geforce now there, for example.

Steam does not control Windows, does it?

You could make the argument that because of Steam having such reach / monopoly on the PC gaming market, Steam (and by extension Valve) is effectively the publisher of games like that, and a very large one at that. There's GoG that mostly focuses on vintage games, and Epic that spends tons of money to get (timed?) exclusives on indie games + free handouts, but I'm not sure how well it's working for them to get market share.

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.

GoG does have a bunch of new games though. And IIRC they are owned by CD Project Red who are doing some big games now :)

Yeah GOG hasn't "focused" on vintage games for at least half a decade now (and the switch from GoG and the original acronym to branding wise it's just GOG and its own "word" these days) and while back compat remains a core strength (though one as much exported at this point as most Publishers have paid attention to what GOG was doing and released many of the same games with the same tricks [ScummVM, DOSBOX, etc] on Steam and other platforms) has kept up with Steam (and Epic) on every major AAA release and a large swath of Indies so long as the publisher will allow a DRM Free release. Plus of course CD Projekt Red's own AAA releases (Witcher series, Cyberpunk) as obviously they want DRM Free publishing where available.

I'm not certain if you enjoy remakes or not - but I think GOG is pretty much single handedly responsible for making them a thing. Things like AoE2 (Age of Empires) HD & DE probably wouldn't exist if AoE and AoM (Age of Mythology) didn't get a bunch of surprise sales on GoG. I'm hoping it'll also lead to some of the older IPs that died off with the likes of SSI getting resurrected into new titles - Imperialism 1 & 2 were pretty amazing games long before the likes of Victoria 2 came about.

Both CD Projekt Red and GOG are actually just subdivisions of CD Projekt.

id Software -- the makers of Doom 2016 -- is owned by ZeniMax Media, which has been acquired by Microsoft as per the featured article we are discussing

Correct me if I'm wrong, but was id actually involved in the 2009 Wolfenstein or in New Order? I think not. However, they did develop Doom 2016...

They are involved for the technical aspects beyond merely MachineGames using id engines. MachineGames in a lot of ways acts like another id software studio, but it is free to form its own flavor.

MachineGames also has (uncredited?) work on Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal.

Wolfenstein was made by Machinegames. Though there is quite a bit of overlap between the two studios during production.

2009 - they were producers, but the development was done by Raven Software and published by Activision. So not really involved other than owners of IP?

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.

FYI the 'id' in 'id Software' is lowercase. It's a word (not an initialism or acronym) so 'Id' would be more grammatically correct, though the name of the company is nevertheless lowercase.

Don't forget Factorio -- aka if Software Development were a computer game with tech debt, copy/paste and literal bugs.

And satisfactory, that's my newest obsession.

And stardew valley

This is the inevitable trend of gaming since the 90s.

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.

Bingo! CoD, Quake, Doom, Civ, Madden, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, All of Nintendo... you can’t fault them for milking an IP though when fans vote with their wallets. I would love new stories, new hero archetypes, new consequences, in games and I think indie have done a decent job at showing it can be done. But even indie suffers from the “Hey! This worked! Let’s just keep doing this!” IP milkage. Game dev, like software dev, has gotten more and more complex. What was once a vision of unity and standards is now Unity3D or micro-fracture SDK’s of the same graphics pipeline concepts and a wasteland of bones from those who came before you.

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.

To directly name some of games you seem to be implying are automatically bad; I'm personally very happy with Doom (2016), Doom Eternal, Breath of the Wild, and Mario Odyssey. I am glad that ID and Nintendo have been "milking" these IPs.

I think there's a difference between continuing an IP and milking one.

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.

> 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.

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.

> why Nintendo rarely outsources games

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.

This is great! No apologies. Example of how Nintendo milks their IP’s too. To be aware of it. Nothing wrong with Mario or Zelda, but the innovation and creativity is lacking for the sake of business and monetization.

> 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.

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.

Not implying any sense of quality, just naming some IP's that have been milked.

Change = risk

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.

That’s the crux of it right there. Funding. Studios that have funding secured (or don’t need it) should be the ones taking those risks. But yes, it’s risky to introduce new IP, the results can be disastrous. Cliff Bleszinski knows this.

Look at when Blizzard tried starting new a new IP with Overwatch, I'm sure they did okay but Overwatch doesn't have the same legendary luster that Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo have (or had).

My daughter became an overwatch pro-am (she’s in college now). So I have a slightly different take. Overwatch was extremely successful new IP.

Overwatch is definitely a big success - it's not the biggest competitive FPS on the market (probably fortnite if you count that - otherwise maybe CS:GO?) but it's up there. They also own Hearthstone which baffled me on release since it's so far out of their wheelhouse - but I believe they're making bucket loads of money off of that still... it's a literal collectable card game ><.

From a raw sales standpoint Overwatch has done better than most of those games. The only Blizzard game that beats Overwatch in terms of raw revenue is WoW. I find that tech people that used to game in the 90s tend to way overestimate how popular and successful those early foundational games were in comparison to modern games. Overall growth in the game industry (especially PC world wide) has been massive

Overwatch is pretty successful.

The trend is definitely moving away from many separate games and toward "living" games. Look at how many games these days end up just doing updates/DLCs over many years rather than releasing whole new versions of 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.

It makes a lot of sense for most games to work like this: once you have a core game, adding content to it is comparatively cheap. Which means that the ROI can be really high if a point release with new content causes a spike in unit sales.

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.

> 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.

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).

Not that they were trying to milk it, but that they are currently twisting 2 into something it wasn’t. The game was not originally written to support also being Destiny 3.

I'd argue that was always the Destiny plan to be a constantly shifting MMO and Destiny 1 is the real outlier at this point. The teething pains right now "twisting 2 into something it wasn't" seem to be more somewhere between "twisting 2 into what it was always meant to be" and "Bungie is still learning how to run and build an MMO the hard way by ignoring most of what worked for decades" (for instance, relying so much on streaming from the disc/hard drive over streaming from the server making it real hard for them to keep all zones active at the same time because they run against disc/hard drive size limits; that's Ancient MMO Trade-Offs 101 that Bungie seems dead set on doing the weirdest possible solutions, though to Bungie's credit they aren't the only ones in this current "live service" games era learning this old lesson the hard way as games like Fallout 76 and Sea of Thieves seem just as likely to hit the exact same wall if they try to expand much more).

From a historical preservation viewpoint I find this trend extremely disturbing. Along with online requirements this makes it more and more impossible to experience older games the way they used to be. Even for completely single player games, online content distribution platforms tend to only give you the latest version (except for a few games where the developers specifically set up legacy branches), often even refusing to launch an already installed game until available updates are downloaded. If updates were only bugfixes that would not be a problem, but it is not unheard of for post-launch changes to significantly change the core mechanics of games.

This is a significant step down from the old phsical media distribution model where any changes from the initial master were optional.

The "living game" approach has to do with the cost of the DLC and the difficulty at moving the price point of a game (while costs to build it go up).

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."

No, the "living game" approach is because it turns out taking a "hat" asset that took an artist like 2 days to make (or you literally got for free from your fanbase!) and selling it for $5 to the 10 million people playing your game makes A FUCKLOAD of money. It's absolutely milking. Games make more money now when they are "Oh woe is me so expensive to make oh poor me feel pitty" then they ever dreamed of even when a game could be made by one person.

> there was originally planned for Destiny 3

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.

Have you watched Mythic Quest? There's a particular episode touching this, that doesn't really require the rest of the series and is very good.

Check it out if you can - it' "Dark Quiet Death" from Season one

if they would just keep cranking out sequels at the same level of quality but no real innovation, I would be pretty happy. mass effect 1 was pretty good, me2 was great, me3 was still decent. why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda? similar with far cry. fc2 was great, but probably too unforgiving for the mainstream audience. they dumbed it down a bit for fc3, and fc4 was more of the same but with a couple pain points ironed out. then they had to mess everything up for fc5, why?

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...

> why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda?

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.

I didn't actually finish the game, so I can't speak too much to the story. for me it wasn't even about the bugs; I just thought the andromeda open world was the blandest of any I'd played at the time. it was like they looked at the lunar rover minigame from me1 and decided to make it the whole game. I wish they had just stuck to the traditional rpg level design of the previous games. I didn't much like the combat mechanics in andromeda either, but that could just be personal taste.

Well yeah, I loved the ME1 Mako and thought that very "Star Trek exploration" concept something strong about ME1 that I thought 2/3 deviated too far from, but I realize how much of a personal taste issue that becomes. MEA's open world could have used more time to bake (and still seems as much a restrictions caused by the Frostbite engine issue as anything, at least to my outside perspective). Also, yes, I find that for an FPS/3PS-focused engine, I don't entirely understand why Frostbite feels so bad at FPS/3PS combat mechanics, but I also have never played Battlefield/Battlefront games so I don't know if that is a BioWare/Mirror's Edge fork(s) specific problem or a general Frostbite problem.

And then there's franchises like Mega Man which have been going for over 30 years.

Absolutely. It's fine for gamers to indulge in some nostalgia, too.

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.

The “Small team makes innovative and interesting X. Gets bought” trend is hardly limited to gaming! Or the 90’s.

Indy is great if you like one of the genres where they excel (e.g. rogue like, deck builder, walking simulator, retro, traditional RPG, etc.). However, if you are into genres like modern FPS or open world action adventure then good indy games are difficult to come by.

It doesn't take many to saturate those markets though.

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.

0: https://www.diabotical.com/

1: https://www.twitch.tv/thisiszoot

Maybe not "indie," but you don't have to look to the big 4 publishers for the best FPS and open-world action games these days.

Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 came out of CDProject Red. My favorite FPS of the last few years (Hunt: Showdown) came out of Crytek.

Cdproject costs some 4 billion more than Microsoft paid for Zenimax.

Yeah, open world games generally take a large team to create tons of content and a large tools/pipeline team to get said content in engine. So yeah, I doubt we'll see them dominating that space any time soon.

I can't think of a good reason though that there aren't a few very successful indie shooters though.

Mount & Blade series is an interesting counterexample to that, although I'm at a loss as to how define the genre ("feudalism sandbox"?). The first games were very clearly indy, but they capitalized on that success, and Bannerlord is a much more ambitious and polished game.

M&B is actually published by an arguably large company? I don't know where folks put Paradox in the ranking but they're certainly raking in the money with both internal dev & publisher only projects.

And they're making a new World of Darkness RPG for the first time in forever.

It was originally self-published indy, Paradox picked it up sometime during their betas. In 2015, TaleWorlds decided to return back to their indy roots, and got the publishing rights (for all already-released games, as well as M&B2: Bannerlord) back.

TaleWorlds were pretty lucky to stumble upon a community that could keep their game running for over a decade.

Did they stumble upon a community, or did they create one?

Open world as in sandbox? Sandbox is a very big genre among indie games.

My kids love Nintendo and Minecraft, but they also love Untitled Goose Game, Factorio and Frog Detective. Indie games are probably more available now than ever.

Well, not everybody has the same tastes. I mostly don't like the aesthetics of indie games, especially not the "indie feel" or any kind of pixelated or animation-style graphics. I will not play anything that reeks of "design".

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.

Realistic graphics are no more AAA than well done "indie feel" graphics. Realistic-looking games can just as much "reek of design" as you put it. Many of those indie games have AAA-graphics with good story and original gameplay.

There are a lot of great Indie titles, and you can get a lot of them DRM free on Humble or Gog.

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.

I'm loving Annapurna Interactive, games like What Remains of Edith Finch and Outer Wilds have been amazing. 'What Remains of Edith Finch' feels like a (shorter) AAA title, no compromise in production values whatsoever.

Devolver is astounding, they really keep snapping up indie projects that do exceptionally well - don't forget Reigns in that list it's definitely on the lighter end but it's very well put together.

Focus Home Interactive publishes some great AA games. I'm very glad publishers like them continue to exist.

Same, Devolver is phenomenal. Enter the Gungeon and Fall Guys are both smash hits too

We seem to have near identical taste so can I add: - they are billions - Kerbal space program - faster than light To your awesome indie games list

Kerbal is so awesome, it brought me back some authentic gaming experience

Stellaris might be one of my favorite games in recent memory (granted, I don't play that much).

There's no end to enjoyable ways to waste your time when it comes to enjoyable games across time and genre, plenty of fish. Games media like all media loves hyperbole. Who cares about Caves of Qud if you can get MAD about a GIRL fighting in WW2? Fallout 75! For all I care the AAA industry can cannibalize itself until there's only 1 studio left slaving away in the Call of Duty mines. Games are made by people. There will always be more games released every year by middling and small studios than you have time. Now more than ever if someone has thousands of hours to burn on an autistically singular interest, we'll always have good games. As I get older and the world sinks into a fervor of self-preservation and tribalism, I realize the number of fucks I have for Bobby Kotick or loot boxes has dwindled to none. In fact, I'm running out of those real quick in general. So congratulations on joining the Microsoft family Bethesda, I'm sure your children will have non recessive genes and normal sized heads.

I've been playing a lot of great retro-inspired shooters from the new 3D Realms and New Blood. Plenty of great indie stuff on PC.

The absence of civ6 is lamentable, but then we do only have so much time to find to pursue hobbies like work and careers.

> Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore.

Brilliantly put.

Open source gaming is an option too - Cataclysm DDA as a thriving example, Nethack, so on.

Isn't WoW Classic published by ActivisionBlizzard?

Dead Cells, Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac, Papers Please, Return of the Obra Dinn, Spelunky 2

All fantastic games better than most major studio titles.

Ha, in Demolition Man every restaurant became a Pizza Hut after the corporate wars.

Stellaris wins hands down for me in most time played. Honestly such a good game.

> My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic.

I had a similar experience with Cosmoteer. And the darn thing is not even released yet! :)

River City Girls (WayForward), Factorio, Two Point Hospital, FTL.

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.

Not to mention the biggest gaming phenomenon at the moment is Among Us, which was made by one developer and one artist.

WoW Classic is Activision, isn't it?

correct, Activision-Blizzard

I wonder what Lucas Pope is up to. There have been no press since Return of the Obra Dinn.

For anyone into games like this, I also highly recommend Cataclysm: DDA

You should try Factorio!

Europa Universalis 4 is way better than Stellaris, friend.

It's interesting - they're very different. The historical setting and investment into events to try and keep things on a historical path add a lot to the game IMO by allowing a mostly balanced but asymmetrical game - France can usually ROFLstomp everyone but an overly aggressive France can easily be ROFLstomped themselves. That said, I think EU4 still falls on its face in the late game with mechanics like Absolutism absolutely pulling the breaks off the train and making Ulm WCs possible - in fact EU4 is sorta confusing for that reason, there are essentially two (maybe three if you want to count the reformation+counter reformation) games there and a portion of that playthrough may be more or less appealing to individual players. Stellaris definitely has some distinct phases but without trying to railroad players the mechanics flow from one phase to the next in a much smoother manner.

Is it possible to play dwarf fortress on mobile yet ?

Yes, see dfremote — iOS only though I think but works nicely with an iPad Pro and the pencil (provided you have a machine capable of running docker somewhere)

Excellent taste in colony survival titles!

Give Factorio a try

Deadcells ?

I actually feel compelled to express an opinion regarding WoW classic:

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.

That's not fair...

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...

Fair points, but do you have a source? I'm skeptical that previous versions of the game were discarded.

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.

Blizzard did not charge for WoW Classic. It merely requires an active subscription to the regular game. There's no additional purchase or subscription.

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.

> Blizzard did not charge for WoW Classic. It merely requires an active subscription to the regular game. There's no additional purchase or subscription.

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.

If you think wow classic had "practically zero development cost", you don't know what you're talking about.

Care to elaborate? How many lines of code do you think were written for the release of WoW classic compared to the original release?

Blizzard shut a "wow classic" style private server down because they are the owners of WoW but then they left lots of people who wanted the classic experience stranded and decided to give them an official way. It's not a money grab.