Do you guys remember when the majority of the challenge with a fancy new game was finishing it? It's one of the things I find quite striking about this cancerous 'modern game design'. It's almost like with advertising online where the goal isn't to engage you with something genuinely interesting it's to practically force you to at any cost to keep you clicked onto something or watch something.
So as long as big studios see numbers go up and their player count being maintained, they're happy. Doesn't matter to them if they get 100,000 negative reviews on steam they'll just chug along going "Well those people might all be complaining but we've got 300,000 players durrr". Which is another example of how people who don't fucking play video games have taken over this industry.
The first descendent and once human seem to be classic examples of this mentality and explains to me at least a bit of why the studios refuse to give a shit. No peasant, how dare you demand good gameplay in a game, you're supposed to become a mentally ill skin addict and grind for hours to keep our numbers up or pay us money if you can't be bothered doing that.
Oh and of course I can't forget the cancer that is skill based matchmaking.
Everyone wants to be Rockstar with GTA online. Make one game now, and then never have to make another game again but somehow just keep getting money from that one game. Actually making games and having to do real work with timelines and a product that either sells or doesn't is haaarrrrdddd :( And game companies saw what Rockstar managed to pull off. We've all seen that timeline of how they were consistently making games every couple years until they came out with GTA v online, and then suddenly their output dropped to less than one a decade. And yet they still kept making money. Every game studio wants that. Why keep doing work over and over to get paid when you can do work once and get paid forever for that.
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Asserting that huckstering is inherently jewish.
I'd add one of the biggest issues with a lot of these game makers is they don't play games EVEN theirs as there's simple QoL features A LOT of these games don't have.
Instead they rely on 'daily log in rewards, new challenges each week/day' things that are good for new players starting out but can easily burnout those who are now experienced especially veterans.
If you want to see the games where they have some good QoL, look up the ones where a designer is treated like a rockstar despite not acting like it even being very introverted. Gamers will stay with an MMO game so long as they know ONE designer who plays and gives a shit is in a position to, even slowly, improve the game.
I have a hard time doing game dev myself understanding how they manage to release projects without having played the entire project once and then I realise their daily workflow is almost certainly checking the debugger for any errors that prevent the project from running and then calling it a day. Then I remember these are people who likely don't give two shits about their job and are just like games journalists where they hate the people they're trying to sell to and generally hate the medium.
If I had to guess, it's also very much a big bunch of divided work at the mega-studios. They never really touch the whole project. What if your job was only the weapons? You'd probably spend all the game play time in a testing room shooting guns and swinging swords that the artist handed to you to implement. Then you spend the other half of the time you actually work sitting in boring meetings.
I can understand the argument for specialisation but at the end of the day every employee in the company down to the janitor and security guard should be at least somewhat aware of the product they're trying to sell. What this indicates is they write their code or do their 3D modelling work and then they fuck off for the day.
Mandatory gaming sessions should be a thing in games companies and they should especially be made to play test the games along with QA instead of outsourcing that crap to a bunch of third worlders thinking they'll do their job properly. As we've seen with CD Projekt Red, outsourcing QA especially and trusting that is a recipe for disaster as it turns out. I think this problem all stems from the fact that these devs obviously hate their jobs if they're not willing to put the time into making sure anything works.
The joke is I'm doing testing myself now in preparation for a release, it takes five fucking seconds to launch a game these days with modern PCs and just do a little play session, these big studios are full of shit. I mean I 'could' simply post up the project now if it's error free and work off peoples' angry complaints, but that would make me no better than the douchebags I'm trying to compete with.
Oh and another one that gets to me is Hollywood and the general film/tv industry too with their workflow. Game of thrones was shockingly bad with how they were telling people they tested on 8k television screens and ridiculous 5.1 whatever surround sound that most people don't have.
That is just the world of large corporations. I worked for one a long time, totally unrelated to any entertainment media. The reward for excellence and the reward for mediocrity is nearly exactly the same. Once you figure this out, it's very difficult to have any motivation to do any more than floating slightly above mediocre. So, some leave and some stay around and be mediocre.
The difference with your game is you're invested in it's success. If it's a good game and does really well you benefit greatly. If it's shit and does poorly, you benefit very little. This doesn't apply much to corporate employees, who might get a small bonus on the success of a game.
I hate having my prejudices confirmed like this because what you're telling me is that game studio employees deserve what they're getting and then some lol, they have absolutely no right to be playing the victims if that's their average work day.
I mean I've never worked for a game studio, but I've done the corporate world in a technical job. There's a reason they want people back in the office, because at least they control their time then. There's a long list of jobs I know of that can easily be phoned in 20 hours a week or less if you get to being able to avoid meetings. It was never uncommon for me to work half the day on personal stuff anything from investments to dev projects when I worked from home, and still get everything done I was supposed to at work on time and with a high level of quality (I did still care about doing things right, I preferred to avoid fixing my screw-ups later). If I hadn't left that job, I was in the middle of a little Python/SQL project to automate an easy 5-10 hours a week of work away.
The bar is just so low at mega corps.
What's obnoxious too is that under modern engines, it's easier than ever for developers to dive right in and test things they're working on, which is not only great for making sure stuff works, but can be a fun and easy way to play around with new gameplay features and see how they're holding up.
I suppose it's possible that larger studios make it a pain in the ass to take advantage of such features. Maybe due to overzealous management and the soul-killing effects of working in some of these corporate environments.
AAA is dead, guys. It’s just a bunch of gamer-girls and cornballs that don’t know what a good game is, or it’s someone intelligent that knows they’re making a bad game but they don’t care because they’re really just there to get experience for one of those 300K/year faang jobs. The only passion left is coming from investors and the actual retards that think people want to see their fat, blue-haired character models.
Very much so, yes. Just about every market has almost completely shifted focus from raw sales numbers to perceived speculative value methods (usually using some of the flimsiest of data to back it up).
And a good portion of what makes up "sales" profits now are micro transactions.
Which isn't even entirely an industry pushing down problem. Plenty of people go look at things like Steam Charts and see "this single player game has lost 75% of its players after 2 months LOL DEAD GAME COMPLETE FLOP" and dance around it.
I won't even go back to a game I've finished when huge content drops that I've already paid for (still ain't played Torna from XB2 despite having the season pass) until a replay strikes me however many years later.
I think that is why they become so obsessed with retention. Their DLC model requires players to come back every few months to pay for more content, but if they aren't still playing the game anyway that chance drops a whole lot. So they need to Skinner Box you along until each drop happens, and that's how "Seasons" became a thing.
Those are normies, normies do that because they're normies and don't understand gaming.
If we have reached the point where /v/tards are normies, then I can only imagine how irrelevant and boring the guys playing CoD and NBA 2k24 are.
That's a whole other fascinating market I could do a several page autism thread on.
They print money with those games so much of the time that it's worth it to their business. Go look around any of that type of game that is multiplayer. See how many paid cosmetic objects other players are using. There's enough cosmetic MTX stuff visible in an average lobby to have bought a $70 game ten times over.
asian games are asian games. Asian games has always been grindy or busy work.
I honestly like if I can say "I finished the game" and then uninstall it. I don't mind additional achievements, people who want to go for 100% can do so.
If I really like a game the community adds their own challenges. Think the old Thief series and "ghosting".
I mean you got my money and most likely will get my money again for a sequel. Don't try to get me to log in fucking often and if I don't then my experience will be worse. Cause that will lead me to not buying your game at all.
For multiplayer games:
Give us back community servers. It solves almost every problem - including moderation. Server X is okay with people calling each other names? Cool, play on another server. Someone is annoying you on your server Y? Cool he can be kicked and play on another server.
Your community server idea for multiplayer modes is probably the best solution I've heard. Do you think it can work on consoles, especially given the power of the PS5 and Xbox Series X?
It sounds like it could make the problems of FOMO content, always online DRM, overreaching moderation, and grossly exploitative monetization models disappear overnight.
And multiplayer. Single player story driven is where it is at.
It's particularly bad when the single player modes require you to be connected to the Internet just to save progress or even access them.
It's why I waited until after the servers shut down that I chose to play GT Sport. I can now enjoy a genuinely compelling single player campaign at my own pace, on my own terms.
This was not an option when the multiplayer servers were still active.
Do you think a day will ever come when developers abandon the notion of having multiplayer dictate the rest of the game, even modes that have nothing to do with it?
The main reason that Indies are the only games I play these days. They are the o my ones who still care about games as art and not about brain dead shooter action online. Or some such.
Yeah, that's been a big dissuader of mine in trying any new online only kind of game.
They do not put any value on the player's time to collect all those items or do all those dailies or whatever. Instead of just being fun and unique and interesting, it has to have a checklist of all the same things every other online game has to keep you connected and hopefully spending.
Too much stick to carrot ratio. From this player's standpoint, it's hard to justify every single online game having a to do list bigger than the real one I'm avoiding doing, just to play video games in my free time.
I don't know whether that's just the state of the medium right now due to pressure to make more money, or the state of those who are paid to be in it and make games who would rather be doing something else and are on the same auto pilot as the players. Or maybe both.
It's because companies and their corporate whore masters want to milk as much money out of every single product no matter what. Few companies just want to make a cool game because they like making cool games
You can still make a lot of money making a cool game lots of people want to play, Rimworld and Cult of the Lamb are classic examples of mid scaled titles that have done incredibly well for what they are. Granted they're in the minority of huge successes, but the reason they can call it a success is because the people doing these games don't have a crap ton of corporate DEI bloat eating away at their profits endlessly.
The people who go around claiming you need a massive budget to even make any kind of game these days don't know what they're talking about or worse are gaslighting to try and normalise bloat. Anyone else would be delighted at selling a million units for one game but corporations always act like it's a disaster because they've got so many financial obligations to satisfy even some hidden ones the average normie doesn't know about.
I had high hopes for Once Human.