Bioware = Mass Effect to Anthem Arkane = Dishonored to Redfall Rocksteady = Arkham to Suicide Squad Crystal Dynamic = Tomb Raider to Avengers All of them was singleplayer focused studio being asked to make Live Service game.
Rare - Sea of Thieves Respawn - Apex Legends Bungie - Destiny (sure everyone hates it but its successful) Ubisoft Montreal - Rainbow six seige AND For Honor (former AC, farcry, and rainbow six devs) It can work out obviously. It's just up to the higher ups to be smart and determine when and where to choose to live service, not just throw them at the wall and see what sticks because what doesn't ends up falling to its death.
@@nickh4354Sea of Thieves was not successful initially and Destiny 2 is currently failing, hard. Sony is straight up Bungie's ass right now for mismanagement of D2 since their preorders for Final Shape is 50% plus below their last expansion which already wasn't being bought for poor reception. D2 has been hemoraging good will since Forsaken (Witch Queen brought back good will then immediately lost it afterwards).
Christal Dynamics never made Tomb Raider. The only good Tomb Raider they made was the first reboot/remake. They just got the IP after the initial developer was forced into bankruptcy.
@@hollywu7768 Even if they did not originate the IP, they still worked on the reboots. More importantly, they are the group behind the legendary Soul Reaver series.
The high-seas has never cost me any amount of money. Some of us were just born smart (RobinsMusic), others need to learn lessons the hard way (McRotten), and some never learn (Chronon88).
One thing to watch out for is DLC bloat. Like Nintendo almost never puts zelda DLC on sale, which i refuse to buy as they never put the base game on sale either, you still see it for 60$ at the stores. A lot of the other games the DLC can bloat the price by 20 bucks so you're still paying close to full price when there is a sale. But ya 70 is a no go for me. I've only bought Formsoft games at full price and even then I don't preorder i'll at least watch some twitch streams before buying hehe
We have focus tested amongst negative 5 years old up to 160 years old and 1270% of all people said they prefer croissants. (snorts line of coke) bro bro numbers don't lie here we have graphs, come on graphs with colours and shit. Does that metric say vegetarians? ignore that, we need more bakeries so i suggest we open up 13 bakeries around that one french one. If each takes 25% of costumers than we'll have 9000% of all the customers that the French has. the numbers make sense, get on it. Don't let me down champ. be a part of the family.
What this dude doesn't understand is that you can't force things, no matter what the "management" does. You can't force caterpillar to build the next Ferrari and wise versa! It's not that simple like this dude makes it out in his mind. There is so much that goes into it, so many layers have to be right in order to make something successful happen. I can tell that he hasn't worked in any modestly large company, or any large project where many different people and departments are involved... It may be easy in your mind theoretically but in practice it doesn't work like that!
Same with Hollywood.. Instead of making what we want, they make what they want us to watch. The entire entertainment industry is on a massive downslide and no end in sight. All we can do as consumers is continue to speak with our wallets and boycott corporate greed
For example, Dreamworks is, well, fucking insane. For one, they make a GREAT movie that has true artistic soul, Puss in Boots: Last Wish. But on the other hand, they make shit movies like Trolls 1 and 2, Kung Fu Panda 4, and THE FUCKING MEGAMIND TV SHOW (which was actually made by peaCock but even still) But then they DO A 180, releasing Trolls 3 WHICH ISN'T EVEN HALF BAD? WHAT? HOW? Well, all of this can be chalked up to horrible executives shunning a good story in favor of money. For example, Kung Fu Panda 4 went through development hell, with executives hurting the artistic expression of the writer team. This led to the movie becoming, overall, lackluster. Except for the Ping and Lee side story. That was gold. But for Puss in Boots: Last Wish, it was a sequel to a random spinoff movie. Executives wouldn't care about that! So they didn't, and the artists working on it could flourish.
except that doesnt work. cause they'll just buy all there own shit. and say they made X amount of sales. and well where does that money go well back into there own pockets so
Look are borderlands you saw the cast a knew it would be back .. I'm game this girl is 25 oh let's cast a 60 year old .. ohh tiny Tina let's make a whole new story up for her thats 2 lines long .. fans will love it
@@DeputyFishBruh they have a fiscal responsibility to make a profit for their shareholders, they can’t just recirculate money because that doesn’t make new money which is the entire point.
One thing to address - cause in the video the guy was puzzled how a single person leaving the Team affects the quality of the game... I worked with some Teams that made games and you would be surprised how LITTLE people in there know about "fun". A lot of them couldn't tell what fun is, even if it hit them in the face. They were absolutely amazing professionals when it came to creating assets, code, animations, music and sound - but had absolutely no idea what makes something "fun". Hell - an example of a coder who was optimizing the "save" feature. He was hellbent on making sure that the save file was taking the least amount of space possible that he spent weeks on it. Indeed, that is a nice thing to have, but if a player was to choose between "having their save files be x4 as big" or "having the game suck", what do you think a player will choose? That's why sometimes losing a single person who directs the entire game will result in a terrible product. That might've been the only person who knew what "fun" is. In bigger studios - you will have a few people leaving. Generally because those people were the only ones who CARED that the game was good. A coder who was saying the features would not be fun. A music producer who would say the themes clash with the gameplay. A 3D/2D artist who wants the animations to be responsive when you play. These people are the first to jump ship if the rest of the team just goes "no, we're not changing stuff" - cause they know the product will suck. The others just have no clue, and the changes sound like "more work" so they resist it.
And even just in general. The people you lose will be the ones who have the skills, and therefore have the option to jump to another company or create a new studio.
Your example shows that you know nothing about management. Optimizing saves isn't opposed to making a fun game. Making a fun game takes years for huge teams of people. Any large company that's even remotely decent will spend significant time creating something akin to scriptable objects for save storage, but that's equivalent to a minor mechanic in the game, not "having the game suck". I'd trade any individual GTA V minigame for them to optimize their saves, the loading is the worst part of the game because they didn't put effort into it. Fun is the job of the creative director or game systems managers, it's not the job of the devs and they usually have little influence over it even if they try.
@@longlivenc7235 I'm gonna be very rude and say that your answer shows that you know nothing about reading comprehension. First of all - I never said I MANAGED the team. I was a 3D Artist and someone else was the producer. Second of all - I didn't say one coder that is hellbent on optimizing a save feature is the reason a game sucks. What I said is that there are a lot of amazing professionals in their fields - but their focus is usually on technical stuff that is not related to "fun". So if you lose a few people in the team that knew what "fun" is, you may get a super-optimized and quick-loading, gorgeous looking game - that is so boring to play, you no longer wish to play it. That's why - by that example - you can have a team of like 100+ people create a bad game when one person leaves the team. Cause if that person is the only one who knows what "fun" is, everyone else technically is doing a great job - creating an unfun product. And nobody on that vast team of people has even a single clue why players say the game sucks.
@@ThomasWindar Ironic to insult my reading comprehension over something I never said. You don't have to be a manager for it to be relevant that you know nothing about management. People leaving the team is a management issue. You directly compared one minor feature to the entire game sucking. I already addressed everything else you said in this comment with my last sentence of the last comment.
The fall from grace of BioWare is the biggest one I've seen in 20+ years and it's not even close. One could argue Blizzard but they're doing FAR better than BioWare.
The saddest part about it, is that it was deserved. I've been playing SWTOR casually since release and it was getting so bad up until BioWare gave up on the game and since Broadsword took the reins, the game is getting a lot more updates and communication from the devs... it's so obvious to me now how BioWare just didn't give a crap about the game. They got what they deserved for their laziness
SBI, forced battlepasses, shitty liveservice, quality cuts to push microtransactions, layoffs, greedy CEOs/Shareholders, pandering, woke-ism, dumb people still preordering... the list goes on. All valid reasons.
One thing to point out about Asmons point on Redfall being broken, and that it would have been the same if it was single player, Is that when you increase complexity and scope it becomes exponentially more difficult to make even if the bugs seem like stuff that could occur in a single player game, depending on their architecture it would likely be done quite differently. Single player games are an order of magnitude easier to make than multiplayer, like it's not even comparable, that's why multiplayer games are usually more simplified with less systems etc. Although there are exceptions, and then again Live service and MMO style games are an order of magnitude above that again. So if Arcane stuck with a smaller scope single player game, they would probably have done an order of magnitude better job.
Speaking from experience, the single fastest and most certain way to break any given part of a game is to add networking functionality. Single player and online are simply two different beasts.
I don't understand how it can be so difficult to understand that it's a big difference. Multiple actual players interacting with the world and each other in a free way vs npc that can't do anything on their own.
the studio from justice league wanted to make Batman Arkham style single player game. The investors made them change the game to be live service, they didn't make a bad game, they were forced to make what they don't want to make
It kind of frustrates me that Asmongold missed the fact that this guy wasn't saying that live service was bad, he was saying that FORCED live service was bad. All of these companies either didn't want to or weren't equipped to make a live service game. Of course they had their own issues, but its the fact that they were forced that led to their downward spiral. I usually believe it's upper management or producers who are at fault, and when it isn't them its a lack of enthusiasm in your individual worker. Remember that game development isn't just a job, but an art, and Forcing an artist to paint when they don't want to doesn't amount to much very often. It's easy to look at bad game design and say "a good developer wouldn't have made these decisions" but I feel it's important to understand circumstance. If a good developer doesn't want a game to EXIST, why would they put effort into polishing it at all? Every time Asmongold got SO close to connecting 'live service' to 'bad game design' but every time he'd miss how important game design being a creative artform was. Instead he'd just spout something about "I support live service" and "these games have obviously bad game design", completely missing the circumstance Gameranx spent the whole video describing. it's not live service's fault that these games are bad, but the fact that it was FORCED onto developers who neither needed nor wanted it.
If the Management is bad the game will be bad. Its that simple. If you cant present your Developers with a cohesive Vision, make them excited to Build that Vision then you failed at your Job as a Manager and your product will fails as well. You never hear about a sucessful game where the devs give interviews and say "yeah our Manager was shit but we pulled through". Its always a team effort and usually the Management is looked at favouably and they speak about how passionate Leadership was about it. Sure sometimes they say "We didnt think the game was good enough but clearly we where wrong and the customers loved it"
The special games will try to marry amazing gameplay and a great story together in my opinion, Foreskin (Forspoken) is literally neither and on top of that they have a preachy annoying agenda.
I'm old enough to remember the Platformer bubble of early 90's, the FPS bubble of mid/late90's, the "obligatory MultiPlayer mode" bubble of 00's and the MMO bubble of late 00's/mid 10's. This is yet another one.
Feel like this is worse cause at least those were trying to be fun. I played the hell out of freerealms, club penguin, Legoverse, and wizard 101. Each one was also different, while every live service seems to be the exact same just different quality.
16:30 Asmon does not understand just how much bad management ruins any project. Some tasks are doomed to fail no matter how many skilled employees you throw at it. Redfall failed because, from the moment of its conceptualization, it never had the possibility of being a good game
@@alexandervlaescu9901 They probably aren't being given the time or resources to properly work on bugfixing tasks. I wouldn't be surprised if they had already been moved to another project that hasn't been made public yet. We know this studio's devs know what they are doing based on the games they released in the past, so it's unlikely that they just suddenly forgot how to fix bugs
Honestly I've heard of them but never checked it out much, just all the bs in "mainstream" gaming journalism had really turned me off of a lot of these sites/outlets, but I'll have to give them a shot this vid actually seemed decent
@@redchinhunt721They're not fantastic. Frankly, Falcon is the classic curmudgeon with little new to say in pretty much every video. This one is the rare good one by him. Jake is way better in his almost naive, but deceptively clever ways. But gaming journalism is so, SO bad nowadays that Gameranx is almost a must as they remind us of what *should* be the baseline, the absolute minimum no big "official" outlet seems to manage to deliver.
"We are losing great game creators." No, no we aren't. The great game creators have already left those studios and either made their own studios or retired. The game creators left are talentless hacks, who went to college and got a useless degree in game design.
And when these mega-studios implode, the actually talented individuals responsible for the few good aspects of a bad AAA game will be scooped up by other studios. "The studio" doesn't make any games, the people within it do.
the fact is that in 2015 you thought "holy crap, if games are like this today imagine how much better they will be in the next 10 years", the 10 years rolls out and you see what it has become, a huge pile of crap is what the today's games are
16:09 - 16:20 Here’s what Asmongold is not understanding here, some projects are destined to fail. Trying to make a terrible project better is like trying to repair a ship that is already sinking, have so many holes, water’s filling he hull and people are running around screaming their heads off not knowing what to do.
Poor gameplay is the direct consequence of being live service. That's why Suicide Squad was a looter shooter with generic guns to be monetized instead of having character specific combat mechanics like Arkham Batman.
@@randybobandy9828 yep. People have limited time and money, and if you are trying to sell a forever game over and over eventually you'll not have an audience because they are taken by the rest.
Company: gets big on mastercrafted carpentry Corperation: buys company and set them to making concrete warehouses Company: fails Asmon: "shoulda learned masonry, sucks to suck"
You make an important point. Asmongold talks as if 5 years is sufficient time to achieve mastery over a genre and mentions Overwatch. Blizzard took 9 years to make Overwatch*. Or take Larian of Baldur's Gate 3, while the Divinity games have usually been good, it took just over a decade for Larian studios to really hit their stride with "Divinity: Original Sin". Video games aren't like line of business and CRUD software where half-heartedly phoning it in can be sufficient. Games need experience, passion and skill to create. It's art in the sense that the creator's passion is always reflected in the end result. Live-service games are like isekai anime in this sense. Isekai need not always be bad, but since they're almost always the result of soul-less cash grabs, the end result is usually without heart, tasteless beyond comparison. Forcing people to work on art they have no passion for nor any experience in will never result in a good outcome. * Work on Overwatch began in 2013, but it originated from strip mining the remains of the failed Project Titan, which began in 2007. Experience, assets, learnings and failings on that project carried over into what would eventually be released as Overwatch.
I think with Baldur's Gate 3 we now have our minimum standard of what a AAA game should be. If you can't match or beat that, you're not AAA. You're wasting money
They complained that such quality could not become a standard and that players should not expect to have this quality in the future. Then we have Miyazaki, in the shadow of the Erdtree, ready to outdo everyone for 2024.
Thing is nowadays all AAA games aren't passion projects, they all projection based. They will study all the metrics they have and test audiences (no clue where they get those, Refall had GREAT internal feedback) in order to make a game. Not blaming the actual devs/programmers, for them I'm sure it was a passion project, but the studios make the calls, and the calls are heartless SHIT. Haven't bought a AAA game since Starcraft 2 and it was the greatest move I made. (I'm absolutely excluding FROM SOFTWARE!) The Indie scence is just amazing, in both single and multiplayer.
Also, it's kind of weird and out of touch to say if you don't like what you're working on, quit. In the real world people dislike their job and merely check the boxes required in order to earn a paycheck. Why would it be different for a game developer?
@@muninntog142 I'm all for art, but I'm pretty sure Madden sales still there and so are CoDs. People confuse business with art. When it becomes your career it transcends being an artistic hobby. Example. You paint art and sell it. Sure your an artist, you paint things, but that isn't what makes your living. Your a salesman.
@@bmark6971 working in the steel industry for example and working as a game developer is very different tho. if you work at a forge you generally dont give a shit about the end product. you just do what youre being told. but if you work in a more creative setting like the games industry you are generally more invested in the project. you put your heart and soul into it but if the game youre making isnt at all interesting to you it will show in the end result. just like asmond said about streamers who just follow trends and play games that are popular rather than something they enjoy. the result is a shit product that people dont want to play/watch.
@@Peron1-MC Developers and artists still need to earn a paycheck. It's not exactly easy for the average developer or artist to jump ship mid-project and land whole. They are likely under contractual obligations/non-compete clauses. They could have joined the company based on previous projects that aligned with their interests but then the company turns around and decides they want to shovel slop for profit and they have no real choice but to stick it out until that project is complete.
"Arkane Austin shit the bed with redfall" Yes they did, but it also wasn't the Arkane Austin they had for Prey, they had plenty of people leave, it's all well and good to say it's bad, but it was bad because they forced a dev to make a live service, and that Dev team decided nah screw that i'm out. EDIT: Like the main issue is a lot of these publishers want a live service, but don't want to offer the fund's or the manpower or the time for a live service to be made. It'd be like trying to make a car with 3 pieces of sheet metal, 1 person and no tools, the hell did you expect?
Back when i was playing FGO and first learned about the fact that buying quartzs cost you the price of multiple triple A games for just a character(with a high chance you might even fail), i was shocked but also was wondering why would single-player game studios only make games with only 50-60$ per buyer instead of possible +1000$ per player like those gacha games do? Bet these corpo suit guys in the director's room think the same thing
@@johnb6474 cyberpunk is the game that proves that a good story line and satisfying play styles ascends game quality. by all metrics cyberpunk SHOULD have failed apron release BECAUSE of endless glitching but, everything else was so well done that gamers powered though to the end of the game. and told all their friends you have to play this game man, oh the glitching? the devs are fixing those play it
@@johnb6474 I didn't really find BG3's story all that good, but the conversion of the 5e battle system into game form was done VERY well, its the main reason i put 250 hours into it. Cyberpunk did nad does have some crust with its systems but the story was very very good.
I really disagree with Asmon's take on Redfall/Arkane, extremely dismissive and ignores the situation of the studio and reduces it to "game bad = dev bad" Think it like this: I personally think that Asmon is a pretty good gamer when it comes to action games or MMOs Now grab Asmon and force him to play a game that he isn't good at it, like a racing game or puzzle(idk) and then say "See Asmon sucks at videogaming" Arkane Austin was good at making single player immersive sims and never tried to make a live service multiplayer game before, the moral was low, most people quit, they struggle to get devs to know how to make this kind of game to their side too and as a result they produced a bad game. Its like if you grab the dev team of Fortnite and then force them to make a singleplayer-immersive sim, Its hard to say if the game would be good or not, successful or not but it is not hard to think that there will be a struggle to it.
asmon not the type of guy admitting he dun enjoy specific genre and instead shaming them as bad games juz bcoz they dun play according to his preference.
100% agree. Hard to make something that isn't a soulless, buggy mess with low morale and 70% of the staff gone. To be fair to Asmon though, he did recognize that it was also Microsoft's fault for putting the studio in that position.
Asmongold:"The problem is not that its live service its because Redfall is a bad game" Maybe most of the technical issues arose because a studio used to making single player content and games had a hard time with the networking issues that comes from making an online game?
@@wetnoodleman He couches it later (probably cause he realized he was wrong) saying that its a two prong issue (it really isnt) and then goes back to complaining about the devs being bad
Even if one accepts that the problem is "bad devs". The next question becomes, "Why does this studio have enough bad devs that nobody can steer the ship right, when the industry is full of people who want to make great things?". One bad employee making things worse is an individual problem. Lots of bad employees making things worse is a management problem. As the lead of a software development team myself, it's my job to fill my team with people who have the skills and can work well together, give them an environment that lets them work most effectively, and let them make great things.
19:40 The lack of quality in functionality might have come from devs departing Arkane on mass during development, because they didn't want to work on RedFall or under Microsoft's regime. Either motive points to the problem being that they got forced to work on RedFall, and chose to resign instead
I play a lot of TTRPGs and Asmon is totally right. My biggest advice to new DMs is to steal everything you can. If you liked something you saw in a show, movie, or game then chances are your players will too.
Gaming companies used to be run by gamers that encouraged freedom and creativity in games. This is what made the 6th Gen one of the most memorable Generations ever. Now it’s run by suits who care more about algorithm more than bumping the needle, and creativity. But we need to stop blaming the companies for this, and blame ourselves. If people didn’t pay for micro transactions, season/battle passes, content locked behind paywalls and any unnecessary in game purchases for over a decade straight, maybe we’d still be in a period where creativity and fun rule still. Give your money to what you want to become the standard, whether it’d be a great AAA release, or Indie stuff. The audience needs to show the gaming business that it wants something to change. And that can’t happen if you buy another COD clone, and games that release unfinished, yet want you to pay for a seasons pass from the start every single year. The audience is in control here, not the developers. Remember that. Same with music and movies.
i don't know man if the dollar was the only guiding star we would have a lot more games like the sims, and more to the point minecraft. games where the developers made an open EMPTY world then gave gamers the tools to build what ever they wanted. and yes, yes i know they do make some like zelda tears of the kingdom where people are STILL playing around with crazy builds and playstyles but, they are not the norm
@@alwaysonyourtail2563 when COD, Fortnite, GTA, 2K, whatever Ubisoft games release, etc (and clones alike) generate an ungodly amount of billions a year, and you can literally copy and paste the games a year later and make the same amount of money, games like Sims are rendered obsolete when it comes to earnings. There doesn’t need to be a ton of them to overshadow everything else. They spawn plenty of clones (for better or worse). Minecraft will always be huge too either way though lol.
@@ooooswain I definitely get that. But there are plenty of people in their 30s playing one of, or every game I just mentioned man lol. But I don’t disagree that gen z make up a large portion of it. I just think a lot of people regardless of age contribute to the problem anyway.
I totally agree. Sadly nowadays the audience is totally different and made of players who never experienced the 6th generation and don't know how great gaming used to be. They grew up with these terrible games so for them it's normal to buy these unfinished games at release and spend money on microtransactions. Videogames became too popular and its popularity killed its creativity.
One of the biggest reasons why these modern games are failing is because developers are trying to target an audience that makes up a very small minority within the gaming community while alienating everyone else. They're transforming well loved franchises like the Arkham series and destroying them with woke ideologies for the sake of ESG scores. Now combine that with everything that's covered within this video and you get the entire reason why modern gaming is on the decline.
To an extend I agree with the sentiment that it's, in the end, still the studio's product and even if they were forced to do it, all the issues it has are their responsibility. But if you ask a car mechanic to take a look at your submarine despite him telling you 8x that he has no idea how a nuceal reactor works, you should not be surprised if the damn thing doesn't end well. Did the mechanic end up causing the reactor's meltdown? Yes. Is it his fault entirely? No, not if his choices were "do it or lose your job".
I definitely get that "There isn't enough time in the day for all these games" sentiment. But in my case, it's not about live service games, but 100~ hour long JRPGs on my evergrowing backlog. "Man, gotta finish Tales of Arise, so I can play Dragon Quest 11, but Unicorn Overlord and Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth and Man Who Erased His Name and Ishin are on my Amazon wishlist, but Judgment and Lost Judgment are in my backlog, but I also wanna dedicate time to Trails in the Sky so I can get to the rest of the Legend of Heroes games on my wishlist, so I can finally see if Sakura Wars for the PS4 is any good before Persona 6 comes out..."
People are either ignorant or just straight up ignoring the fact that these studios ALL had their main devs that made those iconic games leave and instead now they have diversity hire hacks in their places. Thats literally the reason the games sucked. The devs that make them are terrible. Its 80% that and 20% upper management problems.
100% correct. Blizzard replaced all writers with women and they gave us subtle storytelling masterpieces such as Lady Sylvanas one-shotting the Lich King (the patriarch), and then literally shattering the glass ceiling of the entire sky. Super subtle... ❤😅 I can feel the backpatting all the way from here.
Inserting live services into a good game will never improve it. At best a good game will survive it. Inserting live services into a bad game will always make it worse.
@@tarael86 utterly debatable. DRG could easily run on P2P servers with free DLC seasonal updates. It has no reason being a live service and for all intents and purposes it does NOT run like one. Terrible example.
@@Quasar-fv8to Sorry, I don't understand what you're saying. Live service games are games that see a constant stream of new content added post launch. This fits what DRG does, and it's the reason why everyone (including the devs) call it a live service game.
the use of pie makes for a very interesting analogy. if we are to assume that each individual person has an average of 8 "pie slice slots" as portrayed (regardless of income, since subscriptions would take a mental toll as well?) this would mean that very few live service games will make the cut. no matter how good they are. because it will come to a point where they have to choose a favourite.
Idk what he's talking about, there are tons and tons and tons of old games that are way more fun and in depth than games out this year. A game loop when fun, is fun forever.
i think part of it is because the culture of treating Employees as a Disposable Worker. There just a Massive Brain Drain, the Knowledge and Skill aren't retained how can you focus on one single vision, if your talents kept changing every 2 years? Everytime the head of the Project leaving the companies, the Team become unorganized and become directionless, They can only resort on creating the same thing that was already established, because nobody know how to design and improve that Game Design anymore also For every Generations, the Development Time will be Multiplied by 2, it took too much time to the point that even Moving One step forward is like Moving a whole Mountain
Gaming company thought that having a good graphics = good game when what gamers want is good game. Even if the game is pixilated, gamers will still play it if it's good.
@@vashe9 its not about how much money you spend its about the fact that because gacha games live and die off of people pulling characters that they have to make attractive characters and give you what you want. Theres a reason you never see gacha games with DEI funding
It is so interesting Asmon talked about Nighthold fury warr because it really was so peak. The patches that came after just nerfed the good trinkets and interactions to the ground only fun thing was juggernaut on argus but it was already a kinda shell of all the fun it got before.
"Game Studios are so allergic to accountability", just like the entire government in pretty much every country in the world. Corporations just mimic that and get away with as much as they can.
There is another problem these corporate suits don't understand. You can't replicate fortnite's success because it was an accident. They originally made the battle Royale mode as a trial to funnel people into the save the world pve which was in early access at the time. It exploded on twitch due to streamers. Fortnite is the most successful accident in gaming history. It's also the industry's biggest curse because everyone has been trying to replicate it to this day.
To be fair, a lot of Dev time was probably wasted in making networks work for stuff that isn't just updates, something that a lof of these games probably didn't really needed to work in the past... Still, outside of the existence of Life Service, and maybe sudden changes in budget/deadline, the Studio Heads definitely have a lot of the blame to don't be able to manage the games better (Anthem is a great example of that).
The lack of quality is because of the high turnover rate where most of the developers left and it struggled with staffing to even put out anything functional, because it was forced to do a project it couldn't do well.
I honestly hate all these "whales" and idiots who waste their life savings on these services more than the developers. Because if they weren't giving them so much of their money none of this would be happening.
I agree Bob. Also, I see that face and I am saddened to remember the man telling his 'Aristocrats' story :( What a hilarious dude he was him and George Carline are my favs.
One big issue is how much money studios are spending to make games that are bigger and "better." They invest when you invest $100 million, you want at least $200 million in revenue to fund your next game. Youd need to sell 1.4 million copies of a $70 game to make that much. That may sound easy when games like Elden Ring are selling over 20 million copies, but Elden Ring was a massively successful game. AND some companies are spending more than $100 million to make their games. Its absolute insanity. They need to downscale and focus their productions. I hate to say it, but I can guarantee that too many people are working at these studios many times and their is too much dissonance on what the game is meant to look like.
You forgot that steam and such take about 30% of the money. Then there are taxes that countries take. It wouldnt suprise me if there are some more things that take the money. So the publisher probably wont even get half of the money from a 70 dollar game. So i would predict that they would need to sell 3-4 million copies atleast to make back the money.
How much does it cost to hire consultants (costs money) from another company (costs even more money) to make your game less appealing (costs money)? You would think the investors would learn, but as per usual they are blinded by greed and desperate for control. Oi vey! Every. Single. Time.
@@glikorgo Yeah, I was going for the most basic approach because a lot of these studios are trying to push people into buying games directly from them (ubisoft store, epic games store, etc), but that is not the norm as you mention. It still really shows that its best to hire a small quantity of very passionate people and pay them well rather than hire 1,000 people who only generally know what even going on.
@@caseyimiller In a lot of ways, the gaming industry is turning in to the movie industry with subscription to games services like the Xbox game pass. How many people own discs to their favorite movies anymore? Kinda like how the ubisoft ceo wants people to get used to not owning games...
9:30 Assmouth is wrong. There's a HUGE amount of luck in achieving success. And the successful mostly CAN'T see it from their successful position because they rewrite history in their own minds downplaying the luck they experienced. Talent and work are important, too, but they only allow you to fully utilize opportunities you are lucky enough to have. They can't usually make success happen on their own. Read about famous successful people and you'll see that they were simply the fortunate one in the right place at the right time to be able to use their talent to work for a success.
I think his point is that the devs didn't care and worked like they didn't care. They got paid to make a product, but they didn't give it their all and sabotaged their own product hoping it would get canceled. I don't really think luck had anything to do with it, everyone was just bad overall. Management was bad for hiring these devs who didn't want to work on it and the devs were bad because they made it bad on purpose to get it cancelled.
I played Anthem for a while a few years after it came out. I got it on a deep sale for like $10, and only because my brother wanted me to group up with him. At that stage, I would say that everything about it was very competent. The visuals and gameplay were really strong and flying felt very good. The problem with it though, was that after about 12 hours, I had seen everything the game had to offer. All that was left was grinding to get the other Exos and high tier equipment in the same 6 or so mission types, against the same enemies. I think I maybe played for 6-10 hours after the main campaign was over, and then never came back to it. And all the while I was thinking about Warframe - which has more content, more Exos, more weapons, more types of enemies, etc. It's also free to play. Now, the grind is worse, and I eventually left that game after about 100 hours because of it, but in my opinion, the only thing that Anthem did better was graphics.
this is why i primarly play roughly $3 indie games like vampire survivors, Choo Choo survivor, Prop hunter, Runic, Project Lazerus, and probly the most expensive on this list at currently $9 is Artifact Seeker. all great games and very replayable.
Convenience stores and restaurants hire psychologists to study why people buy things and build their stores around them to increase impulse shopping. Why are gaming companies not doing the same for games? Instead they hire fake consultants who care more about activism than profit.
Because those industries have been around longer than gaming has, by a massive margin. Gaming is only 40 years old, with it being "mainstream" for only 15-20 years. There isn't anywhere near enough industry expertise (in boardrooms I mean) to understand the nuances of what sells, what doesn't, what makes a game good, what fails, etc etc. Suits just understand money and graphs, and can't figure out why Fortnite makes money, but their Live service game X, doesn't. It'll take another 20 years or so for boardrooms and publicly traded companies to not clown around, but even so, many of their decisions are rewarded today. Targeting whales, has in fact, proved fairly successful, even for games like AC Valhalla. Similarly, digital pre-orders are always absurdly high, despite what we as consumers, have known for a long time. Microtransactions targeted at kids, work wonders for the graphs. It's like smoking cigarettes; it's super bad, and yet.... BTW, when McDonald's was told by market psychologists to accept credit cards, because plastic money means less to the average consumer than actual cash, the Atari was being launched. That's how new gaming is.
Game development companies *do* hire psychologists (and others) to study people who buy things. That's how we ended up where we are with a constant push towards randomness, peer pressure and flashy dopamine lights. Because that's what gets people to buy more.
They do hire them, that is reason why they change what kind games they are making. But it is much easier to reorganize products in convience store design new menu in restaurant (which usually fails) than it is to get organizational know how to make different type game that you have made in past. Going from single player to multiplayer life service demands knowledge of multitude things that gaming company that focus on singleplayer games does not posses. Like for example understanding network latencies how they effect on player inputs and rendering times and how to build server infastructure that can handle game state for thousands of players same time. And when you take account network security, account management, grouping etc. company may realise that they need different set of engineers to build all the basic stuff that is needed for the game, but usually in that point they have already commited to deadline which they will not be able to achive in that point anymore, even if they found quickly needed engineers. Companies should know what are their assets and where they are good at and what they don't know. Of course in gaming industry it is often difficult to say know for project which promises money as other option may just be close studio, because margins on which lots of gamestudios have are so small that they can't afford not have paid project for year.
I disagree with the developers being wrong for how they handled Redfall. Because they signed up for a job. That job was to make a certain type of game. That no longer became their job when Microsoft took over. They don't wanna quit because they like their job. They just want the job they signed up for back. They often can't afford to just up and quit and lose their livelihood. Whether or not the quality drop was on purpose or due to a genuine lack of motivation, if they made the product successful, they'd just have to do it again and again. Quitting en masse would be worse since it would likely put the entire company under, while simply making a game that performs less successfully won't have such a huge irreparable impact.
I pretty much only buy games when they're on sale these days. I'll buy very few games on launch day - something like Baldur's Gate 3, or the next Elder Scrolls. I also have a big back log, so I can definitely (and should) afford to wait to buy a new game lol.
Anthem if they let them do it right, would have knocked Destiny out easy. But EA wanted "NOW NOW NOW" And instead What we got was a half backed game. I mean the devs made it in about 9 months. Thats absolutely insane for what they were able to do. 9 MONTHS, imagine if they had 2 years? or 4? That game would have revolutionized gaming, just as D1 did when it came out.
11:20 I disagree because a lot of those issues stem from a dev team ill equipped to make an online multiplayer where server and client have to agree over 4 different instances. A single player redfall may have still sucked fundamentally but wouldnt have nearly the same issues. (I have never played redfall so im far from a fanboy of it I am just calling it as I see it.)
"Rare isn't around anymore", he says, while STARING at Sea of Thieves; their latest game. To be fair, that was released in 2018, but it's still being supported and expanded.
i dont think asmon realizes how much just telling a singleplayer studio "make a live service" is going to mess everything up. redfall didnt work forsure but keep in mind it was build from the ground up with multiplayer in mind. which the team didnt even have experience with. its like telling a master fire bender to move water. singleplayer experiences and multiplayer from the ground are extremely different in a way that just picking one will drastically change every single aspect of the game. legit all of them
Y'know what the Live Service thing reminds me of? El Dorado (Not the Dreamworks Movie, but the actual myth). Where people are going out of their way to find Gold and strike it rich only to end up destroying themselves and only make a small amount of profit in return.
16:25 To be fair, network multiplayer games blow the complexity up dramatically, the underlying system is complete different from single player. How much money you are paying would not matter, time and man power will be the primary factor. Programming is a challenging job because sometimes working with a complexed game when you need find out a issue in 100,000 lines of codes and fixing it means affecting 50,000 more lines from different system.
Thank god somebody said it, some of these commenters think good net code and other things they can't see takes 0 work to create, maintain and scale up - something that's especially important for live service games.
What Asmon doesn't understand about Redfall, is that multiplayer games are architecturally, fundamentally different from singleplayer games. instead of everything happening on your computer, part of it happens on a remote server so others can see what you're doing. (And I'm not going to mention p2p, For Honor had enough trouble trying that anyway) So if you make a bunch of people work in an environment they never worked in before, that they don't even like, is going to be demotivating. That's why you can't just turn a single player game into a multiplayer one, it pretty much has to be built like a multiplayer game from day 1. A really good example of this is Fallout 76.
Nintendo Switch notwithstanding, this entire console generation has been MASSIVELY underwhelming. Which is really a shame, because the PS5/XSX are a FANTASTIC VALUE in regards to the hardware itself.
"You are paid to make a product, If you don't like the product you are making good, then why won't you make it better and find a way to like it" It goes like this: The dev: "Hey boss, you said we would need to make it like this, but we found it better to make it like th-" The game designer: "Nahh, let's go the way i visioned it" The dev: "sure boss, what ever you say" like you said *you are PAID to make the product* you aren't paid to shape it to your likings, unless you get a permission to do so. If the client wants a shitty ass game, you make them a shitty ass game. The client gets what the client wants. If the product is ass and you don't like it, you have to either quit and loose all of that juicy money you would get by making the bad game or you stay, get the money and if the game fails, you either get to make another one or you get assigned to another team. The biggest reason why redfall was so buggy, was the people who quit. When new people get in, they need to figure out what the hell the previous did and of course, the new people might not be as experiences than the previous people were. When almost the full team gets switched to another team, the game is destined to be fucked, unless they figure out things in a timely manner.
one important thing. about live service issue. the whole thing about "why don't you make it better and find a way to like it" that doesn't work, at all, you can't just suddenly make yourself be good at making something. you can't become a master swordsman, switch to using an axe, which you hate doing, and no matter how much you work through and try to force it, you will NEVER be as good with that axe as you are with a sword, you can get pretty decent, maybe get lucky, but the skill isn't transferable. mindset and interest dictate how well you can do, someone passionate about something working at it for 3 hours a week will do a better job than the person doing the same thing for 20 hours a week while hating it that's a fact of life, you can tell yourself "i will do good at this and force myself to do a good job" but truth is you'll only do a maybe ok job because guess what? your passion and ability is with something else, it's like saying that a knight is the problem, when he fails at being a stealthy thief. if these people want live service games that actually WORK, turn to people who are good in that general field. you can't hire a produce market to make a steak dinner and expect it to be anything but disgusting, same principle here the truth of the matter, if you can make yourself smile and act all happy to do your job, guess what, YOU'RE STILL TRASH AT WHAT YOU'RE DOING, every single person on the dev team, if they all went on making redfall while faking a smile and doing as much as humanely possible, nothing would change on it. because it was ALWAYS going to be bad, other studios doing things they never have before and being successful was done with research into what they're going to do, a gameplan, these live service flops had none of that "hey do live service game now, you have this many years to have it finished so get to work" "hey plumber go fix this car you have until tonight good luck"
So got a question if anyone sees this, and don't get me wrong I like Asmon for the most part, but does anyone else feel like he fundamentally misunderstands what a live service game is at times? Like to me a live service isn't just a game that receives some updates after release, I just think games like Fortnite obviously, but really anything with a battlepass, daily login bonuses, packed with microtransactions, etc. So I generally wouldn't classify most MMOs as such especially if it's on a subscription model (obviously there are exceptions I'm sure), but yeah sometimes it feels like Asmon thinks people mean just any game that gets updates, which like yeah obviously I don't think anyone would argue that the ability for games to receive updates is a bad thing, its just this specific model of game. Am I crazy/misunderstanding something or anyone else feel like this?
@@keilafleischbein59 Like i said i just don't think added content is the make or break for a live service, its more the other elements. I don't know enough about WoW to really speak on it but i'd tend to agree it has a lot of the same elements from what I have seen, and I did say there are exceptions, but I just generally think of MMOs as their own thing, modern ones less so as a lot of them are basically just a live service. But again its more the battle passes, usually free to play and heavily monetized, daily login bonuses, loot boxes or other "roll" systems, etc. So my point was more like when I hear him talk about it sometimes, and seemingly talk about a live service as anything that receives new content, its like are we gonna start calling Elden Ring a live service because its getting a dlc, or Fallout 3 because it had a few DLCs (at a pretty regular rate for a while), or if you scale it back even further we could call Sekiro a live service because it got a few performance/bug fix patches after release. Hopefully I'm making sense
If every game needs to be revolutionary for studios not to close , well be left with 10studios in a few years time , so that obviously not a treshold that needs to be reached , not to mention it was a japanese studio , they pay their devs peanuts compared to US studios , so its not like they were bleeding money on devs , the Gamepass model is simply broken , thats what killed that studio , if someone can pay 10dollars , play game and cancel the subscription for next month , now the dev is splitting those 10 dollars woth every other game played on gamepass that month , so in reality Microsoft made a service that devalues games but also didn't realize itll need to eat cost until the service is huge enough to support it self
@@bingbong3084 That’s not how GamePass works. Xbox pays them a flat fee to be on GP, they pay every time someone plays the game through GP, and they get paid for every subscriber on GP. The revenue is negotiated with the studio and usually is up to the studio on a per game basis to negotiate. This works differently for Xbox Studios who probably have it built into their contract pre-development. I’m not saying every game should be revolutionary. I’m simply saying that Hi-Fi Rush hype was overblown
Steve Jobs explained it years ago: you remove any obstacle between the customer and the product, make it easy to access and highly desirable. and you can even sell at a highe price as long as everything is very comfortable
lowkey asmon doesnt have any idea wtf he's talking about in regards to Redfall. you spend 5 years being forced to make a shit game you didnt want to make and lose the vast majority of your development team in the process, then get forced to release the game ahead of schedule and the game tanks as aresult, then the studio gets shut down because it didnt make enough money, there's literally nothing Arkane Austin couldve done in that regard. "you decided this, you went with this." they didnt decide anything, they were told by the people who bought out their studio. people left because they werent having it, and there wasnt anything even remotely resembling a team working on the game from that point
FF7 Rebirth has (ALOT OF) climbing towers, to unlock points of interest on the map. There are also birds, that make noise, and shoot sparks, while leading to you to rocks that need scanning (QuickTime event, aka press a button 3 times). Peak gaming
Ok ….. but it balances that out with the combat sequences some which are over 20-40mins you also have other side quests like the card game which highly engaging …. This seems like a misrepresentation of what the game is as a whole
@@chivasroco1752 I don’t understand how sales is quantifiable to a good game by that standard COD has the highest sales every year would you say that means the game is good …. Also I don’t think it’s boring cause a lot of people really like it at least the ones that have played
@@ranchalthor3526 no, but more because I have a specific taste, I like strategy games like civ or the old total war games. A games purpose is to make money, since a game needs sales in order to do so, a game that failed to sell well is therefore a bad game. Objectively speaking, it just happens that my opinion matches that. I thought it was kinda how I imagined an ubisoft version of final fantasy.
I think the minds of CEOs and shareholders have finally after 6 years have finally stopped buffering, and they’re thinking “Oh, people like Fortnite? They want to be serviced? They want to buy skins? We’ll give you tons of live service.” But they’re just too slow and dense to get it. They missed their chance YEARS ago. The market is saturated. The big players in live service are: Hoyoverse, Epic Games, Riot Games, Rockstar Games, Microsoft Gaming, Electronic Arts, Square Enix, Ubisoft, Supercell. There’s nine slices, and they’re not equal in size either.
25:00 You know what the Genshin Devs are doing right? They’re playing Wuthering Waves, and even making it publicly known that they’re playing it. Why do you think Wuthering Waves is good in combat? The dev team learned from PGR and Genshin’s gameplay.
Personally i think a lot of people mix up inspiration with stealing. Inspiration is pretty much how nature and in extension we function and survive: you see something that works, have an idea to improve off of it, and create something of your own on that basis. Some things may be very similar to the original, but overall it’s its own thing.
Genshin does not have great loot. Gearing in genshin is complete RNG in rolling the proper primary stat and substats with no way of influencing the rolls. PoE's crafting system on the other hand, has a weighted affix system with many years of affix groups and crafting methods to influence what you can roll.
The issue wasn't that the studios didn't know how to make a good game, the issue is that these game's problems start because a lot of these studios that are tasked with making live service games have no desire to do so. Yeah it is a job, but it's a job in an industry that's inherently fueled by creativity. People who say "if you don't like the job just quit" are actually unknowingly hitting the nail on the head, because that's exactly what's happening. The creative heads in a lot of these studios end up leaving once they start getting tasked with making live service games, leaving people who are nowhere near as creative or driven to take up the reigns of the project. Just look at games like Anthem and Redfall. A lot of those teams had key personnel leave mid-project likely because they were having their creativity stifled by these demands for live service titles.
other problems with this to is the fact they have to charge outrageous prices and ontop of that keep trying to add item shops and battlepasses to compensate
40:15 I think Asmongold forgot the topic of the video, live service killing single player games. I agree live service games can be fun, leave them to studios who want to tackle them not force them on renowned single player development teams.
37:45 correct. Let it Die is a live service game that gave me hundreds of hours, and I spent money on it because I felt bad about receiving so much for free; the devs are the ones behind "No more heroes", so I supported them with what I could.
You definitely missed out on Destiny 1. Back when exotics were actually exotic, when every new expansion released something new and interesting, back when everything was novel. The biggest problem with d2 is it’s just become too formulaic and nothing is exciting anymore. I have no idea what the solution is but it makes me sad.
