Games Industry (The Absolute State Of)

For an industry that’s never been more profitable its remarkable how badly the games industry is run

This is the thing.

If you look at the film industry, you'd have a very small number of "tentpole" releases staggered throughout the year, from a very small number of major players who are cautious to not step on each others toes. You have a bunch of other smaller releases, sometimes from smaller studios, but they have budgets to match. There are carefully managed release schedules on different channels.

If you look at the music industry you again have a very small number of big players, who have a very small number of *insanely* profitable acts. They marketed in an industry where exposure and marketing is precisely controlled (less so with streaming) to make sure they maximise their income for the whales. A huge number of smaller acts exist but it's accepted that the majority of the will not break even and the whales subsidised that, the overall system is viable.

In the games industry, you've got a number of developers all simultaneously trying to be the majority players with massive tentpole releases, all jostling for position in a crowded release schedule even for releases from the same publisher. There is no room for error as everything costs millions and has to be a massive hit to just break even. That's before you get the the idea that 40 to 70 quid apparently buys you 40+ hours of entertainment. People just don't have *time* let alone the money to make that expectation work.

It's a fucking stupid industry. There's loads of money to make, but there only so many ways you can divide that up

I'm sure there's executives right now absolutely cursing the fact that the lockdown didn't last longer. All these massive dev teams and investment in the hope that people would remain in their homes for longer looking for means of entertainment. So when sales and profits do go down, expectedly, they can no longer justify it.

But of course, the CEO's will get their bonuses in spite of the rampant failure.

Its disgusting how these CEO at the big publishers make massive profits for zero skill and then have the nerve to say games should cost more or some shill gaming website says "games should cost more as developers are going out of business"

That madness of these ballooning team sizes and massive budgets is that the big success stories of the industry in the last few years seems to always be the games made by a solo or a small team of devs that technically could have been made on hardware from 20 years ago. Plus, with the easy access to Unreal Engine, amateurs can make something close to what AAA studios are pumping out in the visuals department too, with the only real distinction coming from animations that are done with actors and motion tracking.

Besides that, you seem to have the big players all being run by people who only seem to be able to chase trends, not caring about splashing the cash in the hope that just one of their investments goes big. Inevitably, the creatives are the ones given the boot when a game fails, rather than those that insisted on making another battle royale or MOBA or hero shooter, doomed the fail from the beginning.

Then you have the medium sized companies that all were created by kids (always male kids) straight out of college in the 90s and 00s. It was friends making games together, but they have continued to act like frat boys even after they started hiring from a wide range of people. Chuck a bit of narcissism in there too and you have a recipe for abusive behaviour and atrocious work practices.

Then you have the staff that are mostly going to be people who absolutely love games and have probably dreamed about making games since being young. They are willing to take a lot of shit in order to fulfill that dream. They likely to have little experience with other industries and mostly don't know any different. Again, just like other industries that people are desperate to work in (like film, fashion, music, etc) it will always lead to the money people abusing that passion and treating the workforce as completely disposable. In doesn't matter if you burn them out by the time they are in their 40s, as there will always be another crop of willing slaves to come along next.

Games can reach those kinds of numbers on replayability(?) alone if the game is good enough. Metroid Dread is roughly a 10 hour experience first time around and yet I’ve clocked 60+ hours simply because it’s a delight to play. It’s tight and well crafted and maintains a consistent quality throughout.

I think it’s harder for narrative-heavy games to have such appealing relatability, but they became hugely popular during the HD era and the only real way to extend that play time is to bloat them.

I’d still love a bite-sized Assassin’s Creed experience that takes place in a small town. Any one of those smaller locations in the second game could have been a £20 download and able to host a nice 15-20 hour experience without feeing old.

Would have cost a fraction of the time to make and could have focused on a smaller cast, perhaps with some deeper narrative.

I'd say you're doing a disservice lumping the current God of War series with the Ubisoft bloat stuff.

I mean the industry can't really sustain this many AAA titles with their millions in production costs, it can sustain a handful of them and a bunch more AA and As basically. But the only way for that to happen is some of the big guys aiming for AAA to implode.

Plus there's been a general trend in tech. Alphabet alone fired 35K people in January, 16K since 2023 is kinda tiny relative to some of the other things going on in tech more generally. Meta/MS/Google/Apple have all laid off massive amounts. Because like the big Video Game players they all over invested during Covid thinking those times would continue forever. They have not and the market is correcting itself.

Also 60-70 quid for a game is a total bargain for entertainment. Does nobody else go out anymore? I regularly get charged £7 for a pint or £20 for a cinema ticket. If the game last longer than a couple evening's out it's basically breaking even.

Yes it's London. Though not the fullness of it as it's easily hitting 8 quid a pint in Soho these days if you're not careful. Then again it was definitely 6 quid last time I was out in Manchester. So still a couple nights out for 1 game.

The cinema tickets are worse because all the local Odeon's have been converted into Lux so they only have stupid deluxe seats.

But yeah I'm playing Satisfactory which is hundreds of hours, Crusader Kings 3, Civ or Baldurs Gate 3. 60 quid is a fucking bargain.

It really doesn’t get said enough that most of these companies being “forced” into closing studios and making savings by firing staff have never been making more money than they are right now.