5 ms·

And more layoffs will come, until western studios start making good games that gamers actually want, not games they think some imaginary audience who doesn't ev

And more layoffs will come, until western studios start making good games that gamers actually want, not games they think some imaginary audience who doesn't even play videogames wants. And on budgets that aren't in the hundreds of millions, blown on sensitivity consultants like Sweet Baby and settling lawsuits on discriminatory hiring practices. They'd better course correct fast, as Asian game devs will be eating their lunch. Black Myth Wukong anyone? Stellar Blade? Dragon Ball Sparking Zero? Nature is finally healing, the free market at work. The indie game scene is flourishing while the old players are dying.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
As long as gamers can't define "good game gamers actually want", this is a useless metric.
- foobarbaz33 2y ago
  Free market is not a metric. It's just natural selection. No one needs to understand it for it to run its course.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    you need to understand it if you think you can just "make good games" like a switch.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  Gocha games are an example of "games gamers actually want". You don't need to ask people define what they want, you need to see what's selling and just do that, because sales and profits are something you CAN measure. But I doubt the DEI departments at Sony, EA, Ubisoft and Microsoft will ever let them release games with waifus and jiggle physics, so they'll have to keep saying no to free money on the table just to die on that hill. Edit: The gocha waifu anecdote was an example to prove a point, I'm not advocating that that's the only way to make money and that everyone should start making that. There's other successful examples besides gocha.
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    Is it really a "want" if it's an addiction?
    - Cumpiler69 2y ago
      Are attractive female features an addiction or natural reaction to biology?
      - lenerdenator 2y ago
        Depends on if they're actual female features or something that doesn't exist in nature. EDIT: I was referring more to the addictive nature of gacha games.
        Cumpiler69 2y ago
        Games aren't addictive because you can see under a girl's skirt, as that gets old pretty quick. They're addictive because they're fun to play. The waifus are to draw players interest.
        lenerdenator 2y ago
        They're not addictive because they're fun to play; they're addictive because they activate certain parts of your brain in a certain way. A dude staring at a screen just clicking buttons with no expression on his face for hours on end might say he's having fun, but that's gonna be hard to sell me on.
  - falleng0d 2y ago
    Gacha + waifus is definitely a huge hit. Especially because it also capture the female audience. Also cosplays on conventions do free advertising. (see Genshin Impact) Never seen western studios release a game of this genre.
    - 2y ago
- vondur 2y ago
  I guess you can by the number of units sold on certain games. GTA 6 looks to be a blockbuster once it's released.
- Avicebron 2y ago
  I mean it's pretty straightforward, hard shift in the opposite direction of what HR wants/is demanding. Don't add microtransactions, make it compelling in game and out of game, aka things like guilds in WoW where there's a meta human interaction element overlaid on top.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    sounds like a great way to make a game people wanted 30 years ago but would fail today. You're basically describing a modern mobile game without the main monetization. People want services, but don't want to continuously pay for a continous service. well, that's why MTX work. For every 100, 1000 people playing for free, you got some whale amortizing the cost for them.
    - Avicebron 2y ago
      > don't want to continously pay for a continuous service Uhh... people do all the time, we invented a word for it, subscriptions. It's like the main form of non-ordinary expense people pay, the issue is that the product has to worth it, MTX focused games are so geared to the lowest common denominator they aren't fun (usually)
- mckirk 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure they could, if you asked them. As an example, I am confident that a true successor to Battlefield 3/4, unencumbered by EA's often terrible decisions, would sell very well. The problem is, it probably wouldn't make the same money as some microtransaction-ridden free-to-play dopamine factory, and so management wouldn't actually _want_ to make the game that the gamers want. (Though supposedly there is a game like that in the making -- I just don't want to get my hopes up because I've been fooled too many times.)
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    sure, I could, you could, every commenter on HN in the last 24 hours could. Put them all together and we'd probably get a mess of genres with little overlap, or "worse": probably some already existing popular game that is hated by the gaming enthusiasts. Because we've long left this monoculture where any one game is the talk of the town for years to come. Or because the businesspeople actually are serving what people want. You're also right that what enthusiasts want are rarely the most profitable. Blizzard can make 5 HD games and even MTX them up to high hell. Candy Crush is probably still making more than any of them. Just another example of how utterly diverse gaming has become (or perhaps, full circle where bejeweled on steroids still can make so much money).
lenerdenator 2y ago
A decent percentage of what "gamers actually want" is literally too cringe to develop.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  It's ok, if you don't develop cringe games, others will and will make money while you will die broke on that hill. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. The customer is always right.
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - Cumpiler69 2y ago
      You're moving the goalposts. I was not talking about porn games here.
      - lenerdenator 2y ago
        That's not moving the goalposts. You can go on Twitter and find plenty of examples of gamers @'ing developers about how they censored the model on some character to maintain decency. It's held up as an example of censorship and the woke agenda. You could absolutely sell a game with those textures and models to those gamers. You'd want to scrub your skin off with boiling water for every shower for the rest of your life, but that dropped nickel is just waiting to be picked up.
        Avicebron 2y ago
        This is literally the problem, let's RP. Engineer: comes up with strong rational solution, hey so all of the people polled -in places with actual gamers, not random polls to people who know what a game is- have said, hey can you make the elf hot please, im spending 10 hours a week on this and having the character being a nonbinary sac of potato orc with a Tumblr addiction is killing my vide. You (Toby), but someone might complain on Twitter and if I conflate some random numbers online I can draw the conclusion that one teenage girl complained. How is that rational?
irrational 2y ago
I agree. We need more Zelda and Stardew Valley and Portal and less Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.
- smileson2 2y ago
  People love GTA and COD they execute really well There’s really no shortage of games atm
  - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    I think there was some sarcasm in the parent comment, although also I believe at the same time a clear expression of personal preference.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  you can throw a dart on an indie board and you'll probably hit a farming sim competitor. And we just got a new Zelda.
sigmoid10 2y ago
Games that gamers want and games that bring in the most money by milking gamers are not the same thing. And publishers will always care about the money first and foremost.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  >And publishers will always care about the money first and foremost. Have you seen their share prices and the garbage games their making with heavy losses? They clearly don't care about making money. If they did they wouldn't be doing what they're doing. Perfect example is Ubisoft.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    What do you think they care about then, if they're not trying (but in some cases failing) to make money? Is this the point where we invoke conspiracy theories about the games industry trying to destroy itself on purpose due to some vaguely defined woke agenda?
    - Cumpiler69 2y ago
      How come some little known games studios manage to make good games consistently that sell well and why does Ubisoft keep failing despite ownings some of the biggest IPs in the industry when their audience keep telling them what their mistakes are but they keep ignoring. So yeah, it's intentional, not a conspiracy. It's the emperor's new clothes. Nobody working there wants to point out flaws in the games they're making (like having a black samurai in medieval Japan as a main character) for fear of being called a racist/bigott, so everyone goes along with it till the studio collapses.
      - jsheard 2y ago
        I don't particularly enjoy Ubisofts games, they're the definition of bland uninspired AAA slop, but they are profitable. As a publicly traded company their financials have to be transparent so we know for a fact they were net positive over FY 2024.
n4r9 2y ago
Had to look up that reference to Sweet Baby. Apparently they've been a recent target of "woke agenda" accusations [0] including wild conspiracy theories like being controlled by BlackRock (what?!) or forcing studios to make characters black [1]. The irony with the latter being that the game in question - Alan Wake 2 - is widely seen as a "good game". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Baby_Inc.#Online_backlash_and_harassment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Baby_Inc.#Online_backlas... [1] https://www.imdb.com/news/ni64471459/ https://www.imdb.com/news/ni64471459/
- sickofparadox 2y ago
  Alan Wake 2 was a critical success but no one bought it. The studio just a few weeks ago said it still hasn't earned its budget back. [1] I tend to ignore major game outlet reviews myself, because the industry simply is not mature enough to review in the way that others are - way too many outlets are afraid of corporate backlash for honest reviews of the negative variety. [1] https://www.ign.com/articles/remedy-has-recouped-most-of-the-development-and-marketing-expenses-for-alan-wake-2 https://www.ign.com/articles/remedy-has-recouped-most-of-the...
  - n4r9 2y ago
    I'm not clued up on modern game economics... how long on average does a game take to start making royalties these days? The article you linked says it's the company's fastest selling game, selling 1.3 million units within a year. Compared to their previous game Control which was released in 2019, had much lower initial sales, but has now reached 4 million units. So is it not reasonable to think that the royalties will be flowing in over the next few years?
    - sickofparadox 2y ago
      Royalties may be flowing in over the next few years, but they still have to keep the lights on and the payroll flowing - the long tail of a game that wasn't initially profitable may not be enough. Remedy has a few projects in the barrel, and if those hit it big they will probably be fine, but I remain skeptical. (especially if they stick with an Epic exclusive PC deal)
djtango 2y ago
I call this Product Manager driven game design. The Soulsbourne series I hold as the shining beacon of game design that decided to go their own way. As games got more and more "accessible" and shipped more and more quality of life features added, here was a game that decided to add friction to everything. You can't pause. You can lose EXP/money when you die. There are cheesy gimmick deaths just to screw with you. You can't replay dialogue. There is no quest log and there are missable quest steps all over. NPCs will disappear and travel to unknown locations. Demon Souls and to some extent Dark Souls 1 were positively niche but the games went on to be genre defining giving birth to "soulslike" games and Elden Ring waz justly rewarded with mass appeal and awards. I don't have a problem with games being accessible but I relish a story of someone going all-in on taste/vision driven-design and succeeding. I am also a little bitter of many AAA games becoming busywork simulators because games must deliver engaging experiences x times per hour which then just leads to bloated fetch quests and checklists and busy screens full of quest markers
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  >I call this Product Manager driven game design. I call it game design by HR. Everything today by big western games studios is designed to be so super safe and sterile just in case to not be offensive to absolutely anyone, so you end up with a limp-dick experience that's not fun to anyone, encased in the carcass of a once famous IP to build up hype. Or worse, modern game devs insert their own social and political ideologies into the games, like for example in Star Wars Outlaws you play as an outlaw who is only allowed to rob the police (we see what you did there) but not the civilians, and you can't kill animals, only pet them. Games studios keep pretending like they don't know their target market. They keep making games for the market they want it to be, not the market that is. People got into video games for the escapism from reality, to do shit they aren't allowed to do in the real world, not to be lectured or have even more constrains than in reality placed upon then just so the game studio can tick all the $CURRENT_DAY social and political messages and safety boxes. Nobody wants to spend money on that. So they'll be loosing money and their jobs till it sinks in. That's the free market at work.
raincole 2y ago
It's really interesting that western game studios act as if they are car manufacturers who are highly protected from foreign competitors by the government.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  I think in many countries they receive a lot of funding from governments. Especially Canada. But yeah, they're not protected from foreign competition.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

As long as gamers can't define "good game gamers actually want", this is a useless metric.

foobarbaz33 2y ago
Free market is not a metric. It's just natural selection. No one needs to understand it for it to run its course.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  you need to understand it if you think you can just "make good games" like a switch.
Cumpiler69 2y ago
Gocha games are an example of "games gamers actually want". You don't need to ask people define what they want, you need to see what's selling and just do that, because sales and profits are something you CAN measure. But I doubt the DEI departments at Sony, EA, Ubisoft and Microsoft will ever let them release games with waifus and jiggle physics, so they'll have to keep saying no to free money on the table just to die on that hill. Edit: The gocha waifu anecdote was an example to prove a point, I'm not advocating that that's the only way to make money and that everyone should start making that. There's other successful examples besides gocha.
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  Is it really a "want" if it's an addiction?
  - Cumpiler69 2y ago
    Are attractive female features an addiction or natural reaction to biology?
    - lenerdenator 2y ago
      Depends on if they're actual female features or something that doesn't exist in nature. EDIT: I was referring more to the addictive nature of gacha games.
      - Cumpiler69 2y ago
        Games aren't addictive because you can see under a girl's skirt, as that gets old pretty quick. They're addictive because they're fun to play. The waifus are to draw players interest.
        lenerdenator 2y ago
        They're not addictive because they're fun to play; they're addictive because they activate certain parts of your brain in a certain way. A dude staring at a screen just clicking buttons with no expression on his face for hours on end might say he's having fun, but that's gonna be hard to sell me on.
- falleng0d 2y ago
  Gacha + waifus is definitely a huge hit. Especially because it also capture the female audience. Also cosplays on conventions do free advertising. (see Genshin Impact) Never seen western studios release a game of this genre.
  - 2y ago
vondur 2y ago
I guess you can by the number of units sold on certain games. GTA 6 looks to be a blockbuster once it's released.
Avicebron 2y ago
I mean it's pretty straightforward, hard shift in the opposite direction of what HR wants/is demanding. Don't add microtransactions, make it compelling in game and out of game, aka things like guilds in WoW where there's a meta human interaction element overlaid on top.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  sounds like a great way to make a game people wanted 30 years ago but would fail today. You're basically describing a modern mobile game without the main monetization. People want services, but don't want to continuously pay for a continous service. well, that's why MTX work. For every 100, 1000 people playing for free, you got some whale amortizing the cost for them.
  - Avicebron 2y ago
    > don't want to continously pay for a continuous service Uhh... people do all the time, we invented a word for it, subscriptions. It's like the main form of non-ordinary expense people pay, the issue is that the product has to worth it, MTX focused games are so geared to the lowest common denominator they aren't fun (usually)
mckirk 2y ago
I'm pretty sure they could, if you asked them. As an example, I am confident that a true successor to Battlefield 3/4, unencumbered by EA's often terrible decisions, would sell very well. The problem is, it probably wouldn't make the same money as some microtransaction-ridden free-to-play dopamine factory, and so management wouldn't actually _want_ to make the game that the gamers want. (Though supposedly there is a game like that in the making -- I just don't want to get my hopes up because I've been fooled too many times.)
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  sure, I could, you could, every commenter on HN in the last 24 hours could. Put them all together and we'd probably get a mess of genres with little overlap, or "worse": probably some already existing popular game that is hated by the gaming enthusiasts. Because we've long left this monoculture where any one game is the talk of the town for years to come. Or because the businesspeople actually are serving what people want. You're also right that what enthusiasts want are rarely the most profitable. Blizzard can make 5 HD games and even MTX them up to high hell. Candy Crush is probably still making more than any of them. Just another example of how utterly diverse gaming has become (or perhaps, full circle where bejeweled on steroids still can make so much money).

lenerdenator 2y ago

A decent percentage of what "gamers actually want" is literally too cringe to develop.

Cumpiler69 2y ago
It's ok, if you don't develop cringe games, others will and will make money while you will die broke on that hill. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. The customer is always right.
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Cumpiler69 2y ago
    You're moving the goalposts. I was not talking about porn games here.
    - lenerdenator 2y ago
      That's not moving the goalposts. You can go on Twitter and find plenty of examples of gamers @'ing developers about how they censored the model on some character to maintain decency. It's held up as an example of censorship and the woke agenda. You could absolutely sell a game with those textures and models to those gamers. You'd want to scrub your skin off with boiling water for every shower for the rest of your life, but that dropped nickel is just waiting to be picked up.
      - Avicebron 2y ago
        This is literally the problem, let's RP. Engineer: comes up with strong rational solution, hey so all of the people polled -in places with actual gamers, not random polls to people who know what a game is- have said, hey can you make the elf hot please, im spending 10 hours a week on this and having the character being a nonbinary sac of potato orc with a Tumblr addiction is killing my vide. You (Toby), but someone might complain on Twitter and if I conflate some random numbers online I can draw the conclusion that one teenage girl complained. How is that rational?

irrational 2y ago

I agree. We need more Zelda and Stardew Valley and Portal and less Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.

smileson2 2y ago
People love GTA and COD they execute really well There’s really no shortage of games atm
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  I think there was some sarcasm in the parent comment, although also I believe at the same time a clear expression of personal preference.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
you can throw a dart on an indie board and you'll probably hit a farming sim competitor. And we just got a new Zelda.

sigmoid10 2y ago

Games that gamers want and games that bring in the most money by milking gamers are not the same thing. And publishers will always care about the money first and foremost.

Cumpiler69 2y ago
>And publishers will always care about the money first and foremost. Have you seen their share prices and the garbage games their making with heavy losses? They clearly don't care about making money. If they did they wouldn't be doing what they're doing. Perfect example is Ubisoft.
- jsheard 2y ago
  What do you think they care about then, if they're not trying (but in some cases failing) to make money? Is this the point where we invoke conspiracy theories about the games industry trying to destroy itself on purpose due to some vaguely defined woke agenda?
  - Cumpiler69 2y ago
    How come some little known games studios manage to make good games consistently that sell well and why does Ubisoft keep failing despite ownings some of the biggest IPs in the industry when their audience keep telling them what their mistakes are but they keep ignoring. So yeah, it's intentional, not a conspiracy. It's the emperor's new clothes. Nobody working there wants to point out flaws in the games they're making (like having a black samurai in medieval Japan as a main character) for fear of being called a racist/bigott, so everyone goes along with it till the studio collapses.
    - jsheard 2y ago
      I don't particularly enjoy Ubisofts games, they're the definition of bland uninspired AAA slop, but they are profitable. As a publicly traded company their financials have to be transparent so we know for a fact they were net positive over FY 2024.

n4r9 2y ago

Had to look up that reference to Sweet Baby. Apparently they've been a recent target of "woke agenda" accusations [0] including wild conspiracy theories like being controlled by BlackRock (what?!) or forcing studios to make characters black [1]. The irony with the latter being that the game in question - Alan Wake 2 - is widely seen as a "good game". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Baby_Inc.#Online_backlash_and_harassment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Baby_Inc.#Online_backlas... [1] https://www.imdb.com/news/ni64471459/ https://www.imdb.com/news/ni64471459/

sickofparadox 2y ago
Alan Wake 2 was a critical success but no one bought it. The studio just a few weeks ago said it still hasn't earned its budget back. [1] I tend to ignore major game outlet reviews myself, because the industry simply is not mature enough to review in the way that others are - way too many outlets are afraid of corporate backlash for honest reviews of the negative variety. [1] https://www.ign.com/articles/remedy-has-recouped-most-of-the-development-and-marketing-expenses-for-alan-wake-2 https://www.ign.com/articles/remedy-has-recouped-most-of-the...
- n4r9 2y ago
  I'm not clued up on modern game economics... how long on average does a game take to start making royalties these days? The article you linked says it's the company's fastest selling game, selling 1.3 million units within a year. Compared to their previous game Control which was released in 2019, had much lower initial sales, but has now reached 4 million units. So is it not reasonable to think that the royalties will be flowing in over the next few years?
  - sickofparadox 2y ago
    Royalties may be flowing in over the next few years, but they still have to keep the lights on and the payroll flowing - the long tail of a game that wasn't initially profitable may not be enough. Remedy has a few projects in the barrel, and if those hit it big they will probably be fine, but I remain skeptical. (especially if they stick with an Epic exclusive PC deal)

djtango 2y ago

I call this Product Manager driven game design. The Soulsbourne series I hold as the shining beacon of game design that decided to go their own way. As games got more and more "accessible" and shipped more and more quality of life features added, here was a game that decided to add friction to everything. You can't pause. You can lose EXP/money when you die. There are cheesy gimmick deaths just to screw with you. You can't replay dialogue. There is no quest log and there are missable quest steps all over. NPCs will disappear and travel to unknown locations. Demon Souls and to some extent Dark Souls 1 were positively niche but the games went on to be genre defining giving birth to "soulslike" games and Elden Ring waz justly rewarded with mass appeal and awards. I don't have a problem with games being accessible but I relish a story of someone going all-in on taste/vision driven-design and succeeding. I am also a little bitter of many AAA games becoming busywork simulators because games must deliver engaging experiences x times per hour which then just leads to bloated fetch quests and checklists and busy screens full of quest markers

Cumpiler69 2y ago
>I call this Product Manager driven game design. I call it game design by HR. Everything today by big western games studios is designed to be so super safe and sterile just in case to not be offensive to absolutely anyone, so you end up with a limp-dick experience that's not fun to anyone, encased in the carcass of a once famous IP to build up hype. Or worse, modern game devs insert their own social and political ideologies into the games, like for example in Star Wars Outlaws you play as an outlaw who is only allowed to rob the police (we see what you did there) but not the civilians, and you can't kill animals, only pet them. Games studios keep pretending like they don't know their target market. They keep making games for the market they want it to be, not the market that is. People got into video games for the escapism from reality, to do shit they aren't allowed to do in the real world, not to be lectured or have even more constrains than in reality placed upon then just so the game studio can tick all the $CURRENT_DAY social and political messages and safety boxes. Nobody wants to spend money on that. So they'll be loosing money and their jobs till it sinks in. That's the free market at work.

raincole 2y ago

It's really interesting that western game studios act as if they are car manufacturers who are highly protected from foreign competitors by the government.

Cumpiler69 2y ago
I think in many countries they receive a lot of funding from governments. Especially Canada. But yeah, they're not protected from foreign competition.