5 ms·

Who cares? Their roadmap has looked the same for 20 years: release the same game again, with slight adjustments to gameplay, new "story", better graphics... And

Who cares? Their roadmap has looked the same for 20 years: release the same game again, with slight adjustments to gameplay, new "story", better graphics... And also new ridiculous engine bugs, more invasive anticheat, and more premium DLC crap on top of the rising price. Activision only succeeds due to size and inertia. Big budgets, lots of artists, name recognition. I like when obscure or indie gaming stuff shows up on this site, because there's usually something interesting to learn about it or discuss around it. Call of Duty number 30 and its set of completely uninspired additions are not the least bit interesting.

MikeTheRocker 4y ago
Some substantial subset of the tens of millions of players probably care. Call of Duty titles may not be innovative or particularly original, but they're undeniably popular.
guhidalg 4y ago
I agree, who cares? Do we care when FIFA documents leak revealing how much certain countries pay for play?
rejectfinite 4y ago
Have you even played recent CoDs?
- smolder 4y ago
  I have played the free warzone games as well as the paid games during the limited "free weekends" and... I'm very happy I didn't give them any money.
  - NationalPark 4y ago
    Well, there's an example of their roadmap changing in the last 20 years. Warzone came out in 2019.
bogwog 4y ago
I think it's interesting to see what the planning side of a AAA live service game looks like...even if it's just a few screenshots in a tweet.
TonyTrapp 4y ago
There's a lot of valid criticism, but rising prices is... not quite accurate. Compared to the inflation of the last 25 years, prices for games have stayed almost constant, so relatively speaking they are a lot cheaper than they used to be (despite the ridiculously large team sizes and production value of modern AAA games). If games kept up with inflation, your average AAA game price would be more than 100€ and not 60-80€ these days.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Should digital goods be indexed to inflation/TAM_growth, to normalize for population growth?
  - tgv 4y ago
    Since all costs are personnel, yes.
    - izacus 4y ago
      What do you mean? This is a digital downloadable good and their sales have grown massively, bringing in massively more profit with the same team sizes. Even if teams grew, the gaming market has outgrown that by several sizes in last years. The profits these publishers have recorded in last years are staggering - raising game prices is pure fleecing.
      - ethbr0 4y ago
        > raising game prices is pure fleecing My curiosity is that there's some normalized change in game pricing, but it's really dependent on both inflation and increased size of gaming market. Since unit costs are so low for digital goods, if you have +5% inflation over a period and +15% gamers, the price of AAA games technically should have gone down to maintain profits. (Assuming you hold development costs static, which isn't true but simplifies the problem) I'm not sure what that inflation-TAM number would be. Maybe games are getting "more profitable" (at the same price point), maybe less.
      - 4y ago
impalallama 4y ago
This is about seasonal road maps with dates, and specifics on what content they plan to drop for each season which is new to only the last few CoD games. If it doesn't interest you why are you even in this thread being so unnecessarily hostile about it.
- smolder 4y ago
  User-hostile business practices result in hostile users, I guess. Plus, this story just feels out of place on HN, to me.
zls 4y ago
While this may be true-ish of the mainline Call of Duty games, it is very not-true of Warzone. Warzone was an immensely popular free-to-play Battle Royale game, released at exactly the right time during the pandemic to catch the wave of isolated people looking for new, online group activities. In contrast to other Battle Royale games, it was much faster-paced and forgiving, with more emphasis on fun gunplay than realism or "tactics." Last November, they released Warzone 2, while simultaneously effectively shutting down the original Warzone. And it's a complete 180 from the original. The game is much more like a conventional BR... extremely slow paced and "tactical," and much more difficult to recover from an early mistake. And while it's hard to point to any one piece of data, the overwhelming sense in the community is that the game is not performing well; viewers on Twitch have fallen off massively since the release, and players are down massively since release. Again, I don't want to say "the game is in trouble," but it's telling that the developers are being bizarrely forthcoming in their "here is what we're going to change, we promise" posts, compared to how they handled the original Warzone. And anecdotally, my group of ~8 people that used to play Warzone every few days all abandoned WZ2 within the first week or two. And I continue to be absolutely perplexed by their decision. Their game was wildly successful, differentiated itself from other BRs for its gameplay, and got incredibly lucky with their pandemic timing. Why oh why would they totally eschew their winning recipe, kill all that momentum, in order to emulate less successful competitors??
- ethbr0 4y ago
  > Why oh why would they totally eschew their winning recipe, kill all that momentum, in order to emulate less successful competitors?? They wouldn't be the first development team to lose the "What are we already doing right?" core features in the "What aren't we doing?" sprint.
- smolder 4y ago
  I don't want to argue at length here, but I disagree: Warzone in either form was just as uninspired as regular CoD. They more or less copy-pasted game mechanics from the other BR titles that established the genre onto their game. They are now doing more mechanics-cloning with their Tarkov-esque game mode.
nickstinemates 4y ago
I enjoyed the new Warzone, and I especially enjoyed the story/single player. Was a fun afternoon.

MikeTheRocker 4y ago

Some substantial subset of the tens of millions of players probably care. Call of Duty titles may not be innovative or particularly original, but they're undeniably popular.

guhidalg 4y ago

I agree, who cares? Do we care when FIFA documents leak revealing how much certain countries pay for play?

rejectfinite 4y ago

Have you even played recent CoDs?

smolder 4y ago
I have played the free warzone games as well as the paid games during the limited "free weekends" and... I'm very happy I didn't give them any money.
- NationalPark 4y ago
  Well, there's an example of their roadmap changing in the last 20 years. Warzone came out in 2019.

bogwog 4y ago

I think it's interesting to see what the planning side of a AAA live service game looks like...even if it's just a few screenshots in a tweet.

TonyTrapp 4y ago

There's a lot of valid criticism, but rising prices is... not quite accurate. Compared to the inflation of the last 25 years, prices for games have stayed almost constant, so relatively speaking they are a lot cheaper than they used to be (despite the ridiculously large team sizes and production value of modern AAA games). If games kept up with inflation, your average AAA game price would be more than 100€ and not 60-80€ these days.

ethbr0 4y ago
Should digital goods be indexed to inflation/TAM_growth, to normalize for population growth?
- tgv 4y ago
  Since all costs are personnel, yes.
  - izacus 4y ago
    What do you mean? This is a digital downloadable good and their sales have grown massively, bringing in massively more profit with the same team sizes. Even if teams grew, the gaming market has outgrown that by several sizes in last years. The profits these publishers have recorded in last years are staggering - raising game prices is pure fleecing.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      > raising game prices is pure fleecing My curiosity is that there's some normalized change in game pricing, but it's really dependent on both inflation and increased size of gaming market. Since unit costs are so low for digital goods, if you have +5% inflation over a period and +15% gamers, the price of AAA games technically should have gone down to maintain profits. (Assuming you hold development costs static, which isn't true but simplifies the problem) I'm not sure what that inflation-TAM number would be. Maybe games are getting "more profitable" (at the same price point), maybe less.
    - 4y ago

impalallama 4y ago

This is about seasonal road maps with dates, and specifics on what content they plan to drop for each season which is new to only the last few CoD games. If it doesn't interest you why are you even in this thread being so unnecessarily hostile about it.

smolder 4y ago
User-hostile business practices result in hostile users, I guess. Plus, this story just feels out of place on HN, to me.

zls 4y ago

While this may be true-ish of the mainline Call of Duty games, it is very not-true of Warzone. Warzone was an immensely popular free-to-play Battle Royale game, released at exactly the right time during the pandemic to catch the wave of isolated people looking for new, online group activities. In contrast to other Battle Royale games, it was much faster-paced and forgiving, with more emphasis on fun gunplay than realism or "tactics." Last November, they released Warzone 2, while simultaneously effectively shutting down the original Warzone. And it's a complete 180 from the original. The game is much more like a conventional BR... extremely slow paced and "tactical," and much more difficult to recover from an early mistake. And while it's hard to point to any one piece of data, the overwhelming sense in the community is that the game is not performing well; viewers on Twitch have fallen off massively since the release, and players are down massively since release. Again, I don't want to say "the game is in trouble," but it's telling that the developers are being bizarrely forthcoming in their "here is what we're going to change, we promise" posts, compared to how they handled the original Warzone. And anecdotally, my group of ~8 people that used to play Warzone every few days all abandoned WZ2 within the first week or two. And I continue to be absolutely perplexed by their decision. Their game was wildly successful, differentiated itself from other BRs for its gameplay, and got incredibly lucky with their pandemic timing. Why oh why would they totally eschew their winning recipe, kill all that momentum, in order to emulate less successful competitors??

ethbr0 4y ago
> Why oh why would they totally eschew their winning recipe, kill all that momentum, in order to emulate less successful competitors?? They wouldn't be the first development team to lose the "What are we already doing right?" core features in the "What aren't we doing?" sprint.
smolder 4y ago
I don't want to argue at length here, but I disagree: Warzone in either form was just as uninspired as regular CoD. They more or less copy-pasted game mechanics from the other BR titles that established the genre onto their game. They are now doing more mechanics-cloning with their Tarkov-esque game mode.

nickstinemates 4y ago

I enjoyed the new Warzone, and I especially enjoyed the story/single player. Was a fun afternoon.