Comment by the_only_law | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_only_law | Hacker News Reader

What’s going on in game dev? I’m seeing a ton of companies, big and small pump out what seems to be the opposite of what their fans want.

The other day, I clicked on a video ranting about one of the latest Battlefield games. I used to play BF4 years ago. I enjoyed it, and remember plenty of CoD vs BF debates. As I was watching the guys rant, I couldn’t help but agree with everything. Everything shown in the video, was exactly the opposite of why BF built a great franchise. It seemed more like the company tried to be every shooter game that’s been popular in the past decade at once, and seemed more like a cheesy Fortnite ripoff than the tactical arcade shooter I remember.

I can name numerous other games (mostly in shooter/strategy genres because that’s what I mostly play) with similar stories of games starting to flop because the companies ignore their customers, usually so they can ripoff some recently successful games.

FWIW, there are some great companies making amazing games (this year has been awesome for Paradox, for example), it’s just odd that many franchises I remember being quite good take such odd direction that people will hate.

"Fans" is a small market, it's better to aim at the mass market who don't go on forums.

This. The video game industry has grown by such huge amounts over the past 10-15 years that fans of old franchises are a small minority of the total demographic developers want and need to justify pumping the budgets they do into games now. Most of the new market consumers are fine with microtransactions, season passes, cosmetics, loot boxes and other types of monetization and gameplay that is way more profitable. If you sell a game d2 fans want, you are making serious monetization concessions to appeal to a tiny sliver of the overall userbase of the next diablo so it doesn't make sense.

When a game like Genshin Impact does 1 billion in revenue every 6 months it is only a matter of time before the rest of the market moves in that direction.

> it is only a matter of time before the rest of the market moves in that direction.

And that’s a terrible thing for players - people - in the long run.

> What’s going on in game dev? I’m seeing a ton of companies, big and small pump out what seems to be the opposite of what their fans want.

A lot of companies are chasing what they have determined to be bigger revenue generators - seasonal content, micro transactions, mobile-first etc. In some cases this has proved successful despite backlash from fans (Diablo Immortal) and in others it's been an unmitigated disaster (Battlefield 2042).

AAA games these days are not about creating a great game any more, they're about creating a highly profitable one.

I have a feeling the 'fans' are getting pretty old and/or stay a minority.

In my case, I was the only 'old gamer' parent in my daughter's entourage that actually bought games. The rest had to make do with whatever they could pirate/play for free. And outside the techie audience they may not even have a gaming computer to play pirated games on. They will have a phone though, and mobile games are all free to play predatory.

Even the daughter plays free to play abominations because they're all social and most youngsters do not understand disconnecting.

Diablo Immortal received a lot of backlash from fans.

Despite the backlash, the game has made $100m of revenue over 2-months.

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