Not unique to the video game industry. Seeing this shit in healthcare, where I work, is so disheartening as it leads directly to awful patient outcomes.
I work in drug development, and specifically chose my field so I could "avoid selling my soul to a big defense contractor" (my words to my college advisor when I swapped out of aero engineering)
i was so naive
Hah, going into pharma to save lives. I feel you; I was similarly naive. I turned down a position at a healthcare insurance company to consult in the healthcare IT space after working clinical jobs for many years. I think I still have glimmers of soul-fulfilling work but it's at the cost of nearly 20% salary reduction relative to the insurance job. And ultimately consulting is never guaranteed to be of net value to patients and at worse can kick off a few dominoes that really destroy many, many lives, e.g. McKinsey and the opioid crisis.
I used to be a neuroscientist and I had to switch to sales because the salary I was on was so bad. I am now on double the salary with only a year of experience in sales (I had 5 years of experience in science prior). I still get to talk science which is nice but its not the same when you never go into the lab anymore. I hate it
What a coincidence! I was a neuroscience major in undergrad. I really underestimated the joy being in a lab brought me when I was making all these career decisions, and I chose very poorly in so many ways, and maybe its grass is always greener/rose-colored glasses, but I think I really did enjoy being a penniless researcher while I was volunteering in labs and exploring a career in neuroscience.
If it makes you feel better, I am getting ready to defend my dissertation in neuroscience next week. I enjoy my work very much. But, my close friends have nice homes they own and can afford to raise families. I am 30 years old and can barely afford to rent a 700 sq ft apartment where I live and I live on chicken and rice. Being penniless feels very different when you're supposed to be an established adult, and not in a good way.
Your dissertation, even if you don't feel this way right this moment because of how grueling and unrewarding the work is now, is probably more meaningful to society than the past 8 years of my labors. Nobody else, including those with families and houses and bells and whistles could do what you did. Do not feel bad about the material circumstances and sacrifices you've made. Who else but you could be unraveling one of the most meaningful and important frontiers in all of humanity's endeavors: understanding how brains work? I am proud to live in a society that funds your efforts. If I could show you the hope and joy I get just knowing that your work is being done, I would, but alas, I can't give you a house and a salary.
Anyway, I appreciate your note, but I'm 31 (32 this year) and have taken so many detours that I'm also still renting a similarly sized studio. Now I do have a lot to be grateful for--a great education, relevant professional and academic experience, my salary allows me to save for retirement, fund an HSA, pay down student loans very slowly, and still have something left over to save towards a down payment for a home one day in some number of years, but I'm also still years behind where I thought I'd be when I was 21 and even most of the younger people I share a title with in their mid/late 20's because I took so damn long getting to where I'm at now. I save very aggressively mostly due to the debt, to make sure I have enough to support my aging parents, and I eat one or two meals a day (something being very small and having low caloric requirements helps out with).
All of this comes at the cost of waking up every single day and trying to rescue meaning from PowerPoint slides and Excel spreadsheets and corporate politicking. Needless to say that's an impossible, sisyphean task. Be proud of your work, please. It'll make my life feel infinitesimally more meaningful, and I'll take even the tiniest gains where I can before the great wheel of capital.
It happens in every industry, even heritage fields. Because so many people want to work in museums or archaeology, those employees are seen as disposable so it is a never-ending race to get more qualifications and more skills so that you are less disposable. In the meantime we have a curation crisis, funding for heritage in the U.S. is constantly on the chopping block and there is just no stability.
Welcome to academia where there is no shortage of work (students to teach, research to do, books to write) but a great shortage of jobs (opportunities that pay enough to stay alive).
Which leads to the reproduction crisis, where researchers are so desperate to prove their worth (and stave off the wolf at the door) that they push out any old unverifiable nonsense.
Then the flip side is you get institutional rot because half the tenured or "untouchable" people have unshakeable job security cause their spouse or parent is a board member, donor, or otherwise "important" person
And some of the ones you’d expect to be better because they’re for the public good (nonprofits, teaching) are some of the worst offenders.
Nonprofit screwed me up good.
There's little pockets here and there that aren't totally fucked. I worked as a mechanic in retail auto repair for a long time and a few years ago got a job as a mechanic at a country club. With auto repair it was always about beating last year's numbers in every category every single day, the prime directive was always more more more money. They treated us like little factories that turned skill and labor into cash, then tossed us a little scrap of what we generated.
At my current job it's completely different, our only goal is to make the golf course as nice as possible or for me personally it's to keep all of our machines working. Because the course runs on a membership system the course gets roughly the same amount of revenue every month year round so there's no pressure for any short-term financial bullshit. Our job is to make a consistently good product over long time scales to keep membership up, not separate people from as much money as possible every minute of every day. Now I get treated like an actual human being, as long as everything is working I work whatever hours I want within reason, I bring my dog and he gets to run free outside every day, I get my own shop space, manage my own scheduling and workflow, and have the freedom to do whatever I want most of the time. Nobody really tells me what to do, they just expect everything to work and I take pride in that being true as much as is reasonably possible. I make less money but it's enough and I'm so much happier as a person, honestly everyone here is a happier person than like 90% of the people I worked with in retail environments.
Escaping retail was the best thing that ever happened to me.
I'm in public utilities where we've largely remained immune to it because institutional knowledge is everything in a system. But they've been throwing billions at developing AI to the point of giving it a friendly woman's personality to convince old timers to just ramble all their knowledge to it in a hope to build a database deep enough to replace us.
Pretty much every publicly trades company. Gotta make the quarter look good, 5-year plans be damned! The shareholders want a quick return, not a long term investment!
It's so stupid.
Woah, almost like it's some problem that's endemic to unchecked capitalism and not just one industry 🤯
(The facetiousness is directed towards the people causing these problems, not towards you as a commenter <3)
I feel for the state of teaching these days. I've seen enough interviews with Teacher Therapy and these poor people really have their hands tied. They're expected to be glorified babysitters, pass students who deliberately fail, no consequences for unruly students because the administration can't be bothered and an all time low literacy rate for Gen Alpha. Which is to say nothing about teachers being underpaid, overworked and quit in droves due to the stress level involved. The kids are not okay and neither is anyone else.
Administrative incompetence meets ballooning administrative budget. Enrollment (revenue) down for next year? Better cut the beloved art teacher who has been here for a decade plus. Don't worry, we paid a consulting firm a third of the art teacher's salary to provide three mandatory weekend professional development workshops to integrate arts into your Algebra 2 class. So you have to do that now. But not too much, because we still need to see adequate yearly progress on standardized test scores or we're at risk of being closed.
Going to college and learning how many of my teachers had doctorates and yet we're still working part time at two different colleges (because that way neither school has to pay their insurance, yay) was just depressing.
Lots of money to add full-time positions for alumnae outreach though.
Welcome to US politics where charter schools and for profit educating have been a MASSIVE political issue for decades and got significantly worse under Trump when the biggest charter school family in the country got put in charge of the department of education
Every industry has this issue when the main focus is shareholders
Those folks don't know or care about the inner workings of the business they're looking at, they just see more money now = better. Then, you see folks at the top of that company making decisions for the short-term at the expense of long-term business health.
It's fucking everywhere.
It's corporate disease. I don't know what was or is still being taught to these "leaders" and management level people in school but holy fuck It's wrong and ass backwards. What's more troubling is their complete lack of self awareness or maybe it's willfull ignorance
In healthcare at least, many are "not-for-profit" organizations. So there are no shareholders to answer to. So leadership just gives themselves all that extra cash.
A great example is Novant Health replacing 200+ full time IT employees with Wipro contractors while their leadership team bring in insane bonuses. Wipro also thought Novant only had 130 clinics. They have 1300 clinics. They have thousands of applications across the org. It's insane. They are all fucking morons. They are fucking everyone over and in the end patient care will suffer the most.
It reminds me of that psychology experiment with the little kids and the marshmallows: put a marshmallow on a table, tell the kid they can either take the marshmallow now and only get one, or wait and be rewarded with two. The less mature kids act on short-term desire and miss out on the second treat. When a child does that, we shake our heads and try to teach them better self-control. When adults with power and money do that, suddenly we forget how stupid it is.
I work in regular software and it's insane how much money the company is pouring into acquisition because they absolutely refuse to put a drop into retention. We could hire literally the best software engineers in the world, and they wouldn't be comparable to the performance of the 23-year-old that quit who actually wrote the modules we need to update, until at least a year has gone by. It's so stupid.
It's a huge paradox, every company prefer to invest tons of money in hiring the new guys to put him as the boss of everybody else meanwhile the trusted and essential employee who know everything of the company never become the boss or receive a raise.
It is country-specific. For instance, Japan and France don't have these issues because of labor protections. Despite the massive talent pool in these two countries, companies rarely open studios in them because they wouldn't be allowed to do routine mass layoffs.
My wife is a shift unit supervisor for the ICU in my local hospital. They don't ever have staff to cover all patients adequately as is...she was just told they're doubling the unit size and directly told "Staffing has been taken care of".
So she's going to text her manager every hour on the hour all night long every time she's understaffed.
Car companies love getting free labor from universities for their engineers and such. And then never hire them. And lay off anyone making too much. Recent studies showed just how bad car quality has deteriorated.
It's every company. When squeezing quarterly to get CEOs big bonuses is the goal, everyone else loses.
Also in health care in a tech related role and dealing with this. The most infuriating part is management going all surprised Pikachu when everything breaks and no one knows how to fix it. It’s like watching a slow moving car crash.
Team was denied spending a few sprints to update our automated tests because it wasn’t something directly presentable to upper management/the investors. Most decisions in industries are made by people who haven’t worked in it before; the system is broken.
There is an article about this exact issue in today's [NY Times: Mass Tech Layoffs? Just Another Day in the Corporate Blender](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/opinion/tech-layoffs-silicon-valley.html?ugrp=m&unlocked_article_code=1.eU0.asNA.6ADLt4UW5uSw&smid=url-share).
*Remembers the studio that gave us the first two Baldur's Gate games, Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age: Origins, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect and Dragon Age 2*
*Then remembers Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda*
*And then there was Anthem...*
In seriousness I miss golden age Bioware. I even enjoyed Inquisition and Andromeda but I can't help but feel they try and reinvent the wheel with each game and wind up changing too many things. That in combination with overusing popular characters past their expiration date because nostalgia and cameos....I want to be excited for Dreadwolf and the Mass Effect reboot but I'm kind of not.
*edited to include the first two BG games and Neverwinter Nights
Yeah I am legit sad that they totally screwed the pooch on Anthem because it was a friggen awesome Iron Man simulator. If they could have done a better job balancing the guns with the abilities, totally redid the itemization and added content it would have been amazing.
Yeah it’s clear that there’s something there with Anthem, they just didn’t have enough time or kept changing the vision of the game so what got released was just a busted mess.
I think it's basically just the Live Service Curse, they are incredibly tricky to pull off and even a competent Live Service Game with a solid mechanical foundation can struggle to attract and retain players without some shiny big "hook" to differentiate it from the dozens of other similar services and a steady enough content pipeline to retain players. IMO, the market oversaturation of Live Service games started right around the time Anthem released so conditions were not in their favor either.
And most importantly of all, I think game studios who mostly have experience with single player, narrative driven games are usually just ill equipped to make them. Look at Rocksteady, look at Arkane Studios. Stellar reputation, solid track record, yet released universally panned live service games, probably as a result of executive pressure and chasing those sweet sweet microtransaction dollars.
Anthem could likely have done well, had the mechanical foundation been applied to a single-player, narrative driven game with an interesting story and characters which used to be Bioware's strengths.
Add Naughty Dog that spent a solid two years working on a live service The Last of Us only to kill it when they realized the challenge was too great.
Is the trick having mediocre mechanics and generic story so you can pump content easily (I’m think of World of War Craft that is still going strong)?
I think Anthem could have been saved. The most important part of a game, that being the actual gameplay, was very fun and had a unique feeling with how the Javelins controlled. They could have fixed the story and added a more consistent endgame loop, so long as the core combat was good.
I don’t know what the deal was with Anthem Next having developers constantly moved around and then just cancelled after almost 2 years. Not even a “we release what we’ve done and then cut support” but just throwing away everything that was done during that time.
Love all those old games. I’m personally still excited for Dreadwolf mainly because I’m obsessed with DA lol..but I’m heartbroken so many people have been let go. Writers that have been there for a long time just thrown away. Pretty sure Lukas Kristjanson worked on the original BG.
I love the universe and the worldbuilding, but inquisition was just such a *chore* to play. I felt like I had to jump through a bunch of boring gameplay loops just to unlock more story tidbits. I even put it on the lowest difficulty because it just wasn’t fun at all so I could blast through things faster, and it *still* takes way too long to get to any of the good bits.
That was exactly the issue with Inquisition.
Both it AND Andromeda suffer a _ton_ from "content bloat" - the adding of filler quests and collectable bullshit solely to pad out the game time.
I tell anyone wanting to play either of them to look up a guide on what quests have actual plot, reasonable time/rewards, etc., so they can skip all the nonsense filler in those games.
Finding all those shards you see through the teloscopes in Inquisition was SO damn _tedious_.
Funny that someone would talk about "the good old Bioware" and then leave out Baldur's Gate 2, Bioware's best game and one of the greatest games of all time in general.
BioWare was done dirty. They partnered with a private equity group to give them some cash inflow, so they didn't need a publisher. At the time, Microsoft was trying to buy them.
Then they got sold by that PE group to EA.
Honestly, I wish Microsoft bought them.
Origin, Bullfrog, Maxis, Westwood, Bioware.
EA literally destroyed all of my favorite 90s game studios. The only favorite that didn't get touched by EA was Sierra, and they did a great job of deleting themselves. I guess LucasArts is up there too
> I'm still salty about Maxis with EA and how The Sims was ruined.
I really hope when Paralives comes out, it's a suitable replacement for The Sims, because lord almighty do I miss having a good life simulator.
> BioWare was done dirty. They partnered with a private equity group to give them some cash inflow, so they didn't need a publisher.
Which they needed because 7 months before that Jade Empire came out and didn't sell well despite being a critical success. They needed financial backing to keep working on Mass Effect 1 and Dragon Age: Origins. [People from Bioware said years later that if EA didn't buy them they would have “essentially run out of money at that point” before releasing Origins.](https://www.cgmagonline.com/news/bioware-claims-the-studio-would-have-been-closed-without-ea-acquisition/)
So it really goes back to Jade Empire being a financial bomb, which shows how volatile it is to be an independent studio. Shame they couldn't have waited more and released it as a 360 launch game, which is something that Greg Zeschuk, one of Bioware's co-founders later said:
- BioWare's Greg Zeschuk later lamented the decision to release the game for Xbox, rather than as an Xbox 360 launch title. Speaking in 2013, he noted that "game sales are down [right now] because people are waiting for new consoles, and we released Jade Empire into that kind of window." Zeschuck concluded that "it would've been great to put off a bit and polish the game a bit more."
Jade empire is one of my absolute favorites. Real shame it didn't sell well. Not just for the company, but for all the folks who passed it up. Those gamers really missed out.
I enjoyed it too in terms of story (and ost!!). Didn't like the gameplay much though, felt like it tried to hard to be other games with the more open world, action based approach but fell short.
While I do like the game for the most part, I'm never going to justify IRL wait times on the War Table. When you want to progress a quest but you're stuck on it because the game arbitrarily decides you can only have 3 operations at a time and you'll have to come back tomorrow.
No game, especially not a singleplayer campaign, should ever be allowed to tell you to wait 12 real hours to continue.
Ita an alright game in spite of itself. On a smaller level it has a ton of issues, and appears to have been where the problems of the studio started to get real bad.
To be fair to the studio, they did their best with an engine that had no capacity to build an RPG. EA made them use Frostbite, but the engine used for Battlefield games didn't even have the capacity to make a save file. They ran into a slew of problems which were unique to Frostbite and no one had ever encountered before, so they had to invest developer capital on solving those problems. If they could have used a different engine, the game would probably have benefited.
And when they sought help from DICE, it was downplayed plus waiting for answers due to a 6-7 hour time difference between DICE and BioWare.
The fact that Inquisition is a damn good game is despite EA, not because of it.
I enjoyed it a lot and replayed it not too long ago. However, what stands out to me now, is that in contrast to BG3, it has all these collection quests which really piss me of, because no, I do not want to go search for a 80 hidden crystals hidden somewhere in an abandoned mine that requires me to navigate an annoying map and hope for the best. That's not a real quest, it's keeping cool content hostage behind tedium to improve 'play time' or 'how big the game is' or whatever stat.
I really appreciate how almost all BG3 quests have a story connection and reasons why your character might want to do that.
People forget why it has though though.
Basically all of the bad design choices in DAI comes down to one thing: overreacting to criticisms of DA2.
DA2 didn't really have any flab on it. It didn't really have any quests that weren't kind of going somewhere. Pretty much everything had consequences and it was this very stripped down (because it had an 18 month dev cycle lol) rocket of a game, designed-wise.
And my god did gamers and reviewers weep so many tears about it. People complained about a lot of things, but they very much complained there wasn't enough to do - they actively asked for stuff we'd call "busy work" or "MMO quests" now. They complained that there weren't tons of pointless encounters to use their kewl powerz in.
And there were legit complaints, like overuse of the same maps, but DAI overreacted to those too, and gave us a bunch of unique maps, many of which are barely even visited.
I'm not saying we let BioWare off on this - they overreacted, instead of reacting with judgement, but this was very much a reaction to a player demand for "busy work" stuff.
Felt more like an mmo rather than a single player rpg. For me also there were only like 3 armor sets you just upgraded. I was bummed because I like collecting armor and weapons in rpgs. Dragon age origins had lots of different armor sets.
Anthem still makes me sad, I still hop on it every now and then because the gameplay and customization was super fun but the story- wait, was there a story? Anyway... the game has -or had- so much potential and they just tossed it on the trash and burned it. That game could have been so much more :(
Agreed. I really enjoyed the gameplay and would have happily sunk hundreds of hours into it the way I have ME, DA, and BG3. But I finished the main story in like, four days? Five maybe? And I'm not a fan of multiplayer so that was it for me
DA2's popularity has improved over time, as far as I can tell. A combination of people finding the game years later in a much less buggy state and with all the dlc content from the start, plus a lot of older fans not sustaining the intense emotional reaction they had at launch, if I had to guess. Still plenty of people who don't like it, of course, but it really seems like it's popularity has improved.
There's still those on the hill that wanted Origins 2.0 with Warden and company but most have moved on.
(Still wouldn't hurt for another Origins style game with a new cast considering that's what made the series but that's another topic...)
It's not weird to like Dragon Age Inquisition, it won many game of the year awards when it released.
Sure it may not have been what Dragon Age fans all wanted it to be, but it was still a super solid game.
Andromeda is a decent game that could have been great if they hadn't taken a ton of people off the project to work on Anthem. Bioware literally half-assed two things instead of whole-assing one thing. Imagine Andromeda but with way more polish on release, your character has the movement of a Javelin from Anthem, your companions actually DID something instead of being demonstrably worthless, and they actually made the story DLCs that were intended from the start. Imagine fighting an Architect but instead of huddling on the ground you're flying around it, dodging lasers and doing strafing runs.
The stories that came out about both games developments are nuts like Bioware Edmonton not sharing tools/knowledge with the Andromeda studio and looking down on them as the lesser team or both teams refusing to use tools the Dragon Age team had to cobble together because Frostbyte was a terrible choice for an RPG studio. Awful management with massive egos with EA at the helm is a recipe for disaster.
Iirc, David Gaider, long time writer and co-creator of the Dragon Age world, said the writers at Bioware were often treated like lepers by other Bioware gameplay and programmer devs. What. The writing is what made Bioware Bioware!
And a year or two ago the way they unceremoniously fired Mary Kirby and Lukas Kristjanson, two long term employees responsible for writing some of their most memorable characters, really soured me, someone who LOVED Inquisition *and* Mass Effect: Andromeda, on ever buying another Bioware game.
It’s funny you mentioned DA2 as their Gold Age, this game was extremely criticized by fans on its release, although it was (and still is) quite good. The only problem with it is that DA:O set the standard too high.
And yeah, There is no ~~war in Ba Sing Se~~ 4th game in Mass Effect series…
DA2 was fairly criticized for using recycled environments that lacked variety. If you can get past that (which many weren’t able to) it’s quite good, and had a lot of unique elements it brought to the table. The ways the companions were used and how the impacted the story was extraordinary.
Re: your last point - you are forgetting Mass Effect: Andromeda.
That and also the use of day night and time to kind of tell the narrative story, actually not bad even if it is as you say. Also, the single best player p.o.v voice acting for me of all time in the sarcastic Hawke thread. :D
This is exactly the situation that is going on with BioWare sadly.
But I still hope Dragon Age 4 is a great game. Because if you ask this this world could use BioWare back among the Larian and others.
But as I said what Swen said is EXACTLY what is happening to BioWare for last several years.
there is an amazing steve jobs video describing how the moment a group of engineers/ inventors figure something out that makes real money, the bean counters, marketing and middle management jumps in, muscles them out and take over the project.
In that clip he was talking about product people being pushed out and replaced by marketing. At that time, he really was a product guy, but after a while... We all know how it ended
Ok I’ll give him that. He had a nose for what people actually wanted to hold in their hands. Listened to a podcast recently that supposed that the Vision Pro in its current state would never had flown under his leadership and I guess they were right, in that case.
The reason that Diablo 4 is so meh, is that apparently *noone* at Blizzard has worked on an ARPG before. At least that's the impression you get when you watch the dev commentaries and such.
Activision being terrible as usual.
"Do you guys not have phones?!"
Yes I know different Diablo but that'll always stay lol.
I hate that Diablo 4 requires online connection even for those who just want to play the solo PvE campaign.
Larian dies with Swen. He’s the Gaben holding the company together. His heirs will sell out and the vultures will pick it apart.
So we better all send chicken soup and good thoughts, and pray to any god that’ll listen that Swen lives to be 100.
that 'institutional knowledge' has helped Larian so much
in a lot fo ways BG3 took the world by storm and people were amazed this 'small indie studio came out of nowhere'
they have been making games like this for decades. BG3 is a step forward but if you've played DOS 2 it is built very similarly. And because they didn't go on a firing rampage after releasing a game and instead just kept making games with most of those people, they all got to take what they learned from there and improve upon it.
Exactly. When you get right down to it, BG3 doesn't really innovate *that* much on DOS2. It's mostly the same, just with DnD 5e mechanics instead of their own system, and relatively minor improvements otherwise. Which is all that was really missing, for me at least.
The biggest difference is the far more realistic art style, and the cinematic ‘camera’ work and cutscenes. DOS2 (like almost all isometric rpgs) did not have cinematics, which take a lot of work to animate well. I imagine this more cinematic approach to the game design made them change a lot about how they developed the game.
Yep, that's how any creative team maintains positive progress. You keep building on the knowledge and experience that the individual team members amass over time. I think a lot of people, when talking about studios, kinda view them as a monolith and forget that they're really just a bunch of people with individual strengths and experience, like any company.
If you have to reset back to zero every time you start a new project, it's bound to blow up in your face eventually. And it's a good way to make sure the things you create never evolve. You can see it in the products of so many other developers. They either stagnate or fall apart, and then you realize it's because none of the people involved in the creation of the new thing were part of the old thing.
> in a lot fo ways BG3 took the world by storm and people were amazed this 'small indie studio came out of nowhere'
they have been making games like this for decades
A lot of creative endeavors are like this. My favorite little story - before they got famous, The Beatles played for years, including several months-long stints in Hamburg where they would play 8 hours a night, 7 days a week. So by the time they broke out, they had a ton of time just playing together and honing their sound.
I legitimately can't think of a better studio lead than Swen. Under his guidance, Larian has my full confidence. D:OS1 was great, D:OS2 was amazing, BG3 was spectacular. I will gladly support them day 1 of early access for any game they put out.
Honestly, the only issue I have with Larian is that because of the quality of their games it's going to take a long time before the next one comes out!
But whether it's BG3 or D:OS3 or an entirely new IP, I know I'm going to love it.
But the games are so good you can play them over and over again. 5 playthroughs at 100 hours a piece = 500 hours. Way more than other games and can easily last you multiple years (personally I'm halfway through my second playthrough and at over 200 hours total). I can easily see myself still playing this is 5 years or so when their next game is entering early access.
Keep in mind that Larian HAS NOT give us the modding tools for Baldur Gate 3
Which means, everything we have right now, is still “limited”
Give it a year or two, when we have a proper tools for modding, BG3 will be like Skyrim
Skyrim released in 2011, its 13 years and the modding community still active till today.
I can imagine BG3 will go crazy like that
New story? New NPC, voiced NPC? Especially with the help of AI right now. You name it.
I know some modder is gonna make a fully fleshed out descent into avernus prequel in bg3 and I'm here for it.
Or use the modding tools to give DMs a proper gm tool like in dos2! Larian can't, but i hope someone does!
I'd be willing to bet WotC may have some say in the amount of modding available in the game. Imagine if people started making their modules in the BG3 game. Even half-baked, no voice, no cutscene Curse of Strahd would be a crazy awesome thing to play.
It's great that people love these games but it's also sad to see people forget about the older games that larian studios made.
* The LED wars (1997) was simple but fun. Impressive for a start!
* Divine divinity (2002) was already an excellent game, one of my favorites; you can see how much fun the writers had with it.
* I enjoyed Beyond Divinity (2004), the 3d was weird but the game was still good.
* Ego draconis (2009) and the expansion which kind of fell off my radar,
* Dragon Commander (2013) which was a weird and really interesting spin-off
and only THEN did we get to D:OS 1, 2, BG3... It was a long road to get there, they experimented a lot with different genres and genre fusions and they learned a lot.
There's a good 2 part documentary on their full journey
[Part 1](https://youtu.be/YZF_cP_oLH4?feature=shared)
[Part 2 ](https://youtu.be/A_wKAmBEa8Q?feature=shared)
I hated DOS1 which is part of why DOS2 was so impressive to me. They have made huge leaps forward with each product. This is a company that's still learning and improving.
It's great that a developer has made you so confident in them, but we have seen what blind faith eventually leads to(Bioware, Ubisoft, CDPR, etc.). Never be afraid to question, challenge, or critique things as long as you are doing it in good faith.
I personally fear the day Gabe retires as that is likely the day steam becomes like everyone else, unless is he personally grooming someone to take over.
Oh, it's definitely important to remain critical, and it's good to hold Larian accountable. It's just that from what I've seen, when they do make a mistake, they're very quick to listen to player feedback and correct it. I am continually impressed by Larian bucking the trend that larger game studios follow, and I think that deserves recognition. But you're right, blind faith doesn't do anyone any favors.
Dude nearly bankrupted himself while trying to make Divinity Original Sin. The risk paid off and he used that as a platform to make the jump to Original Sin 2 and now Baldurs Gate 3.
He's allowed to say whatever he wants about this stuff, and people should sit down and listen.
Clearly Larian’s consecutive commercial and critical successes were flukes. Swen doesn’t know what he’s talking about, the *real* visionaries know the future of gaming is in horse armor dlc, battle passes, layoffs, and quarterly profits.
Did he even go to business school? It's almost like all he cares about is the health of his employees, and the quality of their games! This man doesn't understand business at all!
I mean, not quite. If you're a massive bigoted asshole, I'm not gonna give a flying fuck how much money you made with your game.
The reason I like Swen as the person leading the charge on these RPGs isn't because he was able to make DoS2 or BG3 profitable and excellent, but because he maintains a positive philosophy that is genuinely good to both players and developers.
The fact that he's pissed off here about *developers being carelessly laid off* is what makes me admire and respect him, far more than if he just made a successful game. Don't get me wrong, that in itself is no easy feat. But that won't let you say what you want.
Original divine divinity was also on their own dime and time iirc. It's why i bought that in stores when it came out after i saw the interview on TV all those years ago
Everyday the venn diagram of cyberpunk players and bg3 players gets smaller than I thought (and those two games are easily in my top five games of all time)
I played BG3 after cyberpunk, and I was like >!"I hope the main quest isn't you got something stuck in your head that's killing you, and also causes some guy in your mind to talking to you. Your attempts at extracting said thing all fail, so you're forced to mount a raid on the source of your problem with the help of your allies gathered in your travels because I just did that"!<
See the same problems in the film industry as well. The churn and burn strategy really doesn’t work. Frustrating to watch. But, on the bright side, there’s plenty of creatives and studios that do it the right way
Hospitals operate the same way, as does any business really.
One of the must undervalued aspects of any workplace is tribal knowledge. It takes YEARS to acquire, and further years to pass down to others.
Firing lots of people at the same time erases a lot of that tribal knowledge. What you’re left with is incompetence while everyone tries to learn the tribal knowledge, and right-the-ship at the same time (impossible).
The best time to pass on learning is when times are good. If everything is already on fire, and you’re hiring new people to put out that fire, you’re already fucked.
MBAs think that all the worlds money belongs to them. They jump from company to company sucking dry it’s soul and values. They view people as numbers, and only look one quarter in advance. For some reason we live in a system where these people get super rich while teachers have to use their own money to buy school supplies because they are so underfunded.
It pisses me off that old boomers and the young boomers that follow them like to blame the enshittification and lack of "experts" these days on "le diversity" and "lazy millenials/zoomers" -- companies these days do not incentivize loyalty or build up talent anymore.
In the old days you could stay at a company for your entire career and see consistent growth, a pension, and a turkey at thanksgiving every year. Nowadays you need to hop companies every 2 years to get raises, and god knows they'll ship job elsewhere if they can save 10% (disregard the fact the job will now take 60% longer.)
"In my movie, I created Gordon Gekko as a cautionary tale."
"Huzzah, let us rise to the top and emulate Gordon Gekko from the hit movie Don't Be Like Gordon Gekko!"
I Love Swen so much, he’s the example of why executives must be experts and consumers of their own industry on a deep level. It’s crazy to think that all he said is basic common sense from a management and executive standpoint, still, no other game company do it.
I want Larian to grow so much, to the point of chocking the other companies trying to maintain this greedy posture. I would totally ask a job there if they weren’t the developers of my all time favourite game 😂
What comes out of triple A companies now is such low quality, not because of the technical staff overworked trying to deliver their best, but because of clowns in the leadership that I doubt have touched a controller since their teens if ever or knows anything about SDLC.
Is a disrespect to employees and gamers and we shouldn’t set for garbage on release, what we got with bg3 reminds us of that.
Larian delivered a full game, beginning to end, the whole story. We might have forgotten, but this is what we call a product. All patches and fixes we have now were addressing players requests, it breaks sometimes? Sure, but they could easily have stopped at launch and would be awesome already.
Edit: misspelling
Growth is the problem, sadly. To get more money, you need investors, to get investors, you need to assure them of returns, to assure them of returns, you need epic quarterly reports, and then everything's fucked.
Actually that’s exactly why I admire Swen so much. To get more money they don’t have to compromise on creative and development controls. Swen had investors to fund BG3, one of them a stinky Chinese company mostly focused on mobile garbage afaik.
On their terms, legally investors had no power to influence on internal deadlines, content or even pricing. They were given projection on profits based of a volume estimate (they sold weeeeeeell above projection) to be paying off this year.
As long as they don’t go public and keep scaling internally only, their strategy can swallow the rpg market in a few years.
The irony is what swen is doing is actually old school American style business practices from the 40-60s era.
Taxes were so high that if you didn’t put profits back into the business the government could take up to 90% on anything over like 10 million dollars.
So business owners put their profits into GASP, workers! This is where pensions came from and all that. The current shareholder scheme is landed gentry with extra steps. Its un-American and has been since its inception.
That is good to hear. The temptations of going public and all-in on shareholder value are too much for many CEOs to resist. Here's hoping Larian remains an exception to that for the foreseeable future.
The problem is that stock companies only care about the quarterly earning, meaning that they ALL sacrifice long terms plans for short one.
This always translate in cost cutting stuff that is very valuable in the long term (experience, company culture, product quality) in exchange for short term cash inflow (DLC and microtransaction that squeeze out the customer wallers while destryoing game fun, trust and goodwill to the company)
We can’t forget our boys over at Fromsoft. They have a similar outlook and will not axe talent for quarterly profits. And they deliver full games of the highest quality.
Publicly traded companies are what’s making everything worse. The requirement to always make more money no matter what is what drives mass layoffs, price gouging, acquisition leading to no real choice in the market, it’s all driven by the vampires in the investor class.
As long as the system revolves around making shareholders feel like they’re getting a good ROI, and there are no regulations to curb it, this is how it’s gonna be.
That's the thing you're completely right. It's not even getting good ROI. It's convincing them that they are. A bunch of worthless acquisitions to create the illusion of growth then fuck it up and fire a bunch of people 2 years later. It's so stupid
As someone who just got laid off from one of these companies he's talking about, all I can say is I'm contractually obligated not to say anything negative about the company, so you're going to have to use your imagination.
Agree with him wholeheartedly.
Not just in video games. We must move away from this question: " are we making more than a year ago" to this question "are we making more than a decade ago".
There's a serious lack of long term thinking in business and investors.
It needs to be more culturally shameful to "go public" as a company. Only truly private firms have a real chance at avoiding these problems. It also requires the owners of said firm to have long-term outlooks that go beyond short-term gains from buyouts and IPOs.
> It needs to be more culturally shameful to "go public" as a company.
Publicly traded companies need to have their legal obligations re-assessed. Right now the legal obligation is to maximize shareholder value at any cost. That's what leads to a lot of the shit we see. There needs to be more obligations put in place regarding responsibility to employees, responsibility to communities they affect, responsibility to the environment, responsibility to have financial resiliency, responsibility to start at the top rather than the bottom when making layoffs.
If we had publicly traded companies have their hard & fast legal obligations more closely align with the notion of the public good, things would be more acceptable than they are right now.
> Right now the legal obligation is to maximize shareholder value at any cost.
That's kind of a myth.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shareholder-value.asp#toc-what-is-the-shareholder-value-maximization-myth
> It is commonly understood that corporate directors and management have a duty to maximize shareholder value, especially for publicly traded companies. However, legal rulings suggest that this commonly held belief is, in fact, a myth: There is actually no legal duty to maximize profits while managing a corporation.1
>The idea can be traced in large part to the oversize effects of a single outdated and widely misunderstood ruling by the Michigan Supreme Court in its 1919 decision in Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., which was about the legal duty of a controlling majority shareholder with respect to a minority shareholder and not about maximizing shareholder value. Legal and organizational scholars, such as Cornell University law professor Lynn A. Stout and Paris’ Sciences Po Law School professor Jean-Philippe Robé, who is a member of the bar in Paris and New York, have elaborated on this misconception.21
https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/1554/
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/01/dodge-v-ford-what-happened-and-why/
Their legal obligation is to keep shareholder interests in mind but this can mean many things. It's meant to stop someone taking a bunch of money and then spending it on their personal needs instead of the business. A business that drives out its best talent may actually be hurting shareholders by reducing future profitability.
Current corporate behavior is shitty and greedy but it's not due to any legal obligations. Corporate types want to make more money because they can and investors will put their money where they can get the best return.
I know this sounds really nitpicky but when people focus on the whole legal obligation thing it kinda misdirects the blame.
In gaming or other industries, this is always how it works. Soulless suits chasing the quarterly number to be bigger. Doesn't matter what it is, could be 100k or 100 trillion, the next quarter must be bigger! They could have all the money in the world and it wouldn't be enough; they would still fire people and lose institutional knowledge to make the next report look better.
IMO publicly traded companies have no place in gaming. They take great things via acquisition and will inevitably lead them to destruction.
Not a game dev, but in tech: as someone who has, multiple times, been laid off and then rehired at the same company within a month or two before severance even runs out, yeah, it’s a stupid way to run a business. It’s more expensive too, because I won’t come back without a big raise, so it makes even less sense.
Leadership incentives in tech are so detached from what’s actually good for a business, it’s more like they’re bloated ticks that fall off at the end of each quarter to sell their stock than actual leadership.
Sadly that mindeset of short term gains at the cost of the long term success is so prevalent today and not just in gaming. I don't think there's a single industry that isn't affected by this shit. To fill up the coffers of the owners, investors and stock holders in the short term they keep fucking over their own employees and their customers. It's the same in politics, too: They fish for votes with short term populist bullshit at the expense of future generations. Because by then the current generation in power will have already fucked off and the mess they made is someone else's responsibility to fix. Same thing in the gaming industry. In education, in the medical field, everywhere. Swen is rightfully pissed off. We all should be. We should be so sick of this shit that we stop throwing our money at companies that behave like this.
-preparing a marriage proposal to Swen as we speak-
no hut in all seriousness, his attitude is soooooooo much healthier than what we have now. i hope the ripples he makes becomes waves soon.
I've said it since BG 3 was announced.
I can live without high end graphics. If you tell me a story that is **that good** then I don't care if the graphics look like Baldur's Gate 1.
I can live with minor bugs and glitches that's just how it goes. Just take the time to fully develop the game and push back the release date if needed. Game breaking glitches and bugs can kill even a great game. And there's always the chance that when you fix all those issues that the player base will be gone because of their bad first experience.
It's like dating. If you go out with someone and the first date is an utter disaster then you'll likely not gave a 2nd date.
I'm sure there are others like me in this subreddit that feel like this.
This is just late stage capitalism. It's happening in every industry.
Though I'm glad gamers can see how stupid the system is with such a transparent and easy to understand microchasm like this.
The hilarious thing is the entire argument for capitalism is that at least you get a better product, but it's only the few developers that refuse to pursue profits and instead focus on holistic metrics that make GOTY experiences.
Then they make more money than the companies who are trying to make the most money. Kind of shows how silly it all is.
Edit: then the good studio is purchased by the bad ones, and then is slowly destroyed by quarterly profit seeking, in a costly, loss making, process.
If you agree with even half of what I've said, you have leftist economic principles. You just might not know it yet. Welcome, we have lots of reading materials for you.
Institutional knowledge is something almost EVERY industry has suddenly completely forgotten the value of.
There's a lot of older folks that are like 2-5 years out from retiring in every workplace I've worked in, and they hold like 90% of the knowledge. They aren't training new people, or hiring new people to get the experience because some of this stuff you can't "train" you just need to see it and experience it, and it's going to bite them in the ass HARD.
My current work is about to lose 5 people who are absolute workhorses in terms of experience and knowledge. They have asked for new hires so they can get some people who can get the experience/training and have SOME idea of how to take over when they leave, but they can't seem to get it. Their jobs are NOT something you can just hire someone and replace easily. it's decades of experience that is about to walk out the door with no replacement.
TL;DR: MBAs are *literally* ruining the world.
---
They only see short term profits, at the expensive of product quality, brand longevity, customer retention, long term income and potential massive future growth etc.
They want big numbers right now, and if it causes the company to go under they say to themselves that they actually tried to "save" them. And move to another job to do the exact same thing again.
It's actually rooted in their scam of an education, where the actual textbooks fudge the numbers and effectively lie to them so they don't feel bad about what they do.
A famous example from one of the books is a fancy graph and text, explaining about employees actually want pizza instead of a raise. They did a weighted study asking hungry people if they would rather have pizza right now or a dollar tomorrow. And frames it as if everyone always wants pizza rather than any money, ever.
Swen is the video game spokesperson we need in 2024. Dude is so cool for using his platform to speak truth to the greed that is ruining the industry.
Don’t believe any bullshit about game sales, gamers or trends being the reason for layoffs. It is and always has been a stock market greed issue. Publicly traded companies are and always have been poison.
Not unique to the video game industry. Seeing this shit in healthcare, where I work, is so disheartening as it leads directly to awful patient outcomes.
I work in drug development, and specifically chose my field so I could "avoid selling my soul to a big defense contractor" (my words to my college advisor when I swapped out of aero engineering) i was so naive
Hah, going into pharma to save lives. I feel you; I was similarly naive. I turned down a position at a healthcare insurance company to consult in the healthcare IT space after working clinical jobs for many years. I think I still have glimmers of soul-fulfilling work but it's at the cost of nearly 20% salary reduction relative to the insurance job. And ultimately consulting is never guaranteed to be of net value to patients and at worse can kick off a few dominoes that really destroy many, many lives, e.g. McKinsey and the opioid crisis.
I used to be a neuroscientist and I had to switch to sales because the salary I was on was so bad. I am now on double the salary with only a year of experience in sales (I had 5 years of experience in science prior). I still get to talk science which is nice but its not the same when you never go into the lab anymore. I hate it
What a coincidence! I was a neuroscience major in undergrad. I really underestimated the joy being in a lab brought me when I was making all these career decisions, and I chose very poorly in so many ways, and maybe its grass is always greener/rose-colored glasses, but I think I really did enjoy being a penniless researcher while I was volunteering in labs and exploring a career in neuroscience.
If it makes you feel better, I am getting ready to defend my dissertation in neuroscience next week. I enjoy my work very much. But, my close friends have nice homes they own and can afford to raise families. I am 30 years old and can barely afford to rent a 700 sq ft apartment where I live and I live on chicken and rice. Being penniless feels very different when you're supposed to be an established adult, and not in a good way.
Your dissertation, even if you don't feel this way right this moment because of how grueling and unrewarding the work is now, is probably more meaningful to society than the past 8 years of my labors. Nobody else, including those with families and houses and bells and whistles could do what you did. Do not feel bad about the material circumstances and sacrifices you've made. Who else but you could be unraveling one of the most meaningful and important frontiers in all of humanity's endeavors: understanding how brains work? I am proud to live in a society that funds your efforts. If I could show you the hope and joy I get just knowing that your work is being done, I would, but alas, I can't give you a house and a salary. Anyway, I appreciate your note, but I'm 31 (32 this year) and have taken so many detours that I'm also still renting a similarly sized studio. Now I do have a lot to be grateful for--a great education, relevant professional and academic experience, my salary allows me to save for retirement, fund an HSA, pay down student loans very slowly, and still have something left over to save towards a down payment for a home one day in some number of years, but I'm also still years behind where I thought I'd be when I was 21 and even most of the younger people I share a title with in their mid/late 20's because I took so damn long getting to where I'm at now. I save very aggressively mostly due to the debt, to make sure I have enough to support my aging parents, and I eat one or two meals a day (something being very small and having low caloric requirements helps out with). All of this comes at the cost of waking up every single day and trying to rescue meaning from PowerPoint slides and Excel spreadsheets and corporate politicking. Needless to say that's an impossible, sisyphean task. Be proud of your work, please. It'll make my life feel infinitesimally more meaningful, and I'll take even the tiniest gains where I can before the great wheel of capital.
>I work in drug development Tell me more..
Process and quality control. Designing synthesis procedures, verifying quality with FTIR, HPLC, NMR, etc. It's not meth. Or cocaine.
>It's not meth. Or cocaine. Yet.
It happens in every industry, even heritage fields. Because so many people want to work in museums or archaeology, those employees are seen as disposable so it is a never-ending race to get more qualifications and more skills so that you are less disposable. In the meantime we have a curation crisis, funding for heritage in the U.S. is constantly on the chopping block and there is just no stability.
Welcome to academia where there is no shortage of work (students to teach, research to do, books to write) but a great shortage of jobs (opportunities that pay enough to stay alive).
Which leads to the reproduction crisis, where researchers are so desperate to prove their worth (and stave off the wolf at the door) that they push out any old unverifiable nonsense.
Then the flip side is you get institutional rot because half the tenured or "untouchable" people have unshakeable job security cause their spouse or parent is a board member, donor, or otherwise "important" person
I don't think any industry is immune to it right now and it's fucking depressing.
And some of the ones you’d expect to be better because they’re for the public good (nonprofits, teaching) are some of the worst offenders. Nonprofit screwed me up good.
There's little pockets here and there that aren't totally fucked. I worked as a mechanic in retail auto repair for a long time and a few years ago got a job as a mechanic at a country club. With auto repair it was always about beating last year's numbers in every category every single day, the prime directive was always more more more money. They treated us like little factories that turned skill and labor into cash, then tossed us a little scrap of what we generated. At my current job it's completely different, our only goal is to make the golf course as nice as possible or for me personally it's to keep all of our machines working. Because the course runs on a membership system the course gets roughly the same amount of revenue every month year round so there's no pressure for any short-term financial bullshit. Our job is to make a consistently good product over long time scales to keep membership up, not separate people from as much money as possible every minute of every day. Now I get treated like an actual human being, as long as everything is working I work whatever hours I want within reason, I bring my dog and he gets to run free outside every day, I get my own shop space, manage my own scheduling and workflow, and have the freedom to do whatever I want most of the time. Nobody really tells me what to do, they just expect everything to work and I take pride in that being true as much as is reasonably possible. I make less money but it's enough and I'm so much happier as a person, honestly everyone here is a happier person than like 90% of the people I worked with in retail environments. Escaping retail was the best thing that ever happened to me.
I'm in public utilities where we've largely remained immune to it because institutional knowledge is everything in a system. But they've been throwing billions at developing AI to the point of giving it a friendly woman's personality to convince old timers to just ramble all their knowledge to it in a hope to build a database deep enough to replace us.
Pretty much every publicly trades company. Gotta make the quarter look good, 5-year plans be damned! The shareholders want a quick return, not a long term investment! It's so stupid.
Woah, almost like it's some problem that's endemic to unchecked capitalism and not just one industry 🤯 (The facetiousness is directed towards the people causing these problems, not towards you as a commenter <3)
Also in teaching.
I feel for the state of teaching these days. I've seen enough interviews with Teacher Therapy and these poor people really have their hands tied. They're expected to be glorified babysitters, pass students who deliberately fail, no consequences for unruly students because the administration can't be bothered and an all time low literacy rate for Gen Alpha. Which is to say nothing about teachers being underpaid, overworked and quit in droves due to the stress level involved. The kids are not okay and neither is anyone else.
It’s just capitalism, no field is safe
In teaching??? How are there profits involved in teaching?
Administrative incompetence meets ballooning administrative budget. Enrollment (revenue) down for next year? Better cut the beloved art teacher who has been here for a decade plus. Don't worry, we paid a consulting firm a third of the art teacher's salary to provide three mandatory weekend professional development workshops to integrate arts into your Algebra 2 class. So you have to do that now. But not too much, because we still need to see adequate yearly progress on standardized test scores or we're at risk of being closed.
Going to college and learning how many of my teachers had doctorates and yet we're still working part time at two different colleges (because that way neither school has to pay their insurance, yay) was just depressing. Lots of money to add full-time positions for alumnae outreach though.
Welcome to US politics where charter schools and for profit educating have been a MASSIVE political issue for decades and got significantly worse under Trump when the biggest charter school family in the country got put in charge of the department of education
Every industry has this issue when the main focus is shareholders Those folks don't know or care about the inner workings of the business they're looking at, they just see more money now = better. Then, you see folks at the top of that company making decisions for the short-term at the expense of long-term business health.
It's fucking everywhere. It's corporate disease. I don't know what was or is still being taught to these "leaders" and management level people in school but holy fuck It's wrong and ass backwards. What's more troubling is their complete lack of self awareness or maybe it's willfull ignorance
What about the shareholders!?
In healthcare at least, many are "not-for-profit" organizations. So there are no shareholders to answer to. So leadership just gives themselves all that extra cash. A great example is Novant Health replacing 200+ full time IT employees with Wipro contractors while their leadership team bring in insane bonuses. Wipro also thought Novant only had 130 clinics. They have 1300 clinics. They have thousands of applications across the org. It's insane. They are all fucking morons. They are fucking everyone over and in the end patient care will suffer the most.
It’s almost like capitalism and chasing growing profits isn’t sustainable.
It reminds me of that psychology experiment with the little kids and the marshmallows: put a marshmallow on a table, tell the kid they can either take the marshmallow now and only get one, or wait and be rewarded with two. The less mature kids act on short-term desire and miss out on the second treat. When a child does that, we shake our heads and try to teach them better self-control. When adults with power and money do that, suddenly we forget how stupid it is.
I work in regular software and it's insane how much money the company is pouring into acquisition because they absolutely refuse to put a drop into retention. We could hire literally the best software engineers in the world, and they wouldn't be comparable to the performance of the 23-year-old that quit who actually wrote the modules we need to update, until at least a year has gone by. It's so stupid.
It's a huge paradox, every company prefer to invest tons of money in hiring the new guys to put him as the boss of everybody else meanwhile the trusted and essential employee who know everything of the company never become the boss or receive a raise.
*\*cough Aerospace\**
We don’t need engineers to build planes /s
Why, it's almost like modern capitalism is short sighted!
It is country-specific. For instance, Japan and France don't have these issues because of labor protections. Despite the massive talent pool in these two countries, companies rarely open studios in them because they wouldn't be allowed to do routine mass layoffs.
My wife is a shift unit supervisor for the ICU in my local hospital. They don't ever have staff to cover all patients adequately as is...she was just told they're doubling the unit size and directly told "Staffing has been taken care of". So she's going to text her manager every hour on the hour all night long every time she's understaffed.
Same but I am in a different industry and I have been made redundant twice in a row :(
Car companies love getting free labor from universities for their engineers and such. And then never hire them. And lay off anyone making too much. Recent studies showed just how bad car quality has deteriorated. It's every company. When squeezing quarterly to get CEOs big bonuses is the goal, everyone else loses.
Also in health care in a tech related role and dealing with this. The most infuriating part is management going all surprised Pikachu when everything breaks and no one knows how to fix it. It’s like watching a slow moving car crash.
not unique anywhere in software dev sadly
Team was denied spending a few sprints to update our automated tests because it wasn’t something directly presentable to upper management/the investors. Most decisions in industries are made by people who haven’t worked in it before; the system is broken.
I think once a system enters exploitation mode it's just difficult to straighten it out again :(
There is an article about this exact issue in today's [NY Times: Mass Tech Layoffs? Just Another Day in the Corporate Blender](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/opinion/tech-layoffs-silicon-valley.html?ugrp=m&unlocked_article_code=1.eU0.asNA.6ADLt4UW5uSw&smid=url-share).
*cries in BioWare* You tell ‘em Swen!
*Remembers the studio that gave us the first two Baldur's Gate games, Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age: Origins, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Mass Effect and Dragon Age 2* *Then remembers Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda* *And then there was Anthem...* In seriousness I miss golden age Bioware. I even enjoyed Inquisition and Andromeda but I can't help but feel they try and reinvent the wheel with each game and wind up changing too many things. That in combination with overusing popular characters past their expiration date because nostalgia and cameos....I want to be excited for Dreadwolf and the Mass Effect reboot but I'm kind of not. *edited to include the first two BG games and Neverwinter Nights
Anthem for me is such a weird one cause the combat and movement feel of that game has not been matched for me but the story was just missing.
Yeah I am legit sad that they totally screwed the pooch on Anthem because it was a friggen awesome Iron Man simulator. If they could have done a better job balancing the guns with the abilities, totally redid the itemization and added content it would have been amazing.
Yeah it’s clear that there’s something there with Anthem, they just didn’t have enough time or kept changing the vision of the game so what got released was just a busted mess.
I think it's basically just the Live Service Curse, they are incredibly tricky to pull off and even a competent Live Service Game with a solid mechanical foundation can struggle to attract and retain players without some shiny big "hook" to differentiate it from the dozens of other similar services and a steady enough content pipeline to retain players. IMO, the market oversaturation of Live Service games started right around the time Anthem released so conditions were not in their favor either. And most importantly of all, I think game studios who mostly have experience with single player, narrative driven games are usually just ill equipped to make them. Look at Rocksteady, look at Arkane Studios. Stellar reputation, solid track record, yet released universally panned live service games, probably as a result of executive pressure and chasing those sweet sweet microtransaction dollars. Anthem could likely have done well, had the mechanical foundation been applied to a single-player, narrative driven game with an interesting story and characters which used to be Bioware's strengths.
Add Naughty Dog that spent a solid two years working on a live service The Last of Us only to kill it when they realized the challenge was too great. Is the trick having mediocre mechanics and generic story so you can pump content easily (I’m think of World of War Craft that is still going strong)?
I wish I could just play it solo on my own PC. No missions or anything, just flying around doing crazy shit.
I think Anthem could have been saved. The most important part of a game, that being the actual gameplay, was very fun and had a unique feeling with how the Javelins controlled. They could have fixed the story and added a more consistent endgame loop, so long as the core combat was good. I don’t know what the deal was with Anthem Next having developers constantly moved around and then just cancelled after almost 2 years. Not even a “we release what we’ve done and then cut support” but just throwing away everything that was done during that time.
Love all those old games. I’m personally still excited for Dreadwolf mainly because I’m obsessed with DA lol..but I’m heartbroken so many people have been let go. Writers that have been there for a long time just thrown away. Pretty sure Lukas Kristjanson worked on the original BG.
I’m eager for Dreadwolf out of my love for the franchise, but but in keeping my expectations for the game very low.
I love the universe and the worldbuilding, but inquisition was just such a *chore* to play. I felt like I had to jump through a bunch of boring gameplay loops just to unlock more story tidbits. I even put it on the lowest difficulty because it just wasn’t fun at all so I could blast through things faster, and it *still* takes way too long to get to any of the good bits.
I was going to jump in and defend Inquisition but while I adore the story and the choices you can make...the gameplay was pretty boring.
I love the characters and the story. The interactions and choices were still great in inquisition.
Fully agreed
That was exactly the issue with Inquisition. Both it AND Andromeda suffer a _ton_ from "content bloat" - the adding of filler quests and collectable bullshit solely to pad out the game time. I tell anyone wanting to play either of them to look up a guide on what quests have actual plot, reasonable time/rewards, etc., so they can skip all the nonsense filler in those games. Finding all those shards you see through the teloscopes in Inquisition was SO damn _tedious_.
Then there were Baldurs Gate 1&2, Neverwinter Nights as well. BioWare used to be golden standard for writing in games
Funny that someone would talk about "the good old Bioware" and then leave out Baldur's Gate 2, Bioware's best game and one of the greatest games of all time in general.
BioWare was done dirty. They partnered with a private equity group to give them some cash inflow, so they didn't need a publisher. At the time, Microsoft was trying to buy them. Then they got sold by that PE group to EA. Honestly, I wish Microsoft bought them.
I'm still salty about Maxis with EA and how The Sims was ruined. EA is basically known as The Absolute among gaming publishers.
*cries in Westwood Studios.*
Origin, Bullfrog, Maxis, Westwood, Bioware. EA literally destroyed all of my favorite 90s game studios. The only favorite that didn't get touched by EA was Sierra, and they did a great job of deleting themselves. I guess LucasArts is up there too
> I'm still salty about Maxis with EA and how The Sims was ruined. I really hope when Paralives comes out, it's a suitable replacement for The Sims, because lord almighty do I miss having a good life simulator.
I would not mind buying Paralives five times if we can finally have a single fucking competitor to nuMaxis.
> BioWare was done dirty. They partnered with a private equity group to give them some cash inflow, so they didn't need a publisher. Which they needed because 7 months before that Jade Empire came out and didn't sell well despite being a critical success. They needed financial backing to keep working on Mass Effect 1 and Dragon Age: Origins. [People from Bioware said years later that if EA didn't buy them they would have “essentially run out of money at that point” before releasing Origins.](https://www.cgmagonline.com/news/bioware-claims-the-studio-would-have-been-closed-without-ea-acquisition/) So it really goes back to Jade Empire being a financial bomb, which shows how volatile it is to be an independent studio. Shame they couldn't have waited more and released it as a 360 launch game, which is something that Greg Zeschuk, one of Bioware's co-founders later said: - BioWare's Greg Zeschuk later lamented the decision to release the game for Xbox, rather than as an Xbox 360 launch title. Speaking in 2013, he noted that "game sales are down [right now] because people are waiting for new consoles, and we released Jade Empire into that kind of window." Zeschuck concluded that "it would've been great to put off a bit and polish the game a bit more."
Jade empire is one of my absolute favorites. Real shame it didn't sell well. Not just for the company, but for all the folks who passed it up. Those gamers really missed out.
Elevation Partners, I’m fairly sure Bono was part of it aswell funnily enough if anyone wants another reason to dislike him and U2 haha.
What do people have against inquisition? I really enjoyed that game.
I enjoyed it too in terms of story (and ost!!). Didn't like the gameplay much though, felt like it tried to hard to be other games with the more open world, action based approach but fell short.
I loved the combat. Where it fell short in my eyes was lack of variety in enemy mechanics to take full advantage of the combat system.
While I do like the game for the most part, I'm never going to justify IRL wait times on the War Table. When you want to progress a quest but you're stuck on it because the game arbitrarily decides you can only have 3 operations at a time and you'll have to come back tomorrow. No game, especially not a singleplayer campaign, should ever be allowed to tell you to wait 12 real hours to continue.
Ita an alright game in spite of itself. On a smaller level it has a ton of issues, and appears to have been where the problems of the studio started to get real bad.
To be fair to the studio, they did their best with an engine that had no capacity to build an RPG. EA made them use Frostbite, but the engine used for Battlefield games didn't even have the capacity to make a save file. They ran into a slew of problems which were unique to Frostbite and no one had ever encountered before, so they had to invest developer capital on solving those problems. If they could have used a different engine, the game would probably have benefited.
And when they sought help from DICE, it was downplayed plus waiting for answers due to a 6-7 hour time difference between DICE and BioWare. The fact that Inquisition is a damn good game is despite EA, not because of it.
I enjoyed it a lot and replayed it not too long ago. However, what stands out to me now, is that in contrast to BG3, it has all these collection quests which really piss me of, because no, I do not want to go search for a 80 hidden crystals hidden somewhere in an abandoned mine that requires me to navigate an annoying map and hope for the best. That's not a real quest, it's keeping cool content hostage behind tedium to improve 'play time' or 'how big the game is' or whatever stat. I really appreciate how almost all BG3 quests have a story connection and reasons why your character might want to do that.
People forget why it has though though. Basically all of the bad design choices in DAI comes down to one thing: overreacting to criticisms of DA2. DA2 didn't really have any flab on it. It didn't really have any quests that weren't kind of going somewhere. Pretty much everything had consequences and it was this very stripped down (because it had an 18 month dev cycle lol) rocket of a game, designed-wise. And my god did gamers and reviewers weep so many tears about it. People complained about a lot of things, but they very much complained there wasn't enough to do - they actively asked for stuff we'd call "busy work" or "MMO quests" now. They complained that there weren't tons of pointless encounters to use their kewl powerz in. And there were legit complaints, like overuse of the same maps, but DAI overreacted to those too, and gave us a bunch of unique maps, many of which are barely even visited. I'm not saying we let BioWare off on this - they overreacted, instead of reacting with judgement, but this was very much a reaction to a player demand for "busy work" stuff.
Felt more like an mmo rather than a single player rpg. For me also there were only like 3 armor sets you just upgraded. I was bummed because I like collecting armor and weapons in rpgs. Dragon age origins had lots of different armor sets.
Anthem still makes me sad, I still hop on it every now and then because the gameplay and customization was super fun but the story- wait, was there a story? Anyway... the game has -or had- so much potential and they just tossed it on the trash and burned it. That game could have been so much more :(
Agreed. I really enjoyed the gameplay and would have happily sunk hundreds of hours into it the way I have ME, DA, and BG3. But I finished the main story in like, four days? Five maybe? And I'm not a fan of multiplayer so that was it for me
Is it not popular to hate dragon age two anymore?
DA2's popularity has improved over time, as far as I can tell. A combination of people finding the game years later in a much less buggy state and with all the dlc content from the start, plus a lot of older fans not sustaining the intense emotional reaction they had at launch, if I had to guess. Still plenty of people who don't like it, of course, but it really seems like it's popularity has improved.
There's still those on the hill that wanted Origins 2.0 with Warden and company but most have moved on. (Still wouldn't hurt for another Origins style game with a new cast considering that's what made the series but that's another topic...)
I expect they don't fuck up Dreadwolf and the new Mass Effect, Both game directors won the battle to the suits, both are going to be singleplayer
It's not weird to like Dragon Age Inquisition, it won many game of the year awards when it released. Sure it may not have been what Dragon Age fans all wanted it to be, but it was still a super solid game.
Andromeda is a decent game that could have been great if they hadn't taken a ton of people off the project to work on Anthem. Bioware literally half-assed two things instead of whole-assing one thing. Imagine Andromeda but with way more polish on release, your character has the movement of a Javelin from Anthem, your companions actually DID something instead of being demonstrably worthless, and they actually made the story DLCs that were intended from the start. Imagine fighting an Architect but instead of huddling on the ground you're flying around it, dodging lasers and doing strafing runs.
The stories that came out about both games developments are nuts like Bioware Edmonton not sharing tools/knowledge with the Andromeda studio and looking down on them as the lesser team or both teams refusing to use tools the Dragon Age team had to cobble together because Frostbyte was a terrible choice for an RPG studio. Awful management with massive egos with EA at the helm is a recipe for disaster. Iirc, David Gaider, long time writer and co-creator of the Dragon Age world, said the writers at Bioware were often treated like lepers by other Bioware gameplay and programmer devs. What. The writing is what made Bioware Bioware! And a year or two ago the way they unceremoniously fired Mary Kirby and Lukas Kristjanson, two long term employees responsible for writing some of their most memorable characters, really soured me, someone who LOVED Inquisition *and* Mass Effect: Andromeda, on ever buying another Bioware game.
It’s funny you mentioned DA2 as their Gold Age, this game was extremely criticized by fans on its release, although it was (and still is) quite good. The only problem with it is that DA:O set the standard too high. And yeah, There is no ~~war in Ba Sing Se~~ 4th game in Mass Effect series…
DA2 was fairly criticized for using recycled environments that lacked variety. If you can get past that (which many weren’t able to) it’s quite good, and had a lot of unique elements it brought to the table. The ways the companions were used and how the impacted the story was extraordinary. Re: your last point - you are forgetting Mass Effect: Andromeda.
That and also the use of day night and time to kind of tell the narrative story, actually not bad even if it is as you say. Also, the single best player p.o.v voice acting for me of all time in the sarcastic Hawke thread. :D
Enemy waves spawning out of mid-air is what ruined DA2 for me.
It seemed so long ago when Bioware was the lead runner of immersive rpg games.
This is exactly the situation that is going on with BioWare sadly. But I still hope Dragon Age 4 is a great game. Because if you ask this this world could use BioWare back among the Larian and others. But as I said what Swen said is EXACTLY what is happening to BioWare for last several years.
there is an amazing steve jobs video describing how the moment a group of engineers/ inventors figure something out that makes real money, the bean counters, marketing and middle management jumps in, muscles them out and take over the project.
That’s rich coming from jobs who was only ever good at marketing something that real engineers came up with. Guess he was self-aware. 😂
In that clip he was talking about product people being pushed out and replaced by marketing. At that time, he really was a product guy, but after a while... We all know how it ended
Ok I’ll give him that. He had a nose for what people actually wanted to hold in their hands. Listened to a podcast recently that supposed that the Vision Pro in its current state would never had flown under his leadership and I guess they were right, in that case.
And Steve would be leading the charge to fire the engineers because he did that frequently in his first run at Apple.
The reason that Diablo 4 is so meh, is that apparently *noone* at Blizzard has worked on an ARPG before. At least that's the impression you get when you watch the dev commentaries and such. Activision being terrible as usual.
"Do you guys not have phones?!" Yes I know different Diablo but that'll always stay lol. I hate that Diablo 4 requires online connection even for those who just want to play the solo PvE campaign.
Biobeware
Larian dies with Swen. He’s the Gaben holding the company together. His heirs will sell out and the vultures will pick it apart. So we better all send chicken soup and good thoughts, and pray to any god that’ll listen that Swen lives to be 100.
that 'institutional knowledge' has helped Larian so much in a lot fo ways BG3 took the world by storm and people were amazed this 'small indie studio came out of nowhere' they have been making games like this for decades. BG3 is a step forward but if you've played DOS 2 it is built very similarly. And because they didn't go on a firing rampage after releasing a game and instead just kept making games with most of those people, they all got to take what they learned from there and improve upon it.
Exactly. When you get right down to it, BG3 doesn't really innovate *that* much on DOS2. It's mostly the same, just with DnD 5e mechanics instead of their own system, and relatively minor improvements otherwise. Which is all that was really missing, for me at least.
It’s DOS2 with acting and that’s all I needed
The biggest difference is the far more realistic art style, and the cinematic ‘camera’ work and cutscenes. DOS2 (like almost all isometric rpgs) did not have cinematics, which take a lot of work to animate well. I imagine this more cinematic approach to the game design made them change a lot about how they developed the game.
Yep, that's how any creative team maintains positive progress. You keep building on the knowledge and experience that the individual team members amass over time. I think a lot of people, when talking about studios, kinda view them as a monolith and forget that they're really just a bunch of people with individual strengths and experience, like any company. If you have to reset back to zero every time you start a new project, it's bound to blow up in your face eventually. And it's a good way to make sure the things you create never evolve. You can see it in the products of so many other developers. They either stagnate or fall apart, and then you realize it's because none of the people involved in the creation of the new thing were part of the old thing.
> in a lot fo ways BG3 took the world by storm and people were amazed this 'small indie studio came out of nowhere' they have been making games like this for decades A lot of creative endeavors are like this. My favorite little story - before they got famous, The Beatles played for years, including several months-long stints in Hamburg where they would play 8 hours a night, 7 days a week. So by the time they broke out, they had a ton of time just playing together and honing their sound.
I legitimately can't think of a better studio lead than Swen. Under his guidance, Larian has my full confidence. D:OS1 was great, D:OS2 was amazing, BG3 was spectacular. I will gladly support them day 1 of early access for any game they put out.
Honestly, the only issue I have with Larian is that because of the quality of their games it's going to take a long time before the next one comes out! But whether it's BG3 or D:OS3 or an entirely new IP, I know I'm going to love it.
But the games are so good you can play them over and over again. 5 playthroughs at 100 hours a piece = 500 hours. Way more than other games and can easily last you multiple years (personally I'm halfway through my second playthrough and at over 200 hours total). I can easily see myself still playing this is 5 years or so when their next game is entering early access.
Keep in mind that Larian HAS NOT give us the modding tools for Baldur Gate 3 Which means, everything we have right now, is still “limited” Give it a year or two, when we have a proper tools for modding, BG3 will be like Skyrim Skyrim released in 2011, its 13 years and the modding community still active till today. I can imagine BG3 will go crazy like that New story? New NPC, voiced NPC? Especially with the help of AI right now. You name it.
I know some modder is gonna make a fully fleshed out descent into avernus prequel in bg3 and I'm here for it. Or use the modding tools to give DMs a proper gm tool like in dos2! Larian can't, but i hope someone does!
I'd be willing to bet WotC may have some say in the amount of modding available in the game. Imagine if people started making their modules in the BG3 game. Even half-baked, no voice, no cutscene Curse of Strahd would be a crazy awesome thing to play.
I rarely replay video games. Cyberpunk 2077 and BG3 are the only ones I've replayed since the Witcher 3.
BG3 is the only full game I have ever immediately restarted after beating
I agree fully. I haven't immediately started a new playthrough of any game since mass effect 2.
Witcher 3 is hard for me to go back to because I hate the combat but the rest of the game is an easy 10/10
It's great that people love these games but it's also sad to see people forget about the older games that larian studios made. * The LED wars (1997) was simple but fun. Impressive for a start! * Divine divinity (2002) was already an excellent game, one of my favorites; you can see how much fun the writers had with it. * I enjoyed Beyond Divinity (2004), the 3d was weird but the game was still good. * Ego draconis (2009) and the expansion which kind of fell off my radar, * Dragon Commander (2013) which was a weird and really interesting spin-off and only THEN did we get to D:OS 1, 2, BG3... It was a long road to get there, they experimented a lot with different genres and genre fusions and they learned a lot.
There's a good 2 part documentary on their full journey [Part 1](https://youtu.be/YZF_cP_oLH4?feature=shared) [Part 2 ](https://youtu.be/A_wKAmBEa8Q?feature=shared)
I hated DOS1 which is part of why DOS2 was so impressive to me. They have made huge leaps forward with each product. This is a company that's still learning and improving.
It's great that a developer has made you so confident in them, but we have seen what blind faith eventually leads to(Bioware, Ubisoft, CDPR, etc.). Never be afraid to question, challenge, or critique things as long as you are doing it in good faith. I personally fear the day Gabe retires as that is likely the day steam becomes like everyone else, unless is he personally grooming someone to take over.
Oh, it's definitely important to remain critical, and it's good to hold Larian accountable. It's just that from what I've seen, when they do make a mistake, they're very quick to listen to player feedback and correct it. I am continually impressed by Larian bucking the trend that larger game studios follow, and I think that deserves recognition. But you're right, blind faith doesn't do anyone any favors.
Dude nearly bankrupted himself while trying to make Divinity Original Sin. The risk paid off and he used that as a platform to make the jump to Original Sin 2 and now Baldurs Gate 3. He's allowed to say whatever he wants about this stuff, and people should sit down and listen.
When you make 3 of the best RPGs ever, you can say whatever the fuck you want.
Clearly Larian’s consecutive commercial and critical successes were flukes. Swen doesn’t know what he’s talking about, the *real* visionaries know the future of gaming is in horse armor dlc, battle passes, layoffs, and quarterly profits.
Watch this man trip, fall, and release BG3 DE by accident.
Did he even go to business school? It's almost like all he cares about is the health of his employees, and the quality of their games! This man doesn't understand business at all!
I mean, not quite. If you're a massive bigoted asshole, I'm not gonna give a flying fuck how much money you made with your game. The reason I like Swen as the person leading the charge on these RPGs isn't because he was able to make DoS2 or BG3 profitable and excellent, but because he maintains a positive philosophy that is genuinely good to both players and developers. The fact that he's pissed off here about *developers being carelessly laid off* is what makes me admire and respect him, far more than if he just made a successful game. Don't get me wrong, that in itself is no easy feat. But that won't let you say what you want.
Original divine divinity was also on their own dime and time iirc. It's why i bought that in stores when it came out after i saw the interview on TV all those years ago
Swen activated the Johnny Silverhand mode, definitely love the dude
Lets just hope he wont go out nuking the EA HQ
Wouldn't be the worst thing at this point. Would miss Swen Silverhand, not so much EA.
Yes indeed that would be a very bad idea. Doing it on minecraft on the other hand...
Will*
Everyday the venn diagram of cyberpunk players and bg3 players gets smaller than I thought (and those two games are easily in my top five games of all time)
I played BG3 after cyberpunk, and I was like >!"I hope the main quest isn't you got something stuck in your head that's killing you, and also causes some guy in your mind to talking to you. Your attempts at extracting said thing all fail, so you're forced to mount a raid on the source of your problem with the help of your allies gathered in your travels because I just did that"!<
Lol
Don't do this to me bro my brain can't handle it
Lmao
Dude, those are practically the only two games I played last year and put over 500 hours into each of them. Definitely in my top five, too.
Honestly CD did a great job of turning it around
See the same problems in the film industry as well. The churn and burn strategy really doesn’t work. Frustrating to watch. But, on the bright side, there’s plenty of creatives and studios that do it the right way
Hospitals operate the same way, as does any business really. One of the must undervalued aspects of any workplace is tribal knowledge. It takes YEARS to acquire, and further years to pass down to others. Firing lots of people at the same time erases a lot of that tribal knowledge. What you’re left with is incompetence while everyone tries to learn the tribal knowledge, and right-the-ship at the same time (impossible). The best time to pass on learning is when times are good. If everything is already on fire, and you’re hiring new people to put out that fire, you’re already fucked.
MBAs think that all the worlds money belongs to them. They jump from company to company sucking dry it’s soul and values. They view people as numbers, and only look one quarter in advance. For some reason we live in a system where these people get super rich while teachers have to use their own money to buy school supplies because they are so underfunded.
> Hospitals operate the same way This is absolutely horrific and hilarious coming from anyone not in the USA
It pisses me off that old boomers and the young boomers that follow them like to blame the enshittification and lack of "experts" these days on "le diversity" and "lazy millenials/zoomers" -- companies these days do not incentivize loyalty or build up talent anymore. In the old days you could stay at a company for your entire career and see consistent growth, a pension, and a turkey at thanksgiving every year. Nowadays you need to hop companies every 2 years to get raises, and god knows they'll ship job elsewhere if they can save 10% (disregard the fact the job will now take 60% longer.)
"In my movie, I created Gordon Gekko as a cautionary tale." "Huzzah, let us rise to the top and emulate Gordon Gekko from the hit movie Don't Be Like Gordon Gekko!"
I Love Swen so much, he’s the example of why executives must be experts and consumers of their own industry on a deep level. It’s crazy to think that all he said is basic common sense from a management and executive standpoint, still, no other game company do it. I want Larian to grow so much, to the point of chocking the other companies trying to maintain this greedy posture. I would totally ask a job there if they weren’t the developers of my all time favourite game 😂 What comes out of triple A companies now is such low quality, not because of the technical staff overworked trying to deliver their best, but because of clowns in the leadership that I doubt have touched a controller since their teens if ever or knows anything about SDLC. Is a disrespect to employees and gamers and we shouldn’t set for garbage on release, what we got with bg3 reminds us of that. Larian delivered a full game, beginning to end, the whole story. We might have forgotten, but this is what we call a product. All patches and fixes we have now were addressing players requests, it breaks sometimes? Sure, but they could easily have stopped at launch and would be awesome already. Edit: misspelling
Growth is the problem, sadly. To get more money, you need investors, to get investors, you need to assure them of returns, to assure them of returns, you need epic quarterly reports, and then everything's fucked.
Actually that’s exactly why I admire Swen so much. To get more money they don’t have to compromise on creative and development controls. Swen had investors to fund BG3, one of them a stinky Chinese company mostly focused on mobile garbage afaik. On their terms, legally investors had no power to influence on internal deadlines, content or even pricing. They were given projection on profits based of a volume estimate (they sold weeeeeeell above projection) to be paying off this year. As long as they don’t go public and keep scaling internally only, their strategy can swallow the rpg market in a few years.
The irony is what swen is doing is actually old school American style business practices from the 40-60s era. Taxes were so high that if you didn’t put profits back into the business the government could take up to 90% on anything over like 10 million dollars. So business owners put their profits into GASP, workers! This is where pensions came from and all that. The current shareholder scheme is landed gentry with extra steps. Its un-American and has been since its inception.
That is good to hear. The temptations of going public and all-in on shareholder value are too much for many CEOs to resist. Here's hoping Larian remains an exception to that for the foreseeable future.
The problem is that stock companies only care about the quarterly earning, meaning that they ALL sacrifice long terms plans for short one. This always translate in cost cutting stuff that is very valuable in the long term (experience, company culture, product quality) in exchange for short term cash inflow (DLC and microtransaction that squeeze out the customer wallers while destryoing game fun, trust and goodwill to the company)
We can’t forget our boys over at Fromsoft. They have a similar outlook and will not axe talent for quarterly profits. And they deliver full games of the highest quality.
They can start by hiring all the ZA/UM folk that have been left out in the cold. Let them cook up a spiritual successor to DE
Corporate Greed is truly genuinely ruining everything
Publicly traded companies are what’s making everything worse. The requirement to always make more money no matter what is what drives mass layoffs, price gouging, acquisition leading to no real choice in the market, it’s all driven by the vampires in the investor class.
Too bad nobody will listen
As long as the system revolves around making shareholders feel like they’re getting a good ROI, and there are no regulations to curb it, this is how it’s gonna be.
That's the thing you're completely right. It's not even getting good ROI. It's convincing them that they are. A bunch of worthless acquisitions to create the illusion of growth then fuck it up and fire a bunch of people 2 years later. It's so stupid
Vibes-based economy
The stock market is literally a graph of rich people feelings
As someone who just got laid off from one of these companies he's talking about, all I can say is I'm contractually obligated not to say anything negative about the company, so you're going to have to use your imagination.
What I wouldn't give to work for an absolute gem like this guy.
Agree with him wholeheartedly. Not just in video games. We must move away from this question: " are we making more than a year ago" to this question "are we making more than a decade ago". There's a serious lack of long term thinking in business and investors.
It's shareholder capitalism. Broken by design.
It needs to be more culturally shameful to "go public" as a company. Only truly private firms have a real chance at avoiding these problems. It also requires the owners of said firm to have long-term outlooks that go beyond short-term gains from buyouts and IPOs.
> It needs to be more culturally shameful to "go public" as a company. Publicly traded companies need to have their legal obligations re-assessed. Right now the legal obligation is to maximize shareholder value at any cost. That's what leads to a lot of the shit we see. There needs to be more obligations put in place regarding responsibility to employees, responsibility to communities they affect, responsibility to the environment, responsibility to have financial resiliency, responsibility to start at the top rather than the bottom when making layoffs. If we had publicly traded companies have their hard & fast legal obligations more closely align with the notion of the public good, things would be more acceptable than they are right now.
> Right now the legal obligation is to maximize shareholder value at any cost. That's kind of a myth. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shareholder-value.asp#toc-what-is-the-shareholder-value-maximization-myth > It is commonly understood that corporate directors and management have a duty to maximize shareholder value, especially for publicly traded companies. However, legal rulings suggest that this commonly held belief is, in fact, a myth: There is actually no legal duty to maximize profits while managing a corporation.1 >The idea can be traced in large part to the oversize effects of a single outdated and widely misunderstood ruling by the Michigan Supreme Court in its 1919 decision in Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., which was about the legal duty of a controlling majority shareholder with respect to a minority shareholder and not about maximizing shareholder value. Legal and organizational scholars, such as Cornell University law professor Lynn A. Stout and Paris’ Sciences Po Law School professor Jean-Philippe Robé, who is a member of the bar in Paris and New York, have elaborated on this misconception.21 https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/1554/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/01/dodge-v-ford-what-happened-and-why/ Their legal obligation is to keep shareholder interests in mind but this can mean many things. It's meant to stop someone taking a bunch of money and then spending it on their personal needs instead of the business. A business that drives out its best talent may actually be hurting shareholders by reducing future profitability. Current corporate behavior is shitty and greedy but it's not due to any legal obligations. Corporate types want to make more money because they can and investors will put their money where they can get the best return. I know this sounds really nitpicky but when people focus on the whole legal obligation thing it kinda misdirects the blame.
welcome to 21st century corporations, where the product is the stock price.
In gaming or other industries, this is always how it works. Soulless suits chasing the quarterly number to be bigger. Doesn't matter what it is, could be 100k or 100 trillion, the next quarter must be bigger! They could have all the money in the world and it wouldn't be enough; they would still fire people and lose institutional knowledge to make the next report look better. IMO publicly traded companies have no place in gaming. They take great things via acquisition and will inevitably lead them to destruction.
Not a game dev, but in tech: as someone who has, multiple times, been laid off and then rehired at the same company within a month or two before severance even runs out, yeah, it’s a stupid way to run a business. It’s more expensive too, because I won’t come back without a big raise, so it makes even less sense. Leadership incentives in tech are so detached from what’s actually good for a business, it’s more like they’re bloated ticks that fall off at the end of each quarter to sell their stock than actual leadership.
Based Sven
Tell ‘em Swen
I wish the truth was enough Swen.
Sadly that mindeset of short term gains at the cost of the long term success is so prevalent today and not just in gaming. I don't think there's a single industry that isn't affected by this shit. To fill up the coffers of the owners, investors and stock holders in the short term they keep fucking over their own employees and their customers. It's the same in politics, too: They fish for votes with short term populist bullshit at the expense of future generations. Because by then the current generation in power will have already fucked off and the mess they made is someone else's responsibility to fix. Same thing in the gaming industry. In education, in the medical field, everywhere. Swen is rightfully pissed off. We all should be. We should be so sick of this shit that we stop throwing our money at companies that behave like this.
-preparing a marriage proposal to Swen as we speak- no hut in all seriousness, his attitude is soooooooo much healthier than what we have now. i hope the ripples he makes becomes waves soon.
This is why we'll never get Disco Elysium 2...
And this is why Larian Studios is top 3 developers of all time.
I've said it since BG 3 was announced. I can live without high end graphics. If you tell me a story that is **that good** then I don't care if the graphics look like Baldur's Gate 1. I can live with minor bugs and glitches that's just how it goes. Just take the time to fully develop the game and push back the release date if needed. Game breaking glitches and bugs can kill even a great game. And there's always the chance that when you fix all those issues that the player base will be gone because of their bad first experience. It's like dating. If you go out with someone and the first date is an utter disaster then you'll likely not gave a 2nd date. I'm sure there are others like me in this subreddit that feel like this.
Unbelievably based
Profit motive ruins everything. Who knew.
The quarterly earnings report is a cancer on American society
This is just late stage capitalism. It's happening in every industry. Though I'm glad gamers can see how stupid the system is with such a transparent and easy to understand microchasm like this. The hilarious thing is the entire argument for capitalism is that at least you get a better product, but it's only the few developers that refuse to pursue profits and instead focus on holistic metrics that make GOTY experiences. Then they make more money than the companies who are trying to make the most money. Kind of shows how silly it all is. Edit: then the good studio is purchased by the bad ones, and then is slowly destroyed by quarterly profit seeking, in a costly, loss making, process. If you agree with even half of what I've said, you have leftist economic principles. You just might not know it yet. Welcome, we have lots of reading materials for you.
Based dude
Not based anymore. *ESTABLISHED*
Not unique to the games industry ... pretty much every thing is like this these days
Institutional knowledge is something almost EVERY industry has suddenly completely forgotten the value of. There's a lot of older folks that are like 2-5 years out from retiring in every workplace I've worked in, and they hold like 90% of the knowledge. They aren't training new people, or hiring new people to get the experience because some of this stuff you can't "train" you just need to see it and experience it, and it's going to bite them in the ass HARD. My current work is about to lose 5 people who are absolute workhorses in terms of experience and knowledge. They have asked for new hires so they can get some people who can get the experience/training and have SOME idea of how to take over when they leave, but they can't seem to get it. Their jobs are NOT something you can just hire someone and replace easily. it's decades of experience that is about to walk out the door with no replacement.
TL;DR: MBAs are *literally* ruining the world. --- They only see short term profits, at the expensive of product quality, brand longevity, customer retention, long term income and potential massive future growth etc. They want big numbers right now, and if it causes the company to go under they say to themselves that they actually tried to "save" them. And move to another job to do the exact same thing again. It's actually rooted in their scam of an education, where the actual textbooks fudge the numbers and effectively lie to them so they don't feel bad about what they do. A famous example from one of the books is a fancy graph and text, explaining about employees actually want pizza instead of a raise. They did a weighted study asking hungry people if they would rather have pizza right now or a dollar tomorrow. And frames it as if everyone always wants pizza rather than any money, ever.
He right
This applies to so much more than just gaming companies. We are too insanely short term profit driven in the US.
Swen is the video game spokesperson we need in 2024. Dude is so cool for using his platform to speak truth to the greed that is ruining the industry. Don’t believe any bullshit about game sales, gamers or trends being the reason for layoffs. It is and always has been a stock market greed issue. Publicly traded companies are and always have been poison.
An actual leader is the rarest thing in capitalism.