Less Fun Games but More Game Sales? What's going on?

[Blitz4]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olAn5VN9Jl8


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZCQzu2bsCw



Remember when gamer's joked that the marketing budget equaled the development budget. Now I question. What is that percentage? Is this focus on live service reducing the amount of fun we have playing video games?

The video focuses on Starfield. Mentioning how it was announced 7 years before released. It then mentioned how The Elder Scrolls 6 (the game after skyrim), was announced 6 years ago and likely won't be done for another 5+ years. What's that do when we see new big games come from publishers each year. When we hear about a game 5+ years before it's done and are expected to get excited about it, what's going to happen when it releases? During those 5 years left to wonder what the game will be like, aren't we more likely to imagine what our perfect game would be like and buy the game when it releases expecting it to be that?

The video failed to mention that the generative AI used to create Starfield will be used for all future Bethesda titles.

[Rumpelcrutchskin]

Don`t really care. 95% of stuff I buy these days are from indie and small developers.
AAA simply can`t make a decent game anymore.

[Blitz4]

Originally posted by Rumpelcrutchskin:

Don`t really care. 95% of stuff I buy these days are from indie and small developers.
AAA simply can`t make a decent game anymore.

That's a point made in the video. There's some brilliant things said in it.

Some examples. How games focus more on sales instead of the fun experience that you're buying. How games focus on how big the map is instead of how fun having a bigger map is.

[Tonepoet]

Survivorship bias and Sturgeon's law.

[sleeps]

guess every game out there is starfield, apparently

[Utiviroo]

The AAA and "AAAA" basically suffer from the Hollywoodification issue, in other words, they are trying to turn it into an industry, in the sense there is an endless supply of new things to buy that have nothing to do with the original goal, which is to make a game/tell a story.

Look at the history of film making, anything before 2000 all the way back to 1950 had proper acting, script writing, directing and had a focus on their art, film craft. Lots of great movies in all genres. Even the B and C movies tried to do their best, the good ones became cult classics.

Post 2000 it became an industrial conveyor belt of movie making, increasingly worse to the point of today (mostly drivel that isn't worth even watching the trailer of).

Streaming is even worse for this (TV shows, streamers are a different topic). Today, I want to say its been over ten years since a truly amazing movie has come from Hollywood, indie movies are still interesting, just like indie music, funny that...

Game industry is going through same rather absurd process.

In the case of big old franchises a lot is to do with the ego of the CEO, lot of them wanted to be Hollywood stars/directors (i.e. globally famous/respected by traditional media, which ironically is pretty much dead today) or w/e but instead they ended up running a game company, now that they are "big" their ideas for achieving more glory or w/e just tends to make monster games, that are less game and more interactive movie, thus the out of control costs.

They are gambling with $100's of millions on one product, where as in the late 90's game studios were gambling with just a million or two at most and had tight scope/niche they were not trying to be everything to everyone to try and capture maximum market share and please no one in the process.

Unfortunately for the advertisers gaming is not the new TV or radio, as much as they want it to be.

Which is the real motivation behind games as a service, if you are in their store/app they might only do it at that point (to test the boundaries), but I have seen quite a few documents where the long term goal is to interrupt your game with an advert and force you to watch it, before letting you continue to play your game, much like how TV shows work.

I hope that future never comes.

[Rumpelcrutchskin]

Yep the movie industry has it even worse, absolutely depressing. There used to be dozens of movies each year you could get excited about and now you are lucky if you get one in three years.

[Blitz4]

Originally posted by Utiviroo:

You said it.

In the video they listed the top 10 games in 2007 vs the top 10 games in 2023. I played those games from 2007 and still remember them. 2023 or the recent big titles. They're not fun.



I still don't know what a AAAA game is or a AAA game for that matter or AA .

Metacritic removed the AAA qualifier back in 2018 for publishers so the terms don't make sense because nobody has redefined it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)



Remember 2017? When that star wars game came out that was a mobile game. there were a lot of other micro-transaction heavy games in that year. Then 2022 live service seems so common that games are purposefully releasing unfinished. Just last year Cities Skylines 2 released and promised it'd get better, IGN called them out saying the game is bad unless they fix it, they just stated they wouldn't fix it and instead are working on more profitable things, like a console release and DLC. That's the same that happened with BF2042.

Live service when handled by a company focused more on profit than the customer experience, doesn't work in the consumer's favor. But release after release that's what's happening. No it's not every game it's mostly the big ones. The issue is what was said above about 2007 vs 2023, there are less big games today. Because of what Utiviroo said, the games cost more. Since they cost more, they can't take as many risks.


Whatever happens, it'll be decided by the gamer's wallet.


EDIT: Also brilliant comparison to the movie industry. There was a set of films that were mid-budget that aren't being made anymore. There were some gems among those films. Now the expected budget has grown.

[zeke]

Originally posted by Tonepoet:

Survivorship bias and Sturgeon's law.

That's pretty much 90% of it right there.

[Birds]

at a 50% marketing budget it's already profitable to just sell to yourself instead.

results in more real, tangible marketing data and benefits.

tax deductible if you spin off your marketing self-sell company.

[qb]

all games lack mod support for reasons of competing with developer, so in p[ast you get same broken game that people mod to presentable state, as dev costs rise devs find more ways to squese money out of customers and that often means cutting mod support. only few games support any user content like minecraft and if that is considered modding nowadays at its finest.
i think if devs are afraid they simply need make lesst content and more brunt on the users ie if games is as huge as starfield cut it down into 10 smallers games with mod suipport so people can make their own content, a 30 minute games with good level editor and low budget is suffice like fortnite look some generic map and with mods you can make map and game mode you like, on top of that tey add tons of dlc, like content in the game itself is secondary i finished many games with lond story line and could nt recall even one third of their plotline or what i was going on in them.

[Utiviroo]

All the A's are marketing, meets grade school education report card, meets short hand investor corporate business speak.

They are implying A plus quality, they imply more A (money) more quality/more chance of massive returns, they are being fast without being pinned down to an exact number as, development plans for everything in life never seem to match reality anyway, only "ballpark" estimates at best.

There are a lot of very rich investors from very low education back grounds, or they are international so they have to keep it simple to avoid confusion, they also have short attention spans as rich people are very busy being important and all that so numbers mean more than words.

Those in that game, selling a business know their audience and their craft.

That wiki article is decent in exhaustively explaining it, but getting a little side tracked as its functional goal.

As to the whole industry.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/video-games-industry-revenue-growth-visual-capitalist/

Mobile is basically skinner boxes and outright gambling disguised as mere regular "honest" games. Hence the massive growth in revenue, the general public is probably exhausted/bored of the hole in their pockets at this point. They can not make addicts out of everyone, as much as they would like that.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenues-by-platform/

2010 does feel like about the time, true big money started to interfere with traditional gaming, now its very obvious their hand and finger prints on everything, especially on the big publishers.

In the sense games started to get overtly political/tell you how to be and started to adopt odd things that mirror the movie industry's self pageantry, Bafta used to be TV/Movie but now its games too.

Personally I started losing interest/excitement levels for games around 2015, so your 2017 example is probably as good as any. I still buy and play stuff, its just not make my week/month level of happy, its at best maybe make my afternoon or evening.

As to the fear, how many "games" are on the Steam catalog now, over 160,000, with thousands of new games being added every year, games are now like books, more than you can reasonably read in a life time (play), so, it will continue to be harder for them to make money, hence the rise of free to play stuff and the experiment with subscriptions/games as a service.

Every time there is a successful new game, just like the fashion industry, within months (sometimes days) there dozens if not hundreds of clones/copy cats trying to cash in on the new fad.

They are pushing AI hard for this reason, personalized "targeted" advertising and endless creation/remixing of content without employees to deal with, keep you addicted to your screen so you watch all their product placements and keep buying digital goods that you don't own.

People will probably go back to in person board/card games just so they can enjoy the games and socialization without the middleman BS. Or w/e else they into that is non tech aka "dumb".

[TGC> The Games Collector]

Originally posted by Rumpelcrutchskin:

Yep the movie industry has it even worse, absolutely depressing. There used to be dozens of movies each year you could get excited about and now you are lucky if you get one in three years.

The weird thing is how we got all this tech to make it easier, and yet it hasn't become better.

I mean, plenty of it is just greenscreen and CGI these days, no intricate set building and props, or coming up with crazy ideas for that perfect shot.

[Blitz4]

Originally posted by Utiviroo:

...

(I don't clip like that out of disrespect, only to show who I'm replying to.)


What'll happen, and I'm kinda seeing this. AAA is now a derogitory term. It makes it easy for me that when I see a game called A-whatever, when looking at that game to put on my "I don't trust a word you're saying" look.

I was bored and jumped into a few different discord servers. So many people joke about this very topic. About how bad AAA games are today. Even in the official discord channels for those AAA games.


Personally I use 2017 and 2022 as milestones for noticable changes of the industry. So much happened in 2017. Some clips:

• Co-Optional 2017 Award for Worst Microtransactions (Remember when Battlefront II was called a mobile MTX game released for $60 on PC and got an award, for the most downvoted comment in reddit history).
• Devolver Digital Unethical Business Practices E3 2017 Press Conference (At E3 2017, Saying 4K every sentence was the meme).

We think alike, but you have more insight on the matter. I was gonna link this revenue chart. Love the prediction of in-game advertising increasing:
https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/digital-media/video-games/worldwide#revenue

Your movie analogy is spot on. It's like EA Games is taking notes and trying things out with their complacent customers (I say that cause of that Co-Optional video above). Like if it's such a big deal to sport gamers, why are they still paying for the things they dislike in the game? No. It sells. Then after EA tests the waters, everyone else is following what EA GAmes is allowed to get away with. Then the smaller companies follow them for what works with their business. It's great. It's putting more money into the industry. The problem is. The quality of the product is decreasing and that's likely part of some formula now. It's so similar to the movie industry, there investor reports tell the big movie publisher that spending more than $50M on a movie will create a higher profit margin, and as such we now have "safe" and boring big action movies with lot's of eye candy, that nobody remembers after they watch it. Because that report of $50M tarnished and biased all movies that follow it. If an investor says I'll gamble and turn my $25M into $50M in hopes of going from 100% to 400% profit margin and in so doing I want creative control and blah blah blah is the end result.

How does that apply to games? My theory, I imagine it requiring all design changes be passed up the chain to the investor's dogs (leadership) for approval. Imagine the devs for Starfield creating this boring game and voicing their concerns to the guy in charge of keeping it "safe" to maximize profits. That design director of starfield even wrote a lengthy twitter post complaining how hard it is to make games, but not explaining why the game was bad. There's gems like Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 and Helldivers 2 that are able todo more with less.

2010 was right after Fallout: New Vegas. 2015 we got a preview for Mass Effect: Andromeda, yes that game, but just comparing the graphics between the two shows how much graphics in games improved. But at what cost? To the average gamer, better graphics mean better game. I have a friend who isn't a gamer, didn't have much money, and was given a GPU. I told him about this game with non-realistic graphics that I know he'd like, but he couldn't get over the graphics and wouldn't consider bying it. He wanted the best looking game to show what his new GPU can do, gameplay was secondary to him. That's got to be some bias to be explained for games to change for the better.

What else happned in 2010? Youtube changed their algorithm from focusing on counting clicks to focusing on tracking watch time. As a result, the average YouTube viewer in 2014 was reported to be using YouTube 2x as much as they were in 2010. Interview with an x-dev (at 18:00)[www.nytimes.com] who worked on that algorithm and him covering a few of the negative things how that changed humanity.

Google and Youtube, the #1 and #2 websites in the world, both focus on using AI to handle supporting the everyday of their products. And both are telling you what to think.

The entertainment that I'll have available to me in the future will be determined by what consumer's vote for using their wallets.

EDIT: Looking back. Probably not we think alike. More that you have ESP and knew where the conversation would go lol.

[Chaosolous]

AAA is a joke at this point, it's best we all just move on and let them burn.

[El Mythical 23 k.s.c.]

Hey even Disney held a profit till last year. Just give it a minute. With the economy people are going to start holding their cash a little more. Enough to wait and see if its broken release, we had plenty of paid for broken EA's were people actually paid to beta test. Gamers are more aware of this and how gaming companies care more about diversity than game play. Let them cook. Don't take the past for what is to come. Media is about to be more ♥♥♥♥♥♥ then ever. People are done with nostalgia bait.