Making this mostly because I saw this trailer which is the third game this year I'd actually WANT to play and this video from Arch on how because the games being made are all grey goo (sorry, 'quadruple A') they are losing not just to indies but DECADE old evergreen games like GTA V.
Between the constant woke stories and characters, the piss poor game mechanics and the insistence to be 'live service games' I can't tell if it's deliberate sabotage or they were so reliant on ESG that they forgot how to make a game FOR PROFIT.
And a lot of these games COULD be fixed with mods but thanks to the war on non-narrative modders, a lot of them remain a pile of shit. It's why Fallout 4 still has an active playerbase and Starfield is largely forgotten.
I think 2024, we will see at least ONE major studio fall and a ton of cope articles saying 'gaming isn't as popular' while these guys might make the next hit allowing us to drive a Toyota into medieval knights..
Once the pozz sets in there is no coming back, it is usually death spiral, layoffs, shutdown, then the parasites find other places to embed themselves into.
Pretty much, you can fix jank, long time Bethesda players can testify to that. But you can't fix terrible writing and design if it's the very root of the game's existence.
Hence why Starfield won't have the kind of modding community Elder Scrolls did.
Ive been an active member in the modding community and done mod vids for almost a decade. Half the mod makers expressed no interest in making mods for the game.
Especially since now, even if you try to fix those things, the fucking big mod sites will ban your mod (and then your account) for daring to take out the woke/leftist bullshit.
You don't even have to add anything offensive. You just need to remove something they did (even something as trivial as the stupid "ThiS gaME is OffEnSiVE!" warning in the Tomb Raider remasters), and it gets you out'ed as a political dissident, and banned.
I'm almost glad they're banning these mods because it not only demonstrates how political these studios and mod sites have gotten but it stops people from thinking they can buy these games and just mod stuff out. It's such a self-own to go and buy from some woke dev that hates you and then mod it, come on guys.
I think that not only are indie studios going to be on a massive rise, the big studios are doing so badly you'll be able to create shameless rip offs and no one will care which is great news. Then that way modders could potentially go for the indie titles instead and add interesting stuff in. My only real complaint is that I wish these indie studios using Unreal would learn how to make their own grass and vegetation. Maybe get staff once they make money to do some new rock textures etc.
See: Palworld
I'm about to go back to that once I finish up everything I'm doing in Granblue Relink.
Exactly, that's all the rage right now, but there's also TemTem and Cassette Beasts, I like how people have stopped caring as much about gaming brand now as long as it's good or they find it fun.
It’s also proof positive that the woke bullshit is responsible for these big games flopping. If based devs can copy 90% of the design document and grab huge sales, then the issue isn’t “video game fatigue”.
If modders more work with indies, some of them who COULD do grass and vegetation might work with them to help them.
There's way more talent in the modder scene than big studios, them using that talent for indie than propping up a franchise will only be good news.
100%. Imagine directly funding your sworn enemies because you can’t overcome your impulse to consume astroturfed mainstream garbage. There are more great games already in existence than any one man can responsibly play in his lifetime. You don’t need to give money to the worst people in the world.
No, there's no fixing them.
The problem is that the industry is plagued with people who got their starts working in San Francisco and educated, socialized, all within it. The media and corporations linked themselves together to be staunch Leftist evangelists.
This is actually the fundamental cultural relevance of GamerGate. The consumer uprising never ended, and was already starting prior to 2014. Not even for cultural reasons, but because the corporate industry has been a problem for decades. Gaming, as an industry, has a long habit of being a corrupt industry, but people actually did rebel against it.
GamerGate partly started as a result of the corporate media being threatened by YouTubers who were both doing reviews and walkthroughs. Truth is, they really did lose that fight. That same mechanism of decentralization has been stuck in the industry, and instead of trying to purge it, companies are trying to recruit or manipulate it. Same with the political activists.
The thing that no dissident was able to do, was to actually form game companies. Nor was there an external cultural influence (Gaming was divided between Leftists and Libertarians). As such, Leftism permeated both education and IT, and was the next generation of developers are useless, resentful, mutants who are either from other industries and hate games; or hate games as a "capitalist product".
As such, we will have to continue to build anti-parallel systems, and more explicitly, anti-parallel institutions. As we do so, we will build up people and skillsets (the logistics of a civilization) that is anti-parallel to the intuitions we are subjugated by.
I think Nintendo will survive. I'm wondering about Konami. American and Americanized companies are screwed.
Nintendo is the only one with a good chance at surviving. It still retains its Japanese roots (unlike Playstation), and while it might go a bit too far in protecting its brand at times, it doesn't try to be a monopolous behemoth like Microsoft.
Not many people care that Nintendo platforms have been lower-tech than the competitors, as long as their target audience still views the games as innovative and/or fun.
Crazy that we're on the timeline where Nintendo is the least monopolistic and doing the least censorship of any game console company.
Eh, it's not the 1990s any more.
BMX XXX anybody?
It goes far on the brand thing because it's the only way to fight off the competition. Sony wants an NES emulator for their consoles. Same with Microsoft.
Almost like "higher tech" usually just ends up with 100gig file sizes to being able to see slightly more into the pores of someone's face while forgetting to make an actual fun game.
Nintendo is always hit or miss, but its AAA or First Party content at least usually has a chance of being worth playing while the other companies are offering the same "AAAA experience" that barely qualifies as a game.
They're their own thing so they'll survive no problem.
I'm actually guessing whether or not they'll swallow up some of the originally Japanese studios who may fail thanks to appealing to a 'wider market'.
It's 50/50 as they'd like the assets and IP but don't want ANY of the staff that drove it into the dirt.
They're not above putting someone in a room with nothing to do till they quit.
They're wokists, that's not a torture technique to make them quit.
For that, assign them to have hand out a certain amount of flyers in public each week.
It does keep them from doing more harm though, which is a plus.
The industry is in a death spiral because software development is so in demand now. Why make soulless corporate “art” at a company that expects you to take like a cool-industry discount when you can just go to the soulless corporate sector for more money and less work. The studios have self filtered to the point that the only game devs left are people that don’t care enough about the hobby to know they’re killing it, people that don’t have the skills to get a better job in the real world, and true believers that think the sincere expression of their leftist ideals is enough to justify the microtransactions and live services. I don’t think any studios will fail any time soon though because the live service model does work for them unfortunately (look at Diablo) and it’s why they keep trying to recreate it. Maybe they’ll shrink but the “major” studios are major because they all have at least one moneymaker that isn’t going anywhere
MegaCorps themselves also suffer from the "gray goo" problem in that working for one is the same as working for another. So that being the case, why not just chase the money?
But if the games companies offered something interesting/different in exchange for working for them, then people might be willing to take the pay cut. Obvious one would be "we don't have an HR department; we just have Kelly who manages the benefits". Or barring that, put the head of HR extremely low on the org chart so the damage they can cause is minimized.
Based on my 20 years in the industry this is the life cycle and it seems unlikely to change.
Group of friends (usually mostly men) start a new company.
Work hard, modest pay, long hours, passionate, comradary, unified vision. Blunt honesty with each other.
Successful indie title, big money
Studio expands, wants to make bigger things.
A parasite gets hired, refers its parasite friends for hiring.
Company becomes large enough that it creates an HR dept.
Now there is massive inflow of parasites, non- parasites blacklisted by HR on the basis of not being a "cultural fit". People are no longer hired because of skills but "race" "gender" "sexual orientation" or because they're friends with HR. Recommendations by relevant seniors are ignored.
Parasites care less about games than their own ideology, reinforce each other and create dishonest hugboxes that kill the possibility of honest feedback.
No unified vision, Products are compromised and politics injected into everything alienating a portion of the studio.
Infighting starts, Orignal members are forced out by the parasites, those good ones that remain become disillusioned and check out, do minimal work and spend their energy on personal projects instead.
Output and quality drop.
Talented staff start to quit and move on, some create new companies. When they are replaced its with more parasites (if the company still has money)
Eventually the money runs out, husk of a company crumbles. Parasites disperse and attach themselves to new hosts.
This trend is pretty much universal.
Depends as the Palworld dev seems to be enjoying telling critic media to get bent.
Indie and smaller studios need to become the new big studios.
Not right away, wait a few years. Them being indie and small currently is stopping them being infiltrated.
Once the purges are done and all these wokeists are out of work, begging and reduced to being in their caves with all their cats, then they can take their place. We need HR culture to die first.
I'm roundabout answering "no, there's no fixing the big studios". If you want good big budget games then the current studios need to be replaced. Personally I'm content with the smaller budget titles we get from indie devs.
First they need to earn enough money to get big.
Shameless plugging based developers:
We can still make our own games, the resources are all over the place. I'll admit that I'm still not a Blender master, but there's other people and other tools.
Does anyone have any experience with IdTech 4? Source SDK? UDK? What can we do to make them work better with WINE?
if you want to find good games, you're going to have to dig. the AAA market is all in on live service gambling, and the Indie market is saturated.
I guess you might be young so you don't understand how large games are made in a large, corporate environment. or how debt works, how for instance if a large corporation has the service on their debt raised 2-3% annually they go out of business. and this will happen unless they adopt ESG pushed down from the banks, which is pushed down by the globalist, coin-clipping international middlemen and financiers who hate you hate your people hate your history and hate your culture and want to see all of you die but not before humiliating you and sterilizing the children.
Indies only. I WANT to see all big studios and publishers die a horrible death and destroy all IPs they own in the process. Force ingenuity, indie solution.
There's no fixing the games from big studios because people keep buying the games. As long as people keep buying the games at the quality of the level they are produced, you'll never see this quality improve.