As Tim Willis from Space Marine 2 said:
“We don’t need to sell four million units to make it [Space Marine 2] a success,” Willits said. “There are many games, sadly, especially out of North American developers, where if you do not sell five million copies you are a failure. I mean, what business are we in where you fail if you sell less than five million?”
No guys, don’t you understand, it’s all that DEI that’s ruining games, trust. /s
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.
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.
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.
I am okay with the “I made this game for fun and publish it for free/pay what you want because I can’t be bothered with monetization” business model too.
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.
I’ve played the original “Deus Ex” for years and I’m still discovering new things about it. I don’t even have to worry about Windows anymore. I can play it with Wine on Linux.
I can play it with Wine on Linux
I do hope you’re using Proton…
Is there a benefit to using proton if something works fine with wine?
Better performance, stability, and usually less fatal interactions with whatever de you’re running.
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
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.
Each of those studios, UbiSoft, EA, and Activision, all forcing their employees back into the office. Car accidents up, environmental health down.
Fuck them.
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.
It won’t happen in tech outside gaming because tech outside gaming moves a lot slower so the collapse will happen to the front before the rear even thinks about adopting stupid changes like that.
“Bye Felicia!”
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.
The harder the enshit, the harder the fall
Business majors ruin everything, part 8378384748
So this guy was at the top of Sony America until 2018 and now there’s suddenly a lack of creativity in the industry? Please.
He’s the strategic advisor at Tencent Games now, so I’m sure he’s all over creativity there…
I found UFO 50 pretty creative. Maybe it’s not the problem of creativity. It’s the problem of monopolistic gaming companies run by people that don’t like games.
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Or, exactly what I said? I guess you didn’t read the article either by your logic.
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It’s literally in the title. You don’t even have to read the article.
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
I would even go lower than that. If you showed me Prey 2017 or even Alien Isolation 2014, and told me they came out today. I would probably believe you.
I’m still being impressed by 2017 games
The remasters coming out now is such bullshit, I mean Horizon Zero Down… are you kidding me?
I was playing the original not too long ago, and they freaking “updated” it with ai upscaling. It looks like absolute trash. I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it.
Why would you do that and also remaster it?
We peaked at crysis
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.
High refresh rates solve a real problem for competitive players.
Which is why they were ignored for a decade or two despite game engines easily achieving those FPS numbers and were pulled out exactly when the hardware vendors ran out of any other arguments to convince people to replace their existing screens and GPUs?
Maybe you’re only seeing the marketing now, probably because the customer base that would care about it are finally in large enough numbers due to the business around eSports, but higher frame rates give you better response times, and we’ve known this for a very long time. In my world, in fighting games, the games only draw at 60 FPS usually, but they can run at a 120 Hz or 144 Hz mode so that they can poll for inputs more frequently, which makes the games feel better to play. Resolution ought to have a tangible impact in FPS games as well.
It’s funny but I think my playstation 5is a Neflix machine and my most played game is days gone…
For some reason I feel like nothing interesting got released so far in this generation. Nothing big from Naughty dog. T.T
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.
And you’ll get dick-riders going ‘but inventory management is gameplay, like in survival horror!’
Okay. So why can you pay five actual dollars to play the game less?
Laughs as I remember pumping endless quarters to continue in old cabinet arcade games.
OK, but did you pay $600 to have that cabinet in your house and still pumo endless quarters into it?
A better argument would have been “they still were creative unlike the soulless carbon copy mega games of today.”
Not quite, this has happened before
Nah, the Lion King was famously made so hard that it would force you to put more coins to try again.
Nothing has changed, we just had a brief intermezzo of games not being intentionally fucked to extract more money.
You put coins into your SNES or Genesis?
Hmm, let’s ponder for a while what could I have meant. Soooo, do I put coins into my SNES or Genesis? Hmm, tough question, but if I had to give a definitive answer, it would be no. For multiple reasons, really. Like not having SNES or Genesis. And there being no slot for coins. Well, technically there’s a slot that you can put coins into, but it’s better to put the game cartridge there.
So, long story short, no I don’t. But where else would people in the past put coins into to play games? Well, that, my dear reader, is left as an exercise to you.
There was a lion king arcade game that took quarters?, is what I’m asking pal.
Apparently it is what is known as a rigged rental which is the equivalent of a quarter muncher. The game was so difficult that it would be to hard for new players to beat during the rental period to force them to buy it. It doesn’t seem like there was an actual arcade version, just a case of mixed metaphors. edit: typo
But just imagine how much more money they would have got out of you if you could also add a couple of extra quarters to change your character’s outfit
Fucking horse armor. Fucking dumbasses who bought it.
“Come on bruv, it’s just 2.50, what’s the harm!”
Now a single skin for a single character is the price of an entire game, or multiple games in the case of the newest Jinx skin for league of legends, thanks.
Shawn, bro… not to say it’s your fault, but it started with you
I’ll say it. He’s definitely at least partially responsible for this situation that he’s complaining about now.
Ya think?
