Old series that has a decent following of mostly niche dedicated fans is left to sit without a new installment for many years.
New title is announced. It’s sells gang-busters and flips the community on its head.
Corporate Executives prioritize short term profits and begin planning a quick and easy cash grab. !
Second new installment comes out. It is a shell of the previous title with the soul sucked clean out.
Fans are dissapointed and outside of a small niche following the game series falls into obscurity.
Repeat.
!we are here right now
Look… Maybe BG4 will be good. But after watching this exact cycle play out over and over again for the past decade I’m not sure how you can expect anything else.
When will the business world realize that anything business majors are given control of turns to shit. Like I know that it’s not impossible for a AAA game to be good but I also know that most companies that can handle that kind of a budget are run by people who just think gamers love throwing money at anything labeled “video game”, proved by so many out of touch quotes.
Like the BlizzCon “don’t you have phones?” showed that Blizzard didn’t even realize that their main demographic and shitty f2p phone games didn’t have much overlap.
Or EA’s “sense of satisfaction” was transparent when they give a paid path to skip a ridiculously tuned grind.
Or Ubisoft’s “AAAA” said they hadn’t even noticed that “AAA” was starting to be considered synonymous with “shit”.
The funny part is that they aren’t even wrong about the potential to make a lot of money from video games, it’s just not by using business major tricks to extract the maximum short term gains or approaching making a video game by thinking about how to make the most money from it.
As an accountant and finance person I promise you “business major” and c-suite are not one in the same here…most of us are never allowed to rise that high due to nepotism and we’re just chugging along trying to make a living the same as the devs. I’d love to work for a company where the emphasis wasn’t on this short term ensuitication BS. It isn’t like entry and mid level accounting and finance folks are the ones pushing for this most of this nonsense. We just get dictated all the bs from the top and report/forecast the numbers.
I’m not saying business majors shouldn’t be involved at all, they just shouldn’t be making major game design decisions that the people who have a passion for making a great game disagree with.
It all comes down to the main motivation for doing the work. If the passion guiding the overall operation is about making a great x, then IMO it is much more likely to succeed than if the passion is about making money from making x.
When it’s a large company involved, that can be mitigated by finding people who are passionate about the x instead of just the money, but all the orders of “do it this less fun way because it will make us more money” can kill that passion over time or even just cancel out the positive effect that passion had on the game.
Old series that has a decent following of mostly niche dedicated fans is left to sit without a new installment for many years.
New title is announced. It’s sells gang-busters and flips the community on its head.
Corporate Executives prioritize short term profits and begin planning a quick and easy cash grab. !
Second new installment comes out. It is a shell of the previous title with the soul sucked clean out.
Fans are dissapointed and outside of a small niche following the game series falls into obscurity.
Repeat.
! we are here right now
Look… Maybe BG4 will be good. But after watching this exact cycle play out over and over again for the past decade I’m not sure how you can expect anything else.
When will the business world realize that anything business majors are given control of turns to shit. Like I know that it’s not impossible for a AAA game to be good but I also know that most companies that can handle that kind of a budget are run by people who just think gamers love throwing money at anything labeled “video game”, proved by so many out of touch quotes.
Like the BlizzCon “don’t you have phones?” showed that Blizzard didn’t even realize that their main demographic and shitty f2p phone games didn’t have much overlap.
Or EA’s “sense of satisfaction” was transparent when they give a paid path to skip a ridiculously tuned grind.
Or Ubisoft’s “AAAA” said they hadn’t even noticed that “AAA” was starting to be considered synonymous with “shit”.
The funny part is that they aren’t even wrong about the potential to make a lot of money from video games, it’s just not by using business major tricks to extract the maximum short term gains or approaching making a video game by thinking about how to make the most money from it.
As an accountant and finance person I promise you “business major” and c-suite are not one in the same here…most of us are never allowed to rise that high due to nepotism and we’re just chugging along trying to make a living the same as the devs. I’d love to work for a company where the emphasis wasn’t on this short term ensuitication BS. It isn’t like entry and mid level accounting and finance folks are the ones pushing for this most of this nonsense. We just get dictated all the bs from the top and report/forecast the numbers.
I’m not saying business majors shouldn’t be involved at all, they just shouldn’t be making major game design decisions that the people who have a passion for making a great game disagree with.
It all comes down to the main motivation for doing the work. If the passion guiding the overall operation is about making a great x, then IMO it is much more likely to succeed than if the passion is about making money from making x.
When it’s a large company involved, that can be mitigated by finding people who are passionate about the x instead of just the money, but all the orders of “do it this less fun way because it will make us more money” can kill that passion over time or even just cancel out the positive effect that passion had on the game.