For those of us that don't care for the latest FPS or Battle Royale, the games industry is going perfectly fine.
Never before has it been so easy for someone to get their game into the hands of millions. Games like Factorio, made by people who are passionate about games. With modern distribution platforms, companies like Paradox Interactive find it viable to continue adding content to their games many years after they were released.
Couldn't give two hoots about what EA and Activision are up to. They don't make games for me.
> "For those of us that don't care for the latest FPS or Battle Royale, the games industry is going perfectly fine."
As players, for those who care about these AAA games, it is perfectly fine too. Better than fine, it is great.
The argument of the OP is that the industry is not fine. And I think that includes indie developers. It is not an easy industry to be in. Lots of stress, uncertainty, and failure for indie developers. Take a look at how hard is to make a good game after a successful Kickstarter campaign.
If you, as a player, only care about the couple of indie games that are great and don't care what's going on behind the scenes with the thousand of indie developers that are struggling, that's fine. But that's not the point of the OP
If you, as a player, only care about the couple of indie games that are great and don't care what's going on behind the scenes with the thousand of indie developers that are struggling, that's fine
Can't this be said of any art form, really? If you look at people who tried to make indie comics in the '90's or 'zines I guess... whatever the title you wanted to give them. Painters, failed and prominent, from the 1200's to the present who had to trudge along and get jobs in coffee shops. Art is hard and people line up to take advantage of them (I say this as an art school graduate who now sits at a computer desk because, quite frankly, it's easier to make a living with code than art and I have a family who I love more than art). To be quite blunt, the gaming industry is a multiBILLION (with a B) dollar industry built on passion and artistry (and yes, coders can be artists, as well) which is being fed upon like any art industry gets fed upon.
Yes! The hard realization, which pulled me into more normal programming despite a passion for games, was that game development is a passion career. I already had enough dealings with that with considering being an orchestral performer. Anything in entertainment is always highly boom or bust, and highly intense and stressful even for those who make it.
Edit: of course that doesn't justify the terrible conditions or the way people leverage the situation because they know these people would do this kind of work for free if they had to. I think the answer, as musicians always bring up, is friends don't let friends work for free. It's not okay to work for less than your talent is worth just because you love it.
Most art forms don't require skills that could be commanding 6-figure salaries in an easy 9-5 job. (I am, of course, speaking for the programmers here.)
This is correct. You can apply your highly-valued skills to something you don't find as interesting and make a lot of money, or you can apply them to something you're passionate about and make less money.
But if it's a multibillion dollar industry similar to other multibillion dollar tech industries outside of gaming, why are game developers making so little in comparison to the rest of us? Something is not making sense here, and I don't think passion has anything to do with it.
It's very simple: because the companies don't need to pay high salaries to their developers. Why should they? There's countless developers lining up for these jobs, so if one person gets burnt out and quits, there's 5 more ready to take his place. This is simple supply-and-demand.
Tell me, why should companies pay top dollar for that talent when people are so happy to work their asses off for less? It doesn't make any business sense.
And no, we shouldn't have any sympathy for these developers (not the ones who have easily transferable skills). They're choosing this career path out of their own free will, at a time when there's tons of very boring software jobs out there practically begging them to come to work there, and offering huge salaries and good work hours too. These people just don't want those jobs because they aren't "fun", and don't involve games.
It's really simple: you have highly-sought-after software development skills, so you can either be abused and work in a game sweatshop, or you can go to work making boring CRUD apps in a nice company where the pay is high and the stress is low. If you choose the former, I have zero sympathy for you.
The part that doesn't make sense to me is how people find this hard to understand. It's purely supply and demand. Game developers are willing to work for less than their peers in other industries, and game companies will do everything they can do minimise input costs, as all companies do.
You don't need a conspiracy to explain this effect.
So because of that, we should just blindly accept that the work conditions are extremely shitty, because "well it was their fault for trying to follow their dreams!"
We should accept that people have agency and are in charge of their own well-being unless they have diminished capacities. If they accept unfavorable working conditions because they like the stuff they work on, that's their business. I think a lot of people get exploited when they try to make a career out of their interests (it's harder to get into vet school than medical school for instance and vets are paid less than doctors), but I have to believe that it's worth it. It does bother me when people act as though they expect me to subsidize their hobbies, doubly so when they could pay for their own hobbies by making the small sacrifice of doing work that's compensated better but less appealing.
Every video game dev who's unsatisfied with being a game dev is welcome to explore other opportunities.
We should accept it in cases where the employees are easily able to leave (e.g. software developers). For people who have less mobility (e.g. minimum-wage factory workers), we have more of a responsibility as a society to ensure that they're protected. But if you choose to work in an environment that sucks even though you have the ability to leave, why should anyone worry about you suffering because of your own choice to stay?
> Artists who work on gory cinematics integral to games like Mortal Kombat suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Is it really someone else's fault if someone chooses to work on a game like Mortal Kombat and then complains about having to create graphics like this?
Can we please introduce some agency into people's lives and stop constantly blaming society for issues?
If you have a successful kickstarter campaign and you fail to deliver, that's on you. There's no Big Gaming conspiracy that caused you to fail. You did that all on your own. And people who continue to throw good money after bad ala Star Citizen deserve the outcome they get IMO.
But hey, chin up, Microsoft just threw $1B at OpenAI to make "I am Mother" into a documentary because "we can't discount the possibility of a near-term AGI." And that's some serious #DukeNukemForever optimism IMO.
> It is not an easy industry to be in. Lots of stress, uncertainty, and failure for indie developers.
Yes, probably because it's a very competitive market (why many smaller studios have such a hard time surviving) and there are lots of people out there who are passionate about making games (why so many individuals choose to tolerate crappy work environments). Given that, I have no idea what a "solution" would even look like.
There is no solution. Game devs are doing this to themselves, and have no one to blame but themselves. If they want to make themselves suffer, instead of just getting a low-stress high-pay job in another industry with their valuable skills, that's their problem.
Factorio is a marvel of an example of a game made by people who are genuinely very skilled and care a lot about what they're making.
The networking code, the in-depth blog posts, even the attention to things like preserving mod contracts when introducing breaking changes. The team running Factorio is a great example of a well done gaming project.
Beware of survivor bias. Factorio is a great game built by skilled people with care and devotion, I'm not knocking it. But how many other great games, built by skilled people with care and devotion, didn't get the audience that Factorio did, for whatever reason?
There tends to be an automatic assumption that if you didn't succeed then you did something wrong, and that if you did succeed than you did it all right. These two things are less connected than that. There is "luck" involved here (in quotes because it's more complex than the phrase "I got lucky" implies).
To draw any kind of conclusion about whether Factorio was a success because of its execution as a gaming project, we would need to examine a range of other games, successful and unsuccessful, to see how well they executed and whether that caused a matching amount of success.
Seems like most Zachtronics games are like this too. I'll be deep into a puzzle and then I'll stop and realize I just basically spent an hour optimizing the critical path of a virtual program
> Factorio is a marvel of an example of a game made by people who are genuinely very skilled and care a lot about what they're making.
I'm have more admiration for the fact that they don't have sales. The only way to get a discount is to use a third party discount system like humble monthly.
> In this 2019 GDC talk, independent developer Jason Rohrer digs into the financial data behind the 2014-2018 "indiepocalypse" to help indie devs figure out how not to waste four years of their life on the next high-profile flop.
(Though this might also be subject to survivor bias, probably a hopeful talk on it had a better chance of getting selected for GDC)
I think it happens more in games because it's what many people really want to do. A bit like music bands. Except bands are a lot more side gig friendly and consequently can work without salaries and risk of personal bankruptcy.
Also for other types of ventures it's easier to get bootstrap funding. And you can get to cash flow or fail faster. Etc.
If someone blows all their money on a long-shot chasing the dream of video game success-story, that's their prerogative. I wish them good luck and hope they're able to at least turn out something innovative.
It sort of reminds me of the music industry. I used to DJ in a college radio station, and remember the boxes upon boxes of dreck we used to get from record labels. For every successful pop-band, rapper, alt-rock, or electronic-music act you can think of there are dozens of dullard derivative wannabe copycats who utterly lack the imagination to put out something novel and stimulating.
I think the same dynamic applies to computer games. The good news is that the truly innovative stuff will never die, regardless of how many AAAA games flop. People want to do this stuff. It's OK if most fail, it's OK if most can't make a living out of it.
A music minimum viable product is much more accessible than a video game. It's just as ruthless to get ahead, but at least getting started isn't so hard. My friends who are hobbyist musicians regularly play at pubs or small concerts.
Most people who jump into indie development are gamers themselves, and as gamers their product ideas are not always possible even with years of full time solo development. Realistically what one person with 2 years savings can make is very very small.
So it is a pipe dream. After spending some years in corporate hating it, thinking about your game designs every night, you have the capital, you have the motivation, you jump, and you sink. It's very sad.
> A music minimum viable product is much more accessible than a video game.
This kind of depends on your expectations. I knew a guy who spent more than a year recording a single song. He poured hundred of hours into this, and he did the entire thing: vocals, every instrument, the mixing, everything. It was a labor of love for him, and the result sounded as good as anything on Spotify, at least to my untrained ear.
On the other hand, you have people pumping out soundtracks for their podcast every couple of weeks, using nothing more than GarageBand and a bunch of samples. A lot of these are good enough for people to purchase, too.
Same thing with game dev. You can spend years of your life, and/or thousands of dollars, tweaking Unity and developing game assets. On the other hand, Dong Nguyen developed Flappy Birds in three days.
> Most people who jump into indie development are gamers themselves, and as gamers their product ideas are not always possible even with years of full time solo development.
Business sense trumps passion here. You're right, it's totally unrealistic to expect one guy sitting in his apartment to pump out the next Breath of the Wild. But you could produce a reasonable Candy Crush type game in a few days, and polish it in a few weeks, probably even working nights and weekends.
And yet you're referring to flappy bird by name. Exactly how many flappy birds are there?
Most people who make games aren't trying to make connect3-like games, but rather something more fun/interesting. There isn't much point competing with medium to large studios that churn out games like candy crush anyway.
Stardew Valley, a 2D pixel art farming rpg-lite, was made over the course of ~4 years, by a solo developer who learned how to program in the process.
Undertale, a 2d pixel rpg-like, took ~2.7 years to make according to Toby Fox, the sole developer afaik.
Terraria 1.0, a 2d pixel art mining/building/fighting game, was made by a small team over ~4-5 months. After ~7 months, 1.1. After another ~9 months, 1.2. (They were big content updates).
Starbound, a 2d pixel art mining/building/fighting game, took ~1.5-2 years and launched in beta, with a small team.
Cuphead took 7 years with two brothers and a part time animator iirc, because they were absolute madmen and wanted to make a game with 60fps watercolor animation. Did they end up making a lot of money? probably, but that was quite the gamble.
Making games is tough when you consider it can require programming, storywriting, composing music, designing art, etc. And that's not including the business/marketing side. It -is- true that a lot of beginner indie devs spend way too much time polishing their games and end up not publishing them, but that doesn't mean compelling games are necessarily easy to make.
It seems to me that the parent comment blithely assumes most indie devs are trying to make games solely to earn income. A lot of indie devs are trying to make games they wish existed or just seem like a cool/fun idea that other people might be interested in, too. SWORDY is one such indie game that doesn't seem like it was thought up purely to earn cash, Gang Beasts* is another, and so on.
* Gang Beasts is actually made by Doublefine Studios but it sure feels like an indie game.
No I don't think money is the point. I think money is a resource you need to make more games. I think anyone that truly only wants to get cash can use their skillset in more profitable places. But game devs still need the money to make their dream sustainable and execute on their grander visions. A 20 year studio instead of 2 years as solo.
> A music minimum viable product is much more accessible than a video game.
I don't think that's true. There are a lot of games out there that are small single-person side projects and are interesting and fun. You don't need to quit your job to make a marketable game unless you're targeting a market with much higher expectations than you're likely to be able to deliver.
It's like if you've got a garage band, but instead of playing at house parties and dive bars you mortgage your house for a bunch of expensive lightshow kit and a tour bus or something.
But this is the thing that Lean Startup was built to solve.
I keep talking to indie game devs about Lean, basically telling them to identify the core hook in their game and develop a minimal version of this that they can test on an audience with, and then grow from there. I point to Minecraft, that did exactly this.
They never get it. They always think the game has to be complete and perfect before anyone will like it. They never playtest until they're waaaaay down the line with the game, and then usually get defensive if the testers don't like it or understand it.
It's exactly the same as startup. Build an MVP, get it in front of people, adapt it using their feedback, and you have a better chance of building something that people want. Time for the games industry to start doing the same.
It seems, though, that it's even worse than that for games. Every so often you see an article to the effect of, "Authors of that indie game everyone was talking about this summer ended up netting $not_very_much_at_all apiece."
The economics are just really, really bad. It's not just all the competition driving prices down so low that people will literally consider the price of a coffee to be too much to pay for several hours of entertainment. It's not just that a musician can hold down a day job and do what they love on evenings and weekends. It's also that the the potential payoff on your invested time is really, really crappy. To become a musician, you have to practice a lot when you're a kid, but, once you're there, the time it takes to produce new work is really quite low, especially considering how much replayability it has, especially if you're mostly playing standards and other traditional stuff. And, if people like it, they'll come see you perform it repeatedly.
Indie games, no matter how much I liked that game, I'm gonna play it once, and then, if you want me to be your audience again, you've got to basically go back to square one and start over.
dozens of dullard derivative wannabe copycats who utterly lack the imagination to put out something novel and stimulating.
This is true, and describes one of the huge failings of the music industry. But there's more. At the same time the record labels are pumping out this dreck, there are plenty of truly fantastic artists that just aren't getting lucky. Even those that make it to what they believe is the holy grail - a record contract - aren't getting a real break because they're hard to find in the rest of the crap.
I'm a developer in real life, but a serious photography amateur as a hobby. I happen to have fallen into a lot of music stuff, being the official photographer for an annual musical in my town, and some other stuff. I've developed relationships with a bunch of musicians through this. A few that are clearly a cut above the rest have gotten signed (and I think the labels have shown pretty good judgment at this level). But even of these, I haven't seen anybody break through into real success.
One band whose album actually charted recently called it quits because they couldn't sustain it with the day jobs necessary to survive. Another guy quit his job to pursue music full time. But what supports him (and his family) is primarily sales of his paintings, plus a little income from merch and "house concerts".
I think that the awfulness of the industry is part of the problem. But it's also that we've got an embarrassment of riches. The ability to make music - and to record it professionally - is within the reach of nearly anyone who has that dream. So it's become too competitive, and the available choices for consumers is too large to cut through the noise effectively. This is where the failures of the industry hit, I think - their business model is geared toward finding the next giant star, rather than serving an incredibly diverse range of tastes, helping each of us find what we'd individually prefer.
>And you can get to cash flow or fail faster. Etc.
I think this right here is the key. Game development takes forever, especially if you're starting from scratch. Shovel Knight took 2 years to make, and that was a seasoned team with lots of professional game dev experience between them.
Compare that to another typical business venture that people with limited experience might to go out on a limb with, like opening a bar/restaurant. You can go from concept to having butts in seats in way less time than that. You'll have an idea about how well you're doing early, and it's also something you'll be able to iterate on to improve and keep working at for little additional cost.
If your game goes out the door and is a dud, though, you're kind of fucked. If it has "good bones" you can put in some extra work and get it to good, like "No Man's Sky" or "Warframe" managed to do. But if it's just fundamentally not very fun, then you're back to square one. You can't even sell your codebase and recoup some of the sunk-cost the way you could sell your space and decor.
You bring up a good point that some kinds of projects simply take a great deal of time and resources to advance the industry. Millions of token indie games aren’t going to change AAA gaming any more than millions of screenplays will change Hollywood. However, innovation has a stronger chance somewhere in between with a struggling studio like Digital Extremes was 8 years ago when it comes to new business models and the dynamic between developers and players. I’m not convinced that actual gameplay innovation can happen in a AAA kind of situation though (Valve in 2005 vs Valve in 2015 are pretty different right?) no different than Hollywood coming up with original IP, but the gems are what make paying attention to any of this worthwhile to me. I over-load my investments in mid-cap stocks for this reason similarly.
>no different than Hollywood coming up with original IP, but the gems are what make paying attention to any of this worthwhile to me.
Hollywood used to come up with tons of original IP. One of the problems is that we just don't really have many "B movies" anymore. It's either AAA or not worth bothering with. They used to front a decent amount of cash towards experimental stuff in the hopes that one of the bets would take off. Nowadays you'll be lucky to pull that off unless you have an EXTREMELY bankable name, like Chris Nolan, who has enough of a following to get some money down.
So it is with gaming. Not much in the way of "B games" out of the major studios. They seem to put all their eggs in a few baskets and hope for the best.
FWIW though, after reading "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" I'm starting to feel like where the real innovation needs to happen is in the toolkits around making the games. Seems like tons of work goes into just setting things up to where you can start doing work that's recognizably related to a final product.
The only "big studio" I pay any attention to is Nintendo, because they make games like a midsize to indie firm: Fun gameplay
Otherwise, I think all of the things a "big studio" does now, primarily the backend for online and p2p services is going to have it's open source / platform killer app soon. Valve almost did it with HL/Garry's Mod/ etc but they've stalled out recently.
Whomever develops a truly plug and play infrastructure module, handling networking, server config, deployment, etc will own a big boat by 2029.
As will the guy who figures out distributed PnP microtransactions.
AI and ML will likely be capable of full service character design and modeling in the next 5 years.
So things will change, and democratize like almost all of the rest of tech has as things become less human capital intensive.
I spend maybe $25 a year on games for myself, maybe seeing something at a re-seller at the mall. I spend hundreds on my son who just recently figured out why Garry's Mod is fun, and is finally able to play Mario by himself and not just operate the hat while I play Mario. I still don't think he can appreciate why the latest Zelda was amazing. But I've shelled out a lot to Nintendo, and he has to have the new Mario Maker. I don't know what the cool kids are into, but Steam and Nintendo are friends with my PayPal.
Even Nintendo has been willing to lean back on its cash-cows lately -- Mario (platformers, Party, and Kart) and Pokemon get minimal-change frequent-releases, Kirby's been static even by its own standards for the last few years, lots of their other first-party stuff hasn't seen a release in ages.
Zelda's looking good between BotW and an upcoming remake of a relatively-small and especially old game, Fire Emblem has something that looks like an interesting shift coming up, and Metroid... well, Metroid's been a mixed bag since Other M, but if they were willing to scrap and start over on Prime 4 then there's room to hope. So it's not all bad.
Nintendo always moves slowly (except for wacky-ass hardware ideas). It's a bit painful at times, but the alternative is that they crash and burn explosively.
Pokemon not making the jump to a real time open world is disappointing. But I suspect they'll do it for the next generation. Now that the consumer is finally feeling burnt out on when they're offering.
They probably didn't think they could get open world right this go around.
My one big hangup is that they're so reluctant to develop a proper, system agnostic platform for their retro content. If they weren't the sworn enemy of emulator developers, I could see them in-housing a few to jumpstart the retro platform. But they won't. Though Disney got it's ass into gear about opening up the vault, so maybe Nintendo will too.
More of the same is definitely something people want sometimes -- but other people want something new (or more-of-the-same of something else that hasn't been done as much, e.g. a sequel in a smaller series). The article is about (among other things) the stagnation and general tendency of big developers towards increasingly-stale safe bets.
Mario Kart is an example of that: Nintendo is perfectly willing to make more-of-the-same for Mario Kart, but when asked in interviews about the possibility of a new F-Zero, the answer has generally been "we don't want to just release more of the same, we want to come up with some new twist on it". It's not about novelty (or if it is, their standards for novelty are inconsistent), it's about one being a cash cow and the other not.
The fracturing of video games is really interesting.
I used to game...a lot... constantly. But times have changed and a career, family, and I now play with my kids.
I'm quite happy to just be limited to the Nintendo Switch and for the most part Nintendo first party games, and some indie games.
I don't even know if old devs and gaming companies I used to follow religiously are any good anymore, or exist. The gaming news outlets stink at providing information that isn't a hype train about what is next... that I can't play now.. and if you're not reading them all the time so I'm just out of the loop.
Meanwhile Nintendo does a pretty good job telling me what is up in their ecosystem...
Kotaku to me is doing a pretty good job at discussing released and older games as well. This year I played Bloodborne which was released several years ago because they do frequently discussed it on their podcast and I'm glad I did.
While I do like a good FPS the only thing I've really played in the last year on my stupidly expensive gaming machine (and super high spec monitor) is Rimworld, a £25 indie game.
Hundreds of hours vs. maybe a dozen in games that might actually need that power.
Eh, Breath of the Wild notwithstanding, I haven't found a game, indie or AAA, that scratched that old itch in years. There is a glut of games, for sure, with no easy way to filter them and no promise of a game I will actually enjoy.
Sure enough (and I've wondered how much of this is just getting older), over time I find fewer and fewer games to be worth my time. BotW has indeed been an exception; but I still can't get into it quite as deeply as some of my friends who are a little younger. It's a great game, but I cannot find myself compelled to try to find every Korok seed, or beat every shrine. I think I started gaming before there was the idea of being a "completionist"
The only game I've found in the past few years that made me really feel like I did when I was 8-17 is Divinity Original Sin 2. It's Baldur's Gate, but honestly better (BG hasn't aged amazingly if you really go back and play it. It's good, but we've learned a lot in 20 years). And the multiplayer is amazing, and lets you feel like you're playing AD&D with friends.
There are wonderful games being made and I even found new titles to call my favorites as the years go by. I do not at all believe games are getting worse.
That being said, there are a lot more games now and there's less hard curation, and some genres have shifted (RTS and classic style MMORPGs are both dormant atm).
Katamari and Portal are the last games that really had me thinking about playing even when I wasn't playing them. I wish those games had additional levels to buy.
The Talos Principle — Basically Portal but... different. Physics, timing, & world-affecting-zappy-device puzzles. No actual portals but it's pretty similar. A "there's more going on" story. Quite good.
The Witness — Myst-like I guess? In that you're exploring an island and solving puzzles and piecing together a story, kinda. But the puzzles are all variations on one sort. Elements get added, things get weird, lateral thinking becomes necessary. It's good.
The Talos Principle really had me thinking about it when not playing. I halfway thought I was going to hear a voice when I got on the elevator at work.
Puzzle games, especially good ones, are relatively rare, that's the problem. They're one shot, easy to spoil... And then there is a risk that the puzzle will turn out too hard.
Stephen's Sausage Roll is great little puzzle game I've spent hours playing. Not an easy game by any means, but it's easy to get lost in it & kill a few hours. The puzzles have no time component, which is great, I'm not a fast thinker so timers just annoy me.
There is a glut of games, for sure, with no easy way to filter them and no promise of a game I will actually enjoy.
Has there ever been a time of the "promise of a game I will actually enjoy"?
Back in the day all you had was rare magazine articles, and one wall of a Toys R Us with flaps consisting of the front of the box on one side and the back of the box on the other.
I'm not sure I see that as preferable to the modern situation.
It wasn't so much a promise however long ago as much as a lot of MBA-style thought had yet to be put into the monetization strategy. The games that were made tended to be made for artistic and entertainment motivations over a boardroom identified market niche that is somehow the exact same niche filled by every other game.
Steam has scratched my itch. I too used to game a lot but growing a family takes time and resources. Steam allows me to play on my time and play with my kids. There is a lot to offer from the Indie community.
The VR space is really interesting in that it's almost entirely populated by small studios and indie developers. Most games (including many very highly rated games) seem to be made by teams of 1 - 10 people.
It does show in the production values, you don't get the same level of polish in the artwork, presentation and quantity of content. But it also shows in the creativeness of many titles, which you just don't get from big studios.
I do care what Blizzard does. I want to see new features and balance updates and maps in starcraft 1 and 2, and I also want an SC3. Unless there are indie RTS games worthy of hundreds of hours of deep play, I'll stick with blizzard.
* A theme park MMO they've been milking for years, World of Warcraft.
* A space theme RTS, SC2. If you're not into sci-fi, it ain't good, and to be honest for me the RTS genre is dead (I'm too old and it isn't cooperative enough).
* A coop FPS with loot boxes, Overwatch.
* A P2W (pay 2 win) CCG, Hearthstone.
* A failed MOBA, called Heroes of the Storm.
With the latest developments being:
* A reskin on SC, for kids. Already existed from what I heard.
* A reskin of an existing game, Diablo mobile. Fanbase of Diablo isn't waiting for this. They want Diablo 4.
* A refurbish on Warcraft 3 with higher quality graphics coming end of year. The playerbase wants Warcraft 4, and are wondering why they need to pay for a game they already paid for.
Furthermore they had their best profit year last year, yet they laid off tons of staff. Nah, I'm not betting money on Blizzard.
Good for you, don't bet your money. Doesn't mean there aren't hundreds of thousands of players who want the company to do well. RTS are only "dead" to those who don't play them, believe it or not people have been claiming the games will die for years. And yet we still have thousands of very serious players who barely get any new features or maps.
Dead is a relative term in this context. The momentum is long gone, and the trend is downhill because the genre got rehashed to death.
I want Blizzard to do well. They proved in the past they were able to make quality games for a fair price. At this point, I don't believe they will. Not anymore.
Diablo 3 at release was disappointing. Titan was cancelled. Warcraft and Diablo fanbase sorely desire not new content for their current games but a new, innovative game (the Diablo Mobile game is not that, nor are the WoW bandaid). My observation is that people want Diablo 4, World of Warcraft 2, Warcraft 4. They're not getting anything remotely like that.
Consider the Warcraft movie. It was only good enough for the die-hard fans.
Do any of those actually have a competitive scene? I think the thing I have missed most in the recent RTS was the lack of place to bump into people like you used to be able to. It's the same criticism I give to most of the modern FPS which have replaced the tools to allow a community to be born (lobby mostly) with matchmaking. While I follow SCR/SC2 fairly closely I haven't heard of any ladder/informal competitive arrangements for any of those other games.
The problem with many RTS games from a longevity standpoint is that most RTS fans do find them at some point, they play through the single player campaign, and multiplayer is either stagnant/busted/a mere shadow of the actual singleplayer campaign/has lousy game cycle/no useful replay system. I feel like too many of the recent generation of RTS games have fallen down these paths. People always need to keep in mind when thinking about SCR/BW one of the tricks to making it competitive was running the game on the fastest speed to make it interesting and fix the game cycle. Most of the newer RTS's often do not expose such interesting knobs to help find the competitive mode in the stock game, or are missing map editors and other tools to help create new content for a game and fix perceived problems for multiplayer within the confines of the shipped game.
The actual problem with RTS games from a longevity standpoint are actually the same problems fighting games have:
1. It's a 1v1 game, so you either are playing alone, or if you want to play with a friend, you have to fight each other. That's fun for awhile, but typically one person will be better, and the other person will get tired of losing.
2. They are really hard to be good at. On paper, RTS games are really hard because you are managing a lot of things at once (simplified by saying macro and micro game), and you need to be good at everything. The difficulty of a game is magnified when it's 1v1 because you only have yourself to rely on. So if you are having an off day, you are going to keep losing.
The reason MOBA games are popular is because they fix these issues by being a team game (very easy to play with a group of friends, and if you are not good or having a bad day, you can lean on your teammates to pick up the slack), and reducing your general focus to managing 1 hero (obviously, MOBAs have many layers and systems that make them more complicated, but at anytime you just need to focus on one hero).
Well this is why I point out the community prospects. Most of these new RTS do a really bad job of finding people to play with and especially when you are new and figuring out how to play competitively in a new game you can have extremely high variance of success. If you are just playing with a small group, sure eventually a few will rise to the top but that's not the criticism I have. In older RTS like BW or Homeworld there was chat/clans/reasons to bump into new people for casual or ladder play. In newer ones that sort of community building tool rarely exists at the peak of interest. The competitive community creates other resources to play against other than known friends (the friend aspect for me was always the compare notes/develop new strategies/test things against each other sort of thing).
You comment that in RTS 1v1 and if you are having an off day you are going to keep losing. That's true, but I find MOBA worse in overall enjoyment if you keep losing. I don't mind losing 1v1 and can stop anytime because it's just me. With a MOBA one player playing exceptionally rarely pulls the odds in your favour where one player playing exceptionally poorly swings the game entirely in the other direction. You are actively incentivized to not abandon the game (socially and mechanically) so even if a game starts going south you can't just reset the pieces on the board and start again. If I am playing an RTS I can just gg out at any time without causing a problem, with a MOBA I'm stuck with one or more player's bad decisions for the entirety of the game which could stretch to 50 minutes or more. I also find that unless you 5-man it's really a terrible experience for hours in/enjoyment out. This is more a criticism of the current generation of MOBAs than anything. As a team game there are other kinds of games others can carry the game harder in competition and make up for a player's skill/bad streak (MMO, FPS). MOBAs also don't really have any lack of complexity in being successful it just is mostly an exchange of active skills for passive/booklearned skills so it is my opinion that it is not a good defining line between the two since if you take the net skill(active+passive) from both I find most RTS and MOBAs to be comparably equivalent levels of complexity.
I would rather lose a 100 times and be responsible for 100% of it than lose 5 times and be responsible for 15% of it but be hitched to the burning wagon the entire time it falls off the cliff (and have little agency in stopping it). I do agree that there is a certain kind of player that can't handle losing 100 times in a row and learning from their mistakes, and that's probably why there are less RTS games recently than there used to be.
I think that this is because MOBAs are (unintentionally?) more like a sport with positions, teamwork, etc. I think that leads to MOBAs being more exciting for a mainstream audience and we see huge hits[1], where RTS is more for the niche audience that you saw for PC games 20 years ago-people who are more excited with honing computer skills than communication skills. I fall firmly in the latter camp, but I see why the market favors the former.
I totally agree about the 'being able to play again at will' part. That's what drove me away from LoL when I tried it-it was my very first game, I wanted to walk away, and the interface told me I was hurting the community by leaving early. I took the hint and decided to quit playing entirely. I don't want that kind of responsibility-the whole point of a hobby is that there aren't consequences for failure (or at least I've seen it formulated as such.)
I honestly think that the biggest problem with launching an RTS is that BW already exists. People aren't clamoring for something better, it's just plain good enough. That takes the air out of any possibilty of a competitive RTS and I believe the 'not enough people to play with' is a symptom of this. If there is a remedy I would suggest that an engaging singleplayer campaign can at least sell the title without the promise of PVP-I bought DOW3, for example, knowing I'd probably just play the campaign. Grey Goo's (great) campaign was (according to the devs iirc) an afterthought and as a result some of it's huge potential was squandered.
"Mortal Kombat 11 proceeded to be the best selling video game software in North America for the following month of May, for both Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The sales of the game is nearly doubled comparably to previous entries of the series."
This baffles me. Who are these people that buy games like MK11, a new FIFA game every year(?), go watch obviously purely commercial 'blockbusters' at the cinema, etc.?
Do some people genuinely find these things really enjoyable?
>> This baffles me. Who are these people that buy games like MK11, a new FIFA game every year(?)
I see your point, but Mortal Kombat is not really the best example of a cash-cow franchise that keeps selling the same game over and over. The successive games in this series have huge differences, especially since the reboot a few years back. If you like this style of fighting games, there are plenty of reasons to buy the latest version every few years.
FIFA on the other hand is terrible in this regard. I can say with confidence because I've been buying each entry since FIFA'09, and while there have been a few major changes in 10 years that are worthwhile improvements, you are indeed more or less buying the same game every year. I sometimes wonder why I even keep doing it, I guess it's just because it's become a tradition I cannot get away from, getting the game on release date and inviting my brother to play it until deep in the night.
Isn't part of the draw of FIFA and other sports games that the players change every year, since they're based on real players? I figured sports fans enjoy playing avatars of the players they follow.
>a tradition I cannot get away from, getting the game on release date and inviting my brother to play it until deep in the night
Probably well worth the cost just to spend the time with your brother. I wish I lived close enough to my brother to do a yearly video game night with him--and wouldn't care what the video game was or how much it cost (within sane reason of course).
>Do some people genuinely find these things really enjoyable?
Yes. Why is it difficult to understand that other people can like things that you don't like? Is your ego truly so ingrained you can't even imagine the experiences of someone just a little bit different from you?
the question was not about why people like such games, but why they keep buying the latest ones for full price, when they are just slight reskin with updated player stats. I don't get it either, but it ain't my money being spent so couldn't care less.
There are much worse ways to spend your money, ie cigarettes.
It probably is a humblebrag. But since I have no interest in many of these things that appear to be very popular, I am also genuinely curious about what is it that people find enjoyable about these things.
Is it the fact that these things are a 'common denominator' and as such are a 'neutral' choice of something to enjoy with friends that may have otherwise diverse interests? Or do people genuinely prefer these things, even if they were the only person left on Earth?
I can talk about some blockbusters. I like the Marvel's MCU movies (though each one progressively less, my favorite still being Iron Man 1). For me, they have a near-optimal composition of plot cadence, special effects, music and cliches. They're usually pretty polished. I find them good for light enjoyment, and since they also appeal to a very wide audience, it's something I'll immediately get to talk about with a lot of people, or something I can watch with my SO without worrying it'll bore her out of her mind.
It's fast food of entertainment. A composition optimized to appeal to senses, even though it's of questionable nutritional value. I think it's fine from time to time.
Assuming the Marvel movies fall into the category you're talking about... I adore the Marvel movies, as does everyone else I talk to about them. They're fun to watch, I'm fully vested in the characters (which, to some extent, is based on my reading of comic books so many decades ago), and the shared storyline/world is great.
They're pretty much everyone else. New releases of these "same games" bring better graphics, or animations, or gameplay, or story, or any combination of the previous. FIFA, in addition I assume they also include the new players and trades that happened since the last version (but I don't play FIFA so I could be wrong here).
Nostalgia is also a big factor, with so many reboots and adaptations of source material to new media, today's adults will pay to see all the Marvel blockbusters because they read the comics or saw the TV show as kids. I'd bet many people that bought MK9 - which rebooted the saga - did it for nostalgia. The same probably happened with the new Tomb Raiders, also a reboot of the series. Have you heard of the new The Lion King? Or Dumbo? Or Aladdin? Or any of the 500 new remakes Disney wants to make? Same thing.
If one is a fan of football, and video games, buying FIFA every year isn't that baffling. I actually do it every year - till 2009 it was new PES every year, and since 2010 it was FIFA every year (as fifa got greatly improved on that year and PES is still exactly where it was 10 years ago)
It is the best football game on the market, and every year there are some new features, to which I look forward to. It's always cool to see what changed, what is better than it was, what was fixed, what was broken.
I am lucky enough to not care about spending $60 per year on a single video game. So yeah, I will happily do it and play with my friends for a year. But is it honestly worth it? I can list feature breaking bugs that have been in the game for 3+ years, never touched. I can list features which got broken by new features, never fixed, for years. Considering how much money the product makes, for me it just shows what matters for EA.
And EA's focus seem to be solely Ultimate team, on making sure that they will resell the same shitty game with minimal improvement and people will spend buttloads of money on packs, which they have to do from scratch every year (Personally I do not touch microtransactions, too easy to pay few bucks here and there and this is never worth it in the long run).
(IMO the fact that they release new version every year shows how predatory their business model is)
So yeah, you can find some enjoyment out of it, but I would say that in case of FIFA it is despite EAs best efforts.
And re MK11, I do not beleive it is released every year. I think the first 4 games were came out in quick(ish) succession, than it was quiet for few years, than several others...? So it's a different case from 'I'm a footbal fan and this way I can play with my current team'
People find comfort in franchises, especially characters they've grown up with. Instead of investing time in making new intellectual property, some fans would rather make expansions and sequels despite the risk of cease-and-desist orders.
I don't blame this mentality – it's the kind of loyalty that creative and loved stories naturally engender. It's really hard to imagine Super Smash Bros. having a fraction of its appeal if it had the same mechanics but completely new non-Nintendo characters. Or even the original Super Mario Kart for that matter.
Mortal Kombat games are coming out at a clip of about every 4 years now. People get fighting games to play competitively. You'll find thousands of these people at the EVO tournament next weekend.
I imagine the competitive aspect holds water for FIFA as well.
Yeah, the sequel sneering in other posts in this tree is not a great look. Mortal Kombat changes significantly between iterations and while 2D fighters are not my cup of tea the depth and intricacy of the way MK11 plays is really well done (even separate from the self-aware and campy story stuff, which is good for a couple evenings of fun--we popped when the final boss threw a dang dinosaur at me!). Ed Boon and crew do good work and writing it off as "psh, sequels" is just not smart.
Some people just don't like sequels, or they don't like a genre and then all the hype about the sequels is for nothing (for that person). For example, I got nothing with MOBAs. Never had. Doesn't interest me. If I was younger back when these got popular I might've enjoyed them thoroughly but I grew up with Dune 2 and Command & Conquer.
I played MK2 and MK3 on the arcade back in the days. Looked it up, there were 2 years between those 2 versions (1993 and 1995). MK3 and MK4 I also played on PC, and MK4 is from 1997 (2 years again after MK3). So yeah, back in the 90s there were 2 years between each MK2/3/4. And MK (MK1) was from 1992...
I used to buy Call of Duty every year. I love playing FPS games, and getting the newest game meant new guns, new maps, and just new ways to enjoy an FPS. Sure, you could argue that it is just a reskin, but I really enjoy playing FPS games and I'm okay with paying the retail price.
It baffles me that you are gatekeeping the concept of fun.
>Do some people genuinely find these things really enjoyable?
Well it's not like there hasn't been any changes between Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat 11. If you developed original IP that continued to be popular after decades, would you toss it in the garbage on some principle of "being original"? They continue to innovate.
The comment at the top of this chain mentioned Paradox. They sell DLC for their games every year, which the players for the most part buy. This seems basically the same?
fighting games are basically cartels: you have a couple strong sets of IP, outside of which it's insanely hard to get traction - uber small community to start with and new titles often need bootstrapping and refining [no tournaments/scenes/bad or no online experience, etc.])
it also works backwards: since everyone moves to the latest and greatest, the community evaporates when a new version comes out: nobody still plays street fighter (version - 1) basically as soon as the latest comes out, as tournaments pick it up (=> you need to learn it)
the one dark horse was smash, which had insane longevity but nintendo didn't want that IP associated with the fighting game community/streams for a long while - not sure what current state is
> Do some people genuinely find these things really enjoyable?
The "masses" go consume what they are told to. The (n)th remake of some series is about to come up, the marketing ramps up, adverts, product placement, discussions, reviews, interviews. It all drives demand.
Do you really not notice this? Even if it is a "here we go again, groundhog day" type of noticing?
People (on the whole - in before 'not me I spent hours searching / reviewing my next purchase') don't put effort into their consumption, they just buy / spend how they are told. Why do you think advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry.
> The "masses" go consume what they are told to. The (n)th remake of some series is about to come up, the marketing ramps up, adverts, product placement, discussions, reviews, interviews. It all drives demand.
>Do you really not notice this? Even if it is a "here we go again, groundhog day" type of noticing?
Except not all titles are like this. Smash Bros., Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are not franchise re-skins. There are major balance updates, character updates, game mode updates, and sometimes an entirely new mechanic to address balance issues.
Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars was the predecessor to Rocket League, but they don't play alike at all.
World of Warcraft is on it's 8th iteration. No matter if you like the the current version, each expansion brings lots of new content, balance, and class overhauls.
Are they worth it? Some people say no. Are they Madden-like re-skins? Definitely not.
> Is your implication that only garbage products sold to the "masses" advertise?
That's not the logical corollary to the parent's statement; it's that some of the sellers of non-garbage products are interested in having "the masses" buying their stuff too.
Why would you stop if people like it? I would continue to buy new version of Mario Kart, I still enjoy playing new Pokémon games and hope they will continue to release new ones.
How many westerns are there? Star Wars films? After the second Star Wars films they all sucked and were essentially the same movie. If you like westerns or Star Wars films you're (probably) going to see a lot of them. They'll stop making them when people realise they're getting predictable; when it's too obvious that the differences between releases are extremely small. This isn't art, it's business, no matter what you might read.
>>This isn't art, it's business, no matter what you might read.
Bad art, derivative art, and boring art are all still art. Those terrible paintings in hotel rooms and office lobbies still had to be created by someone. There's always a complex balance between the creative expression vs business side of art (especially in something like film or music).
Some people just genuinely like "safe" or "boring" art, be it music, games or films.
If they had just release MK1 11 times then sure, you could class that as "beating a dead horse".
But that is ignoring the fact that these games evolve. Sure 1 to 2 might not be a huge step or evolution, but 1 to 11? To assume they are the same is ridiculous.
That is partly due to fragmentation in my opinon. There are just so many games I want to play but there just isn't enough time. Even games that are a perfect fit for my personal tastes can go unnoticed this way. And the amount of games being released is so astonishing that even fans have difficulties to keep up with major releases.
That said, I don't consume many AAA-titles, I think game developer conferences are boring because they are 98% marketing vehicles and I just look up some streamers to get to the good stuff.
Factorio just offers more than call of mortal combat fantasy 85. If this market and especially the mobile segment has problems, I wouldn't really mind.
Sure, there are indie developers with good games that will feel this fragmentation. But I don't think anything can be done about it. Developing games is just a popular idea right now.
Since gamers started to finance development themselves, the result has mostly been awesome.
Many of them aren't, especially the smaller ones. You can always pop into their chats and ask them. You can also just look at the gameplay and determine whether you like it or not.
That's all very well to be uninterested in AAA games, but they're the largest segment of games produced and on the back of this growth, the games industry has grown larger than music and movies combined revenue [1].
The indie portion of the games industry that will be 'perfectly fine' is a tiny fraction of the overall landscape. It's wonderful to live in an age where independent games projects can flourish, but the vast majority of people involved in the industry are going to be working in gruelling conditions on AAA titles that are largely responsible for the enormous growth the industry is seeing.
At least for the genre I've been following (indie horror) it seems like the recently-released games are all low budget one-man-studio cash grabs or else quick Game Jam games that have been polished up a bit. There don't seem to be a lot of medium-sized indie studios doing games anymore.
It would be interesting to see some statistics on firm sizes or game budgets.
why does is being low-budget and "one-man-studio" mean it's a cash grab? I would say it's actually more likely these are a fruit of the developer's passion than something made by a larger studio.
Jim Sterling coined the term "asset flip" to describe cheap, rushed, barely-playable games cobbled together with Unity and pre-bought art assets. These games are a shameless attempt to cash in on the latest fad with an absolute minimum of effort. A substantial proportion of indie releases on Steam (and a majority on Android) fall into this category.
If you've seen some of the videos of people playing these "asset flips" you would have seen that they have very little in terms of gameplay. They are also full of bugs and appear mostly unfinished.
I think the medium-sized studios just tends to either get bought by a big publisher (InXile and Obsidian, for a pair of recent example) or just crash after a game that just didn't work well enough
Maybe we're the minority. Still, wube (factorio developers) seem to be living comfortably, they don't seem to be hurting for cash. There is enough money in niche communities if your product is good
Getting there is more challenging than it used to be. Plenty of non-AAA hits seem to come with tales of development almost breaking them, or running out of Kickstarter funds. Including two of my favourites: Pillars of Eternity and Divinity Original Sin.
Survivor bias. How many great indie games never got the exposure and died on steam making basically nothing. The fact that some people can do alright is not evidence of a healthy market.
Never before has it been so easy for someone to get their game into the hands of millions. Games like Factorio, made by people who are passionate about games. With modern distribution platforms, companies like Paradox Interactive find it viable to continue adding content to their games many years after they were released.
Couldn't give two hoots about what EA and Activision are up to. They don't make games for me.