this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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I think EA makes games like this to reinforce THEIR notion that single player games are dead so they can use that as leverage to make more "games as a service". If they made things people actually wanted to play, they'd find that single player (yes even shooter) games are still just as popular as they ever were and poorly thought out, poorly executed, and poorly marketed games still suck.
Case in point. Baldurs gate 3.
Single player (with optional co op multiplayer) but massively successful.
Not to beat a dead horse. Its just the first example that came to mind.
A huge amount of very successful indie games are single-player and even other AAA games.
They talk about the genre being dead but they forget that most games dont charge you to play them anymore. They make money through in game purchases selling cosmetics and battle pasees.
These game genres could be described as dead by the same criteria if they cost actual money.
Uh, in this case it's a single-player, shooter, from a brand new IP. I'm probably just commenting just to argue but I don't think Baldur's Gate 3 is a good comparison at all.
I think you might be, haha.
But in the i terest of a fairer comparison, i had a quick google and found this game "atomic heart," a generally well received game with high ratings and the following from Steam Revenue calculator
"We estimate that Atomic Heart made $55,756,625.68in gross revenue since its release. Out of this, the developer had an estimated net revenue of $16,448,204.58."
New ip, single-player, shooter.
Comparatively, immortals lost money and tbey apparently laid of 45% of the staff who made it to avoid losses.
The thing that we all keep missing about this is even though EA sucks because it is an example of late stage capitalism hollowing out everything for profit, doesn’t actually mean the idiots with MBAs from Harvard or whatever running the company are actually making intelligent choices about profit.
The system of capitalism actually perpetuates itself better when things periodically catastrophically fail from wildly incompetent leadership since it keeps worker power from organizing, wipes out competitors that aren’t also massive corporations that can be easily colluded with, and provides a perfect backdrop for the rich to say “sorrrrrry it all broke again, guess we are the only ones that can fix it, so we will maybe take this chance to buy up more of the economy :) “.
So yes in a very real way I think EA functions to devalue the labor of game developers, keep competition of smaller game development studios categorically unable to create products like EA, and serve as a vessel to ritualistically dissect smaller game companies so that companies like EA have an infinite, desperate workforce and consumers have no better choice for video games. Just because these processes are twisted and rationalized under a story about the ruthless, noble pursuit of profit doesn’t make them have any real connection with efficiency or profit. One could perhaps say this all has much more to do with violence than it does profit.
That is the thing about ideologies, whether they have any connection to reality or not is actually not very important at all to the truly successful ones that permeate the way societies think about themselves.
Additionally, anything that can help massive corporations that are strip mining the gaming industry claim the gaming industry is sliding into a tough period where it’s hard to make games that turn enough of a profit to steadily employ game developers, is EXTREMELY useful to companies like EA because they see this whole AI thing as an opportunity to deal a permanent blow to the quality of life and general leverage workers have in the game development industry. Thank god the movie industry saw it coming a mile off, but video game culture is too full of toxic conservative little boys screaming at each other to understand what is about to happen (and is already happening).
It breaks my heart, but what is happening right now will likely deal a blow to the vibrancy of video games as an art form that will reverberate for decades. After all, once a worker exits the game development industry because they can't find a job it doesn't matter how passionate they were about video games, how special their talent is, how creative or unique their ideas are.... they sure as hell aren't coming back once they get that a job in an industry that doesn't hate its workers so much and besides a deep sense of burnout about something you love is truly one of the most awful experiences in the world... not many people are willing to revisit a place they experienced that.
That's why AAA+ is failing and indie games are getting better than ever. It's insane how good the tools and engines have gotten. Making games had become much more accessible than ever.
Making music has become MASSIVELY more accessible than ever, but you know what? It’s just a hobby now, capitalism has destroyed making and recording music as a livelihood unless you manage to get a handful unicorn jobs.
Just because it is easy for a company to enter a market doesn’t mean that structural, toxic issues with that market magically are nullified as problems. Gamers as a category seem to have a REALLY hard time wrapping their head around this.
When a company like this catastrophically fails and Baldur's Gate 3 or Palworld do gangbusters, that signals to others who also want to make money what they should be making in order to make money. Where the money does go, like a Larian or a Pocket Pair, now has profit to spend on growing their studios and making more of what actually works. They end up hiring the talent that was let go. Not all of them; this is less efficient than if the first studio that imploded had instead made something that the market actually wanted, but this is not a situation so dire that the industry will feel it for decades like you say. New studios form all the time from mismanaged large companies that lay people off after making bad bets.
Look, you are describing a perfectly rational theory for how events could play out in a theoretical universe, but you are just stependously, horrifically wrong if you think this story corresponds to reality in a meaningful way.
The truth is these companies have so much power (money) behind them that they don't just keel over and die when they fail, they annihilate entire industries, catastrophically derail promising career trajectories for countless workers, structurally give themselves an impenetrable advantage with regulatory capture and most importantly utterly dominate the material reality of being a worker in that industry, even if the worker doesn't work at the company.
Look at Uber, remember years ago when Uber keeled over and died once it became apparent that Uber wasn't profitable unless drivers are exploited to an extreme degree? Then all those workers went and worked for other ride sharing companies that ran more effective businesses and treated their employees more humanely (in retrospect the by now well documented extremely sexist and toxic culture of upper management at Uber alone doomed it from the start).... The market solved the problem by rewarding rideshare companies with better technology and business models than Uber. I remember in California, Uber could have blocked legislation that was going to improve the lives of rideshare/gig workers immensely but they realized that the consequences of drivers and riders seeing Uber openly shit on their face and spend massive amounts of money to keep drivers from getting a tiny, measly amount more money and control over their work environment would spell utter disaster so they refrained. The wisdom of the market!
Wait... the exact, precise opposite of all that happened while Uber ran for years at a massive loss as a venture capital superweapon ripping millions upon millions of dollars into a gaping black hole and completely devastating the taxi industry without providing a truly humane or long term viable alternative for most workers or cities?
sigh do you really not understand what is happening right in front of you?
No, this is the reality. The likes of Activision, EA, Ubisoft, and Take Two rule the industry by market cap, but that's because their games notably sell to the type of person who only buys a few video games per year at most. If they utterly dominated the material reality of the industry, how on earth could Baldur's Gate 3 or Palworld even happen? How could Hades or No Man's Sky, made by former EA devs, happen? Your view of reality is quite overly pessimistic. How can you even measure some of the claims you're making?
I don't know, my ideas are so wild and I am pulling them totally out of thin air. It isn't like there is a massive amount of scholarly work on this topic, a pre-existing history of legal cases pertaining to these issues that have caused society defining laws to be passed in most major countries and many political movements that explicitly attempt to define and critique these processes at our fingertips on the internet waiting to educate and inform us.
And you know, the funny thing is I really for once was feeling a little optimistic about this kind of material existing for me to read and educate myself with but I guess in this case my pessimism was well founded.
You slipped in an edit while I was responding, and I think the gist of it is that you and I fundamentally don't agree, especially not the hyperbolic flourish you used. I think you'll continue to see plenty of great games come out in the next decades, because people still want to buy games and other people still want to make them.
If you are only concerned about this from the perspective of having enough good games to keep you personally occupied and not a step further to the experience of human beings working in the industry (beyond the narrow range of game companies you directly buy from) that makes the art you love, then yes you and I fundamentally disagree and I would never want to be misconstrued as making the kind of argument you are making.
Also thank you for complimenting my flourish :)
There will continue to be games to play because people will continue to make them. A bad experience in one place leads to a new studio designed not to repeat it.
No, AAA+ blockbuster games are dead. The 150 million budget is insane. Spending that much on a game, you end up having to minimize the risks and having to cater to the widest audience possible.
If you split that budget into maybe 2 larger and a few smaller games, you don't put all your eggs in the same basket. You can take more risk, experiment with new mechanics and ideas. You can target different types of players. You can give a chance to smaller, lesser known writers who might have potential.
Part of it is that modern games are getting too expensive to make, especially with all the assets to the fidelity given by current technology.
I doubt it, this kind of logic is the same as "medical costs are insane because modern medical tech is expensive."
It completely ignores the entire economy all functioning under advanced technology to create and produce advanced goods more cheaply with the technology that costs money. It's also mismanagement in the same way the movie and TV industry has seen, they don't want to hire writers cause they don't want to pay them, so instead they just spend hundreds of millions on reshoots because having a writer being paid 60k on staff 24/7 was too costly apparently and some suit got a promotion for "saving" that money.
Someone made a better version of "the day before" with a few grand in purchased assets and a couple months using UE5. If you were creating your own resources instead of buying them and you had an actual vision then you absolutely can make a game for less than hundreds of millions that will return that money back to you. How much did pal world take in? How much is helldivers 2 currently making? What were their production costs?
Just because some inept studio run by corporate bean counters can only churn out tech demos for millions of bucks doesn't mean that's the actual standard for cost and production of gaming.
It's only expensive to make if studios decide to make them incredibly expensive. There are plenty of high quality indie games made by a single person.
The problem here is they went all in on "THE BEST GRAPHICS EVAR!!!" And it flopped because of the lack of story and gameplay. The lesson here is to not make it incredibly expensive to develop by focusing all efforts on graphics, and instead focus on gameplay and story and people will tolerate much less flashy visuals.
Games are getting too expensive to make because they're adding extra shit that no one cares about, not because of the cost it takes to make a decent game. Too many admin managers in charge at companies and not enough artists or engineers at the management level.