industry rules
Wow, that took a turn, there's some tonal whiplash in going from complaining about lack of creativity in gaming to calling games "goods".
It has a lot to do with misjudging bug severity (and on PC with compatibility testing, which is its own thing). All games are under pressure to ship late in development, all studios are under pressure to clean that backlog in any way possible and all games ship with known bugs. That's all fine. The question is which bugs are a dealbreaker. The console first parties used to be more stringent about stuff, patches used to be harder to distribute and the whole thing culturally just looks at crashes as the original sin that must always be stopped but will often put a lot of pressure to fix everything else later and ship nominally on time.
It's a bad call and it needs adjustments. I'm glad that peoplpe are angry and not super understanding about it. That will help.
True, but that cuts both ways. Games being shipped before they are finished doesn't mean they're not good games when they're finished. Sometimes even before they're finished, because being technically sound and being a good game are different things.
The industry needs to redefine what a showstopper issue is and what ship-ready means... but the games are still good.
I'm not sure who "they" is in this scenario. If it's Microsoft Games Studios... well, yeah, they're a publisher. You just described what a publisher is.
I think if we're talking about their recent publishing strategy they've certainly been on a bit of a rut. There's still some interesting stuff happening with their IP. They got Relic to make a surprsiingly faithful Age of Empires, people do like Microsoft Flight Sim, that type of thing. But still, yeah, they've made a lot of purchases and we haven't seen new games coming out from most of those to justify those purchases, which does speak to a bit of a struggle to find a direction. That Hellblade sequel looks intriguing, but for a publisher with a lot of fully owned studios that has been fighting claims of monopolistic practices for their high profile acquisitions their output from that stable hasn't picked up pace yet.
I get it, games take forever to make now. That Hellblade game has been marketed for as long as the Xbox Series has, and that came out in 2020. Still, that itself is a problem. If the big oil tanker is hard to steer you have to plan your turns before you get to the icebergs. I do genuinely hope they get it together, though. That's a lot of talent, IP and potential to let run on idle for too long. Or worse, to fail in the context of a major corporation and stop getting support.
Because they're not all failures, they're also making single player games and you're assuming that the one example of publishers wanting to tick a box in their lineup is somehow all they (let alone the entire industry) are producing.
The fact that people are making extraction shooters doesn't mean they're not making anything else. Warner's biggest game this year is a narrative RPG. EA's biggest game is (as always) a sports game, and their highest reviewed games are a Star Wars single player action game and a single player horror game. Sony's biggest game is an open world superhero action game. I don't know about Ubi's sales off the top of my head, but what they've shipped recently is a 2D metroidvania and a throwback to classic Assassin's Creed.
I don't understand why you want publishers to be judged by what they don't make, as opposed to what they make. Major publishers are billion dollar companies that put out many games. I have zero problems with EA running Apex Legends if I get to play Dead Space. I have zero problems with Sony trying to get a live service game going if they keep making insanely refined narrative action games. I don't enjoy every game people make, but I don't hate that people make games that are not for me if there are also games for me happening at the same time.
Alright, new theory:
You guys don't play too many games, right?
For the record, the best selling games of this year had fewer live service games than last year and the year before. The top of the charts was consistently single player games without microtransactions and this is one of the main GOTY candidates of 2023 following trends from "business schools" straight into... eh... a climactic absurdist musical number.
I'd tag that as spoilers if I could because, as I said, it's increasingly clear you guys haven't been playing this stuff.
That is a very weird take.
So let me get this straight, Street Fighter 6 is a "20 year old franchise" so not fresh and original (it is maybe the biggest redefinition of the series since SF3, but hey). Somehow The Talos Principle 2, a direct sequel to a 10 year old game... not that.
But also, Dave the Builder, Sea of Stars, Hi-Fi Rush, Life of P, Lethal Company, Terra Nil, Humanity, Against the Storm... even going by new IP alone it's been a great year. Not that I accept your premise, sequels and licensed games can obviously be, and indeed have been, fantastic and innovative.
I am very confused and you are either being disingenuous or so comitted to arbitrary requirements that any year is an equally good year.
OK, but that's not how reality works, you're making up offenses that nobody has committed because you've decided a particular brand is "bad" while ignoring actual offenses from brands you like and so have decided are "good".
So no, I'm gonna have to say your hypotheticals don't make their offerings any worse (or better) than Microsoft's or Valve's. Now, the pricing and lack of content? Yeah, we can talk about those. But those don't have anything to do with preservation concerns, lack of ownership or content churn, which are all legit issues with all digital distribution and subscriptions.
You could have figured that out in the century it spent in Early Access, I suppose.
Honestly, yeah, I do think devs need to reassess what is a showstopping bug and what isn't. Not much question on that. But also, I have seen worse. I even played a ton of Cities Skylines 2 at launch. Which paid off weirdly, because once they fixed the balance (or at least improved it) my starter city is now an insane utopia.
In any case, my backlog is enormous, I can wait for games to be actually finished before I play them. In BG3's case, I think there was the one quest that didn't pop once, but I spent a hundred hours on it just fine... and then had to go live my real life, so I still have to do the last act at some point. I'll get to it.
None of that changes that this year had banger after banger, from studios large, medium and small. You can complain about many things relating to the business, but man, the skill, creativity and artistry from game developers of all stripes is nuts.
There are valid criticisms, for sure. I was not in the original thread, though, so I don't know how willing to address those he is, but it's a valid point that it's not an all or nothing proposition. You can point out that subs aren't overtaking the market in gaming without implying that they should.
I'd be more interesting in debating whether subs are additive or not. I do know of anecdotal mentions of stunted sales on sub-forward releases, but I'd love to see more data about it (and what that means about revenue eventually, too).
But none of that influences the concerns on preservation one way or the other.
Honestly, I don't think you're right about the reasons growth has flatlined. I think the sub model just doesn't fit gaming best. The content just doesn't work well with the rotating carrousel of new and new-ish games most subscriptions have. I think Nintendo could be onto something, in the way Netflix was early on, in that you may be more willing to pay a fee to just have access to every single game before a certain point and from the beginning of time, but nobody is gonna figure that one out anytime soon.
There's a bit of a hump you get over, though. I've been recently doing some long franchise-wide marathons and once I got into the groove it was surprisingly nostalgic. It recaptured that feeling of coming back from school and just playing games until I got called for dinner.
I do understand that when I lose that flow I REALLY lose that flow. Not sure if it's age or distractions or what. All I'm saying is you can get it back and it does feel good when you manage it.
Sure, it has its uses. So do the subscriptions from Ubisoft or EA, though.
All I'm saying is that the digital distribution outlets that people like and have a good reputation (Game Pass, Steam) still have all the downsides that people love to get mad about in the alternatives they dislike. That doesn't mean you should refuse to use the ones you like, but you should probably keep an eye on the effects it has on the art form and the industry.
I mean... yeah. Turns out that having models and looking at the actual data and analyzing the market tends to land on lukewarm takes. The hot takes are for the press and the trolls.
FWIW, I don't have visibility on subscription growth at all, so I'll have to take his word for it, but none of that sounds unreasonable.... except maybe for the fact that the hype may make people make bad moves and double down in ways that are harmful. A degree of fearmongering can be useful, if only as a deterrent.
Oh, wait, that wasn't a sarcastic joke?
Damn.
Well, I guess if that's been going on for decades at least it's a vote that can be safely discounted. Also no, it won't make a difference. At least not in the US. The math of it is demonstrably that it won't make a difference, especialy if you do it repeatedly. As the guy above said, you change the system so that it makes a difference first (which you may or may not get to via voting) and THEN it'll make a difference. Until then it's just performative absenteeism. Unless you are not in the US and instead live in a parlamentarian proportional system, in which case carry on.
I was extremely politically aware when I was 20. I was involved in activism and political organizations and all that stuff.
And that's where I met the leftists, and like every leftist, I found them extremely annoying. So no more political activism for me now, just... you know, voting the right way and getting into the occassional argument with fashy friends and family, like normal people do.
I see your point, though. People tend to think nobody gets convinced of anything because they are set in their ways, but the normies just get the vaguest echoes and politically active people just don't get a good view of what's going on.
I agree that when the game doesn't work it doesn't matter how creative it is, what I'm saying is that when it's fixed and it does work that doesn't make it indefinitely worse.
The late-game thing you're talking about is a good example of why I think prioritization habits are a bit busted. I do think it makes sense to say that hey, this part of the game is only going to get seen by a small portion of players, so it's a lower priority than the parts that are going to get seen by everybody...
...but if a bug is a major showstopper that prevents any amount of players from going through the game, then it's a major showstopper, you can't just push it to a patch and call the game shippable.
I'd even make a big distinction about minor bugs... and minor bugs that do something peristent. You'd be struggling to convince the average producer to do a late fix for a minor visual glitch, but if the inor visual glitch stays there forever it makes the whole thing look unacceptably broken (which is where some of those BG3 glitched quests would fall for me, btw).
We're getting into the weeds now. The point is that yes, revenue and money are a factor, but I think the current issues with reliability and technical polish in games are coming from more places than that. There's a culture of prioritization that is looking at things that will block shipping externally or that are software-end dealbreakers where the whole game crashes. This has to do with both applying only software development logic to game creation and from having historically relied on first parties to draw the line of shippable quality and a period there in the early 2000s where people were getting very mad at eternal delays and vaporware. That culture needs to change and producers and QA need to start being rated on how clean the game ships, not just on whether it ships on time. Again, the weeds... but it's relevant that it's not as simple as "greedy publishers".
Oh, also to be clear, when I say "prioritization" that also means what gets shipped versus not fixed. That's also a prioritization choice, not just which bugs get fixed first or later. Especially if the dev cycle doesn't end at ship and instead ends five patches and several years down the line.