The game industry is broken – can we fix it?(knowledge.edge-online.com) |
The game industry is broken – can we fix it?(knowledge.edge-online.com) |
People who were playing MMOs back in the early to mid 00s can remember when executives who weren't game developers themselves began taking control of these companies, and things only got worse all around. I've always felt that game development companies should be more like a law firm, a medical clinic, architecture collective, fashion house, design firm, etc. where everyone is a practitioner of the same profession and aware of the consequences of decisions only an MBA would make.
If AI and piracy end up destroying the game industry as it is today, I will not care one bit even if games stop being developed except for small shops that actually care about what they're doing.
The problem with this version of events, is that ever since the floodgates opened on steam, individual indies aren't really making enough money to fund themselves. It's not really sustainable to have an industry where only folks who are already independently wealthy can afford to be game developers-
Most of the indies who do make money these days are in a much more AA-like model where they work with a traditional publisher, who funds development of the next game up-front.
But you can succeed spectacularly with genuinely good games like Balatro or Slay the Spire.
The game industry has merged with the gaming industry.
When WhatsApp was acquired, they had around 50 employees. By now, it's around 1500. It's still just a messaging app.
However it's my (mostly vibes-based) opinion that it impacts software more than most. Imo, disciplines with more stability benefit from knowing how many people are needed for specific roles, and probably don't step on each other's toes so much. Software projects often end up sharing so many interface points between devs. I can't imagine the amount of headaches a 100 strong org would generate when someone breaks CI, lol.
Coupled with the speed at which our industry changes (game engine updates, hardware evolution, new language hotness etc etc), it feels like there's no time to find the 'best' organisational strategy yet.
The revitalization of old games via the "classic" release model has demonstrated that simply undoing the MBA damage is an extremely viable option. World of Warcraft and League of Legends are both great examples of this. Blizzard was even forced to drop the "2" from Overwatch and bring back the 6v6 open queue. Heroes of the storm queue times are under 60 seconds now. This last one they said was dead years ago but they just released a big content update and it sent a very strong message to gamers.
Every morning I pull up YouTube for the last month has felt like 2016. Blizzcon was a breath of fresh air. Proof we can still do things the right way. We need to clear out the org charts and flatten them. There should be one person who owns each game and then everyone else works for them directly. Putting business people above this and letting them jerk around the directors cannot possibly result in long term gains. Anything involving a non domain expert leading in the gaming industry is a short term extraction play that will inevitably ruin the pie for everyone.
For better or worse, some degree of gate keeping is healthy in this industry. I think if you want to be the CEO of Xbox that you must demonstrate some kind of ranked ladder experience in halo or COD. A 1v1 StarCraft match with the interim CEO.
the main differences afaik from movies & music industry are
- larger percentage of highly technically skilled workers who could make more money in another industry with their skillset
- it's a younger industry and thus has slightly less entrenched "this is just how things are done" cultural energy, allowing such articles to exist, fewer nepo-babies in control positions, etc
but as it has grown and every other entertainment industry has been getting their fingers in the pie, it has increasingly been adopting those toxic practices that have long existed in art under capitalism
Start producing games players want, and you will do just fine! And do not tell your customers, how much you hate them! Even better: do not hate your customers!
Mobile gaming is just adware-filled games, while Steam is so flooded with releases that finding these games feels accidental.
There’s a gap in the market for a platform focused purely on small, high-quality games that max out at around 5-6 hours and which have the polish of a big studio.
When I play something new, it is typically either indies or games from smaller studios that still can put out something fun.
I don't touch AAA. Fuck that noise.
It used to be that a big release was reliably interesting with everyone figuring out how to play, and a bit more emergent chaos. Few new titles have captured this. Either they are overly sterile, or buggy live service titles with no real reason to engage at day one.
Possible that the size of the teams is part of the problem, but if the industry needs to drop from 500 man to 100 man teams, I can't imagine how the industry will be healthy during that.
I noped out of AAA games a long time ago because I don’t like where the industry has been heading. I see a lot of the same gameplay with new window dressing and persistent nickel-and-diming of the player base. The smaller studios are the ones doing the really interesting things.
I count 32 people on their team photo + the dog, and even this seems like a somewhat sizable number of people to manage. When I see news of these lay-offs it’s terrible for those people but at the end of the day I feel like those companies never should have reached those numbers. I fear for Larian
Grabbing largest profits possible, but all risks on producers.
For clients there are two problems. Lack of people that steer industry in good direction long term, and everything works until it doesn't.
Epic is in the over-optimization business. With enough complexity, you can get performance up, at a high development cost. The results are truly impressive. See a GTA VI trailer.[1] The cost is high. Development cost for that game was around US $1.5 billion. That's 3x the cost of the most expensive movie ever made. It's more than the Super Bowl.
It will be interesting to see if AI generation can bring costs down. There's endless low-end AI crap, but here's a animation to watch - Kono Express.[1]. This was done by an animator Disney made the mistake of laying off. So he's in the process of replacing Disney Animation. He's turning out about half an hour of finished material per month, all by himself. It's up to Hollywood animation standards. He's combined Unreal Engine and AI to do this. Do we really need Disney's high-cost operation any more?
The only major game in recent history I'm aware was labeled as particularly woke is Dragon Age: Veilguard, mostly due to a particularly cringy (and presumably self-insert) scene where Taash lectures their parent. The character was made even more irritating by regularly refusing to address Emmerich by his name in dialogue.
However, what turned me off from the game and roused most of the discontent I saw had to do with the removal of one of the bigger RP elements the prior games had: the ability to get into significant arguments with companions and even dismiss them entirely or cause them to leave on their own.
https://fictionhorizon.com/games-where-woke-updates-caused-m...
The similar is true for series. Picard saved the universe many times over and random female gives him lectures and dominates entire series...
I guess maybe it shouldn't surprise me that someone in his position advocates for "do the thing which is killing the industry, but do it even harder". But it really did catch me off guard.
> Turns out that even people who are down for that sort of game don't need more than one (and they already have that one)
Not sure about this. There are lots of people who have a main game but still pick up every 3rd or 4th fotm aaa/indie darling, and I think most gacha game players play more than 1 from what I've seen.
> whereas all kinds of people would be happy to buy something unique and fun.
I don't really believe this from my experience with interacting with people.
The game industry is genuinely terrible, starting with low pay and brutal working hours, but it's interesting and lets you do a lot of fun things.
Because everyone wants to do it, there are plenty of people willing to put up with somewhat lower pay.
Guy made $150,000 from the precursor game to Ultima… at 19 years old, in 1980.
The 1980s were full of kids becoming thousandaires by making games from their bedrooms after school, in just a few weeks or months at most..
Can we bring that back somehow?
Those early devs had almost no "prior art" to draw from, just the imagination in their heads (and non-game media).
And they had to code on the VERY FIRST home computers and consoles, in assembly language, before many people could master that hardware and explain all its tricks in a consolidated knowledge base like we have on the internet now.
Now, we have infinitely easier tools, an infinite amount of inspiration, and there is a lot of incredible creativity in the indie game scene, but the discoverability seems worse:
The most popular platforms, iOS, Android, consoles, are notoriously difficult to get a game on and make money from, especially for a kid.
On the other hand there's too much low-effort slop to sift through (which was also a problem during the 1980s)
Seems like what we need most is better discoverability, filtering, and low-friction monetization that isn't ads..
WoW classic was certainly a business move, but afaik from watching a couple of wowc videos, a part of the appeal was the rerelease of the following expansions, which they cant just do forever since it would just lead to the same end, so they have to pivot to WoW forever.
LoL classic has not been as successful as wow, and even they have talked about patching the game literally less than a month after its release.
Both of these classic releases don't seem to be permanent games, and their rerelase seems aimed to capture the nostalgia while still providing live service updates in order to prevent people from getting bored because their endgames can't continuously monetize players.
OW 2 was supposed to be a release with a pve mode as it's focus, which it failed, so there was no real reason to have a distinction between ow1 and 2. Both the removal and return of 6v6 and role queue have been nothing more than attempts to balance the game, and I don't really see the need to point it out as "MBA damage" any more than any other patch for any other game.
I have no comments about HOTS because I played at most 5 matches in the game 10 years ago.
>For better or worse, some degree of gate keeping is healthy in this industry. I think if you want to be the CEO of Xbox that you must demonstrate some kind of ranked ladder experience in halo or COD. A 1v1 StarCraft match with the interim CEO. Just a stupid idea idk what to say. Being a gamer has nothing to do with managing a gaming company well
LoL classic is indeed a bad example, but that’s because Riot didn’t deliver and also importantly used a version that was not at the height of LoL’s success. You can use Runescape as a better example for the return to classic working.
Other mismanaged classic games are the Warcraft 3 remake. So classic does not guarantee success, it has to be done properly.
I believe there was significant controversy about whether it was safe to update or whether it should be a permanent time capsule. The developers ended up earning everyone's trust by experimenting with new major content on a new continent of the game world that was basically their sandbox, until it was felt they were making the game better and not worse. Even the original version of this new continent was criticised for being a massive empty plain, although now it's more filled in. They also developed a system to poll paying players on whether new updates were desirable or not, and most of the time they wouldn't add something that didn't get 3/4 approval.
The rerelease of classic is the MBA damage lol.
And soon we'll see also Wow Legend? I kid I kid.
A big problem is that we now have such big budgets that they need approval higher up, and worse, you end up looking like a fool when your project fails. That is still the case with 100-man teams.
This is not necessarily a terrible situation to be in if it were a startup situation where you could count on having 90% failures and the winner making the whole bucket worth it and people knew and accepted that.
But outside Sand Hill Road nobody gets that, so the strategy is to play it safe, safe, and safe, and then you end up with boring games.
It also doesn't help that it used to be that gamers would reliably update every couple of years, so graphics cards and processes would get faster, and you could make a generic shoot‑'em‑up game that was significantly better than the previous shoot‑'em‑up just because you now had more to work with.
Computers have actually increased in price, so much so that no one buys to update their computers. And at the same time, you need permission from an extremely high level to make games, so you can only make games that are very safe.
Meanwhile, the golden age of indie games is out there. It's never been easier to make your creative game and it's never been easier to find an audience for it.
As a result, there are more games than ever on Steam, and those fun games can last a lot longer because they don't have the marketing budget, so there's no big, immediate launch-month splat window. People will find them on social media, watch their favourite streamers play them etc.
Until we get to a point where games are created by studios who accept that 90% of them will fail, we are going to have interesting games from non‑studios.
That leaves a hole in the options for game development, though. Where are we with games that can be developed by 50 people but not by four? Those games do not have a home right no; They are too risky and uninteresting for the big guys, and they are out of scope for the independent.
The entire game-development business is being torn apart and remodeled by AI development right now. It is very likely that the big companies may never be able to make a game with 500 people.
Many games that were previously too large and required too many people to be feasible for indie developers are now very feasible for them. It's also quite possible that exclusives, such as for PlayStation, will very quickly disappear due to widespread piracy aided by AI powered decompiling. The future is extremely hard to predict at present, even more so than for non-gaming segments of the industry.
I find it unlikely that we will have another once-in-a-century opportunity to be there at the opening of a new frontier like the home computer boom was or the internet revolution that closely followed it.
Maybe it's my pessimism speaking, but the AI boom most definitely doesn't feel the same opportunity wise.
The reason this isnt happening that much anymore is that the standards for games have increased for the average consumer, so development costs have increased to fit those standards. And even then, publishing your game in a monetizable way is hard and often requires starting capital now.
And when it is happening, it is happening on roblox. When is the last time you have opened roblox? It is more or less exactly what you want -- teenagers make either simple games or free copies of more popular games and then fill them with microtransactions to make money.
People also love to pick the outliers like Balatro to point out how feasible a small indie team is. There were thousands of other games released that made $0 dollars and found 10 players for every Balatro. The p90 outcome is barely a sustainable small business in game dev unless you live in literal poverty
Guilty (∪ _ ∪) It was months ago.
but.. to be fair, I haven't purchased any music in years either, but I listen to music all the time; everyone just streams it now.
Can something similar be done for games? That's what the "low-friction monetization" was for.
Like some mechanism where you can go to itch.io and just play in the browser, and the creator gets paid for it somehow? Some itch.io PS+-like subscription maybe?
All the tools are there, and lots of people are doing it already. Literally nothing is stopping anyone from "bringing that back".
How could today ever be classified as inflation when the purchasing power is declining even faster but not because people have more money to spend, mainly beause they have less.
Why for the consumers that feels nothing like inflation whatsoever. How could it? /s
>US dollar has lost 20% of value over the past 5 years.
Sounds like an accurate statistic. Relative to a consistent benchmark that means most to Wall Street and the professional economists who serve them. That's who has and controls most of the money and who the government responds to. Their outlook definitely depends on these statistics being consistent with how it has been in the past when things were quite rosy. There needs to be an obvious path (for them) to once again return to optimistic outlooks similar to how it has worked during previous downturns. As intended.
Too bad.
For the general public an even more accurate measure of damage to the dollar could be the Big Mac index, but I'll go you one up because I just stopped in to McDonald's (the same location) for the first time in 5 years and got an even more representative identical $1 ice cream cone and it is now $2.39. That's without tax. This might have happened even quicker than 5 years for all I know.
This is a product that was engineered to cost exactly a dollar over the long run, and a long run it has been. But no more, now it is engineered the same way and the cost still reflects the very minimum they can get by selling it for, just as always. That's why it's only $2.39 by now and my estimate is it will go up further before there is a chance of coming down, if ever.
That's a greater than 50% drop in purchasing power for the general public already. McDonald's has a better internal gauge on that than New York banks, how would a bank know as deeply if they are merely major shareholders in McDonald's and nothing like the general public anyway? This is the type of thing corporations try to obscure in their financial reporting which makes it even worse. McDonald's is huge and a more accurate barometer of what the general pubic experiences than most economists.
Walmart's "engineered" pricepoint products for low-income consumers are not reflecting this full effect yet, closer to a 30% drop, but they are way bigger and better able to weather the storm, plus don't have the more realistic inclusion of the pain that the franchisees are seeing in addition to the corporation. Which seems to put McDonald's more in line with the general public at this point. I expect that Walmart has had professional economists on staff for their own internal purposes for a while now, who also have more accurate data plus more current than Wall Street has about the general public at any one time. But due to the professional "nature" that they share with their counterparts at the banks and within government, that could be why they sometimes have "rollbacks" and price increases in rapid succession when it's obvious each effort was intended to carry forward to the percentage extent deployed but last much longer, with no further changes foreseen otherwise it would not be reversed so quickly. This coincides with major reshuffling of SKUs like never before since their "superstores" got started, with some tendency appearing like catering a bit to "whales" themselves. Maybe a hedge in case the lower-income customers' spending continues to decline to the point of not being able to support such size going forward. IOW looks like Walmart is more like Wall Street now than McDonald's.
That makes me suspicious that even with the best data, current economic thinking among professionals has already abandoned the general public whether they are trying to cater to the lower income portion of the US or not.
Anyway, looks to me like it is similar to the way it was after Nixon had his way with the dollar, once it gets bad enough for the banks to begin to experience about a 50% drop where they now have "only" 20%, there will finally be a fire under enough government peoples' ass to start taking some action that might be able to lift all boats. Regardless, there will be tens of millions left with nothing but life preservers which can do nothing but directionless bobbing compared to those who manage to stay aboard some kind of vessel. In addition to the growing tens of millions already ordained to drifting in that "non-boat" along with the ones already there.
But nothing like that will be taken too seriously until that level of pain reaches the top, and only under desperation after there is no longer a viable way back in any familiar fashion for them.
Regardless of whether wealth should be concentrated like that, it still presents a significant problem for the games industry, and leads to things like loot box economies to milk the "whales" for thousands of dollars, since 90% of the addressable market can't afford the product.
The wealth inequality we see now is largely a function of every Republican administration in the last half century passing tax cuts for the wealthy while simultaneously dismantling unions and failing to enforce anti-trust, allowing market consolidation the likes of which we haven't seen since the gilded age.
The result is that wage growth completely disconnected from productivity growth to the extent that subsequent generations are now poorer than their parents' generations.
None of that happened naturally - it was the result of repeated policy changes by the government.
not to mention, the marginal propensity to consume for the top 10% is 5-6 times _less_ than the bottom 90%, so I don't know how you can claim the current consumption rate is good?
It's perfectly good for the economy if wealthy people save/invest in production instead of consume themselves.
Pointing out that poorer people have higher MPC simply doesn't mean that redistributive policies would increase production or consumption. It's entirely possible that such policies would decrease overall savings rate which you seem to think would be good, but would reduce total production and consumption.
And the margins on streaming for the artists are quite low. I don't think I would want that for developers.
But also, this kinda exists in roblox, where the games are free but have lots of microtransactions, since roblox uses a digital currenct mtx model, it does kinda lower friction for the users of the platform who play multiple games and spend money on them.
It needs to be a more open platform like itch.io
Not sure what started this wave of CPI skepticism but it's so banal.
Happy for you, though. Or sorry it happened.
We should be de-siloing, not more siloing