Shareholders like CEOs aren’t real people and their opinions should be tossed down the drain.

Best early access ever.

Act 1 was released like 18 months before the game actually released, and they legitimately listened to feedback from players.

Early access is pretty much the only way to do it too. If they had gotten investors there would have been pressure to release early or cram in micro transactions to increase return.

When the players are the early investors, they just want a good game.

I’m curious though, viewing movies as investments has made a some studios filthy rich. Why does that seem to be different for games?

Why do they need to get filthy rich? Why not settle for rich and having a good game?

Bring back games that you’re passionate for and gamers will love instead of designing a gamified soulless money funnel.

There are thousands of amazing indie games created by people who have an idea and a will to make something. I’ll spend my money there instead.

This is the problem with capitalism now. No one is happy making a good profit. They have to extract maximum profit by cutting everything else.

Almost all AAA games are online live service games. I have absolutely no interest in those games. I have been surviving off of indy or lower budget games pretty well while the big guys are off trying to make all the money doing boring shit.

People have been saying that AAA games suck since at least 2007, with the brown and bloom era, the rise of modern military shooters, and gameplay becoming increasingly trivial with quicktime events and so forth.

In my opinion they weren’t wrong then and they aren’t wrong now; indie games, then and now, are where innovation comes from. Though from an aesthetic perspective I think if anything AAA games are actually a little bit better now, since at least they’re using more colors than “gunmetal grey” and “piss yellow”.

They absolutely don’t. I’m just wondering why it works out financially for Marvel and Mission Impossible movies but not for games

Might be because you’re not just spending 2-3 hours with games, but >30h, often hundreds or even thousands of hours. Making that a compelling experience that people don’t quickly get tired of is much harder.

We won’t have enough RAM for new cutting-edge AAA games anyway. System requirements will plateau for the foreseeable future while they continue to raise game prices and complain that it’s too hard.

And also spent by utterly incompetent management whose prime qualification is fluency in corpospeak and AAA tier ass-kissing…

… as opposed to, you know, any kind of actual project management skills.

They’re all self important, self righteous idiots, in leadership roles in AAA.

… The goddamned AAAA pirate game that Ubisoft took 10 years to rework 3 or 4 times, and then shit out as basically a demo of a mobile style gacha game, that requires a fairly high end PC to run.

How is that not just like, money laundering / tax evasion / tax fraud, with extra steps?

Movies have a bigger audience, require less time commitment, are heavily marketed, and cost less to see. Easier to convince people to see a so-so movie as long as it has a couple of good scenes. Harder to do with games, and gamers are usually at least somewhat more aware of games before they buy them.

Early access might legitimately be the way to save the failing AAA market. You get a real chance to learn what players actually want, and how to appeal to them, while slotting your game into its proper niche.

I mean sure, there’s bound to be stinkers, there always is. But Early access would kinda rock for these games. “The game runs like shit, we don’t want to play it.” Then next month you get a dedicated patch for performance and begs get squashed faster and more efficiently. Imagine if they didn’t fuck around with borderlands 4 and released as an ea title. Could have worked.

It’s not. Plenty of game franchises are similarly profitable.

I’ve been on a spree of buying or buying abandoned games or old console games lately and have been really happy with not being online at all, not updating anything I don’t want updated, and paying a reasonable price for the content I got. I don’t care that the graphics are outdated, if the gameplay works and is fun, its fine looking like almost anything.

There’s plenty of constraints still, they aren’t technical though. It’s about making a game good despite the monetization requirements.

Early access is more about getting revenue during development and some limited QA potential. There shouldn’t be any surprises in the feedback, that would be a sign of major problems. EA also generally comes with a discount for the player which is anathema to the AAA crowd.

And then you have Clair Obscur schooling studios on how it should be done.

They aren’t bad, they just aren’t doing anything out of the ordinary. Ubisoft keeps pumping out effectively the same game for every iteration of Assassins Creed and Far Cry. Activision is the CoD machine and has been for some time. EA is… EA. Microsoft refuses to make a good Halo game because they won’t leave their developers alone long enough to see what they can come up with before mandating that it has to be X, Y, and Z.

It’s no wonder that smaller, usually indie, developers are seeing such success. Sony’s been doing well because the games they’re publishing are legitimately good experiences, but that’s only going to last so long before they get tired of spending oodles on singleplayer games and not seeing the returns they want.

Everything’s turned into a live-service game because they’re the only thing that actually generates any kind of consistent return on investment, and everything fancy in those games is out of reach for the common person struggling to get by, so the entire game is held up by a small group spending WAY too much on them.