The Video Game Industry Can't Go On Like This (kotaku.com) 219
How much bigger can video games get? Video games are only getting more costly, in more ways than one. And it doesn't seem like they're sustainable. From a report: There's the human cost, which Kotaku has chronicled extensively. Contract workers are continually undervalued and taken advantage of, as Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 developer Treyarch is reported to do.[...] That's only the start of it. When you adjust for inflation, the retail cost of video games has never been cheaper, and it's been this way for some time. The $60 price point for a standard big-budget release has held steady for nearly 15 years, unadjusted for inflation even as the cost to make big-budget video games has risen astronomically with player expectations. Since changing the price point seems to be anathema, we've seen the industry attempt to compensate with all manner of alternatives: higher-priced collector's editions, live service games that offer annual passes or regular expansions a la Destiny, microtransactions, and free-to-play games. Then you have loot boxes. [...]
Let's run down the Big Three. We're more than halfway through 2019, and Electronic Arts has only published one single-player game, the indie Sea of Solitude. Last year was much the same, with two indies as its only single-player releases: Fe and Unraveled 2. Activision's portfolio of single-player games looks even thinner: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the only exclusively single-player, non-remake game that the publisher has released since 2015's Transformers: Devastation -- which itself is no longer available, thanks to an expired licensing agreement. Ubisoft is an exception, regularly releasing entries in single-player game franchises like Far Cry and Assassin's Creed. But it buttresses them with aggressive microtransactions and extensive season pass plans. (And the occasional diversion like Trials Rising and South Park: The Fractured But Whole.)
The big-budget single-player experience is now almost entirely the domain of first-party studios making marquee games for console manufacturers, which bankroll games like Spider-Man and God of War. The economics of first-party exclusives are totally different -- they're less about making money by themselves and more about drawing players into the console's ecosystem. This is worth considering, because as big publishers prioritize live, service-oriented games, the number of games on their schedules has dropped. If you look at the Wikipedia listings for EA, Ubisoft, and Activision games released by year, you'll get a stark -- if unscientific -- picture of how each big publisher's release slate has thinned out in the last five years, relying on recurring cash cows like sports games and annualized franchises and little else. In 2008, those three publishers released 98 games; in 2018 they released just 28, not including expansions.
Let's run down the Big Three. We're more than halfway through 2019, and Electronic Arts has only published one single-player game, the indie Sea of Solitude. Last year was much the same, with two indies as its only single-player releases: Fe and Unraveled 2. Activision's portfolio of single-player games looks even thinner: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the only exclusively single-player, non-remake game that the publisher has released since 2015's Transformers: Devastation -- which itself is no longer available, thanks to an expired licensing agreement. Ubisoft is an exception, regularly releasing entries in single-player game franchises like Far Cry and Assassin's Creed. But it buttresses them with aggressive microtransactions and extensive season pass plans. (And the occasional diversion like Trials Rising and South Park: The Fractured But Whole.)
The big-budget single-player experience is now almost entirely the domain of first-party studios making marquee games for console manufacturers, which bankroll games like Spider-Man and God of War. The economics of first-party exclusives are totally different -- they're less about making money by themselves and more about drawing players into the console's ecosystem. This is worth considering, because as big publishers prioritize live, service-oriented games, the number of games on their schedules has dropped. If you look at the Wikipedia listings for EA, Ubisoft, and Activision games released by year, you'll get a stark -- if unscientific -- picture of how each big publisher's release slate has thinned out in the last five years, relying on recurring cash cows like sports games and annualized franchises and little else. In 2008, those three publishers released 98 games; in 2018 they released just 28, not including expansions.
Anyone care to explain? (Score:5, Insightful)
"We're more than halfway through 2019, and Electronic Arts has only published one single-player game, the indie Sea of Solitude."
Is indie gaming no longer defined how it I am used to understanding it? In my mind EA and "indie" don't belong in the same sentence, like, ever.
Re:Anyone care to explain? (Score:5, Funny)
In my mind EA and "indie" don't belong in the same sentence, like, ever.
What about EAst Indies?
Re: Anyone care to explain? (Score:3)
Developer is Jo-mei Games. EA is the publisher.
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Is indie gaming no longer defined how it I am used to understanding it? In my mind EA and "indie" don't belong in the same sentence, like, ever.
Their are developers (studios) who write the code and publishers who distribute and market. EA is often both roles, but in this case they are only the publisher not the developer. Nobody is calling EA an independent.
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Yes, you *never* want to play a game that EA developed themselves. It's probably safe to also avoid any game they publish.
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I maintain that it's not possible to play a game from EA, only to stick your lips up to their asshole while they shit it into you.
Re:Anyone care to explain? (Score:4, Interesting)
If EA is the publisher the dev isn't independent either.
That's not how the industry defines it. You can see in articles like this:
https://www.pcgamer.com/why-do... [pcgamer.com]
That there's clearly a distinction between developers and publishers.
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"The industry" has redefined the term after "triple A" name was utterly ruined by major publishers. So now they pretend really hard that "independent studio" means "studio dependent on AAA publisher but not owned by it". Their marketing outlets, the so called "gaming journalism" are obviously fully on board with the current marketing.
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And cigarettes were good for your health according to the tobacco industry.
THAT is a great analogy that really drives your point home. Thanks, I've learned something important today.
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I love people who lean into being incorrect.
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Jinx! You owe me a soda.
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Activision used to publish id software games (doom, quake, etc) long ago before carmack and hollenstead sold the development studio to Bethesda. Some publishers self-develop games, but publishers are generally pretty distinct from development studios.
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Is indie gaming no longer defined how it I am used to understanding it?
No it still is. "EA Originals" is an attempt for the big publisher to get good PR by "helping" indie developers "at cost" to publish games.
Personally I don't believe a word of it, but right now I have dedicated all my fucks to Epic which actually seems to be ruining PC gaming, big game and indie developers, as well as games bankrolled by Kickstarter alike.
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Indie developers make the games they want to make and then look for a publisher. Non-indie developers do what the publisher tells them. That's the basic difference - who decides what the game will be.
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A quote from a Vice President of Tose, "Our policy is not to have a vision. Instead, we follow our customers' visions. Most of the time we refuse to put our name on the games, not even staff names." This company averages over 25 games developed a year.
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Overall it's not the number of games published that's important, it's the quality of the games.
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Re:Anyone care to explain? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the development studio has a publisher, it is not independent.
It's the same with movies. If you have a major studio, production company, or publisher involved it's not "indie". Despite what many believe, "indie" does not mean shitty pencil sketch title cards and posters, crowing about a bunch of awards from festivals/conferences/outlets no one has heard of, or getting Joseph Gordon Levitt involved.
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If the development studio has a publisher, it is not independent.
Sure it is. Lucasfilm shot and made its own movies, and 20th Century Fox and Paramount were chosen to distribute them from the 70s to 2010s. Then Disney purchased Lucasfilm, and Lucasfilm ceased to be an independent movie studio, and Disney/Lucas became developer AND publisher. When you sign a deal with a publisher/distributor, it doesn't mean that the publisher/distributor owns you. That's the difference between indie and not-indie.
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Most of this seems to be talking console games. I thinkt he PC has both gotten rare and far out of the mainstream.
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It is all down to creative works run by shallow thinking psychopaths, lying scummy dickheads who are good at winning the corporate politics games. They have very little idea what is going beyond they get rich quick at everyone else's expense plots and schemes, just lying and lying and lying some more.
Those useless cunts just all pile on what seems to be making the most money at the time, flood out that market and the ones who copied early make money and the ones who copied late lose money. Copying of cours
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Not sure what press you normally read. I've learnt about a large number of indie games via the gaming sites that I frequent.
Of course AAA games are going to dominate attention. They're big, they're flashy, they scream "look at me!". And we all look, because it's an effective way to get our attention.
A good gaming site will also keep track of many indie releases. Because they know that AAA games are not the be all and end all of the industry.
I agree about AAA games struggling because they're just becomin
I’m not a gamer (Score:5, Insightful)
And it’s apparent I don’t know the terminology. So could someone explain to me how Electronic Arts can release an “indie”?
When I see “indie”, I assume that means a game from an independent (and usually smaller) studio.
Re: I’m not a gamer (Score:5, Informative)
EA is the publisher, not the developer.
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I assume EA is the publisher only and that the game was developed by an independent studio.
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When I see “indie”, I assume that means a game from an independent (and usually smaller) studio.
It is. "EA Originals" is nothing more than a minor publishing arm started by EA to try and get some good will back from the industry after reaching peak evil. They apparently "help" indie developers publish "at cost".
It's nice marketing speak. Why do I get the feeling their "costs" include some creative accounting.
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dat fo sho
Your mom is proud.
Indie games are doing just fine (Score:5, Insightful)
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And the "big three" are the publishers most often criticized. Some big AA games came out this year but not from those guys. Ie, Rage 2, a new Wolfenstein (this week?). Before the year is out will be three blockbusters on the PC; Borderlands 3, Outer Worlds, Doom Eternal.
Why talk about the producers who are trying to cram three years of development time into a single year so that they can have a mediocre Assassin's Creed game yearly?
And cost is NOT cheaper, it's only cheaper when you have a severaly limit
Re: Indie games are doing just fine (Score:2)
You apparently forgot to mention that you are Canadian.
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i play maybe one AAA title a year, all others are indie games.
they are so great, so refreshing and most of the time a lot cheaper too.
They're doing just fine (Score:2)
Now, the share of the profits the sports companies (FIFA, NFL, etc) get might drop and some contracts might get renegotiated, but if anyone ser
yes, Yes it can! (Score:2)
As long as the Artitists keep selling themselves to the middleman this model will be sustained.
Consumers have long since given up the idea of boycotting for change in any industry gaming or otherise and instead send easy to buy politicians to talk for them. Loot box gambling is just 1 component of this. Instead of self control, its government control.
Voters now confuse the difference between Capitalim/Free-Market/Monopoly, and constantly call things what they are not for political expedience.
The current g
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Whales break the whole "vote with your wallet" mechanics.
Those lootboxes are designed to make the weaker people just waste all their money into virtual crap, thus "paying for everyone".
It's pretty much the same shit as gambling.
So as "vote with your wallet" don't work, they use the weapon that does, government.
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You cannot legislate away people being stupid no matter how hard you try. We have been governmenting for several millennia now.
Have you see anyone get it right yet?
"So as "vote with your wallet" don't work, they use the weapon that does, government."
Ha ha ha ha!!!! I guess you didn't history or current politics at all. There is so much regulatory capture on capitol hill right now its a joke to say government is an effective regulation.
If government was effective the Drug War would have already died a lon
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History is full of people getting beheaded as well.
But i think what will actually happen is that this mass of people will do so much ruckus, the regular people will end listening and the companies that do lootboxes will just get smeared with an unremovable bad PR and die.
And this is what they're trying to actually fight off with the paid shills and shit, but hopefully this will not work and they will just die.
Procedural generation (Score:2)
My hope is AI will help us build massive procedurally generated content. RPGs used to be much less linear and more interactive before they started adding voiced dialog. With voice synthesis getting pretty good, we should be focused on texture generation, where we still need a bit of work. After that, we can get back to making games instead of creating game assets.
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I dunno. Precedurally generated stuff in the past has been terrible, and not always because of the procedural part of it but because it focuses on endless repetition of the same and not focusing on stuff like a story or characterization. Bigger is not always better, and you can increase the amount of game play in other ways than having a nearly endless supply of the same thing. If someone likes Rogue-like or Diablo-like games then any dumb procedural algorithm will suffice, but if someone dislikes that s
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You might want to take a look at Elite Dangerous's Stellar Forge.
https://elite-dangerous.fandom... [fandom.com]
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You can't really compare it with Borderlands here, since it lacks a story line that is visible to the individual user. Subsequently there's also no humour and quirkiness to be found. And unless you're hunting for a pretty screenshot or some 'high numbers', there's not a lot that can be discovered while exploring. I mean sometimes there are some nice discoveries by players. But
Re: Procedural generation (Score:2)
I think the state of the art for procedural story generation technology has advanced considerably (think of semantic analysis, procedurally generated scientific papers, AIs that write in someone's style, or parse legal documents, etc.).
It just takes some talented team to put the pieces together right and show everyone how it's done.
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My hope is AI will help us build massive procedurally generated content. RPGs used to be much less linear and more interactive before they started adding voiced dialog.
Superficial.
I prefer a strong narrative, credible characters and dialog and unique, hand-crafted, actions and environments. You may be running on a track but it can be one hell of a ride.
Misleading (Score:5, Interesting)
The $60 price point for a standard big-budget release has held steady for nearly 15 years, unadjusted for inflation even as the cost to make big-budget video games has risen astronomically with player expectations
This is misleading. The price has remained at $60 because their sales have increased.
With digital assets it costs the same to produce the first copy as the 1,000,000,000th copy. Okay there's bandwidth, customer support, but it's not like a material good where you have to source the raw materials for each unit.
Re:Misleading (Score:4, Insightful)
This needs correction.
The 2nd copy costs the same as the 1,000,000,000th copy.
The 1st copy can cost a lot to produce, a whole lot!
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I stand corrected!
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You shouldn't stand corrected.
You were talking about copies, not the original.
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You have a fair point, however I did say "CAN".
This "can" (there is that word again) get into the weeds, pretty fast.
For many people 1st Copy is contextually Original Copy. Very few things are actual original works and many are derivatives of something. Art exists practically entirely in simulacrum.
Think about this in Game Sales context... Originals are never sold, but a 1st copy is.
The First Copy "can" indeed cost lots of time effort and money to produce because it has a lot of effort and time behind it
Re:Misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
This is misleading. The price has remained at $60 because their sales have increased.
And it's misleading in more ways than one. Watch any of Jim Sterling's "Jimquisition" videos on the subject (such as "The Sixty Dollar Myth" [youtube.com] or this sequel [youtube.com]) and he makes the very good point that $60 is the "shell price" for the most basic experience that publishers can sell with a straight face.
So much content is being carved out of games for DLC / season passes, microtransactions, and/or retailer-specific giveaways that in most cases $60 doesn't come close to giving you all the content - and in some cases doesn't even open up access to the full storyline or all the multiplayer maps.
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I'm starting to think that streaming services for games might actually make sense now. As much as I hate to admit it.
I want to play Gran Turismo Sport. I don't know if I'll get into it, and I'm not willing to buy a PS4 and the game just to try. If I could subscribe to some kind of Netflix for games and play on an month-by-month basis I'd probably do it. Obviously for that I expect to get all the DLC and stuff unlocked too, low latency etc.
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Yeah... the base package is still around $60, but then they didn't try to cram $50 worth of DLC content and expansion packs down your throats every time you played back then.
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15 years ago when you bought a game for $60 you knew you could sell it later for $30 towards your next game. The effective price was much lower than $60.
Now with features locked to the original purchaser and the impossibility of re-selling downloaded games and DLC, the value proposition is very different.
This is history (Score:5, Insightful)
It's going this way because the big three aren't driven by gamers, they're run by the basic number cruncher CEOs. This is a natural progression of niche companies that make it big, get bought up by investors expecting a return, and eventually disappear due to lack of connection with their target market. Number crunching CEOs don't want innovation or the joy of playing the perfect game, they want a safe and stable income. And throwing out the same garbage every year, like FIFA {current year}, will provide that. I don't think the CEO of EA would care or even notice if EA produced games or tampons as long as the last line of the fiscal report was written in black.
If you want to see how this company progression goes, look at Blizzard as an example. Starts out small, comes up with a great idea. Everyone in the company is a die hard gamer, including the boss. They are successful and gain a lot of cash and traction. Warcraft 1/2/3 and Diablo 1/2 are amazing successes. Then comes WoW, the biggest success in MMO history. Now they're huge, and getting more and more interest from mainstream finance. Business interests take over, and everything starts getting worse and worse. The die hard gamers that created the company abandon ship as they no longer recognize the company and the joy and gamer culture that once permeated the company is gone. Left is a finance-driven husk that slowly stumbles on and will eventually fade away into nothing. Exactly the same story as Bioware.
New companies will emerge to take the crown, with CD Projekt Red being the current king of RPGs. They will follow the same pattern.
Re:This is history (Score:4, Insightful)
Business interests take over, and everything starts getting worse and worse. The die hard gamers that created the company abandon ship as they no longer recognize the company and the joy and gamer culture that once permeated the company is gone
Or -- they age out. Success -> Money -> Retirement. You might be willing to put up with shit working conditions when you're 25, but "doing what you love" gets old just as you get old.
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I continue to play WoW, faithfully buy all its expansions, etc., and have done so since 2005.
Now they're doing something quite curious: they're "re-releasing" (well, not exactly) "WoW Classic", taking us all the way back to 2006! I'm hearing a lot of favorable response to this, and I'm looking forward to it myself (end of August). Of course I'm sure there will be things that irritate me just as they did back then (cooking fires, stocking arrows for my hunters, caring for and feeding hunter pets), but hey
Mostly incorrect (Score:2)
EA and Activision have EA and Activision-specific issues.
Ubisoft and Sony and Bethesda and Take Two succeed where EA and Activision fail. Scope of games is clearly an industry challenge. Companies with better management than EA and Activision seem to overcome it.
Bandai Namco, Focus Home Interactive, Capcom, CD Project Red, and THQ Nordic seem to succeed as well. Why can't EA and Activision also succeed? They should stop being worse at their jobs than everyone else.
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Bethesda Game Studios have well received games because they take along time developing them. They have larger scope because they're not rushing the games to market. It frustrates some fans to be sure but the end result is a game that can have hundreds of hours of gameplay. EA and Activision think that hundreds of hours of gameply in a single game is loss of potential revenue :-)
No, Think of Movies (Score:5, Insightful)
Movies when they first began were small, low budget productions by hundreds of studios but as they modernized they grew into almost Billion dollar budgets and gigantic franchises. (I'm looking at you Disney!). So no the video game industry can go on like this because movies most certainly have.
budgeting (Score:5, Interesting)
And another post.
The budgets are way off, but they don't need to be.
The two largest parts of the budget come down to graphics and marketing. Graphics have been used as a substitute for creativity in many places. You want to release the same crappy game once more? New flashy graphics, same crap underneath. Call of Duty 1,2,3, black ops, white ops, blue ops - just update graphics and you're good to go. Developers that create new and innovative games don't need to rely on graphics to sell. Minecraft, Terraria, Undertale, Cuphead, Warcraft, Diablo, Neverwinter Nights, WoW, Freelancer, and many many more were amazing, and they did not have fancy graphics or fancy graphics budgets. They had innovation, charm, and personality instead. So when graphics cost that much, it's not a problem with the industry, it's a problem with trying to sell the same safe crap again and again.
Marketing is a well known beast. It's roughly half the budget of AAA titles, and if we were being honest, wouldn't count towards the game budget.
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The two largest parts of the budget come down to graphics and marketing.
This is basically the problem. I've noticed that if I pay more than about $20-25 for a game, it tends to just be a pretty, bug-filled, watered down (due to trying to sell to lowest common denominator, or cross-developing for crippled consoles) disappointment.
So, I basically refuse to spend more than that any more, and there's still more really good games to choose from than I have time to play.
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There is also a lot of inefficiency in the development process. For example, work is thrown out because the direction of the project keeps changing until very late in development, as seen with for example Anthem [kotaku.com].
Also the games industry likes to think it is special and software engineering lessons don't apply to it. Excessively long work weeks are known to make programmers less efficient, yet are still very common in the games industry. There is a lot of reliance on manual testing, and while to a degree that
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New flashy graphics, same crap underneath.
There's more to this than you know. Game studios have for the past several years been trying to one-up their previous installments graphic wise without actually ever replacing or upgrading the underlying game engine. This has resulted in incredible wasted developer hours where developers are forced to do more without being given the needed resources to do so.
Overlord: You built a tree house with a hammer, now go build a 5 bedroom American dream.
Developer: Can I buy a nailgun?
Overload: NO MAKE DO WITH YOUR H
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WoW had innovation. That's funny.
WoW had innovation the same way Apple had innovation. It was developed by ex-Everquest players who wanted to make an MMO that did things much better than EQ, fix the problems with that game.
The internet allowed... (Score:5, Interesting)
... companies to steal PC game software out from gamers hands. For those of us who remember the goold old days, of Quake, Descent, Duke 3d. In the 90's because internet penetration hadn't reached the technology illiterate. We got complete games with level editors, programming sdk's, etc.
Near the end of the late 90's RPG's were getting expensive to produce, so devs and ceo's floated the idea of conning the public out of its money by rebading RPG's they had in development as mmo's, this was part of the long term plan by the software industry more generally on software ownership. The whole long term plan was to remove software from customers control and it worked.
The average gamer/consumer is a moron, all the abusive game industry practices exist is because they don't grasp a god damn thing about technology. So as a gaming nerd from the 90's, watching every game become "serviced" (aka stolen). For those of us who know how PC's work, two networked PC's can act as a single computer, so you can divide the software between the two.
Early games like Ultima online, Everquest, GUidl wars and world of warcraft paved the way for these "live service" games, it really kicked off towards the end of 2008 and 2009 when league of legends took off, where kids paid for skins that already exist on their hard drive in a game they didn't own. The whole model can only exist in a world where the average gamer is illiterate.
So watching my hobby be destroyed before my eyes because the average person on our planet got internet was pretty disturbing and now they are putting the final nail in the coffin with windows 10. Microsofts wet dream finally came true, all they had to do was wait for the average person to get internet and seed criminal intent to prevent people from owning and controlling their software because the average person is fucking clueless. There new UWP platform is the move to encrypted computing and locked down file systems and we're seeing this in the UWP games released where they have layer upon layer of hard obscurant drm like virtual machines, etc, so you can't access the raw values.
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The average gamer/consumer is a moron, all the abusive game industry practices exist is because they don't grasp a god damn thing about technology. So as a gaming nerd from the 90's, watching every game become "serviced" (aka stolen). For those of us who know how PC's work, two networked PC's can act as a single computer, so you can divide the software between the two.
That is a bit of hyperbole and over-generalization.
To a certain extent you are correct, but you also have to acknowledge that most gamers just went along with the buggery, regardless of technical expertise in gaming pcs, networking, etc;
Gamers slowly and completely caved to the new reality you describe.
I too came from the lan party scene of the 90s and the way gaming was when it was "owned".
Yea, those days are long gone, and gaming now is more like a heroin dealer and his junkies, who will take any
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That is a bit of hyperbole and over-generalization.
There is nothing hyberbole about it, alwasys online drm = stolen games. You're literally allowing them to hold part of the game files hostage on a machine in their office and now have the power to turn off and shut down your game. So there's nothing there that is "extreme". Why would you buy a game that has a big red button publishers can push to move you onto their next game?
Many gaming classics today are available because publishers couldn't take control of the games themselves, now with internet, the
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That's also where the catch 22 and a kind of stockholm syndrome starts, where people want to continue supporting the platform that holds their games hostage, because of the fear if the platform will go down, so will their games. Hence many tend to commit more and more making the situation only worse.
I encourage people to buy their games on alternative platforms that don't use DRM, like GOG.
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So just don't buy the DRMed always online exploitative crap that you dislike so much. There are plenty of other games out there.
Your hobby isn't being destroyed, it's better served than it's ever been. You can play the online murderfests, the multiplayer tactics games, the ultra pretty story filled AAA releases but you can also play games that offer other experiences. I'm playing Battletech at the moment, a single player game that gave me 75 hours of campaign before I installed mods that add approximately t
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So just don't buy the DRMed always online exploitative crap that you dislike so much.
You don't seem to get you can't avoid it, developers have no incentive to make games without it. Not only that you'd have to be standing right next to the game dev or publishe releasing the game to have any market power at all. The reason we live in this drm and microtransaction world is because they could force the policy. AKA steam was forced into half-life 2 because valve new that gamers were trapped 100's of miles away at the end of the fiber optic cable.
The "market" is not going to save anyone bec
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You don't seem to get you can't avoid it, developers have no incentive to make games without it.
Which of the games I mentioned come with DRM? Any DRM at all, let alone always-online?
Shit, most of them you can buy directly from the developer or from DRM free stores.
Over half of the games I have on Steam lack DRM. Just because you lack the imagination and capability to explore beyond Major Franchise 2020 Super Annual Update Edition doesn't meant the hobby is dying.
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So watching my hobby be destroyed before my eyes because the average person on our planet got internet was pretty disturbing and now they are putting the final nail in the coffin with windows 10.
Holy shit do you have a causality problem. The average person getting internet is not what caused game studios to position accountants as CEOs consolidating the entire industry to a few evil overlords.
Your anger is well founded but holy shit is it misdirected.
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Is it stupidity or lack of alternatives?
Where is the free League of Legends alternative that doesn't have DLC and lets you modify the game and gets decently popular? And if it's that open how do they prevent cheating?
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League of legends is a horrible example.
You cannot but anything from their store that will help you win. It is pure cosmetics only. I've been playing league of legends for 4 years now and I've spent a total of $25 on skins. $25 in 4 years for a game is excellent value. The game is 100% free no strings attached. I have never spent money on anything other than skins. Which is 100% optional.
Man you don't seem to get the business implications for future games and apps that there are people BUYING JPEGS and BMP's of textures inside game files that ALREADY EXIST ON YOUR PC.
You don't seem to get that the game plan was for this game - league of legends, a came YOU DON'T CONTROL means they can now produce every piece of software that they control from their servers, you no longer own your machine. The nerd nightmare in the 90's was having excel, photoshop and quake client servered from the "cloud"
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This is such a weird response. If you enjoy a game for 4 years and have only spent $25 on it, that's a great value - period.
It's not a "great value" you idiot, because EVERY OTHER GAME will now push being server locked to a computer inside big game companies office, aka every new big budget game even single player games will no logner give you the complete files. Every single piece of software is slowly being moved from your computer to theirs. You're looking at league of legends as a isolated island, not looking at the historical trend.
Quake 3 we owned it --> Quake champions bethesda owns it
Doom 2 we owned it --> Doom 2
Misleading (Score:5, Interesting)
Right, but there's an order of magnitude more consoles and gaming PCs out there to sell those units to.
And saying the price point hasn't risen is disingenuous. Sort of like saying airline tickets and cable bills haven't risen without noting the astronomical rise in hidden fees. If a game had a $15-20 expansion at all ten years ago, it was another 20 hours of gameplay content. Nowadays, you're paying that to get an alternative skin to show off your poor impulse control to others in multiplayer. What used to be a season pass getting you all subsequent DLCs and expansion now gets you a one year VIP subscription to the micro-transaction currency treadmill.
If anything, the cost pressure on the initial buy-in on the game is dropping rather than rising because so much more money is made after the initial sale. Talk to mobile developers and they will tell you something like "we have 16 players that spend more than a million dollars a year in micro-transactions on our title. we know them all by name, and we custom design expansion content around their interests to entice them into buying it." They see their whales as their customer, and everyone else as glorified bots/fodder so that their big spenders can feel powerful by destroying them.
The gaming industry isn't like this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Those shitass big publishers are like this. And they've been like this for a very long time, so there's no reason to think they'll change, either.
what a load of tripe by an gamer whiner (Score:2)
Real busines projects say the video game industry will grow three times its current size by 2025.
Games are a small percent of data center energy use.
Data centers are a small percent of mankinds energy use.
There is no issue, no problem
I dont think anyone would be willing (Score:2)
To pay for a video game after inflation. As it is, im loath to pay $80 canadian for a game i cant test first and cant return after if its crap.
Re: (Score:2)
Thank goodness (Score:2)
Thank goodness I still have copies of Captain Comic and Duke Nukem for DOS! Ah, the good old days :-)
It's a game (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sigh. (Score:3)
Video game industry is doing just fine.
Just because the "AAA" studios focus on sequel-upon-sequels to the only things they ever had that were vaguely successful, doesn't mean others aren't making money and doing interesting things with much less budget.
Some of the most famous, memorable, classic games in history were from community mods to well-established engines (CS, TF2) and clones thereof (Fortnite). Or 3D puzzle games (Portal). Or simple 2D casual games (Angry Birds). Or simple 3D casual games (Minecraft). Or re-re-re-re-re-re-iterations of a theme (Mario).
Just because the big studios cater almost exclusively to console games (and PC ports from them are always just ports from console) doesn't mean the industry is failing as a whole. There are more multiplayer casual games, party game, independent studios, random new ideas, successful franchises, etc. than ever.
Stop making FIFA 223478, CoD:WhatWarCanWeDoThisTime, and Assasin's Creed: Redux x 10 and try other things. Literally, cancel one "massive" title sequel and put the money into buying up a thousand independent game concepts of decent quality.
Gaming's great nowadays. I can pick up casual games on phone, sink thousands of hours / pounds into a Steam account, and play all kinds of fun console stuff at just about anyone's house.
That I refuse to pay GBP60 (~$70) for a game that I'll get bored of after a few hours after it turns into a grindfest, side-mission bollocks-hunt, is not indicative of the industry as a whole.
The "Big Name" stuff doesn't interest me. (Score:2)
All the "Big Name" games?
Endlessly adding detail to the FPS games, so you can do an autopsy of the opponent you've gibbed, identifying individual internal organs. *snore*
Yet another "professional" "sports" simulation of something I'd chew my own leg off to escape watching the real thing. *snore*
I find another run around the Mario Karts track more appealing than any of that stuff.
(And get off my lawn!)
Micropayments (Score:4, Insightful)
The answer is simple. (Score:2)
The question was how long game producers can hold the line on price while development costs increase.
As the number of people playing increases, total revenue can increase without raising prices. Raising prices when we've been conditioned for decades to pay less for increasingly better hardware is just another example- the user base has really grown since the end of the last century.
Who cares how many games they make - they know that their clients can only play one at a time, and they want to make sure
It's pretty simple. (Score:2)
Publishers don't get a cut of sales in the second hand market so there's very little incentive for them to make single-player games that can live on "forever."
Always-online games, on the other hand, are only playable for as long as the publisher keeps the servers up. If the publisher wants to release a new always-online title each year they have the power to switch off the servers for last year's always-online title. People will complain, sometimes a lot and very publicly, but ultimately there's nothing the
Slimy summary (Score:2)
Same old tired rubbish about the price not changing, it's total BS, you now have day 1 DLCs, multiple product levels at release, $60 doesn't get you the full game, $60 now gets you something that is more like shareware. $60 doesn't include the season pass which now often costs as much as the game itself so you can easily say that games now cost $120 not $60. And there's all of the shitty monetization such as loot boxes. I haven't paid full price for a AAA game in over a decade, I won't support the dirty vid
They have only them selves to blame. (Score:2)
The AAA gaming Industry is a totally f*cked up mess of *ssholes producing trash and runnnig promising projects and premium studios into the ground after gobbleing them up in a perpetual greed-frenzy. The StarWars Buggyfront disaster was the pinnacle or the live-Service Lootbox/"surprise mechanic"/Gambling mess that has totally engulfed the Industry. I sincerely hope they all fail!
Re:The $60 game is a LIE (Score:5, Insightful)
And don't forget that while they cry about inflation or rising development costs, they're simultaneously:
1) Selling 10 times as many copies as was possible in the early 90s because the market is much, much larger.
2) Recycling games by selling them over and over again as ports, rereleases, HD remakes, etc.
3) Completely skipping out on all manufacturing costs (unless they do a collector's edition, where the $2 plastic/vinyl/digital doodads bring in $20-$100 extra per unit).
4) Skipping out on distribution costs and retail markup in exchange for a 30% tax levied by Valve, a much lower tax levied by Epic, or no tax and near-zero operating cost (at scale) when they set up their own store.
5) Exploiting global markets by selling at the price that each market will accept. Russians only want to pay $10? Chinese only $8? OKAY! Just make sure to lock out the US from getting those same prices, or don't and just raise hell about G2A and other key selling sites. We're too lazy to region lock our keys or track the keys we give out to "influencers", and it's NOT FAIR that our customers want to exploit the same global markets in the same way we do!!
Re:The $60 game is a LIE (Score:4, Insightful)
But then I got tired of keeping track of all the accounts/pwds, the patches that wouldn't install or broke the game, the hassles getting support, etc
I came to the realization that I look at screens enough at work, and that it wasn't doing me any good to add to that.
The gaming I still do enjoy is the kind where you sit at a table with other people, dice, minis and paper.
Much more of a good time and less headaches.
Re: (Score:2)
You forgot:
6) loot boxes
7) DLC
8) DLG (that's DownLoadable Garbage, such as Activation trying to sell you a red dot for your HUD for $5, or EA sliding the hue slider on your character skin and selling it for $10)
Re: (Score:2)
Descent is still available, although I think £7 for a 24 year old game is a tad much.
https://store.steampowered.com... [steampowered.com]
There have been various sequels and 'influenced by' since then, but the 6DOF shooter has never been as popular as a gravity influenced FPS.
But if you want Descent, play Descent with modern graphics..
https://www.dxx-rebirth.com/ [dxx-rebirth.com]
http://www.descent2.de/ [descent2.de]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Company Issue (Score:2)
Not to mention that it's only suitable for some new and special breed of masochist s.
Re: (Score:2)
yet movie tickets remain about the same price as they have for decades; $10-15/ticket.
What! Movie ticket prices haven't been $10-$15 for decades.
Here [boxofficemojo.com] is Box Office Mojo's list of movie ticket average prices, year by year. Of course, it doesn't count separately things like concession prices or surcharges for 3D or IMAX, both which increased average prices in the early part of the decade.