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Comment by kiawe_fire | Hacker News Reader

The gaming sector has already been struggling with a (relative) lack of AAA content and incomplete releases with quality issues.

I can’t help but wonder if we’re in for a rough couple of years in the market with all of the additional tumult.

Granted much of the tumult is a direct result of the conditions that caused quality issues in the first place.

I’ve often argued that AAA games are just too big, and gamer expectations too unreasonable to be sustainable. (Not that I mean to excuse poor management as a leading factor).

Perhaps we’ll see an eventual changing of the guard and a reset to a more sustainable market, closer to what we had in the 90s?

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The paradox is that it feels like better hardware is making AAA gaming worse overall. In order to be taken seriously as "AAA" a developer feels like they cannot choose not to use the hardware to its fullest. Modern hardware means that we can have huge, open, living worlds, so every AAA game must have a huge, open, living world, enormously inflating development costs both in terms of scale and complexity. Likewise, modern hardware means that we can have beautiful, photorealistic graphics, so every AAA game must have beautiful, photorealistic graphics, massively inflating the budget due to hiring so many artists to make those assets, resulting in games that can't afford to take risks because of how much investment has been put into them. The temptation to do this has always existed, but now technology (and gamer expectations) has advanced far beyond the ability of game devs to scale.

> Perhaps we’ll see an eventual changing of the guard and a reset to a more sustainable market, closer to what we had in the 90s?

How about a different point of view: the 90s originated this problem. The advent of 3D hardware meant that every game had to be 3D. The shame is that with the prior generation (SNES et al) we were just mastering the art of 2D games, but suddenly all that gets chucked out the window (or nearly all, see Symphony Of The Night as the exception that proves the rule) in favor of crude, clunky, first-gen 3D adaptations. It wasn't until the mid-2000s that the advent of modern indie gaming would pick up the thread of 2D games, resulting in some of the best gaming experiences I've had. Maybe ten years from now AAA studios will at last feel free from the obligatory burden of pushing hardware to its limit and will content themselves with putting out games that are less technologically ambitious (and put some fraction of the saved effort towards something else, like storytelling or game mechanics).

> The paradox is that it feels like better hardware is making AAA gaming worse overall

Perhaps this is like induced demand with road expansion projects. All you are doing is making the pipes/scalars bigger. You aren't fundamentally changing the nature of the equation or otherwise solving for some bigger creative problem.

Constraints are the path to high quality experiences. Fun emerges because we impose artificial limits on our reality (i.e. game logic). A totally unconstrained simulation without any rules would get boring very quickly.

Imposing real world constraints on those developing games should also encourage more creative solutions that will more likely be experienced as novel and fun by the user.

No one ever had a good time simply because a player model could be rendered with 10e8 triangles rather than 10e7 in the prior iteration.

I sometimes wonder if open worlds have become the norm because, now that they’re possible, they’re easier. Not in a raw effort sense, but in a creative sense. They solve the question of “what will the player do?” by giving the player a carnival of map checkpoints: shoot some targets here, do a scavenger hunt there; it pads out a story that could otherwise be played in 6-8 hours into a game that can be marketed as a 40-60 hour AAA adventure you can “play your way”. They’re not easier for the creatives, but they’re easier for everyone else.

Of course, the continued existence of games like Dark Souls, and the meteoric success of games like Among Us and Phasmophobia tell me that players don’t always want to “play their way.” There’s plenty of demand for games with a finite amount of well-made content with a satisfying gameplay loop.

I completely disagree with this take. The worst offenders recently have been games where the developers were determined to continue supporting outdated old XBox and Playstation hardware as well as trying to offer a next generation experience to PC and next-gen consoles.

There were incredible games like Hades, Cruelty Squad, or 13 Sentinels that released recently and didn’t tackle the induced demand of next-gen hardware.

I think the parent commenter is suggesting that when studios look away from technical showcase, evocative and new work comes to the forefront.

I'm not aware of this happening to any game other than Cyperpunk, can you name others?

Valhalla is a good example. It's a great experience on the modern platforms with SSD/NVME drives, but really rough to play on the older HDD consoles.

Battlefield 2042 is the latest example. All of Ubisoft's games. The new Call of Duty WW2 game. There are lots.

>The paradox is that it feels like better hardware is making AAA gaming The advent of 3D hardware meant that every game had to be 3D. The shame is that with the prior generation (SNES et al) we were just mastering the art of 2D games, but suddenly all that gets chucked out the window (or nearly all, see Symphony Of The Night as the exception that proves the rule) in favor of crude, clunky, first-gen 3D adaptations.

If we don't do anything new, how do you expect things to get better? SNES games wouldn't exist if Nintendo decided to remain as a trading card merchant on the basis that electronics would piss away a century's worth of hard work in "mastering" the trading card market. And besides, early attempts at 3d on the N64 were a success. Super Mario 64 is still one of the most influential games to this day.

I think the shift to "games as a service" or calling a game a "platform" is a reflection of what's happening here. To my knowledge, Halo Infinite, Roblox, CoD, Battlefield, and Fortnight have called their games platforms. Riot is doing something kind of similar with funding indie studious to build on their tech and IP. What they generally mean is that they're moving away from releasing new games/versions every N years and instead continuously updating a single release with new content, modes, and so on.

From a product perspective, this makes a lot sense to me. We're past the era when new releases diverge significantly from their past versions. This approach of continuously updating an existing game has already been happening for a while with Fortnight and CoD, and it's led to a lot of variety with much less friction to getting the new experience.

From an economic perspective, I assume it's a lot cheaper to develop updates than new releases, and a lot of them can monetize with cosmetics.

If we're doing platforms, I'd love to see modding culture make a big comeback this way - more of what Roblox is doing, but with something aimed at adults. The old days of Halflife and Warcraft 3 mods were so huge in my childhood, and I feel like it's a huge missed opportunity by these studios not to tap into this more.

Doesn't really scale, as you mostly have one or two games per genre that will become dominant.

I fear this approach would actually kill any user generated content. The king of user generated content are probably still the elder scrolls games, but I doubt they will develop anything like that ever again because it fails to make a business case against something like fortnite, even if the probability to develop the next craze is quite slim. I believe their latest online versions don't leaver many possibilities for modders

> I’ve often argued that AAA games are just too big, and gamer expectations too unreasonable to be sustainable.

The most recent AAA game that I have attempted is Battlefield 2042.

I managed to force about 7 hours of that game in, and probably won't be able to convince myself to go back for more. I had maybe ~15 minutes of fun across that interval. You could probably flip a coin to determine if my experience was adverse because of rushed buggy garbage, or if it was a bad gameplay concept to begin with (i.e. ridiculous scope).

I still find myself playing older games like Overwatch, League of Legends and Minecraft with far more frequency than anything else out there. Maybe I've become jaded or burned out on gaming, but something in my head keeps saying that these studios just aren't trying anymore.

What is it about one of these "older" titles that can keep me playing for 5-6 hours per day that we cannot seem to capture and move into newer titles? Maybe this is just me and everything is fine...

New AAA games feel like what you get when you digest a previously popular title through "What did you like?" focus groups, generate a list of checkbox features, write a game spec from that list, and then make that game.

And at no point is anyone in the room asking "Is it fun?"

> And at no point is anyone in the room asking "Is it fun?"

Would it be economically infeasible or otherwise unattractive to investors to propose a new game development business where "Is it fun?" is the only question that matters?

Presumably, you have access to this entire marketplace of exiled ubisoft/blizzard/et.al. employees, so maybe the formal business plan starts with acquiring some of this talent and determining what projects they might want to work on.

Essentially, that's Nintendo's first-party business model (or at least as close as it gets in the industry).

But the "acquiring some of this talent and determining what projects they might want to work on" is the standard bloodletting that happened every few decades in the game industry.

Usually, this resulted in the next Blizzard, Westwood, Dynamix, etc. being founded, growing, and then dissolving into the next wave of smaller companies.

But it's been screwed up the past cycle though, as the investment required to make AAA-level games was only available from large publishers, who set terms that generally resulted in development studio bankruptcy and subsequent buyout-by and incorporation-into the publisher.

Which is how you got your Activision Blizzard, EA, Take-Two, Ubisoft arrangement.

Nintendo is that company, so it seems like the concept can exist and satisfy investors. Satoru Iwata was big on this mindset. I guess he’s been gone for 6 years now (good lord, how could it be so long ago?), but I think they still do a good job in this area.

> ...acquiring some of this talent and determining what projects they might want to work on.

That's largely what Valve does, and their games (when they make games...) are usually regarded as some of the best in the industry

Valve, a division of Steam Inc

I'm a massive battlefield fan, I've played every game they've released in the past 15 or so years and battlefield 2042 was so actively not fun I got a refund for it.

Almost every major game developed during the pandemic has been like this. Even Halo, a really good game, had massive swathes of content cut from the game because it was unfinished.

It is partially you, but not in a general "You are different than everyone else" sense. Nostalgia is powerful - the games I played when I was younger will always win out in my head compared to newer games.

You're comparing one AAA to known massive hits. I don't think its fair to say its a trend just from that.

What is it about older games? Survivor bias.

Except Nintendo games I only play indie games.

They are like the games in the 90s or 00s.

So yeah we have this market its just not were these AAA companies play.

Some cool indies: - Shovel Knight - Hades - Deep Rock Galactic - papers please! - unnamed goose game - Probably more which I forgot

The huge 30% commissions charged by Sony, Microsoft, Valve, Nintendo, Apple, Google are a huge negative factor to the potential profits of the industry. On top of that, you have sales taxes from every country in the world, which are creeping upwards globally. For every $1 of customer spending, typically only 50-60c reaches the developer.

In most other Tech sectors, you can go straight to customer, without platform commissions or taxes, and the profitability and salaries reflect that.

All of the profits in Gamedev are taken by platform holders.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UBSFY/ubisoft-ente... lists "Annual Gross Profit (Millions of US $)" => 2021 $2,217. I think they're doing fine.

The market is large enough that I don't see why its important in any way. If one company you like has a major failure or even gets bought out by a larger firm, there are a lot of alternatives who can compete for your time and attention. What constitutes a 'rough couple years' for the market?

The guard changed and like hollywood, the accountants and inbred corporate boards are in charge forevermore.

Massive gamer expectations don't exist in a vacuum, they exist because the AAA game space is heavily marketing for the purpose of building hype and expectation. It's on purpose. once in a while there's an anthem or cyberpunk level implosion but why do they care when they're raking in billions in microtransactions? That's just the cost of doing business.

The companies release incomplete low content games because people keep buying them and the profit is massive. There's too much money to be made in microtransactions and repeat fees like season passes. There have been a few large notable failures but their net loss is much smaller than the massive income through microtransactions.

We will never return to a 'sustainable market' because the market is all about companies trying both the existing things and new things to maximize profit and minimize cost, and others copying. The market is thus always in tumult and is never sustainable, with some firms failing and some firms succeeding at different times based on the ebb and flow of whatever the current events are at the time.

As a gamer, I can say we are a fickle bunch. We’re no different that pop-song listeners at this point. We love it when it’s a hit, and we’ll play it out until we can’t stand it anymore and never look back. If you make an indie game or a big budget one, you are vulnerable to this fickle crowd. You are better off hyping the living hell out of a game and cashing in the initial few months than you are to build a modest game with a community that will stick around.

It was never really like this, I’m not sure what happened. I really don’t know where it all went wrong.

It’s a hits driven industry at this point.

I'm a non-gamer, but my impression is the opposite.

We programmers expect all our tools and libraries to be not only free, but open source too, and then will bitch if they have bugs.

Gamers, though? AAA games release with loads of bugs, clunky DRM/anti-cheat rootkits, often have cheat problems anyway, hundred-gigabyte downloads, online services going down on christmas day, online voice chat full of race hate? They'll pre-order before a single review has come out, at a cost of $70.

These are some of the least fussy customers in the world.

We’re a little different in software because we are apart of the ecosystem. We get to ‘add value’ to open source for our employers. All the more reason to give back for sure. But imagine the gaming industry, where millions of consumers have no ability to establish equity (not even in the form of a career). You won’t be able to add anything back to Call of Duty, other than you playing it (as if it were Facebook, and you were just a profile). That’s all they have, and they pay for it.

We on the other hand, can use the open source thing, or roll our own, or pick another thing that’s freer. That’s why we don’t pay 70 bucks.

Some of this exists in open source projects, where you'll see non-coders or novice coders demand that their most wanted bug be fixed, and they'll storm around the Github issues harassing people for not prioritizing their needs over the project as a whole.

But in general, yes, there is an heir of entitlement in the gaming space right now.

The most harmful, IMO, is the knee-jerk visual shaming of every game. We can criticize the devs and publishers for focusing on graphics over fun, but it's a chicken-and-egg problem. When every game trailer or demo is immediately torn apart for "not looking amazing enough", and every non-critical visual bug of a player model's hair clipping into her face is turned into a meme, it shouldn't be a surprise that the focus is on screenshot worthy visuals first, and gameplay can be "fixed later".

It is a hits driven industry, but the stakes for making that hit are high, and often times the things you need to do to get buzz before release is mutually exclusive with the things it takes to keep the player base after release.

There's also the reactive demands to "just give me this game mode" or "just nerf this weapon" without realizing how much work goes into implementing things in a balanced and fun way. If you've never sat down with a game idea and coded a demo with stick figures before, then you've probably never had that moment where you realize the idea you had in your head just doesn't work when implemented. Or, conversely, how you can then tweak a couple variables and make it unexpectedly fun in ways you never would have thought of otherwise.

That said, I would LOVE a return to modding and more open source extensibility to gaming to converge the two.

That said, I would LOVE a return to modding and more open source extensibility to gaming to converge the two.

There’s such a good case for this when you realize two of the most profitable game modes ever emerged as shitty custom map mods in StarCraft and Warcraft (Tower Defense and the entire MOBA genre). Counter Strike was a mod as well.

The industry has sort of turtled and sheltered itself away from this. In pre-CS:Source/Global Offensive days, players made weapon skins/models/sounds and distributed it for free. Instead of making a marketplace and platform for gamers to create assets, the industry monopolized asset creation and cornered the market in these spaces so they are the only ones that can sell content. This is true across the board, gamers are not being given a chance to take place in the marketplace and effectively shut out. The new map, skin, game mode, all come from the game company only.

Roblox is kind of the only forward thinking platform at the moment because they serve as a platform, but even that is not enough. You still have to be a developer to take advantage of their platform. I don’t think their tools are the same as well designed map creation tools, model creation tools, etc. There’s no effort being put into this, and I believe it’s mostly because there is simply more money in monopolizing content creation.

Weirdly, I think the rise of the Sandbox game (your Minecrafts, every survival game) is an offshoot of the dereliction of player created content. That, in the absence of this initiative, what you have is an admission that the players want to contribute to the game in their own way. Instead of giving them the well thought out tools and monetization platforms, you instead give them a half-assed open world where they construct their gameplay, with no chance of ever making anything more of it (like a whole genre, skins, models, game modes, to share and take credit for).

It really depends on where these players live. A significant number of them read Reddit and Steam reviews, watch YouTube gaming channels, hate Activision/EA/Blizzard/etc big companies and swear against buying their games... but there's tons of buyers outside of the Internet who don't listen to all that. Lots of people just buy games from companies they know. Moreover, lots of these people are parents/grandparents/aunts/uncles who know nothing except the company name, and know the names of stuff their kids are talking about... and they go buy those games for Christmas. The latter buyers are often disconnected from the real players of those games.

Yeah, I don't really get why some people buy all this hype and even preorder stuff. Maybe I'm getting old, but I just don't care anymore for most of the new stuff, no matter how fancy the looks. I downgraded my PC and only play indie / decade old AAA nowadays, with only few exceptions which are mostly niche strategy games.

Funny enough, those niche strategy games are, IMO, a great example of middle ground that I think is missing in the industry.

We have a thriving indie scene full of pixel art action platformers, RPGs, and rogue-likes, often built by a couple dozen developers at most. And we have the AAA scene that is expected to eke out every bit of performance and effects out of your RTX 3080, often developed by hundreds of people.

What about something in between?

Some of the newer strategy games have great, polished visuals with some modern sensibilities, but they aren't super high budget productions with infinitely detailed high res textures and countless objects filling every scene. But neither are they going for some C&C or Dune 2 inspired pixel retro look.

And the player base is just fine with that. As long as there is a certain sense of polish and creative direction to the art, then the most important part is "is the game fun?", "does it have solid gameplay systems", "is it balanced", those sorts of things.

This space doesn't really exist much for first person shooters or third person action games. There have been a couple of examples (Yooka-Laylie, A Hat in Time, Pumpkin Jack?) and certainly some rogue-likes like Strafe or Ziggurat that come close, but the market seems small and spotty. I'd argue in part because player expectations don't allow for this as much in the FPS space as they do in the strategy space.

Games has been a hit driven industry really since it started. Having a longer tail is really a very recent trend. That’s why everyone wants an evergreen GaaS setup. Get a steady annual income and you can float about burning money. You might not even need another hit for decades.

I'm going to go ahead and guess platforms like social media/twitch/etc encourage us to keep looking at the next thing instead of looking at what we have. Meaning the previews look great but they dont translate into lasting experiences.

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