Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

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I have a friend who works at Ubisoft. Even 10+ years ago, she clearly saw the writing on the wall - the massive developer/publisher consolidation was going terribly:

- Every studio uses their own custom set of tools and development practices. The economies of scale of merging studios together just doesn't really exist.

- The functional difference between most engines for consumers at this point is largely meaningless. There are no order of magnitude gains like there used to be. Most of the engineering is on the cloud services architecture or anti-cheat.

- The median "developer" at a game studio is not actually a very technical person. They mostly just spend their days inputting content and assets with the available tools.

- The value of a AAA game is not how innovative the gameplay is but how much content they were able to stuff into the game.

- Nobody cares about "exclusives" anymore when 90% of AAAs have interchangeable gameplay with other AAAs.

- The cost to start a new studio is negligible compared to the cost of acquiring existing IP.

15 years here of game development. Hoping to add some nuance to your viewpoint.

1. Yes. Every studio is optimizing for a different set of problems.

2. We don’t need to re-invent the wheel. There is a lot of value to the consumer in good engineering, and value to the designers. Adding content isn’t free.

3. The median “developer” is good at what they do and will meet the technical proficiency needed. If you’re a writer, or a 3D artist, I’m not going to expect you to be coding - but they all use Version Control, are in Engine, and are familiar with tooling.

4. AAA relies on content to reduce risk, but it is an active conversation on gameplay innovation. It’s hard to take a risk when you are on the hook for repaying millions of dollars to investors.

5. Nintendo sell hardware based on their “exclusives”. Sony know this and invest heavily, they are no longer supporting PC releases (see: GoW).

6. If this was true, every team would be a startup flipping assets. This isn’t the case, not just because new studios don’t have pipelines or internal/external infrastructure.

The business of games is in part the game product. But it’s much more than this- it’s relationships with vendors, platforms, other studios too.

IMO, people should stop chasing making AAA games or whatever nVidia pushed out. They should just build games instead of graphics demos that sometimes sold well.

They can stick to desktops 10 years ago, make smaller teams, and either build their own engine or use something that is not UE5.

Ten year old desktop users aren't exactly known for buying new games, especially at full price.

The average spending gaming hardware are the consoles. No one is going to start building a game targeting a Playstation 4 today, they'll target the 5 year old PS5.

> No one is going to start building a game targeting a Playstation 4 today, they'll target the 5 year old PS5.

That's not true. New games are still being made for and released on PS4 and will still be for the next few years. If the PS4 hardware is enough for your game, you can just release there and people can play it on PS4 or PS5.

https://www.pushsquare.com/guides/new-ps4-games-release-date...

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