Anon pitches a new game

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Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨greentext@sh.itjust.works⁩

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/ea44085b-b19b-411f-8b3a-c32e892afe51.png

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Almacca@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Because they don’t want some of the money, or even enough of the money. They want all of the money, and think all you have to do is copy a successful game to get it.

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- Mirshe@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Moreover, like Hollywood, the gaming industry is largely run by people who truly do not understand the thing they’re there to make. All of the C-levels still think it’s the early 2000s where you could shit out anything that looked like a popular game and make 20 billion dollars from it. They think their entire market is dumb kids who will mindlessly play whatever is put in front of them without regard to polish, story, or even playability.
  
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  - msage@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    And the market proves it’s true.
    
    How in the hell is EA still not dead?
    
    Many studios produce barely acceptable shit, yet people buy it in droves.
    
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  - Almacca@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    And chasing trends when it can take up 5 years or more to complete a project is utterly moronic.
    
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- pyre@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Stephanie Sterling has been saying this for so many years, and it’s only getting worse. at least in the “”“AAA”“” space.
  
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  - Almacca@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I’ve been a fan since The Escapist days
    
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- Niiru@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Because sometimes that’s all it takes… See dayz vs pubg vs h1z1 (vs original fortnite to some extend). Or valorant vs overwatch (and csgo to an extend).
  
  Spins with just a little bit of change can be a massive success.
  
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  - Almacca@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    That “little bit of change” is what these greedy cunts don’t get, though. You need creativity for that too work.
    
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darthelmet@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
My (completely uninformed) theory: It’s competitive advantage. Indies succeed on their creativity, but that works because there are thousands of indie devs out there and we get to see the best (and luckiest) ones. It’s not easy to replicate that creativity by just throwing more money at the problem. So what is a company with ooodles of money but no creativity to do? Make games that only a company with way too much money could make. No indie dev is going to make the next Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed or Fortnite because they just don’t have the budget to make that happen. So they know that even if they keep churning out generic crap, at least it’s generic crap with very little real competition.

Of course then all of them got the bright idea to compete in a game business model that is inherently winner take all with already well established leaders. So yeah now it just seems like they’re lighting money on fire for fun.

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- Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I mean… You could make a knock-off Fortnite, make the cosmetics unlocked by just playing, and give it away for free. That would probably be enough to topple Fortnite. It just also would net you exactly 0 profit.
  
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  - darthelmet@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Maybe. But you’d need servers. And that would cost a lot of money for something aiming to be that scale.
    
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  - Justdaveisfine@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Doesn’t this already exist? I could have swore one of the open source Minecraft clones had a battle royale mod.
    
    There are definitely free battle royale games out there though I don’t know of their cosmetic unlocks situation.
    
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- decipher_jeanne@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Sure but when you have an established successful franchises with a working recipe. Like. Just release the next ace combat I swear to God it’s been 6 years without a peep about ace combat 8 despite ace combat 7 being by far the best selling in the franchise.
  
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  - Gullible@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Let me ask. Do you really want another ace combat after half a decade without information? In all likelihood, the team has been gutted twice. The only similarities to its past might end up being art direction and the name.
    
    Like, I enjoyed the new armored core and duke nukem, but they weren’t quite continuations of the previous games. Mecha sekiro and generic cringy subpar shooter 485 weren’t worth the wait. Though, I admit, I’m a hypocrite and holding my breath for silksong.
    
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- sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Heres a gamer brained analogy:
  
  You know how all the manosphere types describe 90% of women as only being willing to date the top 10% of men?
  
  This is that.
  
  90% of all the money in gaming is going toward developing a game with a 10% chance of being rhe next Minecraft, the next Fortnite, the next big huge thing that will generate a stupid amount of money by functionally acting as its own MTX ecosystem with widespread adoption.
  
  It is: We don’t sell consumer model economy cars because our financial situation is so wound up in financing that we can actually only afford to sell high end luxury models, otherwise our profit margin is too small, and then we can’t afford our operating costs and debt obligations, so then we have to downsize and fire everyone and most importantly, our shareholders don’t get as much ~~wealth extraction~~, I mean profit.)
  
  The … problem with this obviously is that if 90% of the money in gaming is shooting for making basically the same kind of game… well then it is all competing with itself, thus causing a gametheortic prisoners dilemma situation where everyone acting out of maximum self interest actually results in the worst possible outcome.
  
  Another problem with this is that these games are very expensive to make, and they must be made very fast… so, everything other than the MTX system in these games will be buggy and sloppy and garbage tier…
  
  So, yeah. Game companies are the same kind of delulu that the manosphere thinks 90% of women are, chasing a wildly unrealistic outcome via wildly unlikely to work means.
  
  (Disclaimer: I am not saying I endorse or believe in this manosphere idea, I am using it as a gamer-brained analogy, assuming it is true for sake of argument and comparison.)
  
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  - Disaster@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    For the car analogy, the incentives are even more perverse than that!
    
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- Justdaveisfine@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I’d hate to say it, but look at any big publishers quarterly reports. Compare how much base games sell compared to micro transactions.
  
  Image ^ EA’s
  
  They would all like to take the lead and have “the” live service game but unfortunately even their bland attempts still bring in a lot of cash. This is why the push to live service is so aggressive.
  
  The only thing that’s been slowing the push down is these big live service failures, which is making big publishers a little stingy on what games to push.
  
  You are correct though, the big franchises have a lot of name recognition and its really hard for a competitor to muscle in on that established space (though they do try). Its a safe bet that often pays off, despite gamers lamenting it.
  
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- latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  If only we had a way to put that chocolate into the peanut butter…
  
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Etterra@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Because they’re run by executives that have no fucking idea what game development entails.

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- InputZero@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  That and everything now needs to be “disruptive”. An idea doesn’t see the light of day in a tech board room without explaining how it’s going to disrupt the market and create space for itself. So unless the game is pitched as a killer of whatever the competition has it won’t move forward. It’s the whole silicon valley mindset of move fast and break things in action.
  
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floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Infinite growth mentality vs remembering the customer as a human

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- ICastFist@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  “I don’t understand what you’re calling the wallet piggies” - executives and the whole marketing dept
  
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  - Soup@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    And honestly, they’re right. Games are fundamentally optional and there are so many to choose from but these garbage studios make garbage games and openly degrade their customers but people keep paying them.
    
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bitjunkie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Capitalism ruins everything. Usually by design.

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- MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  This one, right here OP.
  
  Capitalism is, at its core: Profits > all
  
  Profit is more important to these chucklefucks than the customers happiness, their loyalty, the staff that make the product, hell, even the product they’re selling… This includes your life; profit is more important than your life. If they can bump their quarterly earnings with you doing something dangerous that turns you into a fucking grease stain, they’ll fucking do it. They’re psychopaths.
  
  Only because of laws does any company do “the right thing”. Everything else they do is to reduce expenses, or increase profits.
  
  They wouldn’t try to make the next fortnite, if fortnite didn’t make its creators disgusting amounts of money. Games wouldn’t become micro transaction hell if microtransactions didn’t rake in shitloads of cash steadily.
  
  Video Games are simply their tool to extract the maximum possible value they can from you. First it was stupid one-off horse cosmetics, then it was paid DLC, then they started shipping half of a game before it was ready (cutting dev costs so they could get their payout faster), then releasing paid “DLC” which was the rest of the fucking game… To now, when we have little more than an idea, some mechanics, and somewhat unique art design before the streaming pile that they call a game gets to be “released”, and they’ll literally add everything later.
  
  Look at halo. Let’s use it as a case study. The original game had its share of problems on release, but it was at least pretending to be a full game when it came out. Full single player and multi player, with a fully fleshed out campaign, complete with working cutscenes. Halo 2 followed a similar path, for the most part… Eventually, the Halo dev team became beholden to the almighty shareholder and now we have halo infinite with an infinite amount of bullshit and no single player campaign… Unless you want to pay extra for it, or for these skins, or for… You get the idea.
  
  I played, and liked Halo. I fell away from it after Halo 2/3 due to life stuff, and at this point, I picked up the matter chief collection for the nostalgia, but that’s probably the last money I’m putting into the franchise. I just can’t be bothered. It was good while it lasted.
  
  Halo is hardly unique in this. I only used them as an example because it was easy. I could have also used Diablo…
  
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  - SLVRDRGN@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Enshittification. Image
    
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  - Aspharr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Part of the reason that happened with Halo is because Bungie lost the IP to Microsoft when they separated. Everything after Halo 3 was done by another studio that was part of M$. I believe it was called 343 Studios or something like that.
    
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agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Fiduciary duty to shareholders. Line must go up, as much as possible, as fast as possible.

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- Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  The profit incentive is toxic to creativity. Try to imagine how much cultural value is lost every single day because of no UBI and having to worry about a survival job.
  
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  - Ummdustry@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    No question that it’s a lot. The cost of a UBI would probably be more though, ($500/month/capita, maybe? $ 2.1 trillion per annum for the USA).
    
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  - hanrahan@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    That.applies evrywhere, theres a.quasi famous quote from somone whose name escapees me, that opined they arent so muvh worried about the intracties of Einstein’s brian but the fact so many like it have had to work below minimum wage jobs picking starberries in fields just to survive and humanities future has been robbed becase of it.
    
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Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
No. I want an incredibly small scale indie game made by a tiny team and fills my desires for power and war/crimes. Rimworld, Kenshi, Factorio.

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- BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Any recs ?
  
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  - sulgoth@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Those three fill the bill pretty easily. I’d add Satisfactory for the snarky AI and the general disregard to anything not made of concrete or steel.
    
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  - ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Stellaris for proper warcriming.
    
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danc4498@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
They honestly need to look at Fortnite as the model. It wasn’t meant to be this massive AAA game. It was a modest game with a unique concept (building). Adding battle royal was done on a whim. It just happened to click with millions of people.

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- Lesrid@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  IIRC it was a joke mode to make fun of how popular BRs were.
  
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  - Justdaveisfine@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I don’t think this is quite right as BRs were new at the time. When Fortnite released there was really only PUBG in the battle royale space.
    
    I believe it was something closer to a prototype they made in a month or two simply because they liked Battle Royales and thought it would be a fun gamemode to add a side thing.
    
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urheber@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
wtf does “AA” and “AAA” even mean, like, why do they need different batteries.?

besides, I thought, batteries were totally out…

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- Artyom@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  AA is a game that is a normal full sized game, but was made on a budget that limited scope. Good examples are the Metro series or Balatro. AAA is your normal games with big budgets. AAAA is a special title for Skull and Bones, it means you spend a gigantic amount of money and make sure the whole thing sucks.
  
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  - hinterlufer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Balatro is indie, songs isn’t it? Developed by a single dude with probably zero budget
    
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- ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Studio size/development costs
  
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- tetris11@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  it’s how much shouting they do when developing and advertising the game
  
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- rockerface@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  AAA is smaller, too, so I’m not sure why they think it’s better
  
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  - kartoffelsaft@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I believe the AAA term actually originates from investing. In investing, a “AAA” investment is one where everyone is pretty confident that it’ll be a positive return. It got a bit of use in the games industry to mean games that were expected to sell well no matter the what. It eventually got warped into just meaning big games with big budgets, and people started using the “AA” term to mean “like AAA but not as much”
    
    The wikipedia article does a better job of explaining it
    
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  - Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I’d bet on JRPG rank rules; D, C, B, A, A+, A++, S, S+ and as many S’ they bloody want in order to make S tier worthless. Instead of doing the sane thing and adjusting the criteria for a rank.
    
    But in this case there is no D C or Bs, only As.
    
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- Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Goku explained it once in front of Buu.
  
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10001110101@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
They work for the shareholders, not the customers. For most publicly traded companies, the stock is completely detached from fundamentals, so they just do whatever the large investors like (often just hype the new hottest thing; such as marketplaces or “increasing efficiency” with layoffs), regardless if its good for the “real” business or not.

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- Pollo_Jack@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  How boeing lost 11.9 Billion in one year, and then 11.8 billion a few years later. Is there anything people that have a lot of money can’t do? Yeah, stay in their fucking lane.
  
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ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I’ve noticed that an increasing amount of games that I enjoy over the past decade have been indie games (or games with lax publishers.)

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JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
We’ve got the IP, why don’t we make the Smash Bros. killer? We can call it “MultiVersus”!

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QueenHawlSera@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
They’d rather oversaturate the fucking market place chasing an elusive Pot of Gold than go for the sure thing.

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- Corn@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  No, going for the sure thing is why we have EA pumping out COD and a dozon sports games identical to last years every year.
  
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  - QueenHawlSera@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    
    If EA is making new COD games then Activision really needs to sue for copyright infringement.
    
    Which would you rather have? Yearly releases of beloved IPs or Rare sitting on Banjo Kazooie because this is totally the year when Sea of Thieves finally becomes Pirate Fortnite?
    
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Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Sadly not every deserving AA studio gets to survive in the long term nowadays. Minimi Studios is my go to example for this. They made amazing niche games with no exploitative DLC/monetization that were widely praised but rarely played. Sometimes good, honest studios can’t make enough money to get by in this day and age and that’s a real tragedy.

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nooneescapesthelaw@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

why are they like this?

Which would you rather have 1 million dollars or 100 million dollars?

That’s basically the thought process, if it bombs I can blame it on some other, if it doesn’t then I’m good

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- rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  
  Which would you rather have 1 million dollars or 100 million dollars?
  
  It’s not that straightforward, unfortunately. The real culprit is allowing all giant public companies to hoover up all the small companies. Now you’re not a 3 person team with a side job trying to pay the bills and getting lucky. Office rent, Unity/Unreal want their cut, app stores want their cut, Salary, IT, Healthcare. You end up needing to support quite a lot of infrastructure to make that 1 Mil game. That no longer ‘moves the needle’ on your company’s yearly income and the stock suffers.
  
  Then, you can’t just make a game and release it anymore, you need live ops, sales, events, campaigns, otherwise you’re leaving money on the table.
  
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  - Soleos@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    
    otherwise you’re leaving money on the table.
    
    This is the same argument as “would you rather have 1 or 100 mil”
    
    But yes, you’re right to point out large companies who need to make big money to keep the lights on and, if public, stock profile. If the market perceives modest growth, it will not react kindly, leading to downstream financial losses. Some investors invest in ideas and products, most invest in perceived potential gains. No investment–>no funding–>no games.
    
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ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Niches exist because they’re already filled

You’re overestimating how easy it is to convince person with 10k hours in random game to move to yours

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- JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  That’s the thing… You don’t need to convince them to put 10k hours into a different game. Only to buy it. Or to play it for at least 2 hours on Steam.
  
  If I get like at least 20 hours of enjoyment out of a game I’m probably already as happy as can be with the purchase.
  
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  - ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    The 10k hours was in the previous game you are trying to pull people from
    
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ampy@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Unrelated to the meme but I have that same monitor in the image. Pretty good monitor.

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2ugly2live@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Because we buy the games, the microtransactions, the cosmetics, etc. Even just one purchase multiplied by millions is a win for publishers. Whales and content creators fuel the cycle even more. Meanwhile, currencies get deliberately convoluted: you need stars for a pull, which require sparkle farts, which you can’t buy directly or in exact amounts. Out of sparkle farts? $14.99 gets you 6000—enough for three whole pills! Don’t worry, there’s a pity system, so the most you’ll spend is only $400. And then you’re left with 60 stars, and if you just had 40 more!

You’re not forced to buy, but they make the grind brutal and a slog. If you’re really unlucky, it can even make actually playing the came harder. And as long as this system makes money, it won’t stop. Games are turning into storefronts with a mini-game attached. Good games feel like rare blessings, and creativity is often found only indie studios. Big teams have talent—they’re just not allowed to use it, their companies don’t care about that. Gotta make money, more money, all the time, forever, or you’ve failed.

~~I say “they” like I don’t play a few gachas myself, but still.~~

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- lessthanluigi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I do like the analogy of the ingame currency named “sparkle farts”
  
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chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Because money isn’t real if you have enough to lose. You can just put the blame on someone else and then get your shareholders to fund another project that will be “different”, just like all the other cash cows on the market.

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samus12345@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Image

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radix@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
But what if number bigger?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VsZr5KGNGM

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TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
People tend to chase trends because it is selling like hot cakes and therefore deemed safe. Everyone wants a piece. Executives feel the same. However, only very few realise that the market become over-saturated as it becomes more competitive because of tunnel vision towards digging any potential profits that may or may not be there.

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- Ummdustry@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Also, even if you do realise the market is going to become over-saturated, you know that stepping out of that market will only yield space for your competitors. It’s better for you that nobody makes that money, rather than that the other guy does, and then buries you in the next cycle.
  
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Coolkat@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I mean it doesn’t look so good for the AAA studios tho

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Wilco@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Because money.

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- Mustakrakish@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Those execs are only concerned with turning the quickest profit so they can move to another company with another hiring bonus
  
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  - Wilco@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Dont forget the golden parachute they get when they piss off the consumer base with several $60 games that turn out to be incomplete garbage and get themselves fired.
    
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