Just put some digital boobs in the game. It WILL sell
Sad but I can see their point, considering that most customer attention spans are limited to memes now.
You’re not wrong at all.
Baldurs Gate 3 was a surprise success. But then again, it took them many years and many Divinity games.
Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk also are narrative darlings. But CD Projekt took a lot of chances over the years to get here.
A bunch of my favorite heavy-story games are sitting at under 2000 steam reviews. While Meme game for Twitch Streamer hits 10k-100k reviews.
I’m currently playing Shadows of Loathing right now, and I can’t believe it took me this long. Next up is Beyond Shadowgate.
I’m in there. I see “story rich” and it reads as a crutch for no gameplay, or a premise for a book without the responsibility of pacing.
I know that’s far from true, and there are loads of great story-rich games that are fun and engaging. But when that’s the main tag, it turns me away.
The title is a bit missleading considering that the actual article mentions a lot other problems that plagued the development.
Project 8 faced both progress and challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic made team stability difficult, but some quality improvements were achieved. However, critical issues persisted, causing delays and budget increases. The latest review revealed unresolved problems needing more time and money, along with revised sales forecasts, raising doubts about the project’s profitability.
– TLDR by Microsoft copilot
While there’s still demand for “narrative-driven story-rich games” one should keep realistic expectations. For this genre I feel smaller scope and indie developers work much better.
Oof.
“The COVID-19 pandemic made team stability difficult,”
Makes me suspect they were woefully behind the rest of the field in development practices. My team, and many others, gained productivity when all the wasteful manager ego stroking in-person meetings stopped.
Alternately, it tells us they rely on a weird dev kit with a lot of esoteric hardware. Though I would still call that out as being super out of date. Nothing is particularly hard to emulate today, for teams that prioritize having rebuildable test environmenta.
Just wild.
Bummer about the layoffs. Probably won’t fix their agility problem, though.
I’m going to guess they mean narrative-driven “games” like Hellblade or Indika, which were all narrative and almost no game.
If they actually believe something so patently ridiculous, then it’s probably best that they cancelled it. So I guess this is good news. Those are the only kinds of games I want to play. FFS.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was only last year. Metaphor just set records for Atlas’ fastest selling game this year. Even amidst the tremendously troubled launch, Cyberpunk 2077 went on to be one of the best-selling video games of all time, and its DLC did very well too. God of War: Ragnarok sold at least 15 million copies. And these are just a few examples off of the top of my head that don’t fall into gray areas like GTA where they’re also a live service.
Those are are the exceptions not the normal case. Look at almost anything remedy has done. Great stories but bad sales. Alan Wake 2 was still not profitable in November.
Meanwhile candy crush has generated more than 20 billion in revenue
What doesn’t sell are the games that don’t have a well written story or well-written characters. Or the games that their developers themselves don’t have any passion or interest in, games just made to please shareholders… Or games that get preachy on issues without proper care…
Just look at most of the winners of Game of the Year. I’d argue most of them fit in the category of narrative driven story-rich games.
