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Comment by francis_t_catte | Hacker News Reader

Soon we'll just have Microsoft, Epic, and a conglomeration of EA, Activision, and Ubisoft after Bobby Kotick forces them all to merge. Facebook will bungle up any chance they have of capturing the gaming market after writing a cryptic paragraph about their legal right to request blood samples from all Oculous users in the TOS. Valve will quietly exit software development altogether, and pivot to building custom vanity knives using their hardware manufacturing experience. Can't wait for the future GAAS market!

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Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore.

My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. Honorable mentions go to Spelunky and Stellaris. It's to everyone's great regret that a single one of these titles was purchased by one of the shitty publishers you mentioned, fortunately it's the one that's on its last legs.

This is the inevitable trend of gaming since the 90s.

Small team makes innovative and interesting game. Gets bought, makes a good sequel, then milks IP forever.

It's up to you to move on.

Absolutely. It's fine for gamers to indulge in some nostalgia, too.

It'd be better for the industry if we all recognized that the job of a guy like Bobby Kotick is to eat a steak every so often, and then vomit it up for the next 25 years. Someone has to drive a garbage truck and there's nothing wrong with paying him for it.

Have you watched Mythic Quest? There's a particular episode touching this, that doesn't really require the rest of the series and is very good.

Check it out if you can - it' "Dark Quiet Death" from Season one

Bingo! CoD, Quake, Doom, Civ, Madden, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, All of Nintendo... you can’t fault them for milking an IP though when fans vote with their wallets. I would love new stories, new hero archetypes, new consequences, in games and I think indie have done a decent job at showing it can be done. But even indie suffers from the “Hey! This worked! Let’s just keep doing this!” IP milkage. Game dev, like software dev, has gotten more and more complex. What was once a vision of unity and standards is now Unity3D or micro-fracture SDK’s of the same graphics pipeline concepts and a wasteland of bones from those who came before you.

I know from experience. The “I’ll write my own engine” bug bit me in 2005. I wrote Reactor3D on XNA in 2007. Worked with Bill Reiss while he masterminded XNASilverlight which eventually would become the basis for MonoGame, which we all love and adore.

What’s interesting is the non-mention of itch.io

I think if enough people want new and interesting games, it will get done. Dev’s are surprisingly open to ideas, it’s the publishers (money people) who have a problem with change.

Change = risk

If you want to build new IP and there isn’t established funding you can go start a Kickstarter campaign to raise money from gamers to go build the game.

That’s the crux of it right there. Funding. Studios that have funding secured (or don’t need it) should be the ones taking those risks. But yes, it’s risky to introduce new IP, the results can be disastrous. Cliff Bleszinski knows this.

To directly name some of games you seem to be implying are automatically bad; I'm personally very happy with Doom (2016), Doom Eternal, Breath of the Wild, and Mario Odyssey. I am glad that ID and Nintendo have been "milking" these IPs.

Not implying any sense of quality, just naming some IP's that have been milked.

I think there's a difference between continuing an IP and milking one.

When the same IP gets passed to a dozen different studios who each create vastly different experiences, that's milking and I generally don't like it. The whole point of an IP is that you know what to expect, and having different studios working on the same IP is contrary to that goal.

Nintendo does not milk IPs, IMHO. They actually put a lot of though into their games and ensuring the the experience is top-notch. Compare Nintendo Zelda games to the few non-Nintendo variants: they've all been trash. Which is exactly why Nintendo rarely outsources games.

> When the same IP gets passed to a dozen different studios who each create vastly different experiences, that's milking and I generally don't like it. The whole point of an IP is that you know what to expect, and having different studios working on the same IP is contrary to that goal.

I think a distinction is if the Publisher treats the individual development studies as functionally equivalent black boxes. With Activision's brutal management of Call of Duty as maybe the key example. Where CoD assigned studios often go bankrupt after a couple games, and several have spun off after great hardship and will presumably never work with Activision again given the choice.

One fun exception from the more "indy" side of things that comes to mind is the playfulness that resulted when Croteam and publisher Devolver let a bunch of indy developers play with the Serious Sam franchise and created some fun games in a variety of styles outside of the FPS the series is known for.

> why Nintendo rarely outsources games

That's an overstatement: Nintendo co-develops a lot of titles with other studios, outsource a lot of their smaller IPs (mostly to Japanese studios), _and_ is being rather friendly to letting people do smaller spinoffs of their big properties.

Examples of third-party colaboration, in no particular order:

- Koei Tecmo co-developed Fire Emblem: Three Houses, did both Fire Emblem Warriors and Hyrule Warriors, which are franchise spin-offs using their Dynasty Warriors engine and gameplay, and Nintendo trust them so much that their next canon Zelda game will be a Breath of the Wild prequel developed by them, using the Hyrule Warriors label.

- Bandai Namco is more or less the main developer of Super Smash Bros since the Wii U/3DS iterations, with Sora Ltd being essentially just a consulting company run by Masahiro Sakurai. Bandai Namco is also co-developing the new Pokemon Snap, and developed Metroid: Other M.

- Capcom developed both Oracle of Ages/Oracle of Seasons and Minish Cap, two portable and very well regarded entries in the Zelda Franchise.

- On the Mario side, pretty much all of their Mario sport titles are handled by Camelot, with the exception of the Mario & Sonic Olympic series, which are published by Sega direcly, and their highly praised portable RPG series Mario & Luigi was developed by (sadly defunct) Alpha Dream.

- Then there was that time when they gave the Mario franchise to Ubisoft and they made a Rabbids-crossover, XCom-like game, which is just too goddamn funny to not put in here separately (especially since it was also fairly well received by critics).

- Good-Feel, another Japanese developer, made entries to both Kirby (Epic Yarn), WarioLand and more recently, Yoshi franchises (Wooly World/Crafted World).

- There is a metric shitton of Pokemon spinoffs (that's probably where you will find the worst offenders of bad outsourced games, to be quite honest, but even then there are series like Pokemon Mistery Dungeon, by Spike-Chunsoft, which are very well regarded).

- And as a another Zelda example, Cadence of Hyrule, made by the Crypt of the Necrodancer developers.

There are more examples, but overall a large part of their output nowadays is made by third-parties, with of course a lot of their projects - big and small - being handled by their in-house studios. That's not even counting the fact that some studios readily associated with Nintendo, like Intelligent Systems and HAL Laboratory, are actually independent (they just like working with Nintendo).

Sorry for the large response, I was bored.

This is great! No apologies. Example of how Nintendo milks their IP’s too. To be aware of it. Nothing wrong with Mario or Zelda, but the innovation and creativity is lacking for the sake of business and monetization.

> The whole point of an IP is that you know what to expect, and having different studios working on the same IP is contrary to that goal.

Is that actually the point of an IP? I would argue that an IP is more like Star Wars where the games that can come from it can vary in format and mechanics. And less like Battlefront where the expectation is a specific set of mechanics and game modes. I would argue that if someone where to make a non RPG Mass Effect that would still be within the IP and wouldn’t go against the core concept of IP.

Look at when Blizzard tried starting new a new IP with Overwatch, I'm sure they did okay but Overwatch doesn't have the same legendary luster that Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo have (or had).

My daughter became an overwatch pro-am (she’s in college now). So I have a slightly different take. Overwatch was extremely successful new IP.

Overwatch is pretty successful.

Overwatch is definitely a big success - it's not the biggest competitive FPS on the market (probably fortnite if you count that - otherwise maybe CS:GO?) but it's up there. They also own Hearthstone which baffled me on release since it's so far out of their wheelhouse - but I believe they're making bucket loads of money off of that still... it's a literal collectable card game ><.

From a raw sales standpoint Overwatch has done better than most of those games. The only Blizzard game that beats Overwatch in terms of raw revenue is WoW. I find that tech people that used to game in the 90s tend to way overestimate how popular and successful those early foundational games were in comparison to modern games. Overall growth in the game industry (especially PC world wide) has been massive

The “Small team makes innovative and interesting X. Gets bought” trend is hardly limited to gaming! Or the 90’s.

if they would just keep cranking out sequels at the same level of quality but no real innovation, I would be pretty happy. mass effect 1 was pretty good, me2 was great, me3 was still decent. why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda? similar with far cry. fc2 was great, but probably too unforgiving for the mainstream audience. they dumbed it down a bit for fc3, and fc4 was more of the same but with a couple pain points ironed out. then they had to mess everything up for fc5, why?

oddly enough, call of duty seems like a pretty good example of how to do a AAA franchise. they hit a winning formula with cod4, and they haven't really changed anything since. I'm not a huge fan of the series, but if you loved cod4, you'll love pretty much every game after that.

or an even better example: counterstrike. hardcore cs players will complain about subtle differences in the engine/hitboxes/netcode over time, but the core mechanics are exactly the same as in 1999. if it ain't broke...

> why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda?

Obviously everyone has their opinions, but I thought Andromeda the strongest sequel to ME1 story content wise. Andromeda's failings weren't in the story or the content (ME "B-Team" or not, thanks to Anthem's black hole, they wrote most of the strongest story content in all four games), they were technical. EA absolutely should not have pushed BioWare to Frostbite without properly productionizing Frostbite as if it were Unreal/Unity with a dedicated team and possibly an honest attempt to sell it as a product outside of EA's walls, instead of leaving it as DICE's in house with BioWare struggling to keep up with forked changes. Almost all of the technical problems in DAI, MEA, and especially Anthem seem clearly the fault of this broken engine relationship between DICE and BioWare. If EA wants Frostbite to be the next Unreal (or even just an okay competitor to Unreal) it needs to learn (five years ago) the lessons from Unreal that you treat even first and second party games as if they were third party customers to get the best results.

I didn't actually finish the game, so I can't speak too much to the story. for me it wasn't even about the bugs; I just thought the andromeda open world was the blandest of any I'd played at the time. it was like they looked at the lunar rover minigame from me1 and decided to make it the whole game. I wish they had just stuck to the traditional rpg level design of the previous games. I didn't much like the combat mechanics in andromeda either, but that could just be personal taste.

Well yeah, I loved the ME1 Mako and thought that very "Star Trek exploration" concept something strong about ME1 that I thought 2/3 deviated too far from, but I realize how much of a personal taste issue that becomes. MEA's open world could have used more time to bake (and still seems as much a restrictions caused by the Frostbite engine issue as anything, at least to my outside perspective). Also, yes, I find that for an FPS/3PS-focused engine, I don't entirely understand why Frostbite feels so bad at FPS/3PS combat mechanics, but I also have never played Battlefield/Battlefront games so I don't know if that is a BioWare/Mirror's Edge fork(s) specific problem or a general Frostbite problem.

And then there's franchises like Mega Man which have been going for over 30 years.

The trend is definitely moving away from many separate games and toward "living" games. Look at how many games these days end up just doing updates/DLCs over many years rather than releasing whole new versions of the game.

Look at Destiny, there was originally planned for Destiny 3, but now the plan is just to make Destiny 2 the only game for the next 10 years with constant content updates. Even now, Destiny 2 of today is a significantly different than Destiny 2 at release.

Microsoft/343 have indicated that "Halo: Infinite" is planned to be this way as well, a living game.

Even indie games like Astroneer and Don't Starve are going down this route of updating a single game over a long period of time.

I'm not sure if that should be considering "milking", but it's definitely a change from how things used to be done.

The "living game" approach has to do with the cost of the DLC and the difficulty at moving the price point of a game (while costs to build it go up).

This allows the studio to make money on the game based on the continued DLC which needs less development investment.

It isn't so much "milking" but rather "acknowledging a change in the way games are monetized because the price of the initial game isn't changing."

No, the "living game" approach is because it turns out taking a "hat" asset that took an artist like 2 days to make (or you literally got for free from your fanbase!) and selling it for $5 to the 10 million people playing your game makes A FUCKLOAD of money. It's absolutely milking. Games make more money now when they are "Oh woe is me so expensive to make oh poor me feel pitty" then they ever dreamed of even when a game could be made by one person.

It makes a lot of sense for most games to work like this: once you have a core game, adding content to it is comparatively cheap. Which means that the ROI can be really high if a point release with new content causes a spike in unit sales.

This probably works better for indies than DLC because I do think people have developed an aversion to DLC due to the big publishers abusing it for cosmetic updates. Personally, I'm very likely to pick up something like Factorio at full price, knowing that the devs are going to be adding "free" content to the base game over the years. But I'll skip over games with "season passes" and just wait for the complete edition to be released.

> there was originally planned for Destiny 3

That was Activision's plan. Bungie never wanted pop new destiny titles likes CoD. D2 also designed with content being constantly added in mind - main story is super short. It's easier to sell cosmetics to fund "big" dlcs with small seasons in between. At least, compared to convincing people to buy an entire $60(70?) new game and wait for all of your friends buy it as well.

> Look at Destiny, there was originally planned for Destiny 3, but now the plan is just to make Destiny 2 the only game for the next 10 years with constant content updates. Even now, Destiny 2 of today is a significantly different than Destiny 2 at release.

Destiny seems to have gone through a lot of different plans. The plan before Activision was seemingly to stop after 1 and make that the live service game, though the 1/2 break helped them hurdle a console generation gap so Activision might not have been wrong to push for 2 at least (but yeah was definitely trying to milk it with 3).

Not that they were trying to milk it, but that they are currently twisting 2 into something it wasn’t. The game was not originally written to support also being Destiny 3.

I'd argue that was always the Destiny plan to be a constantly shifting MMO and Destiny 1 is the real outlier at this point. The teething pains right now "twisting 2 into something it wasn't" seem to be more somewhere between "twisting 2 into what it was always meant to be" and "Bungie is still learning how to run and build an MMO the hard way by ignoring most of what worked for decades" (for instance, relying so much on streaming from the disc/hard drive over streaming from the server making it real hard for them to keep all zones active at the same time because they run against disc/hard drive size limits; that's Ancient MMO Trade-Offs 101 that Bungie seems dead set on doing the weirdest possible solutions, though to Bungie's credit they aren't the only ones in this current "live service" games era learning this old lesson the hard way as games like Fallout 76 and Sea of Thieves seem just as likely to hit the exact same wall if they try to expand much more).

From a historical preservation viewpoint I find this trend extremely disturbing. Along with online requirements this makes it more and more impossible to experience older games the way they used to be. Even for completely single player games, online content distribution platforms tend to only give you the latest version (except for a few games where the developers specifically set up legacy branches), often even refusing to launch an already installed game until available updates are downloaded. If updates were only bugfixes that would not be a problem, but it is not unheard of for post-launch changes to significantly change the core mechanics of games.

This is a significant step down from the old phsical media distribution model where any changes from the initial master were optional.

Open source gaming is an option too - Cataclysm DDA as a thriving example, Nethack, so on.

Stellaris might be one of my favorite games in recent memory (granted, I don't play that much).

You make a good point to bring up indie development (WoW excluded), but I think looking at the storefronts is also important.

For these big conglomerates, the trendy thing is to have your own games store. Complete with exclusivity deals, privacy concerns, and plenty more.

That's not to say that every game on a store has these issues. However, I think the lesson from mobile app stores is: don't discount the impact that a storefront can have on what's allowed to succeed. Stores can exert their control with more than just removals.

Indies can't escape this. Even if they wanted to sell their game independently, not being on one of the big stores hurts visibility. Not all of them get the luxury to be able to expect their users to follow them to their own site/store/etc.

Right now, Steam is still the leader and obvious home for a lot of these otherwise-independent developers. Again, if the big conglomerates get what they want, this won't always be the case.

> Right now, Steam is still the leader

I wonder how they compare to Apple.

Apple probably doesn't have much revenue from the OS X desktop store, but if we're talking about total gaming revenue, Steam is around $5 billion/year and Apple is around $20 billion/year. Although I'm pretty sure Apple's # represents gross sales, not their 30% cut. I don't know if Steam's # is the revenue they receive after their cut, or if it's gross sales. If their # is the cut they take, they'd be far ahead of the App Store in terms of gross profit.

From a gamedev friend, there is no money on macOS. iOS and apple arcade is a viable option, but on Steam, the macOS sales are not worth the headache support and development gives you. Lots of quirks to work around with macOS, and more to come with the ARM transition as apple will surely blame developers for performance problems with x86 titles. Not to mention that the yearly developer fees that you have to pay to keep a game's long tail on the store. It eats into profits for Indies.

> but on Steam, the macOS sales are not worth the headache support and development gives you. [...] Not to mention that the yearly developer fees that you have to pay to keep a game's long tail on the store.

What yearly developer fees do you need to pay to keep a macOS game on Steam? Is it to Valve?

Nothing yearly for Steam, it's a one-off fee, I think about 100 USD these days (it changed over the years). For the macOS store it is a 100 USD a year or so, and of course they take their cut from your sales. I prefer Valve's way of doing business.

Oh, okay. You started talking about whether it’s worth releasing a Mac game on steam, and then brought up a yearly fee, so I was having trouble following where you transitioned.

The mobile gaming market and PC/console gaming are basically two distinct markets with very little overlap though.

> For these big conglomerates, the trendy thing is to have your own games store. Complete with exclusivity deals

How else are they going to get people to use these stores?

Also the fact that the Epic Games Store exists is a step towards countering Steam's monopoly on mainstream titles.

People complain about the loss of functionality like screenshots or the in-game browser when using Epic. And there are exclusivity deals. Complaints against those things are valid, and the actual implementation of the storefront needs a lot of improvement, but I'm wondering if a Steam monopoly would have been any better for consumers and developers.

To me it sounds like a lot of consumers were happy with the monopoly and saw the exclusivity deals as disruptive as they had to migrate their friends list and set up a lot of things just to play that one hyped title. But when it comes down to the hard issue of staying afloat I can see how the money Epic offers to game studios is enticing.

The exclusivity deals were disruptive because they took games that were promised to come to steam and made them exclusive.

The customer has no benefit from the lower cut epic charges.

Epic doesn't treat everyone equally. Big games like Cyberpunk 2077 are allowed to also sell on other platforms, while smaller games either go exclusive or go with everyone else.

Competition is good, but I'd rather have GOG be that competition to Steam than Epic purely based on their anti-DRM stance.

I don't much care for EGS, but Epic is paying small developers a lot for that exclusivity. In the current indie market, that chunk of change can be the difference between profitability and failure.

Or, as the above user put it, the difference between making a creative masterpiece or a clone made to exploit the system.

> Epic doesn't treat everyone equally. Big games like Cyberpunk 2077 are allowed to also sell on other platforms, while smaller games either go exclusive or go with everyone else.

There isn't a conspiracy here. Epic pays developers to make certain games (like Control) temporarily exclusive to EGS. Other developers, like CD Project RED, have not made such a deal, and thus Cyberpunk 2077 is available on many different PC game clients.

There are plenty of games on EGS--large and small--which are not and have never been exclusive. Examples include The Unfinished Swan, SuperHot, and Axiom Verge just to pick three off the top of my head.

I meant the case of DARQ, where the developer was specifically told to either go exclusive or every other store with no possibility of selling on EGS and other stores. [1] According to the article other indie games got similar offers, while the big budget ones can go to multiple stores.

[1] https://www.dsogaming.com/news/epic-games-wanted-darq-as-an-...

To me, asking smaller games for exclusivity is just asking for commitment. One of the reason I don't buy games on GoG anymore is that the developers don't commit to updating their GoG version to keep parity with other versions of the game.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_that_treat_gog_custo...

I didn't know that. Thanks for that list.

Should we also rail against Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo for paying developers to make games exclusive to their platforms?

No, because it's clear from the beginning what platforms their games will support. That wasn't the case with Metro Exodus [1] for example and one other indie game I can't remember the name off.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/metro-exodus-pulled-from-s...

Yes

Steam has been good to me with their native Linux client, Linux client support, proton compatibility tools and community tool support (glorious eggroll proton version). Epic has nothing to offer me.

Furthermore, I know some gamedevs personally who release an early access level title with exclusivity deal on epic's playform just so that they gain access to further funding to finish the game and release on Steam for the actual shot at success. They take advantage of the money to fund their work, but have said that the numbers do not compare to that of Steam.

Phoenix Point was a game I cared about a lot. Then one day, they announced they would not be making a Linux version. Not long after they announced it will be Epic exclusive for a year.

I feel ya, I dropped it so hard I even forgot the game until reading your post.

Is it fair to blame the developers or blame Epic?

Personally I think at the very least the developers deserve equal blame for accepting the bag of money from Epic.

Money is a strong motivator but the Phoenix Point devs chose to break promises from crowdfunding to accept it. I think that reflects worse on them than it does Epic personally.

I began gaming for the first time (unless you count playing on my roommates' XBox in college) this past week, mostly for The Witcher 2/3--both on Linux. The Witcher 3 was never supposed to run on my platform, but somehow Steam and Proton/Wine made that not only possible but actually enjoyable.

I know technically they're doing it to make money, but I can't help like feel it's also something of a labor of love as well. It would have been much easier to leave people in my (our?) position behind, so I appreciate the heck out of Valve for putting in the effort. I imagine they're going to have my goodwill for a long time as a result.

If you want to be cynical, Proton was made from the scraps of a contingency plan that was the Steam Machine. When they realized that Microsoft wasn't going to force their platform onto users, they gave up on Steam Machines and I guess they leveraged the tech to something else.

That's not being cynical - that's just facts on how and why SteamOS was conceived and developed

... and unrelatedly, on the other side, the latest appeasing thing called WSL was made from leftovers of a plan to run Android on Windows Phones, which was dropped when Google refused to allow Play Services run there.

Yep, and Post-Its were made from the scraps of what was supposed to be a really strong adhesive.

It speaks more to me that they released Proton rather than shelving it after losing the original motive.

I think that it is a bit more complex than that. Their original plan was for native[1] gaming on Linux.

When it proved hard to bootstrap that and seeing that the Steam Machine itself they started looking for options. Wine was already pretty good but DX11 support was bad. I do not know if it was serendipity that DXVK started showing promises around they same time they started looking into wine or whether it was the reason for them focusing into wine in the first place.

The rest is history, although the side effect is that it pretty much killed native ports for AAA games on Linux [2].

[1] for some values of native. Many, most, ports are based on internal close source equivalent of wine.

[2] I do not really care about native vs proton, but it would be nice if game companies did officially support proton.

> Steam has been good to me with their native Linux client, Linux client support, proton compatibility tools and community tool support (glorious eggroll proton version)

Reminder: Valve was forced to double-down on SteamOS/Linux by Microsoft's then-intention to shutdown 3rd-party storefronts on Windows. I have a complicated relationship with both Steam (as a Proton user) and Epic (for pulling Linux support on a multiplayer game I already own!), but I still appreciate more competition in the arena: GOG alone won't cut it.

Yes, but they have been owning that decision ever since. If that ever changes, I will reconsider. Until then they have me as a customer.

>if a Steam monopoly would have been any better for consumers and developers.

Well steam runs on and is actively supported on linux, Epic takes games that used to support linux then removes linux support and makes the games exclusive to their store.

So for me personally, a steam monopoly would be better. The epic game store's existence has actually caused games to be removed from the platform I use. It's taken away choice from me. If it stopped existing, I'd be happy.

Now I'm curious, what title previously destined to have linux support and distribution on multiple storefronts did Epic do this to?

This was the high profile one a few months ago.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/23/21078989/rocket-league-ma...

I have one particular example of this I love since it happened right on the borderline. I own Anno 1800 on steam, but if you don't you can't (at least for the foreseeable and likely future) - Ubisoft pulled Anno from the steam storefront shortly after launch but! Probably due to some contract shinnanegans with steam, they continue to offer expansions + DLC to users who own Anno already on steam while new users remain locked out from buying it anywhere except UPlay + EGS. Ubisoft has moved a few things over to EGS but I love the Anno example because it landed just as EGS was gaining fame so it sits in the weird middle ground of technically being on steam but not really.

Be a bit mindful blaming ubisoft for stuff vanishing from Steam.

A significantly large part of why Ubisoft started cozying up to Epic was not because of the 5% stake tencent has in it.

It was because Steam pulls all kinds of nasty shenanigans but ubisoft will not state any of it publicly because it would hurt their relationship.

Steam has outright pulled all ubisoft games before, and ubisoft took the blame. People assumed it was because ubi wanted to push uplay; but it was all about someone at valve deciding that we'd violated some rule about content distribution.

We gave UK players of AC:Syndicate a country specific hat which wouldn't have made sense to the global market.

They didn't warn, we woke up to see that kotaku[0] had run an article about it before we even knew ourselves.

This is not an isolated incident, just a dramatic one that I remember as my own personal shifting point w.r.t. steam, because I'd only just started working at Ubisoft and was hating on uplay and was quite fond of steam.

[0]: https://kotaku.com/ubisoft-pulls-big-games-from-steam-165567...

Having bought a Ubisoft game on Steam and having to sit there for minutes while uplay updates itself when I just wanted to play for 10 minutes or so, I have very little sympathy for you.

> We gave UK players of AC:Syndicate a country specific hat which wouldn't have made sense to the global market.

So Valve makes sure that players from different countries get the same content? As a UK expat that's something I'm glad of.

Better customer service, user experience, and game selection. All these various online game stores should be required, by law, to allow any publisher to put their games on the platform for a standard publishing rate. No exclusivity, no special rate setting. Those are classic anti-competitive tactics, and this is yet another front to fight that battle on.

I also quite like a lot of the blockbuster games as well as the indie games. An indie dev will never release a game like Red Dead 2, for one example. I definitely play more indie games, but I would rather the blockbuster market be healthy too.

I feel the same about the movie business. Indie films can be awesome, but some kinds of movies are hard to do without a large budget.

Pyramids are hard to build without a super-feudal economy and society. But we got rid of that, losing the practical ability to make pyramids in the process, because we value other things like democracy higher.

Uhh we still build things like pyramids all the time - Three Gorges Dam, Burj Khalifa, One World Trade Center - it's just we don't build pyramids themselves anymore.

Hm. The pyramids were an architectural and supply chain genius stroke considering when they were made. It also took fantastic human sacrifice to achieve that. One world trade center was built with the assistance of trains and semi trucks brining ore to smelters and steel to the construction site, electricity, cranes etc.

Minus the slavery, have we really expended that much human effort and equivalent wealth and time on something in the modern era? The only thing I can think of is Free software products, shit like Linux.

This is only tangentially related, but because you are all leaning on this pyramid analogy so hard, I thought I would mention that many scholars now believe the pyramids to have been built by some type of salaried (and very skilled) labor. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_constructio...

The Large Hadron Supercollider?

Pretty sure Appolo or Space Shuttle both were more expensive projects than the pyramids, even adjusted for inflation.

The Burj Khalifa was notoriously built with more or less slave labour, so maybe not the best example.

Or maybe that was part of the point, that unfortunately some large structures are still built by people working under slave-like conditions.

I don't think the Three Gorges Dam was built by something most would call a democracy.

> Pyramids are hard to build without a super-feudal economy and society

[citation needed]

The 10th-tallest pyramid was built in Memphis, TN 30 years ago [0] and it's now used as a Bass Pro shop. Say what you will about working conditions in the US in the 90s, but I don't think it'd be fair to call it "a super-feudal economy and society".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Pyramid

Yea building a pyramid is easy, you just need to invent the internal combustion engine first.

That said, pyramids seem to have been built with hired labor so the point is pretty muddy regardless.

Call me skeptic, but I’m not really sure that pyramid would be able to stand in place 4500 years. Same shape, way less durability.

Huh? Pyramids exist because they are the easiest comparably thing to make. no one makes them because they have better skyscraper designs now and no one cares about making a 4000yr old tomb.

You know what's today's 4000yr long monument to vanity? Elon Musk's orbiting Tesla

> Right now, Steam is still the leader and obvious home for a lot of these otherwise-independent developers.

HN: TEAR DOWN THE APPLE STORE MONOPOLY! Also HN: Steam is cool and pulls 30% from developers.

It's worth drawing the distinction that Steam, as opposed to Apple and their app store, does not hold an exclusive monopoly and cannot dictate where users can install software from. If a Dev doesn't like Steam, there are other publishers and store fronts that they can peddle their wares through. Similarly users can go elsewhere to buy and install, even direct from the manufacturer.

Steam being the de facto choice is another issue entirely, and yet another discussion for their fee structure.

Also, steam is not as controlled as the apple store.

I bet, if nvidia wanted to, they could publish geforce now there, for example.

Steam does not control Windows, does it?

You could make the argument that because of Steam having such reach / monopoly on the PC gaming market, Steam (and by extension Valve) is effectively the publisher of games like that, and a very large one at that. There's GoG that mostly focuses on vintage games, and Epic that spends tons of money to get (timed?) exclusives on indie games + free handouts, but I'm not sure how well it's working for them to get market share.

But granted, the indie game market (and mid-sized publishers like Paradox) are super important right now to fight against the AAA / massive budget game devs and publishers.

Mind you, ID has been a bit of an underdog for a long while; their games are / were good, but did not become crazy big like their EA / Activision counterparts; the 2009 Wolfenstein sold poorly ("only" 100K units in the first month); The New Order, its sequel, did a lot better (400K sold in about a month and a half), and Doom 2016 was a hit.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but was id actually involved in the 2009 Wolfenstein or in New Order? I think not. However, they did develop Doom 2016...

Wolfenstein was made by Machinegames. Though there is quite a bit of overlap between the two studios during production.

They are involved for the technical aspects beyond merely MachineGames using id engines. MachineGames in a lot of ways acts like another id software studio, but it is free to form its own flavor.

MachineGames also has (uncredited?) work on Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal.

2009 - they were producers, but the development was done by Raven Software and published by Activision. So not really involved other than owners of IP?

New Order - not at all, maybe as engine developers. Right for that IP were transferred to MachineGames in 2010 right after ZeniMax got hold of them.

As for Doom 2016 - they enlisted a lot of outside help after Doom 4 was scraped. Bethesda's game directors helped them a lot because they already figured how to make "old ip" to sell well with modern gamers (see Fallout 3).

side note:

I don't think id managed to get deliver a lot of good games since John Romero left. (just like John Romero didn't deliver many good games since the separation)

John Romero and John Carmack were like a dream team, but without each other it was meh.

GoG does have a bunch of new games though. And IIRC they are owned by CD Project Red who are doing some big games now :)

Both CD Projekt Red and GOG are actually just subdivisions of CD Projekt.

Yeah GOG hasn't "focused" on vintage games for at least half a decade now (and the switch from GoG and the original acronym to branding wise it's just GOG and its own "word" these days) and while back compat remains a core strength (though one as much exported at this point as most Publishers have paid attention to what GOG was doing and released many of the same games with the same tricks [ScummVM, DOSBOX, etc] on Steam and other platforms) has kept up with Steam (and Epic) on every major AAA release and a large swath of Indies so long as the publisher will allow a DRM Free release. Plus of course CD Projekt Red's own AAA releases (Witcher series, Cyberpunk) as obviously they want DRM Free publishing where available.

I'm not certain if you enjoy remakes or not - but I think GOG is pretty much single handedly responsible for making them a thing. Things like AoE2 (Age of Empires) HD & DE probably wouldn't exist if AoE and AoM (Age of Mythology) didn't get a bunch of surprise sales on GoG. I'm hoping it'll also lead to some of the older IPs that died off with the likes of SSI getting resurrected into new titles - Imperialism 1 & 2 were pretty amazing games long before the likes of Victoria 2 came about.

id Software -- the makers of Doom 2016 -- is owned by ZeniMax Media, which has been acquired by Microsoft as per the featured article we are discussing

FYI the 'id' in 'id Software' is lowercase. It's a word (not an initialism or acronym) so 'Id' would be more grammatically correct, though the name of the company is nevertheless lowercase.

I've been playing a lot of great retro-inspired shooters from the new 3D Realms and New Blood. Plenty of great indie stuff on PC.

My kids love Nintendo and Minecraft, but they also love Untitled Goose Game, Factorio and Frog Detective. Indie games are probably more available now than ever.

The absence of civ6 is lamentable, but then we do only have so much time to find to pursue hobbies like work and careers.

There are a lot of great Indie titles, and you can get a lot of them DRM free on Humble or Gog.

I've loved a lot of Devolver's stuff. The Red String Club, Hotline Miami I/II, Katana ZERO .. all super incredible games with gameplay and story that's just as fun as the any of the big AAA shops.

Focus Home Interactive publishes some great AA games. I'm very glad publishers like them continue to exist.

I'm loving Annapurna Interactive, games like What Remains of Edith Finch and Outer Wilds have been amazing. 'What Remains of Edith Finch' feels like a (shorter) AAA title, no compromise in production values whatsoever.

Devolver is astounding, they really keep snapping up indie projects that do exceptionally well - don't forget Reigns in that list it's definitely on the lighter end but it's very well put together.

Same, Devolver is phenomenal. Enter the Gungeon and Fall Guys are both smash hits too

WoW Classic is Activision, isn't it?

correct, Activision-Blizzard

Don't forget Factorio -- aka if Software Development were a computer game with tech debt, copy/paste and literal bugs.

And satisfactory, that's my newest obsession.

And stardew valley

> Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore.

Brilliantly put.

There's no end to enjoyable ways to waste your time when it comes to enjoyable games across time and genre, plenty of fish. Games media like all media loves hyperbole. Who cares about Caves of Qud if you can get MAD about a GIRL fighting in WW2? Fallout 75! For all I care the AAA industry can cannibalize itself until there's only 1 studio left slaving away in the Call of Duty mines. Games are made by people. There will always be more games released every year by middling and small studios than you have time. Now more than ever if someone has thousands of hours to burn on an autistically singular interest, we'll always have good games. As I get older and the world sinks into a fervor of self-preservation and tribalism, I realize the number of fucks I have for Bobby Kotick or loot boxes has dwindled to none. In fact, I'm running out of those real quick in general. So congratulations on joining the Microsoft family Bethesda, I'm sure your children will have non recessive genes and normal sized heads.

Deadcells ?

We seem to have near identical taste so can I add: - they are billions - Kerbal space program - faster than light To your awesome indie games list

Kerbal is so awesome, it brought me back some authentic gaming experience

I actually feel compelled to express an opinion regarding WoW classic:

It's a garbage money grab.

The idea that there is a huge nostalgia fueled demand for the original experience doesn't absolve a multi-billion dollar developer from a complete lack of support or quality of life improvements to the game.

There is just too much overlap with the fact that they can literally re-release a game with practically zero development costs.

That's not fair...

1) Costs were not zero for the re-release. The only version of the game data (stats, items, enemy spawns etc.) was in the form of an original database backup (from an old employee's personal stash!). Classic runs on the modern WOW engine, so work was required to shoehorn the old data in and reimplement systems and interfaces which don't exist in the current WOW engine.

2) Before Classic's release, by far the most vocal crowd making demands of Blizzard were shouting their slogan "NO CHANGES". I really don't find it surprising that Blizzard has not made major changes since the majority of the player base requested as such...

Fair points, but do you have a source? I'm skeptical that previous versions of the game were discarded.

In terms of audience demographics, I've experienced nostalgia, but frankly I think the president had a point when he made his infamous comment. But I haven't seen any data to support any claims, beyond the existence of private servers.

If you think wow classic had "practically zero development cost", you don't know what you're talking about.

Care to elaborate? How many lines of code do you think were written for the release of WoW classic compared to the original release?

Blizzard did not charge for WoW Classic. It merely requires an active subscription to the regular game. There's no additional purchase or subscription.

The company invested significant development into Classic. The project started as a fork of Legion, in order to benefit from a decade of anti-bot measures, compatibility fixes, and Battle.net integration (auth and chat). They then ported the original game forward and added "layering" to avoid crashes that plagued the original game in 2004 and 2005.

> Blizzard did not charge for WoW Classic. It merely requires an active subscription to the regular game. There's no additional purchase or subscription.

I'm not sure what you're getting at, in my experience a massive chunk of the players don't play 'retail'. So the cost is just that, $15 a month.

Beyond that, do you have a source? It's not clear that any of these things they've been developing had significant costs in replicating for Classic.

Blizzard shut a "wow classic" style private server down because they are the owners of WoW but then they left lots of people who wanted the classic experience stranded and decided to give them an official way. It's not a money grab.

Indy is great if you like one of the genres where they excel (e.g. rogue like, deck builder, walking simulator, retro, traditional RPG, etc.). However, if you are into genres like modern FPS or open world action adventure then good indy games are difficult to come by.

Maybe not "indie," but you don't have to look to the big 4 publishers for the best FPS and open-world action games these days.

Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 came out of CDProject Red. My favorite FPS of the last few years (Hunt: Showdown) came out of Crytek.

Cdproject costs some 4 billion more than Microsoft paid for Zenimax.

It doesn't take many to saturate those markets though.

If you're looking for a good indie shooter, look at Diabotical[0]. It's more Quake than Quake Champions was, or even Rocket Arena for that matter. There's plenty of pro-level gameplay on Zoot's stream[1] as well.

0: https://www.diabotical.com/

1: https://www.twitch.tv/thisiszoot

Mount & Blade series is an interesting counterexample to that, although I'm at a loss as to how define the genre ("feudalism sandbox"?). The first games were very clearly indy, but they capitalized on that success, and Bannerlord is a much more ambitious and polished game.

TaleWorlds were pretty lucky to stumble upon a community that could keep their game running for over a decade.

Did they stumble upon a community, or did they create one?

M&B is actually published by an arguably large company? I don't know where folks put Paradox in the ranking but they're certainly raking in the money with both internal dev & publisher only projects.

And they're making a new World of Darkness RPG for the first time in forever.

It was originally self-published indy, Paradox picked it up sometime during their betas. In 2015, TaleWorlds decided to return back to their indy roots, and got the publishing rights (for all already-released games, as well as M&B2: Bannerlord) back.

Yeah, open world games generally take a large team to create tons of content and a large tools/pipeline team to get said content in engine. So yeah, I doubt we'll see them dominating that space any time soon.

I can't think of a good reason though that there aren't a few very successful indie shooters though.

Open world as in sandbox? Sandbox is a very big genre among indie games.

Stellaris wins hands down for me in most time played. Honestly such a good game.

Dead Cells, Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac, Papers Please, Return of the Obra Dinn, Spelunky 2

All fantastic games better than most major studio titles.

Is it possible to play dwarf fortress on mobile yet ?

Yes, see dfremote — iOS only though I think but works nicely with an iPad Pro and the pencil (provided you have a machine capable of running docker somewhere)

Excellent taste in colony survival titles!

Give Factorio a try

Well, not everybody has the same tastes. I mostly don't like the aesthetics of indie games, especially not the "indie feel" or any kind of pixelated or animation-style graphics. I will not play anything that reeks of "design".

Instead, I prefer realistic-looking graphics, with moving trees and clouds. I've more often than not spent too much money on new AAA just to look at the graphics and barely play. Unfortunately, games with AAA-graphics with a good story and great original gameplay (no sequels!) seem to get rarer, and the disappearance of independent top-notch game studios could be a reason for that.

Realistic graphics are no more AAA than well done "indie feel" graphics. Realistic-looking games can just as much "reek of design" as you put it. Many of those indie games have AAA-graphics with good story and original gameplay.

This is absolutely right. The best games now are from independent developers who are themselves barely making it. The games you listed were some of the breakout successes of indie games but there are a ton of fun, interesting indie games out there that are dying from lack of revenue.

There seems to be an overall issue now where the quality of the good produced and the benefit to the consumer is divorced from the value extracted by the producer.

For instance, you can make a mobile game company that aggressively monetizes re-hashed bubble-poppers or match three games. With that, you focus not on innovation of pleasing the customer but on making the most money per customer so that you can feed it back into your marketing. The most exploitative game wins.

This is a more profitable strategy than simply trying to make a fun game that people want to play.

With most consumer markets, we find similar stories of customer exploitation being a better play than simply making a great product. This is not as much the case in B2B.

How do we reign back in the markets? It doesn't seem like consumer choice is working out very well.

Maybe marketing is at the core of all of this malignment.

  How do we reign back in the markets? It doesn't seem like consumer choice is working out very well.

consumer choice is working as intended. They are fine playing "free" games supported by the 1%, and many nowadays won't pay >5-10 dollars for a game unless it's from a very established IP.

Even without the mobile market, The story isn't much different. You either throw yourself out there in a sea of indie games, or you find a publisher to pitch and give your IP rights to in exchange for stability. The latter is just harder to do nowadays

If we're willing to regulate gambling (which we are, because we do regulate it), then I don't think we can simply wave our hands at mobile games and say "bah, consumer choice. They play the games, don't they?"

For what it's worth, the "Free to Play" sector that dominates a lot of market share isn't just the gambling-lite, pay-to-win mobile sector anymore. We're talking about major titles like Fortnite, League of Legends, DOTA2, Rocket League, Hearthstone, and Valorant, which have millions of concurrent players, dominate streaming services, and often have high-production e-sports events. Even the latest title in the Call of Duty franchise offers a Free to Play Battleground mode.

The issues with gambling are nothing to do with the arcana of business structures and everything to do with gambling itself.

Gambling ruined games like porn ruined movies -- it didn't. It's just a different partially similar thing.

However gambling did ruin many areas of entertainment. E.g. Live music suffered immensely in my home country as pubs preferred to fill the stages with pokies as they made more money from gambling addicts then they did from having a live band around.

Same deal with games, many previously good IPs are now stuffed with gambling mechanics as the producers controlling it push for it.

Some people enjoy gambling, I guess? That doesn't necessarily mean that they're being exploited or that they're "ruining" games.

I too dislike gambling elements in computer games. I simply choose not to buy such games. If there was a shortage of good games without gambling mechanics, I could see your point. But clearly there's not.

Many indie developers are barely making it. Some are killing it. New ideas come from indies, but sometimes from big companies too. Big companies depend on distribution and marketing, small companies depend on innovation. I have been in video games for twenty five years. It has always been like that.

Where it seems to have broken down is via vertical integration.

When publishers were publishers and developers were developers (80s and 90s), it seemed like there was healthier competition. Even if there were a lot of abusive deals struck.

Now that we have giant, integrated publisher + development conglomerates, there's zero incentive to step out of that structure to publish a popular indie game.

It feels like news sites prohibiting links to external sites, and the world's the poorer.

It feels like the video games industry has done the reverse of Hollywood.

Hollywood went from a vertically integrated system that handled production, distribution, and exhibition by a single entity to a system where production, distribution, and exhibition were done by separate entities.

It feels like game development went the reverse way.

It's important to note that the only reason that Hollywood went from a vertically integrated system to a disaggregated one is because the US Government filed an antitrust suit that forced the disaggregation [1]. And now that that antitrust pressure is gone, we see Hollywood slowly returning to a vertically integrated system, where studios, distribution networks and theaters are all operating in close conjunction to push movies that "ought" to be profitable [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

[2]: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-slow-death-of-hollywo...

Someone can correct me, but I'd put blame for the trend on EA / Madden NFL (~1990?).

It showed what kind of profits you could make off yearly refreshes of software, while minimizing development costs.

Why would an MBA take a chance on new IP when they have the above as an option?

Yes and no. Big companies do development, but they don't necessarily do more development than they used to. EA and Activision actually probably develop fewer titles than they did twenty years ago. They just spend a lot more on each title.

But again: Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Nintendo have always been vertically integrated. This is not new.

I strongly disagree. No publisher or developer conglomerate dominates today more than Sega, Nintendo, or EA did at different times 25- 30 years ago. The past always looks great in retrospect. Today's ecosystem is so much more diverse.

> The best games now are from independent developers who are themselves barely making it.

I wish it was true, at least for my favorite genre. Technically speaking, a small team of developers can create excellent games when it comes to creativity, design, playability etc. but for some titles there is need for a good story, then turning it into acceptable animations, large worlds, complex graphics etc. that's where probably only a major game house can deliver because of the number of writers, developers, designers, actors needed. My favorite games of all time were the Mass Effect trilogy; they were technically great, but the writing, character development, voicing and direction was their point of excellence. I would take ME1-3 story arc over most recent titles. Unfortunately many game studios think only in terms of FPS and technical trivialities that cannot turn a dull story plastered with FPS scenes into something that one still remembers after 10 years. Not been a gamer for a while, so I may have missed a lot lately and would love to be proven wrong (details welcome!).

take a look at Nier: Automata or Dragon Age (1-2, and/or Inquisition). Both easily enjoyable if you like ME.

Seconding Nier: Automata. Rarely have I been as blown away by a game as I was with that one.

Thirding (?) this. The integration of gameplay elements into the story and the story itself are simply amazing. It is similar to Undertale, in that the gameplay is relatively shallow, but is paced perfectly with the story.

Fourthing.

I hate fighting games. I especially despise melee action games. I don't love 3rd person perspective. I haven't really played JRPGs.

Nier:Automata jumped at the top of my list and kept getting better. Even my (non-gaming) wife watched me playing because she was curious and the art and story were fantastic.

A unique experience that is difficult to put into a review. FWIW, my other favourites are Mass Effect, Deus Ex, lots of Sierra & Lucasarts point & click games, etc.

Story telling and surprises (and style) in NieR:Automata were just top notch.

These are all great games with huge art budgets. Nothing remotely indie about them.

It's like when people considered "Star Citizen" an indie game

yeah, GP kinda made it clear that they weren’t looking for indie games

Platinum Games is not an indie studio.

Artistism gap between indie and AAA isn't as big in Japan as in USA, AAA gets more polygons but that's about the only difference.

This, weeb games for the win.

Might be apocryphal, but legend has it Bethesda escaped bankruptcy by taking massive chances with Morrowind. They wanted to go out with a bang, and, creatively, the result was amazing.

That success and the fortune they now had to protect seemed to hemorrhage their creativity or vision or concern. After that, we got Oblivion and Skyrim. Nice but very safe and uninspired games. And the best Fallout was the one from Obsidian Entertainment, not Bethesda Game Studios.

Success kills? Money kills?

With limited resources, bad ideas are ruthlessly trashed.

With limitless resources, all ideas are valid.

That's not it. When you have a profitable IP, the expected value is so high that variance offers you nothing, and hurts. When you have nothing, expected value is so low that high variance ideas are the best -- bankruptcy takes away the sting of negative income.

Squaresoft did the same thing. Their big creative "here goes the company" game was to be their final project. Final Fantasy.

Sixteen FF titles, a dozen spin offs, and two feature films later...

Sounds like one of these word documents. Fantasy_v3_4\ shared\ final\ alpha\ no-really-this-time\ beta5.docx

> The best games now are from independent developers who are themselves barely making it.

....yayy?

> The best games now are from independent developers

Some Indie games are great, but there are still lot of really great big budget story based games being made that an Indie studio just couldn't produce.

>This is a more profitable strategy than simply trying to make a fun game that people want to play.

Still loads of high quality, very profitable, games being made e.g. RDR2, TLoU2, HZD, Ghost of Tsushima, Uncharted, Spiderman, Doom, Gears, Halo, Ratchet & Clank, Cyberpunk2077 (CDPR can't be considered indie anymore), Forza, Gran Turismo etc.

Sony in particular is really delivering with their single player story based, big budget games.

To use cyberpunk as an example because it's one of my favorite genres, I wonder how many of the people who buy Cyberpunk2077 will have ever even heard of Shadowrun Dragonfall by Harebrained Schemes, or Technobabylon by Wadjet Eye Games. I'm pretty sure that while CP2077 has a vastly larger budget for art, code and Keanu Reeves, it won't even come close to these games in terms of narrative, atmosphere etc.

> The best games now are from independent developers who are themselves barely making it.

That's a highly subjective statement, and a blanket one at that.

You could also say that the worst games are made by independent developers and that would also be true at the same time, because "independent developers" is far from being a consistent group.

You're spot on and I wish we knew what to do about it. I think there's a very good parallel between music and games, in both industries it's possible to create great works with innovation, creativity and not much capital. Unfortunately the greatest works don't necessarily bubble up to the top, because the money isn't in producing them, it's in controlling the channels of distribution.

There was great optimism 20+ years ago that the Internet would change this with music, artists would have direct access to their fans, the middle man would be eliminated, and the major labels would crumble. That's not what we got, we just ended up with a new group of megacorps like Apple and Google and Spotify duking it out with the old majors for control of distribution.

To have watched these dreams die in the music industry and see a very similar dynamic unfolding in the digital native industry of games makes me think that maybe this isn't a technology issue, maybe it's something that runs deeper in society and the way people are wired. Then again if we go way back we can argue that the problem was created by technology in the first place (monopolies on music distribution were impossible back when everything was live, they only emerged once we devised technology for recording and copying audio!).

> Maybe marketing is at the core of all of this malignment.

Just a thought: You got these big "movie budget" games. They need to make that budget back, so they use (a large part of the budget for) marketing, in order to sell way more games. This then consumes a very large part of the market. Problem now is that a large chunk of the money made in the majority of the market is spent on marketing. And this chunk of money is locked in with the industry giants, the indies and smaller devs can never get to it. Marketing ate part of the gaming industry.

For anyone into games like this, I also highly recommend Cataclysm: DDA

Not to mention the biggest gaming phenomenon at the moment is Among Us, which was made by one developer and one artist.

River City Girls (WayForward), Factorio, Two Point Hospital, FTL.

Plenty of games out there, no reason to keep buying the same 3d-action RPG formula from the AAA-studios unless that's a thing you like.

Europa Universalis 4 is way better than Stellaris, friend.

It's interesting - they're very different. The historical setting and investment into events to try and keep things on a historical path add a lot to the game IMO by allowing a mostly balanced but asymmetrical game - France can usually ROFLstomp everyone but an overly aggressive France can easily be ROFLstomped themselves. That said, I think EU4 still falls on its face in the late game with mechanics like Absolutism absolutely pulling the breaks off the train and making Ulm WCs possible - in fact EU4 is sorta confusing for that reason, there are essentially two (maybe three if you want to count the reformation+counter reformation) games there and a portion of that playthrough may be more or less appealing to individual players. Stellaris definitely has some distinct phases but without trying to railroad players the mechanics flow from one phase to the next in a much smoother manner.

Isn't WoW Classic published by ActivisionBlizzard?

I wonder what Lucas Pope is up to. There have been no press since Return of the Obra Dinn.

You should try Factorio!

Ha, in Demolition Man every restaurant became a Pizza Hut after the corporate wars.

> My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic.

I had a similar experience with Cosmoteer. And the darn thing is not even released yet! :)

FWIW Ubisoft is very hostile to being acquired.

I worked there for 6-7 years and the CEO fought off vivendis acquisition. Which was not the first.

He has even gone so far as to decentralise the Canadian studios so that if the company was somehow acquired the aquirer could not close down studios without heavy fines from the Canadian government.

Could you elaborate on that last point or share a source? I don't doubt you but I don't understand the legal basis behind that move (but sounds interesting)!

I'm guessing here but the Canadian gov't often subsidizes tech & other engineering companies, so the strategy may be "have the company avail itself of as many subsidies as possible" with subsidies that commit the company to continue operating in City X for Y number of years.

example tech subsidy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Research_and_Experi...

Standard: I am not a lawyer disclaimer here.

The way it was described to me was that there's two major types of fine that the canadian government will levy against large companies that dump lots of workers at once.

1) More than 50 people within a 4week period.

Usually this means that the company must continue paying employment benefits on behalf of the company for a period of a year (iirc).

2) More than x% of your company being closed down.

You can get around #2 by claiming redundancies or claiming that you've moved the job to another canadian state (or, centralised a position), but once you give the studio its own legal entity and place an MD in charge (who is legally responsible for the studio) you can't do that any longer because the parent company continues to have a legal presence in the country, but operations are considered separate/independent.

Thus, if you close down the studio you've effectively terminated 100% of employment there which will garner super heavy fines.

Also also: Ubisoft doesn't want to piss of the canadian government either because nearly their entire profit exists in the tax break that montreal gives game companies.

.. but, like I said, this was told to me only a few times by a few high level directors and it was when we were talking about Vivendi trying to buy us, and they were also not laywers, so it could be a lot of chinese whispers.

But I've spoken to Yves, and while he's a really genuinely nice person... he will salt the earth before he sells the company.

What other Canadian state can you move the job to?

We have offices in Quebec, Ontario and Mantinoba.

None of which are states.

A federated state and a province are interchangeable terms. They have more specific names in some places, e.g. oblasts, emirates, etc. In much of the world the term state is usually used to refer to sovereign states unless directly talking about the US.

But you knew what I meant and are being pedantic.

My point is you can't write a long post about Canadian law, use the wrong terminology and expect to be taken seriously. It's not like its commonly referred to as the Ontario state or state of Quebec. It would be like if I was talking about US law and said the territory of Maryland. It is technically a territory as in "an area of land under the jurisdiction of a ruler or state" but no one refers to it as the territory of Maryland either formally or informally and also makes my post less credible as it sounds like I don't know what I am talking about.

To be perfectly fair with you it's a mistake I commonly make as I'm not exactly interacting with Canadian provinces and it has very little to do with my day to day.

What I am repeating is a "fact" I've heard multiple times from multiple executives and I live half a world away, I've never been truly interested in what the various political systems are in Canada (or the US, or Mexico, or wherever) but I am acutely aware of different laws in those countries too.

For instance in some states in the US it is legal to turn right on red.

If I use the wrong terminology when referencing county or region then it has little bearing on the things I've actually heard.

I never claimed to be an expert on Canadian law, just that I had heard this anecdote and I'm trying to say as often as I can that I'm not an expert in law or Canada itself.

I understand your point, but it _is_ rather pedantic as it doesn't actually change anything about what I said to get it wrong.

I'm sure you know very little about how Switzerland is segmented but you are aware of the direct democracy antics of the country.

Ignorance of one thing does not preclude knowledge of another.

Unity just had its IPO, and the technology is powering a huge fraction of games across all platforms, from recent hit Fall Guys to Pokemon Go, to thousands of indie efforts, not to mention wide adoption in both the AR software industry and as a platform for many AI research projects. I don't know what its financial future will be as the company has been focusing on growth over profit, but it's a significant player.

Tangentially, open-source game engine Godot keeps getting better and better, and it's just a matter of time before a significant game is made using its tools: https://godotengine.org/

According to Switch data, Unity powers about 50% of its games.

It is also the tier1 engine sponsored by Google and Microsoft for their 3D offerings, Godot needs to grow a bit more to reach that level of relevance for game studios, AR/VR companies and Hollywood now looking at Unity.

Nintendo isn't really helpful to understand the greater market.

Most developers don't work with them, and their customers represent a tiny less "gaming educated" population. It's like using cellphone games as a gauge on the greater market.

That's silly gatekeeping bullshit.

By the numbers, mobile gaming is the greater market. It's traditional gaming that's becoming the niche.

If you so wish,

https://developer.android.com/games/develop/build-in-unity

https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/unity/quickstart-an...

https://stadia.dev/blog/unity-production-ready-support-for-s...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/devel...

Is it mobile enough?

That's some impressive mental gymnastics to try to redefine a market to be more like one you want it to be. Here's a tip: Markets are defined by demand, not supply.

> Most developers don't work with them, and their customers represent a tiny less "gaming educated" population.

That's a bit insulting. Mario and Zelda are a few of the consistently best game franchises. Smash Bros gamers aren't "uneducated"

> It's like using cellphone games as a gauge on the greater market.

The mobile game market is bigger than the console and PC market.

The switch is also a huge market for indie devs now. Just a crazy amount of indie games in the switch market. Hell one company, Brace Yourself Games, leveraged their game 'Crypt of the Necrodancer' into a connected zelda licensed game called 'Cadence of Hyrule' that just won some awards.

The whole 'Nintendo is a thing unto itself' narrative is fading quickly.

>The whole 'Nintendo is a thing unto itself' narrative is fading quickly.

I fully agree with you, but that narrative has started changing only in recent times. Not that long ago, I would have mostly agreed with the premise that "Nintendo is a thing unto itself."

If my memory serves right, Nintendo was dipping feet into it since at least GameCube/Wii era, but only with Switch they started seriously being, in my eyes, a not "unto itself" kind of an entity.

It still is, though.

I mean, a part of the reason why indie titles work there is that Nintendo is refusing to offer a AAA gamepass, is using underpowered hardware and is charging a price premium for it. They very much are resisting trends and are their own thing, and it's kind of hard to really use them as a long term market barometer because it can and will backfire as often as it works.

They also kind of are in uncharted waters too. This is now the first time I think they don't have a dedicated handheld and home console, and just have one platform. A lot of why they were able to survive mistakes was having the handheld market as an evergreen to fall back on.

Unity is definitely a big player on all platforms, but it's probably strongest on smartphones / AR / simulation for AI / and indie developers. Epic's niche with Unreal is more high end AAA games / big studio console releases, and now apparently Hollywood & VFX. Disney and ILM are using Unreal for real-time on-set backdrops in shows like The Mandalorian: https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/20/ilm-reveals-how-it-used-u...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Un...

The underlying C++ source code is available for both commercial engines, but Unity charges high fees for source access, and only on a direct per-studio basis, whereas Unreal 4's source is available on GitHub if you pay $20/mo. The vast majority of Unity developers work within its IDE and C# API. There are definitely strong network effects from the sheer number of developers using Unity, such as the amount of documentation, tutorials, and C# code available online.

But again, Godot is fully open source and getting consistently better as it evolves. It's C++ based, closing in on competitive rendering, ported to every relevant architecture, and has a full IDE and scripting system. It reminds me a lot of the Blender project. At some point, some significant video game IP will be built using it and shake things up. It's just a matter of time.

> Unreal 4's source is available on GitHub if you pay $20/mo

Unreal 4's source has been free to access for a while now. The $20/month thing was just when it first came out.

I wouldn't write off Godot, it may not have the hype or big names but it is seeing swelling support from the indie and garage developer side of things

There are more: - paradox interactive - rockstar, which is strong from gta v online and rdr - cd projeckt red, which also get income from gog and hyped cyberpunk - valve won't exit software devs in short time, their investment in vr is big. I won't be surprised if they release vanity knives with lootbox though

IMO Bethesda decided to sell to MS because their recent games cannot generate enough popularity. They can only hoped for skyrim and are struggling with their old engine.

If Rockstar ever gets acquired, this will be one of the most expensive deals ever. They routinely sell games in the dozens of millions of units.

Rockstar is owned by Take Two Interactive. TTWO's entire market cap (including Rockstar and 2K) is about half of EA.

EA is much bigger in terms of revenue.

GTA V, mainly thanks to their online offering, has been the 2nd best selling video game of all time, second only to Minecraft... which Microsoft bought in 2014 for $2.5 billion.

Mind you, Minecraft's income comes from a lot of merchandise and spinoffs, whereas GTA is mainly from the game itself.

I was curious; RDR 2, also a Rockstar game, is the #14 best selling game of all time apparently; I didn't know it did that good. The other GTA games are also in the top 50.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

Note that two thirds of the sales of Minecraft occured after 2014[1].

[1]: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-06-26-minecrafts-con...

It makes me happy to see RDR2 do well financially. It's a breathtaking game that's not just about mindless fast-paced action all the time.

And then you shoot a squirrel.

I rarely buy new games at full price, but I bought RDR2 twice: first for the PS4, the on the PC.

Contrary to popular opinion, Rockstar is actually not a competent game developer.

I'm curious how you measure competence.

Virtually every release Rockstar does sells millions. And from my point of view their games are fun too.

Rockstar makes multiplayer titles, but doesn't have an engine that's capable of dealing with that (leading to an absurd number of bugs and performance problems), and they have no security at all, so their games are only playable on not-yet-cracked consoles. Rockstar even went so far as to include a "finger of god" feature in GTA, which allowed their admins to kick players from and mess with the single player mode, except Rockstar has no security, so mod menu developers figured out how anyone with a menu could use those features to mess with literally anyone's single player. They eventually removed that feature, which as I recall is one of maybe two or three times they fixed a security problem. Previously mod menu users could reset character stats and outright ban other players. It's incredibly broken, even though financially successful, based on ethically questionable marketing of ingame purchases to minors. RDR2 may be beautiful, but performance is bad. RDO runs on the exact same system as GTA, so zero security and unplayable on PC.

I've played most Rockstar titles, but never multiplayer. I don't understand how a lack of security means they're only playable on uncracked consoles. That sounds backwards. I've only ever played them on uncracked consoles. (and it's not just "yet", I just don't crack any consoles I own)

The performance is good enough for any of my purposes. I don't doubt it could be better.

The security thing sounds like a real problem. I didn't know about any of that.

The problem is not what you do with your console or PC, the problem is that multiplayer is P2P and a complete lack of security, anticheat and hardening means that anyone with a mod menu can do practically everything with your game (kick from the game, ban you from in-game features, make the game stuck, crash it, give you bad FPS, flashing or shaking screen, follow you into every session you join and even damage your installation). The only thing that prevents all of this is the platform not being cracked.

How do you define competency? Games sold, aggregate review score, or some other arbitrary metric that you're using to gatekeep on game quality?

My point was that they know how to make games that sell by truckloads. Quality of development is another matter altogether

The people that made GTA great left so that well is going to dry up pretty quick

How do you know? Do you have any source information? I had not read of this before

So more flying motorcycles that shoot rockets? :-) I think they ran out of ideas some time ago unless you count my example.

> IMO Bethesda decided to sell to MS because their recent games cannot generate enough popularity

Truly mystifying why they'd want to create an MMO. It's as if they hadn't been following the news. The success of WoW is incredibly hard to repeat, and most studios who try fail, no matter how much money they throw at it.

The MMO space has been, WoW aside, a money bonfire for one and a half decade at this point.

That, and also, Bethesda already owns the (3rd largest? ish?) MMORPG on the planet, with Elder Scrolls Online.

ESO has been pretty successful, 15 million players:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjagneaux/2020/03/30/elder-...

I'd guess that the article has it wrong and they're mainly on the free tier and that's not the subscriber count though.

ESO has no free tier. You need to buy the base game.

I forgot, that's true. But it wasn't a big hit on release, I'd imagine the vast majority of those are bought when it's on sale, like the steam summer sale.

Fallout 4 was a massive hit and they've got a new franchise about to come out (Starfield). Wolfenstein + Dishonored have consistently sold well.

In May 2016, 5 years after Skyrim was released, it was valued at $2.5 billion, now it's being bought 4 years later for $7.5 billion.

I appreciate some Bethesda fans have a weird agenda, but you are wrong. Also, Starfield has been written in an overhauled engine, so again, wrong[1]. Although to be honest, it's probably the same engine with updates and they're just saying that to try and stop the small minority of rabid fans that keep on harping about their imagined deficiencies of the creation engine with every new Bethesda game. That's then always a massive hit.

[1]https://bethesda.net/en/article/4IwKWIj174Cb2QNTTtBAEb/todd-... - paragraph 9 "[The new console cycle has] led to our largest engine overhaul since Oblivion, with all new technologies powering our first new IP in 25 years, Starfield"

Fallout 76 was an unmitigated disaster and absolute embarrassment to the studio however [1].

[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjyeCdd-dl8

So? Lots of studios have flops. The point is they've had plenty more successes since Skyrim. I even forgot to mention DOOM and Prey. And don't forget, FO76 wasn't even made by the main studio.

Adding the back catalogue to gamepass (and probably taking it all off steam), is part of the price too.

Hell, if the price was $7.5 billion even after the FO76 flop, what would it have been if they'd pulled it off? Making a whole new type of MMO.

Fallout 76 is even the exact sort of "live service" game that seems to do really well on Xbox Game Pass. (Sea of Thieves is often mentioned by Microsoft as a gold standard live service game that exceeds exceeds "sales expectations" precisely because of Game Pass; it probably wouldn't have sold as much as it has without Game Pass.) Rumors are that when Bethesda put FO76 on Game Pass the player count went way up, though Microsoft remains mysterious about actual Game Pass numbers, and FO76 also released a major expansion pack and cross-play at the same time, so if those rumors are true it may not just have been Game Pass but the confluence of things.

That video is a year and a half old. I hear the game has improved since then, but I haven't tried it myself.

So was No Man's Sky when it came out. Though rare, sometimes studios do the right thing over time. FO76 seems to be having a better second act.

See also, Final Fantasy XIV. From disaster to IMO one of the most magnificent games ever created.

I think comparison is a bit unfair since nms is (mostly) single player while fo76 is not. If nms gets good (i believe it is good btw, I play it regularly on VR) it would still sell 5 years later but fo76 would be dead if it can't keep up player count high.

So yeah, a failed multiplayer/mmo game is a bigger failure imo, because it is hard/impossible to recover from

> ... stop the small minority of rabid fans that keep on harping about their imagined deficiencies of the creation engine with every new Bethesda game.

Seeing as there are still some ancient problems with CreationKit (physics over 60fps, widescreen support, etc), I'll be interested to see how much they will overhaul it and how many old bugs will have to be fixed by the community (see nexusmods "Universal Patch" for any CK Bethesda game).

The creationkit games are one of the few that have the two critical components that allow this, mod support and extensive modding communities.

It's easy to have no fixes, when it can't be fixed.

FWIW the 60fps issue was introduced in Oblivion (it didn't exist in Morrowind) and that was because of the physics integration. However that is an integration issue and something they have actually fixed - in other games (e.g. Skyrim VR).

Similarly with widescreen support, there isn't really an issue with it, you can use any resolution by modifying configuration files but they just... do not bother to polish it up.

(note that any bug that can be fixed with normal mods isn't really an engine bug but a content bug - though some mods do work by hooking the engine executable)

> I appreciate some Bethesda fans have a weird agenda, but you are wrong

> small minority of rabid fans that keep on harping about their imagined deficiencies of the creation engine

You post comes across a bit aggressive and insulting.

> their recent games cannot generate enough popularity

I wouldn't be so sure. Sure, they are not GTA or CoD, but Prey, Dishonored or Doom have all sold rather good.

If Epic is successful in their lawsuit against Apple, then I think it's only a matter of time before the consoles will have to allow alternate stores as well.

The hardware-is-sold-at-a-loss argument that people like to use to defend closed console stores isn't as convincing when the console makers also own the biggest money making game studios as well.

Go Epic, go!

Following from alternate stores on consoles, we're not far away from Valve's SteamBox, i.e. prebuilt PCs marketed for living room play. I'm disappointed the idea never took off.

I would love the game industry to fully embrace Linux. If cloud gaming gains more traction, the industry might just do that. Why develop games to run on custom-built blades in a data center when generic blades exist?

> prebuilt PCs marketed for living room play

That's been a dream for a long time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX

> I would love the game industry to fully embrace Linux.

Take a look at what all linux games are lacking and what nearly all AAA game that aren't on linux have.

...

DRM and Anti-Cheat.

Let's forget that DRM is trash. Publishers want to have it, and they don't care about our opinion of it. You can't really "port" DRM, you have to develop a whole new one for Linux and figure how to prevent easy-peasy eBPF programs to make cracking it easy.

Anti-Cheat is another story. Valve and Easy Anti-Cheat are currently working on bringing it to Linux. You need that and you want that for any online game. Probably not as hard as DRM, but still requires a lot of linux specific work.

> The hardware-is-sold-at-a-loss argument

Kind of ironic how bad an argument that is when discussing anti-trust. It's a form of dumping to distort the market. It prevents new competitors becoming viable purely by selling hardware.

It's not a form of dumping, it's loss-leading. Loss-leading can be part of a dumping campaign, but is not necessary or sufficient for one.

Loss leading itself is illegal in some EU countries and half of the US states.

https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/us-submi...

I was expecting you to finish with valve pivoting to hats.

I mean, the joke is funny but realistically it's clear that Valve is getting back in the game, so to speak, and we're probably going to see some VR followup to Alyx in the next year or two.

I dunno about this. The current consensus of community is that Dota 2 is dying and valve couldn't be bothered doing anything about it. Just cashing in while they can.

And Dota 2 is by far their biggest game.

I would say since it was made free to play CS:GO (also Valve) surpassed Dota 2 and it is still rising.

> Dota 2 is dying

I'm old enough that I remember people saying this in 2014. Actual data on active users - https://steamcharts.com/app/570#All. This indicates that it's far from it's peak of 1.2M active players but 700k active is still respectable.

> Dota 2 is by far their biggest game.

Not by players. That would be CS:GO (https://steamcharts.com/app/730) with 900k active players.

900k active presumably includes the 50% of Deathmatch players that are zombies?

It's interesting to see there seems to be some evolutionary pressures at play as a couple of new routines are being used, not just 'rotate on the spot', one or two shoot now (yes, I got shot by an XP farming zombie) and one does epicycles which makes them surprisingly hard to shoot.

I think its actually someone in a computer lab in pakistan etc running 10 computers at a time and just selectively doing an action or two per account each round. CSGO has the same thing.

They've managed to make a Dota 2 tutorial that's worse than the 2014 one. And matchmaking for the new players is just brutal, there is no retention.

Personal story time, few months back me and my buddy got asked to help our non-dota friend get into the game. We are both playing occasionally in lower brackets.

Both of us created new account to so that noobie wouldn't be thrown into deep water right away. Note that me and my friend were 'baby sitting' - playing neutrally not trying to win vs lower rated opponents.

Out of 10 games 7 had hardcore smurfs in them. People in stack dominating their lanes. I don't see how anyone new and without any friends could possibly survived through such acid pool.

Imagine you are starting to play chess and 7/10 opponents are rated master and will crush you. And its kind of crush that you can't really learn from either.

I really don't see how dota can grow when there are so many alternatives.

Are you sure matchmaking didn't detect you were smurfing?

Nah we both play passive (avoiding aggression ourselves), besides blatant smurfs getting 15 kills by 20min are not tagged as smurfs. I just don't think there are any mechanisms to catch that and match noobies with other noobies. Instead they are sent straight into slaughterhouse.

To fix that problem you have game systems that are more random / forgiving in lower ranked games (remove the skill).

Then in the harder ranks you can dial back those mechanics and make the game more skill based.

Just a little tip for Valve there. I'm sure they're reading.

I am of the mind that any new player should play 10 games with bots at a minimum with tutorial driven gameplay.

Only after that should they be allowed multiplayer.

On a side note, the bots are not working since the latest patch.

CS:GO is actually their biggest game now, but it does look like Dota 2 is dying. From a business perspective, they don't have any reason to try and save it though. They've lost ~40% of their players over the past 4 years, but are making more money than ever. The in-game tutorials have been unfinished for years, their Dota+ subscription service is all but abandoned (but still bringing in millions of dollars a year), and even cosmetics are mostly contained to a time-limited battlepass to take advantage of FOMO.

CS GO was abandoned by valve, community picked up the scene by creating their own leagues and tournaments. Only then valve gracefully came back to support CS :(

CS:GO is also going to trend downward soon with the release of Valorant, which is basically the same game with a few superpowers attached. All my friends who played GO switched over, they're attracting a pro scene, I think it's only a matter of time tbh.

I've avoided Valorant because it requires kernel drivers. But I'm in the minority, most gamers don't even know whats involved there.

I'll be a single counter-point. I straight up reinstalled Windows to play Valorant and all it's done is made me play a lot more CSGO. I'm legitimately having more fun with CSGO now than I have in a very long time! The game feels like it's in a super good place. It's got a ton of cool skins, the competitive scene feels really competitive at the moment, playing it competitively feels great. The DM mode scratches a very good itch, gun game is still a lot of fun, etc...

The International has been growing every year.

I'm not sure about that. I read Alyx as a very successful tech demo intended to push the market sector out a bit and make money off the platform and hardware, rather than a renewed more games-centric direction for Valve. Much like iD's output often being tech demos for the game engines that they then license to other studios.

> very successful tech demo

Can't think of a Valve game that doesn't fit this description.

Tech demo? Have you played it?

It's a heck of a "demo". It's about the size of Half Life 2.

I do not doubt it is a full game.

But that is not its sole purpose.

The only debate is whether is a game first, or a demo of how full games work in the framework/hardware first and a full game because that was deemed the best way to showcase the what is possible.

People really need to watch (play?) (read?) The Final Hours of Half Life Alyx. Its a documentary-like experience available on Steam which dives in to the past decade or two at Valve.

From the outside, all we see is very few games being produced. From the inside, its far more complex; something like a Dark Decade for Valve where even they weren't sure what they should be working on. Hundreds of failed prototypes and ideas. Major technical issues with Source 2 that took years to fix. L4D3 was under development, but ran into huge scope creep (full open world with variable length days depending on time of year and hemisphere, variable tides based on moon cycle, crazy stuff like that). They were working on a tech showcase codenamed ARTI/Artifact using a brand new voxel-based game engine separate from Source (and after the game was canceled, the name was taken and used for the now-released Dota 2 Card Game).

When you hear stuff like this, the acquisition binge that so many companies go on starts to make sense.

When you hear stuff like this, you start to wonder if Valve's management style is half as sustainable as they would like to think. Without Steam and hats/knives they'd be broke several times over with that sort of lack of focus and inability to release games outside of what seems a decadal cycle. (ETA: Which possibly makes a "locusts of gaming" analogy relevant for Valve, hah.)

Except that out of that experimentation came Alyx. Everything in that game is outstanding from a technical perspective, the way you interact with the world feels completely natural.

Sure they could have pushed out a VR game every year for the last 5 years to maybe get to the same level of interaction fluidity but they would all feel subpar, not quite there, like the vast majority of other VR games.

Valves strength is that they a have a structure that allows experimentation without a hard deadline, they can afford to throw millions at the wall and see what sticks. This allows themw to take a decade between large, ground breaking projects. They're not beholden to YoY or QoQ growth.

They've had what? Two duds in 20+ years? Not bad when you consider the rest of their output are beloved classics.

Granted they have a good few money printing machines to help them work like this but I would argue that they have these money printing machines because they have the ability to experiment, because of their structure.

Sort of; unless they make more games, Alyx is "just" a tech demo or an attempt to sell more of their VR kits.

It's weird, they've got some seriously good franchises that they haven't done anything with; Half-Life could use a sequel every few years; Portal could become a massive franchise; Team Fortress 2, CS:GO and DOTA 2 are huge money makers but I think they're reluctant to make sequels to those because of balancing and pissing off the existing, invested player bases. (I think that may have happened when they went from CS:S to CS:Go, where the latter had very lucrative monetization options, lucrative but morally dubious because of off-site trading and gambling)

as a player, I'm not really sure what would be gained from a sequel to csgo. any big change to the mechanics would just piss everyone off, and smaller changes can just be done as updates to the existing game. csgo was only ~$20 when it launched, and it's free now, so I don't think there's much financial upside to selling a newer cs title. they already make plenty of money off skins.

the only thing I see that they could really change in a new title would be the graphics, but I don't think that's much of a selling point to the audience. cs players care more about getting >100fps on their potato computer than pretty graphics.

Do we need sequels every few years? Don't get me wrong I'll be the first I the queue for HL3 or Portal 3 but only because historically it has been a fantastic set of games.

Maybe I misunderstand what you mean but pretty sure the CS:GO knife market is way bigger than the TF2 hat market, so knives fit the joke better.

We still have large, amazing, original games coming out of small studios. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an excellent example.

We may get to a point where there are practically no "medium-large" developers and only "massive" ones like Microsoft, but I'm confident we'll still get great games from outside the massive groups.

In just a generation we will have our own version of zaibutsu and chaebols, isn't that exciting !

Nintendo is self-sustainable, Apple is exerting a lot of influence among smaller studios with Arcade. Like Annapurna Interactive (which is nota bene funded by Oracle).

I would never want it to happen because of how much I love Nintendo. But I have always thought if there is any gaming property Apple can really benefit from buying, it is Nintendo.

If I'm doing the maths correctly - Nintendo's current worth is somewhere around $40BN?

Like, that's a lot of money, even for Apple, and then I'm not sure Nintendo would want to sell?

> I'm not sure Nintendo would want to sell?

Nintendo definitely wouldn't want to sell but it's publicly traded so a hostile takeover is always in the cards

Japan government would for sure exercise their golden power if someone tries an hostile takeover on any big national corporation like Nintendo.

I mean, one of the founders (Megan Ellison) is Larry Ellison's daughter, I'm sure he helped it get started, but does Oracle as a company have any official activity with Annapurna?

Nintendo is just two bad generations of hardware from being vulnerable enough to sell itself (IMO.)

They had only $4.3 billion cash on hand as of 2018 (surely more by now thanks to the success and maturation of the Switch.) But Microsoft just dropped a little less than double that on ZeniMax.

I wish Nintendo were in such a rock-solid place where I'd feel confident about them existing forever like Disney but I don't think that's ever been the case.

Edit- The people downvoting me have apparently already forgotten about the Wii U. Imagine if they had two such systems in a row, without the DS/3DS line as a profitable fallback. Such are the possibilities of the future.

When Nintendo's doing well, they're doing great, and everyone seems to forget the bad times. The GameCube era wasn't much better, but at least the GameCube and GBA were profitable/break even from their launches, as opposed to the Wii U and especially 3DS post-Ambassador price cut.

Would be interested in a discussion or any kind of rebuttal from others who are actually familiar with Nintendo's financial history.

To be clear: Nintendo as a company operated a loss from 2012-2015. An incompetent CEO could easily exacerbate that into a death spiral. Don't take Nintendo for granted, is all I'm saying.

> But Microsoft just dropped a little less than double that on ZeniMax.

And there you have a key difference between Microsoft and Nintendo.

Worst case scenario for Nintendo would likely be making Xbox and PS5 games and PC games. I don't think they will ever be for sale.

Yeah, I mean, Sega don't have the mindshare they used to when they owned hardware, but they're very much still a thing.

(replying to both you and the parent)

It's a possibility but pivoting to software isn't easy by any stretch, and it wasn't something Sega should have even been able to do (financially.) The only reason it happened is because Sega's biggest debtor, Isao Okawa, forgave that debt on his deathbed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/17/business/isao-okawa-74-ch...

In a slightly altered timeline where Okawa didn't do this, Sega would have went under and its IP's would have been sold piecemeal to the highest bidders.

Nintendo has famously large cash reserves rich and a quick Internet search suggests they have about 7 billion in cash. Things would have to go very badly for them to go out of business, especially as they can presumably issue new stock to help raise money for a pivot in some sort of doomsday scenario.

You make good points but Nintendo is such an iconic Japanese brand, it seems like their government would get involved if they were in dire straights.

As a Nintendo baby, it'd be a dark day if some conglomerate bought them.

I was just thinking though, if they needed money they could easily raise crazy amounts of cash from their fanbase via crowdfunding.

Their central bank is already buying Nintendo stock and is the largest shareholder in Japan, I think.

Over $4 billion cash on hand is an insane amount of money for such a small company. Nintendo is only about 4,000 employees worldwide, so that cash will go a very long way.

Wow you say "only $4.3 billion" for not huge company.

I wish Nintendo would just take some ideas from other companies in the areas of online play and incorporate them into their own products. My friends and I would love to play Mario Kart on Switch with each other, but we can't be bothered to setup an additional voice chat solution and use the dumb lobby system. We also would like to play Mario Party online, but Mario Party Switch doesn't even offer its main game modes online, just a handful of mini games.

It's frustrating because there's a lot of untapped potential.

You're getting downvoted because you are talking from a place of objectivity. From my understanding (outside of the Wii U), aren't they the only company not losing money on consoles - even now? Why would you bring up "selling themselves" when talking about a company founded in 1889? None of the competitors existed that long - using your logic, Sony and Microsoft might as well count their last days.

"It eventually became one of the most prominent figures in today's video game industry, being the world's largest video game company by revenue"

i.e. on the verge of bankruptcy according to ^

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Nintendo

Annapurna Interactive has had their name on so many creative, well-done projects recently. I had no idea they received funding from Oracle, but quite frankly that just makes me think (somewhat) better of Oracle, not less of Annapurna.

Annapurna was founded/is run by Megan Ellison, Larry Ellison's daughter, if it seems curious!

I'd disagree here. Would recommend checking out this piece [1] on Nintendo's failure to expand as an IP brand.

https://www.matthewball.vc/all/onnintendo

> Nintendo is self-sustainable, Apple is exerting a lot of influence among smaller studios with Arcade. Like Annapurna Interactive (which is nota bene funded by Oracle).

I feel Apple Arcade sucks. I recently subscribed, cause I thought maybe my daughter would enjoy it. But most of the games are still too hard for her. So then I tried to play some games on Arcade for myself, but can't say I enjoyed it. Played a few games for 15 - 30 minutes then got bored. There just seems to be very few -if any- really quality games on Apple Arcade, at least from my point of view.

A few days ago I ordered the Retroid Pocket 2 [0], I hope this device will help me get my gaming fix.

If the Retroid Pocket 2 provides me and my daughter with a fun experience, then later I'll order a 2nd one for my daughter. I believe old NES/SNES games are probably easier to play for a 3.5 year old child compared to most of Apple Arcade's offerings. My daughter can already handle a simple gamepad, so as long as the game doesn't use too many buttons (4 directions + A/B/X/Y), a game should be playable for her.

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[0]: https://www.goretroid.com/products/retroid-pocket-2-handheld...

Have you tried any NES games lately? They're super hard! SNES games are better but they're still almost all very difficult.

> Have you tried any NES games lately? They're super hard! SNES games are better but they're still almost all very difficult.

NES games might be hard. I never really had a NES while I was young. But I do know for sure some SNES games that will be easy to play. E.g. Mario Kart & Unirally. There's some videos on YouTube that shows other games that are playable by young children [0]. Super Double Dragon isn't too complicated either I think and the Retroid Pocket 2 can be connected to a tv using HDMI cable and can use BLE to connect controllers. So that way I can play together with my daughter at the same time, to make it even easier for her.

Here's a video that suggests some NES games for children [1].

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[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwn1IM7GV10

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dmF3FbZwlQ

Apple's entire approach to gaming is broken. I tried to play various games on my iPad Pro and AppleTV recently and just getting a controller to work is a shitshow. Half the games that work with controllers have weird moments where you need to touch the screen.

It's fine for extremely casual or touch based games but doesn't work for anything serious.

As long as no one buys From Software everything will be ok. Praise the Sun.

Fear the Old ~~Microsoft~~ Blood.

There's been already 2 Playstation exclusives from From Software, Bloodborne and Demon's Souls (original and remake), so you never know.

The barrier between what indie studios and big studios can produce is increasingly shrinking. I'd say the market has never been healthier. The sheer amount of content is still constrained by some linear function of man hours but there's enough crowdsourcing business models like kickstarter and early access releases that even small shops can afford to show a cool concept and get funded for its completion.

Don't forget Tencent.

Epic is partly owned by Tencent but yeah, they are a very big fish, specially with their interests in mobile gaming.

And not just Tencent - there are also other companies, like NetEase, which while smaller than Tencent at about 1/6th of the size, still takes more annual revenue than EA. (Going by figures on Wikipedia).

And also Bilibili might also join the industry with Fall Guys mobile https://twitter.com/ZhugeEX/status/1297205586350747648

If you think Valve will exit software development, then you don't understand the market. Valve did do that and had this luxury when they were the only big game platform on PC. Unfortunately for them, there's GOG, EPIC, and MS Game Pass now. They need exclusives and the best way to do that without going the EPIC route is by developing their own games.

I'd argue that Valve doesn't need exclusives just yet. By virtue of being the default PC store they get plenty of games that are not on any other store. But this will change.

Alyx wouldn't exist if you were right. GOG and EPIC are credible threats.

A lot of people claim that this is reducing competition but the gaming industry seems to be much less consolidated than many others.

I don't think it's fair to include Microsoft in that list. They buy game studios so they can close them and shelve their IP after several attempts to turn beloved franchises into GAAS products. They're less of a game studio conglomerator and more of a recycling bin.

Depends on which era of Microsoft Game Studios / Xbox Game Studios you are talking about. Also, Microsoft has never really shelved IP ever, even Flight Simulator is back out of retirement! They've sold IP back to (nearly) the original developers, which is somewhat unheard of outside of Microsoft (Fasa's BattleTech/Mech Warrior and Shadowrun IP brands are back in the "indy space" because Microsoft sold it back; you rarely hear of an Activision or EA IP getting sold back to small developers). Even Microsoft's worst turnover period of developer subsidiaries had some interesting mitigating circumstances: Bungie wanted to be independent again (and again that's a weird case where you'd be surprise to see a developer like Bungie spin back out of an Activision or an EA; Bungie themselves had to do a ton of work on their publishing contracts to avoid being swallowed up by Activision with Destiny), and rumors are that whatever happened to Lionhead may have been a suicide, though who knows if the story will ever be substantiated one way or the other (and Lionhead's IP hasn't been "shelved" for long either with Playground Games working on a new Fable).

This - only if Activision returned Infocom to an indie or sent it to the public domain!

Godot, Blender, itch.io, Krita. Nobody forces you to use walled gardens. Games are entertainment, not something mandatory, so I wouldn't worry too much. If there's too much of an lock-in from the major vendors, it will simply cause the indie scene to explode.

How did you leave out Nintendo? :(

Ouch! This cuts deep because of how close to actual future it sounds. Especially

> Valve will quietly exit software development altogether, and pivot to building custom vanity knives using their hardware manufacturing experience.

I think Sega is also a major player, they have bought up many studios in recent years including Relic, Creative Assembly and Amplitude.

That's how every maeket works, sooner or later, things will be in a few hands.

At least indoe games still have a chance. (among us for example)

I find that funny when Among Us (indie) and Fall Guys (also indie) are some of the highest-trending games at the moment.

Both of them are free, though. The former one only got this push due to streamers suddenly playing it together. These are kind of "meme of the moment" games more than anything, in the same way VR Chat was a bit ago, or Five Nights at Freddy's.

On what platforms are they free? They're paid games on all the platforms I know of.

Fall Guys was "free" on PS4 at launch in the sense that it was included in PS+.

Among Us is just really cheap (free to play on its original mobile platforms, I believe, but that's not really the source of its current moment of popularity).

Being included as part of a paid service seems a like a liberal use of the word "free".

Well, hence my quotation marks.

Plus is a strange case because you need it for online play and some other PS features like cloud saves, so many people have it regardless of what games are on offer. Let's just say that a large number of PS4 players got it at no marginal cost.

Microsoft and EA have some deal now revolving around Game Pass Ultimate which grants you access to EA Play also.

Probably missing the largest gaming company in the world Tencent here. I believe they will still thrive.

Bobby Kotick is on Jeffrey Epstein's list. He also lost a sexual harassment case against a flight attendant from one of his private flights.

Miss Ukraine 1996 married Bobby Kotick's dad, Charles Kotick (for 2 years, before he passed away).

Where can I preorder the butterfly cloud9 knife?

>Soon we'll just have Microsoft, Epic, and a conglomeration of EA, Activision, and Ubisoft

And, you know, all the other independent developers. Of which there are a legion.

Embrace, extend, extinguish but for games!

Lol, you're probably not far off :D

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