Disco Elysium, Cyberpunk 2077, Hi-Fi Rush, HellDivers 2, FF7, its always the games with strong critiques of capitalism that are usually in someway undermined or at least heavily tarnished by their respective publisher/studio's insane obsessions with it.
@@Ehh..... Corporatism =/= Capitalism. These are two distinct economic models, and most of these games are critiquing corporatism, though most people don't know what that is so they just say capitalism.
Man, it's really depressing now that a game could come out to critical acclaim, receive incredible financial success, win multiple categories at entire award shows and have wide regard from all corners of the internet with everyone highly anticipating their next game only to get closed down. Can't believe a studio can do literally everything right and _still_ get laid off like this
it is the cancer in public companies: investors that demand unsustainable profits and executives that focuses solely in administration, trend chasing and treat their most important employees that work in creative proccess like Boeing treated their quality managers and inspectors
Because people allowed the mindset of "Line must go up" to thrive- sry, it's political and this is a symptom, act now because "being cozy with how things are" won't last ya long
I'm so heartbroken for Tango Gameworks. By the end of Hi-Fi RUSH, there's a song called Making Things Is Hard, refering to the developement of the game. Hurts a lot listening to it now.
Haven’t played it yet but always respected Tango. I love The Evil Within games - before Capcom got their shit together, they were some of the few games keeping the spirit of Resident Evil alive. Besides that, they’ve never made a bad game and were very experimental. It blows my mind that a studio founded by someone as influential as Shinji Mikami had to close.
yeah havent played it too but just knowing that all devs do this and now they're no longer more is just sad, really sad, and you can tell like they said, proud of the game, sucks man
Hi-Fi is genuinely my favourite game ever and I will never understand Microsoft. They want "more games like Hi-Fi Rush" yet destroy the studio that made it?? How does that even compute? Between this and Sony's Helldivers mess it makes me believe the higher ups have no clue what they're doing.
I'm betting the reason Tango got sold is because they are outside the US. The tax implications of software development outside the US might not be tenable suddenly. Xbox likely doesn't want to admit it blindsided them.
Nonsense. Stop consuming depressing media like this channel. It's bad for your mental health. Things are amazingly great and getting better every year.
@@TheSkaOreoI mean, devil’s advocate a bit, but it is better than having to make peace with the fact that the only way out of this fun little horror show we have here is to be some strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees, to quote Billie Holiday.
as a fellow scot who saw their friends signed by a major label, make an album, then have the major label decide not to release the album, then refused to let the band perform live even though the label didn't want them, i was like "huh do we both know the same band?" and then i remembered no, that's just how the music industry works.
I know somebody who were outright banned from performing a specific genre of music, _ever,_ and they also have been forced to delete EVERYTHING they've done from the Internet - stuff made _before_ the signing of the contract. Pirate label music, people, pirate the fuck out of it, if you don't - you're supporting modern chattel slavery.
Out of curiosity, when this kinda bullshit happens, can they at least change their name and keep performing together? I mean, obviously you're losing good songs and whatever name recognition you may have built, but if you tell your fans you'd think they'd keep following musicians they like, regardless of what they're called. I'm just curious if a contract can literally forbid artists from doing other projects (With the same people) because if so, that's EXTRA bullshit.
@@MadMadNomad it depends on the contract, but it's super normal for major labels to have clauses preventing you from appearing as part of other acts (thus why featured artists often have 'appearing courtesy of Butthole Records' in the credits) or even from appearing in non musical projects like podcasts or starting a streaming channel for example. They quite literally own you.
It's a bit out of left field, but this also happened to Jane Austen (the author) - she sold her work to a publisher, he never published it, and it took her about a decade to get the rights to the manuscript back so she could get it published. This sort of practice has been going on for literally hundreds of years 😕
The problem with major corporations in gaming is that there's no such thing as too much profit. They'll never stop a studio and say "you've made enough money, here's some leeway to make a better experience, treat your employees better, or just paces yourselves." Any normal product could be monetized more, and any hyper-monetized product making record-breaking profits is just proof that it can be squeezed harder. There is no end point, just "better than the year before," which was better than the year before that and so on. Making money has always been a part making games, if only to pay the bills, make the next project possible, and (hopefully) reward everyone involved for everything they put into the project. But the dynamic of "make a product, make money" is increasingly being treated as just "make money" by the ones calling the shots, with the idea that you actually need to have an enjoyable, quality product to sell being treated like an annoying obstacle to all those profits. Indie games are absolutely full of talent and creativity, but I also think they're a breath of fresh air because they're operating off the premise of actually making a game, instead of mandating overworked employees bump the next profit margin before they get laid off for the CEO's next bonus.
You can even see this mindset in reporting on games- when the slight ddrop in players is reported as "game is dying", even tho it's a comparison between the standard level of players and the big spike at release. TLDR. It's a symptom of broken systems we live in, not just games, and people should start acting at large and not just sit around hoping that it will fix itself or accept another "convinience" at expense of everything else.
@@masterzoroark6664 yeah it's a symptom of runaway capitalism without any end goal in sight other than number/line go up forever exponentially forever always and right away. Almost all of humanity's problems are being caused by myopic views from the rich who do not care for or are even against sustainability and stability for anything that doesn't directly effect them on a personal level. The problem I also find is that saying this invites tons of bad faith arguments of people defending capitalism as if the only other option is communism that results in authoritarian states. With proper protections and workers rights you don't need to become a single party authoritarian state to achieve this, things are allowed to be better. Taxing the rich at a much higher rate than the disappearing middle class in the States for one thing would be a start. Hell this merger with activision/blizzard and microsoft should have never happened as it was a catalyst for more lay offs as mergers tend to create. It is a failure of the system at large to protect anyone who isn't already a C-suite or above. It is ridiculous.
I think it really depends on the people who are running the company. For example my father worked for the PGA Tour Golf Company for nearly 20 years. In that time he built up relationships with his clients and the people he worked with. Prioritizing a “customer first” approach to the business. And the owners did for a time too. However the moment leadership changed to a “profit first” business the people who cared about the customer experience slowly left or were fired. If you have the right people you can have a company that is headed by a “that’s enough profit” mindset but unfortunately those are practically impossible to find these days due to “get rich quick” culture invading everything.
@@Sci-Fi_Freak_YT Well, yeah But you need to make sure it"s an overall atmpsphere and ethics thing, not a centralized dictatorship thing- one where when the leader with ideals leaves the place goes to shit because reins are no longer present.
The other industry to look at is Boeing & the aircraft industry, which was captured by corporate raiders in the 80's and since then has had a steady & noticeable decline in quality and staff morale as they get ground up in a system that looks for constant quarterly profit improvements over EVEN THE PRODUCT ITSELF! These investor class only systems are toxic to every industry they get control over because they at the end of the day, do not care about the industry or understand it, they only care about profits. They are lords who make peasants plant cash crops on land that needs to lie fallow and over food crops, and then get surprised when the famine comes, and often get to bail while all the workers suffer. No industry should be run by people who's only motive is profit and only expertise in the industry is a business degree and friends they made in a frat at college. They are the NFT guys, looking to pump hype for the bag before dumping it in someone else's hands or into the river while they run off with the cash, and all of us get screwed.
this is not a good comparison. airline industry is of national and international public interest, not just private interest. governments intervene heavy handily in it, and governments are the entire reason the industry exists at all. without it, private companies would have slashed it to a fraction of what it is in the last decades. they cannot do so legally. games industry is purely entertainment and art.
@@00101001000000110011 but in the case of Boeing, the company’s higher ups manipulated regulators and even straight up convinced the government to let them regulate themselves. when one of their planes dropped out of the sky due to an unknown malfunction, killing every single person on board, the FAA didn’t force them to ground their aircraft while an investigation was conducted. mere weeks later, another Boeing plane of the same model dropped out of the sky, also killing everyone on board. Boeing knew what the problem was. they knew it was going to be a deadly problem when they first released their new flagship line of commercial aircraft. they released them anyway. even some of the FAA regulators knew, but didn’t speak up because they were literally employed on Boeing’s payroll. publicly they stated they were looking into the issue, but really they knew precisely what was causing the planes to crash from day one. it was a feature that was introduced as a last minute cost saving measure. engineers who pointed out it could murder people were fired. it took nearly 500 people dying horrifically for the government to finally force them to ground their aircraft so yes, they are of public interest, and governments should be intervening. but at least in the U.S. they haven’t intervened at moments that were screamingly obvious, and countless lives were lost as a result. if the U.S. government won’t step in when a company is willingly sending entire planefuls of civilians unknowingly to their deaths, when will they?
It absolutely was the right choice. You can say a lot about Nintendo from a legal perspective in how they approach fan content and emulators...but in terms of gaming, they're on the right path.
Japanese studios are also more hush hush. So even if there are issues internally, we are less likely to hear about it. However, if we do hear about it, then you know its really bad.
@@IsaacSperrow I mean if Nintendo was firing people on the level that western developers have been doing, or even to what Square Enix have been doing, we would absolutely hear about it. At the end of the day, Nintendo is a business, they are of course very interested in their profit margins; they are not my friend. However, how they've handled things have set them up for success long term and we're seeing that play out now.
@@TheSkaOreo i learned recently that one of the reasons nintendo cannot lay off workers like our game studios, is because it is not legally allowed in japan. so to some extent, we have to consider what it is legal for companies to do. and i don't think shutting down your small studios like this should be legal.
I think that studios, gamers and media should promote game design and game designers as much as they promote film directors. Thanks to this, the very name of the creator will work as an advertisement, and games will have a greater focus on how the game is played, and not on the visuals or all sorts of gimmicks, which takes a noticeable toll on the wallet. It's really funny to say, but industry needs more people like Kojima
I honestly have started to do this myself, for example Toxic Commando is a game coming out right and it does look kinda generic (Left 4 Dead) but the moment I saw John Carpenter on there my excitement went through the roof (he made The Thing from 1982). Or when the Callisto Protocol was coming out I was excited because it was from Glen Schofield from Dead Space, now that game was a disappointment but I will still check out the next game he does because of his involvement in the OG Dead Space.
It’s interesting in film they’ve been trying get rid of it for the last couple of decades. Which i think is so misguided, they have a problem with ‘auteurs’ and think they are sticking up for the little guy(not that all people on the team shouldn’t get credit) but i think they’ve done more harm than good. When we give people directors,actors,creators,etc less power we really are giving the power to all the money people.
@@egirlegirlegirlthis! we used to know at least the names of the most famous game designers. miyamoto, aonuma, kojima, and even the bad ones (peter molyneux, im looking at you)
I know the Sonic 'I want smaller games' meme is just a meme, but I feel like it really does capture how I feel about AAA games as a whole. I can't even remember the last time I bought a AAA game.
The indie scene is where gaming is still alive. I thought I was tired of gaming, that maybe I had grown out of it because it no longer made me feel the sense of wonder and joy it once did. And then I played the indies I bought on steam sales for under $5… It felt like being reunited with a childhood friend. The joy I had been missing came back. It showed me I still loved games… I just hate corporate interactive experiences
As someone who works in the games industry, the games industry was broken for a long time. Covid exacerbated those issues to the point where it couldn't be ignored anymore. Turns out, when you think the good times will last forever you stop thinking about sustainability.
@@00101001000000110011 If you mean that game industry is broken since it was born because it follows neoliberal capitalism, ok, that's an intrinsic truth. But you have to admit that the situation is worsening lately.
@@mattd5240 Idk how well you'll read this fundamental fact about us politics, but here in America we exist in that "middle". And yeah. Even outdide of gaming, things are $ucking. BADLY. It's only gotten worse.
@thechosenbuns9991 Used to be in the middle, now it's become far too corporate. But becoming too far left won't fix things, it'll just lead to the same problems the soviet union faced. There should be a balance.
Baldure's Gate 3 wasn't a masterpiece over a night. And i am not talking about it's development. ENTIRE HISTORY of Larian Studios was building up to BG3. Especially Divinity Original sin 1 and 2. And also with each project Dos 1, 2 and BG3, they were risking. If one of these games flopped, Larian would probably be gone.
Divinity 2 (not DOS2) failed commercially despite multiple re-releases and Dragon Commander wasn't successful either. Like there's a reason why DOS and DOS2 were funded by Kickstarter. So yeah Larian had amazing games but they also had their own low points and tough times.
@@miguelcondadoolivar5149 i personally think there's no such thing as bad game by Larian and actually ment commercial failure which sometimes sadly happen even with good video games (heck i LOVE Obsidian's Tyranny but it was a big flop).
@@miguelcondadoolivar5149 "pretty decent" - that game is amazing. It's arguably better than BG3 in terms of gameplay and soundtrack.
4 месяца назад
7:29 - Not the PS2, but when I played The Last of Us and GTA V on the PS3 I said to myself "I don't care if graphics get any better than this", and I still stand by it.
I absolutely do care about graphics, but not if their progression is totally unsustainable. Looking back, The Last of Us and GTAV do look worse, for sure, but I don't think it matters. The consumption of art is largely about hallucination or the suspension of belief. I can go back and play 'Mark of Kri' on the PS2 and be completely immersed in that setting. Given enough talent, games can fake a space for incredibly cheap, and yet AAA markets insist upon masturbatory fidelity. I loved Red Dead Redemption 2 to death, but knowing that the final product required nearly 6 years of unbroken crunch makes me feel sick. That's a legitimately cancerous business model, and I am complicit. Shiny graphics are wonderful, but ugly games provide just as much value when viewed holistically. The ever longer dev cycles and ever ballooning budgets are absolutely nonsense.
During the 2008 financial crisis, video games were considered recession-proof. Corporations mentioning economic headwinds as a reason for studio closures and layoffs are full of shit and only have themselves to blame for destroying their developers' lives.
If you look at Redfall's credits, few of the leads who worked on Prey or Dishonored were still at Arkane Austin when they made Redfall. Jason Schreier reported that 70% of Prey's total developers had left by the time Redfall launched, including Prey's creative director, lead art director, lead animator, lead systems designer, and lead environmental artist. I don't want to condone Microsoft's decision to close the studio, but it's a bit disingenuous to suggest that Arkane Austin in 2024 were "the people who made Prey and Dishonored" when they weren't. It was an entirely different team.
Arkane Austin also assisted with dishonored, arkane lyon were the creators of dishonored, dishonored 2 and deathloop, prey and redfall were made exclusively by Austin and both studios only share tech/ideas/assets among one another, they no longer act as one massive studio since 2014
@@JonathanTacoman it was only sinking, because the studio was forced to make a game basically none of the devs wanted to make. So of course, with low interest in the project, morale would fall and key figures would just leave the studio and look for other projects to work on.
And funny thing is that they keep studios that are obviously struggling (343 Industries) open, mostly becuase the IP they work on, could at some point print them money and push the graph this 1pt up
Halo Infinite, a game that was supposed to "always adding new contnent" turned out to be a complete scam. Barley any massive updates were added, other than fixing the mess 343 caused at launch, and *NO STORY MODE EXPANSIONS* , meaning the entire campaign felt like a glorified tutorial stretched out just to fill space, barley adding onto the story more than Halo 5 did, and a ungodly battlepass system that wound up damaging the game's reputation. Plus they recently reported to be done with the game altogether, so much for it being "Infinite" amirite? FFS, they literally *lied* about the game's splitscreen. They said it was planned before launch, but they backpaddled out of sheer laziness and contempt for their own playerbase. A massive disrespect for what should've been a proper Resurgence to Halo. Utterly disgraceful. Microsoft and 343 *should be ashamed of themselves* . And as a non Halo fan, That should speak volumes for how badly they F*Ed up.
as the AAA industry eats itself alive, indies are proving beyond the shadow of a doubt they're the real future. Another Crab is rivaling the best of the Souls franchise for me and i couldn't be happier.
I have a feeling a similar thing is going to happen to the bloated movie studios out there. Sometimes big companies get too big and collapse under their own weight.
What Microsoft, Embracer and EA have doing recently with all the studio shutdowns and mass staff layoffs makes another video game crash like in 1983 more and more likely to happen again.
You clearly don't know what you are talking about. Comparing the 1983 game "industry" (more like just Atari) with the current game industry is so comically stupid. Most of the game industry still sucks though.
And yet... Nintendo kept Monolith soft, a studio that, while successful and hits the millions (2.5M at most), are still considered underground. And really the reason is that the team is valuable in supporting Nintendo's bigger projects. Totk, animal crossing, mario, etc, monolith soft helps out with the corporate nintendo stuff so that nintendo can keep them afloat to make their artsy games, and quite frankly, I wish more studios gave that option, but instead, they buy every studio out, they hire thousands upon thousands of people... and eventually fire half of them. So... they work for corporate projects, and in return get to stay afloat while working on their projects with a good enough budget I'd say that's quite frankly the only story of an artsy team being owned by a large corp that seems to be doing shockingly well for themselves, and unfortunately, it's one of the very few in recent memory
History repeats itself. Microsoft finds a big hit in a cell shaded, music driven, fun and quirky game only to completely ignore its existence and never push for sequels.
@@Camacho4Prez2024 I read about it just now, isnt it getting a sequel or a reboot in 2023, I myself have played absolute masterpieces that nowadays aren't even known cuz the were cut off so bad. It's really sad.
Feels like the suits kinda prefer a development studio of half a person, developing a 500-hour AAAA game, within 9 months, selling 5 million at opening with community hype spreading through word of mouth, while continuing to sell for 10 years, on their own webstore, with recurrent payments from players over its lifespan, but at the same time use minimal server costs. Then repeat next year! It might even with an award or two simply for existing.
None of this is new. Publishers have been buying up and arbitrarily shutting down great studios *at least* since the 90s. The main reason Larian Studios' is so determined to *remain* independent is because they experienced a lot of that, working with publishers in the 90s and early 00s -- including *Microsoft*. It's really weird how many developers don't seem to have noticed this very clear and obvious and long-running trend, or at least don't care about it. As a big CRPG fan, it was especially disheartening to see both InXile and Obsidian allow themselves to be bought by Microsoft -- when both CEOs, Brian Fargo and Fearghus Urquhart, have been in this business for decades and know exactly how trustworthy these big corporate overlords are. Hell, MIcrosoft alone is almost as notorious for this kind of shit as Electronic Arts -- again, a reputation going back *decades.* It's never a question of *if,* only *when.* Hell, let's look back at InXile's and Obsidian's own history. Brian Fargo used to head up Interplay Entertainment, which used to be a pretty big video game publisher... but some bad decisions forced him to leave the company in 2002, after which he founded InXile, focusing on making games instead of money stuff. One might wonder just what he felt he was in exile from. Meanwhile, Black Isle Studios was responsible for some of the biggest RPGs in the history of the genre... and they got shut down just one year later, in 2003... by parent company Interplay, who was still struggling to recover from those aforementioned, unrelated, poor decisions. Those jobless developers went on to found Obsidian Entertainment, and continued to produce some of the best RPGs out there.... ...And then in 2018 both companies got swallowed up by Microsoft. Who surely *won't* ever, say, immediately shut them down after their next game releases in order to avoid paying a bunch of employees for several years while they develop a game, even though they won't be *releasing* anything in those financial quarters, and therefore won't be producing any *fiscal growth.* Nah, surely such at thing would *never* happen. Well... here's hoping, at least, that if the fine people over at Obsidian decide to keep making games after their inevitable closure, they can at least come up with another name for the company that continues the *Black* Isle legacy in their name moving forward. (
So glad I grew up in the 90s/early 2000s. The games just kept getting better and better until they didn't. DMC, Ninja gaiden, MGS, Jak 1-3. Gran turismo 1-3, NFS Underground. Zelda. FF6, 7, 8, 9 10. Dark souls. Rome total war.Gears of war, Halo 3 Dawn of war 1-2. Diablo, WOW. I lived through the golden age of gaming, and I'll always remember that time
Mentioning both Ninja Theory and "creative control" is actually really important to this conversation. Most of Ninja Theory's development history has come from underperforming in the eyes of the publishers that've overseen them. Whether it's Sony, Bandai Namco, or Capcom, their works didn't reach the levels that the suits wanted them to reach. But when they had the creative control awarded to them via self-publishing, here comes Hellblade, a very niche title that let the studio present a totally unique idea in the way they wanted, a way that arguably led to their strongest project. So seeing them get acquired, putting them once again under the boot of a huge publisher, I have no faith that Hellblade II will suffice in the eyes of Microsoft. Hellblade was a success story for Ninja Theory. It was everything that they simply couldn't get from a publisher, both financially and artistically. But their future is so uncertain now and that's a real shame.
I'm not sure how ANYONE thought Microsoft making itself any more of a monopolistic conglomerate was a good idea. The number of people who thought them buying ActiBlizzard/King was a good thing absolutely boggled my mind, and I can only imagine how they'll fair outside of Call of Duty and... wait no, I think that might be it going forward, actually.
It's a shame with Tango gameworks, they should have given them time to get on their feet. They earned themselves a cult following with Hi-Fi Rush and that can bleed into the mainstream but it takes time. Give them another project to complete that they are compassionate about. You don't get Witcher 3 without Witcher 2, you don't get Balder's Gate 3 without Original Sin 2. The credibility of a company takes time to form and throwing the baby out with the bath water is a stupid thing to do.
Well you see, that requires long-term thinking and investment which these public companies are discouraged from doing. If you want companies to think long-term instead of short-term then you must change how the stock market functions as it encourages short-term growth as of now
@@XrayDVD Sadly not. The game itself was an easy 10/10 and it would have been received as such, had Bethesda let them use the original name Neuroshock. Instead, it had to be called Prey which instantly threw a good percentage of the playerbase off simply because they were still rightfully angry about Prey 2s cancellation. To be fair, this was on Bethesda, not Arkane Austin, but the people who wee actually behind Prey 17 have left the studio by now which would explain RedFalls overall quality.
Again, Arkane Austin did make Dishonored. The first game was co-developed by both Lyon and Austin. After that both teams started working seperately with Dis2 and Prey. The creator of the studio has clarified this a million times and people still get it wrong.
@@pandyssianrat That´s because every source i google up says something different. The Wikipedia Article says Dishonored was all Lyons things for example. But anyway, thanks for clearing it up.
It's all eerily parallel to Hollywood in the 1960s, where a few big studios released hugely expensive, safe, boring movies that couldn't recoup their budget. The time is ripe for the Lucases, Coppolas and De Palmas of the gaming world.
Sadly we don't live in that environment anymore. When Lucas and Coppola were in school they went to state funded film schools. They barely had to spend a dime in order to pursue their goals. Today you can't just work a part time job and make a game or movie and have it completely change the world. Those that do barely survived and we don't know just how many people spent so much money/time making an indie game just for it to flop or for them to drop it entirely. The world we live does not allow you to make your dream project if you don't have the capital to back it
@@slayertakim1 Sure you can. You just need to work 100 hours a week while attending school full time. So, 140 hours of work in a 168 hour week. No problem! Good luck getting any sleep.
I don't know why everyone assumes HiFi Rush was a huge success on of the devs literally said it didn't make enough money. I'm not saying it was a disaster like RedFall, but all we know is the player numbers. This is a problem with entertainment in general right now a movie or a game can't take $500 million to make then just do ok. Its way too expensive to develop these huge games now it shouldn't be surprising studios are experiencing radical restructuring. Redfall was a 9 figure disaster easy.
@@DionPandayno, the corporation is definitely evil. It shows how capitalism crushes creativity. There was no reason for their layoffs to be so drastic.
Didn't microsoft themselves state that HiFi rush performed beyond every expectation they had of it? That sounds like a good basis to assume it was sucessfull to me, if Microsoft lied then they set themselves up for the negative reaction.
This is why the best AAA company’s president is a developer instead of a marketer like all the other AAA, also try and guess what company/president I’m talking about
Preach it, brother. The situation in the industry is sad and maddening. Hopefully, the affected developers will land on their feet and continue to create things that they are proud of in the environments that they deserve and that deserve them in return. I have extremely low expectations for the corps, but man, I hope they get their shit together. Their current way is unsustainable.
I still have a PS2 and a CRT TV being played almost daily and some of my friends urge me to get with the times or call me "nostalgic" and I always say a) I'm too stupid to be nostalgic and b) I love playing PS2 games because of the sheer variety of games, where you can clearly tell how developers are taking risks with games where they knew it's not the end of them if the game isn't chasing the latest trends. I still haven't gotten a PS5 simply because of the ubiquity of the catalog, the sense that most games are just a variation of one another and variety can't happen because each game is expected to be hit or the studio shuts down.
Eh…while I see your point, I don’t really buy into the “golden era of gaming” in much the same way I don’t buy a “golden era” in society at large: it’s mostly nostalgia blinding people to the fact that there were, in fact, a lot of shit. And many of the games that are beloved now absolutely were the result of publishers chasing trends.
Sometimes it's fun to jump on an old console or buy one when it's cheap to just go through the catalog and see some of the wild and goofy stuff they came up with. Earlier this year, I decided to play Metal Gear Revengeance on my ps3 to completion and holy shit was that a wild and ridiculous ride.
I don’t think that graphics “peaked” with the PS2, but rather that the limited resources required more interesting art direction. The ps3/x360 era is well known for its push of ultra realistic and boring brown art direction for games. There were very few games where the graphics and art direction legitimately contributed to the game’s atmosphere (off the top of my head, I remember Assassin’s Creed 2, Darksiders 2 Batman Arkham Asylum and Arkham City and Sonic Unleashed). And honestly, it’s not much different these days. Games that genuinely look interesting are usually remakes, such as Spyro or MediEvil, or artsy fartsy indie games. Although, props should be given to Ghost of Tsushima, which created some truly stunning vistas in-game.
With Tango Gameworks and Arkane's case, it's an issue that leans heavily on the internal politics are Zenimax and Bethesda. Leaked emails after Redfall's release heavily suggest that higher-ups just straight up dislike their smaller studios even if the games both sell and review better than their larger projects. Not to mention the near-absence of marketting put into Hi-Fi Rush, and Deathloop not even getting a final release trailer until 2 weeks before it came out. Compare that with the abundance of marketting put into Starfield, the heaping of game details, and GotY contender status before we even got a single ounce of gameplay footage.
This was the perfect time for Dunkey’s company to publish its first game, Animal Well, which has already been receiving heaps of praise from critics and audiences alike. Game Grumps accomplished a similar feat with Dream Daddy years back. If youtubers are able to successfully publish great games with no big corporations involved, what the hell are those corporations even good for?
The demands of big company getting more and more ridiculous each year, following trend, really long hours of gameplay, high quality graphic, and getting money from gamer till the last drop It's hard not thinking developer already become machine who can always be cut if they not getting big success Nintendo is not ideal company but still proofing they philosophy can carry them soo far than other, making much more successful game and console
We are transistioning from what I would call "Tier 1 Gaming" and moving onto "Tier 2 Gaming", where Indies and AA title shine until they evolve into the new AAA standard... and Publishers get rejected.
Obviously the current small studios getting shut down are not thriving, due to being under the thumb of publishers and shareholders, especially those who are too fat with aquisition to maintain themselves.
It's just capitalism. Like boilerplate capitalism described 150 years ago by ol Karl Mars. The Falling Rate of Profit is a fundamental and recurring feature of the system that causes increasingly irrational decision making. The number needs to go up at the same percentage rate, and since thats impossibe and unsustainable, the investor class in control, who sees everything as naught but abstract commodities to be bought and sold start cutting and consolidating in a panic to manufacture the appearance of growth. This has happened before and it continue to happen until the capitalist mode of organization is recognized as obsolete and discarded.
@@La0bouchere you lost love shooting the messenger cuz you're so very smart. Meanwhile capitalist generated climate collapse is going to kill billions sooooo
Stop buying crap games. It's that simple. Wait for it to come out, do your research and then pay up if it looks good. Consumers encourage this nonsense with pre-orders and day one DLCs so the companies just kept at it.
Yeah I agree. I know that a lot of consumers will see this as blaming them but in reality it is just reminding consumers of the the power we all hold over where our money goes.
conscious consumerism never works. it works for a small percentage of peopls who care, but for every one nerd who only buys indie there are a thousand kids and casuals who go "schmeep schmoop pretty colors" and don't consider or care how their choice to buy a fifteen dollar fortnite family guy skin affects the industry at large. this shit needs to be enforced through antitrust.
@@ashleydavis3318 Yes, it does. Companies exist to make money. People incentivise them to do whatever they're doing, good or bad, when they buy their products.
Wonderful video and well stated. Luckily indies are getting much bigger and better while keeping it all reasonable and not needing to make ALL THE MONEY. The problem is that a lot of these companies are owned by a person or a few people, and since they can get generational wealth from selling to a large corp, they do it. It's understandable, but it perpetuates the cycle we are seeing. I'd love to see more studios pop up that are advertise as employee owned and/or affiliated with an external union. Build up via that way and then you can't have the 1 or 2 sell out. And you won't lose your job because your team probably can't go work in the Call of Duty mines and it's faster/cheaper to close it than sell you off (especially since anybody buying would want those potentially valuable IP rights that big companies will never use again). With that said, what was the car game with the yellow taxi at around the 08:18 point?
loved the video. loved seeing SIEGE live. you went full circle just as i did. punk rock > video games > economics. finding the connecting threads between these three seemingly unrelated spheres will teach you plenty!
@@WritingOnGames good eye! i’d love to know what grand conclusions you’ve come to. not that it’s any of my business of course. but where do you stand on free markets? capitalism?
It's the same thing that happens to movies too, don't you think? Ludicrously massive budgets, every drop of life squeezed out of artists, and executives raking in huge wads of cash at everyone else's expense. F this, indies is where it's at.
Consolidation never leads to good things. Just look at mainstream media now. It's just six giant companies. The mainstream media is festering corpse at this point and the gaming industry can take a few points at least from there.
From my perspective, we need smaller, tighter made games that are sold as products instead of insidiously engineer them as service games to be played in perpetuity. Smaller budget games made my talented developers with sensible profit margins. I shy away from everything 'big' because I appreciate a tightly woven gameplay experience than having to sink hour upon hours in a repetitive gameplay loop to see 'number go up'. I recently replayed The Last Story a 27 hour RPG that did not waste my time and it gave me what I wanted: a fun battle system and a good story. Imagine: you could sink 100 hours in FFVII Rebirth completing it or you could have experienced the original FFVII and another awesome game in that same amount of time.
It does make sense! *It's all about reccurrent revenue.* A single sale is not the model that can sustain the costs of these AAA studios need for ever increasing profits, hence the push for live service titles. Why? Because they cost about the same as any AAA game but they have the potential for years or decades of constantly generating income through in-game purchases and subscription fees. People buy in-game transactions like toilet paper in a pandemic and the market is adapting. "It's just cosmetic, it doesn't affect the game." was always a willfully ignorant response. It not only affects the game, it is shaping the whole industry. AAA companies will make more of what sells and cut what does not generate the amount of constant revenue they need.
Nintendo has the most sustainable business model. Going lower-tech and lower-spec was the smart play. Nintendo is one of the only companies that realizes they make video games... not "technology". GAMES. Sony has completely lost this perspective, and I'm not sure that Microsoft ever had this perspective. Nintendo is the last REAL game maker around that happens to also make consoles. I think Nintendo has seen this coming for a long time. With age comes experience, and this company has seen many adversaries rise and fall. Nintendo saw their competitors promising better and better production to the point where there is no return on investment and only their frail fundamental IP to justify hardware. Now the third parties are fleeing and afraid of partnering. Nintendo have been playing the long game and it has paid off in spades. Nintendo thrives in limitations it allows for more creativity Sometimes too much freedom means no direction But within a limitation you can challenge yourself how to be flexible within it like a fun puzzle you experiment with PEOPLE NEED TO STOP GIVING A DAMN ABOUT GRAPHICS IF YOU WANT GOOD GRAPHICS WITH REALISTIC TEXTURES GO OUTSIDE AND HUG A TREE NINTENDO WAS SMART AND REALIZED WHAT EVERYONE ELSE IS TOO SLOW TO Nintendo realised long ago that competing in graphics is pointless. No matter how powerful your console is, in a couple of years it is going to be obsolete, and anybody who really cares about graphics is going to buy a PC, because that is where the best graphics are. Instead, Nintendo focuses on their strengths: * Nintendo likes hardware gimmicks, because it makes their console stand out. Nobody bought a Wii because it had the prettiest graphics, they bought a Wii because they wanted to play with the motion controls (An idea so good both the “superior” PS3 and Xbox 360 tried to copy it). The same thing is happening with the Switch: people are buying it because they can play their games anywhere, and can move between a handheld and a home console. They like to focus on giving customers something that they cannot get anywhere else. * When Nintendo did try to compete on power, they didn’t do very well. The N64 and Gamecube were the most powerful consoles of their generations, but were both massively outsold by the “inferior” PS1 and PS2. The Wii was the weakest of its generation, but outsold the PS3 and Xbox 360. This proves Nintendo’s approach to console design clearly has something going for it. * Performance is expensive. Performance is even more expensive when you are using it in niche applications. If Nintendo wanted to have something as powerful as an Xbox One or PS4, while still being portable, then it would probably cost twice as much. This means that Nintendo would have to charge more for the console (probably not something the market could sustain) and/or eat a hefty loss on each console sold. Instead, by not focusing on performance, Nintendo make a profit on each console, and keep it at a price point where more people can afford it. * One of Nintendo’s biggest strengths is their first party titles, all of which rely on stylised graphics and strong art-style. It doesn’t matter that the console is not very powerful when Pokémon, Zelda, Mario (and its millions of spin offs), Smash Bros, Metroid and Donkey Kong are incredibly popular and all don’t care about high end graphics. Why make your console more expensive to make and develop for when you don’t even need it? * The companies that tend to focus on graphics are third party developers, such as EA, Activision, and Rockstar. If the console sells well (like the Switch currently is), then those developers will find a way to bring their games to it or, failing that, make unique games that work best on the hardware. * By not competing with the other consoles, or PCs, in terms of power, while offering unique gaming experiences, Nintendo has comfortably found a niche as an optional second system. If you have a PC, PS4 or Xbox One you have very little reason to buy one of the others, because they are all basically the same. Nintendo’s consoles offer things that none of the others offer, and thus can easily tempt people with another gaming device into purchasing it. * Nintendo has also found a strong market in all ages These people don’t care about graphics, so why waste money on giving them something that they don’t want? An families don’t care that the Switch doesn’t have the best looking games, they’re just happy that they can have fun Ever since the Wii era Nintendo has. Been trying to train us that power doesn’t matter Whimsy and imagination and creativity and memorable experiences are more important to them And y’all still aren’t getting it Move on from Power it don’t matter Nintendo doesn’t want it They think it’s boring They don’t care Official quote from iwata: "Even when we were going to launch the Wii system, there were a lot of voice saying 'Nintendo should stop making hardware'," Iwata recalled, talking to Gamasutra. "The reasoning behind that was Nintendo would not have any chance against Microsoft and Sony. The fact of the matter was: I did not think Nintendo should compete against these companies with the same message and same entertainment options for people. "We have not changed our strategy," he added. "In other words, we just do not care what kind of 'more beef' console Microsoft and Sony might produce in 2013. Our focus is on how we can make our new console different than [others]." The switch is faithful to iwata’s legacy .
Awesome video project man. Loved it and hit the nails on the head! Some of the things I personally believe we need to return the games industry to full glory; new/refreshing ideas, smaller teams and smaller scoped projects! Oh, AND MORE SUPPORT FOR INDIE AND AA TITLES!
On the graphics thing, I've been playing Abiotic Factor with a partner lately. It looks like Half Life. Not Half Life 2, just... Half Life. Character models are low-poly blobs, animations are chonky, the whole thing looks like it fell out of 1998. And it looks AMAZING. The entire game is a beautiful work of artistic design, ditching fidelity in favor of aesthetic coherence, and it's absolute proof that games don't need to look like blockbuster movies in order to be a hell of a lot of fun.
Nail on the head. Excellent video. I've worked in the industry as an artist for 12+ years and struggled to make it happen by putting myself through college with the hopes of one day being able to work at Blizzard. That dream was realized in 2022, I inherited work for Overwatch 2 which was already in development. Criticism aside, this was the main reason I wanted to join the industry, and I was erased from a spreadsheet one morning because corporate owners needed abide by Gartner hype cycles. I was on track to pay off my student loans and buy a house, now all of that is gone. This is the 3rd time I've been laid off in the industry, and this one looks like a long dark tunnel... job opportunities are lower than they have ever been. WFH model has completely vanished and the only opportunities now seem to be relocating to obscure locations to work on new IPs -- the worst part is a lot of these "mid level" studios have a dream to one day be acquired by a big fish....... like Microsoft...... who after acquiring Blizzard decided to shutter 1900 jobs (see paragraph 1). The games industry is more the ouroboros, and it seems like the only saving grace would be to just be an independent developer and hope for a big hit.
Indiegame scene is even more brutal. In regular development you lost your job and maybe had a bit of severance. In the indie scene you lose your life savings. Speaking as an ex regular and indie developer. Games need to move to a contract guild model like the film industry so the people involved aren't affected by the success and failure of the project.
It's baffling to me how such companies (or specifically their management) "cut costs" by firing entire studios and the next week they get new boni and increases in the eight digits. Wasn't there a recent example? Publisher gets rid of a studio and at the same time the CEOs yearly compensation more than doubled to something ludicrous like 48 million USD? So much money they could've kept the studio running for two years or so, making a proper product they'd all profit from. Insane. Anyway. It sucks for the developers, but I'm starting to more and more vote with my wallet. What else can I do.
Independency for developers is the only way we will get games like we used too. When 2 million copies isnt enough sales, when you have to spend that and if not more for salaries and all the other nonsense and expenses that are paid. The industry is too big, there are too many people in it, too many people work on these projects, and it doesnt matter whay the outcome is. The closing of Arkane is the worst part about this, that they had to tarnish their legacy with Redfall because they simply couldn't stop the project; under a Publisher that makes more money than their entire Gaming division does off *fucking LinkedIn* and somehow couldn't atop it and divert the financial loss into an actual successful idea. Im 34, been gaming since Doom originally came out in gaming, and i simply do not play modern games sny more. I haven't bought a moderm game since Elden Ring, and while it was great, it was a busted and broken mess on PC. More developers need to go independent. If you have a truly good idea that can capture audiences, it seems to blow up and be successful almost every damn time.
This is what happens when executives who are completely detached from the development process and shareholders who only care about bolstering their stock portfolios make all the decisions. We need a games industry-wide strike. Workers deserve a seat at the table for all the sacrifices they make, just to be discarded like trash when they've outlived their usefulness.
I'm glad you brought up Ninja Theory. I remember being uneasy when they announced that Microsoft bought them after Hellblade, since it seemed - based on their development diaries during its production - that one of the major points of the game was to prove you could create a successful AA title that was artistic as well as independent. Selling to Microsoft flew in the face of that. I'm not throwing shade or anything towards the studio. I just remembered thinking why sell to Microsoft when your game is obviously successful, and you can continue to make more games in the AA space.
Think about how insane that actually sounds for all the people involved in building these games. "i.e. It's not good enough for your game to be profitable". That is indicative of a system that makes no goddamn sense whatsoever.
@@LPW638look at Helldivers 2. Sony was willing to possibly ruin one of their biggest hits and one the only games you'd buy a PS5 for, to artificially raise PS Network numbers, something that does not by any realistic measure have more value than simple monetary gain. This industry has evolved past the point of cartoonish corporations that only want money.
It's not just games. This is the reality of late stage capitalism post-Reagan and post-Trump. More power to the workers is what's needed, more protections from the shadowy corporations cutting corners.
@@catcat63527that’s what capitalism is. The government used to make it so monopolies couldn’t happen, but with lobbying those protections and other protections for the workers started disappearing and here we are.
@@catcat63527that's about as naive as saying that a gunshot victim died due to blood loss, not the gun that shot the bullet. Monopolies are a typical effect of capitalism not being regulated properly and it wasn't for decades now.
I keep saying this on and on in the last couple of weeks: If you're an indie studio that manages to survive, create games, and pay your employees fairly, all the while growing with each new project, don't sell out to a corporate overlord-stay independent, and grow naturally if that's your goal. Make the games you can with your team, in peace.
Everyone bangs on about Hi-Fi Rush. But do we even know if it was profitable? It was a sleeper hit for sure, but how sleeper was it? Do we know if it made MS any money? In the corporate world, it doesn't matter how good you are, it matters how much revenue you generate. We don't know if Tangleworks was on its last legs financially. We don't know any if the context to the decision making. So how about we all settle down a little and stop wringing our hands about a conclusion we've all jumped to.
I think this is a good lesson to not sell out to a large corporation. When I worked in games every studio closure or lay off came as the result of a sell out. So really, we should put some blame on the studio heads that choose to sell out to bigger companies. Their greed is what starts the process.
You forgot the first part of that title, "The conglomerate Frankenstein-monster trying to buy and shut down the game industry is completely broken, and this is why."
This is some great timing tied in with Skill Ups also fantastic video on this topic. Really glad you guys are both shining a light on this! Why would devs want to sacrifice salary and location for a company that fires them even when they produce a success
The problem is with the “cash cow games” that make absurd amounts of money like Fortnite, Wow, Call of Duty, GTA online, Candy Crush, Hearthstone etc. To big companies, these games are the goal. They will scrap everything that doesn’t make billions for them, since making billions is all they care about.
so the real criticism here is capitalism; that companies are beholden to shareholder dividends and their stock going up rather than the provision of quality services, that's how it seems to me. Same thing with all these massive companies whether it's Sony, Ms or Boeing et al.
When you invest you expect return dude. They probably needs to cut the cost more than halves to even make it proper 'business', not just burning money for fun.
Capitalism also allows for the constant creation of the better indie stuff too. Sure a lot of the legacy big players are messing up but that creates the opportunity for innovation to take hold and make them obsolete.
@@markn866 I would say that works despite capitalism not because of it. That's simply *independent* creators pursuing their goals of creative output imo.
Games take too long to make. Simple. The longer a game takes to make, the more expensive it becomes. Developers get carried away with SCOPE CREEP because of all the available technology.
The whole 'line goes up' insanity of shareholders is so bizarre to me. A company can be extremely sustainable and be making consistent profits, but because they didn't make *more* profits it's suddenly a massive problem that'll make the rats scurry as if the ship was about to sink, stealing huge amounts of capital from the actual coffers in the process.
This is exactly what has been crushing gaming - taking what is a long-term, experience-based art form and squeezing it for short term, quarterly performance. Giant corporations buy up gaming studios (whose value lies in their devs, designers and artists) and then using on them standard corporate practices (dump workers to improve quarterly profits) not understanding that in the process they have dumped the main thing that held the company's long term value. What is valuable about Bethesda - the team that made Skyrim, or the company that made Fallout 76 and Starfield? The Bethesda that made the first one is not the same company that made the last two.
That and consumers. People keep wanting better graphics to the point where gameplay is made to suffer for it, spending thousands of dollars on it when something with simple graphics and great ganeplay would do and make plenty of bank. Many games don't make the money back people think they do even if the game rakes in millions - because it costs even more to make it and in some cases keep staff on to provide maintenance & server costs. Things like the sims where people think they make millions from would be shocked to find it probably barely breaks even because all the maintenance for it's small server useage drains majority of the money.
The culprit is consolidation. Big companies acquire small companies and then dissolve their assets to cut costs. But this also dissolves the talent and their workflow, leaving little identity behind. Then, these big players will have the little pawns make games that don't match their original expertise. Do you see where this is going?
The difference between gaming and other industries is that online platforms like steam or itch prevent large companies from destroying small companies directly. For now.
MS shutting Tango Gamework burns me like hell. The fact that despite Hi-Fi Rush they closed the studio that would give me The Evil Within 3 is just so fcked up. I hate the hollow corporate bs in what gaming has become
Marx was a spoiled man child who never worked a day of his life, he mooched off his rich friend, never bathed and let his family starved as he played at being an economist with the mindset of an envious child who wamted the best toys, like everyone who supports his delusions
Larian avoiding the baldurs gate mines might be the best decision they made as a studio. They will have been offered more than their worth but they knew they were better off on their own.
It's not a gaming industry problem. That is a capitalism problem. Swap the privately own companies for worker cooperatives - and you get rid of most of the problems, including the major ones. Even in indie studios - the fact that owner could easily and by themselves sign up a corporate flavoured death warrant to all of their employees is part of the problem. Not to mention that it's *a good deal* for the studio owner, as long as they value their legacy and work less than *life changing* money
Really feels like we're on the verge of another games market crash at the moment. Likely because AAA became too reliant on investor money and the ESG investments. Now they're pulling out because investors have no respect for art and the games aren't reaching desired sales or desired ESG benchmarks for inclusion and accessibility And now all that big corpo money is leaving and the companies that relied on it can't sustain themselves
The Lyon division covers most of the Arkane's catalogue, I believe Austin's only output was Prey (2017) and Redfall, which doubly maddening considering the tremendous potential they displayed with the former was forcibly snuffed out by the latter. Wanted to be optimistic about Tango but the type of (pretty good) experiences they put out in the current gaming landscape, Microsoft's track record being what it is, I figured no matter how well they did they'd eventually end up a casualty.
4 месяца назад
"What do you mean this game didn't sell as well as Call of Duty? I guess it's a failure then, shut down the entire studio."
