AAA's Doom

[igor_kavinski]

Hey I didn't know 42 had exported to the U.S. Good for them.

It was in the US for a while but got closed down after some scandalous events (director getting his thing on with female students ON campus!). I attended the one in Abu Dhabi.

 

[Mahboi]

It was in the US for a while but got closed down after some scandalous events (director getting his thing on with female students ON campus!).

So damn french. 🤣

 

[igor_kavinski]

Let me show what a market with low demand is, because I happen to be a low demand buyer, as I play less and less as I age:
- Game is $60? I don't really want to play it, so I don't buy.
- Game is on sale at $40? Still don't really want it, I do not buy.
- Game is $20? Well, I don't really want to play it now, but I do like these types of games and want to support it financially, so I'll buy it just to encourage these types of games to exist, and to own it if i ever want to play it. And that way I'll have it if I ever have the desire to play it.

I have almost similar game buying habits. Humble Bundle helps a lot too!

- DLCs? If I buy them, I consider them a good buy. If I don't, I don't buy. I almost never buy those, maybe I bought a few OSTs since I'm a big game music fan.
- Game is perma 60/70 because it's a console game? That is precisely why I do not buy consoles, despite thinking that the PS5 is an exquisitely well designed system.

Only buy DLCs on sale rarely. Sometimes they come in Humble Bundles so I get the DLC essentially free since I don't buy these bundles for DLC.

Consoles have yearly or even quarterly sales on their digital stores. Very rare for me to pay full price for a console game.

 

[Mahboi]

I have almost similar game buying habits. Humble Bundle helps a lot too!

Yeees, HB is easily one of the more interesting sale bins of modern times, I used to use them a lot, bought games for almost two years with them, then decided that it was not particularly valuable for me since 99% of what I had bought went unused in the end. But I did love their offer, I just am not playing that much anymore.

Only buy DLCs on sale rarely. Sometimes they come in Humble Bundles so I get the DLC essentially free since I don't buy these bundles for DLC.

Consoles have yearly or even quarterly sales on their digital stores. Very rare for me to pay full price for a console game.

Huh, didn't know that consoles did sales too. Nintendo too?

 

[igor_kavinski]

Nintendo too?

Maybe. Never paid for a Nintendo game other than Super Mario Galaxy disc edition. That was for a girl who rejected my gift so I still have it. Painful memory 😀

 

[Ranulf]

Again, basic economics.
If the market is over-saturated, the prices should go down, not stay.
If demand isn't there, you don't sell.
What do you think it means when prices stay up? Demand is still responding positively to the price.

Then don't buy?

Then don't buy?

"the problem is always capitalism" is the most childish answer to any economic analysis.
Also
DO
NOT
BUY?

You have just proven me right at every turn:

"I'm a victim"
Then don't buy? 1080p is as good as 10 years ago. How is MSI/ASUS/Nvidia FORCING you to take 4K exactly? Does a gruff man with a leather jacket stalk you from the other side of the street and cough "BUY 4090" as soon as you walk out your house?

"I pay enough, game should be good"
Then do not buy?

"too much offer, but I still buy somehow"

I do not know what game this rant is about, but again, do not buy?

The problem is gamers being presented expensive things that aren't worth the money and buying.
You are what I just described.
Somehow in your mind, it's not you being, as you say, "fickle, cheap, not knowing what, FOMO, or buying pre-orders...", it's the games industry presenting "excessive, expensive, abusive, exploiting FOMO, offering pre-orders"...THAT YOU STILL BUY!!!

Those companies would literally all crash if it weren't for the people who buy. Plain and simple. They don't actually force anything. They OFFER. The fact that a DEMAND responds to the offer is how the market holds. It's always two hands signing the deal. And you still sign.

Who's silly here?

Let me show what a market with low demand is, because I happen to be a low demand buyer, as I play less and less as I age:
- Game is $60? I don't really want to play it, so I don't buy.
- Game is on sale at $40? Still don't really want it, I do not buy.
- Game is $20? Well, I don't really want to play it now, but I do like these types of games and want to support it financially, so I'll buy it just to encourage these types of games to exist, and to own it if i ever want to play it. And that way I'll have it if I ever have the desire to play it.

This pattern is the exact reason I must have 450+ games in my Steam Library and have played barely 100 of them BTW. And I don't complain that I was "tricked" or "FOMO'd". I just accepted the prices.

- Game has a "game pass"? Do not buy.
Just to illustrate how much I do not even consider those: I don't even know what they are. I can explain the full economics of AAA, but I don't actually know what a "game pass" even does. Cause I never bought a single one. I buy games, I don't care about whatever a "game pass" is and never buy. THAT is low demand. THAT is the attitude that will quash AAA.
- DLCs? If I buy them, I consider them a good buy. If I don't, I don't buy. I almost never buy those, maybe I bought a few OSTs since I'm a big game music fan.
- Game is perma 60/70 because it's a console game? That is precisely why I do not buy consoles, despite thinking that the PS5 is an exquisitely well designed system.

I buy games rarely, only good ones, and do not regret my buys. If I regret them, I blame myself for assuming that I'd enjoy the game and paying for it. If I think I'm going to regret it, I do not buy. THAT is low demand. That is someone who buys what he considers good, but what he considers good isn't too expensive nor is it many things.

You think you can scream "publically traded companies worrying about the stock market and short term profits" with your mouth while swiping left and right on the credit card reader with your hand. You can't. And I'm a perfect example of it being avoidable, because I AM NOT PART of this crushing demand. The deresponsibilisation of gamers in a market where they are 99% of the demand is profoundly ridiculous. This market exists the way it does because you enable it, as I demonstrated. As YOU just demonstrated. Literally just do not buy and they'll stop selling it, crash the market and it will rebuild on saner principles.

I don't blame anyone for the contracts I sign but myself, unless the terms of the contract were willingly misleading. This is what gamers really, really can't stand to be put under: accountability. And they must. You are the problem for paying, you are the problem for blaming them, you are the one(s) accepting the terms of the contract.

"Do not buy". Uh, I don't. Most is at deep discounts because as I mentioned, the games are rarely worth full price. As mentioned above, bundle deals are often the best value. Yes, one should exercise more control instead of buying into the modern marketing mindset of "consume product, be excited for next product". This does not invaldidate the continual mindset of business vs the customer, where each side is looking to get the best deal especially something for nothing. Business wants to be continually attached to the customer's wallet via subscriptions, the customer wants the most amount of product with spending the least amount of money.

As for hardware, it is the same thing. Then I get told I'm horrible for complaining about 1080p cards being $300-400 for the past 8-10 years.

 

[nurturedhate]

Nintendo too?

Nintendo first/second party games rarely if ever go on sale and when they do we're lucky if it's $10 off. Keeps resale value high though.

 

[quikah]

This is a seriously fascinating thread by an ex-director at Square Enix on the topic of the failure of FF16/7 to meet expectations. Highly recommended (yeah, it is on that evil ex-twitter platform...)

https://twitter.com/x/status/1793779717813723521

TLDR - Fortnite has screwed us all.

Anecdotal secondary information. My 2 sons (12 & 14) and their friends are avid gamers. Of the ~10 kids, 1 plays on a switch, 1 on xbox and all of them on PC and mobile. Fortnite and Roblox are staples. They couldn't give a damn about AAA games.

 

[Shmee]

<3 Tifa!

 

[Mahboi]

Anecdotal secondary information. My 2 sons (12 & 14) and their friends are avid gamers. Of the ~10 kids, 1 plays on a switch, 1 on xbox and all of them on PC and mobile. Fortnite and Roblox are staples. They couldn't give a damn about AAA games.

It's a great thread, it's too bad he doesn't allow responses.

I find it worrying that I can see myself in his descriptions: once I got into Overwatch, getting me to try games that I had bought already but wasn't in the right mindset to try was near impossible.
I have a lot of games that I know are good and would be fun experiences, I'll buy them easy, but then never get in the mindset, never want to learn their gameplay, or never get interested in a unique experience.

Meanwhile, back when OW was still up, I could feel the desire to go lose more hours into it every day, because it was like laying at the beach right in front of the waves: it was cozy, it was quiet, and the worst that could happen was that a "big wave" (real bad match) would come tickle me the wrong way.
The repetitive yet renewable nature of these types of games is really what keeps you in. The game is always the same, so you know what to expect, you are in the zone pretty much 5 minutes after restarting them, you don't need to think or be in any kind of mood.
All the while you know what to expect from the game, you don't know what to expect from the matches. Maybe you'll find a team of gods that just trounce you, maybe you'll be with a team of fools who you'll carry to victory, maybe you'll do crazy things and get destroyed, maybe you'll do crazy things and surprisingly carry your team with your play.

Interestingly, when OW2 came out, the gameplay downgrade was so damned bad that I went from wanting to play 10 hours/day to about 90 minutes before I got tired of the game. After a few months of giving up and trying again, I completely quit the game.
Which means that the entire game's job is provide a strong core gameplay experience. If your core gameplay is great, people can essentially keep playing until the content runs dry, and all you need to do is water it with new content somewhat regularly.
I'm afraid it denotes the true nature of what most people want from games: easy to approach, non-committal experiences that can bring you "just another 10 minute match" where the variables for fun are completely randomised.

As that Twitter thread says, if this is where people will increasingly spend their gaming time, AAA is even more doomed, because their offer is to pay more to get a unique experience that'll be less approachable than your regular F2P game.
Kind of steps in the social question of how does high quality art survive in a world that is increasingly obsessed with economic throughput. People don't like paying for complicated things, so all economics always boil down to offering the most approachable product. But if all we do is make eternally simpler, more commonplace and generic products, don't we just end up becoming soulless drones that keep living increasingly monotone existences?

 

[quikah]

I completely forgot about this website, here is an easier way to view the twitter thread I linked above:

Thread by @JNavok on Thread Reader App

@JNavok: A thread on the recent Square Enix news regarding FF sales numbers and expectations. ign.com/articles/final… As a reminder I reported to two CEOs of Square Enix for the better part of a decade and ran a...…

threadreaderapp.com

It's a great thread, it's too bad he doesn't allow responses.

Not surprising, the replies will inevitably be a few good points, a whole bunch of braindead console war trolling and hardcore porn (I wish I was kidding).

 

[DigDog]

if any thread ever deserved a TLDR, it is this one.

I grew up in the infancy of video games. And back then, videogames were MAD expensive. i remember paying 10-15 dollars for a boxed game back when f* Wasterland came out, that's 36 years ago. Same for SSI's D&D games. Games actually have come down in price since then.

What i don't like, is that games have been designed worse and worse since the late 90s. Yeah ok i love the amazing graphics and whatnot. I'm all for immersive storytelling, but there's two massive problems that pre-AA games tried to solve and that AA games seem to have simply ignored.

1. AA games are self-contained.
This absolutely blows. In 2002 one of the world's greatest games was released, Neverwinter Nights 1. You install the game, and inside the install is a .. a mission, an adventure, a module, a campaign, a scenario, call it whatever is the term your RPG group uses, it's the story that you will play, but it's not *the game*. And in the same way, you can then download, for free, a community-created module, and play an entirely new story, with new characters, INSIDE the game.
We seem to have completely forgotten this. Yeah some games have swaggy DLCs but it's insulting that you, the game design company, are the only one who has the competency to write a story, when in reality the community modules are often substantially better than what your PG-13 ass can put out. And, you know, it's gonna take me maybe 1 day to play through your DLC. Even worse is when a DLC picks up from the ending of the main game, and you just steamroll everything without any effort whatsoever.

2. AA games are very limited.
See, if you spend millions of dollars in creating content for your game, and because of (1) YOU are the only entity allowed to create content for that game, you sure as hell want your players to see that game content. This is a solid portion of the main reasons why modern games are so linear, and also because they are so damn easy. When i was young, it wasn't common AT ALL to "beat" a game. It was common to buy half a dozen games and maybe manage to beat one of them, but most you'd cap out at your maximum skill and you just couldn't go any further. I've never beaten Ricky Dangerous, never beaten The Shard Of Spring, jesus i never even beaten Pool Of Radiance (damn bar brawls and hordes of kobolds).
We'd hotseat games like Simon The Sorceror and Day Of The Tentacle because on our own, there's no chance we'd beat them, but as a team we'd come up with whatever absurd solution the puzzles needed. I beat every Wing Commander game ever made, but i was the only one of my group who could do that. We had a guy that was good at Lemmings, we had a guy that was good at Fury Of The Furries. I never beat Sid Meyer's Pirates, Defender Of The Crown, or Prince Of Persia, and many, many more.
Games were meant to be hard, they were meant to be cryptic, they were meant to test your skill and that you'd go to school the next day and ask everyone how tf do you beat this or that screen.

I really don't mind if a game costs a hundred bucks, i wouldn't mind if it costs TWO hundred bucks, but i have a long, long list of demands, of things i expect in a videogame of 2024.
I expect a challenge, hard enough that i can feel i have accomplished something by beating it. I expect replayability, community content, i expect fully customizable control and UI, i expect multiple paths, and gameplay designed by people who actually play. A good game can keep you busy for months, games like Tekken, or WipeOut, Gran Turismo, buying one of these meant weeks and weeks and weeks of play, and today, i expect even more. And i'm just not getting any of it.