Jim Sterling's Jimquisition on the trends of modern "AAA" publishers:
The previous episode is about how gambling mechanics are another fixture nowadays, causing a huge spike in children gambling their parents' money away. There has to be someone reading this who still hasn't figured it out: there is nothing cool anymore about big big gaming firms and their big big mega titles, no matter what the horse bollocks can do. They're just like any other corporations.
Fuck Jim Sterling.
But no shit. The bigger the dev and/or publisher the more bloated, buggy, and watered down the product.
It's like repeating what any sensible person has been saying for years.
PS: idk how my "delete my account" post got shifted around on SDA, but I would really like my account deleted.
I usually like Jim's stuff, but some parts of this are just off base.
ITT: Krayzar defends AAAs shitty behavior. eyeroll
Well, no one's going to pay more than 60 bucks for a game (even though they really should), so what do you expect?
The real cost in Dev time for most current gen titles is roughly 60 to 80 bucks. Want that Nintendo/Blizzard iterative approach and polish? Probably closer to the 80 bucks range. Devs need to eat, and companies need to recoup overhead costs, so by the time all of that is taken into account, you need 20 to 60 bucks worth of extra stuff that isn't included with the game but should be just to "make it up in volume". The real cost of some of these games should be anywhere from 80 to 150 in reality.
The problem is really our unrealistic expectations, and the rising costs of producing anything on current gen hardware. The major players backed themselves into a corner because of our whims. We kept buying the latest and greatest things, The PS3s and XBox 360s, and we bought them for ridiculous sums, and we started expecting giant open world blockbusters every month.
These latest and greatest things were much more complicated to program for so teams expanded, and with success brought about even more expectations. It became cyclical. In order to do well, you have to have giant amounts of content, but no one wants to pay the real cost. Now they're all too big to fail and hyper focused on the bottom line because we forced their hand. We kept buying these things. And that's the rub though, none of us have TIME for a giant open world game every month. A lot of these are phantom sales. Folks who just buy it and barely touch the content or may not even open the game until a year or two down the road.
So now, whenever one of these big players doesn't hit a sales number, heads nearly roll, and series get threatened with cancellation and outsourcing. And maybe, studios close, and a lot of great people lose their jobs.
And sadly, maybe it should be like this. Maybe we need another video game crash. Maybe some consoles need to die. Maybe we need to let the Indies take over.
Once a developer starts working for a AAA company it becomes a grind doing what the board wants which is ways to get as much cash out of the users before they move on to the next game released. The microtransactions and the lootbox gambling helps to engage with people that cant resist the cosmetics and they hide the cosmetics in the lootboxes without showing you the odds of you getting that one skin you really want. Indie games I find are more fun as the devs usually(not always) are doing it because they want to make a fun game and money is a side effect of a good game. Can I see a video game crash? Probably if the lootbox shite continues its only a matter of time before people get fucked right off with it like I already am.
I have no idea. I at first thought it would be about Triple AAA Batteries or calling the Triple AAA roadside company. But what I do know it's a post from an advertiser to try to troll people's opinions.
LotBlind has been around since the SDA days. Posting a video doesn’t automatically make someone an advertising bot...
And they’ve done absolutely nothing to troll anyone. They posted a video on a topic and opened it up for people to discuss the topic in the video. There’s nothing trolling with this.
What a weird post.
I really think LotBlind meant to post that on SDA, or he's given up on SDA, idk which.
If you look back at older games there are a lot of stinkers. I do agree that the money-grabbing trend has been ridiculous with all the different editions and the pushing of micro transactions. It is a huge problem that is essentially making the industry stale. Afraid to innovate due to potentially poor sales these money grabbing companies will continue to put out stale content that will be guaranteed to at least be "decent". These "decent" games will in the long run turn off gamers ...at least that is my expectation.
Most recent games do not interest me. Why? Because many are the same content that was peddled before only with a different skin. Look at what happened to Halo, COD, GTA, Mega Man, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, etc. They can be a fun distraction, but I would only ever buy them after they have been out awhile and used. The only recent games that seem pretty innovative are phone and VR games. Some of those are pretty interesting. But again many of the phone games have made what could be a normal rewarding game with a grinding freak show unless you open your wallet. VR seems hopeful to me, but I am still on the fence due to a lack of titles.
Every recent game is not mediocre, sometimes using the same type of game play works great. Look at Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Monster Hunter: World, Doom (2016), or Uncharted 4. Extremely high quality games that are not particularly innovative, but just done to a really high level.
So while "Everything isn't completely shit, but most of it is." is too pessimistic, but if you are looking for something new and exciting and innovative "AAA companies" or whatever you want to call them are probably not going to risk millions or maybe even billions of dollars on something completely new.
A good comparison to the current video game market is the movie business. Think about the most recent movies you have watched. Seen anything really new or innovative lately? Probably not. A few great ones, a couple good ones, but most are just passable.