Disclaimer: this is my opinion as an IT worker and dev, not fact. Please be constructive.
I feel with the folks losing their jobs or seeing their indie studio crash and burn.
That said, I feel like they’re starting to pay the price for letting a monopoly dictate game sales (as benevolent and popular this monopolist is, I know I will again be brigaded for this).
As another commenter said, the industry still tries to go ahead with triple or even quadruple A games, push hype and sell to underage gamers practically gambling games with hero faces.
Then there arent enough unions to hold companies to a standard because in the IT world as a whole, people are used to their privilege. „Trust me bro“ is still seen as a valid strategy in this business.
All while customers get put on pink glasses to make them oblivious to the fact that IT work is just a craft, like carpentry, but less known. The amount of buzz words and bullshit in the industry is appalling and needs to go, double time.
A dev should be judged by their ability to develop, not play corporate mindgames or „speak the lingo“.
While I agree with just about all of your points, there’s one thing I’m not clear on. Who’s the monopolist in your scenario? The console space has 3 competitors and on the PC side, you’ve got several more. I don’t see any of the big PC or console companies dictating game development trends. That seems to me to come from the publishers chasing the next big thing, or trying to make their own version of the last big thing. The rest of what you said is spot on, though. We need stronger unions and we need to demystify what developers do. And we absolutely need to tell the tech bro types to fuck off and stop stinking up the place.
The monopolist in this case sells the games to the gamers. It is steam. You have practically no chance to sell games outside of steam and although there is good reason for it being popular, its not healthy.
But the barrier to entry for publishing a game on Steam is super-low, it’s honestly dead simple. And even though Steam takes a sizeable cut, they do tons of work in exchange w.r.t. promotion, distribution, community management, the modding workshop, Steam Input, testing Steam Deck compatibility, etc…
For indies it’s one of the easiest routes to publish a game. And given the relative success of indies on Steam, it seems to work quite well.
Steam being larger than all their PC competitors put together is certainly a problem, but I don’t think it’s a problem that’s affecting the topic the article discusses. That seems to be an entirely different issue.
So consoles don’t exist?
Also, what exactly is the problem with Steam in your opinion, apart from “monopoly bad.”
To put it bluntly, if they make something I want to buy, I’ll participate, but this live service shit isn’t anything I want to buy, so.
They’ll learn eventually, I don’t care what they make. It’s all mostly cookie cutter garbage. Support devs going against the grain like GSC and indie devs. Let AAA die. What’s it alive for, constant disappointment?
Let AAA die.
I don’t give a shit generally about AAA games but the value of having large stable game development studios goes beyond the direct games they create, this is a crucial stepping stone for would be indie game development studio founders detonated and destroyed and mark my words the collapse of stable, consistent employment in the game development industry will play right into a brutal deleveraging of worker’s negotiating power and lead to further consolidation in the industry around AAA studios that have to try less and less hard (and pay their developers less and less) because very few indie studios will be able to weather these manufactured and designed shocks to the system.
This is the same old strategy cut throat robber barons/capitalist oligarchs always use to steal from workers.
the return of Gamergate
Really?
I feel like a perpetually online person, but maybe not as much as I think? I missed this one, but I also don’t spend a lot of time on 4chan these days either.
Traditional media likes to call “gamergate” to being called out for “access journalism”. That’s also why they took the uncivility of a vocal few to represent a larger movement that demanded more transparency in games journalism. Turns out, if you have a megaphone, you seldom want to share the power to use it.
I envy you. If you search for “DEI”, “Sweet Baby”/“SBI”, or “modern audiences” in Steam forums or on Google, you’ll find it.
Dud you’ll have people posting shit in steam forums who haven’t even bought the game bitching and moaning.
I saw a post on the forum for a game I’ve been playing recently and it was “One Year Anniversary: never forget the dev added a pronoun selector at character creation. Never buying this garbage.”
Game in question is Lunacid, and apparently the dev added the pronoun selector specifically to bait the trolls. And the pronouns are literally never used in any capacity. It’s just flavor text.
ETA: I believe steam forums should be locked unless you’ve bought the game in question and played for at least like an hour or so. The damn points shop makes you play your games for at least 2 hours before you can get any of that useless shit, so why not the forums?
Some people are obviously farming clown awards on the Steam Community forums, probably to distract themselves from their pitifully meaningless existence.
As I’ve said before, Steam needs stronger moderation. But barring people who don’t own the game from the conversation is not the solution. Sometimes you have legitimate questions about a game before you buy. Or maybe you own it on another platform.
Anything with a minority or woman in even a supporting role is getting blasted by conservatives.
Well, get ready because within the next 4 years, their uneducated and stupid voices will be even louder. They got a government now who’ll enable this behavior.
I think you mean the front fell off.
For the lucky 10,000 today who don’t get the reference:
Did it? I bought a shitload of amazing indie games this year.
Indie games are the only games worth buying.
AAA is dead in the water for the most part, maybe exept the occasional fromsoft banger
