Publishers Are Getting What They Deserve 

Stop cursing.

"they wouldnt burn down paris, would they?" "Hold our croissant."

@@Killer2Croc Macron did, unfortunately.

@@UmbraFaux That's debatable, and Macron got enough shit going on, he will not give a single fuck. So yeah...

French 🏳️

They publish for a shit ton of devs. They could probably dissolve the studio and remake a new one while they still get operational revenue from their published titles

"Let them eat cake" - Nacon executives, 2024 (probably)

First game was actually half decent.

we were all like "we want smaller teams not driven by ideology" then when they start laying off the people making the games bad you say "oh look its greed"? i dont get it you do know its not the publishers that write the tripe right?

The problem with half decent is the half part.

@@SpicyFiur yeah, a bit janky but was rather enjoyable as a AA game.

Yeah i have no problems waiting a few years for a superb and un-corrupted masterpiece. Done it multiple times already with elden ring, armored core 6, black myth, ace combat etc.

We already are in that age.

But than again, wouldn't these indie studios will later get to become a big company's at some point? It's an endless cycle if big company's always going to disapoint while indie's don't have anything to lose and win, wich once more will lead to becoming a big company?

I would argue that the shift began when Sega made its jump to Steam around 2016. We started to see many indie games start popping up since then. It's just that gaming news are drown out by major publishers when these smaller games don't have a marketing team or budget at all

@@somesheesht they would get bought by big companies. More about company ethics. FromSoftware is triple AAA but due to being a private company and having long tenured management, they still release the kinds of games people want to see

I have full confidence that the industry will hold the line and continue to not learn anything.

@@octavianpopescu4776 i also have full confidence in 9 out of ten people wont learn anything aswell and still support our AAA overlords

It's all fun and games unless you dedicate your career to making games... and to be honest, this just sounds exactly as every single product I ever helped to push over the finish line 😥F

@@octavianpopescu4776 as long as the ESG/DEI funding is available this will continue. Every loss is just a tax write off.

Leave the democrats alone, they’re in on the joke, they are laughing at themselves

To be fair, they blame us too.

This guy gets it.

@@mac19999x your exactly right, you have a marketable skill and so can to an extent, determine your salaries. With gaming development you can do it at home on a pc and do any number of other jobs to pay bills, just doing it out of a passion and to build your own studio from the ground up. Instead of working for a useless baseless company you could rise to become their largest competitor and they pretty much can’t do anything to stop you.

Probably because those people have some illusion that working for a game dev is awesome and cool. There was some coverage this channel had earlier in the year on Blizzard about layoffs, and there was this software engineer making six figures (in the US). He left his job to take a low-level, underpaid job at Blizzard because it's Blizzard. Not sure what that guy was smoking when he thought that was a wonderful idea.

@@XBluDiamondX In the late '90s/early 2000s? I could actually understand that. There was a point where they WERE apparently a great place to work, and they made nothing but huge successes. Now? I'd never recommend anyone try to become a game dev in the current market, and DEFINITELY not for one of the big AAA companies. Blizzard is a shell of what it used to be, like most of them.

@@XBluDiamondX This is true, but also remember that game developers are artists. Many developers want to create so bad that they will take a low pay if it means they finally get any amount of money for their hard work. Many of these publishers are just taking advantage of the passion game developers have for their craft.

@@mac19999x 600 PLN a month?! What the fuck

They're going to kidnap us and force us to play Concord.

Many lords have failed. We havent hada great complete product since 2010. Waky up Joe

arent they quadruple-a nowadays?

@@JNJNRobin1337 that was skull and bones, emphasis on the "was"

@@galactica_2 werent there other AAAA titles, not just skullbone?

Yeah, but if the company has no money they can't pay their employees in the future. We know they get a salary lol we're not 5

@@doommaker4000 The shareholders can be replaced, make shares solely the result of being employed in the company. Without those leeches a lot of money is freed up.

No that's completely wrong. Its true that its very rare for us to get a cut of the royalties, though we do sometimes get bonuses. But if customers don't buy the games then we don't get new projects and we don't get paid. Usually investors or publishers are paying us out of pocket to develop the games, for years, before they finally maybe make their money back.

@@maledwarfwarrior The entire point of having shares is to pull in investment from the outside. If you limit the shares only to the staff then all you're asking is for the staff to give their savings to the company so it can give it back to them as their salary. That makes no sense. Its actually worse than just working for free until royalties because they would be losing money through the pointless transactions. Shareholders do and should get a say in the running of the company since they're the ones putting their money on the line. However if the game bombs we developers get paid either way, maybe we lose our jobs but we go and apply for new ones. But the investors lose all their money. That's the nature of gambling.

yes but to get jobs in the future the game they worked on has to do well if nobody nought there game they wont be making games anymore, unless your JUST talking about when people say that as a excuse to buy products from a company that has completely changed and if so id add Rockstar, Bethesda and Overkill Software oh and Volition before they failed themselves out of existence

Sink never was outside in those cases

Not to give any credit to gollum, but space marine 2 doesn't look like a good game either. It just looks like a minor variation to the first game. I have no idea why everyone is so excited about a game that looks so uninspired.

Paid reviews wont save any game anymore. Nor massive marketing. At this point its more waste of money

@@searchengine27I think the point is they gave gollum such a high review….

@@searchengine27 It's more the fact that if Space Marine 2 really IS a 60/100...Gollum DEFINITELY isn't a 64. More like a 14 if I'm being generous.

The main issue is unions are somewhat stopping the meritocracy from working. Being unable to fire union staff is an issue if they aren't performing or are causing problems. A union membership should not make you immune to layoffs, anymore than it should allow you to set company policy or direction! The problem is most unions are rammed full of clueless activists that never left the college dorms and genuinely think being in a union makes them untouchable and they will demand things without understanding the reality of the situation, threatening to strike if their unreasonable demands aren't met. This culture of self defeating activism has given companies the excuse to fire their unionised staff first because it's cheaper and easier to fire them and settle instead of leaving them on staff to cause further disruption and loss.

@@joncarter3761 A very true observation. Unions are not the white knight who protects the workers. They are just as greedy and corrupt as the companies.

@@joncarter3761 Me when I lie

@@joncarter3761 Yeah, unions aren't perfect. At all. But even if they're only the lesser of two evils, they're still an evil that wouldn't exist AT ALL if the collective world of business management weren't so horrible in the first place. Even when unions are at their best, they're still extra complication, bureaucracy, meetings, dues, and other hassles. Do you think anyone WANTS to deal with that? Of course not. But workers are forced into all that because the alternative of living purely at the whims of management that cares about nothing but next quarters numbers eternally going up at any human cost is even worse. Their very continued existence, despite being so flawed, proves they're needed. So yeah, unions screw up, get corrupt, and sometimes shield people who have no business being shielded. No argument there. But I'll still support unions over management so long as management is even worse by far.

@@joncarter3761 thanks for letting us know that you know nothing about unions. As a skilled tradesperson, I recognize your ignorance.

$20 for HD fire

And its a good thing.

Heck Bethesda use them as QA and bug fixers.

It's tricky because in some cases like Baldur's Gate 3 or Hades, early access helped because those devs really listened to player feedback. That allowed for amazing and universally loved games to be released at launch. Sadly, those examples are few and far between. But at least there's proof that it can work under the right circumstances.

@@AidenAlias I agree when it comes to game like Star Wars: Outlaws like you said, because they’re literally just locking the game for a few days for the premium edition owners, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing in the way games live Valheim or Baldur’s Gate 3 do it where they take feedback from players and take what they want into consideration for the full game. That’s just my opinion.

@@LeonValenti Yep, same was done for Divinity: Original Sin 2, also made by Larian.

​@@LeonValentiSame with Subnautica. That game would have been nowhere near the lightning in a bottle that it is today (in my opinion) without the early access model.

I feel like Early Access should be like a week, or a month, so it can be used for what Early Access was always meant to do: preliminary testing. If you're selling "early access" by 3 days, you're just charging extra for people who want to play the game on its actual release date instead of 3 days later, and you aren't likely to get enough data or have the time to fix any problems found in that EA time.

For corporations a strike hits much harder than that because most of their financial strength is tied up in the speculative value of the comoany not from what is actually in their bank account. Investors will dump shares if they see that workers have no confidence in an unreleased product, that devalues the company as a whole thereby making it harder for them to go begging for loans, negotiating reduced interest rates or asking for extensions on deadlines for debts due. Hopefully this hits them so hard that the existing senior management "volunteers" to retire or step down like we saw happen with the Unity Engine fiasco earlier this year.

And then just cancel the game before release.

Charge them $120 to play in the alpha like Ashes of Creation is doing.

gamers are good at testing / breaking games, but do you think they can be made to write long, detailed bug reports? that's a _bit_ beyond what you can convince people to do without paying them.

Gamers aren't stupid either they write bug reports for free if u read comments and Reddit more detail than some QA testers also it better to stress test with Alfa unless Ur tripleA ​@@J1428753

​@trucid2 $130 for Star Wars: Outlaws. Then the day 1 patch force deletes all the Early access payer's save files, lmfao

Because the system was been redesigned to prevent any upheaval.

@@Sypitz Tell that to the French causing chaos on the streets every week.

@@pablotomasllodra4423 oh. I thought we were talking about the states

"We'll get an AI* to do it!" *ChatGPT Wrapper

something~ that money goes towards publishers. Devs make the same money no matter what the result. The CEOs of Xeen make more money based on sales, I guess. Anyway, the system is rigged.

That may be true... but the Visions of Mana world design and art direction is head and shoulders above that of Trials, and I'm saying that a big fan of the original Trials gameplay and music. Some real talent was jettisoned here

I'd rather have delayed game releases than abused workers. The people who make these games deserve to be treated better and that's important to the health of game development in the long term.

Thing is... crunch doesn't work. We have research in the industry and without that shows as such. Crunch is brute forcing a solution. And extended crunch? Studios are actively hurting the very talent and knowledge to make what they make. And on the people level, crunch may sound great, perhaps because of misplaced passion or what not. But you can only crunch through so many holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, and what not before you realize a decade has past and your kid has become a teenager without you noticing, or you haven't had the time to make friends and find a partner, that you've missed out on life outside of work.

I'm not sure that the impact will be as dramatic as all that. It will, certainly, make the "HQ has committed to a Q3 release; everyone is chained to their desks until we have something just functional enough to receive a 20GB day 1 patch that we can shove out the door in Q3" scenario harder to pull off. However, it's much less clear that it will actually increase the amount of time required to go from concept to actually working game or decrease the accuracy of predicted dev time: actually striking(as opposed to just having the fact that you could strike taken seriously when you raise a concern or make a request) isn't anyone's first choice; and conditions that encourage the retention of experienced people (especially in roles where management prefers to believe that they're just fungible temps, like QA) and reduce the risk of reprisals for being the bearer of bad news are quite likely to increase the overall smoothness of the project management and surface issues that might require adjusting the timeline earlier, rather than having them concealed until they are simply too dire to paper over. It's not like people generally go into game dev for the sweet cash money; some of the skills on the art side are less transferrable; but the dev side could almost certainly be making more if they just took a job in a really uncool industry that knows it's uncool and so needs to offer competitive pay, benefits, and work/life balance; because nobody grows up with dreams of slinging line-of-business Java for some insurance company's back office in New Jersey; so anyone inclined to make genuinely unworkable demands is likely to just leave the industry rather than wasting their time in endless industrial actions.

@fuzzyfuzzyfungus It is a multi-headed problem, yes, that needs many approaches to fully solve. But that does not mean any one part or piece of action has to be dramatic in results. It just has to help make progress. Otherwise, we risk sitting around all day trying to find perfect broad spectrum solutions that we'll never actually do or that are variable and accomplish able.

I am so grateful that I live in a right to work state. (NC) I never did like the fact that I had to give money to a corrupt organization in order to get a job.

I know right.

Problem is the elites are barely burning while the workers in the trenches are the kindling.

winning against a remake is not really a win anyway

@@thronosstudios yeah I would've played SB if it was on pc

I don't think this is quite the whole picture. People's expectations of scope, depth and scale have only really increased at this pace for AAA games. Because, after all, what else do AAA games offer? People's expectations of indie games have grown, but I feel it's been at a much slower pace, because people appreciate what's possible at a given scale and budget. The issue then is, if you're paying AAA prices, you want to get a AAA product.

@@phill8223 that's true. I agree that indie games are set to a different standard, and that isn't a bad thing, as plenty of indie games are way above AAA in my book. We're already seeing a surge in indie game purchases. It'll be interesting to see how the trend develops.

There's too much bloat in the management structure and the myth that you can suplant lack of quality with massive marketing, these thing cost MUCH and yet wont impact the final product quality. Specially when ALL good games that where released can still be played these days, so theres a surpluss. Sure theres live service/multiplayer current-thingy public... And chasing this audience put them where?

@@pedrojustice I agree that the whole management system for AAA studios is generally backwards and out of touch. I also think that won't change because the ones that would need to accept that change have interests in keeping themselves in the current positions. Instead, I'm expecting them to feign some level of "I don't understand what's happened, but we need to downsize" followed by massive layoffs, and reduced budgets for products. Likely we'll see live service taken to even further extremes, until either the consumer refuses to put up with it anymore, or worse

That and they are more interested in appeasing the likes of Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street for funding. Thus following ESG or rather BRIDGE standards, hiring based of "diversity" quotas more so than colorblind merit, and bloating their staff with slackivists who push the "right" socio-political messaging rather actually making a good product. Combine that with the factors you presented and a terrible economy where folks have less disposable income and...well the industry is in a terrible place.

They do. It's bs because everyone already knows AA and dei exists and a woman has insane power she can make one accusation and ruin someone's life.

⁠Not always the case there has been a lot of good MMOs and live service games like Destiny 2/PoE/Warframe haven’t been bad at all. Just publisher executives that don’t care if the product is any good. Greed is just running rampant in every industry.

@@Turn5ignal "Destiny 2" Ahh yes, Bungie, the company who permanently removed expansion content we the players had paid for from the game and then proceeded to fuck up any sense of progression with the free to play update. I was having fun, I had paid for the DLC because I knew I was gonna play it later. But no, they removed the DLC I had paid for, that I had never gotten the chance to play. And then they fucked up the progression in such a disruptive way I could not continue from where I left off. Fuck Bungie.

@@Turn5ignal Destiny 2 stole content from me that we were forced to pay for, what do you mean Destiny hasn't been bad at all?

Right because clearly it's just a case of all of the men who apply being more competent than all of the women who apply and there's absolutely no sexism involved here. /s

@@Nodiee1 Agreed! We should look into hiring blacks and native Americans too! Maybe someone in a wheelchair will make the game better if they were on the project! Sky's the limit!

@@Nodiee1 Games were better when it was men. Cope and deal with it. If you believe there is any sexism except in the opposite way you imagine in the modern west you are living on a completely different planet (let alone in FRANCE).

​@@Nodiee1When you're trying to fill quotas, yes? This doesn't mean there are no qualified women (past or present) in the industry. Though most of the women (and even men too) are being hired on checking socio-political boxes for quotas rather than their individual merit.

People are to greedy to fix it. They know how to fix it, but it would cost them profits. So it can't be done.

Indie devs: are we a joke to you?

@@TheSuperappelflap I like Indie games a lot, but I've run into almost nothing that fills the 2000s to early 2010s Bioware itch, almost like the industry deleted my favorite genre. I live for book-like narratively structured party RPGs with a close over-the-shoulder view (Dragon Age Origins and KOTOR are probably tied for my favorite) and just enough in the way of character-perspective graphics to hit that immersion threshold as isometric doesn't do that for me. Greedfall wasn't perfect--too action dodge-roll for my tastes--but closer than what I've found. If you've other recommendations, would love to hear.

@@shinnyshin7792 BG3? Kingdom Come Deliverance?

@@shinnyshin7792 Not a fan of that genre, but these are my recommendations to at least check out: Divinity: Original Sin 1/2, Baldur's Gate 3, Nier: Automata, Disco Elysium Haven't played the below, but they are kinda in that genre: Kenshi, Lost Odyssey, Granblue Fantasy Project Re: Link, Xenoblade Chronicles 1 Remastered

@@searchengine27 yeah in the 80s union membership was like 25% and it’s down to just 10% now. Really really happy to see people start exercising their collective bargaining rights. They’ve been getting f*cked for way too long. Hopefully signaling a larger return to union membership

I agree Unions are a joke, but for the opposite reasons you outlined. I live in a state where Unions have a tremendous amount of power and more rights than even the companies they claim to fight against. I say because prior jobs were all unionized, and when I joined I was told I could not opt and they always took a cut out of my paycheck. Oh, but they would totally have my back because of it right? No. Even when needed them most ob work related jobs and told them my issues they ignored me. Oh, but say anything bad about unions you'll be labeled a corporate shill or bootlicker. As if I can't dislike both corporations and unions for virtue signaling, poor management, and corruption. Like I'm tired of hearing corpo's bad and greedy (Yeah, no kidding.) Yet unions can do no wrong and are the de facto right solution.

It is evident why their games suck when one of the first things they ask for is more woman DEI. Game is already infested

So true. Anyone who believes all the wahmen allegations about blizzard is a fool too. Hopefully more eastern devs keep coming up and performing like wukong. I'm so sick of all this western slop.

Nah you arent allowed to have any nuance on this topic since everyone puts all the blame on publishers and pretends like the devs are little angels. They arent. Especially in this example.

The wahhh poor women slant they took ensured my skepticism.