Comment on WTF Is Happening To The Video Game Industry?
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
For a generalized channel from people who don’t know gaming like we do, it’s surprisingly spot on. Something that they might not know is a data point even worth quantifying is that in addition to hiring more developers, those developers are also, on average, spending more time making a single video game, whether it’s live service or not. And contributing to that problem of not having enough time is that even the non-live-service games are longer than the equivalent game used to be 20 years ago.
I would push back on this point that even Mat Piscatella makes where if you’re not Fortnite, League of Legends, Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft, or a handful of others, you’re somehow “fighting for scraps”; there’s the argument later in the game about what people want out of a multiplayer game or a social space; and then the question of “why wouldn’t you just make a mobile game?”. I don’t think these are often the same audience. The thing in common between most mobile games and most console games is that they’re made by people who have a very similar skill set, but their customers are often very different human beings. People on a Lemmy gaming community will probably play Grand Theft Auto, but they’ll also probably a dozen other new games in the same year. Those dozen other games aren’t fighting for GTA’s scraps; they’re just a subset of GTA’s audience who don’t intend to play it forever.
slimerancher@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I don’t have the data Mat has, but anecdotally, I agree with him. My kid wants to sometimes play a single player game if he watches me play it and likes it, but it will always be when his friends aren’t online to play Fortnite with him. And it’s not just him, it’s all his friends and cousins and their friends and cousins. They play Fortnite / Roblox etc primarily, and occasionally, if no one is online to play that with them, they may take a look at something else.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
But that’s your kid falling into that other bucket that primarily plays one of those games. It’s a fool’s errand to target that player rather the type who samples many video games on a regular basis, because your kid has already found more or less the only game he’s interested in. Meanwhile, the kind of person who plays Resident Evil is far more likely to play a dozen other games in a given year. You’re not getting “scraps” if that’s your target customer.
slimerancher@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Well, I am not sure how game companies define their target audience, but aren’t these players part of the same “gamers” pie that all these companies want to get attention of? These kids would still be playing games if there was no Fortnite, but it’s the live service game that is keeping them so engaged that they don’t have time for much else.
Of course if they aren’t even the target customers, then that discounts this whole argument.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
I can’t speak for Piscatella or how much he thinks about it that way, but it seems to be the perspective of this video, and one I would very much disagree with. The video acknowledges what the video game audience used to be 20 years ago. I’d argue that audience stuck around, while the growth that the industry experienced disproportionately went to people who “aren’t gamers, but they just play this game”. I don’t remember exactly how the video put it, but we know who that person is, and it includes your kid. Your kid would still be playing games if there was no Fortnite, but how that demographic used to look (best we can scale it to yesteryear, as times have certainly changed) was just picking up this year’s model of an old franchise, like moving from Halo to Halo 2 to Halo 3, a dynamic that still exists in sports games for that same large bucket of players that might only play one game.