I’m not sure that’s the likeliest situation, given the Saudis’ stake in so many other gaming companies. If memory serves, they’ve got in the neighborhood of a 10% stake in Nintendo and outright ownership of SNK.
Comment on It's official: EA is going private.
simple@piefed.social 13 hours ago
Huh.
So who’s betting that EA dissolves over the next few years and they start passing their IPs around to other companies? Not sure how I feel about this because on one hand it could end with EA in the gutter and their dead franchises in the hands of companies that still know how to make games
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca 13 hours ago
I personally don’t care that huge companies that make bland boring flash stuff every year get thrown around to even crappier companies. I never bought their games, and will continue to not buy them. when I hear these games move to another company, I’ll assume they are just as crap and avoid them too.
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 13 hours ago
It’s not so much about the shovelware crap they release every year, but rather about the IPs that they own but aren’t doing anything with.
sbbq@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
I would be so happy, they own a lot of great IPs that are just rotting on the vine.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
You should be worried if you at all care about video games. Yes, EA sucks. But even a decade or so ago they were pretty much one of the big two and are still one of the biggest “developer” houses.
Because we already saw this play out with Embracer et al and increasingly with Microsoft. Video games are a horrible investment. If you make a "good game"and do all of your PR right and get REALLY lucky? Yeah, you can buy a yacht or twenty. But that comes after 2-8 years of expensive development with many points where you have to just keep throwing money at it in the hopes of success.
And EA was one of those companies that could get away with that because their sports games are so popular that they can fund development of the entire company AND still make a solid profit.
Because
That isn’t how this works. You don’t say “Wow. Development is really expensive and has no guaranteed ROI. Let’s fund external development that we have even less control over”.
As Swen et al constantly remind people: Baldurs Gate 3 is not a model that studios can follow. It was a once in a lifetime convergence of circumstances. Larian had been making CRPGs for close to two decades at that point and had used multiple kickstarters to modernize their stack in a genre that had mostly been forgotten. And they STILL needed 3 years of early access and a LOT of marketing money (BG3 was a fricking keypoint of Stadia for crying out loud).
That isn’t what Mass Effect or Dragon Age or Mirror’s Edge will get. At best they will get cheap remasters by Nightdive (which would actually be nice but…). More likely they will get the kind of “Are you sure this isn’t a mobile game? From the 2010s?” that we see plaguing Warhammer 40k and the like.
simple@piefed.social 12 hours ago
It’s a problem only for the AAA industry, The market is correcting. It’s becoming clearer risky 200+ million dollar investments on one game that takes 8 years to make and flops on release isn’t working. This year especially showed the AA/indie scene thriving
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
No, it really isn’t. Rather than just regurgitate what the “video game devs hate you but I love you so give me money” twitch streamers continue to say, actually listen to some developers.
Xalavier Nelson Jr has been pretty vocal about how incredibly hard it is to be an indie dev these days. And Strange Scaffold (his studio) is pretty much exactly what everyone says they want: They release REALLY interesting games on budget with no DLC. And people “wait for sales”. Which makes pitch meetings REALLY difficult which, in turn, makes getting more funding to keep making games REALLY difficult. And that is for a very established studio with a solid portfolio. Let alone actual new developers who are finding their funding cut or cancelled over the past five or six years.
I’ll also add on: What you are seeing are not “AAA games”. At this point? You basically have the GTAs and Call of Duties and Star Citizen and MAYBE some of the higher profile Sony games that fit that bucket. The AAA market more or less died with THQ where they released a string of games that were REALLY good but just couldn’t justify the development costs.
What we are mostly seeing are what would historically be considered AA/A games. Large scale games made by (ass pulling) O(10) headcounts with a LOT of money and MAYBE a support studio if they are more AA. And that is the market that is increasingly being destroyed. Which mostly leaves the “B Game” studios and the “I spent the past 10 years making this in my free time” indie studios and… I shouldn’t have to explain why the latter is not sustainable.
And just to highlight this: Geoff Keighley has decided his latest obsession is bragging about how small studios are because he is, and always has been, an obnoxious prick who actively hurts the industry. And one of his favorite things to bang on is Sandfall’s Clair Obscur. Which is a truly amazing game… that increasingly can’t be made anymore.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Clair_Obscur:_Expedition_33#De…
Founded by devs who had been heavily trained by the Ubisoft pipeline and all the benefits of working for a massive super studio. Questionable amounts of funding from Kepler Interactive in 2023 (right before the pandemic) that was used to headhunt LOTS of developers from major super-studios/publishers. And then they used said funding to hire “dozens” more contractors.
Clair Obscur is an “indie” game in the sense that Sandfall don’t have long term obligations. But it was made by easily over a hundred people with major publisher investments. And, much like with my example of Larian above, much of the staff and techniques were trained on other games over the course of literally decades.
As more and more of those publishers die off or are only interested in VERY short term investments? That money goes out the window. And as the major studios/super-studios like EA get shuttered? That pipeline that allowed Broche et al to understand enough about large scale project management to make their own games goes out the window. And more and more developers leave the industry because they need to live. Which means all the “I’ve been animating for 12 years” are gone and it is just the fiver crowd who need to “build out a portfolio” for one of the very few remaining jobs.
kartoffelsaft@programming.dev 11 hours ago
Honestly to me it seems like nothing has actually changed, except the names of the teams behind critically acclaimed games.
Like, your point about being an indie developer being hard is, well, just ask anyone who was making indie games 1, 2, or even 3 decades ago. It’s always been a lottery where 1-3 games a year hit it big and the rest can only barely fund themselves.
Though I do think you have a good point about asking what PP considers AAA. Something I’ve noticed is that there’s a bunch of people who, for whatever reason, see some big AAA release and act like it’s not AAA because it’s the first time they’ve heard of the studio / publisher. BG3 is the most obvious example of this (~400 people from my search). Expedition 33 also outsourced a ton of it’s work so it also gets paraded around as “only 30 devs!”. It’s especially frustrating that people will call these games a “wake up call” for AAA studios as if it’s not a huge risk.
Though I don’t think EA (and from what I’ve seen Ubisoft) dying this slow death is a herald of the industry at large dying. We’re seeng a lot more publishers that try to carve out their own little corner of the industry, such as NewBlood, Iron Gate, Hooded Horse, and as you mention Kepler. They’re funding and releasing plenty of successful titles. I think there’s space for, and already space taken, for various publishers to fill the same position as EA did in it’s prime.
You also seem to take this argument that these megapublishers are a prerequisite to having people with proper gamedev skills? As I see it, that’s either not changing, is effecting nearly every industry in NA & EU, or just not a thing. Valve, for example, when making Half Life, realized their game sucked when they were most of the way through development because they were learning as they went. So they scrapped most of what they built and what they remade is what we know as HL1, and that’s well over 2 decades ago. To my understanding Sandfall did a similar thing with E33 but what I saw on the subject might have been embellished and/or I’m misremembering.