2nd Video Games Industry Crash Coming? Interesting Take From The Critical Drinker

I've been out of the loop for gaming for years now, my life has been too hectic and my gear too weaksauce for any modern games, but I still keep my ear to the ground about the industry I'm interested in. Looking forward to the day my life simplifies (yeah, right) and my gear levels up to play fairly modern games, if not latest and greatest.

Seems the industry is setting up for another crash of the magnitude that happened in '83 (I remember that one).

What say you guys?


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2_9tKih1GM

Yes. But probably not as bad. I guess it depends on how many people end up unemployed and/or homeless in the coming years.

Not sure if it will really be a "crash" or just more of a radical transformation. Skyrocketing hardware prices are going have a clear and obvious impact on gaming as fewer people are willing to buy increasingly expensive gaming computers and increasingly expensive gaming consoles. On the other-hand, I see mobile gaming continuing to expand as devices become more capable overall and people look to mobile gaming as a cheaper alternative. The two segments will grow closer together over time as computers increasingly adopt cheaper mobile hardware for cost reasons (Macbook Neo, etc). I also think that we will see a lot of "AI fatigue" in gaming, as the market is increasingly flooded with AI-Generated content.

There will still be room for genuinly good games to persevere, and when AI is used to actually make the game better, not just cheaper to create, it has huge potential. I look forward to what games like GTA 6 will be like when the NPCs aren't so dumb (hopefully).

US games industry? Maybe. We've been hearing about an impending crash for almost 4 years at this point, but considering the volume of bootlickers I see online, I doubt it. This is all just a correction to pre-2020, in my opinion, since the entertainment industry thought we were entering a period of infinite growth at the end of 2020.

giant amount of gaming is made at extremelly low rate (for many it will be for free all the way) per hours on roblox (and the rest going in large part to a few forever games) + the giant on screen but not games competition for attention seem a lot more what going on, than consoles prices or the games projects themselves.

As for the expedition 33 being a new concept when it is so clearly Final Fantasy-Persona with its own astheatic twist... maybe it is more a proof of the exact opposite, do again a classic that already worked many time and super easy to sell in a sentence (Final fantasy as a Belle Époque fantasy setting) with a small twist and execute it really well, instead of trying to come up with something new and not focus on the execution but new mechanics and gameplay.

long live indy gaming and AA gaming
Dont much care if AAA gaming collapses
Long term it's probably better for the industry if Microslop abandons gaming entirely

I've been finding that the younger generation is just not playing AAA games and I really can't blame them.

This is where for me, video games just haven't felt like video games for decades now. One of the few companies which seems to understand this is Nintendo. Nintendo tries to make fun games. Sony, MS, the entire AAA industry in the west just tries to make engagement machines to sell microtransactions, and the games turn into jobs after addicting you on dark patterns.

I don't put much stock in what Critical Drinker says. I used to watch him, and some of his movie commentaries had merit in the earlier days of his channel. When he made a movie with a Mary Sue character after whining about Mary Sue's in movies, using money he raised from fans instead of out of his own pocket (which I assume he makes bank with the amount of views and subs he has), he's just another grifter.

PC part prices and kids using mobile phones instead of PCs. Woke DEI boycotts on games and game reviews by morons.

I'm more excited about a Renaissance with indie gaming at the forefront and lots of optimization around existing hardware average footprints.

Nytegard said:

I've been finding that the younger generation is just not playing AAA games and I really can't blame them.

This is where for me, video games just haven't felt like video games for decades now. One of the few companies which seems to understand this is Nintendo. Nintendo tries to make fun games. Sony, MS, the entire AAA industry in the west just tries to make engagement machines to sell microtransactions, and the games turn into jobs after addicting you on dark patterns.

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Dude seriously, I built a $1000 rig for my gf's little siblings and all they do is play Roblox on the thing. They have access to my entire steam library. They have access to my Microsoft account too. All they play is Roblox. Drives me insane, could have gotten them a chromebook.

I even got them a meta quest 3 VR headset and they don't even touch the thing. Now, I didn't buy them any games for it, but I assumed they would learn how to pirate games and get some more computer literacy skills during it. I mean, that is exactly what I did back in my day! My parents would never want to spend money on the internet, so I had to find other ways to play games. Runescape private servers, cracked Minecraft, torrented unreal tournament 2004.

It is even more crazy to me because these kids have AI nowadays too. You can literally just ask AI how to do these things and it spits it out for you. The barrier of entry is near 0. Yet they don't bother. I just don't get it man. I wanted a PC like that so bad growing up, wanted VR for a decade, and these kids just play Roblox smh

Another rant I could go on too is how toxic Roblox's monetization is. Kids want money to spend on Roblox to get back at a rich kid not realizing it is just a net loss. So many gambling mechanics in Roblox too. Ugh. Part of the issue is all the kids play Roblox because they can't afford a console and games nowadays, but like maybe if you quit blowing your allowance on revenge mechanics/P2W in Roblox you would be able to save up for a real console or better yet a PC and then learn to torrent? Ughhhh I'm becoming old I shake my fist as these kids smh

I agree with you about how AAA games don't really feel like fun games anymore. They try to be movies or something instead of a game first. I really miss the days of flash games. So many unique and cool games. Some of my favorite games to this day are free flash games. I guess Roblox serves to fill that niche now but there is way less variety on Roblox compared to the days of flash games. Flash games didn't have disgusting monetization either.

i still find myself playing much older games and nothing really new. I still play Helldivers 2 daily but thats the newest game I have played. I many i bought, played a bit and never finished.

Nytegard said:

I've been finding that the younger generation is just not playing AAA games and I really can't blame them.

This is where for me, video games just haven't felt like video games for decades now. One of the few companies which seems to understand this is Nintendo. Nintendo tries to make fun games. Sony, MS, the entire AAA industry in the west just tries to make engagement machines to sell microtransactions, and the games turn into jobs after addicting you on dark patterns.

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I think the industry offer both (never engaged in a microtransaction outside one time for Magic the gathering game), there a giant amount of game that are made to be bought and simply played (with pure extra easy to pass on DLC), it is customer prefering and pushing all the industry toward the engagement-micro transaction model.

Like the example just above of playing Roblox when they have a giant regular old model steam library available just above.

They will all be playing GTAVI in a bit.

I'd say we've been experiencing the crash for awhile. What else would you call AAA studios losing money left and right? More games seem to flop then not. The difference between the crash in the 1980's and now is pretty staggering. Mainly the size of the industry and the amount of money being lost. The Drinker makes most of the relevant points in the video, primarily the AAA studios downsizing and tons of studio shutdowns, etc. being signs of the crash. He touches on the fact that games produced by Western studios take way too long to make and cost too much. It's literally the Hollywood business model and everything that's wrong with it.

What he doesn't really get into a whole lot is the fact that games from Asian studios can be made for half as much in half the time and they tend to be higher quality. Even the live service stuff coming out of Asian countries is downright nimble in that they can take feedback from their players and implement changes in about a third the time it takes the AAA Western devs to do so. (Or less).

Really, it boils down to a few issues:

1.) Games cost way too much.
When a video game costs 200-300 million dollars, it needs to sell a shit load to break even, much less turn a profit. A game that costs 200-300 million dollars or more to make needs to sell upwards of 8 to 10 million copies to turn a profit. This may not seem like a big deal because you've got games like Cyberpunk 2077, Wukong, and some of the Assassin's Creed games, as well as others that hit these numbers easily. But the games that achieve this level of success are few and far between. Yes, they exist but the odds that any given game will achieve this, especially without being part of an established IP is pretty low.

2.) Game development companies have become too greedy and chase trends.
If a game isn't the first in a genre or type, every other developer ends up chasing it. An example of this is all the WoW clones trying to be the next "WoW" or the next Fortnite or whatever. It's a dangerous mindset for studios and executives ultimately in control of these companies. Gamers are fickle and its hard to capture the same lightning in a bottle that makes some games critical successes. Simply iterating on something done by another studio while trying to make it different enough not to get in trouble legally rarely seems to work.

Let's also not forget, by the time a game comes out in 6 or 7 years, the trends and bandwagon the game was trying to capitalize on may have completely changed, disappeared or simply aren't popular anymore. Not only that, but the game everyone's trying to emulate so much may have evolved iteratively and benefited from doing so. Not to mention live service games are lifestyle games. People with a significant monetary investment in a live service game aren't simply going to make the switch to something else when they are deeply invested in something already. It takes something spectacular to get a gamer to switch from one live service game to another.

The days of developers trying to make a great game and being happy with it being decently profitable are sadly long over. Studios want to sell 15-20 million copies and rake in 100's of millions when most games just don't have that kind of earning potential.

3.) Game development cycles are excessively long.
If a game takes 5-8 years to develop, not only do the costs balloon out of control but chasing those trends with a long development cycle means your going to miss the train. Concord famously tried to be Overwatch and missed the mark by 8 years. By the time it came out Overwatch had been massively updated and was on its sequel, which had a completely different business model than the game did originally.

4.) Stake Holder Capitalism and Out of Touch Executives
This one is probably one of the biggest pitfalls developers face. Studios and the executives steering the ship are out of touch with what gamer's want. Concord's whole hook was weekly or bi-weekly cutscenes telling a Guardians of the Galaxy style narrative. Granted, there are less egregious examples I could use here but this one illustrates the point on multiple levels. People who play Overwatch type games aren't there for the story. They don't play because the story is super engaging. Typically, games like Overwatch, Destiny 2 etc. don't actually present their narrative all that well leaving you to have to watch third party videos or go down a rabbit hole with in-game codexes, reading lore tabs on gun descriptions and crap like that.

While I'd like to completely avoid the political side of things, the fact is you can't really separate it totally from the industry. You have a lot of executives and developers "going woke". Let's be honest, at the top the people in charge of these companies couldn't give two-squirts of piss about woke talking points. The issue is that they mistakenly believe that the vocal minority on the internet is the majority. They don't understand how the internet typically works and that the loudest voices aren't always the ones you need to listen to. Often these voices aren't even their customer base. Black Rock's CEO even admitted to saying that it was the duty of companies like Black Rock to conduct social engineering to force changes in behavior.

This thinking led to Blackrock only providing funding to companies that played ball and got with their identity politics. The part of the business that most of the public doesn't know about is the finance part. Companies don't fund these endeavors exclusively on their own. They do this to avoid insolvency. If Disney used its own money exclusively to make films and TV shows it would be far more risk-adverse than it is. Often they get help in the form of investors. Investors like Black Rock often have conditions that have to be met before they'll agree to provide funding. In other words, they'll have some measure of control in the final product and how its made. This leads to compromised products made to appease investors. This part is unique to the modern day as it wasn't an issue in the 1980's. At least, not the same way it would be today. Stakeholder capitalism being problematic isn't a new thing, but the disparity between the companies financing this crap and the general public is far more polarizing than anything we've seen before.

Why that's the case is a much bigger topic revolving around social media influence and other factors that are a mess to get into.

Not sure about 2, it clash quite a bit with #1, spending a lot to make your product is a bit on the opposite spectrum of greed and I suspect the success rate of the 200-300 millions dollars affair is much higher than any other budget (like it tend to be for Hollywood), they are more modest ROI than small game success story but more reliable, because they will tend to be from established IP or teams only.

Same for copying success and trends, it is probably the safest bet if you do not have an big IP, there is so many example of it working, it is just easier to see the failure (like the 200-300 millions games). Fortnite jumped on the PUBG bandwagon battle royal premise and made a fortune, candy crush on bejeweled, FInal Fantasy on Dragon Quest

Dan_D said:

The days of developers trying to make a great game and being happy with it being decently profitable are sadly long over.

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Commercially successful game getting sequel always had been a thing, Zork, mortal kombat, final fantasy, zelda, doom, mario bros all had sequels, I am not sure those days of just being happy and moving on were that common ever before.

But, how different say Kingdom Come 1 and 2, Cyberpunk, Ghost of Tsushima are versus games of the 1990s ? (and a giant list of example), there is a very long list of good old regular single player game (getting a bit more DLC release over the years maybe....) and sequel like before existing in parallel to the live service affair. Steam is filled with those.

Is there every month a couple of new Doom or something similar, relatively big, old school not needing micro transaction-live service to survive if people buy them in mass release ? People just prefer and heavily push the industry in the other direction, it is not like there is not a really big 1990s style offering outthere, and obviously the giant smaller game affairs by the hundreds.

Dan_D said:

If Disney used its own money exclusively to make films and TV shows it would be far more risk-adverse than it is.

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Disney is a bit of an exception with how much they self fund versus others studio and in part it is because they are so risk-adverse working on proving IP and concept a lot that made it possible and their high success rate/high cash flow/borrowing power.

Something like this:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14513804/companycredits/?ref_=tt_ov_at_dt_cmpy

Is way cleaner production company and financing versus the usual Sony/warner/paramount movie (they will often pre-sales some market as well), those other studio usually to get financiers to take risk on the riskier movies they have to let them participate of the tentpole in exchange.

Games are making more money than they ever were.

I wouldn't call it a crash of the games industry. I would call it a crash of the Western games industry, specifically the West Coast California culture type game studios.

sharknice said:

Games are making more money than they ever were.

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as a total entity maybe, but it got concentrated in a few forever game winners and Roblox type platform too right ?

People buy less full priced individual title than before, the aggressive pull on their attention by others thing is quite strong and not just the on going forever GTA 5/call of duty/fortnite.

LukeTbk said:

Not sure about 2, it clash quite a bit with #1, spending a lot to make your product is a bit on the opposite spectrum of greed and I suspect the success rate of the 200-300 millions dollars affair is much higher than any other budget (like it tend to be for Hollywood), they are more modest ROI than small game success story but more reliable, because they will tend to be from established IP or teams only.

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The reason why a lot of games cost what they do is due to corporate bloat and design by committee choices. These are games that aren't that expensive because the money is being invested wisely. Like Hollywood, I think the belief is that if you spend the money, you'll have a bigger return. There is some truth to that, I mean they didn't get the idea out of the blue. It does work. It's also a high risk-high reward scenario too.

LukeTbk said:

Same for copying success and trends, it is probably the safest bet if you do not have an big IP, there is so many example of it working, it is just easier to see the failure (like the 200-300 millions games). Fortnite jumped on the PUBG bandwagon battle royal premise and made a fortune, candy crush on bejeweled, FInal Fantasy on Dragon Quest


Commercially successful game getting sequel always had been a thing, Zork, mortal kombat, final fantasy, zelda, doom, mario bros all had sequels, I am not sure those days of just being happy and moving on were that common ever before.

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Sequels are common and when it comes to the video game industry, unlike Hollywood, sequels tend to be more popular than the originals. Usually, they are better than their predecessors and have the benefit of drawing in new players as well as retaining the old ones. When a big AAA sequel doesn't do as well as its predecessor, its actually a huge indicator something went very wrong. Even when the games are still successful, it still indicates a problem. IE, God of War, Last of Us 2, etc. While these were still massively successful financially, they didn't do the same numbers as their predecessors. For a sequel in a big franchise like Assassin's Creed to fail is an even bigger sign of issues.

And yes, I get what you are saying. Copying trends does seem to be the safe bet and it would be, were it not for games taking three quarters of a decade to go from concept stages to release. It's too long a window which is why its not really the safe bet. Also, the fact that chasing trends can and sometimes does work doesn't mean that the point doesn't still stand. It's fine for games that can be made relatively quickly before the trends die off or customer tastes change.

LukeTbk said:

But, how different say Kingdom Come 1 and 2, Cyberpunk, Ghost of Tsushima are versus games of the 1990s ? (and a giant list of example), there is a very long list of good old regular single player game (getting a bit more DLC release over the years maybe....) and sequel like before existing in parallel to the live service affair. Steam is filled with those.

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I'm not sure what your point is. I'm not sure the complexity of the game really matters here. As the Drinker put it, the crash of the 1980's was due to oversaturation in the market, high development costs and low effort slop. Sound familiar? The only difference here is the scale of time and the budgets we are talking about here. Yes, modern games are orders of magnitude more complex but I'm not sure that's relevant.

LukeTbk said:

Disney is a bit of an exception with how much they self fund versus others studio and in part it is because they are so risk-adverse working on proving IP and concept a lot that made it possible and their high success rate/high cash flow/borrowing power.

Something like this:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14513804/companycredits/?ref_=tt_ov_at_dt_cmpy

Is way cleaner production company and financing versus the usual Sony/warner/paramount movie (they will often pre-sales some market as well), those other studio usually to get financiers to take risk on the riskier movies they have to let them participate of the tentpole in exchange.

Click to expand...

Again, I'm not sure where you are going with this. For starters, I'm speaking in general terms here but also, Disney is a great example of what I am talking about. Again, Black Rock was a big financier of their products and has a significant stake in Disney itself.

Dan_D said:

Really, it boils down to a few issues:

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It's the change in philosophy of games though. Games used to be designed around being disposable bite size eats. You paid $50, you got 10, maybe 20 hours of game time, and then if you wanted more, you bought the next game. This worked well up through the 8-bit and 16-bit era.

The thing is, you were never supposed to play games for hours on end or long periods of time. Sega was a king of the arcade, and when the Genesis came out, many of their ultra-popular games were brought over. And the audience got sick of them, and those popular games became sub-par Genesis games, even though the games themselves were near arcade quality, if not pixel-perfect. But arcade games were designed as, play 5 minutes, get a dopamine hit, go do something else.

I used to be considered a problem child in that I was a video game addict as a kid. I looked at some of my save disks that I had, and I might have played up to 2 hours of video games a day. Today? That's considered average.

So, during the 32-bit era was where we all of the sudden got the mythical 40-hour game, and 100 hours if you wanted to do everything. That's where things really started to go wrong, as they started to become expensive to produce. And you just can't create a game that's fun for that long. But I would say, at that point, it still wasn't harmful.

It's the social media era where things really started to go downhill. We need you to be playing the game as much as humanly possible. No doing house chores, no playing sports outside, etc. And that's where you have to addict kids. And like most addictions, it starts out feeling good, but that dopamine hit gets smaller and smaller every time until you're playing so that you don't feel miserable.

But because modern games have low up front costs and last a long time, it's near impossible to convince people to go back to the more disposable and healthier game ecosystem.

Yeah, now live service games are lifestyle games. They want you to commit to playing the game as much as possible so that you'll spend money on microtransactions. Player retention through FOMO is a good example of that.

Dan_D said:

I'd say we've been experiencing the crash for awhile. What else would you call AAA studios losing money left and right? More games seem to flop then not. The difference between the crash in the 1980's and now is pretty staggering. Mainly the size of the industry and the amount of money being lost. The Drinker makes most of the relevant points in the video, primarily the AAA studios downsizing and tons of studio shutdowns, etc. being signs of the crash. He touches on the fact that games produced by Western studios take way too long to make and cost too much. It's literally the Hollywood business model and everything that's wrong with it.

What he doesn't really get into a whole lot is the fact that games from Asian studios can be made for half as much in half the time and they tend to be higher quality. Even the live service stuff coming out of Asian countries is downright nimble in that they can take feedback from their players and implement changes in about a third the time it takes the AAA Western devs to do so. (Or less).

Really, it boils down to a few issues:

1.) Games cost way too much.
When a video game costs 200-300 million dollars, it needs to sell a shit load to break even, much less turn a profit. A game that costs 200-300 million dollars or more to make needs to sell upwards of 8 to 10 million copies to turn a profit. This may not seem like a big deal because you've got games like Cyberpunk 2077, Wukong, and some of the Assassin's Creed games, as well as others that hit these numbers easily. But the games that achieve this level of success are few and far between. Yes, they exist but the odds that any given game will achieve this, especially without being part of an established IP is pretty low.

2.) Game development companies have become too greedy and chase trends.
If a game isn't the first in a genre or type, every other developer ends up chasing it. An example of this is all the WoW clones trying to be the next "WoW" or the next Fortnite or whatever. It's a dangerous mindset for studios and executives ultimately in control of these companies. Gamers are fickle and its hard to capture the same lightning in a bottle that makes some games critical successes. Simply iterating on something done by another studio while trying to make it different enough not to get in trouble legally rarely seems to work.

Let's also not forget, by the time a game comes out in 6 or 7 years, the trends and bandwagon the game was trying to capitalize on may have completely changed, disappeared or simply aren't popular anymore. Not only that, but the game everyone's trying to emulate so much may have evolved iteratively and benefited from doing so. Not to mention live service games are lifestyle games. People with a significant monetary investment in a live service game aren't simply going to make the switch to something else when they are deeply invested in something already. It takes something spectacular to get a gamer to switch from one live service game to another.

The days of developers trying to make a great game and being happy with it being decently profitable are sadly long over. Studios want to sell 15-20 million copies and rake in 100's of millions when most games just don't have that kind of earning potential.

3.) Game development cycles are excessively long.
If a game takes 5-8 years to develop, not only do the costs balloon out of control but chasing those trends with a long development cycle means your going to miss the train. Concord famously tried to be Overwatch and missed the mark by 8 years. By the time it came out Overwatch had been massively updated and was on its sequel, which had a completely different business model than the game did originally.

4.) Stake Holder Capitalism and Out of Touch Executives
This one is probably one of the biggest pitfalls developers face. Studios and the executives steering the ship are out of touch with what gamer's want. Concord's whole hook was weekly or bi-weekly cutscenes telling a Guardians of the Galaxy style narrative. Granted, there are less egregious examples I could use here but this one illustrates the point on multiple levels. People who play Overwatch type games aren't there for the story. They don't play because the story is super engaging. Typically, games like Overwatch, Destiny 2 etc. don't actually present their narrative all that well leaving you to have to watch third party videos or go down a rabbit hole with in-game codexes, reading lore tabs on gun descriptions and crap like that.

While I'd like to completely avoid the political side of things, the fact is you can't really separate it totally from the industry. You have a lot of executives and developers "going woke". Let's be honest, at the top the people in charge of these companies couldn't give two-squirts of piss about woke talking points. The issue is that they mistakenly believe that the vocal minority on the internet is the majority. They don't understand how the internet typically works and that the loudest voices aren't always the ones you need to listen to. Often these voices aren't even their customer base. Black Rock's CEO even admitted to saying that it was the duty of companies like Black Rock to conduct social engineering to force changes in behavior.

This thinking led to Blackrock only providing funding to companies that played ball and got with their identity politics. The part of the business that most of the public doesn't know about is the finance part. Companies don't fund these endeavors exclusively on their own. They do this to avoid insolvency. If Disney used its own money exclusively to make films and TV shows it would be far more risk-adverse than it is. Often they get help in the form of investors. Investors like Black Rock often have conditions that have to be met before they'll agree to provide funding. In other words, they'll have some measure of control in the final product and how its made. This leads to compromised products made to appease investors. This part is unique to the modern day as it wasn't an issue in the 1980's. At least, not the same way it would be today. Stakeholder capitalism being problematic isn't a new thing, but the disparity between the companies financing this crap and the general public is far more polarizing than anything we've seen before.

Why that's the case is a much bigger topic revolving around social media influence and other factors that are a mess to get into.

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Long story short, all those points have been issues for decades. "Woke" games have been around for decades as well, it was just never called "woke". What it was back then was original, unforced, and from the ground-up. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is a good example for movies. The executives were like, no. However, Kumar (Penn), asked Ryan Reynolds to cameo for it, and helped get it greenlit.

For games, "woke" games before they were called "woke", were all from indie game developers, that eventually made a hit game. Top executives for big game companies went, "hmm...". Except, they always think money-first, not idea-first.

Remember kids, "woke" is made from the top down, and look at who's at the top. "Woke" was also a good term before it got hijacked, like the swastika was a good symbol before Nazi Germany.

Dan_D said:

The reason why a lot of games cost what they do is due to corporate bloat and design by committee choices. These are games that aren't that expensive because the money is being invested wisely. Like Hollywood, I think the belief is that if you spend the money, you'll have a bigger return. There is some truth to that, I mean they didn't get the idea out of the blue. It does work. It's also a high risk-high reward scenario too.

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the belief is a lot more, you spend the money you are more likely to get a positive return, but a smaller ratio, it is really hard to make a 10x successs story from those but they are way more safer, you can do something similar by investing in a lists of smaller titles has well, lower your ROI but diminish risk.

high risk-high reward is more say manor lord, self finance evreything almost certain to fail, but when the rare time it work you make 100x time the money back.

Dan_D said:

Also, the fact that chasing trends can and sometimes does work doesn't mean that the point doesn't still stand. It's fine for games that can be made relatively quickly before the trends die off or customer tastes change.

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Sure of course, but if the chasing trend success rate is higher than trying something original, then the point would not stand, and we can bet that it is the case.

Dan_D said:

I'm not sure what your point is. I'm not sure the complexity of the game really matters here.

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Was not thinking about the complexity or the game itself, purely the business model, make a game, people buy it or not, do not spend extra money on it if they do not want too, pretty much like we did in the 1990s, the industry do provide and offer that experience, which is still somewhat popular, no one is forced into the live-service model, that something customer are pushjing the industry toward too, as they prefer it and spend more money on it.

Dan_D said:

Again, I'm not sure where you are going with this. For starters, I'm speaking in general terms here but also, Disney is a great example of what I am talking about. Again, Black Rock was a big financier of their products and has a significant stake in Disney itself.

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Being a stockholder is different than a financier, the movie industry is famous for most movies to have many direct stakeholder in it, BlackRock are not investor usually in a Disney movie and do not get points on it (Disney being exceptional here versus others, they self finance movies-tv a lot without any other player sharing profit with), like a LStar Capital on a sony movie. Village Roadshow, TSG, Legendary picture (big one often have logo at the start of movies) is more what a movie co-financier look like, BlackRock did with Aviron Picture for small movies project and got burned a long time ago and some others like MacroFilm or Anton, but they are not a big player I do not think and Disney do not need/usually like to dilute their production with co-financier.

El_Capitan said:

Long story short, all those points have been issues for decades. "Woke" games have been around for decades as well, it was just never called "woke". What it was back then was original, unforced, and from the ground-up. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is a good example for movies. The executives were like, no. However, Kumar (Penn), asked Ryan Reynolds to cameo for it, and helped get it greenlit.

For games, "woke" games before they were called "woke", were all from indie game developers, that eventually made a hit game. Top executives for big game companies went, "hmm...". Except, they always think money-first, not idea-first.

Remember kids, "woke" is made from the top down, and look at who's at the top. "Woke" was also a good term before it got hijacked, like the swastika was a good symbol before Nazi Germany.

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There is a big difference between progressivism of old and woke. But that's really not the topic at hand. It's simply a contributing factor to a lot of modern games being shit.

Dan_D said:

There is a big difference between progressivism of old and woke. But that's really not the topic at hand. It's simply a contributing factor to a lot of modern games being shit.

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Yeah, one is to actually make something of substance based off of life experiences, ideas, and creativity. While the other is just to popularize and monetize it. The problem is that the two are being conflated. Grassroots is a good thing, but now astroturfing is through the roof so people don't know whether something is actually ground-up, or top-down. Being woke is a good thing, but being "woke" is not. Diversity, equality, and inclusion is a good thing, but "DEI" is not.

MikeTrike said:

I'm more excited about a Renaissance with indie gaming at the forefront and lots of optimization around existing hardware average footprints.

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Man that would be nice. Would be the silver lining of all of this, devs having to tighten things up instead of assuming there will be unlimited resources to run whatever is built.

I'm not super confident that will happen, but here's hoping.

ivandagiant said:

Dude seriously, I built a $1000 rig for my gf's little siblings and all they do is play Roblox on the thing. They have access to my entire steam library. They have access to my Microsoft account too. All they play is Roblox. Drives me insane, could have gotten them a chromebook.

I even got them a meta quest 3 VR headset and they don't even touch the thing. Now, I didn't buy them any games for it, but I assumed they would learn how to pirate games and get some more computer literacy skills during it. I mean, that is exactly what I did back in my day! My parents would never want to spend money on the internet, so I had to find other ways to play games. Runescape private servers, cracked Minecraft, torrented unreal tournament 2004.

It is even more crazy to me because these kids have AI nowadays too. You can literally just ask AI how to do these things and it spits it out for you. The barrier of entry is near 0. Yet they don't bother. I just don't get it man. I wanted a PC like that so bad growing up, wanted VR for a decade, and these kids just play Roblox smh

Another rant I could go on too is how toxic Roblox's monetization is. Kids want money to spend on Roblox to get back at a rich kid not realizing it is just a net loss. So many gambling mechanics in Roblox too. Ugh. Part of the issue is all the kids play Roblox because they can't afford a console and games nowadays, but like maybe if you quit blowing your allowance on revenge mechanics/P2W in Roblox you would be able to save up for a real console or better yet a PC and then learn to torrent? Ughhhh I'm becoming old I shake my fist as these kids smh

I agree with you about how AAA games don't really feel like fun games anymore. They try to be movies or something instead of a game first. I really miss the days of flash games. So many unique and cool games. Some of my favorite games to this day are free flash games. I guess Roblox serves to fill that niche now but there is way less variety on Roblox compared to the days of flash games. Flash games didn't have disgusting monetization either.

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It really seems that is all these gen Z/Alpha kids play is Roblox and Minecraft. That is all ever early 20s kid at work talk about.

Highwind said:

devs having to tighten things up instead of assuming there will be unlimited resources to run whatever is built.

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Dev have been making games running on switch 1-PS4 in the 2020s, XboxS has well, dev never assumed unlimited ressources and optimising always been pretty much all along what game making is mostly about. (not that PS5-XboxX is that much hardware in 2026 either)

1060 gpus and 8GB or less GPU in general would have been with us for a very long time no matter what on the PC sides, it has been a long time since game dev assume some big hardware shift would happen between a game seriously start and the planned release date.

MikeTrike said:

I'm more excited about a Renaissance with indie gaming at the forefront and lots of optimization around existing hardware average footprints.

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I don't think that's going to happen. Indie games are usually low budget affairs. Some of them find an audience but a lot of that stuff is slop too. Just a different kind of slop. The kind that results from not having enough people, money or resources to make a compelling game. Every indie game I've ever seen is low budget clones of crap from the late 80's and early to mid 1990's with rare exceptions. I think the AA space is where we'll see the successes that create the new AAA studios of tomorrow.

Dan_D said:

2.) Game development companies have become too greedy and chase trends.

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Great points overall. I will just add a bit here, I think games are focusing too much on being game like. Following standard gameplay loops and adapting different settings and game styles to the same overall loops. This is why Ubisoft games largely feel the same, even if in one game you're running around with swords 900 years ago or if it is set in the modern day with guns. Games need to go back to making something more about an experience or creating an illusion that you are doing something more than just running to checkpoints on a map to pick up a task and then run somewhere else. Too many games I play now days seem to make missions justifying the need to run around and turn in objectives. The actual objectives are an afterthought and typically a small part of the experience.

Dan_D said:

I don't think that's going to happen. Indie games are usually low budget affairs. Some of them find an audience but a lot of that stuff is slop too. Just a different kind of slop. The kind that results from not having enough people, money or resources to make a compelling game. Every indie game I've ever seen is low budget clones of crap from the late 80's and early to mid 1990's with rare exceptions. I think the AA space is where we'll see the successes that create the new AAA studios of tomorrow.

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I hear indie-game, indie-game, indie-game all the time, and how that's going to solve the problem of the industry. How there's something for everyone. And it's the same reason Windows still comprises over 90% of the market, no matter how much Linux zealots state how there's a Linux distro for everyone.

The bottom line is most of us don't want to have to search for that needle in a haystack.

You bought something from EA, you bought something from Activision, you knew it was quality, no matter how much the forums complained about it. They said they would boycott the terrible practices, yet 95% of those who claimed they would boycott secretly preordered the games anyway and were playing on day 1.

Don't pay attention to what people say, pay attention to what they do.

ivandagiant said:

Dude seriously, I built a $1000 rig for my gf's little siblings and all they do is play Roblox on the thing. They have access to my entire steam library. They have access to my Microsoft account too. All they play is Roblox. Drives me insane, could have gotten them a chromebook.

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lol that's like buying your beloved cat a nice and expensive toy that it ignores to play with the box it came in

Dan_D said:

I don't think that's going to happen. Indie games are usually low budget affairs. Some of them find an audience but a lot of that stuff is slop too. Just a different kind of slop. The kind that results from not having enough people, money or resources to make a compelling game. Every indie game I've ever seen is low budget clones of crap from the late 80's and early to mid 1990's with rare exceptions. I think the AA space is where we'll see the successes that create the new AAA studios of tomorrow.

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They don't need to do much, but if they chip away 5, 10 or 20% of audience of the bigger titles, it's going to continue hurting them to the point of default and closure, and the remaining hopefully tighten things up.

The main problems with AAA multiplayer games as I see it:
1. Cheating is out of control.
2. Most companies seem to want to look like they are fighting cheaters more than actually fighting cheaters
3. Free to play just eliminates any penalty for chronic cheating
4. The switch from player and clan operated servers to algo matching lobbies. In the old days, your community could boot sus or unpleasant players - no proof needed. You could make friends, enforce community standards, etc. New games are atomizing and anti community.

I used to be huge into car audio and even did competitions for 10+ years. When I started there were small, private companies like Precision Power, MB Quart, Orion....these brands were proud and made stellar gear. Only by one they got bought out by giant corporations for tons of cash. Oddly enough, the main company was Directed Electronics Incorporated otherwise known as, yep, DEI.

First thing these companies did was get rid of all the people that designed all the great products and made everything mid range at best. Took about 10 more years before they started falling apart.

Kinda the same here. All these great developer studios bought out by EA or Activision and turned into shells of their former selves.