Instead of go woke go broke, I’d argue it’s be greedy, become needy.
This is what I hate with the state of the gaming industry now. They’ve instilled the mindset in me, where there are games I would’ve ideally love to get and play. But, the skepticism of my mind is ever-churning, so I’m working around to find out what about the game that I will not like about it than there is to like about it. Like whether the game was made by a studio who’ll be shut down later because of unrealistic expectancies. Whether the game is going to one day be free-to-play.
Just so many guesses and it’s robbed me of the simple concept of just getting a game, playing it and enjoying it. That’s what the gaming industry has done, is bastardize what I should be looking for out of games. Because the industry just fucks one thing up after another every damn year from shutting down studios, passing up on better projects in favor of this shitty ass live-service, MTX ridden one and flaunting how well they’ve taken advantage of every gullible “GAMURRR” that wastes their money on feeding into the shit that is served to them.
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 elephant in the room here is that hardly anyone has a disposable income to spend $90 on an AAA game title and potentially thousands in hardware on which to play it.
Shelter, food, healthcare and power costs have increased too much. When the basics can’t be met, people stop spending money on these additional things because it makes the difference between eating or not for a week.
I’ve been saying for a while that the best thing that can happen to standard, microtransaction-free, singleplayer video games is: An increase in the US Minimum Wage.
Sadly, that doesn’t help international markets as much. I really wish we could get rid of key resellers so that games sold somewhere like Africa can be fairly measured out in terms of loaves of bread, not US dollars.
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.”
