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[MetalSlimeHunt]

I don't even remember the last time I experienced a AAA hit. There was Doom and Wolfenstein, because somewhere somebody in a AAA studio listened to reason for half a second and made games for a "dead genre" (that's only dead because 14 year old focus testers are not an authority on market trends), but before that? Far Cry 3 is my last memory of a AAA game that worked out well, and even that had some of the early stages in Ubisoft's standardizing rot which had gone full blown by Far Cry 4.

If I have to choose between AAA culture and indie flop culture, I choose indie flop culture. It's not even a competition. But you don't have to choose between that, you just have to recognize that AAA gaming is some Prisoner's Dilemma nonsense. The owners of publicly traded game studios make the same mistake as every other pack of capitalist fucks: they want to hit the jackpot. Winning ain't good enough. Accidentally winning the jackpot isn't even good enough.

The truth is that there's no way to reliably hit the jackpot, no formula that will ever make that happen, and so they degenerate into revenue streams and lootboxes then forget to make the game.

I understand the idea of risk and backing perfectly fine Reelya, but I'm not sure if you get what I'm saying: Toss out the AAA companies. Fuck em. If they can learn to change to mid companies that can make real fucking games like, say, Naughty Dog? That's great. But if we approach this from an attitude of justification, of "oh, but they have to because profit risk", then we're gonna get just keep getting fucked whether we consider ourselves consumers or gamers. The reason they have this risk game going on is because the idea of being a moderately stable company is anathema to the business culture they've developed. Everybody has to be Nintendo, except even Nintendo doesn't act half as bad as this, which probably is why they're surviving better. Say what you will for Nintendo stock, the company as a whole survived to fight another day. If that happened to modern EA they'd be down the drain gambling their way back out until their shareholders liquidated.

If you want to hear some gaming heresy, I've got it for you here. I want smaller games. I want more linear games. I want games that aren't as open world and aren't as graphically sharp. You know why? Because the games we're headed towards aren't games for gamers, they're games for twitch superstars and trailer makers, games that are warped and twisted like a skinned cow around the shape of a slot machine. Anything that throws out the megabucks saves gaming. When Bethesda and Valve made their best products they were both small teams with some experience but a world of passion.

Megabucks is poison. People just assume more money works out for the better somehow, but it does not, and it attracts the absolute shitlers of the business world to offer honeyed words and long contracts. Gaming didn't need that to rise, to make the old classics, and the new classics being made now aren't being made in any AAA studio I'd care to name.

[Akura]

Looking up some uniform references and I come across this one:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Paint me like one of your French officers."

That could be an Old Spice ad.

[Reelya]

<snip>

But the thing is, nobody is forcing you to play these games. If you don't like them, don't play. Tossing AAA companies out won't improve your gameplay experiences at all, so why do you care?

That comment comes across the same as saying "I never watch reality TV. it's cancer. it should be banned". Sure, it's cancer, but it's merely existing isn't a whole lot of burden on you not giving a damn.

~~~

Some people want to play high-action online shooters with photo-realistic graphics. The fact is, CoD and similar deliver that. If there was a much more cost effective way to deliver the same thing, then the CoD series would go out of business. They don't have a monopoly on "war" as a setting, so they don't even really have any real sort of franchise advantage there. War is war.

Sure, you can argue that there must be a more cost-effective way to deliver similar content*, but the fact is nobody has been able to do that, there have been plenty of attempts. No company has a monopoly on that market segment.

*Games like Stardew Valley don't count as similar content. Sega Genesis-level artwork on a homebrew game isn't the same thing as a photorealistic online shooter based on a movie.

[Egan_BW]

But the thing is, nobody is forcing you to play these games. If you don't like them, don't play. Tossing AAA companies out won't improve your gameplay experiences at all, so why do you care?

That comment comes across the same as saying "I never watch reality TV. it's cancer. it should be banned". Sure, it's cancer, but it's merely existing isn't a whole lot of burden on you not giving a damn.

So many indie games, man. You could just pretend that massive budget huge open world games with ten thousand things to pick up don't exist.

[Twinwolf]

Just going to put in a rerail that this is the laughs thread; I would sort of recommend continuing it in PMs if you intend to.

Looking up some uniform references and I come across this one:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Paint me like one of your French officers."

That could be an Old Spice ad.

Pffft
Yes
I can hear the jingle playing over it

[MetalSlimeHunt]

<snip>

But the thing is, nobody is forcing you to play these games. If you don't like them, don't play. Tossing AAA companies out won't improve your gameplay experiences at all, so why do you care?

That comment comes across the same as saying "I never watch reality TV. it's cancer. it should be banned". Sure, it's cancer, but it's merely existing isn't a whole lot of burden on you not giving a damn.

~~~

Some people want to play high-action online shooters with photo-realistic graphics. The fact is, CoD and similar deliver that. If there was a much more cost effective way to deliver the same thing, then the CoD series would go out of business. They don't have a monopoly on "war" as a setting, so they don't even really have any real sort of franchise advantage there. War is war.

Sure, you can argue that there must be a more cost-effective way to deliver similar content, but the fact is nobody has been able to do that, there have been plenty of attempts. No company has a monopoly on that market segment.

It affects all of us. Have no doubt that misbehavior by the giants of an industry can come crashing down on the individuals of an industry. Wal-Mart ravaged general stores all across America, amalgamated all of them and absorbed them into a gelatinous blob that was simultaneously worse and more costly.

Perhaps you think such things can't happen to gaming, but I do. Normalization is what allows these things to be accepted. Kids grow up now thinking lootbox gambling is just the way games are, and they suppose always were. People call for shit they don't understand the consequences of all the time, like the open world gaming craze or the gunmetal gritty artstyle craze. Except now the thing that pro-AAA gamers are calling for is an end to this hobby/art/content/whatever as we know it and its replacement by all the aformentioned shit.

iOS gaming used to be very inventive, very cool. Now it's all Clash of Clans clones or whatever shit they've moved onto now. I used to play iOS games, I haven't played one in years now. It's as dead to me as dead gets. Consoles improved for a little while and then crashed hard into AAA culture, to the point where they're now infested with it and without the alternatives available in PC gaming. I've hardly played any console games in the past few years, where I used to actually be a console gamer almost exclusively.

The things that people want to play are not helped by AAA standards, objectively. It's a psychological trick they play on the public, but the best overall games for any market historically have had nothing at all to do with this bullshit, and this bullshit twists the game they make in the end. Call of Duty 4 is didn't have to do half this shit to make a hit, and they've been chasing that dragon ever since. I was quite the CoD4 boy back in the day myself, but I'd never pick up one of the modern CoD games, because they've become spaghettified in (ugh) "content" by being modular and lootboxed to death. I, once a part of their market, have ejected because of their behavior, and now the games they make in that market tend to fail. Gee, I wonder what it was? It couldn't have been that their bad behavior lost them customers, surely, it must be an inherent part of this particular genre market.

So yes, it affects all of us, and if we aren't conscious of what these companies do and vote with our wallets to beat them back, then gaming will become Wal-Martified, except I don't have to pay five dollars to open the freezer doors in Wal-Mart to see if my dinner is inside it or not.

[Reelya]

I think it affects you in different ways. Would high tech consoles even be a thing without the AAA industry driving sales? How about bleeding edge video cards in PCs. Without AAA games driving hardware specs up, then the platforms wouldn't exist for the indies to exploit with their cost-cutting methods. you know it's not business applications that's driven processing power in PCs, right? It's being able to run the latest AAA games. And that is basically what allows you to run Dwarf Fortress at a reasonable frame rate. If the AAA games industry wasn't there then the PC capable of running DF properly would probably cost 5-10 times as much as be a specialist thing.

Many of those cost-cutting methods involve using Unity3D and other engines which were only created because the market is there for 3D games. Plus there are commercial sound effects packs and similar which are only curated because they have buyers in the AAA industry, and those are also cost-effective for indie developers to get a license, or hire a professional sound guy who has a license to them. Those sorts of sound libraries, as well as robust physics engines were only created because there were AAA studios willing to pay for their development. Later, they trickled down so that indies could use them.

And also like I said before, the indies hat make successful "AAA looking" games almost all learned the ropes in AAA studios, not on their own. You can tell the "self taught" game makers because they might be fun, but they look like balls. High fidelity graphics is only around because of AAA.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The "pre-AAA" industry (AAA as it exists now with revenue streams and such is an invention of this decade) got along just fine making high tech consoles and using bleeding edge video cards. Half-Life 2 is not a AAA game in the modern sense and hell, neither was Crysis. I don't have a problem with big studios inherently, I have a problem with the same old stockholder and executive bullshit seeping into the development studios of these companies because anything less than a single game that magically transforms them into the biggest player in the world is going to get you a "you didn't meet your target, pack up your desk" from the bosses.

Or a "you did meet your target but were fired before the date of your payment", as has disturbingly started happening a lot. Indie games are not oh so inherently better as they are the only segment of gaming development currently reaching their potential. AAA is as we've been discussing and mid studios are all but extinct due to AAA's buying and killing them.

They are not innocent victims of capitalism, they are the source of the capitalistic greed. The owners of these companies established this business culture because they are disconnected from reality and took some previous successes as a sign of a burgeoning but inefficient industry that needed their "guidance". You need look no further than the target goals of Dead Space 3 to see what this looks like in extremis.

Edit: Did...did you actually just endorse trickle-down economics by name? Are you trolling me?

[Reelya]

I don't think the history really bears that out. Before they really started the "alternate revenue stream" stuff, about 80% of all production studios had in fact gone out of business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)#History

the seventh generation saw a contraction in the number of video game developing houses creating AAA level titles, reducing from an estimated 125 to around 25, but with a roughly corresponding fourfold increase in staffing required for game development.

So the seventh-generation console era saw 80% of the top-tier studios completely go out of business, while the remainder saw labor requirements increase 4-fold. This is what preceded the current-era you're talking about. The order of events here is clear: only the largest studios with the biggest budgets even survived economically. It's not how you're saying it is. They didn't willfully expand because of capitalist excesses in the "good times": only those few who invested in expansion survived.

So-called "lean and mean" mid-tier studios in fact couldn't compete in the market. They are not the answer. The mid-tier model already failed - and that's why we are here where we are. Big studios invested in "being the bestest evar" because only the absolute best were staying in business at all, not because of some idea of "hubris".

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Oh no, my argument is completely

According to a whitepaper published for EA games (Dice Europe) the seventh generation saw a contraction in the number of video game developing houses creating AAA level titles, reducing from an estimated 125 to around 25, but with a roughly corresponding fourfold increase in staffing required for game development.[4]

Interesting how these things wrap back around. And according to the citation this whitepaper was calculated by the CCO himself, who ended up leaving EA in 2016. He had been with the company since 1982. Suffice it to say I consider this a tainted source.

This comes back to my argument from before: The reason they aren't profitable is because they want for too much. Their reaction to increased development costs was to not scale back their games vision to something actually affordable but to fall prey to what's basically happening with Star Citizen right now: an impossible goal with impossible promises. Only now we've almost past by that and gone straight to the revenue stream scum gaining so much influence even inside the dev studio proper that the game becomes about revenue stream at the expense of everything else.

I've agreed with you from the beginning that their model is financially unsustainable. We part on the idea that the unsustainability came into being because of their model for business. That's why they just shouldn't do it to begin with. Literally the only comparison I can think of that makes sense is pollution regs, borrowing from our future wellbeing to benefit...well, not our current wellbeing. The current wellbeing of a very select few of us.

You say mid-tier failed, but I sure don't seem to see any mid-tier companies failing on their own. The publishers are the problem for mids, that deal with the devil ends the same way every time and is attributable to the more general business problem between the interactions of mid and large businesses. They were consumed as a part of AAA trying to claw its way back from the brink.

[Reelya]

The reason they aren't profitable is because they want for too much.

But where are the other 100 studios who didn't do that? Not everyone "went for too much". They all went out of business whether they did that or not. In any time period the innovators who take the big gambles are going to be a minority. So it's highly illogical to believe that all 125 studios massively expanded at the same moment, then 100 of them collapsed at the same time, leaving only the largest. That ... doesn't make any sort of rational sense.

If "went for too much" was the cause for the collapse then why did only the biggest studios survive, at all? Logically, if "went for too much" was the cause of the collapse then those who didn't buy into that - which in any era will be > 50% of studios should have had a higher survival chance than the "went for too much" people, and the average studio size would have shrunk.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

That's literally "invisible hand of the market talk" and doesn't follow. Wal-Mart is not the best general store in America, but they are the surviving one. The others didn't get Capitalist God's blessings because Wal-Mart undercut them out of business. I don't have the inclination to list every form of dirty business tactic, but imagine I put them all here and applied them to game development studios.

What I see from this pattern isn't going out of business with some lucky winners escaping the axe, I see consolidation under a few big studios. It's also not outside the realm of plausibility that all pre-AAA studios took the bet and then almost all lost. Your argument is predicated upon the idea that some wouldn't do that...but with the business culture of large studios being inundated in follow the leader behavior, I'm not convinced that there are any.

I also have yet to see any actual statistics on mid devs. The only stats I can find listed are for mid publishers, which are a whole different kettle of fish.

[Reelya]

The point is, like with Walmart. They outcompete you. That's the point. Smaller studios weren't able to compete.

Whether that's fair or shitty isn't the issue. not competing is not competing. If they can't compete, then winding the clock back to that business model isn't the answer.

And it directly contradicts you're "they went for too much" argument. Only those who went for more survived.

~~~

The argument that every one of the 125 smaller AAA studios from 2005 all went broke because they were literally all in an upsizing arms-race actually sounds very implausible actually. You'd have to posit that everyone decided to expand at exactly the same moment, whereas different studios all have different multi-year development cycles with funding locked in well before that. Some studios are there making the same game for a good 5 years at a time. The idea that every one of them, regardless of size all decided to upscale in a short time-window doesn't seem very plausible, given that companies have been upscaling or downsizing on their own timetables based on their needs for decades.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Actually, that's exactly the issue. Their competitiveness is, in the end, the consequence of acceptance by the commons. We can critique capitalism all day, but if the gaming public could just get a goddamn boycott together you'd see AAA shape up and find another way in short order. Same with Wal-Mart, incidentally. If we don't want shitty incomplete games, that's the order of the day.

You're not going to steer me into "we should buy microtransactions because they just need it to survive" no matter how we go with this, I know for a fact that isn't true. As for the contradiction, the gaming public is sadly complicit in a lot of this, though the studios helped it along a great deal. They bought into those games leading up to modern AAA because of marketing and promises over more modest and economic ones. The good news is I don't think that'll last for long with the way AAA has been recently, they're entering a death spiral in my judgement.

Also Reelya, I gotta say, for someone who ardently defended Hugo Chavez and is this forum's foremost anti-colonial poster, this is a really weird position for me to find you standing up for.

[Reelya]

we should buy microtransactions because they just need it to survive

I'm not going to say that because that's a plea to emotion. I'm going to say what I already said before:

 if people want an online super-hi-res realistic looking shooter that doesn't have subscriptions, you accept that they need microtransactions for the game to survive or shut the fuck up and play something else. that's not even aimed at you, it's aimed at the dickwad entitled players of these things.

It's not greed, it's just reality of how a game needs to pay for itself if you're not charging monthly subscriptions.

You can't just front-load server costs onto the original game box, because that's not a fair way to spread out the costs of running servers to all players.

The revenue needs to be proportional to how much you play. So you either have subscriptions, advertising or micro-transactions.