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Comment by Cumpiler69 | Hacker News Reader

And more layoffs will come, until western studios start making good games that gamers actually want, not games they think some imaginary audience who doesn't even play videogames wants. And on budgets that aren't in the hundreds of millions, blown on sensitivity consultants like Sweet Baby and settling lawsuits on discriminatory hiring practices.

They'd better course correct fast, as Asian game devs will be eating their lunch. Black Myth Wukong anyone? Stellar Blade? Dragon Ball Sparking Zero?

Nature is finally healing, the free market at work. The indie game scene is flourishing while the old players are dying.

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Games that gamers want and games that bring in the most money by milking gamers are not the same thing. And publishers will always care about the money first and foremost.

>And publishers will always care about the money first and foremost.

Have you seen their share prices and the garbage games their making with heavy losses? They clearly don't care about making money. If they did they wouldn't be doing what they're doing.

Perfect example is Ubisoft.

What do you think they care about then, if they're not trying (but in some cases failing) to make money? Is this the point where we invoke conspiracy theories about the games industry trying to destroy itself on purpose due to some vaguely defined woke agenda?

How come some little known games studios manage to make good games consistently that sell well and why does Ubisoft keep failing despite ownings some of the biggest IPs in the industry when their audience keep telling them what their mistakes are but they keep ignoring.

So yeah, it's intentional, not a conspiracy. It's the emperor's new clothes. Nobody working there wants to point out flaws in the games they're making (like having a black samurai in medieval Japan as a main character) for fear of being called a racist/bigott, so everyone goes along with it till the studio collapses.

I don't particularly enjoy Ubisofts games, they're the definition of bland uninspired AAA slop, but they are profitable. As a publicly traded company their financials have to be transparent so we know for a fact they were net positive over FY 2024.

Their share price today is lower than in 2008. Unadjusted for inflation.

Ubisoft is always making profit but their profit margin getting smaller and smaller so that one day (if this continues), executives will begin to sack developers to keep their high salaries intact while pandering to shareholders.

Funny you should choose 2008 as the reference point because they did a 2:1 stock split right at the end of that year (i.e. the stock price halved but they doubled the number of stocks in circulation, keeping the companies value the same). Comparing the price of a single stock now to then is apples and oranges.

Their stock price has dropped sharply since its all-time peak in 2018-2021 but I recall they were already being accused of a woke agenda during that peak, for example due to the villain of 2018s Far Cry 5 being a white American conservative preacher. Their stocks decline wouldn't start until 3 years later.

They are held afloat by a few massive live service games, but every single one of their major releases this year has been a disaster. From the comedy of errors in their latest Assasin's Creed game, to the first ever "AAAA" flop Skull and Bones, to Star Wars outlaws, which was so bad the board announced a comprehensive internal review to figure out what went wrong, and the recent announcement of the sunsetting of their "COD killer" XDefiant. They can't coast off of Rainbow 6 Siege forever.

>How come some little known games studios manage to make good games consistently that sell well

because you're ignoring the thousands that failed, I suppose. Survivor's bias will do that. I wouldn't call Torn Banners a large studio and that's the other half of this article.

> why does Ubisoft keep failing despite ownings some of the biggest IPs in the industry

because "succeeding" for a company the size of ubisoft is no longer just "making a fair profit on games and coasting about to make more games. Which is what most not-large studios strive for. And because they use these failures as an excuse to not say the quiet part out loud in that they are preparing for a recession. You'll at best hear "economic headwinds". People woulda been laid off no matter what.

The fact that not just ubisot but virtually every lage studio this year has been doing this shows that this isn't some speciic ubsoft failure. And the profits sugggest this isn't some upcoming 2nd collapse. But you gotta read between the lines, and you're not even reading the same book to begin with.

> What do you think they care about then, if they're not trying (but in some cases failing) to make money?

They care about attracting investment fund money and not building a good product and growing their consumer base. There's no conspiracy, ticking woke checkboxes gives you extra points in any consideration, that's a fact in current political climate.

Biggest investment funds are those managing retirement funds so even a single fund like that is 'voting with wallets' of hundreds of thousands(if not millions) of its clients that wouldn't support the game company to begin with.

If you want to see something grassroots check Grinding Gear Games and their developer interviews for the sequel game (POE2) that will be releasing tomorrow. You will see them engaging in discussion with community for hours, talking about their server infrastructure and how it can fail, releasing numbers of their stress tests and how many players they expect based on preorders (~1 milion).

Than again this only happens when your PR person is actually the technical lead that knows the product inside out and not someone interested in quick buck. Guess how many of that team will be fired this christmas...

Edit: 10 minutes about their infrastructure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lB3TM5FrsY#t=1h9m50s

Hmm, there are some companies that are run by openly ideologically driven people who are caught up this. They are very open about their agenda which is also very well defined in conference talks and blog posts, there is no conspiracy theory, just annoying preachy people whose games are undesired by the market. Not sure why you think this is a conspiracy theory.

Absolutely true - but because games are time consuming to make you have to anticipate what will make money in 2-6 years. Faced with this challenge, a lot of studios have fallen back on chasing trends - witness the deluge of "hero shooters" coming out 8 years after Overwatch released. Unfortunately the long time delay means that a trend might already be on its way out by the time your game ships. Worse still, monetization methods sometimes lose their potency/viability over time as bad actors give them a bad name (see what happened with loot boxes).

>Absolutely true - but because games are time consuming to make you have to anticipate what will make money in 2-6 years.

Or, hear me out, you can choose to stop chasing fads that might get outdated in 2-6 years, and actually make something original or make something tried and tested that's low-risk on a small budget.

Gamers are simple people with simple wishes, they just want to have some fun, some escapism for a few hours, and they'll give you money for it. Sony's Astro bot is a clone of Mario64 but it works.

Chasing fads is the laziest thing you can do, because it's easy to present to management/investors.

Making something on a small budget often means smaller returns as well. A large game studio would rather make a couple of billion on a huge AAA game than spread themselves across a dozen projects which collectively won't make the same returns - even if each one is profitable. This is the same reason that movie studios love chasing a few massive blockbusters instead of investing in a bunch of smaller projects.

At the end of the day some of this comes down to market incentives. A public company is expected to grow. For a gaming company this means either shipping more games or bigger games. If you ship more games, at some point you start cannibalizing your own sales (e.g. how many different shooters can you make that would have non-overlapping audiences?) so you go bigger.

Notice this affliction doesn't affect some of the more successful private, indie studios. Supergiant Games has shipped a pretty long string of hits, but the level of production for each one is relatively constant - they're not aiming for "AAA" graphics or scale.

> Chasing fads is the laziest thing you can do, because it's easy to present to management/investors.

Totally true, but at the end of the day you have to convince someone to spend $200,000,000+ on development. You need something concrete to point at as a reason why you'll be successful.

>Making something on a small budget often means smaller returns as well.

Yeah but you also don't loose the farm if it fails, which let's be real, is the more likely statistical outcome than success , unless you were surrounded by Yes Men who told you how much gamers are gonna love Concord lol and you were dumb enough to believe it because you're a bean counter and not a gamer.

What hurts more, loosing a million dollars of a hundred million?

Game Studios need to learn to be more scrappy and do more small scope projects on tighter Budgets instead of betting the farm on one hit game.

Yep. Tencent (Fortnite) and Activision/Blizz (overwatch + COD) are printing money while publishers who missed the battle royale train almost all killed themselves trying to release a bunch of failed overwatch clones.

Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Metaphor: ReFantazio seem to go against this.

I call this Product Manager driven game design. The Soulsbourne series I hold as the shining beacon of game design that decided to go their own way.

As games got more and more "accessible" and shipped more and more quality of life features added, here was a game that decided to add friction to everything. You can't pause. You can lose EXP/money when you die. There are cheesy gimmick deaths just to screw with you. You can't replay dialogue. There is no quest log and there are missable quest steps all over. NPCs will disappear and travel to unknown locations.

Demon Souls and to some extent Dark Souls 1 were positively niche but the games went on to be genre defining giving birth to "soulslike" games and Elden Ring waz justly rewarded with mass appeal and awards.

I don't have a problem with games being accessible but I relish a story of someone going all-in on taste/vision driven-design and succeeding. I am also a little bitter of many AAA games becoming busywork simulators because games must deliver engaging experiences x times per hour which then just leads to bloated fetch quests and checklists and busy screens full of quest markers

>I call this Product Manager driven game design.

I call it game design by HR. Everything today by big western games studios is designed to be so super safe and sterile just in case to not be offensive to absolutely anyone, so you end up with a limp-dick experience that's not fun to anyone, encased in the carcass of a once famous IP to build up hype.

Or worse, modern game devs insert their own social and political ideologies into the games, like for example in Star Wars Outlaws you play as an outlaw who is only allowed to rob the police (we see what you did there) but not the civilians, and you can't kill animals, only pet them. Games studios keep pretending like they don't know their target market. They keep making games for the market they want it to be, not the market that is.

People got into video games for the escapism from reality, to do shit they aren't allowed to do in the real world, not to be lectured or have even more constrains than in reality placed upon then just so the game studio can tick all the $CURRENT_DAY social and political messages and safety boxes. Nobody wants to spend money on that. So they'll be loosing money and their jobs till it sinks in. That's the free market at work.

As long as gamers can't define "good game gamers actually want", this is a useless metric.

Gocha games are an example of "games gamers actually want". You don't need to ask people define what they want, you need to see what's selling and just do that, because sales and profits are something you CAN measure.

But I doubt the DEI departments at Sony, EA, Ubisoft and Microsoft will ever let them release games with waifus and jiggle physics, so they'll have to keep saying no to free money on the table just to die on that hill.

Edit: The gocha waifu anecdote was an example to prove a point, I'm not advocating that that's the only way to make money and that everyone should start making that. There's other successful examples besides gocha.

Is it really a "want" if it's an addiction?

Are attractive female features an addiction or natural reaction to biology?

Depends on if they're actual female features or something that doesn't exist in nature.

EDIT:

I was referring more to the addictive nature of gacha games.

Games aren't addictive because you can see under a girl's skirt, as that gets old pretty quick. They're addictive because they're fun to play. The waifus are to draw players interest.

They're not addictive because they're fun to play; they're addictive because they activate certain parts of your brain in a certain way.

A dude staring at a screen just clicking buttons with no expression on his face for hours on end might say he's having fun, but that's gonna be hard to sell me on.

Gacha + waifus is definitely a huge hit. Especially because it also capture the female audience. Also cosplays on conventions do free advertising. (see Genshin Impact)

Never seen western studios release a game of this genre.

It's a mixed bag. Like any other live service game, you'll see 1-2 breakout hits and then 100 more that can't even last a year. Sex can't magically sell everything.

relying on organic advertising is even harder than making a good game. Some things are just in a snug little corner and never truly break out to that mainstream.

1. gacha, not gocha

2. Ubisoft is large, it does both. it has several mobile games. No gacha models, AFAIK.

3. "You don't need to ask people define what they want". If someone is going to assert "make good games", then yes. I may as well just simply ask them. Alternatively: do you really think I'll make Genshin Money if I just copy Genshin? a dozen studios already beat me to it.

4. "I doubt the DEI departments at Sony, EA, Ubisoft and Microsoft will let them release games with waifus and jiggle physics so they'll have to keep saying no to money to die on a hill." Those aren't the only ways to make money. Not even in Asia. And this is an odd statement given Sony did publish Stellar Blade this year. Its wishy washy but it's not like there's some hidden cabal banning this stuff. It really comes down to a mix of culture, PR, and sales. Dead or Alive's newest dating sim isn't releasing in NA just because of "DEI"

A lot of developers don't want to make those games regardless of petty social politics. It's not productive to imply that teams working in creative mediums should optimize for profit to the exclusion of what they want to make or are good at making. There is a lot of room between the scattered financial flops of big producers and gacha waifus. Great things are in that space.

You know Stellar Blade, a game you used as an example in your first comment, was published by Sony, right?

I guess you can by the number of units sold on certain games. GTA 6 looks to be a blockbuster once it's released.

I mean it's pretty straightforward, hard shift in the opposite direction of what HR wants/is demanding. Don't add microtransactions, make it compelling in game and out of game, aka things like guilds in WoW where there's a meta human interaction element overlaid on top.

sounds like a great way to make a game people wanted 30 years ago but would fail today. You're basically describing a modern mobile game without the main monetization.

People want services, but don't want to continuously pay for a continous service. well, that's why MTX work. For every 100, 1000 people playing for free, you got some whale amortizing the cost for them.

> don't want to continously pay for a continuous service

Uhh... people do all the time, we invented a word for it, subscriptions. It's like the main form of non-ordinary expense people pay, the issue is that the product has to worth it, MTX focused games are so geared to the lowest common denominator they aren't fun (usually)

I'm pretty sure they could, if you asked them.

As an example, I am confident that a true successor to Battlefield 3/4, unencumbered by EA's often terrible decisions, would sell very well. The problem is, it probably wouldn't make the same money as some microtransaction-ridden free-to-play dopamine factory, and so management wouldn't actually _want_ to make the game that the gamers want. (Though supposedly there is a game like that in the making -- I just don't want to get my hopes up because I've been fooled too many times.)

sure, I could, you could, every commenter on HN in the last 24 hours could.

Put them all together and we'd probably get a mess of genres with little overlap, or "worse": probably some already existing popular game that is hated by the gaming enthusiasts. Because we've long left this monoculture where any one game is the talk of the town for years to come. Or because the businesspeople actually are serving what people want.

You're also right that what enthusiasts want are rarely the most profitable. Blizzard can make 5 HD games and even MTX them up to high hell. Candy Crush is probably still making more than any of them. Just another example of how utterly diverse gaming has become (or perhaps, full circle where bejeweled on steroids still can make so much money).

Free market is not a metric. It's just natural selection. No one needs to understand it for it to run its course.

you need to understand it if you think you can just "make good games" like a switch.

I agree. We need more Zelda and Stardew Valley and Portal and less Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.

People love GTA and COD they execute really well

There’s really no shortage of games atm

I think there was some sarcasm in the parent comment, although also I believe at the same time a clear expression of personal preference.

you can throw a dart on an indie board and you'll probably hit a farming sim competitor. And we just got a new Zelda.

It's really interesting that western game studios act as if they are car manufacturers who are highly protected from foreign competitors by the government.

I think in many countries they receive a lot of funding from governments. Especially Canada. But yeah, they're not protected from foreign competition.

A decent percentage of what "gamers actually want" is literally too cringe to develop.

It's ok, if you don't develop cringe games, others will and will make money while you will die broke on that hill. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. The customer is always right.

Had to look up that reference to Sweet Baby. Apparently they've been a recent target of "woke agenda" accusations [0] including wild conspiracy theories like being controlled by BlackRock (what?!) or forcing studios to make characters black [1]. The irony with the latter being that the game in question - Alan Wake 2 - is widely seen as a "good game".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Baby_Inc.#Online_backlas...

[1] https://www.imdb.com/news/ni64471459/

Alan Wake 2 was a critical success but no one bought it. The studio just a few weeks ago said it still hasn't earned its budget back. [1] I tend to ignore major game outlet reviews myself, because the industry simply is not mature enough to review in the way that others are - way too many outlets are afraid of corporate backlash for honest reviews of the negative variety.

[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/remedy-has-recouped-most-of-the...

I'm not clued up on modern game economics... how long on average does a game take to start making royalties these days? The article you linked says it's the company's fastest selling game, selling 1.3 million units within a year. Compared to their previous game Control which was released in 2019, had much lower initial sales, but has now reached 4 million units. So is it not reasonable to think that the royalties will be flowing in over the next few years?

Royalties may be flowing in over the next few years, but they still have to keep the lights on and the payroll flowing - the long tail of a game that wasn't initially profitable may not be enough. Remedy has a few projects in the barrel, and if those hit it big they will probably be fine, but I remain skeptical. (especially if they stick with an Epic exclusive PC deal)

Sad but True. Okami also had quite the cult following and tail, but that was way after Capcom shut down Clover Studio. These studios depend a lot on the first month sales to stay afloat.

I imagine Remedy was overall fine (as in payroll) thanks to Epic's bankrolling, but few studios get that privileged.

> Remedy has a few projects in the barrel, and if those hit it big they will probably be fine

It's hard for me to gauge whether this is normal for modern game studios or they're desperately hanging on by their fingernails. But the disparity between you saying "no one bought it" and it being the company's fastest-selling game makes me suspicious of everything. Either way, times have changed since my only interaction with Remedy, the original Max Payne :D

As with any kind of statement released to the public I hold little stock in things that are not definite. What exactly does "fastest selling" mean? Is that an indicator of a wide and long tail or did it sell a bunch of copies in the first month and then very few later on? 1.3 million is a hard number - something they (I hope) can't lie about, as with the statement "almost made back its budget". Everything else to me is just spin and fluff.

Critics are a minuscule part of the audience. Also reviews can be bought.

To be actually successful a game needs to capture the target audience (gamers).

Problem is there seems to be a huge disconnect between critics and gamers gamers nowadays

I couldn't get past the first 30 minutes. All the sudden I have some ghost thing chasing me in basement of the sheriffs office. Then the sheriff just ups and disappears. Seriously felt like i skipped something on accident.

>Alan Wake 2 was a critical success

Gaming critics are irrelevant. Their opinions on games is not more relevant than your opinion or my opinion. It's not like they got a PhD from Game Criticism University.

They're just average joes who give each other clout online to practice access journalism and are bought and paid for by the big studios to parrot opinions favorable to drive sales for their games.

Games studios should listen to the gamers who actually buy the games, not to the journalists who don't.

>Had to look up that reference to Sweet Baby. Apparently they've been a recent target of "woke agenda" accusations

It's not just accusations, it's the truth. Sweet Baby Inc CEO came out in public talking about how they're blackmailing game studios with social media mobs in order to create demand for their services on censoring games, and recordings of SBI employees in video presentations saying their jobs is to "burn the games industry to the ground" and that game devs principles are rooted in "white supremacist patriarchal values".

How can one call it a conspiracy, is beyond me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq86DnmX2xY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6DygXwMOJU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQa7NyicVAY

Maybe it's my age, but I don't find reaction videos over a couple of selected quotes to be persuasive. Especially the first video, where the quote doesn't sound much like blackmail to me. The script is:

> If you're a creative working in AAA (which I did for many years), put this stuff up to your higher-ups, and if they don't see the value in what you're asking for when you ask for consultants/research, go have a coffee with your marketing team and terrify them with the possibility of what's going to happen if they don't give you what you want.

This is advice to employees about how to push for change from within. It's kind of aggressive, and the word "terrify" is OTT, but it's legit to say "if we don't do this we're going to get roasted on social media". Unless I'm missing something, there's no suggestion that Sweet Baby themselves would be the ones whipping up social mobs.

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