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Or, hear me out, you can choose to stop chasing fads that might get outdated in 2-6 years, and actually make something original or make something tried and tested that's low-risk on a small budget.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