Indie gaming is the best it’s ever been. AAA gaming was always going to devolve into cashgrabs.
Anon blames millennials
Submitted 3 weeks ago by Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works to greentext@sh.itjust.works
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Comments
rockerface@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
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.
altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
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.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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!
Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
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.
9point6@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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
masterspace@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
AAA gaming shows the effects of late term capitalism on gaming.
OrganicMustard@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Indie gaming now is great for players, but for gamedevs it is a saturated market and most of them don’t make a profit
Nalivai@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
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.
Chadus_Maximus@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
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.
CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
adoxographer@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
I don’t think that is true at all.
Strategy games existed, adventure and point and click existed, puzzles, turn based rpg, even forgiving platformers existed since before PC gaming, and flourished with PC gaming. Many of the hits needed nothing of that.
Many of the hits today still need all of that and are competitive.
The market grew, and with it came more audience and genres.
If we all liked yellow, what would happen to blue?
Sparrow_Joint@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Those shareholders? Dentists. No love lost between them and the gamers.
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It went to shit because big corpos realized there was money in the games industry.
DittoTron@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
No one I know can afford to buy a house because our generations been so royally fucked in every which way, yet somehow we are responsible for steering the entire game industry. Right… lol.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Bu-but Asmongold and Kirsche Verstahl told me the problem was woke gamedevs! /s
13igTyme@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Asmongold is a Nazi sympathizer. No idea who the other person is.
ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 2 weeks ago
Like they didn’t realize in the 90s
DittoTron@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Institutional money didn’t take it seriously until the mid to late 2000s.
redwattlebird@lemmings.world 2 weeks ago
That’s why most of the money hungry games were in the arcades back then. PC gaming wasn’t nearly as big.
digitalnuisance@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
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.
PolydoreSmith@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
tldr; Capitalism ruins everything.
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Sunflier@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Capitalism doesn’t ruin everything. Corporatization ruins everything.
Drbreen@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Not that I disagree with you but it’s more like greed ruins everything
digitalnuisance@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
^^^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.
pory@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Unlike most "everything"s out there, games are doing great. Ignore shovelware and corpo schlock, some of the best games ever made have come out in the past few years. Genres get pushed, art gets made, phenomenal brain-off gameplay loops are polished, stories get told. Which world is better:
4 good games come out every year but it’s Nintendo and co making them. Also 100k bad games come out every year.
10 good games come out every year. Nintendo and Ubisoft and Sony churn out 29 shareholder revenue generators. There are nine million AI asset flip cash grabs and porn VNs released that year. People are paying 20,000 dollars a month for catgirl jpgs on their gambling phone games.
Who cares about “ratio” of good to schlock? You were never gonna play it all anyway. The last couple years alone saw everything from Balatro to Caves of Qud to Blue Prince.
ShittDickk@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Gamers gamify a system that can be games. More at 11.
SitD@lemy.lol 2 weeks ago
I’m just so sad that it seems most execs in the field go play tennis or golf after work and think videogames are for losers. there is a lot of contempt and expectation that losers will just forever dish out money. if it wasn’t for this strange phenomenon that game engines are so available nowadays, we would be screwed. thank god for the indie space
digitalnuisance@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Tbh most gamers are indeed losers.
j4k3@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Alaik@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I’d argue management ruined gaming but broadband and mobile enabled it.
People are making these choices.
moakley@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think the main difference is that we mostly forget about the shovelware titles of 20 years ago. Meanwhile the predatory monetization practices of the popular kids games of this current era will not be forgotten.
You can’t say that gaming is better now when Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Roblox are the most popular games for an entire gaming generation. There are still masterpieces being made today and there was plenty of shovelware back then but there will never be another year for gaming like 1998.
You get like 3 games worth playing a year now and studios that would make all timers year after year now release a game once a decade and sell micro transactions or 50,000 ports of it.
moakley@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Obviously I don’t know your personal situation, but they can’t actually force you to play Roblox. You’re allowed to say no.
Joking aside, the existence of bad games doesn’t make gaming worse when there are great games still being made. ET doesn’t count against Super Mario Bros. just because they were released in the same decade. Superman 64 doesn’t count against Ocarina of Time just because they were a year apart. And Fortnite being released eight years ago definitely doesn’t count against gaming today just because people are still playing it.
Yeah 1998 had some great games. A couple of them even hold up today. But not many, and the biggest reason those games topped the charts back then was because gaming as a whole was like 1% of the size it is today.
If you can’t find more than three games worth playing in a year, then either you don’t like games that much, or you’re not looking.
13igTyme@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’d agree with the 3 games worth playing a year comment if you limit it to bigger budget games and anything new over $50. But indie games and games that are around $20-40 at launch. Naw, you need to raise that number significantly or expand beyond a single genre.
wulrus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Right, and let’s not forget that Retro gaming is completely legal.
Thcdenton@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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
KaiReeve@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
fishy@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
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.
KaiReeve@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
andybytes@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
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.
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
I’ve always found it deeply insulting.
KaiReeve@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You’re not wrong
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Zoomer consumers accepting micro transactions in games
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 3 weeks ago
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.
AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
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.
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Holy shit, it was Microsoft. Microsoft ruined gaming.
bollybing@lemmynsfw.com 2 weeks ago
Bethesda pioneered MTX with horse armor long before MS bought them.
EA and Valve pioneered in game ads and loot boxes.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
Horse armor.
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Nailed it. When casino and packaged goods marketers and executives started malignantly metastasizing into the games industry.
Dagwood222@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
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…
silasmariner@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
Oh man. Iron butterfly is just…
I have no words. They’re very special to me
MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
The baby boom in the USA was a real demographic phenomenon but every “generation” after that gets fuzzier to the point where its now just rage bait nonsense or just a proxy term for complaining about changing fashions. Even within the Boomer cohort people had wildly different experiences growing up across such a large span. That said, every game studio I ever worked for was run by Gen X and Boomer aged people.
When they started in the industry it was small teams, tight budgets, a new frontier with a low bar to entry. Now it is highly corporate, capitalized, shareholder driven behemoth (like everything else). This transform happened when the millennial cohort was in our 20s, we had no influence on this, and it mirrored similar larger-scale transformations in the rest of society.
I’m fortunate in that I basically retired early, although I wouldn’t mind going back to work with a good group of people, even for cheap. Like the old days again. I still like the work I just hate the business. But it doesn’t matter, the whole industry is in ruins now.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
tarrox1992@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Yeah, this seems like a case of survivorship bias and the fact that there are way more games coming out in the modern age.
OmegaMan@lemmings.world 2 weeks ago
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.
SuperCub@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The LOTR games were so good!
kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Riddick has a good one, and I remember enjoying Shrek 2 on the 6th gen consoles.
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Rockstar made GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas, Bully, Max Payne and Max Payne 2 in the PS2 generation. We are 5 years into this current generation and Rockstar has made 0 total games for PS5.
Yeah there was a lot of shovelware back then. We get barely anything now.
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah if you only look at Triple A then it looks barren. But small and indie studios have filled that vacuum.
ICastFist@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
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.
Pacattack57@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
get absolutely abused by employers squeezing every penny they can while blocking union efforts
He forgot that part
WatTyler@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Obligatory;
No war but class war.
RedditIsDeddit@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The gaming industry is fine. It’s all the AAA publishers that are shit.
Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Most definitely can be refuted. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of amazing games out there made by young and old people that appeal to both young and old people. The issue Anon is struggling with is non gamer capitalists running game companies and milking games for every last penny at the cost of quality.
I know it’s a tired example, but look at the company and team responsible for BG3. A game that is widely considered one of the greatest games to be realsed in at least the last 10 years, maybe even longer. This game was made by a company owned and operated by old people and young people. The teams directing, designing, creating, and writing this game were made up of multiple generations of people, and what was made, unimpacted by corporate greed, was a masterpiece.
Good games are products of passion and creative freedom, not money.
Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
There’more great games now then ever there ever was. So many choices. Plus, the older games didn’t disapear and there is no such thing as “the Golden Age of gaming” lol. It’s just that a bunch of low- losers are spending their days on the internet crying about “woke runing my videagame” because they see a woman not having huge boobs and a bikini armor.
rumba@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
The ruin of modern games is the perfect shit storm of:
- The quest for the other side of the uncanny valley, making releases closer to decades
- The death of the in-house game engine.
- The half-baked attempt to cross-platform consoles with PCs
- The half-baked attempt to cross-platform mobile devices with consoles
- The merger of Live Service Games and Free to Play
- Game prices not following inflation.
- Everyone and their brother trying to take a major cut.
Shit is more complex and resource intensive than it has ever been, we’re hardly even looking to optimize these days if it works.
You get to choose from a couple of engines, who want a serious cut, or a free engine who has serious problems on consoles.
You need the game not only to pay for itself in sales, but in in-game sales without making it to gambley or making it too pay to win.
Adjusted for inflation, Mario Odyssey is $20 less at launch than E.T. was at launch for the atari.
Fizz@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
Gaming is insane right now. I can buy a game for $10 that would have won game of the year every year straight for an entire decade. Even saying this there’s probably like 15 games that fit this category.
kooks_only@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
More of a late stage capitalism issue than a millennial issue
BlackSheep@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
STOP blaming age groups! It’s a divide and conquer tactic. It’s not your parent’s fault. It’s not your grandparent’s fault. It is the fault of the rising Oligarchy Super Wealthy. Their system works when we work against each other. We’re even suspicious and blame our parents and grandparents these days. WTF??
match@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
the entire us went to shit, what’s your point
TheHalifaxJones@lemm.ee [bot] 3 weeks ago
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.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
There’s plenty of great games these days. The “golden age” wasn’t because of the quality of games. It was because I was able to delve into them deeply and enjoy them without all the concerns of my adult life running on the back of my mind pulling me out of it.
rtxn@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
- Hollow Knight
- Stardew Valley
- Factorio
- Outer Wilds
- Baldur’s Gate 3
- Clair Obscur
Gaming is fucking phenomenal right now, OP is looking in the wrong direction.
Jankatarch@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Who is the main target audience downloading and paying for these games?
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
I certainly wanted to be a gameDev, and had shit ideas. It is my fault.
Glide@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
The executives, investors and accountants making the decisions that are ruining games are not millenials.
SatyrSack@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
I am sure many are. Millenials are in their forties these days
known_unknown@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The average age of a manager in gaming is 45 and the oldest millennial is 44 lol get mathed idiot
Forester@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
The old ones, yes
Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
They’re Elder Millennials at best (born in the 80’s, maybe late 70’s). Or do they qualify as another generation ?