Spolier: Do not put 'listening to leftists' as your answer, too easy.
With the paracite hangers on of game 'journalists' the first to go, the amount of bleakness from Ubisoft, EA trying to sell itself harder than a crackwhore, we are approaching a point where we may end up with only 3-5 major ones left and a few focused on one title that's been around for decades (eve online, your DOTA games etc).
Doesn't really affect us as I think I'm safe in saying we all have backlogs that can outlast us being on Earth! So why not make this a fun opportunity to go 'you know, if you did this , you wouldn't be begging for money'. Choose whichever companies you want on what you think was a missed opportunity:
EA: Not using their IPs together enough. Seriously how hard would it have been to make a Battlefield game set in the Command and Conquer Red Alert or Tiberium franchise or even do a sports game but in the backdrop of Mass effect. They seemed to be all about processing IPs than using them effectively.
Bethesda: not using an Id engine for Fallout 4. When I played Rage, the story was lackluster but the combat and gameplay was smooth, fun with fantastic visuals. Unless there was a hidden licensing reason, why not use THAT for Fallout 4, that seemed like the perfect engine .
Nintendo: making it too difficult to buy and play older titles so creating a piracy market.
Microsoft: not letting gamers be the one to design their military AR project as they could've probably told you the dumb parts quickly.
Sony: Not embracing Japanese game devs, not leveraging their monopoly on anime with PS+ by doing, for example, free first 3 episodes of a series on Crunchyroll if you have PS+. Also on Crunchyroll, just put an adults only section for uncensored anime, have it behind a paywall of some small fee and a SECOND password and you'll probably get a lot more subscribers.
There's more I could mention like Ubisoft, Rockstar, CD projekt etc but gone on too long and let this be a collective 'I would've done this' thread.
This one is easy: diversity hires.
The sad truth is that white and Asian men are the only demographics that reliably create good video games. The only reason indie devs can still kick out good games is because their teams are small enough to avoid diversity mandates. This allows them to employ exclusively white/Asian male devs, and the results speak for themselves.
The demise of AAA gaming isn’t because the teams are too large or the executives are too greedy. Corporate greed and 100+ person dev teams existed throughout some of the best years in gaming. No, the problem is diversity quotas forcing developers to waste half their funding on people who not only don’t contribute to the game but actually sabotage it.
Hmm, that actually does make me think, has anyone got any good games that came out of South America, Africa or the Middle East?
99Vidas and Horizon Chase Turbo come to mind.... I believe they're from studios out of South America.
Horizon Chase Turbo is an extremely fun game, but unfortunately the devs are pozzed and it features globohomo content where it shouldn't.
I think there was a EMEA studio that made a 3D action-strategy-war game about the Sasanian Empire. It actually looked really cool from the trailers I saw, but I'm unsure if that game ever came out?
All that being said, current_horror is 100% correct. There may be some one-offs from South America/EMEA that are decent, but all the really good games come from East Asian studios, Eastern European outfits, and American developers back when they were mostly White/Asian.
SquareEnix: going after "trends" and imaginary audiences (WESTERN trends and audiences at that), throwing away what people loved them for.
Ah the endless pursuit of a 'general audience', which always ends up with a bland, tasteless grey product..
Exactly this. And that's a hell of a price tag on that blandness to boot
I think the AAA game developers need to stop wishing they were Hollywood. They spend way too much money on making their product cinematic (thousands of hours of dialogue voiced by famous actors!) which requires obscene sales requirements to break even. Then they say a title under performed despite selling a million+ copies. Not that Hollywood doesn't have the same problem of spending way too much on actors and ... I'm not even sure what they waste so much on. Yet story, the easiest and cheapest thing to get right from the start, they skimp on.
I hate seeing famous actors in games. It completely takes me out of the moment when I recognize them, and I think about how many talented voice actors there are who could have gotten those roles if they hadn't cast some Hollywood millionaire who doesn't even know what he's reading for.
Which is also stupid considering how easy it can be to make your money back on games SO LONG as the core gameplay is fun
People buy skins and colours in games if they enjoy it so much compared to Hollywood were you need people to see a film multiple times to break even
“Not that Hollywood doesn't have the same problem of spending way too much on actors and ... I'm not even sure what they waste so much on.”
Cocaine. Mountains of cocaine.
Not enough plug and play - I don't always mind a download but we've entered an era of ridiculousness, that and too many damn required third party services, the blight of aggressive micro-transactions, etc.
Sometimes I just want to play the damn game. I can't even think about a game that I look forward to outside of what Sonoshee or Mason Lindroth is cooking.
Don't fucking remind me, had a 26GB update for one of my games this week, took HOURS to complete
I've not played a lot of mainstream titles just because of microtransactions, one of the main reasons I stay off mobile gaming.
In any country with remotely decent internet infrastructure that's maybe a 40 minute download.
Listening to and hiring women.
They're all stuck looking over at Activision nervously, knowing any time, their fate will be the same, only without the Microsoft rescue deal. We already saw the leader of Activision's takedown trying to get a job at Epic, and suing for sexism when they rejected her.
EA : Just existing. Sell Codemasters, you feminist hacks.
Epic : Their biggest mistake was casting Brie Larson as The Paradigm. Nobody cares about the story now. Live events were what made the game special, but they're pointless now. You already know Paradigm has plot armor because of how much Larson paid to cling to relevance.
Microsoft : Putting Playground Games on the Fable reboot instead of making a better Forza Horizon expansion. It hasn't happened yet, but I'm guessing - firing the Rick and Morty guy. People inexplicably liked that crap game he made.
Anything that MS has touched has turned to shit in the gaming department. They fucked Rare, they ruined Halo and Gears of War, Fable at this point is fucking vaporware. They were the ones to introduce DLC, they were the ones that incentivized that developers patch their fucking games at a later date. Constant patching of their UI which always got worse.
Square-Enix from a beloved developer that made fantastical worlds that people loved to sink their time in, to adopting Western trends in video games that have alienated half their fucking fans, and are now a laughing stock. They only have managed to survive because of FFXIV and the good team that they have. Which they are now making FFXVI and might save them, but it could be too late since hype for that game is average.
EA/Ubisoft is pure trash, nothing redeemable about them, it's employees should all be fired and never hired again. The scummiest people in the world.
I don't think it's Microsoft's fault that Gears of War was trash. They didn't choose the insufferable female protagonist, The Coalition did. Halo could have been better, I haven't played the single player so I can't tell you whether that's woke or not, but the multiplayer was pretty average.
Playground lost all their team leads to some feminist hedge fund backed project. I'm concerned about Forza Horizon 6 being vaporware, it looks like they might try to use good thoughts and used gum to hold FH5 together for another year or more.
EA should stick to sports games and do a firesale of all the other dead IP they've got.
Ok hang the fuck on, they put a studio, that has ONLY made Forza in charge of a Fable reboot? Not even another kind of racing game, a full on RPG!?
I have no idea who might buy Activision for COD alone as it's weird, everything else got infiltrated but the COD franchise seems, from an outside perspective, to have their 'men doing manly shit!' in their games, it's just a question of if the game is shit or not.
This was known back in 2019 (I think. It was definitely a while!). The Forza community was really pissed that we lost Playground's full attention, but FH5 came out okay in the end.
I think Fable and FH6 are dead now, a feminist hedge fund poached all the team leads from Playground Games to make some insufferable GTA clone. Microsoft might need to reboot Forza Horizon entirely.
Microsoft. Why do you think they bid so high for it? It's never worth what they paid. $90 a share for a dying company at war with itself and subject to more ridiculous feminist rules than an orgy at FTX headquarters?
I don't have Xbox and never play racing games so it was off my radar, damn that's bad.
Why a GTA clone as there's no point, there's GTA V, despite all their horrible ideas and sometimes gross negligence (like currently thanks to a mod exploit, it is EXTREMELY dangerous to play GTA V on PC currently as modders/hackers can ban your account or even corrupt your pc), they still have a large playbase as turns out being a criminal in a virtual world is fun.
They had success with Saints Row doing it's own thing until the reboot killed it so then trying a GTA clone sounds like another dead on delivery game.
Well, if it wasn't funded by feminists, I'd say that GTA VI's confirmed female protagonist leaves a good chance for them to take over that market.
I greatly enjoyed GTA V, but I'm not playing as a woman, not even if they pay me.
Too many micro-transactions.
"Fuck it! We'll do it live!" style launches
Simultaneously relaying too much on established brands while not staying true to them
creativity of a sea sponge in multiple areas player races seem to lately boil down to its a human with blue paint on it
Make game for white male nerds (how it used to be 10-30 years ago) and everyone else will follow.
Make games for libtards and they will be praised by Very Online types but then nobody actually plays the game because it's shit.
HEY! I said no easy answers, we all know that listening to the left goes wrong in EVERY industry, even chocolate! But let's rub it in like a gloating parent with specific examples of 'see, if you'd only listened to me, you'd not be sleeping on my coach' lol.
Give me another Symphony of the Night. More generally, what happened to Konami? Outside of Nintendo, it's like all of the Japanese gaming giants of the '80s and '90s just evaporated into a few major franchises and completely forgettable one-offs at best.
Pachinko machines is what happened to Konami
Yeah. It's just sad.
And Bloodstained was alright, but I honestly couldn't get into it again for a replay. I've finished SotN dozens of times but Bloodstained left me with no desire to play through it again.
Chasing photorealism at the cost of everything else. Crysis started this trend and pretty much every game since has been making only incremental improvements to graphics. Gameplay, however, has suffered.
Technical bloat. So many games nowadays are multiple 10s, if not 100s of GBs in size, with multi GB patches. For people with bad internet connections, this is incredibly tedious to suffer through.
Desperatley trying to seek approval and validation from TV and Movies. This was already covered in this thread, but it bears repeating. I'm sure it's easier to count the number of people in gaming not here because they couldn't cut it in Hollywood.
Lack of professionalism. With how important public image and marketing is to certain types and their influence in the wider culture, I want to know who's teaching these people to be openly antagonistic to their customer base.
I can think of 3 individuals off the top of my head, there are others of course but those three were at the heart of the outrage, grifting shamelessly
People who talk big, but are useless. I saw it during the Manly Men era of E3 in the 00's. Guys would get up and talk about how they made a game based on all this cool stuff. They made sure to look tough and it was hilarious. The only guy who did it right was Reggie Fils Aime.
I saw it a lot when they tried to promote stuff they didn't actually believe in. The Kinect, most of the CoD's, and others didn't have passion so much as a desire to sell a game designed by a committee.
That's how all the useless people got in. They made themselves look tough and like they knew what they were doing, but couldn't even play their own games.
Gonna disagree heavily on this one. In fact, if they had made that change it would just be playing into what I see as the real problem: Bethesda decided to stop making interesting (if janky) RPGs and instead make mediocre action games with increasingly stripped down RPG components. Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim does add a couple neat things to each step, but to get that the world, character progression systems, item systems, etc. get gutted on each progression. Fallout 3 to Fallout 4 to Fallout 76 does the exact same thing. Heck, even the fact that you're saying "FO4 should have been a better shooter game" points out the problem that Bethesda's games are ARPGs heavy on the A and super light on the RPG scale. And that's why I'm basically ignoring Starfield until a good 6 months or more after it is out because I'm willing to bet it will follow Skyrim and FO4 into "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" territory.
It was less on the shooting part more on when I played Rage I was thinking at the time 'imagine if this engine was used for Fallout NV, you'd have less of an issue with how janky the game runs and plays plus the story and dialogue of that series would make it legendary'
As when Fallout 76 came out it was crystal clear that they need a new engine for their rpgs as it's getting ridiculous how buggy and patchwork it is now.
Gonna avoid the low hanging fruit for a second and say: this started with the melding of console and PC game engines. This is why, for example, Microsoft killed 3D audio on Windows after the XBox came out - the Xbox didn't support such things and they wanted a uniform framework for both platforms. Let it sink in that PC game audio 20 years ago was more advanced than it is today. Today, PC games are usually just console games with minor tweaks. Real antialiasing doesn't even exist any more thanks to shitty deferred rendering engines and lazy programmers who don't want to put more effort into supporting something only PCs can do. The games themselves have also become artistically bereft and generally designed for knuckleheads.
Universally: hiring lots more people than they could effectively manage, because they had the money to spend on salaries. That created long-term liabilities, because these people cost money continuously, and aren't given mentorship, direction, or discipline that they need in order to become effective developers. The solution the industry picked was to try to outrun that through revenue, but that can only work in times of artificially cheap money.
Counterpoint: the only gaming market collapsing is AAA. Indi devs will inevitably rise to take their place
Over corporatized business practices is what did it. Big expensive meticulously planned cgi slugs are all they can do. Nintendo as well don't let the cute graphics fool you. And because they are so big and expensive and time consuming-- many new games take years to build-- they have to be runaway hits otherwise it's a massive loss studio's cannot survive
They simply cannot afford a misstep. And because of that they stagnate and collapse. Too afraid to fail to be unique and innovative and potentially plunder much bigger riches therin. (Potentially - being the scariest word there is)
oi, i dont think i can really settle on one but i will do my best. i think the biggest mistake in general was the corpratization for lack of a better word of game studios as they grew and hired staff they gradually listen to their internal staff more then their fans as a result they gradually loose touch with them, on top of that you have foul things like marketing and other executive meddling that alter the game and a corperations goal is to make profit so of course they are going to go public bringing in the vultures to take yet more control from the company and those that made it. eventually the people that make it split and your left with a bugman in a skinsuit that cant create their way out of a papper bag hiring based on chckboxes and quotas with their design process being similar resulting in a product that has little soul if any inside it but thats fine your buddys at game site 9000 will spin up hype and promoted results anyway for early acesses and other favors,
Is it just me or is Left 4 Dead a better gaming experience than Darktide? I would sacrifice some of the graphics, the cutscenes and the entire hub for PVP, modding, custom maps, and the capacity to hold more zombies. We're talking about the difference between a game that requires 100GB storage and 8. That's also over 10 years old. Fuck, just make Left 4 Dead in space.
TLDR: sacrifice ALL of the graphical improvements in the last 10 years for a game engine that can host more zombies.