Soon we'll just have Microsoft, Epic, and a conglomeration of EA, Activision, and Ubisoft after Bobby Kotick forces them all to merge. Facebook will bungle up any chance they have of capturing the gaming market after writing a cryptic paragraph about their legal right to request blood samples from all Oculous users in the TOS. Valve will quietly exit software development altogether, and pivot to building custom vanity knives using their hardware manufacturing experience. Can't wait for the future GAAS market!
Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore.
My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. Honorable mentions go to Spelunky and Stellaris. It's to everyone's great regret that a single one of these titles was purchased by one of the shitty publishers you mentioned, fortunately it's the one that's on its last legs.
This is absolutely right. The best games now are from independent developers who are themselves barely making it. The games you listed were some of the breakout successes of indie games but there are a ton of fun, interesting indie games out there that are dying from lack of revenue.
There seems to be an overall issue now where the quality of the good produced and the benefit to the consumer is divorced from the value extracted by the producer.
For instance, you can make a mobile game company that aggressively monetizes re-hashed bubble-poppers or match three games. With that, you focus not on innovation of pleasing the customer but on making the most money per customer so that you can feed it back into your marketing. The most exploitative game wins.
This is a more profitable strategy than simply trying to make a fun game that people want to play.
With most consumer markets, we find similar stories of customer exploitation being a better play than simply making a great product. This is not as much the case in B2B.
How do we reign back in the markets? It doesn't seem like consumer choice is working out very well.
Maybe marketing is at the core of all of this malignment.
> The best games now are from independent developers who are themselves barely making it.
I wish it was true, at least for my favorite genre. Technically speaking, a small team of developers can create excellent games when it comes to creativity, design, playability etc. but for some titles there is need for a good story, then turning it into acceptable animations, large worlds, complex graphics etc. that's where probably only a major game house can deliver because of the number of writers, developers, designers, actors needed.
My favorite games of all time were the Mass Effect trilogy; they were technically great, but the writing, character development, voicing and direction was their point of excellence. I would take ME1-3 story arc over most recent titles. Unfortunately many game studios think only in terms of FPS and technical trivialities that cannot turn a dull story plastered with FPS scenes into something that one still remembers after 10 years.
Not been a gamer for a while, so I may have missed a lot lately and would love to be proven wrong (details welcome!).
Thirding (?) this. The integration of gameplay elements into the story and the story itself are simply amazing. It is similar to Undertale, in that the gameplay is relatively shallow, but is paced perfectly with the story.
I hate fighting games. I especially despise melee action games. I don't love 3rd person perspective. I haven't really played JRPGs.
Nier:Automata jumped at the top of my list and kept getting better. Even my (non-gaming) wife watched me playing because she was curious and the art and story were fantastic.
A unique experience that is difficult to put into a review. FWIW, my other favourites are Mass Effect, Deus Ex, lots of Sierra & Lucasarts point & click games, etc.
Story telling and surprises (and style) in NieR:Automata were just top notch.
Many indie developers are barely making it. Some are killing it. New ideas come from indies, but sometimes from big companies too. Big companies depend on distribution and marketing, small companies depend on innovation. I have been in video games for twenty five years. It has always been like that.
Where it seems to have broken down is via vertical integration.
When publishers were publishers and developers were developers (80s and 90s), it seemed like there was healthier competition. Even if there were a lot of abusive deals struck.
Now that we have giant, integrated publisher + development conglomerates, there's zero incentive to step out of that structure to publish a popular indie game.
It feels like news sites prohibiting links to external sites, and the world's the poorer.
I strongly disagree. No publisher or developer conglomerate dominates today more than Sega, Nintendo, or EA did at different times 25- 30 years ago. The past always looks great in retrospect. Today's ecosystem is so much more diverse.
It feels like the video games industry has done the reverse of Hollywood.
Hollywood went from a vertically integrated system that handled production, distribution, and exhibition by a single entity to a system where production, distribution, and exhibition were done by separate entities.
It feels like game development went the reverse way.
It's important to note that the only reason that Hollywood went from a vertically integrated system to a disaggregated one is because the US Government filed an antitrust suit that forced the disaggregation [1]. And now that that antitrust pressure is gone, we see Hollywood slowly returning to a vertically integrated system, where studios, distribution networks and theaters are all operating in close conjunction to push movies that "ought" to be profitable [2].
Yes and no. Big companies do development, but they don't necessarily do more development than they used to. EA and Activision actually probably develop fewer titles than they did twenty years ago. They just spend a lot more on each title.
But again: Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Nintendo have always been vertically integrated. This is not new.
Might be apocryphal, but legend has it Bethesda escaped bankruptcy by taking massive chances with Morrowind. They wanted to go out with a bang, and, creatively, the result was amazing.
That success and the fortune they now had to protect seemed to hemorrhage their creativity or vision or concern. After that, we got Oblivion and Skyrim. Nice but very safe and uninspired games. And the best Fallout was the one from Obsidian Entertainment, not Bethesda Game Studios.
That's not it. When you have a profitable IP, the expected value is so high that variance offers you nothing, and hurts. When you have nothing, expected value is so low that high variance ideas are the best -- bankruptcy takes away the sting of negative income.
How do we reign back in the markets? It doesn't seem like consumer choice is working out very well.
consumer choice is working as intended. They are fine playing "free" games supported by the 1%, and many nowadays won't pay >5-10 dollars for a game unless it's from a very established IP.
Even without the mobile market, The story isn't much different. You either throw yourself out there in a sea of indie games, or you find a publisher to pitch and give your IP rights to in exchange for stability. The latter is just harder to do nowadays
If we're willing to regulate gambling (which we are, because we do regulate it), then I don't think we can simply wave our hands at mobile games and say "bah, consumer choice. They play the games, don't they?"
For what it's worth, the "Free to Play" sector that dominates a lot of market share isn't just the gambling-lite, pay-to-win mobile sector anymore. We're talking about major titles like Fortnite, League of Legends, DOTA2, Rocket League, Hearthstone, and Valorant, which have millions of concurrent players, dominate streaming services, and often have high-production e-sports events. Even the latest title in the Call of Duty franchise offers a Free to Play Battleground mode.
However gambling did ruin many areas of entertainment. E.g. Live music suffered immensely in my home country as pubs preferred to fill the stages with pokies as they made more money from gambling addicts then they did from having a live band around.
Same deal with games, many previously good IPs are now stuffed with gambling mechanics as the producers controlling it push for it.
Some people enjoy gambling, I guess? That doesn't necessarily mean that they're being exploited or that they're "ruining" games.
I too dislike gambling elements in computer games. I simply choose not to buy such games. If there was a shortage of good games without gambling mechanics, I could see your point. But clearly there's not.
You're spot on and I wish we knew what to do about it. I think there's a very good parallel between music and games, in both industries it's possible to create great works with innovation, creativity and not much capital. Unfortunately the greatest works don't necessarily bubble up to the top, because the money isn't in producing them, it's in controlling the channels of distribution.
There was great optimism 20+ years ago that the Internet would change this with music, artists would have direct access to their fans, the middle man would be eliminated, and the major labels would crumble. That's not what we got, we just ended up with a new group of megacorps like Apple and Google and Spotify duking it out with the old majors for control of distribution.
To have watched these dreams die in the music industry and see a very similar dynamic unfolding in the digital native industry of games makes me think that maybe this isn't a technology issue, maybe it's something that runs deeper in society and the way people are wired. Then again if we go way back we can argue that the problem was created by technology in the first place (monopolies on music distribution were impossible back when everything was live, they only emerged once we devised technology for recording and copying audio!).
> The best games now are from independent developers
Some Indie games are great, but there are still lot of really great big budget story based games being made that an Indie studio just couldn't produce.
>This is a more profitable strategy than simply trying to make a fun game that people want to play.
Still loads of high quality, very profitable, games being made e.g. RDR2, TLoU2, HZD, Ghost of Tsushima, Uncharted, Spiderman, Doom, Gears, Halo, Ratchet & Clank, Cyberpunk2077 (CDPR can't be considered indie anymore), Forza, Gran Turismo etc.
Sony in particular is really delivering with their single player story based, big budget games.
To use cyberpunk as an example because it's one of my favorite genres, I wonder how many of the people who buy Cyberpunk2077 will have ever even heard of Shadowrun Dragonfall by Harebrained Schemes, or Technobabylon by Wadjet Eye Games. I'm pretty sure that while CP2077 has a vastly larger budget for art, code and Keanu Reeves, it won't even come close to these games in terms of narrative, atmosphere etc.
> Maybe marketing is at the core of all of this malignment.
Just a thought: You got these big "movie budget" games. They need to make that budget back, so they use (a large part of the budget for) marketing, in order to sell way more games. This then consumes a very large part of the market. Problem now is that a large chunk of the money made in the majority of the market is spent on marketing. And this chunk of money is locked in with the industry giants, the indies and smaller devs can never get to it. Marketing ate part of the gaming industry.
> The best games now are from independent developers who are themselves barely making it.
That's a highly subjective statement, and a blanket one at that.
You could also say that the worst games are made by independent developers and that would also be true at the same time, because "independent developers" is far from being a consistent group.
You make a good point to bring up indie development (WoW excluded), but I think looking at the storefronts is also important.
For these big conglomerates, the trendy thing is to have your own games store. Complete with exclusivity deals, privacy concerns, and plenty more.
That's not to say that every game on a store has these issues. However, I think the lesson from mobile app stores is: don't discount the impact that a storefront can have on what's allowed to succeed. Stores can exert their control with more than just removals.
Indies can't escape this. Even if they wanted to sell their game independently, not being on one of the big stores hurts visibility. Not all of them get the luxury to be able to expect their users to follow them to their own site/store/etc.
Right now, Steam is still the leader and obvious home for a lot of these otherwise-independent developers. Again, if the big conglomerates get what they want, this won't always be the case.
I also quite like a lot of the blockbuster games as well as the indie games. An indie dev will never release a game like Red Dead 2, for one example. I definitely play more indie games, but I would rather the blockbuster market be healthy too.
Pyramids are hard to build without a super-feudal economy and society. But we got rid of that, losing the practical ability to make pyramids in the process, because we value other things like democracy higher.
Uhh we still build things like pyramids all the time - Three Gorges Dam, Burj Khalifa, One World Trade Center - it's just we don't build pyramids themselves anymore.
Hm. The pyramids were an architectural and supply chain genius stroke considering when they were made. It also took fantastic human sacrifice to achieve that. One world trade center was built with the assistance of trains and semi trucks brining ore to smelters and steel to the construction site, electricity, cranes etc.
Minus the slavery, have we really expended that much human effort and equivalent wealth and time on something in the modern era? The only thing I can think of is Free software products, shit like Linux.
This is only tangentially related, but because you are all leaning on this pyramid analogy so hard, I thought I would mention that many scholars now believe the pyramids to have been built by some type of salaried (and very skilled) labor. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_constructio...
> Pyramids are hard to build without a super-feudal economy and society
[citation needed]
The 10th-tallest pyramid was built in Memphis, TN 30 years ago [0] and it's now used as a Bass Pro shop. Say what you will about working conditions in the US in the 90s, but I don't think it'd be fair to call it "a super-feudal economy and society".
Huh? Pyramids exist because they are the easiest comparably thing to make. no one makes them because they have better skyscraper designs now and no one cares about making a 4000yr old tomb.
You know what's today's 4000yr long monument to vanity? Elon Musk's orbiting Tesla
Also the fact that the Epic Games Store exists is a step towards countering Steam's monopoly on mainstream titles.
People complain about the loss of functionality like screenshots or the in-game browser when using Epic. And there are exclusivity deals. Complaints against those things are valid, and the actual implementation of the storefront needs a lot of improvement, but I'm wondering if a Steam monopoly would have been any better for consumers and developers.
To me it sounds like a lot of consumers were happy with the monopoly and saw the exclusivity deals as disruptive as they had to migrate their friends list and set up a lot of things just to play that one hyped title. But when it comes down to the hard issue of staying afloat I can see how the money Epic offers to game studios is enticing.
Steam has been good to me with their native Linux client, Linux client support, proton compatibility tools and community tool support (glorious eggroll proton version). Epic has nothing to offer me.
Furthermore, I know some gamedevs personally who release an early access level title with exclusivity deal on epic's playform just so that they gain access to further funding to finish the game and release on Steam for the actual shot at success. They take advantage of the money to fund their work, but have said that the numbers do not compare to that of Steam.
I began gaming for the first time (unless you count playing on my roommates' XBox in college) this past week, mostly for The Witcher 2/3--both on Linux. The Witcher 3 was never supposed to run on my platform, but somehow Steam and Proton/Wine made that not only possible but actually enjoyable.
I know technically they're doing it to make money, but I can't help like feel it's also something of a labor of love as well. It would have been much easier to leave people in my (our?) position behind, so I appreciate the heck out of Valve for putting in the effort. I imagine they're going to have my goodwill for a long time as a result.
If you want to be cynical, Proton was made from the scraps of a contingency plan that was the Steam Machine. When they realized that Microsoft wasn't going to force their platform onto users, they gave up on Steam Machines and I guess they leveraged the tech to something else.
I think that it is a bit more complex than that. Their original plan was for native[1] gaming on Linux.
When it proved hard to bootstrap that and seeing that the Steam Machine itself they started looking for options. Wine was already pretty good but DX11 support was bad. I do not know if it was serendipity that DXVK started showing promises around they same time they started looking into wine or whether it was the reason for them focusing into wine in the first place.
The rest is history, although the side effect is that it pretty much killed native ports for AAA games on Linux [2].
[1] for some values of native. Many, most, ports are based on internal close source equivalent of wine.
[2] I do not really care about native vs proton, but it would be nice if game companies did officially support proton.
... and unrelatedly, on the other side, the latest appeasing thing called WSL was made from leftovers of a plan to run Android on Windows Phones, which was dropped when Google refused to allow Play Services run there.
Phoenix Point was a game I cared about a lot. Then one day, they announced they would not be making a Linux version. Not long after they announced it will be Epic exclusive for a year.
Personally I think at the very least the developers deserve equal blame for accepting the bag of money from Epic.
Money is a strong motivator but the Phoenix Point devs chose to break promises from crowdfunding to accept it. I think that reflects worse on them than it does Epic personally.
> Steam has been good to me with their native Linux client, Linux client support, proton compatibility tools and community tool support (glorious eggroll proton version)
Reminder: Valve was forced to double-down on SteamOS/Linux by Microsoft's then-intention to shutdown 3rd-party storefronts on Windows. I have a complicated relationship with both Steam (as a Proton user) and Epic (for pulling Linux support on a multiplayer game I already own!), but I still appreciate more competition in the arena: GOG alone won't cut it.
>if a Steam monopoly would have been any better for consumers and developers.
Well steam runs on and is actively supported on linux, Epic takes games that used to support linux then removes linux support and makes the games exclusive to their store.
So for me personally, a steam monopoly would be better. The epic game store's existence has actually caused games to be removed from the platform I use. It's taken away choice from me. If it stopped existing, I'd be happy.
The exclusivity deals were disruptive because they took games that were promised to come to steam and made them exclusive.
The customer has no benefit from the lower cut epic charges.
Epic doesn't treat everyone equally. Big games like Cyberpunk 2077 are allowed to also sell on other platforms, while smaller games either go exclusive or go with everyone else.
Competition is good, but I'd rather have GOG be that competition to Steam than Epic purely based on their anti-DRM stance.
I don't much care for EGS, but Epic is paying small developers a lot for that exclusivity. In the current indie market, that chunk of change can be the difference between profitability and failure.
> Epic doesn't treat everyone equally. Big games like Cyberpunk 2077 are allowed to also sell on other platforms, while smaller games either go exclusive or go with everyone else.
There isn't a conspiracy here. Epic pays developers to make certain games (like Control) temporarily exclusive to EGS. Other developers, like CD Project RED, have not made such a deal, and thus Cyberpunk 2077 is available on many different PC game clients.
There are plenty of games on EGS--large and small--which are not and have never been exclusive. Examples include The Unfinished Swan, SuperHot, and Axiom Verge just to pick three off the top of my head.
I meant the case of DARQ, where the developer was specifically told to either go exclusive or every other store with no possibility of selling on EGS and other stores. [1] According to the article other indie games got similar offers, while the big budget ones can go to multiple stores.
To me, asking smaller games for exclusivity is just asking for commitment. One of the reason I don't buy games on GoG anymore is that the developers don't commit to updating their GoG version to keep parity with other versions of the game.
No, because it's clear from the beginning what platforms their games will support. That wasn't the case with Metro Exodus [1] for example and one other indie game I can't remember the name off.
I have one particular example of this I love since it happened right on the borderline. I own Anno 1800 on steam, but if you don't you can't (at least for the foreseeable and likely future) - Ubisoft pulled Anno from the steam storefront shortly after launch but! Probably due to some contract shinnanegans with steam, they continue to offer expansions + DLC to users who own Anno already on steam while new users remain locked out from buying it anywhere except UPlay + EGS. Ubisoft has moved a few things over to EGS but I love the Anno example because it landed just as EGS was gaining fame so it sits in the weird middle ground of technically being on steam but not really.
Be a bit mindful blaming ubisoft for stuff vanishing from Steam.
A significantly large part of why Ubisoft started cozying up to Epic was not because of the 5% stake tencent has in it.
It was because Steam pulls all kinds of nasty shenanigans but ubisoft will not state any of it publicly because it would hurt their relationship.
Steam has outright pulled all ubisoft games before, and ubisoft took the blame. People assumed it was because ubi wanted to push uplay; but it was all about someone at valve deciding that we'd violated some rule about content distribution.
We gave UK players of AC:Syndicate a country specific hat which wouldn't have made sense to the global market.
They didn't warn, we woke up to see that kotaku[0] had run an article about it before we even knew ourselves.
This is not an isolated incident, just a dramatic one that I remember as my own personal shifting point w.r.t. steam, because I'd only just started working at Ubisoft and was hating on uplay and was quite fond of steam.
Having bought a Ubisoft game on Steam and having to sit there for minutes while uplay updates itself when I just wanted to play for 10 minutes or so, I have very little sympathy for you.
> We gave UK players of AC:Syndicate a country specific hat which wouldn't have made sense to the global market.
So Valve makes sure that players from different countries get the same content? As a UK expat that's something I'm glad of.
Better customer service, user experience, and game selection. All these various online game stores should be required, by law, to allow any publisher to put their games on the platform for a standard publishing rate. No exclusivity, no special rate setting. Those are classic anti-competitive tactics, and this is yet another front to fight that battle on.
Apple probably doesn't have much revenue from the OS X desktop store, but if we're talking about total gaming revenue, Steam is around $5 billion/year and Apple is around $20 billion/year. Although I'm pretty sure Apple's # represents gross sales, not their 30% cut. I don't know if Steam's # is the revenue they receive after their cut, or if it's gross sales. If their # is the cut they take, they'd be far ahead of the App Store in terms of gross profit.
From a gamedev friend, there is no money on macOS. iOS and apple arcade is a viable option, but on Steam, the macOS sales are not worth the headache support and development gives you. Lots of quirks to work around with macOS, and more to come with the ARM transition as apple will surely blame developers for performance problems with x86 titles. Not to mention that the yearly developer fees that you have to pay to keep a game's long tail on the store. It eats into profits for Indies.
> but on Steam, the macOS sales are not worth the headache support and development gives you. [...] Not to mention that the yearly developer fees that you have to pay to keep a game's long tail on the store.
What yearly developer fees do you need to pay to keep a macOS game on Steam? Is it to Valve?
Nothing yearly for Steam, it's a one-off fee, I think about 100 USD these days (it changed over the years). For the macOS store it is a 100 USD a year or so, and of course they take their cut from your sales. I prefer Valve's way of doing business.
Oh, okay. You started talking about whether it’s worth releasing a Mac game on steam, and then brought up a yearly fee, so I was having trouble following where you transitioned.
It's worth drawing the distinction that Steam, as opposed to Apple and their app store, does not hold an exclusive monopoly and cannot dictate where users can install software from. If a Dev doesn't like Steam, there are other publishers and store fronts that they can peddle their wares through. Similarly users can go elsewhere to buy and install, even direct from the manufacturer.
Steam being the de facto choice is another issue entirely, and yet another discussion for their fee structure.
You could make the argument that because of Steam having such reach / monopoly on the PC gaming market, Steam (and by extension Valve) is effectively the publisher of games like that, and a very large one at that. There's GoG that mostly focuses on vintage games, and Epic that spends tons of money to get (timed?) exclusives on indie games + free handouts, but I'm not sure how well it's working for them to get market share.
But granted, the indie game market (and mid-sized publishers like Paradox) are super important right now to fight against the AAA / massive budget game devs and publishers.
Mind you, ID has been a bit of an underdog for a long while; their games are / were good, but did not become crazy big like their EA / Activision counterparts; the 2009 Wolfenstein sold poorly ("only" 100K units in the first month); The New Order, its sequel, did a lot better (400K sold in about a month and a half), and Doom 2016 was a hit.
Yeah GOG hasn't "focused" on vintage games for at least half a decade now (and the switch from GoG and the original acronym to branding wise it's just GOG and its own "word" these days) and while back compat remains a core strength (though one as much exported at this point as most Publishers have paid attention to what GOG was doing and released many of the same games with the same tricks [ScummVM, DOSBOX, etc] on Steam and other platforms) has kept up with Steam (and Epic) on every major AAA release and a large swath of Indies so long as the publisher will allow a DRM Free release. Plus of course CD Projekt Red's own AAA releases (Witcher series, Cyberpunk) as obviously they want DRM Free publishing where available.
I'm not certain if you enjoy remakes or not - but I think GOG is pretty much single handedly responsible for making them a thing. Things like AoE2 (Age of Empires) HD & DE probably wouldn't exist if AoE and AoM (Age of Mythology) didn't get a bunch of surprise sales on GoG. I'm hoping it'll also lead to some of the older IPs that died off with the likes of SSI getting resurrected into new titles - Imperialism 1 & 2 were pretty amazing games long before the likes of Victoria 2 came about.
id Software -- the makers of Doom 2016 -- is owned by ZeniMax Media, which has been acquired by Microsoft as per the featured article we are discussing
They are involved for the technical aspects beyond merely MachineGames using id engines. MachineGames in a lot of ways acts like another id software studio, but it is free to form its own flavor.
MachineGames also has (uncredited?) work on Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal.
2009 - they were producers, but the development was done by Raven Software and published by Activision. So not really involved other than owners of IP?
New Order - not at all, maybe as engine developers. Right for that IP were transferred to MachineGames in 2010 right after ZeniMax got hold of them.
As for Doom 2016 - they enlisted a lot of outside help after Doom 4 was scraped. Bethesda's game directors helped them a lot because they already figured how to make "old ip" to sell well with modern gamers (see Fallout 3).
side note:
I don't think id managed to get deliver a lot of good games since John Romero left. (just like John Romero didn't deliver many good games since the separation)
John Romero and John Carmack were like a dream team, but without each other it was meh.
FYI the 'id' in 'id Software' is lowercase. It's a word (not an initialism or acronym) so 'Id' would be more grammatically correct, though the name of the company is nevertheless lowercase.
Bingo! CoD, Quake, Doom, Civ, Madden, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, All of Nintendo... you can’t fault them for milking an IP though when fans vote with their wallets. I would love new stories, new hero archetypes, new consequences, in games and I think indie have done a decent job at showing it can be done. But even indie suffers from the “Hey! This worked! Let’s just keep doing this!” IP milkage. Game dev, like software dev, has gotten more and more complex. What was once a vision of unity and standards is now Unity3D or micro-fracture SDK’s of the same graphics pipeline concepts and a wasteland of bones from those who came before you.
I know from experience. The “I’ll write my own engine” bug bit me in 2005. I wrote Reactor3D on XNA in 2007. Worked with Bill Reiss while he masterminded XNASilverlight which eventually would become the basis for MonoGame, which we all love and adore.
What’s interesting is the non-mention of itch.io
I think if enough people want new and interesting games, it will get done. Dev’s are surprisingly open to ideas, it’s the publishers (money people) who have a problem with change.
To directly name some of games you seem to be implying are automatically bad; I'm personally very happy with Doom (2016), Doom Eternal, Breath of the Wild, and Mario Odyssey. I am glad that ID and Nintendo have been "milking" these IPs.
I think there's a difference between continuing an IP and milking one.
When the same IP gets passed to a dozen different studios who each create vastly different experiences, that's milking and I generally don't like it. The whole point of an IP is that you know what to expect, and having different studios working on the same IP is contrary to that goal.
Nintendo does not milk IPs, IMHO. They actually put a lot of though into their games and ensuring the the experience is top-notch. Compare Nintendo Zelda games to the few non-Nintendo variants: they've all been trash. Which is exactly why Nintendo rarely outsources games.
> When the same IP gets passed to a dozen different studios who each create vastly different experiences, that's milking and I generally don't like it. The whole point of an IP is that you know what to expect, and having different studios working on the same IP is contrary to that goal.
I think a distinction is if the Publisher treats the individual development studies as functionally equivalent black boxes. With Activision's brutal management of Call of Duty as maybe the key example. Where CoD assigned studios often go bankrupt after a couple games, and several have spun off after great hardship and will presumably never work with Activision again given the choice.
One fun exception from the more "indy" side of things that comes to mind is the playfulness that resulted when Croteam and publisher Devolver let a bunch of indy developers play with the Serious Sam franchise and created some fun games in a variety of styles outside of the FPS the series is known for.
That's an overstatement: Nintendo co-develops a lot of titles with other studios, outsource a lot of their smaller IPs (mostly to Japanese studios), _and_ is being rather friendly to letting people do smaller spinoffs of their big properties.
Examples of third-party colaboration, in no particular order:
- Koei Tecmo co-developed Fire Emblem: Three Houses, did both Fire Emblem Warriors and Hyrule Warriors, which are franchise spin-offs using their Dynasty Warriors engine and gameplay, and Nintendo trust them so much that their next canon Zelda game will be a Breath of the Wild prequel developed by them, using the Hyrule Warriors label.
- Bandai Namco is more or less the main developer of Super Smash Bros since the Wii U/3DS iterations, with Sora Ltd being essentially just a consulting company run by Masahiro Sakurai. Bandai Namco is also co-developing the new Pokemon Snap, and developed Metroid: Other M.
- Capcom developed both Oracle of Ages/Oracle of Seasons and Minish Cap, two portable and very well regarded entries in the Zelda Franchise.
- On the Mario side, pretty much all of their Mario sport titles are handled by Camelot, with the exception of the Mario & Sonic Olympic series, which are published by Sega direcly, and their highly praised portable RPG series Mario & Luigi was developed by (sadly defunct) Alpha Dream.
- Then there was that time when they gave the Mario franchise to Ubisoft and they made a Rabbids-crossover, XCom-like game, which is just too goddamn funny to not put in here separately (especially since it was also fairly well received by critics).
- Good-Feel, another Japanese developer, made entries to both Kirby (Epic Yarn), WarioLand and more recently, Yoshi franchises (Wooly World/Crafted World).
- There is a metric shitton of Pokemon spinoffs (that's probably where you will find the worst offenders of bad outsourced games, to be quite honest, but even then there are series like Pokemon Mistery Dungeon, by Spike-Chunsoft, which are very well regarded).
- And as a another Zelda example, Cadence of Hyrule, made by the Crypt of the Necrodancer developers.
There are more examples, but overall a large part of their output nowadays is made by third-parties, with of course a lot of their projects - big and small - being handled by their in-house studios. That's not even counting the fact that some studios readily associated with Nintendo, like Intelligent Systems and HAL Laboratory, are actually independent (they just like working with Nintendo).
This is great! No apologies. Example of how Nintendo milks their IP’s too. To be aware of it. Nothing wrong with Mario or Zelda, but the innovation and creativity is lacking for the sake of business and monetization.
> The whole point of an IP is that you know what to expect, and having different studios working on the same IP is contrary to that goal.
Is that actually the point of an IP? I would argue that an IP is more like Star Wars where the games that can come from it can vary in format and mechanics. And less like Battlefront where the expectation is a specific set of mechanics and game modes. I would argue that if someone where to make a non RPG Mass Effect that would still be within the IP and wouldn’t go against the core concept of IP.
If you want to build new IP and there isn’t established funding you can go start a Kickstarter campaign to raise money from gamers to go build the game.
That’s the crux of it right there. Funding. Studios that have funding secured (or don’t need it) should be the ones taking those risks. But yes, it’s risky to introduce new IP, the results can be disastrous. Cliff Bleszinski knows this.
Look at when Blizzard tried starting new a new IP with Overwatch, I'm sure they did okay but Overwatch doesn't have the same legendary luster that Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo have (or had).
Overwatch is definitely a big success - it's not the biggest competitive FPS on the market (probably fortnite if you count that - otherwise maybe CS:GO?) but it's up there. They also own Hearthstone which baffled me on release since it's so far out of their wheelhouse - but I believe they're making bucket loads of money off of that still... it's a literal collectable card game ><.
From a raw sales standpoint Overwatch has done better than most of those games. The only Blizzard game that beats Overwatch in terms of raw revenue is WoW. I find that tech people that used to game in the 90s tend to way overestimate how popular and successful those early foundational games were in comparison to modern games. Overall growth in the game industry (especially PC world wide) has been massive
The trend is definitely moving away from many separate games and toward "living" games. Look at how many games these days end up just doing updates/DLCs over many years rather than releasing whole new versions of the game.
Look at Destiny, there was originally planned for Destiny 3, but now the plan is just to make Destiny 2 the only game for the next 10 years with constant content updates. Even now, Destiny 2 of today is a significantly different than Destiny 2 at release.
Microsoft/343 have indicated that "Halo: Infinite" is planned to be this way as well, a living game.
Even indie games like Astroneer and Don't Starve are going down this route of updating a single game over a long period of time.
I'm not sure if that should be considering "milking", but it's definitely a change from how things used to be done.
It makes a lot of sense for most games to work like this: once you have a core game, adding content to it is comparatively cheap. Which means that the ROI can be really high if a point release with new content causes a spike in unit sales.
This probably works better for indies than DLC because I do think people have developed an aversion to DLC due to the big publishers abusing it for cosmetic updates. Personally, I'm very likely to pick up something like Factorio at full price, knowing that the devs are going to be adding "free" content to the base game over the years. But I'll skip over games with "season passes" and just wait for the complete edition to be released.
> Look at Destiny, there was originally planned for Destiny 3, but now the plan is just to make Destiny 2 the only game for the next 10 years with constant content updates. Even now, Destiny 2 of today is a significantly different than Destiny 2 at release.
Destiny seems to have gone through a lot of different plans. The plan before Activision was seemingly to stop after 1 and make that the live service game, though the 1/2 break helped them hurdle a console generation gap so Activision might not have been wrong to push for 2 at least (but yeah was definitely trying to milk it with 3).
Not that they were trying to milk it, but that they are currently twisting 2 into something it wasn’t. The game was not originally written to support also being Destiny 3.
I'd argue that was always the Destiny plan to be a constantly shifting MMO and Destiny 1 is the real outlier at this point. The teething pains right now "twisting 2 into something it wasn't" seem to be more somewhere between "twisting 2 into what it was always meant to be" and "Bungie is still learning how to run and build an MMO the hard way by ignoring most of what worked for decades" (for instance, relying so much on streaming from the disc/hard drive over streaming from the server making it real hard for them to keep all zones active at the same time because they run against disc/hard drive size limits; that's Ancient MMO Trade-Offs 101 that Bungie seems dead set on doing the weirdest possible solutions, though to Bungie's credit they aren't the only ones in this current "live service" games era learning this old lesson the hard way as games like Fallout 76 and Sea of Thieves seem just as likely to hit the exact same wall if they try to expand much more).
From a historical preservation viewpoint I find this trend extremely disturbing. Along with online requirements this makes it more and more impossible to experience older games the way they used to be. Even for completely single player games, online content distribution platforms tend to only give you the latest version (except for a few games where the developers specifically set up legacy branches), often even refusing to launch an already installed game until available updates are downloaded. If updates were only bugfixes that would not be a problem, but it is not unheard of for post-launch changes to significantly change the core mechanics of games.
This is a significant step down from the old phsical media distribution model where any changes from the initial master were optional.
No, the "living game" approach is because it turns out taking a "hat" asset that took an artist like 2 days to make (or you literally got for free from your fanbase!) and selling it for $5 to the 10 million people playing your game makes A FUCKLOAD of money. It's absolutely milking. Games make more money now when they are "Oh woe is me so expensive to make oh poor me feel pitty" then they ever dreamed of even when a game could be made by one person.
That was Activision's plan. Bungie never wanted pop new destiny titles likes CoD. D2 also designed with content being constantly added in mind - main story is super short. It's easier to sell cosmetics to fund "big" dlcs with small seasons in between. At least, compared to convincing people to buy an entire $60(70?) new game and wait for all of your friends buy it as well.
if they would just keep cranking out sequels at the same level of quality but no real innovation, I would be pretty happy. mass effect 1 was pretty good, me2 was great, me3 was still decent. why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda? similar with far cry. fc2 was great, but probably too unforgiving for the mainstream audience. they dumbed it down a bit for fc3, and fc4 was more of the same but with a couple pain points ironed out. then they had to mess everything up for fc5, why?
oddly enough, call of duty seems like a pretty good example of how to do a AAA franchise. they hit a winning formula with cod4, and they haven't really changed anything since. I'm not a huge fan of the series, but if you loved cod4, you'll love pretty much every game after that.
or an even better example: counterstrike. hardcore cs players will complain about subtle differences in the engine/hitboxes/netcode over time, but the core mechanics are exactly the same as in 1999. if it ain't broke...
> why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda?
Obviously everyone has their opinions, but I thought Andromeda the strongest sequel to ME1 story content wise. Andromeda's failings weren't in the story or the content (ME "B-Team" or not, thanks to Anthem's black hole, they wrote most of the strongest story content in all four games), they were technical. EA absolutely should not have pushed BioWare to Frostbite without properly productionizing Frostbite as if it were Unreal/Unity with a dedicated team and possibly an honest attempt to sell it as a product outside of EA's walls, instead of leaving it as DICE's in house with BioWare struggling to keep up with forked changes. Almost all of the technical problems in DAI, MEA, and especially Anthem seem clearly the fault of this broken engine relationship between DICE and BioWare. If EA wants Frostbite to be the next Unreal (or even just an okay competitor to Unreal) it needs to learn (five years ago) the lessons from Unreal that you treat even first and second party games as if they were third party customers to get the best results.
I didn't actually finish the game, so I can't speak too much to the story. for me it wasn't even about the bugs; I just thought the andromeda open world was the blandest of any I'd played at the time. it was like they looked at the lunar rover minigame from me1 and decided to make it the whole game. I wish they had just stuck to the traditional rpg level design of the previous games. I didn't much like the combat mechanics in andromeda either, but that could just be personal taste.
Well yeah, I loved the ME1 Mako and thought that very "Star Trek exploration" concept something strong about ME1 that I thought 2/3 deviated too far from, but I realize how much of a personal taste issue that becomes. MEA's open world could have used more time to bake (and still seems as much a restrictions caused by the Frostbite engine issue as anything, at least to my outside perspective). Also, yes, I find that for an FPS/3PS-focused engine, I don't entirely understand why Frostbite feels so bad at FPS/3PS combat mechanics, but I also have never played Battlefield/Battlefront games so I don't know if that is a BioWare/Mirror's Edge fork(s) specific problem or a general Frostbite problem.
Absolutely. It's fine for gamers to indulge in some nostalgia, too.
It'd be better for the industry if we all recognized that the job of a guy like Bobby Kotick is to eat a steak every so often, and then vomit it up for the next 25 years. Someone has to drive a garbage truck and there's nothing wrong with paying him for it.
Indy is great if you like one of the genres where they excel (e.g. rogue like, deck builder, walking simulator, retro, traditional RPG, etc.). However, if you are into genres like modern FPS or open world action adventure then good indy games are difficult to come by.
It doesn't take many to saturate those markets though.
If you're looking for a good indie shooter, look at Diabotical[0]. It's more Quake than Quake Champions was, or even Rocket Arena for that matter. There's plenty of pro-level gameplay on Zoot's stream[1] as well.
Yeah, open world games generally take a large team to create tons of content and a large tools/pipeline team to get said content in engine. So yeah, I doubt we'll see them dominating that space any time soon.
I can't think of a good reason though that there aren't a few very successful indie shooters though.
Mount & Blade series is an interesting counterexample to that, although I'm at a loss as to how define the genre ("feudalism sandbox"?). The first games were very clearly indy, but they capitalized on that success, and Bannerlord is a much more ambitious and polished game.
M&B is actually published by an arguably large company? I don't know where folks put Paradox in the ranking but they're certainly raking in the money with both internal dev & publisher only projects.
And they're making a new World of Darkness RPG for the first time in forever.
It was originally self-published indy, Paradox picked it up sometime during their betas. In 2015, TaleWorlds decided to return back to their indy roots, and got the publishing rights (for all already-released games, as well as M&B2: Bannerlord) back.
My kids love Nintendo and Minecraft, but they also love Untitled Goose Game, Factorio and Frog Detective. Indie games are probably more available now than ever.
Well, not everybody has the same tastes. I mostly don't like the aesthetics of indie games, especially not the "indie feel" or any kind of pixelated or animation-style graphics. I will not play anything that reeks of "design".
Instead, I prefer realistic-looking graphics, with moving trees and clouds. I've more often than not spent too much money on new AAA just to look at the graphics and barely play. Unfortunately, games with AAA-graphics with a good story and great original gameplay (no sequels!) seem to get rarer, and the disappearance of independent top-notch game studios could be a reason for that.
Realistic graphics are no more AAA than well done "indie feel" graphics. Realistic-looking games can just as much "reek of design" as you put it. Many of those indie games have AAA-graphics with good story and original gameplay.
There are a lot of great Indie titles, and you can get a lot of them DRM free on Humble or Gog.
I've loved a lot of Devolver's stuff. The Red String Club, Hotline Miami I/II, Katana ZERO .. all super incredible games with gameplay and story that's just as fun as the any of the big AAA shops.
I'm loving Annapurna Interactive, games like What Remains of Edith Finch and Outer Wilds have been amazing.
'What Remains of Edith Finch' feels like a (shorter) AAA title, no compromise in production values whatsoever.
Devolver is astounding, they really keep snapping up indie projects that do exceptionally well - don't forget Reigns in that list it's definitely on the lighter end but it's very well put together.
There's no end to enjoyable ways to waste your time when it comes to enjoyable games across time and genre, plenty of fish. Games media like all media loves hyperbole. Who cares about Caves of Qud if you can get MAD about a GIRL fighting in WW2? Fallout 75! For all I care the AAA industry can cannibalize itself until there's only 1 studio left slaving away in the Call of Duty mines. Games are made by people. There will always be more games released every year by middling and small studios than you have time. Now more than ever if someone has thousands of hours to burn on an autistically singular interest, we'll always have good games. As I get older and the world sinks into a fervor of self-preservation and tribalism, I realize the number of fucks I have for Bobby Kotick or loot boxes has dwindled to none. In fact, I'm running out of those real quick in general. So congratulations on joining the Microsoft family Bethesda, I'm sure your children will have non recessive genes and normal sized heads.
It's interesting - they're very different. The historical setting and investment into events to try and keep things on a historical path add a lot to the game IMO by allowing a mostly balanced but asymmetrical game - France can usually ROFLstomp everyone but an overly aggressive France can easily be ROFLstomped themselves. That said, I think EU4 still falls on its face in the late game with mechanics like Absolutism absolutely pulling the breaks off the train and making Ulm WCs possible - in fact EU4 is sorta confusing for that reason, there are essentially two (maybe three if you want to count the reformation+counter reformation) games there and a portion of that playthrough may be more or less appealing to individual players. Stellaris definitely has some distinct phases but without trying to railroad players the mechanics flow from one phase to the next in a much smoother manner.
Yes, see dfremote — iOS only though I think but works nicely with an iPad Pro and the pencil (provided you have a machine capable of running docker somewhere)
I actually feel compelled to express an opinion regarding WoW classic:
It's a garbage money grab.
The idea that there is a huge nostalgia fueled demand for the original experience doesn't absolve a multi-billion dollar developer from a complete lack of support or quality of life improvements to the game.
There is just too much overlap with the fact that they can literally re-release a game with practically zero development costs.
1) Costs were not zero for the re-release. The only version of the game data (stats, items, enemy spawns etc.) was in the form of an original database backup (from an old employee's personal stash!). Classic runs on the modern WOW engine, so work was required to shoehorn the old data in and reimplement systems and interfaces which don't exist in the current WOW engine.
2) Before Classic's release, by far the most vocal crowd making demands of Blizzard were shouting their slogan "NO CHANGES". I really don't find it surprising that Blizzard has not made major changes since the majority of the player base requested as such...
Fair points, but do you have a source? I'm skeptical that previous versions of the game were discarded.
In terms of audience demographics, I've experienced nostalgia, but frankly I think the president had a point when he made his infamous comment. But I haven't seen any data to support any claims, beyond the existence of private servers.
Blizzard did not charge for WoW Classic. It merely requires an active subscription to the regular game. There's no additional purchase or subscription.
The company invested significant development into Classic. The project started as a fork of Legion, in order to benefit from a decade of anti-bot measures, compatibility fixes, and Battle.net integration (auth and chat). They then ported the original game forward and added "layering" to avoid crashes that plagued the original game in 2004 and 2005.
> Blizzard did not charge for WoW Classic. It merely requires an active subscription to the regular game. There's no additional purchase or subscription.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, in my experience a massive chunk of the players don't play 'retail'. So the cost is just that, $15 a month.
Beyond that, do you have a source? It's not clear that any of these things they've been developing had significant costs in replicating for Classic.
Blizzard shut a "wow classic" style private server down because they are the owners of WoW but then they left lots of people who wanted the classic experience stranded and decided to give them an official way. It's not a money grab.
I worked there for 6-7 years and the CEO fought off vivendis acquisition. Which was not the first.
He has even gone so far as to decentralise the Canadian studios so that if the company was somehow acquired the aquirer could not close down studios without heavy fines from the Canadian government.
Could you elaborate on that last point or share a source? I don't doubt you but I don't understand the legal basis behind that move (but sounds interesting)!
The way it was described to me was that there's two major types of fine that the canadian government will levy against large companies that dump lots of workers at once.
1) More than 50 people within a 4week period.
Usually this means that the company must continue paying employment benefits on behalf of the company for a period of a year (iirc).
2) More than x% of your company being closed down.
You can get around #2 by claiming redundancies or claiming that you've moved the job to another canadian state (or, centralised a position), but once you give the studio its own legal entity and place an MD in charge (who is legally responsible for the studio) you can't do that any longer because the parent company continues to have a legal presence in the country, but operations are considered separate/independent.
Thus, if you close down the studio you've effectively terminated 100% of employment there which will garner super heavy fines.
Also also: Ubisoft doesn't want to piss of the canadian government either because nearly their entire profit exists in the tax break that montreal gives game companies.
.. but, like I said, this was told to me only a few times by a few high level directors and it was when we were talking about Vivendi trying to buy us, and they were also not laywers, so it could be a lot of chinese whispers.
But I've spoken to Yves, and while he's a really genuinely nice person... he will salt the earth before he sells the company.
A federated state and a province are interchangeable terms. They have more specific names in some places, e.g. oblasts, emirates, etc. In much of the world the term state is usually used to refer to sovereign states unless directly talking about the US.
My point is you can't write a long post about Canadian law, use the wrong terminology and expect to be taken seriously. It's not like its commonly referred to as the Ontario state or state of Quebec.
It would be like if I was talking about US law and said the territory of Maryland. It is technically a territory as in "an area of land under the jurisdiction of a ruler or state" but no one refers to it as the territory of Maryland either formally or informally and also makes my post less credible as it sounds like I don't know what I am talking about.
To be perfectly fair with you it's a mistake I commonly make as I'm not exactly interacting with Canadian provinces and it has very little to do with my day to day.
What I am repeating is a "fact" I've heard multiple times from multiple executives and I live half a world away, I've never been truly interested in what the various political systems are in Canada (or the US, or Mexico, or wherever) but I am acutely aware of different laws in those countries too.
For instance in some states in the US it is legal to turn right on red.
If I use the wrong terminology when referencing county or region then it has little bearing on the things I've actually heard.
I never claimed to be an expert on Canadian law, just that I had heard this anecdote and I'm trying to say as often as I can that I'm not an expert in law or Canada itself.
I understand your point, but it _is_ rather pedantic as it doesn't actually change anything about what I said to get it wrong.
I'm sure you know very little about how Switzerland is segmented but you are aware of the direct democracy antics of the country.
Ignorance of one thing does not preclude knowledge of another.
I'm guessing here but the Canadian gov't often subsidizes tech & other engineering companies, so the strategy may be "have the company avail itself of as many subsidies as possible" with subsidies that commit the company to continue operating in City X for Y number of years.
Unity just had its IPO, and the technology is powering a huge fraction of games across all platforms, from recent hit Fall Guys to Pokemon Go, to thousands of indie efforts, not to mention wide adoption in both the AR software industry and as a platform for many AI research projects. I don't know what its financial future will be as the company has been focusing on growth over profit, but it's a significant player.
Tangentially, open-source game engine Godot keeps getting better and better, and it's just a matter of time before a significant game is made using its tools: https://godotengine.org/
According to Switch data, Unity powers about 50% of its games.
It is also the tier1 engine sponsored by Google and Microsoft for their 3D offerings, Godot needs to grow a bit more to reach that level of relevance for game studios, AR/VR companies and Hollywood now looking at Unity.
Unity is definitely a big player on all platforms, but it's probably strongest on smartphones / AR / simulation for AI / and indie developers. Epic's niche with Unreal is more high end AAA games / big studio console releases, and now apparently Hollywood & VFX. Disney and ILM are using Unreal for real-time on-set backdrops in shows like The Mandalorian: https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/20/ilm-reveals-how-it-used-u...
The underlying C++ source code is available for both commercial engines, but Unity charges high fees for source access, and only on a direct per-studio basis, whereas Unreal 4's source is available on GitHub if you pay $20/mo. The vast majority of Unity developers work within its IDE and C# API. There are definitely strong network effects from the sheer number of developers using Unity, such as the amount of documentation, tutorials, and C# code available online.
But again, Godot is fully open source and getting consistently better as it evolves. It's C++ based, closing in on competitive rendering, ported to every relevant architecture, and has a full IDE and scripting system. It reminds me a lot of the Blender project. At some point, some significant video game IP will be built using it and shake things up. It's just a matter of time.
Nintendo isn't really helpful to understand the greater market.
Most developers don't work with them, and their customers represent a tiny less "gaming educated" population. It's like using cellphone games as a gauge on the greater market.
The switch is also a huge market for indie devs now. Just a crazy amount of indie games in the switch market. Hell one company, Brace Yourself Games, leveraged their game 'Crypt of the Necrodancer' into a connected zelda licensed game called 'Cadence of Hyrule' that just won some awards.
The whole 'Nintendo is a thing unto itself' narrative is fading quickly.
I mean, a part of the reason why indie titles work there is that Nintendo is refusing to offer a AAA gamepass, is using underpowered hardware and is charging a price premium for it. They very much are resisting trends and are their own thing, and it's kind of hard to really use them as a long term market barometer because it can and will backfire as often as it works.
They also kind of are in uncharted waters too. This is now the first time I think they don't have a dedicated handheld and home console, and just have one platform. A lot of why they were able to survive mistakes was having the handheld market as an evergreen to fall back on.
>The whole 'Nintendo is a thing unto itself' narrative is fading quickly.
I fully agree with you, but that narrative has started changing only in recent times. Not that long ago, I would have mostly agreed with the premise that "Nintendo is a thing unto itself."
If my memory serves right, Nintendo was dipping feet into it since at least GameCube/Wii era, but only with Switch they started seriously being, in my eyes, a not "unto itself" kind of an entity.
That's some impressive mental gymnastics to try to redefine a market to be more like one you want it to be. Here's a tip: Markets are defined by demand, not supply.
There are more:
- paradox interactive
- rockstar, which is strong from gta v online and rdr
- cd projeckt red, which also get income from gog and hyped cyberpunk
- valve won't exit software devs in short time, their investment in vr is big. I won't be surprised if they release vanity knives with lootbox though
IMO Bethesda decided to sell to MS because their recent games cannot generate enough popularity. They can only hoped for skyrim and are struggling with their old engine.
> IMO Bethesda decided to sell to MS because their recent games cannot generate enough popularity
Truly mystifying why they'd want to create an MMO. It's as if they hadn't been following the news. The success of WoW is incredibly hard to repeat, and most studios who try fail, no matter how much money they throw at it.
The MMO space has been, WoW aside, a money bonfire for one and a half decade at this point.
I forgot, that's true. But it wasn't a big hit on release, I'd imagine the vast majority of those are bought when it's on sale, like the steam summer sale.
Fallout 4 was a massive hit and they've got a new franchise about to come out (Starfield). Wolfenstein + Dishonored have consistently sold well.
In May 2016, 5 years after Skyrim was released, it was valued at $2.5 billion, now it's being bought 4 years later for $7.5 billion.
I appreciate some Bethesda fans have a weird agenda, but you are wrong. Also, Starfield has been written in an overhauled engine, so again, wrong[1]. Although to be honest, it's probably the same engine with updates and they're just saying that to try and stop the small minority of rabid fans that keep on harping about their imagined deficiencies of the creation engine with every new Bethesda game. That's then always a massive hit.
So? Lots of studios have flops. The point is they've had plenty more successes since Skyrim. I even forgot to mention DOOM and Prey. And don't forget, FO76 wasn't even made by the main studio.
Adding the back catalogue to gamepass (and probably taking it all off steam), is part of the price too.
Hell, if the price was $7.5 billion even after the FO76 flop, what would it have been if they'd pulled it off? Making a whole new type of MMO.
Fallout 76 is even the exact sort of "live service" game that seems to do really well on Xbox Game Pass. (Sea of Thieves is often mentioned by Microsoft as a gold standard live service game that exceeds exceeds "sales expectations" precisely because of Game Pass; it probably wouldn't have sold as much as it has without Game Pass.) Rumors are that when Bethesda put FO76 on Game Pass the player count went way up, though Microsoft remains mysterious about actual Game Pass numbers, and FO76 also released a major expansion pack and cross-play at the same time, so if those rumors are true it may not just have been Game Pass but the confluence of things.
I think comparison is a bit unfair since nms is (mostly) single player while fo76 is not. If nms gets good (i believe it is good btw, I play it regularly on VR) it would still sell 5 years later but fo76 would be dead if it can't keep up player count high.
So yeah, a failed multiplayer/mmo game is a bigger failure imo, because it is hard/impossible to recover from
> ... stop the small minority of rabid fans that keep on harping about their imagined deficiencies of the creation engine with every new Bethesda game.
Seeing as there are still some ancient problems with CreationKit (physics over 60fps, widescreen support, etc), I'll be interested to see how much they will overhaul it and how many old bugs will have to be fixed by the community (see nexusmods "Universal Patch" for any CK Bethesda game).
FWIW the 60fps issue was introduced in Oblivion (it didn't exist in Morrowind) and that was because of the physics integration. However that is an integration issue and something they have actually fixed - in other games (e.g. Skyrim VR).
Similarly with widescreen support, there isn't really an issue with it, you can use any resolution by modifying configuration files but they just... do not bother to polish it up.
(note that any bug that can be fixed with normal mods isn't really an engine bug but a content bug - though some mods do work by hooking the engine executable)
GTA V, mainly thanks to their online offering, has been the 2nd best selling video game of all time, second only to Minecraft... which Microsoft bought in 2014 for $2.5 billion.
Mind you, Minecraft's income comes from a lot of merchandise and spinoffs, whereas GTA is mainly from the game itself.
I was curious; RDR 2, also a Rockstar game, is the #14 best selling game of all time apparently; I didn't know it did that good. The other GTA games are also in the top 50.
Rockstar makes multiplayer titles, but doesn't have an engine that's capable of dealing with that (leading to an absurd number of bugs and performance problems), and they have no security at all, so their games are only playable on not-yet-cracked consoles. Rockstar even went so far as to include a "finger of god" feature in GTA, which allowed their admins to kick players from and mess with the single player mode, except Rockstar has no security, so mod menu developers figured out how anyone with a menu could use those features to mess with literally anyone's single player. They eventually removed that feature, which as I recall is one of maybe two or three times they fixed a security problem. Previously mod menu users could reset character stats and outright ban other players. It's incredibly broken, even though financially successful, based on ethically questionable marketing of ingame purchases to minors. RDR2 may be beautiful, but performance is bad. RDO runs on the exact same system as GTA, so zero security and unplayable on PC.
I've played most Rockstar titles, but never multiplayer. I don't understand how a lack of security means they're only playable on uncracked consoles. That sounds backwards. I've only ever played them on uncracked consoles. (and it's not just "yet", I just don't crack any consoles I own)
The performance is good enough for any of my purposes. I don't doubt it could be better.
The security thing sounds like a real problem. I didn't know about any of that.
The problem is not what you do with your console or PC, the problem is that multiplayer is P2P and a complete lack of security, anticheat and hardening means that anyone with a mod menu can do practically everything with your game (kick from the game, ban you from in-game features, make the game stuck, crash it, give you bad FPS, flashing or shaking screen, follow you into every session you join and even damage your installation). The only thing that prevents all of this is the platform not being cracked.
If Epic is successful in their lawsuit against Apple, then I think it's only a matter of time before the consoles will have to allow alternate stores as well.
The hardware-is-sold-at-a-loss argument that people like to use to defend closed console stores isn't as convincing when the console makers also own the biggest money making game studios as well.
Kind of ironic how bad an argument that is when discussing anti-trust. It's a form of dumping to distort the market. It prevents new competitors becoming viable purely by selling hardware.
Following from alternate stores on consoles, we're not far away from Valve's SteamBox, i.e. prebuilt PCs marketed for living room play. I'm disappointed the idea never took off.
I would love the game industry to fully embrace Linux. If cloud gaming gains more traction, the industry might just do that. Why develop games to run on custom-built blades in a data center when generic blades exist?
> I would love the game industry to fully embrace Linux.
Take a look at what all linux games are lacking and what nearly all AAA game that aren't on linux have.
...
DRM and Anti-Cheat.
Let's forget that DRM is trash. Publishers want to have it, and they don't care about our opinion of it. You can't really "port" DRM, you have to develop a whole new one for Linux and figure how to prevent easy-peasy eBPF programs to make cracking it easy.
Anti-Cheat is another story. Valve and Easy Anti-Cheat are currently working on bringing it to Linux. You need that and you want that for any online game. Probably not as hard as DRM, but still requires a lot of linux specific work.
I mean, the joke is funny but realistically it's clear that Valve is getting back in the game, so to speak, and we're probably going to see some VR followup to Alyx in the next year or two.
People really need to watch (play?) (read?) The Final Hours of Half Life Alyx. Its a documentary-like experience available on Steam which dives in to the past decade or two at Valve.
From the outside, all we see is very few games being produced. From the inside, its far more complex; something like a Dark Decade for Valve where even they weren't sure what they should be working on. Hundreds of failed prototypes and ideas. Major technical issues with Source 2 that took years to fix. L4D3 was under development, but ran into huge scope creep (full open world with variable length days depending on time of year and hemisphere, variable tides based on moon cycle, crazy stuff like that). They were working on a tech showcase codenamed ARTI/Artifact using a brand new voxel-based game engine separate from Source (and after the game was canceled, the name was taken and used for the now-released Dota 2 Card Game).
When you hear stuff like this, you start to wonder if Valve's management style is half as sustainable as they would like to think. Without Steam and hats/knives they'd be broke several times over with that sort of lack of focus and inability to release games outside of what seems a decadal cycle. (ETA: Which possibly makes a "locusts of gaming" analogy relevant for Valve, hah.)
Except that out of that experimentation came Alyx. Everything in that game is outstanding from a technical perspective, the way you interact with the world feels completely natural.
Sure they could have pushed out a VR game every year for the last 5 years to maybe get to the same level of interaction fluidity but they would all feel subpar, not quite there, like the vast majority of other VR games.
Valves strength is that they a have a structure that allows experimentation without a hard deadline, they can afford to throw millions at the wall and see what sticks. This allows themw to take a decade between large, ground breaking projects. They're not beholden to YoY or QoQ growth.
They've had what? Two duds in 20+ years? Not bad when you consider the rest of their output are beloved classics.
Granted they have a good few money printing machines to help them work like this but I would argue that they have these money printing machines because they have the ability to experiment, because of their structure.
I'm not sure about that. I read Alyx as a very successful tech demo intended to push the market sector out a bit and make money off the platform and hardware, rather than a renewed more games-centric direction for Valve. Much like iD's output often being tech demos for the game engines that they then license to other studios.
The only debate is whether is a game first, or a demo of how full games work in the framework/hardware first and a full game because that was deemed the best way to showcase the what is possible.
Sort of; unless they make more games, Alyx is "just" a tech demo or an attempt to sell more of their VR kits.
It's weird, they've got some seriously good franchises that they haven't done anything with; Half-Life could use a sequel every few years; Portal could become a massive franchise; Team Fortress 2, CS:GO and DOTA 2 are huge money makers but I think they're reluctant to make sequels to those because of balancing and pissing off the existing, invested player bases. (I think that may have happened when they went from CS:S to CS:Go, where the latter had very lucrative monetization options, lucrative but morally dubious because of off-site trading and gambling)
as a player, I'm not really sure what would be gained from a sequel to csgo. any big change to the mechanics would just piss everyone off, and smaller changes can just be done as updates to the existing game. csgo was only ~$20 when it launched, and it's free now, so I don't think there's much financial upside to selling a newer cs title. they already make plenty of money off skins.
the only thing I see that they could really change in a new title would be the graphics, but I don't think that's much of a selling point to the audience. cs players care more about getting >100fps on their potato computer than pretty graphics.
Do we need sequels every few years? Don't get me wrong I'll be the first I the queue for HL3 or Portal 3 but only because historically it has been a fantastic set of games.
I dunno about this. The current consensus of community is that Dota 2 is dying and valve couldn't be bothered doing anything about it. Just cashing in while they can.
CS:GO is actually their biggest game now, but it does look like Dota 2 is dying. From a business perspective, they don't have any reason to try and save it though. They've lost ~40% of their players over the past 4 years, but are making more money than ever. The in-game tutorials have been unfinished for years, their Dota+ subscription service is all but abandoned (but still bringing in millions of dollars a year), and even cosmetics are mostly contained to a time-limited battlepass to take advantage of FOMO.
CS GO was abandoned by valve, community picked up the scene by creating their own leagues and tournaments. Only then valve gracefully came back to support CS :(
CS:GO is also going to trend downward soon with the release of Valorant, which is basically the same game with a few superpowers attached. All my friends who played GO switched over, they're attracting a pro scene, I think it's only a matter of time tbh.
I'll be a single counter-point. I straight up reinstalled Windows to play Valorant and all it's done is made me play a lot more CSGO. I'm legitimately having more fun with CSGO now than I have in a very long time! The game feels like it's in a super good place. It's got a ton of cool skins, the competitive scene feels really competitive at the moment, playing it competitively feels great. The DM mode scratches a very good itch, gun game is still a lot of fun, etc...
I'm old enough that I remember people saying this in 2014. Actual data on active users - https://steamcharts.com/app/570#All. This indicates that it's far from it's peak of 1.2M active players but 700k active is still respectable.
Personal story time, few months back me and my buddy got asked to help our non-dota friend get into the game. We are both playing occasionally in lower brackets.
Both of us created new account to so that noobie wouldn't be thrown into deep water right away. Note that me and my friend were 'baby sitting' - playing neutrally not trying to win vs lower rated opponents.
Out of 10 games 7 had hardcore smurfs in them. People in stack dominating their lanes. I don't see how anyone new and without any friends could possibly survived through such acid pool.
Imagine you are starting to play chess and 7/10 opponents are rated master and will crush you. And its kind of crush that you can't really learn from either.
I really don't see how dota can grow when there are so many alternatives.
Nah we both play passive (avoiding aggression ourselves), besides blatant smurfs getting 15 kills by 20min are not tagged as smurfs. I just don't think there are any mechanisms to catch that and match noobies with other noobies. Instead they are sent straight into slaughterhouse.
900k active presumably includes the 50% of Deathmatch players that are zombies?
It's interesting to see there seems to be some evolutionary pressures at play as a couple of new routines are being used, not just 'rotate on the spot', one or two shoot now (yes, I got shot by an XP farming zombie) and one does epicycles which makes them surprisingly hard to shoot.
I think its actually someone in a computer lab in pakistan etc running 10 computers at a time and just selectively doing an action or two per account each round.
CSGO has the same thing.
We still have large, amazing, original games coming out of small studios. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an excellent example.
We may get to a point where there are practically no "medium-large" developers and only "massive" ones like Microsoft, but I'm confident we'll still get great games from outside the massive groups.
Nintendo is self-sustainable, Apple is exerting a lot of influence among smaller studios with Arcade. Like Annapurna Interactive (which is nota bene funded by Oracle).
Nintendo is just two bad generations of hardware from being vulnerable enough to sell itself (IMO.)
They had only $4.3 billion cash on hand as of 2018 (surely more by now thanks to the success and maturation of the Switch.) But Microsoft just dropped a little less than double that on ZeniMax.
I wish Nintendo were in such a rock-solid place where I'd feel confident about them existing forever like Disney but I don't think that's ever been the case.
Edit- The people downvoting me have apparently already forgotten about the Wii U. Imagine if they had two such systems in a row, without the DS/3DS line as a profitable fallback. Such are the possibilities of the future.
When Nintendo's doing well, they're doing great, and everyone seems to forget the bad times. The GameCube era wasn't much better, but at least the GameCube and GBA were profitable/break even from their launches, as opposed to the Wii U and especially 3DS post-Ambassador price cut.
Would be interested in a discussion or any kind of rebuttal from others who are actually familiar with Nintendo's financial history.
To be clear: Nintendo as a company operated a loss from 2012-2015. An incompetent CEO could easily exacerbate that into a death spiral. Don't take Nintendo for granted, is all I'm saying.
It's a possibility but pivoting to software isn't easy by any stretch, and it wasn't something Sega should have even been able to do (financially.) The only reason it happened is because Sega's biggest debtor, Isao Okawa, forgave that debt on his deathbed.
In a slightly altered timeline where Okawa didn't do this, Sega would have went under and its IP's would have been sold piecemeal to the highest bidders.
Nintendo has famously large cash reserves rich and a quick Internet search suggests they have about 7 billion in cash. Things would have to go very badly for them to go out of business, especially as they can presumably issue new stock to help raise money for a pivot in some sort of doomsday scenario.
Over $4 billion cash on hand is an insane amount of money for such a small company. Nintendo is only about 4,000 employees worldwide, so that cash will go a very long way.
You're getting downvoted because you are talking from a place of objectivity. From my understanding (outside of the Wii U), aren't they the only company not losing money on consoles - even now? Why would you bring up "selling themselves" when talking about a company founded in 1889? None of the competitors existed that long - using your logic, Sony and Microsoft might as well count their last days.
"It eventually became one of the most prominent figures in today's video game industry, being the world's largest video game company by revenue"
I wish Nintendo would just take some ideas from other companies in the areas of online play and incorporate them into their own products. My friends and I would love to play Mario Kart on Switch with each other, but we can't be bothered to setup an additional voice chat solution and use the dumb lobby system. We also would like to play Mario Party online, but Mario Party Switch doesn't even offer its main game modes online, just a handful of mini games.
It's frustrating because there's a lot of untapped potential.
> Nintendo is self-sustainable, Apple is exerting a lot of influence among smaller studios with Arcade. Like Annapurna Interactive (which is nota bene funded by Oracle).
I feel Apple Arcade sucks. I recently subscribed, cause I thought maybe my daughter would enjoy it. But most of the games are still too hard for her. So then I tried to play some games on Arcade for myself, but can't say I enjoyed it. Played a few games for 15 - 30 minutes then got bored. There just seems to be very few -if any- really quality games on Apple Arcade, at least from my point of view.
A few days ago I ordered the Retroid Pocket 2 [0], I hope this device will help me get my gaming fix.
If the Retroid Pocket 2 provides me and my daughter with a fun experience, then later I'll order a 2nd one for my daughter. I believe old NES/SNES games are probably easier to play for a 3.5 year old child compared to most of Apple Arcade's offerings. My daughter can already handle a simple gamepad, so as long as the game doesn't use too many buttons (4 directions + A/B/X/Y), a game should be playable for her.
Apple's entire approach to gaming is broken. I tried to play various games on my iPad Pro and AppleTV recently and just getting a controller to work is a shitshow. Half the games that work with controllers have weird moments where you need to touch the screen.
It's fine for extremely casual or touch based games but doesn't work for anything serious.
> Have you tried any NES games lately? They're super hard! SNES games are better but they're still almost all very difficult.
NES games might be hard. I never really had a NES while I was young. But I do know for sure some SNES games that will be easy to play. E.g. Mario Kart & Unirally. There's some videos on YouTube that shows other games that are playable by young children [0]. Super Double Dragon isn't too complicated either I think and the Retroid Pocket 2 can be connected to a tv using HDMI cable and can use BLE to connect controllers. So that way I can play together with my daughter at the same time, to make it even easier for her.
Here's a video that suggests some NES games for children [1].
Annapurna Interactive has had their name on so many creative, well-done projects recently. I had no idea they received funding from Oracle, but quite frankly that just makes me think (somewhat) better of Oracle, not less of Annapurna.
I would never want it to happen because of how much I love Nintendo. But I have always thought if there is any gaming property Apple can really benefit from buying, it is Nintendo.
I mean, one of the founders (Megan Ellison) is Larry Ellison's daughter, I'm sure he helped it get started, but does Oracle as a company have any official activity with Annapurna?
The barrier between what indie studios and big studios can produce is increasingly shrinking. I'd say the market has never been healthier. The sheer amount of content is still constrained by some linear function of man hours but there's enough crowdsourcing business models like kickstarter and early access releases that even small shops can afford to show a cool concept and get funded for its completion.
And not just Tencent - there are also other companies, like NetEase, which while smaller than Tencent at about 1/6th of the size, still takes more annual revenue than EA. (Going by figures on Wikipedia).
If you think Valve will exit software development, then you don't understand the market. Valve did do that and had this luxury when they were the only big game platform on PC. Unfortunately for them, there's GOG, EPIC, and MS Game Pass now. They need exclusives and the best way to do that without going the EPIC route is by developing their own games.
I'd argue that Valve doesn't need exclusives just yet. By virtue of being the default PC store they get plenty of games that are not on any other store. But this will change.
I don't think it's fair to include Microsoft in that list. They buy game studios so they can close them and shelve their IP after several attempts to turn beloved franchises into GAAS products. They're less of a game studio conglomerator and more of a recycling bin.
Depends on which era of Microsoft Game Studios / Xbox Game Studios you are talking about. Also, Microsoft has never really shelved IP ever, even Flight Simulator is back out of retirement! They've sold IP back to (nearly) the original developers, which is somewhat unheard of outside of Microsoft (Fasa's BattleTech/Mech Warrior and Shadowrun IP brands are back in the "indy space" because Microsoft sold it back; you rarely hear of an Activision or EA IP getting sold back to small developers). Even Microsoft's worst turnover period of developer subsidiaries had some interesting mitigating circumstances: Bungie wanted to be independent again (and again that's a weird case where you'd be surprise to see a developer like Bungie spin back out of an Activision or an EA; Bungie themselves had to do a ton of work on their publishing contracts to avoid being swallowed up by Activision with Destiny), and rumors are that whatever happened to Lionhead may have been a suicide, though who knows if the story will ever be substantiated one way or the other (and Lionhead's IP hasn't been "shelved" for long either with Playground Games working on a new Fable).
Godot, Blender, itch.io, Krita. Nobody forces you to use walled gardens. Games are entertainment, not something mandatory, so I wouldn't worry too much. If there's too much of an lock-in from the major vendors, it will simply cause the indie scene to explode.
Both of them are free, though. The former one only got this push due to streamers suddenly playing it together. These are kind of "meme of the moment" games more than anything, in the same way VR Chat was a bit ago, or Five Nights at Freddy's.
Fall Guys was "free" on PS4 at launch in the sense that it was included in PS+.
Among Us is just really cheap (free to play on its original mobile platforms, I believe, but that's not really the source of its current moment of popularity).
Plus is a strange case because you need it for online play and some other PS features like cloud saves, so many people have it regardless of what games are on offer. Let's just say that a large number of PS4 players got it at no marginal cost.
> Great! I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs, and they don’t have a grudge against me, so maybe I will be able to re engage with some of my old titles.
The fact that Zenimax corporate, and likely some unknown exec in that machine, had a long standing grudge against John Carmack made me loose so much respect for them. I may not always agree with Carmack from what I've read on twitter (he works for Facebook now) but I have the utmost respect for him, his transparency in his key note lectures, and his supremely engineering focused priorities. His leadership at id Software led to open sourcing of game engines and building modding support in all their titles. This openness and community building became a trend in the PC gaming industry though the 90s and 2000s and ushered a creative golden age that jumpstarted many game development studios and careers. It seems like Zenimax took whatever excitement those early days of PC gaming generated and started extracting consumer dollars with over-produced sequels that treated PCs like another console. They were able to make much more money, but we all came out intellectually impoverished in my opinion.
>had a long standing grudge against John Carmack made me loose so much respect for them.
No kidding. You want to keep a guy like Carmack in the family in whatever capacity you can, because he carries such deep respect in the industry. It was a stupid thing for ZeniMax to burn that bridge.
Late Satoru Iwata famously coded Pokemon Stadium battle system without design document, only by looking at the gameboy source code. He later became Nintendo CEO.
Just wanted to point out a small discrepancy here: As his bio on Twitter says, he's currently an independent AI researcher. But also sometimes consults for Oculus VR, although not actively employed there anymore. [0]
It'd be very interesting to see if his return to Id might spark some changes :)
Carmack's Facebook Connect talk last week[1] sure made him sound very plugged into what's happening at Oculus. I was surprised, given that I, too, thought he had essentially left for AI research.
Most of the higher level Oculus engineers are very in tune with what is happening within Oculus and the industry. There is constant discussion internally about it, and Oculus still knows more about VR than anybody else. Source: I was one of them.
I think every non-manager employee these days should be "independent." Some may not have noticed, but tech company managers have gone insane and turned their ego up to 11 echoing the current political climate. Anyone who is a famous dev or even a grunt that shows they have basic competency is going to be an immediate management target.
Perhaps, but also perhaps that recent thing where Nine Inch Nails released an LP with the Quake 1 soundtrack [0], had some notes from John Carmack and American McGee to be included with the record and Zenimax forced NIN to remove the notes [1]. Though of course people saved it [2].
Carmack left Zenimax because they wanted him to work on sequels instead of VR. They only started caring about VR once the $2B Oculus acquisition was dangled in their faces, and then scrambled to find a way to get a slice that they didn't earn.
I didn't buy DOOM because I didn't support Zenimax's cynical lawsuit/cash grab. Maybe now I'll get DOOM after the Microsoft acquisition closes.
Is there a source for this? Because I always thought that it was the other way around - Carmack was rather bored, sold the company and moved somewhere else.
He sold the company in 2009, long before Oculus existed. He intended to continue working there [1] and he did for several years. AFAIK he didn't start dabbling in VR until 2012 and didn't leave id until 2013, after attempting to work on VR stuff there for a while which was seemingly blocked, e.g. DOOM 3 BFG VR support which he promised but Zenimax never released.
They lost on their claims against Carmack, had their award against Oculus reduced and injunction denied, and ultimately settled out of court. I strongly disagree with the magnitude of the damages sought.
Carmack also sued them separately for failing to pay him for part of their id software acquisition. They settled out of court again, with Carmack saying the settlement "fully satisfied their obligations" to him.
I believe it did, in addition to mega-textures in video games.
What I am hoping for, and been hoping for a while, is for game engines to start integrating AI into workflows. There are some tools out there that do leverage machine learning to some extent, but what I would love to see are tools for instance that can take a video shot of an actor and then infer the bone structure a decent degree and transfer that animation into the model. Or a tool that allows style transfer of an image onto a 3D model so we can have realistically dynamic brush tools for environments, also integrating Face generation GANs onto models to reduce sculpting effort. Not to mention tools that can dynamically and infinitely scale 3D models based on material information.
I know some tools exist that can do some of these things at an okay degree, but it can be taken even further.
Truly the power of AI in video game tooling has yet to be unlocked, but I believe video games as a medium is in the position of being able to push for practical applications of new and exciting research, second only to CGI films. It's exciting what's in store for the future and I'm sure Carmack can appreciate the kind of breakthroughs that Microsoft would be able to foster
Well I was just thinking the other day that Microsoft really doesn't have any first party studio that are really as good as Sony's first party. IMO they didn't release a game 'this' gen that makes picking up a xbox one worth it. This could change that with fallout and doom. Also this allows them to bring the ID tech engine under their stewardship....
I just hope that they don't trash the franchises in an attempt to bolster game pass.
The weird thing about F76 is that the monetization doesn't effect the game, it's just not very good. I have never supported a game through microtransactions, but I actually felt I wanted to for F76 as it seems like a candidate for a "Forever Game" fallout world that gets expanded upon. But they have nothing I would ever want to buy.
I hope this acquisition will fix Bethesda. Skyrim was their last game worth talking about, everything since then has either been effectively a Skyrim mod or a cash grab. With exception to Doom.
Just to double down on Skyrim - I paid for it at least four times.
Once on PC, once on Xbox, another time to get the remastered special edition, and finally on Nintendo Switch and I had zero regrets tbh. I even played switch and xbox in parallel when I traveled more.
Every game has somebody who loves it. Even that terrible Superman game. Fallout 4 wasn't total garbage, but it was huge step down from Fallout 3 or Skyrim.
Skyrim was a significant technical advancement of Gamebryo, not just in terms of visual quality or so forth, but also in terms of what was possible with the engine. Fallout 4 was a minor upgrade and could have easily been a total conversion mod for Skyrim - there was no innovation and it did nothing new. Irrespective of whether people enjoyed that re-skinned Skyrim, it was a blatant cash-grab.
The argument has nothing to do with anybody enjoying the game, a metric that I did not mention at all in my comment, it has to do with a growing trend where Bethesda has been doing the absolute bare minimum to cash in on their fans' good will.
That was my big problem with Fallout 3, it felt like an Oblivion total conversion... I had difficulty enjoying it because it still "felt" like Oblivion in so many ways, to me :(
They left a comment on the internet - I don’t think it’s civil to conflate it to being universal - why not explore their opinion, or just accept that de gustibus non est disputandum?
Also, what if vanilla could be proven to be universally better? That’d be cool, how could one go about doing that? Probably either: eliminate the supply of chocolate world wide, or spend billions marketing vanilla... Probably lots of ways to get a universal sentiment with the right levers!
One ding in chocolate: there’s no chocolate coca-cola... or is there? I should google that :) There do seeeeeem to be more vanilla flavored mass market colas than chocolate, but that’s very much cherry picking.
A ding for vanilla, I’m not sure if it’s ever eaten alone in any meaningful way, but I dunno, I’d have to think about it more.
> That's exactly my point. I haven't once conflated the two, all of your comments have.
How? The disagreement is if Fallout 4 was a moneygrab or not. Is that correct?
According to you it was because it "Skyrim was a significant technical advancement of Gamebryo, not just in terms of visual quality or so forth, but also in terms of what was possible with the engine. Fallout 4 was a minor upgrade and could have easily been a total conversion mod for Skyrim - there was no innovation and it did nothing new."
Correct me if I am wrong but isn't this "conflatng" the effort gone into a game, and specifically the engine, with the quality of the game?
No. It's measuring the amount of investment into the game.
Some very dedicated folks took the pittance of time/money afforded to them and made a fantastic effort. Imagine what the same people could have done with an engine that wasn't merely a minor graphical improvement. Imagine what FO4 could have been with richer story telling technology (dialog mechanics, interaction mechanics, etc.), instead the content team was stuck with the same scripting power available in Skyrim.
BOTH the effort of people who clearly care about the franchise AND the publisher's shameless money grubbing show in the final product.
I don't see it as shit throwing or being toxic. Apologies if I came across like this. I am just trying to argue about something that really doesn't matter for the sake of making arguments
Appreciate you saying this. Consider that your argument counterparts don’t see it this way. Are you saying you’ll sign up for my weird internet argument championships?
It was a huge step down if you liked RPG games, which given Bethesda traditionally made rpg games and that fallout was originally an rpg series is hugely important.
Fallout 4 suffered from quest repetition/duplication, an emphasis on combat over other rpg driven approaches to play and a relatively low ability to effect the world as the player.
It's not a bad game per say but it's a mediocre rpg. It was arguably more disappointing given how incredible an rpg New Vegas was despite not having been finished properly.
I only started Fallout 76 this summer so I can't speak to the bad state it launched in. But the recent major update got good word of mouth and it was on sale for $15. I haven't paid a dime extra and I've had a full single player experience that matches or succeeds Fallout 4.
If you just want another single player Fallout game, this game is a steal and has no monetization problem. What I can't do is build up a camp using a lot of different trinkets from the store, but luckily I don't care about that.
What would you say is Microsoft's worst game for microtransactions?
I've played Forza Horizon 4 for a while and you can buy cars in that game, but you earn enough points that they all become pretty cheap after only a few hours in the game.
The biggest issue for me was that certain in-game cars were locked behind the spin-the-wheel game, and while(thankfully) there was no way to spend real life money for more spins, it still felt absolutely shit that I could have 100+ in-game hours, hundreds of millions of in-game currency, and yet no, I can't have that Mercedes E63 AMG, because it can only be won through spins. In Horizon 3 you could just buy any car at any point, it was just a matter of getting enough currency.
Thankfully Microsoft experimented with the real money payment for sort of the "spin-the-wheel" equivalent in the mainline Forza Motorsport series (off hand I can't remember if it was 5 or 6 that was the absolute nadir), and learned enough from that failed experience (and a similar one in I think it was Gears 4 and Halo 5) that it never infected the Horizon series.
Forza Street probably. Anything with microtransactions is bound to be bad for customers but FS is probably the most criticized MS product to date (and yeah, it's a re-skinned, acquired product but I'd still count it against Microsoft since they attach themselves to it).
Halo 5, Warzone REQ packs could be a money sink for certain kinds of players. Personally, I haven’t spent a dime on the game except the initial purchase - but it really soured the community that one could spend real money on power weapons. Given that many items in REQ packs are single-use rather than permanent unlocks it can be a whale magnet as well, and I absolutely do not think game developers should be allowed to capitalize on people with addiction problems like this.
You can't buy them in-game without buying them with real money first. Once you unlock the car pack, or spend 1/3 as much to unlock that particular car, you can buy as many extras as you want with in-game money.
Sure thing. But this also changes the reference point. If the entire video game industry is THAT predatory by 2022, it's hard to single out Microsoft for that and hold me responsible for my optimism today. ;)
When I saw Doom 2016 running on OpenGL I was shocked. I would’ve never thought you could write an AAA game with it. It made me wonder why game developers use DX instead.
If you want to target Xbox, you need to write a D3D renderer anyway (although the Xbox API has some significant differences, if I understand correctly). There's little point writing an OpenGL renderer if your target platforms are Windows, Xbox, and PlayStation (which has its own graphics API).
Also, my understanding is that on Windows, OpenGL generally runs into more issues with driver bugs than D3D does.
I work for a large video games company and we usually write two backends - DirectX for Windows and Xbox, and a special one for PlayStation. That is changing slightly with Stadia, because that forces us to write a Vulkan renderer too. But on the few games that have it, the DX12 performance is better on windows than that of the Vulkan renderer backend - so we haven't released it to the public.
So.....no, because gamer press is ruthless :P We've had one graphical bug in one of our games(which I'm certain everyone on the internet has seen by this point), and in reality it was only happening if you played on one specific GeForce card, and only when using beta Nvidia drivers. But of course no one cared that the bug only happened when using experimental drivers - it was somehow a proof of how broken our games are. If this(the vulkan backend) lead to any graphical bugs in our games, I can almost guarantee that they would be paraded everywhere, no matter how clearly we mark it as experimental and unfinished.
> Also, my understanding is that on Windows, OpenGL generally runs into more issues with driver bugs than D3D does.
I'm not sure if that's the case anymore, but it definitely has a bad rep on Windows. Initially (throughout XP and maybe some of Vista) OpenGL support on Windows was done by a OpenGL -> DirectX translation layer, so performance was always worse in OpenGL mode unless a game's Direct3D implementation was especially awful. This stopped being the case when NVIDIA started shipping a full OpenGL driver. (I'm not sure when AMD/ATI started shipping theirs)
> Initially (throughout XP and maybe some of Vista) OpenGL support on Windows was done by a OpenGL
Initially (Windows 95), OpenGL support was provided directly by the OS. Starting with Windows 98, Microsoft stopped updating the OGL version of their reference driver, so users were stuck with OGL 1.1 unless the graphics card driver shipped with a custom OpenGL implementation.
So whenever an application uses an OGL version higher than v1.1, it is provided by the graphics card driver and that has nothing to do with DirectX. There is no translation layer in that case (unless of course, that's what the driver does internally, but that's up to the manufacturer).
TL;DR Custom OGL drivers shipped with every graphics card that supported OGL in Windows since 1998.
That hasn't been the case, then, because I clearly remember OpenGL being translates to DirectX in XP/Vista days. Whether it was because anything >1.1 called that up or because the driver vendors chose translation over native, I don't know.
Original link seems to be dead but Slashdot references Vista layering OpenGL on top of Direct3D:
That comment references something else entirely - namely the Aero rendering system of the OS. This didn't affect applications that didn't use the Aero glass scheme (it was an option during window creation), however, or apps running in full-screen mode.
The Aero glass scheme was hardware accelerated and only worked with Direct3D, thus any OGL context created for a window using this renderer would have to run via Direct3D.
This is a very special case and as noted earlier, easily circumvented by simply not using this feature in your app.
Because game developers mostly don't pick the backend, game engine developers do. The vast majority of game developers pick a game engine and that drives most of their other technical decisions. There are really only a dozen game engines that have enough market share to matter, and a decent chunk of the biggest ones were built on top of DX for various reasons. OpenGL, while a great concept, was a fairly flawed execution for quite a while (its gotten a lot better in the last 10 years or so), so I can at least partially understand why in the past someone who doesn't care at all about cross-platform support might have steered clear of it.
Reading this the second time, I think it might be one of the best "we're being acquired by X" announcements I've ever read. Excited but restrained, and it acknowledges (somewhat implicitly, but still) that there's going to be _quite a bit_ of trepidation in Bethesda's fanbase over the change.
"WHEN THE HELL WILL YOU TELL ME ABOUT STARFIELD?" and the rest of that paragraph actually fills me with a pretty high degree of confidence that this will go well. That, and Nadella-era Microsoft's surprisingly good track record in recent acquisitions.
Really? I was immediately unimpressed when they started trying to claim they did it so they can make better games, rather than because Microsoft offered them a boatload of money.
Looking outside of the gaming space their recent acquisitions seem to have gone fine, no? For example Github seems to go well, Linkedin was always pretty shit and unethical, so I'm not sure it's any better or worse. Citus seems to still be going well and still offers on-prem or enterprise versions on other clouds than Azure. Xamarin is more open-sourced since Microsoft took over.
IMO, (and if you told me I'd say this 10 years ago I'd say you're crazy) of the big tech companies right now I think MS might be the best steward.
Skype is a very loud example of a poorly handled acquisition by Microsoft.
The client has been turned into a real fan-spinner and it seems like they sacrificed a great standalone service for something that pushes consumer and business users towards tight integration with Microsoft's platform.
2020 could have been a banner year for Skype; instead Zoom is now shorthand for any video meeting whatsoever.
Yes, Skype was handled incredibly bad. I don't think MS knew what they bought and both the client and the platform turned from being the kleenex of voip to similar to seeing a yahoo email nowadays.
I think MS'es ways have changed since then though, looking at acquisitions since 2013 to 2015-ish they seem to have been handled better IMO.
Also, an argument can be made that some of Microsoft's mess was being too hands off with Skype. A lot of Skype's own development woes were projects they started back while owned by eBay and simply finished in time for Microsoft to get the blame. Also the whole "Skype for Business isn't Skype and doesn't share anything but the brand name" was a hands off decision that was dumb in retrospect.
> Also this allows them to bring the ID tech engine under their stewardship.
It doesn't have to be id tech, but can they make Todd Howard use some other engine than whatever Gamebryo monstrosity Bethesda Softworks been using for 20 years?
I think that's overstating it. Fallout 4 was well received even if it was a little disappointing. So it really is just Fallout 76. They can recover from that, especially considering that Fallout 76 wasn't even a proper mainline sequel.
A lot of people think that Fallout 76 did recover with the last expansion pack (and cross-play and Game Pass). Microsoft acquiring Bethesda even further insures at the very least it will stay a Game Pass mainstay for some time now.
(Also, it is interesting to note that with the Bethesda purchase, Microsoft will now own "all" of Fallout and the "Fallout diaspora" caused by Interplay's death, as Microsoft already owned development studios Oblivion [made FO:Vegas, had developers involved with FO1 and FO2] and inXile [had developers on FO1, FO2, and FO-predecessor Wasteland 1/2/3, and was in a blood feud of sorts with Oblivion].)
Obsidian, the company is called Obsidian Entertainment.
That said, the folks at Obsidian (especially the creators of the original Fallout and New Vegas) have said they have no interest in doing a Fallout game. Tim Cain specifically mentioned during the Outer Worlds Q&A that the Fallout ship had sailed.
Hah, an easy typo/slipup to make when talking about Fallout/Bethesda (due to ES: Oblivion).
I think that Obsidian is better off doing non-Fallout things (and personally Outer Worlds is so much "Fallout Alternate Space Timeline" already that I'd much rather see them continue with Outer Worlds as the closest thing they ever again do to Fallout). It's just interesting to point out how many of the "Fallout birds" will come home to roost at Microsoft.
This is right of nose and defines exactly why MSFT pivoted to the Game Pass strategy - there were no console-moving titles (besides Sea of Thieves, that game rocks)
What we could see now is these games coming to Game Pass early, or even getting Xbox exclusive content. Theres a low chance they dont drop on other platforms (Skyrim on your Windows phone?) but still a big chip for MSFT to have on hand.
>Also this allows them to bring the ID tech engine under their stewardship....
I'm surprised that isnt more commented on here. Everyone is focused on creative IP. Owning id Tech 6 is or should be a play against Epic, Unity, Crytek etc. 1-4 were open source, and ZeniMax clamped down 5-6. I can see Microsoft marketing id Tech's long open source history, and transforming it into an Amazon Lumberyard competitor.
>Owning id Tech 6 is or should be a play against Epic, Unity, Crytek etc.
Does Microsoft even want to compete against their customers/partners in this space? After all, MS may not want to alienate them to the point they won't release their games for the Xbox.
Microsoft is a developer company and their oldest division is developer tools. They've made several attempts into the game engine / game engine adjacent space over the years, though rarely saw wins outside of low level DirectX. (XNA will be most remembered as an indie dev play, but a key piece of XNA was its content pipeline and Microsoft tried but didn't succeed that well at trying to replace the mostly mish-mash of custom tools that most AAA studios use for content pipelines for something somewhat more standardized; though of course with the easy retrospect failure of being hobbled by focusing on Xbox first/primarily.) So productionizing id Tech 6 isn't an entirely crazy idea for Microsoft in terms of something that makes cultural sense for them. Game Engines can be an important dev tool; especially in the increasing interest in non-game capital-E Enterprise in game engines for visualization tools (including AR/MR/VR).
But yes, Microsoft seems to have a good working relationship with Unity at this point and probably wants to try to keep a good relationship with Epic, so I don't envy whatever product strategist would have to figure out if that minefield would be worth disturbing.
I honestly don't see it being the kind of competition that ruffles those feathers. Microsoft wants developers developers developers to fill Game Pass and run their Infrastructure on Azure, and Microsoft Hearts Open Source. Microsoft open sourcing id Tech 6, and then saying Azure/XboxStore is the best places to build your game and host it, regardless of which engine you want, is the cold war, mutually assured rising tide raises all boats, kind of competition.
What Microsoft doesn't want is Epic or Google getting all the power, becoming the standard, and then being able to strongarm them. Competition, especially open competition, keeps the players more honest.
Though Epic being a very loud squeaky wheel right now (versus Apple) is exactly why Microsoft may show concerns of rocking the game engine boat right now. Xbox Game Studios is using the Unreal engine in a lot of projects (Rare's projects like Sea of Thieves; though divorced from Epic for several years now, The Coalition still sometimes seems to get "second party tech demo" support from Epic on Gears) and probably couldn't quickly switch everything to id Tech if Microsoft got into a showdown with Epic like Epic has been fighting Apple lately. Which partly means it is already too late for Epic getting "too much" power to strong arm in the engine space (and thanks to Fortnite increasingly having the confidence to use it).
I want to think that Microsoft can do it, regardless of Epic (and even Unity), but I still think it is a minefield.
Indeed, which is why the potential threat of Epic trying to end support for Microsoft for Unreal would be a very credible threat that I think Microsoft would have to deal with. Xbox Game Studios has a lot of projects invested in Unreal today.
Yup, I have the same feeling. I've had an Xbox since the Xbox 360 days:
Xbox 360 -> Xbox One S -> Xbox One X
But, looking at the different showcases. Definitely getting a PS5 this time. I don't do many multi-player games and actually enjoy story based single player games. Looking forward to play God of War, Unchartered, Spider Man, etc.
Maybe this will give Microsoft the boost they need to make some fun next gen games.
Then you might be getting the best deal with the new PS Plus Collection offer. You'll get to play some of the best games of the past generation immediately on release of the PS5.
If I am not mistaken they have some few PS5 exclusives under development. Is there any new IP that Bethesda is working on, which can be potentially a Xbox/PC exclusive?
Given how many of the PS4 exclusives were absolutely amazing (some of the best games in the last decade in my personal opinion), I have no reason to think that PS5 won’t have some incredible games too. Hell, between Demons Souls and the next Horizon Zero Dawn, there’s enough there to make me want one.
Microsoft doesn't care about exclusives that much, imo. Sure, a few here and there, but overall they just want people to use their software. That's why their new "exclusive" titles are also on Xbox One. Microsoft will make money by selling their Bethesda titles to PlayStation users, etc. They might make a few of their titles exclusive, but Fallout and Doom won't be among them.
Microsoft's Mojang titles are still on PlayStation and with the xCloud partnership with Sony, things are probably going to get weird on what is considered an "Xbox Exclusive" to the point where "Xbox on PlayStation powered by xCloud" sounds almost a reasonable expectation to happen this console generation.
All of these consolidations of power are nuts. Feels like we need another round of trust busting in the next 10/20 years to help introduce real competition back into the markets.
Normally I would 100% agree, but the barrier for entry is so low that I'm not sure that consolidation in the video game market. There are plenty of issues which plague the video game market (software ownership rights, anti-competitive exclusivity deals, workforce abuse, literal gambling for children, pre-order "culture", etc), but I don't think this is one of them.
That said, I don't know if this is necessarily a good thing either. Strictly as a video game publisher, Microsoft has been doing pretty well for themselves over the last five years. They've definitely stood out as one of the more consumer-friendly publishers, but the market is full of notoriously bad publishers (Bethesda included) so being one of the better ones isn't very praiseworthy.
Microsoft also has their own jaded publishing history which includes some pretty bad moves at the end of the 360 generation and beginning of the Xbox One generation. The Kinect was a very high-profile failure. The original Xbox One was met with a strong backlash for lacking support for physical media. They played a significant role in the integration of "microtransactions" into full priced video games. Although they have done many great things over the last few years, I'm still weary of them as a publisher.
I think the jury is still out on whether this is a net positive for the video game market, but it will definitely make the upcoming console generation very interesting.
I think you're right from a "person looking to play a good video game" perspective but what's easily overlooked is the data to be gained and who gains that data.
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have unprecedented insight into user behavior and that is power, and that continues to consolidate.
They are accumulating data through many other devices and applications from a wider user group, I doubt gaming makes all that much of difference.
Barring MS none of the others actually have any presence in gaming
FB and Google efforts in engaging the gaming community has not scaled. Stadia or Oculus is not mainstream yet.
Amazon has even smaller presence with just some products on AWS.
Apple is just interested in taking their 30% cut and done nothing really in this space.
For now I think we'll wait and see; while the big companies slowly poison the well with microtransactions and live services, ruining games to push for sales, the indie market is massive, turning single developers pottering around in their proverbial basements into millionaires and spawning franchises left and right.
I mean Minecraft started off like that. Terraria is following behind it. Among Us, a $4 game on Steam released in 2018, suddenly became a meme and huge out of nowhere. Fall Guys, made by a small studio that mainly did web, Flash, Facebook and mobile games for most of their existence, came out of left field and created the top game of last month, which (if played right) is an instant brand because of their simple yet infinitely customizable cute characters.
There is still real competition because the big publishers cannot stop the small developers.
I think the real worry would be Steam (Valve) being acquired. Without such a ubiquitous and relatively open platform for distribution, indie devs would have a much harder time making any money.
Bethesda Games are not going not be exclusive to Xbox -- Confirmed by Todd Howard:
>Like our original partnership, this one is about more than one system or one screen. We share a deep belief in the fundamental power of games, in their ability to connect, empower, and bring joy. And a belief we should bring that to everyone - regardless of who you are, where you live, or what you play on. Regardless of the screen size, the controller, or your ability to even use one.
While statements like these are common when mergers/buyouts happen, the final decision down the line will not be his to make. Not saying that things will not happen as he states, but it shouldn't be seen as a certainty.
When Facebook bought Oculus, Palmer Luckey said that a Facebook login would never be required to use Oculus products. The Oculus Quest 2 that comes out in October will require a Facebook login.
to be fair, Microsoft has been loosening up on exclusives as of late. Minecraft is supported on all platforms, with the dungeon side game coming to all consoles. Psychonauts 2 is still slated to come to PS4 and Switch. Ori's 2 games are multiplat (the sequel just now releasing on Switch).
I don't doubt there will be timed exclusives, but at the current moment it seems like they aren't opposed to publishing on non-MS platforms.
Xbox won't even mean the same thing then as it does now.
Would a platform agnostic game only available on the Xbox online store count as "exclusive to xbox?" What if it required an Xbox Live/GamePass subscription for significant features - but not everything? Or they introduced super-skewed pricing ($100 for ES6 w/ no sales vs. included with GamePass)?
My concern isn't that this won't be true (at the very least, they release everything for Xbox on PC anyway), it's that the platform will evolve so much that console lock-in won't matter, so the promise will elide the real concern.
Yes. When Epic bought Psyonix for Rocket League there was plenty of reassurance linux would remain supported. After waiting the absolute minimum time for people to stop paying attention Epic removed linux support and steam distribution.
Why would they limit there revenue to a single platform? That doesn't make sense to me. But I don't play videogames, haven't since my kids were teenagers, think Call of Duty. I have sold software to corporate, and I can say the revenue from software sales far outweigh hardware revenues.
Targeting all platforms means the Zenimax division within Microsoft will make more money.
Targeting only Xbox means more Xbox will be sold, so Xbox division will make more money.
They promised with last-gen Xbox One, and have followed it up, that all first-party games that launch for Xbox will also launch for PC. (Originally this extended to all games, but some late releases were xbox-only.) There are no xbox-only games for Xbox Series announced, from any publisher, that are not available for PC.
Microsoft's Xbox+PC strategy is pretty much taken for granted now, "exclusivity" between Microsoft and Sony now means "just Xbox and PC" or "just Playstation (and sometimes PC)."
I think the multi-device strategy is a clear winner. The lifetime value of a console itself is probably not terribly high. After all, most game companies do not sell hardware at all and a few who have eventually gave up (Sega, Atari).
Plus, the PC, Switch, and iPad markets are largely orthogonal to the XB/PS ones. Content for the former probably doesn't compete with the latter, so it makes sense to sell in those markets. And lastly, could you imagine how Sony execs would feel if their best selling PS titles all came from MS studios? That would certainly put them in an awkward position to suddenly be financially dependent to some degree on MS.
It also begs the question what MS has to gain by buying Bethesda/ZeniMax besides exclusivity. Given the fact that they own the XBox/Windows gaming platform, would the revenue they get selling Doom on PlayStation really be enough to outweigh the potential of making it exclusive to drive more people to their platform?
From now until acquisition, the language internally will be 'we have our own identity within Microsoft' and then 3 to 6 months later, there will be these offhand remarks from senior management about how nameless other employees are confused about their place in the company. Then within 1 year, there will be an email about how the CEO has decided to eleviate the confusion among the staff and unite the company under one name. And that name surely won't be Bethesda.
You're right that can happen in most cases, but look at Microsoft's recent acquistions: LinkedIn, GitHub, Xamarin, and game studios like Mojang, Double Fine, Obsidian, and inXile. All well-established brand names that have continued to maintain their own identity and team culture, albeit like any culture I'm sure they've evolved over time.
I don't read that as saying Bethesda Games aren't going to be exclusives. Or maybe it'll be xbox plus windows. Meanwhile, there's this quote from Satya Nadella from press release at the bottom of OP, speaking about this acquisition:
> Quality differentiated content is the engine behind the growth and value of Xbox Game Pass—from Minecraft to Flight Simulator.
"Differentiated content" sounds to me like exclusives.
Given Todd's history on, well, anything the past decade... why would anyone believe literally a word out of his mouth?
As a Playstation gamer, anything Todd Howard related can stay on Xbox for all I care. What I will potentially miss are games like Wolfenstein and Doom.
Ask Fallout fans what they think of Todd Howard and how he disrespected gamers through the launch of Fallout 76. Better yet see it in full comedic affect in an internet historian video [1].
You're right. They won't be just on Xbox. They'll be on Xbox and Windows 10.
In other news, the only 3D API that matters now for gaming is DirectX. Which was kinda always the case, except now OpenGL and VK fanboys can't go "but... idTech!"
I think this will be one of the most interesting fallout effects of this whole acquisition. Bethesda’s tech stack, as a developer, is basically worthless. But Id has plenty of tech, both tooling and engine, that are viable going into PS5/Xbox/new gen GPUs. If Microsoft does intend to push heavily for Xbox/Windows exclusives from all the acquired components the impact on DirectX as the standard 3D API is going to be pretty large. Also the internal transitions from current tooling and API will probably be prioritized to get early day titles ready for spring 2021 sales season (but surely for the holiday 2021 rush).
>Bethesda Games are not going not be exclusive to Xbox
The biggest problem that Microsoft has with the Xbox is lack of AAA exclusives. If the next Elder Scrolls game is going to be released for Xbox and PS5 - what's the point of this exercise?
They will definitely also release on Windows PCs. But that meaningless corporate speak doesn't really confirm that they will stay true multi-platform and release games on PlayStation and Switch as well.
I don’t know why anyone would think Microsoft would be against publishing on competing platforms. Minecraft is available on Switch and PlayStation. It’s all about that $$$
They wouldn't; most of their games are PC games first and foremost, with ports to other platforms. Sometimes painfully complicated ports, like Skyrim's to the PS3 (due to memory constraints).
By 2007 Bungie had been fully absorbed into Microsoft. Microsoft retained the rights to Halo and held a minority stake in the "new" Bungie, LLC. I assume by 2007 any vesting periods were over and MS came to a mutual agreement with the Bungie shareholders to allow them to spin off.
Also note they Microsoft mismanaged the Halo property royally. The most recent failure the delay of Halo Infinite, that allegedly has been in development for over 4 years and will miss the launch of the new Xbox console due to poor quality. Microsoft also run Rare almost into irrelevancy after the acquisition. Not the greatest track record there.
I think you severely underestimate the piles of money Nintendo is sitting on if you don't think they'll make it to 2040. Sony is also big enough, diverse enough, and well-established enough that I doubt they would have trouble weathering one or two bad console generations back-to-back.
And let's not forget 2K, 505 Games, Chucklefish, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Deep Silver, Devolver Digital, EA, Epic Games, Focus Home, Gearbox, Koei Tecmo, Paradox, Sega, Stardock, Square Enix, Take-Two, Team17, THQ Nordic, Valve, Warner Bros, and hundreds of other publishers that I can't even begin to list here.
2040 is definitely too soon for the dystopian future you're talking about. Maybe 2042.
I'm sure Disney will be there too. After they acquired Star Wars it's been a looming presence ready to swallow and regurgitate forever any entertainment properties.
I am not sure Nintendo would be up for sale to Disney. They have pretty unique culture in the industry.
Sony Entertainment would be the better fit, however after buying Fox properties it may be difficult to sell the merger of another major studio into Disney.
I mean this is the future described in Cyberpunk novels. United States of Coca Cola, Republic of Microsoft. Mega Corporations will replace states in an era of neocorporatism (AKA something else...), that's inevitable.
2040 huh?
I'd have guessed Tencent (incl subsidies Facebook, Oracle, Microsoft, in order of acquisition) and Alphabet Activision share the market 75%/25%, with Apple still commanding a 30% sales tax in certain spaces.
This just further confirms that my energy and money is going to the indie space. The level of enjoyment I get out of Factorio, Cuphead, Cogmind, Crusader Kings III, Curious Expedition 2, EXA Punks, Elite Dangerous, Kenshi, etc is so much greater than any AAA title I've touched in the past 5 years, yet these games are cheaper and most can run on a potato. I want to play games, not interactive movies.
Speaking of Frostpunk, I would love to see more games set in that world. I would love a Frostpunk RPG for example, something a bit like Divinity Original Sin, or maybe Disco Elysium, but in the Frostpunk world. Or maybe a Life is Strange style story game.
I was initially saying I'm done with AAA... I know Paradox Studios isn't exactly indie, but these games are not $100m+ affairs and are relatively niche titles.
> If you're releasing with the help of a publisher you're no longer independent.
Dear diary, I was today years old when I learned that Stardew Valley is not an indie game.
> What does it mean to be an indie game developer?
There's no hard-and-fast rule, but generally speaking it means the devs are not subordinate to the publisher.
There are games for which the publisher contracts a studio, therefore the publisher decides and has the last word, these are not indies.
There are others where the publisher provides funding and / or assistance (e.g. managing distribution channels), but doesn't take much or any active part in the development process. These are generally considered indie games.
There are also games which are entirely self-published. These are also, obviously, indie games.
Super Meat Boy, Shovel Knight, or The Witness are self-published indie games. Fez[0], Stardew, or Bastion are not (published respectively by Trapdoor, Chucklefish, and Warner).
Hell, World of Goo ultimately self-published because they didn't manage to convince a publisher, would that have made them "not indie"?
[0] literally one of the subjects of Indie Game: The Movie
The person I replied to stated that releasing a game with the help of a publisher means you’re not indie. Therefore my publication concerns were the terms at release.
On the other hand Paradox publishing parts grew out of distributing their own games using IP that they have developed themselves all the way back from the late 90s.
Incredible that Fallout and Obsidian are now under the same roof again. The Outer Worlds was fun, and I want to see Obsidians efforts continue. Still, new Vegas 2 would be fine too.
It's fun, but it's pretty much on rails. It's not open world.
In terms of game area progression it's more like Borderlands than Skyrim/Fallout. You can't just wander around the map to a random town and possibly spend a whole game mucking around in that area.
It's definitely a spiritual successor to New Vegas, but overall it's much smaller in scope and (in my opinion) has a less satisfying progression system.
Pros:
1. Solid Writing: I found the story to be interesting and engaging. There's great ambient world building via notes you find and the main story is fairly interesting with lots of branching paths.
2. Flexible playstyles: they really committed themselves to allowing you to play how you want to. There are the standard melee and ranged playstyles, but stealth and speed are also completely viable for the entire game as well.
3. Combat: Combat is actually pretty good. They replaced VATS with a time dilation mechanic that is basically bullet time/slowmo. I played a ranged character so it felt cool to slow down time and get headshots, etc. Maybe it feels less good with melee characters, I don't know.
Cons:
1. Limited loot: This was a big dissapointment. There were only 2-3 weapons per category, plus a few special weapons thrown in. I felt like I basically had 2 guns for the entire game, which was a bit of a let down. It was disappointing to get the same generic gun again and again from enemies, especially compared to the huge variety of guns in NV.
2. Less exciting progression: They changed the perk system to be much simpler and there are many fewer perks to choose from. Around the mid game I basically had selected all the good perks and felt like there was no point in selecting new ones. You also get perks from leveling up skills but I found that those weren't well balanced and frequently the first tier of perk unlocks were way better than the later tiers, which didn't incentivize much specialization.
3. Setting: This one definitely comes down to personal preference but I was not a big fan of the aesthetic. They swapped 1950s nuclear age with 1920s art deco. Some of the environments and costumes look cool, but generally I found it to be less compelling and exciting than Fallout. This is arguably an unfair comparison because they had a big body of existing Fallout lore to build on for NV but IMO it's a much weaker universe - I can't see it being as interesting even after they make a few games in this setting.
For me, The Outer Worlds was right there with Witcher 3 as one of the best games this generation. It really does feel like Fallout, but perhaps somewhat less open world when you're actually on a planet b/c of map boundaries and enemies too dangerous for your level to keep you on track. The diverging story lines and open space travel (once you get the requisite navkey to be able to land) compensate for that somewhat.
While it IS a great game, it's REALLY short. I've been hoping for a surprise DLC to expand the content. (There are several other planets in the galaxy map you can't travel to. Hint, hint.) I hope the game did well enough to get a larger treatment in Outer Worlds 2.
Yeah, definitely looking forward to some DLC content. Did you try it on Supernova difficulty? I beat it pretty easily on the Hard setting, but had to completely change my playing style to get anywhere on Supernova. Went from going in guns blazing to a stealth run.
I enjoyed the character writing a lot and the overall story arc was interesting. The quests could be challenging without being too grindy or obscure, but the moment-to-moment gameplay was... just ok? It felt even clunkier than Fallout 4 in terms of how an FPS plays..
The maps and environments looked good but were pretty generic in terms of layout and variety.
I don't regret buying it (on sale), but I haven't picked up the DLC, and probably won't.. I had my fill with the base game.
I don't like combat in RPGs anyway, but it did feel like less of a chore than combat in Fallout games. Maybe they just got the "grind/success" ratio closer to what I prefer.
I'm with you on that, but I still find the game forced enough combat on you (especially the end game) and it didn't feel good.. I felt like a lot of my deaths weren't due to my mistakes but to the gameplay being janky.
About 1/100th of the content that New Vegas has. The map is deceptive at the start making you think theres so much left to do when in reality there is about 2 total worlds. The rest of the planets are pretty tiny maps. It is a good game but its incredibly short, especially when your expectations are not managed.
I was definitely surprised by the cue for the ending arc to begin. I have gotten a fair bit out of the sidequests though, so I've still got lots to do.
I did two play throughs and was very entertained both. The stories and humor is excellent and I like the combat system. You can definitely chose play style, whether you're the creepy sniper, rambo or hammer-in-the-head. It's just a solid fun game.
The writing (and especially the 'humor') was completely miss for me, some of the visual was just ok and the gameplay was so-so. Of course to each his own, you might enjoy it more than I.
It’s ok. It scratched that “Bethesda fallout” itch better than Bethesda did, but ultimately I found it got a bit monotonous and dull after a little while. It’s not a bad game, but it’s no masterpiece.
Yeah, I didn't like it either. The graphics are good, but there was nothing that made me want to keep going; the writing just wasn't good. It's one of the best games ever since I wasn't tempted to play for just "5 more minutes". No loss in productivity.
I played a good chunk and then I decided to see what would happen if i just shot everyone. I mean literally everyone, civilians, guards, everyone. I was disappointed to see that this tactic could actually have carried me to the end (I played a good 20% of the game like this to see how far I could push it and... I just didn’t hit any major resistance so in the end got bored and gave up — a little bit after deorbiting the ship, for context. It’s my understanding that’s reasonably close to the end although I can’t be sure since I didn’t continue)
I am not sure it is half as good as it sounds. Played through a few first quests, and got more Borderlands feeling from it, than Fallout. It was so gimmicky, I did not continue to play.
Huh, I kind of disagree with that. It's like Fallout in that you can pop in and make some decent progress on a side story or just poke around if you have limited time. I definitely didn't do very many 3 hour sessions when I played it.
I get sucked in pretty easily and play for ages. I don't feel satisfied if I only play for a short while, as I feel like I've just completed a task rather than immersed into a world.
I think it has a few replays in it, there's heaps you can do differently but I guess the question is would you want to? I think it'll be a game I revisit, just not right away.
I bought xbox game pass just to play The Outer Worlds. Best fun I've had playing a game since FNV and watching Firefly. If they pooled the resources for their studios it would be amazing.
Microsoft is just trying to recreate console lock-in without having to subsidize hardware so much.
(1) Microsoft is trying to expand their gaming division, but struggle with first-party games. This acquisition is an acknowledgement that MSFT needs Bethesda creatives.
(2) Microsoft's big strategy right now is to build their Xbox ecosystem - they're pushing GamePass, Xcloud, etc. heavily, and trying to become Netflix for games.
I'd guess they're basically buying Bethesda's key franchises to drive GamePass subs. They'll build them quick, lock you in with a $10/month sub, and let Bethesda slowly merge with the mothership.
Short term, I'm excited because I want these new games! Long term, I fully expect Bethesda to get hollowed out.
Microsoft has hinted that it's a financial success already.
It's probably the gym membership model. Developers get money for actual time played. The market of users that just play from time to time and don't really care about the 10$s is probably substantial.
I fall into this category. I only really get an urge to play every few months. And unless there is some specific game I'm interested in, I just pick something from the Gamepass catalogue, which is already pretty substantial. (it has/had great games like RDR2, GTAV, Witcher 3, Subnautica, No Mans Sky, ...)
While cancelling the subscription and then re-subscribing when needed is actually pretty smooth (re-subscribing takes just 2 button presses), I don't care enough to do it.
And all the "idle" revenue probably allows Microsoft to play decent rates to publishers, so they actually incentivized enough to put their games on the service.
I'd be curious to know what kind of impact that $10/mo/user would have compared to the traditional game sales cycle from a revenue stream perspective.
Say that the system has a current-gen lifespan of 5 years and users run their subscription throughout the duration of the service, that's $600 per user assuming no price increases. I don't game nearly as much as I used to, so that would cost me way more than I've spent the last several years on games.
The shitty thing about a model like this is that I can't just power the system on after 6 months and just play without turning the subscription back on.
Think of how many people have Netflix that don't even use it. They want to get Game Pass to the point where it's a de facto standard that a gamer has Game Pass.
I would assume there are more people who would pay $10 a month ($120/year) for access to all of these AAA games than there are people who buy >2 new AAA games a year (~$120/year).
Thus, roughly speaking, it should be profitable. There is ~0 marginal cost for a customer playing a new game
I've been using Game Pass for roughly 18 months. Really like it so far, though I've gotten it for "free" through MS Rewards. I'd probably have a different opinion if I actually paid for it monthly.
The thing that is missing are the huge AAA games, but I honestly can't see most of those coming to Game Pass. They may come but like 1-2 years after initial release.
Minus like the Forza and Halo series, most of the MS owned studios developing games are fairly shorter in length. Don't take that the wrong way though, even though they are shorter some are real gems. Just don't expect to play every game on there for 20+ hours or anything.
Definitely a winning move. Netflix beat Blockbuster, TiVO, AND cable's on-demand video services with a worse content library and harder UI (initially - those boxes sucked) - because it was cheap, easy, and felt free. GamePass recreates that, at least for casual gamers.
Plus, GamePass locks you in like consoles once did. That stickiness in recurring revenue is hugely valuable in itself, and because it has a network effect (this was basically the reason for the ongoing console wars).
Combine that with cloud gaming, and the lock-in and UX just gets better.
Their main barrier is good content. Thus the splashy buy.
TikTok is not an investment in tech, it’s an investment in relations with the US public sector. The fact that it comes with an actual company attached is almost irrelevant for Oracle.
Bethesda was already trending this way however this has deep implications. Ultimately I think it's going to slowly kill the core of the modding community as modding is forced into the platform and new users are displace the modding culture.
The modding will no longer be able to truly edit the engine itself through some reverse engineering and be forced to utilize the APl/scripting framework. Third-party tools will be locked out. Obviously this has happened already on the console platform. There's still the PC platform but that could be locked down further as well.
Think about the time and fostered talent that it took to make some of the communities amazing tools. For example script extenders for elder scrolls series. As mods are now centralized in official 'the store' the community grow around which will never allow mods like the script extender for developers to make advanced innovative mods. Even if other modding communities like the Nexus allow for that It's going to continue to fragment the community and the talent which is foster within the community. Then you throw paid mods into the picture... Thus begins the death of the open source pillar in modding.
The East India Company was founded in 1600 and had its own army before it was nationalized. So it is not like big companies is something that never happened before. And as we can see in the US, the state can easily control, cooperate with and even destroy companies, no matter how big they are.
It's unfortunate that the Xbox Series X and PS5 are so, so, so similar. It seems stupid to have to purchase 2 nearly identical boxes. It's not just the console. You then need multiple controllers for each, and possibly other accessories (Sony has a PS5 specific headset, camera, charger, will have a PS5 VR etc.)
I've historically preferred PS exclusives (Uncharted, Spiderman, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn), and the cross platform stuff, was a little worse than Xbox in the PS3 days, and a little better in the PS4 days (at least prior to XoX).
Speaking as a biased PS4 owner, I'm happy with current layout of PS exclusives and cross platform stuff. Each new announcement like this sucks. I like DOOM and Dishonored. I liked being able to get them on PS4 and expected to get them on PS5. I don't think this will make me get an Xbox, but it sucks I'll likely be missing out on these games. I suppose what Microsoft hopes is that people like me get a PS5 and a cheaper Xbox Series S with Gamepass.
I love that the Nintendo Switch exists. It's completely different, and doesn't really compete with Playstation/Xbox. As a gamer, it makes sense to purchase a Nintendo Switch and one of either the Playstation/Xbox. I wish Xbox/Playstation differentiated somehow. I suppose Microsoft tried to do that with Kinect, but failed/gave up.
I've been a Playstation gamer since the PS2. I have multiple PS4s and a library of over 1000 games in my digital account.
With that context laid out that I am a big-time PS user, looking at the XBOX game pass subscription model where you get the console for free is REALLY tempting.
In every market I've looked at, there is a deal that works out to about $30 a month for two years. They give you the console, instant access to hundreds of really good games, day one access to all microsoft first-party games included in the price, many new release games from other publishers (for example EA ACCESS titles). Free monthly titles on PC.
AND all of that is actually CHEAPER than buying the console with the two years of subscription.
Plus the XBOX is going to have a number of new features related to second-screen-game-streaming that are also really exciting.
I'm really torn here right now. I might move away from playstation for this next generation - the XBOX is looking like it is going to be a big deal this time round.
OTOH - I really want to play the Miles Morales spider-man ... so there are arguments on both sides. To say nothing of the third option involving an Nvidia RTX3080...
I don't think there's any payment plan that nets you the console for free? The payment plans are good on their own right, because you aren't paying much more (or slightly less) if your plan was to get a Series S + Gold + Game Pass (Gamepass Ultimate). But there's no plan where you get it for free.
One really refreshing thing is that the Xbox Series S/X are compatible with Xbox One controllers.. so you won't have to buy a bunch of new controllers for it.
That always drove me nuts. Controller design hasn't changed that much since the mid 2000's.. there's zero reason for breaking backwards compatibility other than to sell you more hardware.
They're both basically a great value gaming PC at this point. With a handful of hardware-level optimizations making them cheap and powerful for the price.
Great, yet another acquisition. So eventually everything will become one company or what?
I like free markets, at least the idea of competition. I hate conglomerates. Am I contradicting myself?
That depends on your definition of free market, but I think everyone likes the golden-years of a free market. The long tail of unhindered capitalism has some rough edges, we have some laws to help but they're not much use if no-one uses them.
microsoft are seeing that the money is going to be made in a subscription model for games. by purchasing the studios it makes it much easier for them to bundle games (possibly with exclusivity) with their gamepass.
i know i'm more likely to subscribe to gamepass (and keep it running for years) vs. the 1/2 games i buy a year.
I'm in the same boat. My current phone is a work-supplied iPhone, but next time I have to buy my own cell phone it will be an Android device for this reason.
I've only ever owned iPhone smartphones, but unless Apple changes their approach to game streaming services like xCloud or Stadia, I won't continue to be a customer.
I still have some trouble around the idea that hardcore consumers will want a bundle that has maybe 2-5 games they would have bought otherwise + 95 more they dont really care about.
Aren't consumers just going to buy what they want anyway? Plus the Sony world just has so many more games worth playing
If you look at the games shown for the next gen, it's MS is not far away. They have acquired some serious studios and reviving Fable, Halo Infinite hopefully lands, Hellblade 2 looks truly next gen and there's Obsidian, The Initiative and rumoured unannounced "AAAA" game
That's the model Microsoft are going for with Game Pass, just pay us a fixed monthly fee and play any of the hundreds of games we have available on Android/PC/XBox.
Not really. The alternative before Netflix was more expensive cable/satellite tv. Netflix was both better and cheaper.
As a gamer I probably only spend ~£150 a year on a few really good big games and the odd cheap sale game. And I prefer not to spend so much because it feels wasteful, moreso than Netflix for reasons I can't figure.
Paying £15-20 a month is more money for something I feel I should be spending less on.
I wonder if they are moving to a subscription model because players hate the Windows store and basically refuse to use it instead of Steam when purchasing games. Having failed at running a store I wonder if they've decided plan b is running a rental service.
Well if nothing else, it makes people use their new React Native Xbox app, which is quite possibly the worst windows application Microsoft has ever produced (and they've produced a lot of very bad ones).
The total market for AAA games right now is probably in the region of 250 to 300 million people if you look at the install base of xbox, playstation and pc.
With gamepass being on pc, xbox and cloud they could potentially capture a substantial part of that market and even expand it due to the low barrier of entry of xcloud or their rent to own scheme. They have 15 million subscribers now which is about 2 billion in revenue depending on the composition of their subscribers. They grew 50% in just 6 months. The potential for gamepass is therefore vast compared to traditional boxed products. If they capture 50% of the current market, thats 20 billion. That would be similar to netflix in size.
When it works it's fine but sometimes the window store breaks and you basically have to reinstall Windows- in whole or in part- to get it running again. It also is designed to prevent modding and doesn't work with Steam Link for remote play even though normal non-steam games work with Steam Link just fine.
GloSC[1] will get you steam controller mapping / streaming for UWP apps (and more, but I've never had an issue ie adding UPlay games as non-steam games). Here's Minecraft Dungeons running on iOS via Steam Remote Play that I just recorded[2].
Also, Windows Store / GamePass doesn't stop modding, as Crusader King 3 proves.
Thanks. I tried to get a hardware Steam Link working with Gamepass games and failed, I either tried with that App or some other one I forget but ultimately I got it working by installing Moonlight on the Steam Link instead and essentially using it like a remote desktop.
I've read reports of Windows Store overwriting mod files, either this is a game by game problem or maybe it's solved. I do know a year or two ago the Window Store refused to open on a Windows PC of mine so it's a real problem and there's no way to easily reinstall the windows store if it occurs.
Whether Microsoft has solved these issues by now I don't know. I think I eventually got the windows store back with a Windows update.
It's interesting. Despite all the money that these studios have, my favorite games of the past few years have all been indie games (Rimworld, Factorio) or smaller studios (Paradox Plaza games such as EUIV, Stellaris). I understand that the majority of the industry's revenue is generated from these bigger studios, but acquiring first party developers doesn't make me as too concerned.
What I'm concerned about is distribution is controlled by a few parties to a higher degree on desktop, like it is on mobile.
Having just watched Netflix vs. the World documentary (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8407418/) last week, this acquisition seems to be inevitable as game streaming is taking off and will eventually become the defacto means of playing video games.
Microsoft's endgame is to increase the subscribers to its GamePass subscription so akin to Netflix's insatiable appetite for video content, Microsoft's will be for video games. But since IP development for games is expensive, time-consuming and hard to break into, it's arguably easier to acquire game studios entirely.
The impact is so wide-ranging: what becomes of Google Stadia and Nvidia GeForce Now? Same goes for Sony and Nintendo. The most interesting one could be Apple, who clearly does not want game streaming to be the norm.
I don't see how both game streaming and high resolution/high refresh rate displays can both be the future. The bandwidth requirements will keep going up and high resolution particle effects can create terrible compression artifacts.
Local processing power is also not standing still in time, the capability a given price purchases is increasing year upon year. Do you imagine a future where people have limitless bandwidth, with low latency, and only use incapable thin clients?
Agreed that bandwidth and latency remains a challenge for most people today, especially for non-urban dwellers. For streaming to be the norm, there has to be a fundamental change in how ISPs treat internet connectivity and how the government regulates it. Maybe I'm overly optimistic in how things will play on in this front - in addition to newer technologies like SpaceX's Starlink platform.
The main point is that Microsoft is pivoting its gaming approach to the "gaming-as-a-service" and selling subscriptions, rather than the previous one of selling hardware and individual games. The digital-only editions of both the upcoming new Xbox and Playstation underscore this - plus you can even buy a subscription bundled with a console. Buying up studios help them achieve this vision.
One weird thing is that Deathloop and Ghostwrite are timed exclusives on PS5. I'm assuming that'll still happen because of contracts, but I wonder if there will never be another Bethesda game on PlayStation afterwards.
I was looking at my list of favorite games when I realized that all my favorite games are indi, except for Fallout/Elder scrolls. KSP, Subnautica, factorio, minecraft, papers please, FTL, EVE, x-plane, city skylines ... they all at least started as indi titles. Then I look at fallout and oblivion, the only non-indi games I've really enjoyed in the last 10+ years. There is something difference about them. So when I see microsoft buying Bethesda, I worry.
True. And another reason to worry. Microsoft at large may be less linux-hating than it once wase, but Microsoft games have never been linux-friendly and show no substantial moves in that direction of late.
We are going to a world of very big corporations dominating the industries. Market tendency is to concentrate capital. And I'm not sure this is a good thing.
The upside being that in the game industry overall, it's never been easier to get started and to reach a wide audience.
So while the inevitable trajectory of AAA gaming is consolidation, we are still seeing more and more indie developers break out and succeed at a larger scale, and there's no reason why that phenomenon shouldn't continue (or even grow).
That was more then 18 years ago though, back when Microsoft was very new to the console game. They've had a lot of successes and failures since then. A more recent example would be Mojang which has gone extremely well for them - Minecraft is now the best selling game of all time with 147m copies by 2019 compared to around 14m back in 2014 when the company was acquired - largely down to their successful pivot to mobile and console.
the things Rare has been known for were platformers (Banjo Kazooie, Donkey Kong) and FPS games (Goldeneye, Perfect Dark).
Perfect Dark Zero in 2005 was probably the last title in either of those veins, which was a launch title for the 360 (soon to be 2 consoles ago!)
Sea of Thieves is certainly a feather in their cap, it's just a bit disappointing that we haven't been able to see Rare take a modern crack at the things they were so known for, if that's even possible now.
Most of the Rare staff responsible for those games have left in the decades since (many of them formed Playtonic, which was the pitch behind Yooka-Laylee)
To expect a company to produce the quality/type of games that they made 20+ years ago is a bit unfair, don't you think? I'd venture to guess that the folks behind those games left the studio along time ago anyway.
Bethesda/Zenimax as a whole has had a very rough time of it recently, but their IPs alone are ridiculously valuable and id Software has been killing it lately. I wonder how much Microsoft intends to shake things up.
Also, if MS just wants development studios and IPs, I imagine a lot of the publishing arm of the company will be redundant. I wonder what MS intends to do about the publishing staff.
I really hope that they move away from the ESO/MMO format that they've focused on the last few years in regards to Elder Scrolls. I'm a huge fan of that series, but I just have zero interest in playing MMOs, and it's clear that they've been trying to push further into that space as opposed to shipping high-quality single-player games.
The team that works on the mainline Elder Scrolls games hasn't so much as touched MMO or GAAS games - they've been working on Starfield which we know next to nothing about, but there's been no indication it's an online game. Even before that they made Fallout 4 which was a traditional singleplayer game.
ESO is by ZeniMax Online Studios and FO76 is by a separate studio inside Bethesda Game Studios. Nothing to do with the team that works on mainline TES and FO games.
Well, I find this even more ironic, giving how wannabe game developers just blindly following Carmack's advises.
> Speaking to bit-tech for a forthcoming Custom PC feature about the future of OpenGL in PC gaming, Carmack said 'I actually think that Direct3D is a rather better API today.' He also added that 'Microsoft had the courage to continue making significant incompatible changes to improve the API, while OpenGL has been held back by compatibility concerns. Direct3D handles multi-threading better, and newer versions manage state better.'
A few paragraphs below
> 'It is really just inertia that keeps us on OpenGL at this point,' Carmack told us. He also explained that the developer has no plans to move over to Direct3D, despite its advantages.
Can you clarify what you mean? I recently got into developing on the Quake 2 engine, which I think is an amazing piece of software, so I'm kinda obsessed with all things Quake right now.
Its my understanding that, back in the day, Quake was "the" poster child game for OpenGL's capabilities over D3D. Similar to today, how Doom Eternal is "the" poster child for Vulkan. And now Microsoft owns id software.
Carmack is the only reason why OpenGL is at all relevant in PC gaming as it was miniGL that made it popular in first place, against Glide.
Later on he changed his mind regarding OpenGL vs DirectX, but there are legions of wannabe game developers that worshiped his opinions regarding OpenGL.
See my sibling post regarding his change of opinion.
Technical merits and discussions aside, without Carmack keeping OpenGL alive, we wouldn't have gaming, engineering and visualization support on GPUs to the level we do today on non-windows platforms.
If MS kills (migrates) Bethesda off of Vulkan, I'd like the DOJ to censure them.
Contrary to urban myths consoles don't fully support OpenGL, if at all, depending on the model.
Good example of non-windows platforms.
Which I would also add Mac OS, because the only reason it supports OpenGL is Copland's failure, as it was going to use Quickdraw 3D.
And they are on the path to migrate off to Metal anyway.
OpenGL portability on anger is like POSIX or Web development, write once, debug everywhere, rince and repeat.
It is hardly any different than just defining an abstraction layer and loading the best API for the job on each platform.
A 3D API is a tiny portion of a game engine.
By the way, only DirectX works in all Windows modes and Microsoft is keen to contribute to Mesa/Angle instead of allowing ICD drivers on such contexts.
We'll never get a Doom game or any other games for that matter to be first-class supported titles on Linux then. It'll have to be Proton and Valve funding this and the community. I don't like this.
People are forgetting that the original Zenimax Studios is not exactly the most pro-gaming group of shareholders. Their original motivations were to increase shareholder value (I imagine that Fallout 76 decision was a factor among this).
I think Microsoft’s gaming vision aligns well with Bethesda’s and they probably have a better vision compared to Zenimax board of directors.
I believe it was in the 80's when they changed the interpretation of monopoly to only be illegal if it can be proven that the consumer suffers. So in a way, yes we have given up.
That's funny, I watched Bethesda's history documentary by noclip[1] last night. Bethesda studio is/was owned by ZeniMax[2], which in recent history purchased/hostile-takeovered a bunch of studios. ZeniMax's CEO is a lawyer, hence their long history of litigation tactics. And according to the article, Microsoft bought ZeniMax, so in theory it just bought a basket of gaming studios.
Best thing to ever happen to Bethesda Softworks and id. Zenimax is a mess of a parent company and has underinvested in id and hasn’t gotten beyond letting Todd Howard keep going further and further off target from what people want.
3x Mojang makes it sound like MS got a really good deal on Bethesda, at the time they bought Mojang they were really buying a single (very popular) game, while with Bethesda they get a huge back catalogue, some really big franchises, and ID with all their knowledge of engine development.
This (that Bethesda are selling, not that Microsoft are the buyer) isn’t really a surprise. It seems that everything they’ve been doing for a few years now was to align themselves with a sale.
Bethesda/Zenimax has arguably the longest lineup of critically acclaimed franchises in the video game world. Additionally, almost every franchise still feels fresh and has pulling power, unlike ones like Halo and Assassins creed which have slowly lost their thunder.
Additionally, Bethesda had no idea what they were doing with their 2 biggest properties - Fallout and Elder scrolls. Hopefully with the MSFT acquisition, both will get some direction.
For those that work at Obsidian and MSFT owned game studios, is the Work-life-balance still terrible like most video-game studios or is it more in line with the 'family frendly' pace at proper MSFT ? Am I too naive to think that this might be a good thing for the employees and their sanity.
I worked at Turn 10 (the Xbox studio which makes Forza) about a year and a half ago. Work life balance was amazing. The tech director of the studio made it a huge point that staff get adequate time off. He brought it up in almost every dev team meeting, "Let me know if you don't feel like you can take time off". He also made a huge point about having a sustainable team.
I don't know that this is a characteristic of all Microsoft studios. Departments in Microsoft can almost be like little companies all of their own. It _did_ leave a positive impression on me though and I can see myself working at Microsoft again in the future.
I left on good terms to see what it was like to work at startups.
This is an attack on Vulkan, since Bethesda were very strongly pushing it. Guess what MS will tell them to do now. No doubt more Xbox and DX-only stuff.
So it's a lock-in move and again something that should have been stopped by anti-trust, but of course, it's non existent these days.
It's not looking good for another TES or FO game unless they're already very well under development.
EA has taught the industry that mega corps are where IP goes to die a long, slow, cash-cow squeezing death. I'm actually more disappointed in ZeniMax/Bethesda. In my mind, there is absolutely no possibility that Bethesda will ever produce another game on the level of FO3/NV now because corps do what corps do which is A/B test and second guess every decision until the product is a flavorless lump.
To add to the parent here, Doom was made by id Software, which generally has a huge history of making very good FPS games. I'm certain they were given a lot of leeway from the producer.
Arkane's 2016 Prey was just amazing... shame so few immersive sims get made anymore.
One thing that confused me, is the Announcement says MS is acquiring Doom IP, but from what I can tell they are not acquiring id Software, so how is that going to work?
That makes more sense, I now have read the MS Statement it was more Clear than the one I read earlier that made it seem like they were only buying Bethesda from ZeniMax not buying all of ZeniMax...
Good move, Sony had up to now more exclusive titles for their Playstation lines. Many people wrote off the new XBox because there were not enough exclusive titles. Now perhaps next Doom etc. will be time limited exclusive for the Xbox.
A lot of people dislike Bethesda's management, is there now any risk of ex-Bethesda managers or executives poisoning the other game studios Microsoft owns?
This acquisition has interesting timing given that they acquired Obsidian not long ago and we know Obsidian is developing a first person fantasy RPG (Bethesda's bread and butter). Have to imagine M$ execs will be thinking about further consolidation.
Cool and if Im not mistaken Zenimax Online's headquarters is down the street from me in Hunt Valley, MD. Nice area with nice housing that isn't crazy expensive, especially right on the border of MD/PA.
From a strategy perspective this is an absolutely massive win for Xbox. Their entire strategy [1] for the next generation of consoles is breadth vs depth, essentially saying they cant beat Sony in exclusives so they'll offer way more value for a lower price.
What this acquisition means is that the gap between potential Xbox exclusives/Day 1 releases and what Sony has is much smaller. Realistically there is a very low chance that any of the IP from this purchase becomes Xbox-exclusive, but even an early launch on Xbox shifts momentum massively.
Something I'm curious about here is if MS will put in the effort to fix the relationship with Carmack. Bethesda and he have been on bad terms since he left fully to go over to Occulus.
I doubt this. Microsoft has spent last years integrating PC gaming under XBOX brand too. E.g. XBOX Game Pass for PC, or adding controller support etc.
They even promote so called "Xbox Play Anywhere", and tried to make it normal for the new XBOX so that you can buy a single game and play it on PC and XBOX. However the gaming studios haven't yet to my knowledge approved it fully so they want to sell you the game twice.
I would hope this would not be the case - in the past few years Microsoft have gone out of their way to build bridges with the PC gaming community, bringing their traditional first party titles (Forza, Halo, etc) to PC.
With Fallout and The Elder Scrolls’ history as PC only titles in their early iterations I would suspect this bridge building will continue
So this is it! Bethesda is officially dead. ESO was the early prognosis and 76 was the death rattle. This is the funeral.
Morrowind was a masterpiece of a game. Oblivion was amazing. Skyrim was quite special and carried the genre forward but left behind important bits from morrowind. The job of making the spiritual successor to oblivion and morrowind is now officially open to anyone because Bethesda will never do it.
For investors maybe, but probably not for consumers. It seems likely this will result in people having less choice about how and where they can play the games they enjoy.
I find it troubling that good news for the former group seems to trump bad news for the latter.
From Betheasda news press release: "And, we have a long history of working with Microsoft. Our companies share many of the same basic principles. We believe in a culture that values passion, quality, collaboration, and innovation."
Last week Microsoft was thanking Trump from giving them a chance to acquire TikTok. It did not go well.
Wow, amazing to see Microsoft really being aggressive when it comes to their games line up for Xbox. With the strong offering they are showing with the Xbox All Access I am in general really impressed with them.
Microsoft is serious about great content for its Xbox/Windows 10 platform.
The press note still caused some fear in me. Years ago (FASA?) such a move meant closure, since MS was not really in the gaming industry business content wise.
Bethesda has become formulaic, with the elements of gameplay virtually the same amongst titles. Same across the board really, not much genre-defying for quite a while.
Outer Worlds, Fallout, and so on just differ by visuals and story, the general jist is all samey samey. No innovation. No just single series but across the estate. Nothings been as good as Fallout 3 & Skyrim, just repetitions and echoes of greatness.
Is this a good purchase for MS? Maybe, if it's for tech, IP, and bringing talent on board. Hopefully they'll add some originality in game play elements, not just reskinning.
Bethesda also includes id and Arkane. Arkane's games in particular are incredibly unique and well designed. There's still a lot of innovation happening under the Bethesda umbrella, even if Fallout and Elder Scrolls are stale.
