So here’s a very simple boiled down summary of what’s been happening in the last ~15 years, and has gotten exponentially more extreme with every subsequent year:
Game doesn’t sell well = All the devs are laid off, CEO gets a new yacht.
Game sells really well = Most devs are laid off, CEO gets three yachts
There’s too many knock-on effects to list, but specifically in the videogames business:
Quality of games goes down.
Prices go up.
Burnout in the industry goes up.
Exploitation of foreign contractors goes up.
There’s a metric fuckton of environmental, economic, and societal damage being done as well but I’m not qualified enough to explain/express them. The effects of all this will be felt by out-of-the-loop-ers in the years and decades to come
There’s just so much insane bloat in the industry. It feels like every game made by a AAA studio has a hundreds of millions of dollar budget, and hundreds of people working on it. A lot of people are just completely unfazed by the novelty of high production value anymore. Not a majority, but the number of people checking of AAA seems to grow constantly a little bit over time.
There’s obviously an audience for these massively produced games, but I just don’t understand how every AAA game is expected to be successful like this.
Meanwhile digital publishing, with Steam Early Access being the default example, has lowered the bar to entry in the market to basically nothing. Indie and “AA” games are on the front page of the storefront next to multimillion dollar AAA games.
Sure the vast majority of Early Access games never get finished enough to grab attention, but given the sheer volume, even a tiny fraction of those games releasing and getting traction dilutes the hold of AAA games.
People spending time playing Zomboid or Kenshi aren’t spending that time playing AAA next big thing.
I’m not deluded enough to think anything like a majority of gamers are playing mostly indie games, but a noticeable enough amount might be to reduce the needed profit margin of a bloated production.
The crisis is that the triple-A industry is starting to feel consumers loss of interest in them as indie devs continue to outshine them with every release
This seems to be the case of software engineering industry in general, I’m hoping to get out of this field entirely in the next few years it’s become a shit hole
So here’s a very simple boiled down summary of what’s been happening in the last ~15 years, and has gotten exponentially more extreme with every subsequent year:
Game doesn’t sell well = All the devs are laid off, CEO gets a new yacht.
Game sells really well = Most devs are laid off, CEO gets three yachts
There’s too many knock-on effects to list, but specifically in the videogames business: Quality of games goes down. Prices go up. Burnout in the industry goes up. Exploitation of foreign contractors goes up.
There’s a metric fuckton of environmental, economic, and societal damage being done as well but I’m not qualified enough to explain/express them. The effects of all this will be felt by out-of-the-loop-ers in the years and decades to come
There’s just so much insane bloat in the industry. It feels like every game made by a AAA studio has a hundreds of millions of dollar budget, and hundreds of people working on it. A lot of people are just completely unfazed by the novelty of high production value anymore. Not a majority, but the number of people checking of AAA seems to grow constantly a little bit over time.
There’s obviously an audience for these massively produced games, but I just don’t understand how every AAA game is expected to be successful like this.
Meanwhile digital publishing, with Steam Early Access being the default example, has lowered the bar to entry in the market to basically nothing. Indie and “AA” games are on the front page of the storefront next to multimillion dollar AAA games.
Sure the vast majority of Early Access games never get finished enough to grab attention, but given the sheer volume, even a tiny fraction of those games releasing and getting traction dilutes the hold of AAA games.
People spending time playing Zomboid or Kenshi aren’t spending that time playing AAA next big thing.
I’m not deluded enough to think anything like a majority of gamers are playing mostly indie games, but a noticeable enough amount might be to reduce the needed profit margin of a bloated production.
That feels like the ugly norm for way more than 15 years. I’m surprised it’s called a crisis just now.
The crisis is that the triple-A industry is starting to feel consumers loss of interest in them as indie devs continue to outshine them with every release
lots of growth during covid that could not be sustained => many, many layoffs to prop up earning statistics in the following years.
Also even if it was only 15 years I’m struggling to understand the “crisis now” part.
This seems to be the case of software engineering industry in general, I’m hoping to get out of this field entirely in the next few years it’s become a shit hole