They essentially want a low-effort low-cost perpetual money-printing machine

Problem is that they can’t micromanage that into existence, ConcernedApe more or less created a money printing machine with Stardew Valley all by himself, at least at first. It would be so much cheaper for studios to find like 15 inspired independent devs/designers that need money to make their dream a reality, give them just a lil equity and room/time to cook and they might actually get something amazing. But ain’t no way execs and shareholders would let that happen, they’d yank the plug after year one of a three year contract.

Call me crazy, but I don’t want to play a game “with staying power”.

I want to play games that are fun, I finish them, then move on.

I don’t need a “forever game”. I don’t want seasons, season passes, dailies, battle passes, time limited, time gated content.

Part of that is due to the sheer complexity of games now compared to then. It’s hard to test everything.

Of course, there’s also the problems of games getting released in noticeably buggy states, which seems a lot more common now than it used to be (there were definitely buggy games released for the PS1, but they were rare).

With staying power I thought of games like Factorio.

Bought it once, played it for thousands of hours. A decade later or so it gets an extension which basically quintuples the content, am playing it thousands of hours more.

I blame botw, everyone thinks they can squeeze out more play time for less effort with it’s open world/collection/crafting model. In reality it just makes the game slow, boring and unrewarding by introducing a shit load of pointless travel and breaking rewards in to shards

This is what happens when you chase trends instead of just having a solid idea.

Newsflash: You aren’t going to turn random horror IP into the next Dead By Daylight. DBD is already Dead By Daylight

You aren’t going to make a multi-player online shooter that is the next Fortnite. Fortnite is already Fortnite.

Actually now that I’ve said that aloud it seems like the problem is that they’re trying to be the next big multi-player experience when they should be focused on a solid single player

I played BG3 and liked it, but stopped because the game seems to have been co-opted by the Far Right

Who would have thought that the long years of constantly pushing hard for monetization/profits from leadership while not giving a fuck about making a good game would end up eroding their reputation and choking their golden eggs goose. They released too many AAAs that were really AA$$.

Indeed.

What I’m really tired of is companies getting a random Horror IP and going “Let’s compete against a game that has MULITPLE horror ips”

the game seems to have been co-opted by the Far Right

Oh no, I hadn’t heard about this yet. What’d they do?

I wonder if this has an expiration date, though.

For example, as much as I love Broodwar, it would be nice to get “the next RTS” at this point.

I remember that.

I really wish society had class conciousness because if we did. That would have been enough to never ever support another AAA dev again

Whole industry has been saying that for a while. It’s unsustainable and to a large extend large studios have fallen to the sunk cost fallacy since they are often on 5-10 years development cycles (!), with very rigid schedules (since they rotate development teams).

Now the big studios are going bankrupt/getting sold to MBS while Expedition 33 is doing tricks on their grave (at least relatively, in absolute numbers their sales numbers aren’t high with normies who only play CoD and FIFA).

Sadly, I think that’s a dead genre, and I don’t even see the Indie Crowd picking it up.

I say this as a big fan of Starcraft and Command & Conquer

Crazy. I want to play a game with staying power.

I want the game that I look at and go “When did I get 1000 hours on the game?” Because I keep coming back to it.

But this is where we agree. I want to play games that are fun.

Seasons, dailies, battle passes, etc aren’t the things that I see as “staying power”, that’s microtransactions to a sunk cost fallacy.

Staying power to me is like Terraria, where I go in, build a world. Run around. Then wander off to something else… to wander back and play more Terraria.

I think game designers and studios have to realize that there is a big market they arent serving as much. I’m not a basement dwelling teenager anymore, I’m in my 40s, I’ve got basically no time, I can’t spend 100 hours locked in on something anymore. Take Kingdom Come Deliverance II for instance, like it’s clearly a banger of a game, but I was like 15 hours in and it still hasn’t really started. I just don’t have the attention span for that kind of stuff anymore. I guess I’m desiring more casual like gaming.

They played it, probably.

The game had massive success on the entire political spectrum.

Fortnite is a great example. It started as a co-op tower defence game. Then they saw the success of PUBG and borrowed their game mechanic (and some developers too I think).

Then epic coined it in selling skins.

I mostly agree with you, I feel like most games with staying power, are games that fundamentally will have you playing because you enjoy it.

I don’t think I can write off seasons in multiplayer games though, some games do benefit from having larger changes that happen at the end of these seasons.

Battle passes can at best be fine(if they at least pay for the next one), I don’t think any are particularly good as a metric for staying power, you still need/want to enjoy playing the game to progress the battle pass.

For me the best staying power is a game that has complexity and depth to mechanics. So I have something to improve on and chase(like lap times in sim racing)