7 ms·

This is the inevitable trend of gaming since the 90s. Small team makes innovative and interesting game. Gets bought, makes a good sequel, then milks IP forever

This is the inevitable trend of gaming since the 90s. Small team makes innovative and interesting game. Gets bought, makes a good sequel, then milks IP forever. It's up to you to move on.

apatters 6y ago
Absolutely. It's fine for gamers to indulge in some nostalgia, too. It'd be better for the industry if we all recognized that the job of a guy like Bobby Kotick is to eat a steak every so often, and then vomit it up for the next 25 years. Someone has to drive a garbage truck and there's nothing wrong with paying him for it.
gota 6y ago
Have you watched Mythic Quest? There's a particular episode touching this, that doesn't really require the rest of the series and is very good. Check it out if you can - it' "Dark Quiet Death" from Season one
gabereiser 6y ago
Bingo! CoD, Quake, Doom, Civ, Madden, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, All of Nintendo... you can’t fault them for milking an IP though when fans vote with their wallets. I would love new stories, new hero archetypes, new consequences, in games and I think indie have done a decent job at showing it can be done. But even indie suffers from the “Hey! This worked! Let’s just keep doing this!” IP milkage. Game dev, like software dev, has gotten more and more complex. What was once a vision of unity and standards is now Unity3D or micro-fracture SDK’s of the same graphics pipeline concepts and a wasteland of bones from those who came before you. I know from experience. The “I’ll write my own engine” bug bit me in 2005. I wrote Reactor3D on XNA in 2007. Worked with Bill Reiss while he masterminded XNASilverlight which eventually would become the basis for MonoGame, which we all love and adore. What’s interesting is the non-mention of itch.io I think if enough people want new and interesting games, it will get done. Dev’s are surprisingly open to ideas, it’s the publishers (money people) who have a problem with change.
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  Change = risk If you want to build new IP and there isn’t established funding you can go start a Kickstarter campaign to raise money from gamers to go build the game.
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    That’s the crux of it right there. Funding. Studios that have funding secured (or don’t need it) should be the ones taking those risks. But yes, it’s risky to introduce new IP, the results can be disastrous. Cliff Bleszinski knows this.
- shuntress 6y ago
  To directly name some of games you seem to be implying are automatically bad; I'm personally very happy with Doom (2016), Doom Eternal, Breath of the Wild, and Mario Odyssey. I am glad that ID and Nintendo have been "milking" these IPs.
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    Not implying any sense of quality, just naming some IP's that have been milked.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    I think there's a difference between continuing an IP and milking one. When the same IP gets passed to a dozen different studios who each create vastly different experiences, that's milking and I generally don't like it. The whole point of an IP is that you know what to expect, and having different studios working on the same IP is contrary to that goal. Nintendo does not milk IPs, IMHO. They actually put a lot of though into their games and ensuring the the experience is top-notch. Compare Nintendo Zelda games to the few non-Nintendo variants: they've all been trash. Which is exactly why Nintendo rarely outsources games.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
trevyn 6y ago
The “Small team makes innovative and interesting X. Gets bought” trend is hardly limited to gaming! Or the 90’s.
leetcrew 6y ago
if they would just keep cranking out sequels at the same level of quality but no real innovation, I would be pretty happy. mass effect 1 was pretty good, me2 was great, me3 was still decent. why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda? similar with far cry. fc2 was great, but probably too unforgiving for the mainstream audience. they dumbed it down a bit for fc3, and fc4 was more of the same but with a couple pain points ironed out. then they had to mess everything up for fc5, why? oddly enough, call of duty seems like a pretty good example of how to do a AAA franchise. they hit a winning formula with cod4, and they haven't really changed anything since. I'm not a huge fan of the series, but if you loved cod4, you'll love pretty much every game after that. or an even better example: counterstrike. hardcore cs players will complain about subtle differences in the engine/hitboxes/netcode over time, but the core mechanics are exactly the same as in 1999. if it ain't broke...
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  > why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda? Obviously everyone has their opinions, but I thought Andromeda the strongest sequel to ME1 story content wise. Andromeda's failings weren't in the story or the content (ME "B-Team" or not, thanks to Anthem's black hole, they wrote most of the strongest story content in all four games), they were technical. EA absolutely should not have pushed BioWare to Frostbite without properly productionizing Frostbite as if it were Unreal/Unity with a dedicated team and possibly an honest attempt to sell it as a product outside of EA's walls, instead of leaving it as DICE's in house with BioWare struggling to keep up with forked changes. Almost all of the technical problems in DAI, MEA, and especially Anthem seem clearly the fault of this broken engine relationship between DICE and BioWare. If EA wants Frostbite to be the next Unreal (or even just an okay competitor to Unreal) it needs to learn (five years ago) the lessons from Unreal that you treat even first and second party games as if they were third party customers to get the best results.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    I didn't actually finish the game, so I can't speak too much to the story. for me it wasn't even about the bugs; I just thought the andromeda open world was the blandest of any I'd played at the time. it was like they looked at the lunar rover minigame from me1 and decided to make it the whole game. I wish they had just stuck to the traditional rpg level design of the previous games. I didn't much like the combat mechanics in andromeda either, but that could just be personal taste.
Osiris 6y ago
The trend is definitely moving away from many separate games and toward "living" games. Look at how many games these days end up just doing updates/DLCs over many years rather than releasing whole new versions of the game. Look at Destiny, there was originally planned for Destiny 3, but now the plan is just to make Destiny 2 the only game for the next 10 years with constant content updates. Even now, Destiny 2 of today is a significantly different than Destiny 2 at release. Microsoft/343 have indicated that "Halo: Infinite" is planned to be this way as well, a living game. Even indie games like Astroneer and Don't Starve are going down this route of updating a single game over a long period of time. I'm not sure if that should be considering "milking", but it's definitely a change from how things used to be done.
- shagie 6y ago
  The "living game" approach has to do with the cost of the DLC and the difficulty at moving the price point of a game (while costs to build it go up). This allows the studio to make money on the game based on the continued DLC which needs less development investment. It isn't so much "milking" but rather "acknowledging a change in the way games are monetized because the price of the initial game isn't changing."
  - mrguyorama 6y ago
    No, the "living game" approach is because it turns out taking a "hat" asset that took an artist like 2 days to make (or you literally got for free from your fanbase!) and selling it for $5 to the 10 million people playing your game makes A FUCKLOAD of money. It's absolutely milking. Games make more money now when they are "Oh woe is me so expensive to make oh poor me feel pitty" then they ever dreamed of even when a game could be made by one person.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  It makes a lot of sense for most games to work like this: once you have a core game, adding content to it is comparatively cheap. Which means that the ROI can be really high if a point release with new content causes a spike in unit sales. This probably works better for indies than DLC because I do think people have developed an aversion to DLC due to the big publishers abusing it for cosmetic updates. Personally, I'm very likely to pick up something like Factorio at full price, knowing that the devs are going to be adding "free" content to the base game over the years. But I'll skip over games with "season passes" and just wait for the complete edition to be released.

This is the inevitable trend of gaming since the 90s. Small team makes innovative and interesting game. Gets bought, makes a good sequel, then milks IP forever. It's up to you to move on.

apatters 6y ago

Absolutely. It's fine for gamers to indulge in some nostalgia, too. It'd be better for the industry if we all recognized that the job of a guy like Bobby Kotick is to eat a steak every so often, and then vomit it up for the next 25 years. Someone has to drive a garbage truck and there's nothing wrong with paying him for it.

gota 6y ago

Have you watched Mythic Quest? There's a particular episode touching this, that doesn't really require the rest of the series and is very good. Check it out if you can - it' "Dark Quiet Death" from Season one

gabereiser 6y ago

Bingo! CoD, Quake, Doom, Civ, Madden, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, All of Nintendo... you can’t fault them for milking an IP though when fans vote with their wallets. I would love new stories, new hero archetypes, new consequences, in games and I think indie have done a decent job at showing it can be done. But even indie suffers from the “Hey! This worked! Let’s just keep doing this!” IP milkage. Game dev, like software dev, has gotten more and more complex. What was once a vision of unity and standards is now Unity3D or micro-fracture SDK’s of the same graphics pipeline concepts and a wasteland of bones from those who came before you. I know from experience. The “I’ll write my own engine” bug bit me in 2005. I wrote Reactor3D on XNA in 2007. Worked with Bill Reiss while he masterminded XNASilverlight which eventually would become the basis for MonoGame, which we all love and adore. What’s interesting is the non-mention of itch.io I think if enough people want new and interesting games, it will get done. Dev’s are surprisingly open to ideas, it’s the publishers (money people) who have a problem with change.

gogopuppygogo 6y ago
Change = risk If you want to build new IP and there isn’t established funding you can go start a Kickstarter campaign to raise money from gamers to go build the game.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  That’s the crux of it right there. Funding. Studios that have funding secured (or don’t need it) should be the ones taking those risks. But yes, it’s risky to introduce new IP, the results can be disastrous. Cliff Bleszinski knows this.
shuntress 6y ago
To directly name some of games you seem to be implying are automatically bad; I'm personally very happy with Doom (2016), Doom Eternal, Breath of the Wild, and Mario Odyssey. I am glad that ID and Nintendo have been "milking" these IPs.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  Not implying any sense of quality, just naming some IP's that have been milked.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  I think there's a difference between continuing an IP and milking one. When the same IP gets passed to a dozen different studios who each create vastly different experiences, that's milking and I generally don't like it. The whole point of an IP is that you know what to expect, and having different studios working on the same IP is contrary to that goal. Nintendo does not milk IPs, IMHO. They actually put a lot of though into their games and ensuring the the experience is top-notch. Compare Nintendo Zelda games to the few non-Nintendo variants: they've all been trash. Which is exactly why Nintendo rarely outsources games.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago

trevyn 6y ago

The “Small team makes innovative and interesting X. Gets bought” trend is hardly limited to gaming! Or the 90’s.

leetcrew 6y ago

if they would just keep cranking out sequels at the same level of quality but no real innovation, I would be pretty happy. mass effect 1 was pretty good, me2 was great, me3 was still decent. why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda? similar with far cry. fc2 was great, but probably too unforgiving for the mainstream audience. they dumbed it down a bit for fc3, and fc4 was more of the same but with a couple pain points ironed out. then they had to mess everything up for fc5, why? oddly enough, call of duty seems like a pretty good example of how to do a AAA franchise. they hit a winning formula with cod4, and they haven't really changed anything since. I'm not a huge fan of the series, but if you loved cod4, you'll love pretty much every game after that. or an even better example: counterstrike. hardcore cs players will complain about subtle differences in the engine/hitboxes/netcode over time, but the core mechanics are exactly the same as in 1999. if it ain't broke...

WorldMaker 6y ago
> why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda? Obviously everyone has their opinions, but I thought Andromeda the strongest sequel to ME1 story content wise. Andromeda's failings weren't in the story or the content (ME "B-Team" or not, thanks to Anthem's black hole, they wrote most of the strongest story content in all four games), they were technical. EA absolutely should not have pushed BioWare to Frostbite without properly productionizing Frostbite as if it were Unreal/Unity with a dedicated team and possibly an honest attempt to sell it as a product outside of EA's walls, instead of leaving it as DICE's in house with BioWare struggling to keep up with forked changes. Almost all of the technical problems in DAI, MEA, and especially Anthem seem clearly the fault of this broken engine relationship between DICE and BioWare. If EA wants Frostbite to be the next Unreal (or even just an okay competitor to Unreal) it needs to learn (five years ago) the lessons from Unreal that you treat even first and second party games as if they were third party customers to get the best results.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  I didn't actually finish the game, so I can't speak too much to the story. for me it wasn't even about the bugs; I just thought the andromeda open world was the blandest of any I'd played at the time. it was like they looked at the lunar rover minigame from me1 and decided to make it the whole game. I wish they had just stuck to the traditional rpg level design of the previous games. I didn't much like the combat mechanics in andromeda either, but that could just be personal taste.

Osiris 6y ago

The trend is definitely moving away from many separate games and toward "living" games. Look at how many games these days end up just doing updates/DLCs over many years rather than releasing whole new versions of the game. Look at Destiny, there was originally planned for Destiny 3, but now the plan is just to make Destiny 2 the only game for the next 10 years with constant content updates. Even now, Destiny 2 of today is a significantly different than Destiny 2 at release. Microsoft/343 have indicated that "Halo: Infinite" is planned to be this way as well, a living game. Even indie games like Astroneer and Don't Starve are going down this route of updating a single game over a long period of time. I'm not sure if that should be considering "milking", but it's definitely a change from how things used to be done.

shagie 6y ago
The "living game" approach has to do with the cost of the DLC and the difficulty at moving the price point of a game (while costs to build it go up). This allows the studio to make money on the game based on the continued DLC which needs less development investment. It isn't so much "milking" but rather "acknowledging a change in the way games are monetized because the price of the initial game isn't changing."
- mrguyorama 6y ago
  No, the "living game" approach is because it turns out taking a "hat" asset that took an artist like 2 days to make (or you literally got for free from your fanbase!) and selling it for $5 to the 10 million people playing your game makes A FUCKLOAD of money. It's absolutely milking. Games make more money now when they are "Oh woe is me so expensive to make oh poor me feel pitty" then they ever dreamed of even when a game could be made by one person.
mywittyname 6y ago
It makes a lot of sense for most games to work like this: once you have a core game, adding content to it is comparatively cheap. Which means that the ROI can be really high if a point release with new content causes a spike in unit sales. This probably works better for indies than DLC because I do think people have developed an aversion to DLC due to the big publishers abusing it for cosmetic updates. Personally, I'm very likely to pick up something like Factorio at full price, knowing that the devs are going to be adding "free" content to the base game over the years. But I'll skip over games with "season passes" and just wait for the complete edition to be released.