Submitted 22 hours ago by Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works to greentext@sh.itjust.works
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/9edf42c9-62fb-47fc-a95a-e78415fae080.png
Young millennial/millennial AAA game dev speaking.
It is 100% a top-down issue. Most devs are talented people. When you’re incentivized by quarterly returns as management, you care less about game quality and more about stock prices and net revenue in addition to whatever else you need to satisfy your bloated ego.
tldr; Capitalism ruins everything.
The worse thing that can happen to your niche hobby is for it to go mainstream. US anime has been consolidated into the Sony/Crunchyroll/Funimation/Rightstuf monster.
^^^This is true, but I also think it’s important to note the role repeated financial and cultural success has on one’s mind and ego when elevated repeatedly by both the market and culture. You are not only just financially incentivized not to innovate, but your ego continues telling you “my ideas are always good no matter what others think” after these successes, even when they’re not true. This is how top-down cultural problems in studio disciplines calcify in addition to financial incentives. It’s important as a person(s) running a successful studio to not surround yourself with yes-men, which is not an easy task due to the previously-mentioned perverse incentives.
Gamers gamify a system that can be games. More at 11.
The executives, investors and accountants making the decisions that are ruining games are not millenials.
I am sure many are. Millenials are in their forties these days
The average age of a manager in gaming is 45 and the oldest millennial is 44 lol get mathed idiot
They’re Elder Millennials at best (born in the 80’s, maybe late 70’s). Or do they qualify as another generation ?
The old ones, yes
Gaming hasn’t gone to shit.
Some of it is shit, but that’s true for literally all media and art across all of human existence.
Gaming is better than ever. This whole discussion is ridiculous, with everyone blaming this or that for something that just doesn’t align with reality.
Right, and let’s not forget that Retro gaming is completely legal.
Indie gaming is the best it’s ever been. AAA gaming was always going to devolve into cashgrabs.
Yeah, as far as I’m concerned most AAA games might as well be part of a totally separate hobby that I don’t pay much attention to. The way I see it (and this is an oversimplification) games used to be made by nerds for nerds. Then normies started making games for normies, but there are also more nerds than ever making games for nerds.
I’ve had a similar experience.
For me it was more accessibility issues like timely checkpoints and not forcing the player to button mash.
I realized that a lot of my childhood gaming was possible because I just put up with gaming mechanics that need a lot of time and patience.
The past: don’t know what to do? Spending an hour just trying things and if that doesn’t work, try again tomorrow.
Today: don’t know what to do? This game has half an hour to give me a hint or I’m moving on to the next game cause I’m here to have fun damn it!
It’s far worse than pretty much any modern ARPG, not because the technology has improved but because people have learned from Diablo II’s mistakes.
I was ready to argue you at the start of the sentence and then went completely agreeing with you. New games aren’t better because they are new, but they have a potential to become better by learning about what worked good or bad in previous games. And it doesn’t make classics look bad now, like, we don’t need to fix Chess for how wild the horsey is in it, but coming to any old game requires setting oneself into the context of when it was launched, and therefore we need to see any new game through the lense of past experinces and how they learnt on mistakes of the past instead of repeating them.
I seriously have nothing to say to anyone who doesn’t see it that way. If all you play is big budget corpo horseshit and your first instinct is to blame a generational cohort, that says more about you.
AAAlways has been .jpg. Just look at literally every sports game since the Street series.
Btw kudos on the memetic payload that is your username, you monster.
AAA games are made by companies that have boomers and early gen x in charge
Indie games are more likely to be made by people actually doing the development, i.e. millennials & early gen Z currently
Indie games have been having a great decade, AAA keeps getting worse
Thanks for attending my TED talk
AAA gaming shows the effects of late term capitalism on gaming.
Indie gaming now is great for players, but for gamedevs it is a saturated market and most of them don’t make a profit
And also, the rate of good AAA games coming out is still the same, it’s just they’re drowning by the see of identical boring cashgrabs.
It’s the same with all the other media, cool shit is still there, you just have to learn to filter the bullshit out.
that has to do with shareholders realizing they can make money out of the gaming industry. they basically ruined it like they ruined healthcare and housing.
When it was released in 1993, Doom — which was developed for under $1M USD — was earning id software $100k/day immediately upon release, in shareware registrations alone.
It’s no wonder capitalist leeches saw those returns and wanted to insert themselves in the process. Of course the more who latch on, the more value they need to extract by screwing over both the devs and the players.
Obviously the devs and players are actually the only two groups who are necessary in this relationship, and they’re the ones getting soaked.
PS by “devs” I mean anyone who works on the game to make it better.
It’s mobile games. It has always been mobile games. A certain part of population is simply unable to engage in games as a medium that requires quick reactions, precision and thinking. Until about 2012, these people didn’t realize these kinds of games games existed on consoles or the PC so we were safe. Mobile app stores tapped into this market, got huge returns and made everyone else realize how many people were willing to engage with a glorified skinner box. Every fiscally responsible company now has to assess the degree of implementing the dogshit gameplay loops, instead of just not doing that like they used to.
The company I work for recently tried to make a mobile game, being a fairly informal studio with many gamers on staff we made something more like a mini linear rpg than a typical mobile game. Testers loved it but the publisher said it was too complicated for mobile and cancelled on us.
Those shareholders? Dentists. No love lost between them and the gamers.
It started roughly around the ps3/360 era, when corporate devs began prioritizing turning their games into skinner boxes that were designed to motivate players to keep playing, so they would be more likely to engage in microtransactions, see more ads, or continue paying subscriptions. Of course gacha garbage is a fuller expression of this kind of manipulation now days.
Still plenty of great games out there, and in some cases we have a real renaissance.
Frank Zappa ideas; paraphrased by me.
In the 1960’s the music execs like Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington and had no idea what the kids wanted. They just threw money at the problem and gave contracts to anyone. The result was a vast variety, everything from Sha-Na-Na to the Mamas and the Papas to Iron Butterfly. When the next generation of bosses got hired, they looked at the one consistent moneymaker; Motown Records. Everyone at Motown had a similar look and singing style…
Oh man. Iron butterfly is just…
I have no words. They’re very special to me
I mean, kind of, but not really.
It all started with Halo. Back in the late 90s and early 00s the movie industry was the big money maker of entertainment and there was actually a lot of anti-gaming rhetoric in news and politics. The weekend Halo 3 released it was so popular that it disrupted the box office numbers for a couple of movies. The movie executives decided to stop trying to kill the gaming industry and take it over instead.
So I guess you can blame millennials for playing Halo instead of going to the movies that weekend.
It’s the same in every industry. Rich shit bags move in and buy successful entities but have no idea how to run them. They slowly get shittier, so good employees move on and do their own thing.
There’s still amazing games being made, there’s just a lot more shit games you have to sift though. Follow great game devs, not who they work for.
Yeah, the industry seems to be changing again. There’s a push towards passion projects and those projects are seeing more success than the big budget games. I think we will either see a new cycle of conglomeration or, hopefully, we will see the executives take a more hands-off approach and let the games make money for them.
Just because you own a sports team doesn’t mean you should be head coach.
A movie when I was a teenager was $3.25 for a matinee. Also, there were like barely any mass shootings. America is imploding. All these issues people bring up the outliers and they never want to talk about the root causes because it’s a contentious arena. Capitalism consumes itself until there’s nothing left and the wealth is all consolidated at the top horded and then World War. The cycle continues. Everything’s connected. Nothing in a capitalist society happens without money. If we want to understand the differences of then and now we would focus on the economy. I hate gaming of today. There are advances, but all I see is cigar chopping game execs as they pray on nostalgic millennials and children. I can’t even watch movies anymore because all I see is propaganda, mischaracterization, and the profit motive. All I see is rich people trying to mold your minds and destroy education and keep you hyper-distracted with short-term goals. It’s not that technology is evil, but anytime the Imperialist come up with some kind of new gizmo, it’s always a double-edged sword. I know people will think I’m overreacting, but I’m not. Once you realize how real life is, and all the mechanisms that go on around you, you start thinking about things differently. You change your behavior. Pearls before swine.
You’re not wrong
Zoomer consumers accepting micro transactions in games
I think people don’t realize that current CEO’s are still old. Many of them in their 50s. I don’t think those are millennials.
Mobile and fast broadband internet is what ruined gaming. Back in the day, it was impossible to download a game very reliably plus it was super slow if you tried. It was far easier to go to a store and buy the disks.
Mobile showed that there is an enormous crowd of extremely stupid people willing to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at adolescent half baked code and that the best retention and monetization is often with junk that is never fixed or is even broken worse over time. That standardized garbage and flooded the space with loads of slop. Just sorting through the slop is a chore now and fools have proven that it is profitable to take a giant shit of slop and dump it on everyone to let people pay their way through searching for undigested corn kernels in these places. The same is true of streaming. You pay for it to waste your time. You lower your expectations, and the cycle continues. It is profitable to target the stupidest people. Culturally, it will require the majority to stop being brain dead zombies, but good luck with that. We’re both zombies on an idiot brick right now.
I’d argue management ruined gaming but broadband and mobile enabled it.
People are making these choices.
Wait, gaming is shit now and it was great in the past?
I agree about the speed of progress, but someone is forgetting all the movie games on the ps2.
Also, I’m old enough to remember the angry video game nerd reviewing bad NES games, holy shit, you have no idea how bad it can get.
Yeah, this seems like a case of survivorship bias and the fact that there are way more games coming out in the modern age.
Movie tin-in games that end up being utter pieces of shit date back to the Atari 2600. The USA videogame crash was caused by ET, of all things.
There should be a list of actually good movie tie-in games. There’s probably like 20 of em and 2 of them are LOTR.
Riddick has a good one, and I remember enjoying Shrek 2 on the 6th gen consoles.
I don’t know, games are getting really good these days. If you ignore the aaaaaaa slop you’re going to find some awesome stuff
I certainly wanted to be a gameDev, and had shit ideas. It is my fault.
You probably don’t have shit ideas, you just need help making you ideas work. Even Tolkien had a group of people help I’m improve the Hobbit.
One of the things I wanted to make, is a pixel style build a vehicle game, where you earn parts for vehicles that you build.
Shit is subjective. As long as you love your own shit or the process of it, you are good.
Excuse me, but a lot of passion han be found on the indie market.
It is the money people’s fault. Once there was money to be had in the industry, all the idiots moved in, and no power can resist them. The game devs hate making awful cash-grab games that aren’t fun to play, too.
Mostly or straight became indie devs or got they asses fired on AAA studios, let’s be honest indie and double A studios are what still keep this hobbie alive today
get absolutely abused by employers squeezing every penny they can while blocking union efforts
He forgot that part
the entire us went to shit, what’s your point
More of a late stage capitalism issue than a millennial issue
Ape Escape was such a good game. Shame that Sony has abandoned it
The people who break there bakes making the games. Are the ones who enjoyed them as kids. It’s the executives and managers who run the decisions. Who have never played games before.
Who is the main target audience downloading and paying for these games?
Boomers, unironically. Well then x too, but 45+ are the biggest share of gamers by far in the west.
Boomers would be 60+ though. Anyone 45-59ish would be Gen X.
Serious, genuine question:
Has a team of, or single Zoomer game dev(s) … made… any… game?
I am not gonna pretend that I somehow know all games and all game dev teams by age, but uh…
Yeah, are there any notable games made by a team that is majority composed of people born after '96 ish?
Like… I am a millenial, and I am well aware of the ludicrous greed and mismanagement of AAA studios, how even most AA studios end up getting fucked by some kind of IP rights/funding issue, if they live long enough… I’m still pissed that EA killed Maxis… and I am also well aware of many games with primarily millenial dev teams… very often devolve into, or revolve around ‘millenial speak’ / ‘millenial writing’ …
Most of us millenials, outside of the tiny number of mod teams that actually stuck together long enough to form a game studio, or just outright form an indie dev studio… yeah most of us just jumped into the megacorp game dev meat grinder and then acted both entitled and surprised to find out that ‘corporation bad, actually.’…
But I seriously cannot think of a mainly zoomer game dev team that’s made anything other than pretty much shitty asset flips and/or outright scams, enternal alpha/early access type bullshit.
I would love to be informed that I am an idiot and there are some really good zoomer made games, but I am ignorant of their existence.
A huge amount of games in the indie scene are made by zoomers. Lethal company was made by a 21 year old. The current game industry is composed of mostly millennials, but still a lot of zoomers.
Hey there ya go!
I didn’t know Lethal Company was made by a Zoomer.
Apparently he has been modding/making Roblox gamemodes/doing itch.io releases since he was 10!
LC isn’t exactly my cup of tea personally, but that is definitely a good example, LC has been quite popular.
Thank you for informing me =D
But I seriously cannot think of a mainly zoomer game dev team that’s made anything other than pretty much shitty asset flips and/or outright scams, enternal alpha/early access type bullshit… or maybe mobile, gacha type games?
You didnt exclude game jam games and there are a lot of those. There are also quick games that are not meant to be expanded so they wouldnt count as eternal early access
Thats true, I did not explicitly exclude those, but I think you can tell that … I am trying to mean a game that… someone would actually pay for, a game that has at least some level of popularity.
Some game jam games do kind of achieve this, some are later expanded into more fully fleshed out games that later release…
But generally speaking, a game jam is more or less a speedrun tech demo of you or your team’s ability to whip up something fairly basic… and most of these do not usually go on to have any real impact or popular awareness or even a niche following that expands outside of other game devs.
Its like a training routine / job interview process for a game dev.
I am not trying to insinuate no zoomers are technically capable of making a game, of course many obviously are.
I am trying to match the context and language of the OP, referring to a much more generalized: ‘what has been the effect of zoomer game devs on the kinds of games produced by game industry broadly?’
Easy solution: Do game dev as a hobby, release as FOSS
Millennials killed gaming.
They played too many videogames instead of learning good skills. 😥
I’ve been curious lately if the original Ape Escape is as good as I remember. I heard the sequels weren’t as good, but I have fond memories of the first game on PS1.
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
It went to shit because big corpos realized there was money in the games industry.