I wholeheartedly agree, just to add that currently even the most competent industry leaders have been seriously struggling in the last few years.
- Bethesda's Starfield and RedFall flops.
- The tumultuous Cyberpunk 2077 story from the darling CD Projekt Red.
- Many masters of their craft have lost their luster after serious flops or stagnation: BioWare, Dice, Arkane, Crytek, Blizzard, Rocksteady...
- The long-term slow death of Ubisoft and its recent big-budget failures with Star Wars Outlaws and Avatar, underwhelming Far Cry 6, also AC Shadows is looking grim.
- EA has all but disappeared from the big picture, it was hated before, but now it's just ignored. They failed to properly take advantage of their Star Wars monopoly.
- Microsoft is volatile, with aggressive acquisitions and aggressive studio closures, seriously struggling to make Xbox competitive, and a Game Pass that will have difficulties in transitioning from a loss-leader to a real business.
- Sony's Concord crash, and generally confused strategy of exclusives vs PC ports/remasters.
- The whole failure of Embracer Group trying to gobble up most of AA.
Only Rockstar seems unscathed, but mainly because they haven't released anything major since Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) and GTA 5 remains insanely profitable. It would be the first time, but I wouldn't be surprised if GTA 6 was a disaster looking at what has happened to other highly reputable studios like Bethesda, Arkane, Bioware or CDPR.
AAA games are just getting too expensive to make now. They can still be highly profitable when they hit the right notes, but it's so much riskier now, you can end up loosing hundreds of millions unexpectedly. Because of the risk, everyone is forced to make more and more anaemic games, which make the situation worse. There seems to be an industry-wide difficulty in leveraging properly creative and talented writers and game designers, even if they don't cost much.
It would be nice if it was just AAA, but it's not. There have been some recent success stories on AA with Baldur's Gate 3, Helldivers 2, Space Marine 2... But just as many failures too (you don't hear as much about them). Also, there's been a wave of acquisitions and investments from aggressive VC-like money, and even moderate successes are studio-closing failures for them (Hi-Fi Rush, an example of many).
And as usual, there are always a few fantastic success stories for Indie games, but big-picture the market is more saturated than ever and the vast majority of indie developers end up making less than minimum wage.
Tough times.
I mean, I think there is a signifigant portion of video game players that could have told you Starfield and RedFall would underwhelm.. Bethesda players clearly want, nay are begging for more Elder Scrolls and Fallout main line games.
I know Bethesda wanted a new IP, but literally their audience was begging them to make the stuff they want to play faster and it seems like they ignored it, at their peril.
Agree on everything else, just salty at Bethesda for dropping the ball. I'd also add Valve to the list somewhere as another weird example because they make far too much money distributing games to have as strong an appetite for making them despite a pretty good track record (The hardware... maybe another story)
I agree, again, there's a surprising endemic difficulty throughout the whole industry to empower decent writers and designers to make properly engaging and interesting games, and that's not really a budget issue. There's a comparison to be made with Amazon Prime's big-budget flops like Rings of Power, but others like HBO or Apple TV are still managing to reward and empower good writers.
It must be an underlying systemic issue, they are not stupid. They keep betting big on things that are obviously doomed from the outset to any average gamer, but they are blind to it. They think these bets are safe because they appeal to a wider audience, but they end up making them even riskier because they don't appeal to anyone.
On Valve, they have been doing their own thing for like 15 years. They flirted with being a normal games studio in the Half-Life and Portal era, but that didn't last long. It's not just Steam, most of their games like Dota, Counter-Strike and Team Fortress are still always at the top of the charts in active players, they require such minimal maintenance, and they are wildly profitable due to user generated content and item trading economy. Steam Deck has been surprisingly successful too, and they've taken a decent piece of the pie in VR.
>Sony's Concord crash, and generally confused strategy of exclusives vs PC ports/remasters.
Sony has two subsidaries making games:
* Sony Music Entertainment Japan (SMEJ) through their subsidary Aniplex. They are not to be confused with Sony Music Entertainment (SME), another subsidary.
* Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), who are the PlayStation people and historically Sony's video game division. They were previously Sony Computer Entertainment before they moved to California and rebranded.
* SMEJ and SIE are equals under the Sony Group Corporation conglomerate.
SMEJ more or less minds their own business, their operations concern all entertainment media in Japan including games. Their subsidary Aniplex is their anime, video game, pop music, and overall otaku division.
Aniplex's games have been generally well received, with Fate/Grand Order (developed by DelightWorks and subsequently bought out by Aniplex, this is important for later context below) being the foremost example and others such as all the Sword Art Online games.
SIE loathes SMEJ and Aniplex because their games by comparison have crashed and burned again and again, Concord being just the most recent example of many. They even spun up a game dev studio called ForwardWorks to defeat Aniplex's DelightWorks, but ForwardWorks like most of their other ventures failed while DelightWorks just kept moving along.
SIE is also in the awkward position of approving PlayStation ports of Aniplex's games, despite their hatred.
So if you ever wonder why some of Sony's games are crashing and burning, just remember: It's probably by Sony Interactive Entertainment, and they are too busy trying to drag their fellow co-workers down to be making good games.
Yes, relatively speaking Sony is not doing too badly. They might have been doing better a few years ago, but it hasn't changed that much.
PS5 was a real success story despite supply-side struggles the first few years. They still have a highly respected portfolio of exclusives, and now that Xbox is not really competing, they can afford to loosen their grip a bit and cashing-in by also slowly releasing them on PC, generally encouraging players to pay for a game multiple times through remasters and cross-platform ports.
They might not be doing as well with first-party games, but that's fine. Astrobot has been a pleasant surprise and unexpectedly successful.
AAA games need to do honest pricing. They can release at $70 dollars but if it’s not a hit, drop the price and release modding tools so the community can have a go at reinventing it.
What they seem to do is drop the price and give it another go with updates, but the game has already failed by their standards (it no longer sells at $70). The second life of games always comes from the community.
They underestimate how much gamers want to be involved in the game design process, even by a mere purchasing vote.
Speaking for PC games here.
Indeed, Skyrim was really not that good, the modding community made it a >decade-long success. Bethesda has acknowledged that to some extent and built some infrastructure to facilitate it, but they also tried to get a cut from it, so the result is quite mixed. Few other studies are open to it.
Skyrim was great for 2012, and while it was fairly bland it was still large, colorful, and had great music. it's pretty shallow, but modding breathed new life into it.
I agree that mods can greatly improve the Skyrim experience but I sunk 1K+ hours into the game (over a decade-ish) all on my Xbox (unmodded). I was super happy when they released support for mods but the game was/is awesome standalone IMHO.
They're trying to make art by committee, which can only happen by accident if at all. In the case of some (Concord, reportedly, but probably some of the others too), those committees are probably cripples by toxic positivity, such that negative feedback doesn't exist and the committee is left thinking its farts don't stink. You cannot make art if you can't identify and correct deficiencies. I think anybody who has really developed their own artistic talent probably understands this, if you want to make something good you have to be critical of it and be willing to change your approach to make things better. This process is crippled in committees where criticism is stifled.
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I agree, but there's somewhat of a selection bias here. Pretty much all big games, successful or not, are designed by committee. Auteurs have always been rare in gaming and the few that exist are mostly a marketing front and don't have as much influence as they seem.
I think you are right, but this cannot be the whole story, widely successful games have followed this methodology too.
>There seems to be an industry-wide difficulty in leveraging properly creative and talented writers and game designers, even if they don't cost much.
That is a symptom of the investment guarding gremiums not signing off on any risky endeavours which is another symptom- the people in charge of the investment destroying the investment with funny political games.
On the other hand, the type of games just below AAA is as alive as never before. I'm having a very good time with Steam right now filling my simulation and strategy games itch, genres that were pretty much dead in the AAA heydays. And small indie teams don't need million sellers to stay afloat either. I think the looming "death" (or rather contraction) of AAA will be good for gaming overall because it makes room for new things.
I'm not sure I agree... There's certainly somewhat of a AA resurgence, but that's mainly because AA all but died a decade ago squeezed between AAA and indie, and it's slowly coming back to fill-in the gaps.
But AA used to be much more significant before and that's how all the current AAA companies got to where they are now. We've been missing that renewal process for a while, the big players have not felt the pressure from underneath and have stagnated.
And Indie has been a very tough situation since Steam opened its floodgates after stopping Greenlight. Sure indies don't need millions, but the vast majority don't even get thousands. You are seeing an extreme survival bias, if you talk to professionals in the industry you'll hear how hard it is to even stay afloat.
Add to it the number of hours each of those ask for, and now the service games, that means one can kill their daily dosis of gaming with a single one, that gets improved over time, with new server side content, or DLCs.
And the horrible prices that they nowadays ask for as well.
Even though I still game, nowadays anything that requires several GB to download, or more than a couple of hours, isn't worthy of my attention.
Sure that will leave out all cool AAA, no FOMO here, a couple of random sessions of people playing them on YouTube or whatever are more than enough to get an idea of their gameplay and that is about it.
Even in my teenage years of Spectrum/Amiga/PC gaming I wasn't burning the amount of hours in gaming that many of those AAA ask for.
AAA games now are lukewarm slop, designed to appeal to the nonexistent "modern audience". if there's a strong IP or studio reputation to sacrifice, they can be profitable despite significant or overwhelming negative sentiment, and if there isn't, you get Concord.
all of those big studios are staffed by writers who hate their audience and designers who believe their audience to be too stupid for a system deeper than "damage" and "hp", and they all rightfully deserve to die.
> Because of the risk, everyone is forced to make more and more anaemic games
and this is exactly why they flop, you're already taking on the exact same burden making something milquetoast vs making something risky, weirdly by watering it down and not rocking the boat and hoping just a scattershot mass of apathetic players will make it worth the investment is exactly why it's failing.
By aiming for the apathetic you're missing any chance at all of fanaticism around what you're making, it's a false economy believing that by watering a thing down you're increasing the chance of success.
Probably the next most anticipated game other than GTA6 is the next Souls game, and if you had pitched the original Demon Souls or Dark Souls in an Ubisoft, Bethesda, California era Sony, Microsoft, EA boardroom they'd have asked you "Who's going to even play something so difficult" yet here we are where Elden Ring made almost $1 billion with 400 employees, put in perspective to UbiSoft one of the most egregiously formulaic companies they managed 2.4 billion in 2023 with 20,000 employees and needing many more games to get to that.
I agree, but I'm more interested in understanding why everyone is making these mistakes over and over again.
It's naive to think that they are all stupid, it's just not possible. It's not just old soulless corporations, many beloved and sharp studios are falling into the same traps. Even the most savvy and successful newcomers from the Indie scene trying to go bigger fall for this now.
The leading examples are the 4-5 Forspoken-likes we've seen this year that no one was asking for and everyone has forgotten instantly. With derivative open-world action, unbelievably boring story and characters, and that neon-purple magic+tech aesthetic that all studios seem to think is so fresh but somehow they all come up with the exact same thing.
I get that you want to play it safe and copy a proven model, fine, but is it so hard to at least sprinkle it with some decent writing please? Everyone is so hungry for good IP to exploit, but IP is all about characters, world-building and story, and they are skimping on those for no good reason.
I'm sure they hire good writers, but for some reason they are not getting through. The current political mood might be a factor, but there's still a lot of room to play in the politically-neutral space, games have always lived there.
It's not just the big companies making these, it's also every talented studio that got some extra funding to scale-up. I guess it's all about the tech VC attitude seeping in at all levels? Uber didn't need writers... But you'd think money people would at least be good at actually making lots of money. I get all the aggressive monetization and creatively bankrupt cash-grabs, fine, but now they are creatively bankrupt and don't even make any money! Perhaps with some patience the industry will learn the right lessons from this and we are headed towards a new golden age.