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 I don’t care that the graphics are outdated, if the gameplay works and is fun, its fine looking like almost anything.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.

It is less of an effort and time commitment to passively consume tv shows or movies. You can zombie out while watching it before going to sleep or fall asleep to it.

Games are an active medium in comparison with progression gated behind level of skill, so that makes it less accessible than something like movies or tv shows that is the equivalent of an auto clicker game.

On a movie set, the director has a huge amount of authority. It’s been baked into the culture for about a hundred years that the director is one step below God. A studio treats films as investments, but they also hire a director and (mostly) get out of the way. Sure, producers do meddle, but it’s nowhere close to the same amount as with games – and all the meddling is still pointed at the director, not the crew. I think this limits the damage that can be done.

Also, the film industry has strong unions. Most of the abuses in game dev simply aren’t allowed. I suspect that the horrible culture of game dev can cause developers to stop caring, which bleeds through to the final product, and that won’t happen to the same extent for movies.

That’s not all ea has to be, it can be more than that, all we have to do is make it look like more money can be made that way for AAA and we can have our cake and eat it too.

Capitalism has always been that way. Might be more accurate to say it gets worse when hobby becomes mainstream enough for more money to start flowing into it. Best balance seems to be when something is profitable but niche so corporations consider it not big enough for them to go all in on with their wealth.

Gaming was better when it was some loser hobby in the eyes of society than accepted like it is now causing it to grow to bring in more revenue than movies and music combined. That drew the attention of the vultures.

EA is great for small and medium sized studios to get games out that might be a bit more ambitious than they could manage with traditional models. The point of AAA is that they have the money to do big impressive things. They can already do focus groups and closed betas to get community feedback. The thing that might attract AAA attention is you could make a good amount without actually releasing anything.

Idk, id love to see it properly done from AAA. That would be a great way to prove you right or wrong.

I just started playing this game. I cried at the end of the fucking prologue. What amazing writing and voice acting.

It’s okay, we can just not play AAA games.

Buckle up, mate.

Uh oh. I’m starting it tonight.

The amount of genuinely good and successful live service games is so minimal that it’s actual insanity seeing AAA execs trying to reinvent the wheel and failing every time.

The only ones I play these days are Warframe and occasionally PoE2, both relatively smaller dev teams with large publisher backing but mostly left to their own devices to do whatever the fuck they want. Coming from the predatory FOMO hell that was Destiny 2, getting into similar games but ones that actually respect the players is refreshing.

I have zero interest in throwaway AAA slop in general, let alone with all the usual live service shit tacked on.

Uh oh. I’m starting it tonight.

Some dude pushed himself to finish it all in a weekend because he had a busy week ahead and was in shambles. Man was not made to handle that much feels in such a short period 🥲