WTF Is Happening To The Video Game Industry?

Comments

• Sanctus@anarchist.nexus ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  What’s happening to American studios, the same guys have been working at Nintendo for the past 30 years. American culture doesnt care. The game shipped? Axe the developers, send the bonuses to the C Suite, and we’ll all pop some champagne. Surprisingly, this destroys the regional industry.

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  • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Not quite just American studios. Ubi isn’t American and they’re closing studios in Europe and Canada. Pretty sure Tencent has pulled back a lot of their funding across the industry as well. Nintendo and Capcom are definitely on very firm ground right now thanks to their longer term outlook and solid bets paying off though, I agree.

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    • Sanctus@anarchist.nexus ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I guess its really just the American Culture that has spread. What I mean by that is the burn and turn thats so prevalent. Nintendo seems to want to keep their Japanese developers, while the traditional west treats them like they treat literally every worker they have. Like the ideas are somehow completely disconnected from the people who made them. Then they wonder why their shit stinks when its produced by a bunch of junior devs sleeping on cots away from their families.

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  • rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    And people wonder why unionization is spreading so rapidly in the industry

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  • Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Ubisoft isn’t American and does the same shit.

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    • Sanctus@anarchist.nexus ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      They are honorary American, oof.

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  • architect@thelemmy.club ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Western. It’s western not America. It would be nice if you all figured that the fuck out soon.

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    • Sanctus@anarchist.nexus ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Me and you both, bub.

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• Fandangalo@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  14 yr game dev, worked on all platforms (mobile, web, console, Roblox/UGC)

  This video undersells the scale of Roblox. I’m 37, and a lot of people my age don’t know that millions of people hop on Grow a Garden or whatever is hot there right now every weekend. Valve’s closest peak numbers are a scale less. That platform is going to define how a genre sees “video games.”

  I would say the other point missing: China. China is doing exceedingly well at capturing market share over the last decade. While the west is struggling & self imploding, teams of hundreds of devs are working 996: 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week. It’s tough to compete vs that.

  Finally, and I know people don’t want to hear it, but AI is a great tool to speed up game development, especially in the prototyping phase. Even in production, there’s a real risk mitigation in what video games are NOT: they aren’t legal apps, they aren’t medical apps, they aren’t financial apps, at least in the ways that those apps have serious compliance hurdles, other considerations for what you develop. If a video game is poorly designed, no one’s health is at risk.

  I think the benefit is, yes, video games are about to be democratized in a way that’s hard to describe. If you know enough about game design, you can stand up applications that took full teams weeks in a matter of days as a solo. We’re about to drown in a Cambrian explosion of games (if society doesn’t implode separately).

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  • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    teams of hundreds of devs are working 996: 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week

    And probably being about as productive as if they were working 9 to 5 four days a week. Exhaustion is really bad for productivity.

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  • Saganaki@lemmy.zip ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    25yr GameDev here. AI Prototype? Yes. Long-term code? Oh hell no. And this is me speaking as somebody that uses Opus 4.8 heavy all the time.

    It speeds up dev time slightly. If you are finding that it speeds dev time significantly, you are 100% taking on tech debt (dare I say complete and utter spaghetti).

    It generates code okay, but it does not make it anywhere near maintainable.

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  • Batmorous@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    What are your thoughts on the competitors to Roblox? Especially that one web-based one that will get mobile apps soon. Trying to remember the name of it

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• Batmorous@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  More and more people are saying the solution:

  We need more better alternatives to what we currently have

  More worker-owned unionized game studios that make spiritual successor games to what the big publishers make (To gradually replace them. AC is only thing keeping Ubisoft afloat. A spiritual successor that is better than it with mod support would make Ubisoft tumble fully)

  More worker-owned companies that champion physical media, same for worker-owned companies that champion digital ownership for all industries, even videogames

  A few more videogame hardware components, and hardware manufacturers to compete with each other. To fight for our money and actually have to innovate

  Those are what will help game industry. Oh and supporting Indies, and AA games of course.

  Everyone let’s keeping building those new options up and supporting any good alternatives that already exist too.

  “Different parts of industry head honchos need to be replaced by way better ones”

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• FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Your links are all broken because they appeared to be copied and pasted without actually pasting the full unabreviated hyperlink.

  Here’s my take:

  First, the Videogames made money based on number of plays, and the developers had to strike a balance between innovation, replayability, difficulty, and price then ship directly to arcades.

  Then, the home console era took off, and competing consoles started signing exclusivity contracts with game developers in order to compete. Innovation was still a strong influence, but storylines and graphics became the major selling points. During this time, studios began consolidating as larger ones like EA, Activision, Tencent, etc all bought out smaller ones and dissolved them to move talent around to different flagship products.

  Next, live service games proved incredibly profitable and hosting them became cheaper every year. Instead of monetizing a game once, developers could monetize them infinitely by simply adding microtransactions. During this time online distributors also became popular, giving rise to Steam and Epic Games stores to sell games purely digitally instead of via physical media. This has culminated in some distributors removing access to paid for games, as they were never truly purchased only leased.

  Finally, major console companies started buying up or partnering with major studios, and then maximizing profitability which naturally means one thing: More Live Service Microtransactions, Less of Everything Else.

  But Gamers aren’t idiots. There is a gap in the market for content that we own, in physical form, with good story, and decent graphics. But there are no longer any professional studios left to make them. This has led to the term “Indie Studio” becoming broader and more successful, and the constant decline in the trust of major studios. Now, “AAA Studios” as they’re referred to as, mostly sell towards children and people easily manipulated by social media feeds that they target to advertise on, but a new legislative landscape is slowly introducing obstacles for them to do that. It’s plain to see that the current way of things is unsustainable and set to collapse.

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• ms_lane@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The same as every other industry?

  No one else gets articles about how it’s hard on them though, most journalists actively support the end of manufacturing and insult those who work it.

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  • Batmorous@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Surely there must be independent journalists that are voicing loud how it is needed

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• Jumi@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Leading roles were filled with PR idiots and marketing morons instead of people who actually care about games. Also, they are public

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• yermaw@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Lots of little reasons, but I dont think any reason is as big as “more people than ever are a ballhair away from homelessness”

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• 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.

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  • slimerancher@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨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.

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    • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨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.

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• mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  This is a video game essay on all things games this year.

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• dan69@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Pay to look good…

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• Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  they are laying of tons of gaming devs its going to get bad, and fresh out college will not be finding job. its always cutting overheads/labor, record profits for the c-suites and ceo, rinse and repeat, until the company is a dead husk.

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