@Pedro said:
@mrbojangles25 said:
@R4gn4r0k said:
Konami, Warner Brothers, Activision, EA...
The list of AAA publishers that have absolutely no clue of what they are doing grows by the day.
AAA development is mostly crap. There's a diminishing return I think at this point, sort of like mining coal, where they've literally leveled entire mountains of intellectual property and now they're digging into the earth and yet there's only inches left to mine...and yet they still keep mining it, even though it burns more fuel at this point than what you're mining up.
Time to spend less on development, more on making new IP. Take risks. More one and dones. Not everything has to be the n'th installment in a decades-old franchise with a multi-million dollar development budget and even more millions in marketing. Even the Japanese game industry is guilty of this now, and they always sort of seemed like they had a healthy dose of still making games for gaming's sake.
Make a new stealth game. Thief or spy. Doesn't matter. Write a neat story. Forget multiplayer, just a 10-20 hour campaign with some replayability.
Make a real-time strategy. Sci-fi or WWII or fantasy, who cares? Just make it! There's clearly some demand as we were hyped (and really disappointed by) for Company of Heroes 3.
Make another action-RPG. Doesn't need to be some huge open-world game, just semi-linear. Model it after Mass Effect, who cares? Just make it.
And so on and so forth...
Obviously said as a consumer, I know nothing about business and game development...but I do buy lots of games, and 95% of my purchases are from independent and small-scale developers these days.
Y'all need to stop whatever this is. The reality is that you all are not the target audience for these companies. They are not oblivious as you would like to believe. You don't reach that level of success being oblivious. Adding to this, is the reality that gamers as a whole don't care much for what you are requesting. The market is where it is at because of gamers spending. There are many great games that fail and many mediocre games that succeed. Developers need to make money and even when a game design is not their preference or even their specialty, they will shift to survive especially if it is trending. Gaming is not a noble form of entertainment. It is just like very other business.
Eh, yes and no.
I'm not so ignorant as to believe gaming is a noble endeavor, and I do realize it is a business. But like any other? That's sort of pushing it a bit into cynical territory.
You want to say that about, I don't know...a tire company. A factory that makes can openers. Fine. They either make good ones or shit ones or mediocre ones and that is that. There's no soul to products like that.
But game development is a craft. I'd even go so far as to call much of it art. So there needs to be a certain degree of artistic integrity kept intact.
The question should not simply be "How can we make money?", the question needs to be "How can we make a good product, gain the respect of our customers, and make money?".
This combination of questions is especially important moving forward, with so many games adopting a service-based model. It's important to maintain integrity and gain and keep the respect of your customers.
I work in an industry as a craftsman (not gaming, but somewhere else) and these things matter. It's not just a matter of smart business decisions. You need to have a vision of what you want your product to be. It's not just about maximizing profit and competition.
And for the record, I've said many times that your average System Warrior is not the target audience. I am well aware of this lol 😋We are definitely the outlier.
But, as an old poster once said, if your favorite chocolate factory started producing literal shit and the masses kept gobbling it up, isn't it your duty to scream from the highest peak "YOU'RE EATING SHIT!?" even if all the people around you tell you to stop being such a preachy snob?
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