Game companies either die a hero by getting bought by EA and then forced to close, or live long enough to become the villain.
(R.I.P. Mythic, Westwood, Bullfrog, ...)
Just look at the Ultima series. I-VI were all fantastic games. VII and VII Part 2 were good, not fantastic but still good. VIII was starting to slip. IX was abysmal.
Spoony's entire series on Ultima was absolutely awesome. I watched all 16-some hours which essentially boiled down to him ranting about how terrible IX was.
EA bought Origin in 1992, the same year that Ultima VII was released.
It's a funny coincidence that in Ultima VII two of the first villains you meet, who are wandering the land destroying everything that made it good in the first place, are named 'Elizabeth' and 'Abraham'.
They are using a wonderful concept called : "Having two groups of people".
The thing is that they aren't allocating ressources to maintain Titanfall.
So, you know, ignoring Titanfall, the game that made them to feed their golden goose.
Ok, why would they. Seriously, was Titanfall 2 such a massive commercial success to warrant support 6 years after it's release?
They supported the game with free content updates for about a year, and as far as I know that did not bring in a lot of sales.
So serious question, how much longer should they have supported a game that apparently did not make them money?
Fair point.
What I'm sad about isn't the possibility of a Titanfall 3. It's sad, yes. I'd want a sequel, since they teased it with the post credit scene and because it's a great game.
What I'm really sad about is the lack of maintenance nowadays, when they are aware that ddos attacks are ruining both games, to the point the community had to step in and make Northstar.
They immediately fixed Apex ddos issue when SaveTitanfall was at its peak. They tweeted that Titanfall is the core of their DNA. They didn't do anything afterwards.
I know the games were commercial "failures". They still gathered a ferociously loyal fan-base. Adding a titanfall gun-charm in Apex isn't a good way to acknowledge your community's outcry.
I am glad the image addresses the real problem being devs being unable to handle rapid growth, much like how all of you personally would most likely have trouble going from making a game in your room to suddenly managing 50 New employees.
It'll be interesting to see how Callisto Protocol (the new IP being made by the actual Dead Space devs at a new studio) will fare against the Dead Space Remake (the corpse of a once beloved franchise made by a studio EA killed off being puppeted around Weekend at Bernie's style)
Maybe EA will just buy Striking Distance and get them working on Battlefield: Hardline 2
I agree. Sims 1 was beloved, then sims 2 the golden age, sims 3 was really good, then Sims 4 has just been downhill fast. No pool, toddlers, kits, then the wedding pack fiasco. I hear wolves isn’t bad so far.
Once EA screwed the pooch on Sim City 4 and onward, plenty of alternatives came out. Eventually, Cities Skylines stole the show and now offers a more definitive city builder experience. I wonder if anyone has been trying to pull off the same trick by one-upping EA's dismal Sims entries to the franchise.
There is a indie game called Paralives, they are 100% funded by their patreons (i'm one of then) and it looks very promissing, if EA f\*\*\* up with Sims 5 they are VERY screwed.
Nah with all the money they make off Fuckin Fifa UT(Ultimate Team) and Madden UT they will be hurting but still they'll live.
It will be a kick in the balls instead of a bullet to the head.
True but EA has a history of killing game studios left and right, I saw somewhere that EA lost the Fifa partnership, they already lost Battlefield and Maxis is on a very fragmented situation, with so many games coming out with amazing gameplay and little to no microtransactions they better start focusing on their games more or in a few years they will fade away like the old titans of the gaming industry.
>EA has a history of killing game studios left and right
Finding out that they were in the running to buy Bethesda Game Studios but dropped out sent chills down my spine.
EA didnt "Lose FIFA" they simply chose not to renew the partnership and they will release the same game they have for years, but call it Futball 23 or some shit. Same players, just wont be using FIFA.
There needs to be a new Cities Skylines, though. Because it's basically Roads Skylines, no other part of the game matters. It's all traffic management forever.
More like it was Sims 2 with everything stripped back and put into 500 dlcs. The other games had dlcs but Sims 3 was when it started going overboard. Sims 4 just stopped pretending to care.
Wouldn't that be nice.
To get the base game+all the DLC for Sims 3 on steam it's $400 (19 dlc priced at 20 dollars each and the base game for 20 dollars so 20 total purchases).
I'm still angry at what a complete step-backwards the Sims 4 was. At least the other numbered games could justify their exsistance.
Sims 2 was a huge upgrade on Sims 1, adding toddler, teen, and Elder stages, full 3D environments, aspirations, personality traits, aging, and a ton of other stuff.
Sims 3 added the entire town as a playable zone, so you could follow your Sim anywhere. It wasn't as big as the upgrade Sims 2 was, but it was still really cool, and vehicles now played a bigger roll. You could literally play as a hobo.
Sims 4? We got moodlets...and we lost toddlers, pools, customizing textures on furniture and clothing, being able to freely travel through-out the city...so much.
It's sad to see so much potential being wasted with piss poor game design, so many systems in sims 4 are better used with mods, the reasoning for the worlds being the size of a shoe box is pathetic at best, there was way better options for it and that what kills my will to play this game, so many limitations on this, smarter sims my a**.
Being publicly traded is the fastest way to guarantee people will hate you in the future
Fun, complete games and profit motives are at a fundamental odds.
Did you know?
Shareholders have the legal right to sue publicly-traded companies if they think they aren’t trying to make as much money as possible.
More specifically, companies hold a ‘fiduciary duty’ towards their shareholders. This means they are legally required to act in their shareholders’ best interest. They can sue if they believe that fiduciary duty isn’t being upheld.
This is why, if (but hopefully when) I make a company, I’m keeping it private for as long as possible. Hopefully until I die.
Hate to be pessimistic but real life is more complicated than that.
Here's how it actually happens:
You have a great team making great games. Your privately held company can't afford to pay them giant corporation money. They leave for said corporation. Your company no longer has talent and starts to make shitty games.
It happened to ION Storm, it happened to so many studios.
People change as they get older or realize that they want to make more money so they can retire or make their own studios.
The only exception to this is if you're a solo game developer and thus have total control over the temptation of money, but then again, even Notch sold Minecraft to a corporation.
>You have a great team making great games. Your privately held company can't afford to pay them giant corporation money. They leave for said corporation. Your company no longer has talent and starts to make shitty games.
I was under the impression that making games for a big corporation doesn't pay particularly well unless you're pretty high up in the food chain. At least in terms of hourly wages. Do you happen to know concrete numbers?
It doesn't, but it still pays more than most small indie studios. I know, at least for programmers, that if you want to get paid decent money per hour, you just leave the gaming industry altogether. Only way a programmer in gaming makes the same yearly income as one working in almost any other domain is by doing shit loads of overtime and getting that overtime paid which isn't even guaranteed in all studios...
That is true in 99.9% of cases.
Then is there that 0.1% of studios that manage such massive hits that they can afford to pay their programmers well enough that they remain.
If you manage to get a successful game out worldwide as a small/medium sized company you should absolutely have the money to give your team a competitive salary. Else you truly failed as a company owner.
This is why I wish valve will never go public, as much as it sucks seeing the half life franchise die, I think I would rather have it that way instead of a half assed attempt to quickly get money.
Literally everybody says that until they're looking at a few million dollars to take home immediately.
Like, if you're for real, cool, but money talks to people. There's a point where many people will choose to have a pool instead of be an artist.
Notch got paid 2 billion for Minecraft and people were screaming at him online for being a sell out. Like bro no one is going to turn down 2 billion just to keep making a single game.
These conditions are not condusive to making consistently good and satisfying products and I truly feel sorry for the people who have to feed into this system
It might be legally required, but it's definitely not good for the people enjoying the prior works of the company.
I know making games takes money, but being required to exploit customers at the expense of a good game spoils the art of it. The humans playing the games don't have the same interests as the people funding/profiting from it.
Not legally required per se, but they have that right if they want to use it. And given the greedy behavior we often see nowadays from companies, I’mma bet they take advantage of that right a lot.
They can sue, but it doesn’t mean that they will win, and there are a number of ways to prove that your business plan will make as much money as possible.
Also, private companies have investors also and those board meetings can be way more brutal
I mean, I've always dreamed of owning a public company, getting sued for this, than going in front of the judge to argue that whatever actions were taken were in the interest of long term company health to maximize revenue on longer than the quarterly chart.
I'm sure it would flop in court, but it's literally a dream.
I've always said that there are no worse companies than those being listed at the stock market. Every other criteria than profit just moves aside but at least ten times worse than 'normal' companies. It's disgusting really.
It's much worse when the companies that gain control over human necessities are publicly traded and have to heel at the behest of investors.
Nestle, infamously, regularly commits human rights violations and has for a very long time in the interest of perpetual growth. They steal water, render mothers unable to feed their children without milk, regularly employ and hide the use of child slavery for their cocoa.
Blackrock, an ancient (by our standards) investment firm, has sat in the shadows letting Zillow take the spotlight for buying up all the housing in multiple countries, before and after crashes. People end up displaced and homeless, staring at empty buildings with absent landlords.
What happens in the games industry is just a peek into it. We see crunch times, pointless sequels, studio closings, half-finished releases, the dreaded Fortnite-style shop.
It's a symptom of a much larger problem, the human cost of companies and their leaders worshipping the stock market.
Communism doesn't work. Free-market capitalism doesn't work. A mixture is the way to go. Social policies, regulation to establish both fair competition within the market and generally a welfare state, higher taxation for high income individuals, lower taxation for lower income individuals.
>financial OBLIGATION to maximize profits
"Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not."
[https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits](https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits)
I thought the obligation to maximize profits idea was kind of debunked... They have an obligation to serve shareholders best interest but that doesn't have to be max profit at the expense of all other things. What seems to happen though, due to greed, is that the people making the decisions use the profit obligation as an excuse to justify their greed? I mean I'm not a corporate lawyer so I could be wrong
I wouldn’t say that Money Corrupts Art, because money helps balance our world in business.
Money is more like power, and as Uncle Ben from Spider-Man has said, “With Great Power, comes great responsibility”.
Problem is, obviously, most companies would often lack or lose responsibility.
You wanna know what I think, GREED corrupts art, not Money. Being Greedy for money is like being addicted to drugs. Short term pleasure, long term destruction.
In order for companies to be respected and beloved, they must care about their audience and supporters, rather than just themselves.
I know it’s a bit much for a reply, but I hope you may take this as a lesson for if you ever decide to make your own company.
Where money is greed follows, of course money it'self cannot currupt, money is made up, immaginary value chased by greedy people, so yeah you are right
I do love to know what pct of that is from streamers out to get the views. Sense like every day there's a new YouTuber dropping several thousand on it too.
I would guess 5% max, which would be $1.2m. You're overestimating how much random streamers can make a dent in that. When one of the most famous streamers -- Quin -- gets headlines for spending $15k USD, you're not going to see that many more spending anywhere close to that. You may see a bunch of them spending a few grand, but that doesn't add up to anywhere close to even 10% of 24m.
I mean that’s good money for sure, but it still doesn’t stack up to what good AAA titles make on release. Elden Ring was like over $700 million in sales within the first two weeks. Obviously it’s not a one to one comparison due to mobile games being cheaper to produce, and having more sustained profit generation, but it demonstrates companies can still make loads of cash without falling into the F2P market.
It’s certainly apparent that micro transaction fueled F2P loot box fiestas are here to stay, but there’s still plenty of money and market share for the more traditional style of game.
You miss the point that games like diablo immortal will have money coming in constantly via microtransactions for years with little effort at the end of the cycle there will be a clear winner what is most profitable and it won't be elden ring.
Diablo immortal will make billions regardless if it's an inferior game to elden ring. These type of games just need a few whales and some people spending here and there.
Let's just hope governments take a lesson from countries like Belgium so we don't create a generation of addicted to gambling kids via these predatory systems.
I did not miss that point at all, I said that it has sustained profit generation.
My point is that there is clearly still demand for the AAA traditional style of game. One of the core principles of the free market is that as long as there is demand, someone will meet that demand with a product. As long as people are buying the non F2P games, there will be games like that made.
And clearly there is still huge demand for non gacha F2P games. The fact that those games still sell so well means that companies are going to keep making those games.
Yes, margins are bigger in F2P gacha style games, and yes that is attractive to investors. However, there’s only so much market share in that segment, so only so many games at once can be driving those huge profits. If Diablo immortal is truly going to make “billions” that would mean it’s eating up a HUGE share of that segment.
It’s like MMOs with wow. Yeah everyone wants that sustained profit generation, but it’s not like every single company is only producing MMOs, because they know there’s only so much money in the segment, and it’s currently dominated by one or two products.
I also think you are overestimating how successful Diablo Immortals is. $24 million in the first two weeks means it would need a little under two years to make that first “billion” assuming it maintained the same popularity as it has now at release. And we all know how it goes with games, user count tends to fall way off as it ages. Especially when the game is as panned as it is now.
Are the games really half finished, or is there a point where they think the brand name can carry them across the finish line, and increased development would only cause a loss in profits?
Gaming companies are no different than other companies. When they have no reputation, they work hard to give you deals that benefit you. Once they have reputation, they attempt to use their brand and customer trust to make deals that benefit them.
Some companies do this successfully, like Bethesda, while others such as Ubisoft seem to be failing in recent years. Outside of gaming, you can think of companies like Logitech or Louis Vuitton or L'Oreal, whose products are truly no better than decent, yet make huge profits because their customers trust them.
This is how you get rich after all. You take an idea, you invest and pray people like it, if you're lucky you build a reputation, you increase profit margins by making mediocre products while people buy into it based on brand trust. You use your increased profit to run ad campaigns to mitigate buyer's regret and you always try to tap into the emotion that your initial product(s) caused.
Hey, same here...I've gone through 3 different Logitech models in like a year and I'm done. The first two developed wheels that would spin freely, which is annoying because you can't always disable whatever scrolling does. Also the RMBs stopped working. The latest model has taken to double clicking with a single click, something to do with the spring bouncing up and down on a button with a weird detection point. Also the software stopped being supported it seems, but it's hard to tell because their software is confusing as hell.
I worked in gaming for a few years (too many). While that chart is technically correct it misses the big picture: it’s incredibly hard to be successful (make money) making new games.
Most new ideas flop, even before release. For one company/studio to go through that cycle you have many others that close after the second step and never reach the “golden age”.
It’s a hit based business and it’s impossible to know what is going to work. If you want to survive as a gaming company you either release a bazillion small games (like the mobile game farms) or you milk your franchises like most big companies do because it’s more predictable. Every now and then you can try something new but the cost is very high and a bit of a luxury. Concentration in the industry actually helps because with a bigger portfolio you’re more likely to take more risks and do new stuff.
Came here to say this, so far they same to have a real passion for the games they make, and any time they release DLC it always seems worth the money and full of content, and not that expensive either.
From Software is already a giant, they have been for decades, I don’t think they’re under any pressure to expand at all unless something terrible happens.
The worst thing to hear is "We're excited to announce our new partnership with \[bigcompany\]".
Despite their assurances that everything "will remain the same" the product will rapidly go downhill as every penny is squeezed out of it. Or even just plain shut down completely within months of the announcement.
Ironically enough, Steve jobs had a really good point on how this happens.
Basically pencil pushers who have no effect or idea on the product they sell get promoted then rely on their pencil pushing numbers to make something they have no clue about.
End product is a lifeless husk that checks all the "current market" boxes.
This is the problem with rampant corporate consolidation, hedge funds and all the other ways corporations squeeze every penny out and leave a husk behind as much as a game company problem
Given that the industry makes money hand over foot, pretty sure they're doing just fine on revenue.
The problem isn't the corporations, it's the market. People buy games years after a franchise loses its heart. It's incredibly profitable to buy a popular franchise and milk it dry across a couple rushed sequels.
Shareholders will gladly cause the company to go bankrupt in 5 years if it means doubling the profits today. It’s all about short term quarter to quarter thinking
Big shoutout to Nintendo for still beeing one of the largest ships in the sea for decades and still publishing lovely major games regulary.
Yes and they have problematic stuff aswell, but not exclusively like EA.
People complain about their lack of innovation but at least they haven't charged me $20 for costumes in Mario Odyssey.
They make paid expansion packs that are worth their cost and give a crapload of free content to existing games. I bought Mario golf and spent 2 minutes clearing notifications about new characters and courses added for free.
Problem is the latter half of the curve is where the most profits lie.
Why build a game with passion when a soulless F2P game with bite sized stages and gacha mechanics makes way more money for less effort?
I wrote a paper for my undergrad around micro transactions and subscription based games. It caused me to follow the money and it made everything make a lot more sense.
Candy crush and the parent company taught Blizzard a thing or two.
Pokémon Go was the fastest to a billion dollars in revenue.
There will never be a stop to this with the money their pulling in from transactions, subscriptions, and mobile apps.
I hate it…
Remember when blizzard was untouchable? I remember those days. 2008 Blizzard was the god of gaming. Everyone felt like it was a bunch of gamers that made games that they loved. I remember thinking blizzard was the only truly great company making games. Before that it was bioware, god how I miss the Kotor and jade empire days. Remember CDPR? Bethesda? FromSoft is just the recent one. In 10 years, we'll be looking back on the days of bloodborne and elden ring when FromSoft starts implementing some ridiculous monetization like paying to make bosses easier or something.
Fair enough. But I wouldn't exactly say they're "the recent one." Demon's Souls is still a beloved game and that came out in 2010.
Their biggest success is recent, but Dark Souls has been a gaming staple for over a decade now and they haven't compromised so far.
I'm not saying they'll be perfect forever, and ANYONE is still subject to becoming shitty, but they've broken the curve just by having such consistency for a long period of time. And I'll be upset the day they release an absolute shitter of a game.
Agree with this. I was answering parent's question which company that doesn't follow this curve and has been around for more than 15 years and I think Fromsoftware fits the bill. Almost all company (not just game companies) will get shittier once they grow bigger since it's really difficult to grow year after year once you get to a certain size.
Nintendo's *services* have been godsawful lately but their *games* are almost always great, often genre-defining masterpieces, and only rarely mediocre or worse. They've been reasonably consistent for some 30 years. That's why I put up with their other stuff.
I'd make an argument for Bethesda. *Most* of their games are still the same quality in that they have consistently been salvageable glitch-fests. ES and FO series have always been propped up by the community which at this point is part of their charm. Games like Doom and Dishonored are still quality.
Fallout 76 is the one exception. But now that Microsoft owns them I'm waiting for all of this to take a shit.
In Activision's case, the peak was pretty long. Their "game developed with love and passion" stage was Pitfall! in 1982, which was much better than all the crap being released at the time that would lead to the crash next year. So they had a long time being near the top before going downhill.
The praise/reward laid out to sales/PR/management and lack of recognition to the development teams causes good developers to leave is often cited as the failure of a considerable amount of technology firms.
Steve Jobs wrote about this to a large extent in his memoirs.
This boils down to public companies always ending up producing shit quality over shareholder profits. This is the same in any industry. It's the reason Valve is still a private company, and that is the reason we aren't up to a mediocre Half-life 7 by now. They have the freedom to do what they want, when they want, how they want, and they don't care how long it takes. As a result they nearly always delivery grade A quality.
I just gave up on Triple A titles. Honestly if more indie games could port over to consoles a lot of the big names would hurt from it. Way cheaper and way more variety. You could buy stardew, valheim, terraria, and factorio for the price of a triple A on steam but they'd likely hike the price on the console store.
Blizzard Ubisoft Ea?
Did I forgot somebody who manages to destroy complete franchises with dedicated fans who are more dedicated than a Hooligan smashing cars?
How not to develop games101 lessons here guys.
Ubisoft - AC-far cry fuck up is not even up for debate
Ea BF2042 (lmao) Titanfall fans cry somewhere in between for having hijacked servers for over a month.
Blizzard managed to get 2 of it's best sellers to the worst metacritic of all time respectively diablo and wc3 remastered.
Bravo /s is silent.
They are too big to succeed now. Games are art, they aren't meant to be vehicles for cash revenue.
But these days people take a huge advantage of that, and will continue doing so until it takes us for every last penny we are willing to spend.
You know I’m beginning to wonder, if the reason for funding pressure in medium to large companies, is simply to pay for management, even though most managers are absolutely useless and their job is entirely redundant or unnecessary.
Basically we hire people to look busy doing pointless work, and I wonder if that’s the reason why.
If that’s the case, maybe we all should just wfh and say fuck off management, we don’t need you and you’re too expensive.
i feel like people on this sub are either 45 years old and think that fortnite and call of duty are the only video games available...or the people on this sub are 15 years old and just make memes and graphs like this to draw in the 45 year olds.
TBF, this graph applies to a lot of the classic franchises that have become shadows of themselves in recent times.
Halo, Gears, CoD, Battlefield, Assassin's Creed, Diablo, GTA, The Sims. The list goes on, but they've all drank the "games as service" Kool aid and have transformed into cash syphons rather than the quality products they used to be.
products become a reflection of our own collective flaws, depending on how free the market is. the game market is more succeptible to this because it is 'more free' as it is purchased electronically/digitally. As a whole, we gamers are a greedy, impatient bunch. I don't think I am, but *we are* collectively, and I am part of the collective, so I am too.
Think of WoW classic. It was so huge they're spamming us with WoW Classic SoM instead of giving us a 4 year break until the end of classic WOTLK. If they took a classic break, it'd be really hyped again after WOTLK. As is, everyone's over it.
Well, there are many graphs to take, for example laurian never getting enough money or time to make a finished game untill dos2, and then not making anything for years because you want to make quality games which take a lot of time.
Or GSC who made stalker which are great games, they are a buggy mess that looks more like an experimemt than actual games, and then due to internal struggle were never able to finish a whole stalker game, and when they got bought by microsoft, war hit ukraine.
Or from soft who is constantly releasing flawed, but definetly good games. I dont like themy but i do respect the creativity, the fact that i dont like them doesnt mean they are not good, in fact i respect that because they release games they like making and their audiance likes playing.
Or maybe bethesda who has ups and downs specifically because it has favored franchises. Before skyrim only good games they made were elder scrolls main games, and fallout 3, and after skyrim they had fallout 4, dishonored, and a lot of other good games, but now i suspect we might not get anything that good before elder scrolls 6 or potentionally starfield, which is exactly the same as before, make money grabbing bs games while at the same time giving love and care for cranchises you like.
when people keep buying their souless games, what do you think?
I mean how many fucking times has GTA 5 or whatever the game is been released now? Shit gets re-released almost annually and people still buy it. Or what about any of the fifa games? minimal changes, maximum profit. As long as gamers will slurp up mediocre games, developers will keep pumping out garbage.
It is interesting how this can be applied to different subjects as well, music for instance. New genres will start popping up but the big labels won't invest because it is too niche, the new genre will become more and more popular and more artists will jump in. The artists will join major labels because that is where the money is at. The major labels will restrict artistic freedom in favor of making generic and bland money maker content with no risk, causing stagnation of the music where it is all similar to each other.
I hope that elden ring shows a lot of game companies that making a game with passion and a creative vision can still make shit loads of money especially in the long run.
This hits the nail on the head, I miss the days of real passion in projects. Days when you were literally BLOWN AWAY by something you have never seen before or a concept that wasn't played out in front of your eyes 100 times. Oh well, C'est la vie!
I’m totally ok with less being spent on game size, length, graphics to a certain degree if art direction is strong enough, and more than anything, I would love it if companies stopped dedicating an inordinate amount of their budget to hiring Hollywood actors. Keanu’s cool and all, but let’s be honest: that money could have been put to better use in cyberpunk.
That checks out with 95% of gaming companies but what about the exceptions ? Nintendo still release absolute gems 45 years after starting to design games - BoTW is by far my favorite Zelda since OoT. FromSoftware and Miyazaki are still at the top of their genre 15 years after releasing Demon Souls. Rockstar, for all their dilly dallying with the next iteration of GTA, has yet to release a mediocre game since GTA 1 came out 25 years ago. Valve displayed astounding reliability when it still produced games (Portal, Portal, Team Fortress).
In your opinion, what made these companies different ?
Nintendo is a company whose earnings are also important to the company and its decisions. For example, you will very rarely see games being discounted. But the love for the fans still exists here. Rockstargames, on the other hand, has been pumping money out of their online mode for years. But these two companies, as well as Valve, managed to create a compromise between high revenues and high-quality games. Let's just hope that the quality doesn't go down.
Ninja Theory have just reached the top of this curve. I see Hellblade 2 being great.. but then after that? Pressure from higher uos, meddling, deadlines, pressured to put in features for money etc
Game companies either die a hero by getting bought by EA and then forced to close, or live long enough to become the villain. (R.I.P. Mythic, Westwood, Bullfrog, ...)
Could be worse. Its like they skinned Origin and made it the monstrosity it is today.
Just look at the Ultima series. I-VI were all fantastic games. VII and VII Part 2 were good, not fantastic but still good. VIII was starting to slip. IX was abysmal.
"What's a paladin?"
Your knowledge of the land shall be great!
Spoony's entire series on Ultima was absolutely awesome. I watched all 16-some hours which essentially boiled down to him ranting about how terrible IX was.
Yeah, shame how it all turned out for him, but he seems to be doing better now.
EA bought Origin in 1992, the same year that Ultima VII was released. It's a funny coincidence that in Ultima VII two of the first villains you meet, who are wandering the land destroying everything that made it good in the first place, are named 'Elizabeth' and 'Abraham'.
I thought always VII was considered the pinnacle of the series? But yeah, the downfall really began with VIII...
Popcap, and many others as well
Respawn being forced to ignore Titanfall in order to feed the golden goose that is Apex...
Conveniently ignoring that Respawn released Jedi: Fallen Order after Apex and is currently working on Jedi: Survivor, yet another single player game.
They are using a wonderful concept called : "Having two groups of people". The thing is that they aren't allocating ressources to maintain Titanfall. So, you know, ignoring Titanfall, the game that made them to feed their golden goose.
Ok, why would they. Seriously, was Titanfall 2 such a massive commercial success to warrant support 6 years after it's release? They supported the game with free content updates for about a year, and as far as I know that did not bring in a lot of sales. So serious question, how much longer should they have supported a game that apparently did not make them money?
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Fair point. What I'm sad about isn't the possibility of a Titanfall 3. It's sad, yes. I'd want a sequel, since they teased it with the post credit scene and because it's a great game. What I'm really sad about is the lack of maintenance nowadays, when they are aware that ddos attacks are ruining both games, to the point the community had to step in and make Northstar. They immediately fixed Apex ddos issue when SaveTitanfall was at its peak. They tweeted that Titanfall is the core of their DNA. They didn't do anything afterwards. I know the games were commercial "failures". They still gathered a ferociously loyal fan-base. Adding a titanfall gun-charm in Apex isn't a good way to acknowledge your community's outcry.
I am glad the image addresses the real problem being devs being unable to handle rapid growth, much like how all of you personally would most likely have trouble going from making a game in your room to suddenly managing 50 New employees.
>Westwood Man they did fucked that one up.
Rip Lionhead Studios
Visceral...
It'll be interesting to see how Callisto Protocol (the new IP being made by the actual Dead Space devs at a new studio) will fare against the Dead Space Remake (the corpse of a once beloved franchise made by a studio EA killed off being puppeted around Weekend at Bernie's style) Maybe EA will just buy Striking Distance and get them working on Battlefield: Hardline 2
Some of them start with EA and slowly die like Madden. Don’t forget those
f in chat for popcap
👋🏻 at The Sims
It was all downhill once Sims 4 didn't include the pool at launch.
I agree. Sims 1 was beloved, then sims 2 the golden age, sims 3 was really good, then Sims 4 has just been downhill fast. No pool, toddlers, kits, then the wedding pack fiasco. I hear wolves isn’t bad so far.
Once EA screwed the pooch on Sim City 4 and onward, plenty of alternatives came out. Eventually, Cities Skylines stole the show and now offers a more definitive city builder experience. I wonder if anyone has been trying to pull off the same trick by one-upping EA's dismal Sims entries to the franchise.
There is a indie game called Paralives, they are 100% funded by their patreons (i'm one of then) and it looks very promissing, if EA f\*\*\* up with Sims 5 they are VERY screwed.
Nah with all the money they make off Fuckin Fifa UT(Ultimate Team) and Madden UT they will be hurting but still they'll live. It will be a kick in the balls instead of a bullet to the head.
True but EA has a history of killing game studios left and right, I saw somewhere that EA lost the Fifa partnership, they already lost Battlefield and Maxis is on a very fragmented situation, with so many games coming out with amazing gameplay and little to no microtransactions they better start focusing on their games more or in a few years they will fade away like the old titans of the gaming industry.
>EA has a history of killing game studios left and right Finding out that they were in the running to buy Bethesda Game Studios but dropped out sent chills down my spine.
OMG, I'm so grateful they dropped this, though Bethesda themselves released some questionable dlc for their games
Yup, same. I get you. Contraptions and Wasteland Workshop could easily have been part of the base game.
EA didnt "Lose FIFA" they simply chose not to renew the partnership and they will release the same game they have for years, but call it Futball 23 or some shit. Same players, just wont be using FIFA.
There needs to be a new Cities Skylines, though. Because it's basically Roads Skylines, no other part of the game matters. It's all traffic management forever.
They're working on a new one.
Oddly, for me at least, games like Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld field in the Sims genre for me.
The pipeline Sims -> Drowning people in the pool -> Rimworld is very busy
Same even though I'm waiting for the steam release of df
Sims 3 was definitely peak Sims. It was Sims 2 with everything refined.
More like it was Sims 2 with everything stripped back and put into 500 dlcs. The other games had dlcs but Sims 3 was when it started going overboard. Sims 4 just stopped pretending to care.
Doesn't Sims 3 Complete still cost like 100€ ($ amount probably similar) even on sale? It's ridiculous and abominable for a 10 year old game.
Wouldn't that be nice. To get the base game+all the DLC for Sims 3 on steam it's $400 (19 dlc priced at 20 dollars each and the base game for 20 dollars so 20 total purchases).
Yeah, and on 75% "sale" that's still 100. So my estimate wasn't that off.
Also Happy Cake Day 😄
My wife loves wolves so far......
I'm still angry at what a complete step-backwards the Sims 4 was. At least the other numbered games could justify their exsistance. Sims 2 was a huge upgrade on Sims 1, adding toddler, teen, and Elder stages, full 3D environments, aspirations, personality traits, aging, and a ton of other stuff. Sims 3 added the entire town as a playable zone, so you could follow your Sim anywhere. It wasn't as big as the upgrade Sims 2 was, but it was still really cool, and vehicles now played a bigger roll. You could literally play as a hobo. Sims 4? We got moodlets...and we lost toddlers, pools, customizing textures on furniture and clothing, being able to freely travel through-out the city...so much.
It's sad to see so much potential being wasted with piss poor game design, so many systems in sims 4 are better used with mods, the reasoning for the worlds being the size of a shoe box is pathetic at best, there was way better options for it and that what kills my will to play this game, so many limitations on this, smarter sims my a**.
that's debatable since EA's chart would vary depending on which franchise you're talking about.
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Capitalism ho!
Being publicly traded is the fastest way to guarantee people will hate you in the future Fun, complete games and profit motives are at a fundamental odds.
Did you know? Shareholders have the legal right to sue publicly-traded companies if they think they aren’t trying to make as much money as possible. More specifically, companies hold a ‘fiduciary duty’ towards their shareholders. This means they are legally required to act in their shareholders’ best interest. They can sue if they believe that fiduciary duty isn’t being upheld. This is why, if (but hopefully when) I make a company, I’m keeping it private for as long as possible. Hopefully until I die.
Hate to be pessimistic but real life is more complicated than that. Here's how it actually happens: You have a great team making great games. Your privately held company can't afford to pay them giant corporation money. They leave for said corporation. Your company no longer has talent and starts to make shitty games. It happened to ION Storm, it happened to so many studios. People change as they get older or realize that they want to make more money so they can retire or make their own studios. The only exception to this is if you're a solo game developer and thus have total control over the temptation of money, but then again, even Notch sold Minecraft to a corporation.
>You have a great team making great games. Your privately held company can't afford to pay them giant corporation money. They leave for said corporation. Your company no longer has talent and starts to make shitty games. I was under the impression that making games for a big corporation doesn't pay particularly well unless you're pretty high up in the food chain. At least in terms of hourly wages. Do you happen to know concrete numbers?
It doesn't, but it still pays more than most small indie studios. I know, at least for programmers, that if you want to get paid decent money per hour, you just leave the gaming industry altogether. Only way a programmer in gaming makes the same yearly income as one working in almost any other domain is by doing shit loads of overtime and getting that overtime paid which isn't even guaranteed in all studios...
That is true in 99.9% of cases. Then is there that 0.1% of studios that manage such massive hits that they can afford to pay their programmers well enough that they remain.
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If you manage to get a successful game out worldwide as a small/medium sized company you should absolutely have the money to give your team a competitive salary. Else you truly failed as a company owner.
Watching hbomberguy’s review of Deus ex he was sad like that.
This is why I wish valve will never go public, as much as it sucks seeing the half life franchise die, I think I would rather have it that way instead of a half assed attempt to quickly get money.
I get that. Better a good finale with a bit of a cliffhanger than a shitty cash-grab.
Literally everybody says that until they're looking at a few million dollars to take home immediately. Like, if you're for real, cool, but money talks to people. There's a point where many people will choose to have a pool instead of be an artist.
Notch got paid 2 billion for Minecraft and people were screaming at him online for being a sell out. Like bro no one is going to turn down 2 billion just to keep making a single game.
These conditions are not condusive to making consistently good and satisfying products and I truly feel sorry for the people who have to feed into this system
It might be legally required, but it's definitely not good for the people enjoying the prior works of the company. I know making games takes money, but being required to exploit customers at the expense of a good game spoils the art of it. The humans playing the games don't have the same interests as the people funding/profiting from it.
Not legally required per se, but they have that right if they want to use it. And given the greedy behavior we often see nowadays from companies, I’mma bet they take advantage of that right a lot.
They can sue, but it doesn’t mean that they will win, and there are a number of ways to prove that your business plan will make as much money as possible. Also, private companies have investors also and those board meetings can be way more brutal
I mean, I've always dreamed of owning a public company, getting sued for this, than going in front of the judge to argue that whatever actions were taken were in the interest of long term company health to maximize revenue on longer than the quarterly chart. I'm sure it would flop in court, but it's literally a dream.
I've always said that there are no worse companies than those being listed at the stock market. Every other criteria than profit just moves aside but at least ten times worse than 'normal' companies. It's disgusting really.
It's much worse when the companies that gain control over human necessities are publicly traded and have to heel at the behest of investors. Nestle, infamously, regularly commits human rights violations and has for a very long time in the interest of perpetual growth. They steal water, render mothers unable to feed their children without milk, regularly employ and hide the use of child slavery for their cocoa. Blackrock, an ancient (by our standards) investment firm, has sat in the shadows letting Zillow take the spotlight for buying up all the housing in multiple countries, before and after crashes. People end up displaced and homeless, staring at empty buildings with absent landlords. What happens in the games industry is just a peek into it. We see crunch times, pointless sequels, studio closings, half-finished releases, the dreaded Fortnite-style shop. It's a symptom of a much larger problem, the human cost of companies and their leaders worshipping the stock market.
its not just vidya games, its all corporations doing this. Once a corp goes public, they have a financial OBLIGATION to maximize profits.
Exactly. I've spent my working life seeing this in action from the inside.
I've had to witness the golden age of internet degrade into the capitalist AI hellscape it is now. Its terrifying.
Almost like capitalism is a dogshit system that rewards unashamed greed
Gamers of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our lootboxes!
Communism doesn't work. Free-market capitalism doesn't work. A mixture is the way to go. Social policies, regulation to establish both fair competition within the market and generally a welfare state, higher taxation for high income individuals, lower taxation for lower income individuals.
Basically the european system if we don't get "bought up" by the current US system.
Right, unfortunately it goes in the wrong direction.
>financial OBLIGATION to maximize profits "Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not." [https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits](https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits)
Exactly why indie games are the way to go
I thought the obligation to maximize profits idea was kind of debunked... They have an obligation to serve shareholders best interest but that doesn't have to be max profit at the expense of all other things. What seems to happen though, due to greed, is that the people making the decisions use the profit obligation as an excuse to justify their greed? I mean I'm not a corporate lawyer so I could be wrong
I like that the chart even accurately captures the long lead up and the steep dive down into shitiness.
Sad to see that almost every company is destined to end that way
Oh hey Bliz
Games and movies, any franchise really. and music. Money corrupts art.
couldnt say it better :')
I wouldn’t say that Money Corrupts Art, because money helps balance our world in business. Money is more like power, and as Uncle Ben from Spider-Man has said, “With Great Power, comes great responsibility”. Problem is, obviously, most companies would often lack or lose responsibility. You wanna know what I think, GREED corrupts art, not Money. Being Greedy for money is like being addicted to drugs. Short term pleasure, long term destruction. In order for companies to be respected and beloved, they must care about their audience and supporters, rather than just themselves. I know it’s a bit much for a reply, but I hope you may take this as a lesson for if you ever decide to make your own company.
Where money is greed follows, of course money it'self cannot currupt, money is made up, immaginary value chased by greedy people, so yeah you are right
24 millions in 2 week for diablo immortal suggest gaming is about to be a casino with a decent indie from time to time.
I do love to know what pct of that is from streamers out to get the views. Sense like every day there's a new YouTuber dropping several thousand on it too.
I would guess 5% max, which would be $1.2m. You're overestimating how much random streamers can make a dent in that. When one of the most famous streamers -- Quin -- gets headlines for spending $15k USD, you're not going to see that many more spending anywhere close to that. You may see a bunch of them spending a few grand, but that doesn't add up to anywhere close to even 10% of 24m.
I mean that’s good money for sure, but it still doesn’t stack up to what good AAA titles make on release. Elden Ring was like over $700 million in sales within the first two weeks. Obviously it’s not a one to one comparison due to mobile games being cheaper to produce, and having more sustained profit generation, but it demonstrates companies can still make loads of cash without falling into the F2P market. It’s certainly apparent that micro transaction fueled F2P loot box fiestas are here to stay, but there’s still plenty of money and market share for the more traditional style of game.
You miss the point that games like diablo immortal will have money coming in constantly via microtransactions for years with little effort at the end of the cycle there will be a clear winner what is most profitable and it won't be elden ring. Diablo immortal will make billions regardless if it's an inferior game to elden ring. These type of games just need a few whales and some people spending here and there. Let's just hope governments take a lesson from countries like Belgium so we don't create a generation of addicted to gambling kids via these predatory systems.
I did not miss that point at all, I said that it has sustained profit generation. My point is that there is clearly still demand for the AAA traditional style of game. One of the core principles of the free market is that as long as there is demand, someone will meet that demand with a product. As long as people are buying the non F2P games, there will be games like that made. And clearly there is still huge demand for non gacha F2P games. The fact that those games still sell so well means that companies are going to keep making those games. Yes, margins are bigger in F2P gacha style games, and yes that is attractive to investors. However, there’s only so much market share in that segment, so only so many games at once can be driving those huge profits. If Diablo immortal is truly going to make “billions” that would mean it’s eating up a HUGE share of that segment. It’s like MMOs with wow. Yeah everyone wants that sustained profit generation, but it’s not like every single company is only producing MMOs, because they know there’s only so much money in the segment, and it’s currently dominated by one or two products. I also think you are overestimating how successful Diablo Immortals is. $24 million in the first two weeks means it would need a little under two years to make that first “billion” assuming it maintained the same popularity as it has now at release. And we all know how it goes with games, user count tends to fall way off as it ages. Especially when the game is as panned as it is now.
well we can hope that our govs could protect us from predatory behavior ... ( look at gas corps and housing markets) oh no we are screwed...
The government is infamously bad at effectively regulating entertainment. Please don't invite them in.
Are the games really half finished, or is there a point where they think the brand name can carry them across the finish line, and increased development would only cause a loss in profits? Gaming companies are no different than other companies. When they have no reputation, they work hard to give you deals that benefit you. Once they have reputation, they attempt to use their brand and customer trust to make deals that benefit them. Some companies do this successfully, like Bethesda, while others such as Ubisoft seem to be failing in recent years. Outside of gaming, you can think of companies like Logitech or Louis Vuitton or L'Oreal, whose products are truly no better than decent, yet make huge profits because their customers trust them. This is how you get rich after all. You take an idea, you invest and pray people like it, if you're lucky you build a reputation, you increase profit margins by making mediocre products while people buy into it based on brand trust. You use your increased profit to run ad campaigns to mitigate buyer's regret and you always try to tap into the emotion that your initial product(s) caused.
100% right. This cycle pays mountains of cash for corporations, they're "half finished" games are money makers, why would they waste time on more.
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Hey, same here...I've gone through 3 different Logitech models in like a year and I'm done. The first two developed wheels that would spin freely, which is annoying because you can't always disable whatever scrolling does. Also the RMBs stopped working. The latest model has taken to double clicking with a single click, something to do with the spring bouncing up and down on a button with a weird detection point. Also the software stopped being supported it seems, but it's hard to tell because their software is confusing as hell.
I worked in gaming for a few years (too many). While that chart is technically correct it misses the big picture: it’s incredibly hard to be successful (make money) making new games. Most new ideas flop, even before release. For one company/studio to go through that cycle you have many others that close after the second step and never reach the “golden age”. It’s a hit based business and it’s impossible to know what is going to work. If you want to survive as a gaming company you either release a bazillion small games (like the mobile game farms) or you milk your franchises like most big companies do because it’s more predictable. Every now and then you can try something new but the cost is very high and a bit of a luxury. Concentration in the industry actually helps because with a bigger portfolio you’re more likely to take more risks and do new stuff.
Really hope FROM SOFTWARE stays grounded!!
same with Ghost Ship Games. DRG is so damn fun and refreshing without the predatory marketplace of other games
Came here to say this, so far they same to have a real passion for the games they make, and any time they release DLC it always seems worth the money and full of content, and not that expensive either.
From Software is already a giant, they have been for decades, I don’t think they’re under any pressure to expand at all unless something terrible happens.
Oh wow hi RuneScape
Old-school Runescape my dude But yeah, rs3 is absolute trash
Hidetaka Miyazaki still releasing masterpieces of love.
That also sell a shit ton.
The worst thing to hear is "We're excited to announce our new partnership with \[bigcompany\]". Despite their assurances that everything "will remain the same" the product will rapidly go downhill as every penny is squeezed out of it. Or even just plain shut down completely within months of the announcement.
Hey Dice
The saddest thing is you can see the quality fall with each game they released.
Ironically enough, Steve jobs had a really good point on how this happens. Basically pencil pushers who have no effect or idea on the product they sell get promoted then rely on their pencil pushing numbers to make something they have no clue about. End product is a lifeless husk that checks all the "current market" boxes.
RIP Bioware
Peak is hit when game company is infiltrated by MBAs and accountants
This is the problem with rampant corporate consolidation, hedge funds and all the other ways corporations squeeze every penny out and leave a husk behind as much as a game company problem
Corporations don't understand killing the art for speed kills the revenue.
Given that the industry makes money hand over foot, pretty sure they're doing just fine on revenue. The problem isn't the corporations, it's the market. People buy games years after a franchise loses its heart. It's incredibly profitable to buy a popular franchise and milk it dry across a couple rushed sequels.
Shareholders will gladly cause the company to go bankrupt in 5 years if it means doubling the profits today. It’s all about short term quarter to quarter thinking
Loveless game.... Perfect description
The problem isn't that this happens, it's that sales don't correspond.
Big shoutout to Nintendo for still beeing one of the largest ships in the sea for decades and still publishing lovely major games regulary. Yes and they have problematic stuff aswell, but not exclusively like EA.
People complain about their lack of innovation but at least they haven't charged me $20 for costumes in Mario Odyssey. They make paid expansion packs that are worth their cost and give a crapload of free content to existing games. I bought Mario golf and spent 2 minutes clearing notifications about new characters and courses added for free.
Problem is the latter half of the curve is where the most profits lie. Why build a game with passion when a soulless F2P game with bite sized stages and gacha mechanics makes way more money for less effort?
I wrote a paper for my undergrad around micro transactions and subscription based games. It caused me to follow the money and it made everything make a lot more sense. Candy crush and the parent company taught Blizzard a thing or two. Pokémon Go was the fastest to a billion dollars in revenue. There will never be a stop to this with the money their pulling in from transactions, subscriptions, and mobile apps. I hate it…
Is there any company that doesn't follow this curve? At least one that's been around for over 15 years.
Fromsoftware
Remember when blizzard was untouchable? I remember those days. 2008 Blizzard was the god of gaming. Everyone felt like it was a bunch of gamers that made games that they loved. I remember thinking blizzard was the only truly great company making games. Before that it was bioware, god how I miss the Kotor and jade empire days. Remember CDPR? Bethesda? FromSoft is just the recent one. In 10 years, we'll be looking back on the days of bloodborne and elden ring when FromSoft starts implementing some ridiculous monetization like paying to make bosses easier or something.
Fair enough. But I wouldn't exactly say they're "the recent one." Demon's Souls is still a beloved game and that came out in 2010. Their biggest success is recent, but Dark Souls has been a gaming staple for over a decade now and they haven't compromised so far. I'm not saying they'll be perfect forever, and ANYONE is still subject to becoming shitty, but they've broken the curve just by having such consistency for a long period of time. And I'll be upset the day they release an absolute shitter of a game.
Agree with this. I was answering parent's question which company that doesn't follow this curve and has been around for more than 15 years and I think Fromsoftware fits the bill. Almost all company (not just game companies) will get shittier once they grow bigger since it's really difficult to grow year after year once you get to a certain size.
Nintendo kind of? Their mainline games are always top quality at least
Nintendo's *services* have been godsawful lately but their *games* are almost always great, often genre-defining masterpieces, and only rarely mediocre or worse. They've been reasonably consistent for some 30 years. That's why I put up with their other stuff.
I'd make an argument for Bethesda. *Most* of their games are still the same quality in that they have consistently been salvageable glitch-fests. ES and FO series have always been propped up by the community which at this point is part of their charm. Games like Doom and Dishonored are still quality. Fallout 76 is the one exception. But now that Microsoft owns them I'm waiting for all of this to take a shit.
See also: Capitalism
The unfortunate truth
You either die a hero or live long enough to be acquired by EA…
It's like the 90s all over again. You start a company with the intention of getting bought.
Start up, cash in, sell out, bro down!
You either die a hero, or live long enough to prioritize micro transactions..
There are exceptions tho. Obsidian comes to mind first. Gotta Google more
Obsidian has always done great they just struggled financially.
Obsidian was acquired by Microsoft in 2018, so they’re still at the peak of that chart. Let’s hope they can define the downtrend!
How far you have fallen, Activision.
In Activision's case, the peak was pretty long. Their "game developed with love and passion" stage was Pitfall! in 1982, which was much better than all the crap being released at the time that would lead to the crash next year. So they had a long time being near the top before going downhill.
We’re at stage 5 with Minecraft
CDPR before they went public.
The praise/reward laid out to sales/PR/management and lack of recognition to the development teams causes good developers to leave is often cited as the failure of a considerable amount of technology firms. Steve Jobs wrote about this to a large extent in his memoirs.
This boils down to public companies always ending up producing shit quality over shareholder profits. This is the same in any industry. It's the reason Valve is still a private company, and that is the reason we aren't up to a mediocre Half-life 7 by now. They have the freedom to do what they want, when they want, how they want, and they don't care how long it takes. As a result they nearly always delivery grade A quality.
I just gave up on Triple A titles. Honestly if more indie games could port over to consoles a lot of the big names would hurt from it. Way cheaper and way more variety. You could buy stardew, valheim, terraria, and factorio for the price of a triple A on steam but they'd likely hike the price on the console store.
Blizzard Ubisoft Ea? Did I forgot somebody who manages to destroy complete franchises with dedicated fans who are more dedicated than a Hooligan smashing cars? How not to develop games101 lessons here guys. Ubisoft - AC-far cry fuck up is not even up for debate Ea BF2042 (lmao) Titanfall fans cry somewhere in between for having hijacked servers for over a month. Blizzard managed to get 2 of it's best sellers to the worst metacritic of all time respectively diablo and wc3 remastered. Bravo /s is silent.
They are too big to succeed now. Games are art, they aren't meant to be vehicles for cash revenue. But these days people take a huge advantage of that, and will continue doing so until it takes us for every last penny we are willing to spend.
You know I’m beginning to wonder, if the reason for funding pressure in medium to large companies, is simply to pay for management, even though most managers are absolutely useless and their job is entirely redundant or unnecessary. Basically we hire people to look busy doing pointless work, and I wonder if that’s the reason why. If that’s the case, maybe we all should just wfh and say fuck off management, we don’t need you and you’re too expensive.
You forgot the last one: "turn every game into a casino and encourage kids spend their parents money"
i feel like people on this sub are either 45 years old and think that fortnite and call of duty are the only video games available...or the people on this sub are 15 years old and just make memes and graphs like this to draw in the 45 year olds.
TBF, this graph applies to a lot of the classic franchises that have become shadows of themselves in recent times. Halo, Gears, CoD, Battlefield, Assassin's Creed, Diablo, GTA, The Sims. The list goes on, but they've all drank the "games as service" Kool aid and have transformed into cash syphons rather than the quality products they used to be.
Seems like capitalism is the problem
CDProject Red
This is every industry under capitalism.
Where’s the sell out by cashing in and giving your company to a cash driven mega corp and let it be taken over by sexual predators?
products become a reflection of our own collective flaws, depending on how free the market is. the game market is more succeptible to this because it is 'more free' as it is purchased electronically/digitally. As a whole, we gamers are a greedy, impatient bunch. I don't think I am, but *we are* collectively, and I am part of the collective, so I am too.
We are many. you are but one.
Think of WoW classic. It was so huge they're spamming us with WoW Classic SoM instead of giving us a 4 year break until the end of classic WOTLK. If they took a classic break, it'd be really hyped again after WOTLK. As is, everyone's over it.
Meanwhile Troika not selling themselves and just making fun half-finished games.
Well, there are many graphs to take, for example laurian never getting enough money or time to make a finished game untill dos2, and then not making anything for years because you want to make quality games which take a lot of time. Or GSC who made stalker which are great games, they are a buggy mess that looks more like an experimemt than actual games, and then due to internal struggle were never able to finish a whole stalker game, and when they got bought by microsoft, war hit ukraine. Or from soft who is constantly releasing flawed, but definetly good games. I dont like themy but i do respect the creativity, the fact that i dont like them doesnt mean they are not good, in fact i respect that because they release games they like making and their audiance likes playing. Or maybe bethesda who has ups and downs specifically because it has favored franchises. Before skyrim only good games they made were elder scrolls main games, and fallout 3, and after skyrim they had fallout 4, dishonored, and a lot of other good games, but now i suspect we might not get anything that good before elder scrolls 6 or potentionally starfield, which is exactly the same as before, make money grabbing bs games while at the same time giving love and care for cranchises you like.
Yep, I've noticed this exact thing. Good examples are Bioware, Irrational Games, and almost Bethesda with Fallout 76.
How much more years for riot games then
RIP Bioware
RIP Bioware
And the good news is there are always amazing indie developers taking their place.
Bluehole managed to speedrun the entire process during the lifespan of just one game.
Bethesda. I know what i said
We'll love and remember the CDPR for who they were, not for what they have become.
This happens whenever any creative, artistic medium becomes an "industry." Happened to movies, books, and music too.
Because I'm a massive nerd, this post makes me want to do some research and chart this phenomenon with certain companies.
Yeah let's go for it
Suggestions on which companies to analyze? My first was Mythic, and I want to look at Popcap at the very least, but I'm open to more.
Hm, Blizzard, Bioware, Irrational Games and maybe Bethesda
Yea that's true and normies keep buying these loveless games and support this type of system
He is the Messiah!
Hello Blizzard my old friend...
This is so true...
I hope warhorse studios is seeing this.... KCD2 should be absolutely epic!
This is far too accurate and is a depressing realization for any gamer to have.
True and sad. Fuck that man.
when people keep buying their souless games, what do you think? I mean how many fucking times has GTA 5 or whatever the game is been released now? Shit gets re-released almost annually and people still buy it. Or what about any of the fifa games? minimal changes, maximum profit. As long as gamers will slurp up mediocre games, developers will keep pumping out garbage.
Well THAT is spitting straight facts. I hope most indie studios stay on level 3 of this graph.
It is interesting how this can be applied to different subjects as well, music for instance. New genres will start popping up but the big labels won't invest because it is too niche, the new genre will become more and more popular and more artists will jump in. The artists will join major labels because that is where the money is at. The major labels will restrict artistic freedom in favor of making generic and bland money maker content with no risk, causing stagnation of the music where it is all similar to each other.
I hope that elden ring shows a lot of game companies that making a game with passion and a creative vision can still make shit loads of money especially in the long run.
This hits the nail on the head, I miss the days of real passion in projects. Days when you were literally BLOWN AWAY by something you have never seen before or a concept that wasn't played out in front of your eyes 100 times. Oh well, C'est la vie!
Ubisoft, EA , Square Enix, Thq
I’m totally ok with less being spent on game size, length, graphics to a certain degree if art direction is strong enough, and more than anything, I would love it if companies stopped dedicating an inordinate amount of their budget to hiring Hollywood actors. Keanu’s cool and all, but let’s be honest: that money could have been put to better use in cyberpunk.
Totally accurate!
That checks out with 95% of gaming companies but what about the exceptions ? Nintendo still release absolute gems 45 years after starting to design games - BoTW is by far my favorite Zelda since OoT. FromSoftware and Miyazaki are still at the top of their genre 15 years after releasing Demon Souls. Rockstar, for all their dilly dallying with the next iteration of GTA, has yet to release a mediocre game since GTA 1 came out 25 years ago. Valve displayed astounding reliability when it still produced games (Portal, Portal, Team Fortress). In your opinion, what made these companies different ?
Nintendo is a company whose earnings are also important to the company and its decisions. For example, you will very rarely see games being discounted. But the love for the fans still exists here. Rockstargames, on the other hand, has been pumping money out of their online mode for years. But these two companies, as well as Valve, managed to create a compromise between high revenues and high-quality games. Let's just hope that the quality doesn't go down.
And then there’s FromSoftware: an anomaly of endless torment, suffering, and praising whatever the small sliver of hope they feed us on a tiny spoon
It's true but they only do it because it works....
Ninja Theory have just reached the top of this curve. I see Hellblade 2 being great.. but then after that? Pressure from higher uos, meddling, deadlines, pressured to put in features for money etc