As games got more and more "accessible" and shipped more and more quality of life features added, here was a game that decided to add friction to everything. You can't pause. You can lose EXP/money when you die. There are cheesy gimmick deaths just to screw with you. You can't replay dialogue. There is no quest log and there are missable quest steps all over. NPCs will disappear and travel to unknown locations.
Demon Souls and to some extent Dark Souls 1 were positively niche but the games went on to be genre defining giving birth to "soulslike" games and Elden Ring waz justly rewarded with mass appeal and awards.
I don't have a problem with games being accessible but I relish a story of someone going all-in on taste/vision driven-design and succeeding. I am also a little bitter of many AAA games becoming busywork simulators because games must deliver engaging experiences x times per hour which then just leads to bloated fetch quests and checklists and busy screens full of quest markers
I call it game design by HR. Everything today by big western games studios is designed to be so super safe and sterile just in case to not be offensive to absolutely anyone, so you end up with a limp-dick experience that's not fun to anyone.
Or worse, game devs insert their own social and political ideologies into the games like for example in Star Wars Outlaws you play as an outlaw who can only rob the police but not the civilians and can't kill animals only pet them.
People got into video games for the escapism from reality, not to have even more constrains than in reality placed upon then just so the game studio can tick all the $CURRENT_DAY social and political safety boxes. Nobody wants to buy that.
Or, hear me out, you can choose to stop chasing fads that might get outdated in 2-6 years, and actually make something original or make something tried and tested that's low-risk on a small budget.
Gamers are simple people with simple wishes, they just want to have some fun, some escapism for a few hours, and they'll give you money for it. Sony's Astro bot is a clone of Mario64 but it works.
Chasing fads is the laziest thing you can do, because it's easy to present to management/investors.
At the end of the day some of this comes down to market incentives. A public company is expected to grow. For a gaming company this means either shipping more games or bigger games. If you ship more games, at some point you start cannibalizing your own sales (e.g. how many different shooters can you make that would have non-overlapping audiences?) so you go bigger.
Notice this affliction doesn't affect some of the more successful private, indie studios. Supergiant Games has shipped a pretty long string of hits, but the level of production for each one is relatively constant - they're not aiming for "AAA" graphics or scale.
> Chasing fads is the laziest thing you can do, because it's easy to present to management/investors.
Totally true, but at the end of the day you have to convince someone to spend $200,000,000+ on development. You need something concrete to point at as a reason why you'll be successful.
Yeah but you also don't loose the farm if it fails, which let's be real, is the more likely statistical outcome than success , unless you were surrounded by Yes Men who told you how much gamers are gonna love Concord lol and you were dumb enough to believe it because you're a bean counter and not a gamer.
What hurts more, loosing a million dollars of a hundred million?
Game Studios need to learn to be more scrappy and do more small scope projects on tighter Budgets instead of betting the farm on one hit game.
Have you seen their share prices and the garbage games their making with heavy losses? They clearly don't care about making money. If they did they wouldn't be doing what they're doing.
Perfect example is Ubisoft.
They care about attracting investment fund money and not building a good product and growing their consumer base. There's no conspiracy, ticking woke checkboxes gives you extra points in any consideration, that's a fact in current political climate.
Biggest investment funds are those managing retirement funds so even a single fund like that is 'voting with wallets' of hundreds of thousands(if not millions) of its clients that wouldn't support the game company to begin with.
If you want to see something grassroots check Grinding Gear Games and their developer interviews for the sequel game (POE2) that will be releasing tomorrow. You will see them engaging in discussion with community for hours, talking about their server infrastructure and how it can fail, releasing numbers of their stress tests and how many players they expect based on preorders (~1 milion).
Than again this only happens when your PR person is actually the technical lead that knows the product inside out and not someone interested in quick buck. Guess how many of that team will be fired this christmas...
Edit: 10 minutes about their infrastructure:
So yeah, it's intentional, not a conspiracy. It's the emperor's new clothes. Nobody working there wants to point out flaws in the games they're making (like having a black samurai in medieval Japan as a main character) for fear of being called a racist/bigott, so everyone goes along with it till the studio collapses.
because you're ignoring the thousands that failed, I suppose. Survivor's bias will do that. I wouldn't call Torn Banners a large studio and that's the other half of this article.
> why does Ubisoft keep failing despite ownings some of the biggest IPs in the industry
because "succeeding" for a company the size of ubisoft is no longer just "making a fair profit on games and coasting about to make more games. Which is what most not-large studios strive for. And because they use these failures as an excuse to not say the quiet part out loud in that they are preparing for a recession. You'll at best hear "economic headwinds". People woulda been laid off no matter what.
The fact that not just ubisot but virtually every lage studio this year has been doing this shows that this isn't some speciic ubsoft failure. And the profits sugggest this isn't some upcoming 2nd collapse. But you gotta read between the lines, and you're not even reading the same book to begin with.
Ubisoft is always making profit but their profit margin getting smaller and smaller so that one day (if this continues), executives will begin to sack developers to keep their high salaries intact while pandering to shareholders.
As an example, I am confident that a true successor to Battlefield 3/4, unencumbered by EA's often terrible decisions, would sell very well. The problem is, it probably wouldn't make the same money as some microtransaction-ridden free-to-play dopamine factory, and so management wouldn't actually _want_ to make the game that the gamers want. (Though supposedly there is a game like that in the making -- I just don't want to get my hopes up because I've been fooled too many times.)
Put them all together and we'd probably get a mess of genres with little overlap, or "worse": probably some already existing popular game that is hated by the gaming enthusiasts. Because we've long left this monoculture where any one game is the talk of the town for years to come. Or because the businesspeople actually are serving what people want.
You're also right that what enthusiasts want are rarely the most profitable. Blizzard can make 5 HD games and even MTX them up to high hell. Candy Crush is probably still making more than any of them. Just another example of how utterly diverse gaming has become (or perhaps, full circle where bejeweled on steroids still can make so much money).
But I doubt the DEI departments at Sony, EA, Ubisoft and Microsoft will let them release games with waifus and jiggle physics so they'll have to keep saying no to money to die on a hill.
2. Ubisoft is large, it does both. it has several mobile games. No gacha models, AFAIK.
3. "You don't need to ask people define what they want". If someone is going to assert "make good games", then yes. I may as well just simply ask them. Alternatively: do you really think I'll make Genshin Money if I just copy Genshin? a dozen studios already beat me to it.
4. "I doubt the DEI departments at Sony, EA, Ubisoft and Microsoft will let them release games with waifus and jiggle physics so they'll have to keep saying no to money to die on a hill." Those aren't the only ways to make money. Not even in Asia. And this is an odd statement given Sony did publish Stellar Blade this year. Its wishy washy but it's not like there's some hidden cabal banning this stuff. It really comes down to a mix of culture, PR, and sales. Dead or Alive's newest dating sim isn't releasing in NA just because of "DEI"
Never seen a eastern studio release a game of this genre.
relying on organic advertising is even harder than making a good game. Some things are just in a snug little corner and never truly break out to that mainstream.
EDIT:
I was referring more to the addictive nature of gacha games.
A dude staring at a screen just clicking buttons with no expression on his face for hours on end might say he's having fun, but that's gonna be hard to sell me on.
People want services, but don't want to continuously pay for a continous service. well, that's why MTX work. For every 100, 1000 people playing for free, you got some whale amortizing the cost for them.
Uhh... people do all the time, we invented a word for it, subscriptions. It's like the main form of non-ordinary expense people pay, the issue is that the product has to worth it, MTX focused games are so geared to the lowest common denominator they aren't fun (usually)
There’s really no shortage of games atm
You could absolutely sell a game with those textures and models to those gamers. You'd want to scrub your skin off with boiling water for every shower for the rest of your life, but that dropped nickel is just waiting to be picked up.
well there's your first mistake. I'd rather go on 4chan and ask them for game design ideas. At least they will be consistently trash. Consistency is key in game design.
As it turns out, the things they bitch about are occasionally indicative of people who have tastes that polite society doesn't want to indulge.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Baby_Inc.#Online_backlas...
[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/remedy-has-recouped-most-of-the...
To be actually successful a game needs to capture the target audience (gamers).
Problem is there seems to be a huge disconnect between critics and gamers gamers nowadays
It's hard for me to gauge whether this is normal for modern game studios or they're desperately hanging on by their fingernails. But the disparity between you saying "no one bought it" and it being the company's fastest-selling game makes me suspicious of everything. Either way, times have changed since my only interaction with Remedy, the original Max Payne :D
I imagine Remedy was overall fine (as in payroll) thanks to Epic's bankrolling, but few studios get that privileged.
Gaming critics are irrelevant. Their opinions on games is not more relevant than your opinion or my opinion. It's not like they got a PhD from Game Criticism University.
They're just average joes who give each other clout online to practice access journalism and are bought and paid for by the big studios to parrot opinions favorable to drive sales for their games.
Games studios should listen to the gamers who actually buy the games, not to the journalists who don't.
It's not just accusations, it's the truth. Sweet Baby Inc CEO came out in public talking about how they're blackmailing game studios with social media mobs in order to create demand for their services on censoring games, and recordings of SBI employees in video presentations saying their jobs is to "burn the games industry to the ground" and that game devs principles are rooted in "white supremacist patriarchal values".
How can one call it a conspiracy, is beyond me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq86DnmX2xY
> If you're a creative working in AAA (which I did for many years), put this stuff up to your higher-ups, and if they don't see the value in what you're asking for when you ask for consultants/research, go have a coffee with your marketing team and terrify them with the possibility of what's going to happen if they don't give you what you want.
This is advice to employees about how to push for change from within. It's kind of aggressive, and the word "terrify" is OTT, but it's legit to say "if we don't do this we're going to get roasted on social media". Unless I'm missing something, there's no suggestion that Sweet Baby themselves would be the ones whipping up social mobs.
They'd better course correct fast, as Asian game devs will be eating their lunch. Black Myth Wukong anyone? Stellar Blade? Dragon Ball Sparking Zero?
Nature is finally healing, the free market at work. The indie game scene is flourishing while the old players are dying.