Business majors ruin everything, part 8378384748
I think there’s also a “Netflix effect” where old games are incresingly accessible as an alternative to newer crap, kinda like (from my personal observations) how a lot of young people seem to be really fluent in old movies and TV due to streaming and YT.
Its going to bite these publishers in the bum.
Indies I think helped younger gamers and old gamers become less impressed by graphics compared to the past. Gamers expect more and there’s many indies and old games people haven’t played.
There is also just tiny graphic improvements now, so for most people, 5 years old games look similar to what we have now
And that the requirements for those minimal improvements are vast. If you need to pull down 200GB for a minor graphical upgrade, that’s just not really worth it compared to an older game that is a bit graphically worse, but is both smaller, and runs better on newer hardware.
You can sort of tell by the whole 4k (or even 8k), 144Hz stuff that opportunities for real improvements have been running out for a while.
So, the scheme is basically to have you, the publisher, invest some money into marketing the game, to get potential players aware of it, then have them pay a one-time premium to actually play it, if they’re interested.
If that’s not the business model, then I’m honestly not playing it.
And while I may be outnumbered by children playing Fortnite obsessively, at this stage of life I do have more money than gaming time.
Sorry that doesn’t drive MAU, DAU, or ARPPU. Also we want users on our walled garden data harvesting service that’s just “Steam but Worse”, so I’m afraid you need to close your studio. What’s that? Sorry you’re breaking up, must be something wrong with the phone here in the Swiss Alps. Ok ta ta.
There’s more to game development than that. Setting, art style, gameplay loop, interface…
The argument being made is that a “proven” mechanism for monetization is getting in the way of developing other attributes of gameplay, as the
- get potential players aware of it
and
- then have them pay
Steps are made the focus of design, and only known existing formulas for the above encourage the
- invest some money
step.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
It’s an abuse of how games work and what games are.
Only legislation will fix this. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
Exactly, the moment things cost real money in the game, the design of the game changes to increase likelihood of spending. Guild Wars 2 e.g. sells increased inventory space…and it fills your inventory with so many crap items that you’ll constantly be managing your inventory without the extra space.
At least you can improve inventory in-game (eg: do normal gameplay quest and crafting stuff to get bigger bags). Some monetization is cash or nothing.
Still bad when they make something annoying and then charge to fix it.
Guild wars 2 specifically has a surprising amount of quality of life stuff for free, but you can see places where “we can make money here” won out occasionally.
God I hope the gaming industry collapses just like in 1982. We have more than enough retro and indie games to get by until a new business model arises
It won’t collapse in the same way because, like you said, we have tons of indies and they have easy access to publishing now. Hopefully the AAA space collapses though. It looks like it’s going that direction. They’ve forgotten why they exist.
I’m curious if it would expand past games to tech. So many businesses aim for AI to take most of their programming role and fire their staff. Assuming that fails in some hilarious public ways over the next five years, I’m wondering what the old guard that knew the technologies well will do.
Unfortunately that may well make them double down on the F2P mobile market.
They’re cheaper to make, and success tends to be tied directly to marketing efforts and exploitation.
Also, machiens capable of gaming are ubiquitous. Say the console market collapses because people recognize that Playstation and Xbox offer less entertainment per dollar than lighting $20 bills on fire. PCs, phones, tablets, maybe even smart televisions are everywhere. It’s not like the early 80’s when having a computer in your house is a new idea people were still figuring out.
It would be fun watching some of the bigger studios fart themselves to death though. I don’t know if we need Ubisoft, EA or Activision anymore.