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The wild monetary successes of Call of Duty and Fortnite send a clear message: treat unsupervised children as prey and you will earn billions of dollars
As if managers & stakeholders would listen to reason
They should manage the organization and stay the fuck away from the product.
Only really mature product owners that understand what they are doing and LOVE the product they are making should be allowed near your product… and they will work with devs to make something wonderful.
Satisfactory, Valheim, manor lords, enshrouded… just a few examples of product that is loved. And it shows.
Just because a signal is sent, it doesn’t mean it’ll be received. We all know that practically any other major brand will still pump and dump e-waste, filled to the brim with mtx
While Helldivers 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 might look like sudden jackpot successes
This article is funny. It’s like the feel-good inverse of a rage-bait article. It’s stating what we all want to be true and cherry-picking two games that only sort of provide evidence towards it, and only if you squint really hard.
Both games are sequels backed by huge publishers with tons of cash.
BG3 is a Dungeons and Dragons franchise title; a franchise which recently received a massively successful film, a huge boost in popularity during a pandemic, and a boost in cultural relevance in Strange Things.
Helldivers 2 fits the claim a bit better, but it is still a sequel to a well received, well selling title. The extraction shooter genre is also exceedingly popular right now, and the fact that it has Games as a Service bullshit built in says that publishers weren’t as hands-off as the article implies.
So the more realistic take-away from this is that good games with huge budgets for development AND marketing in reasonably popular genres can make a ton of money.
Which isn’t saying much. And it certainly doesn’t look like a sudden jackpot.
“Two popular games with little else in common can be shoehorned into my pet narrative” is a bad title, though.
I can’t speak to Helldivers, but pinning Baldur’s Gate 3’s success on the recent growing popularity of the D&D franchise is beyond reductive. There’s no huge publisher for Baldur’s Gate 3; Larian’s a licensee and an independent studio to boot, and Hasbro’s not running massive marketing campaigns for them any more than Disney is for the typical licensed Star Wars game. There’s also the game’s pay-once sales model, which is something else you get when you’re not beholden to publishers or public shareholders.
BG3 was the culmination of decades of iteration by Larian and was the studio’s first attempt with a AAA budget. The game has more in common with Divinity: Original Sin 2 than it does Baldur’s Gate 2, as the Baldur’s Gate die-hards would be happy to tell you.
Calling CRPGs a popular genre is also going to get some laughs. Sure, we might be able to look on this point now in a few years as when CRPGs went mainstream (or maybe not, as the insane amount of choice built into the game set the bar so high that it’s possible no one’s going to bother with that kind of risky content-making). But by the time Larian started development on BG3, the genre had just risen from the dead after some successful Kickstarter campaigns and was still very niche.
There’s also titles where the Devs cooked and ended up spending too much time and resources and underdelivered on huge flops. See Daikatana or whatever kickstarter game is disappointing people at the moment. Making games is just difficult, let alone making something that everyone loves.
Or Star Citizen, which may still never deliver (at least not a “launch” game and certainly not 80% of what has been promised).
Most time and most money spent developing a game ever so far.
I agree with every criticism of that game, but fuck I want to be sooooo wrong.
