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Moreover, like Hollywood, the gaming industry is largely run by people who truly do not understand the thing they're there to make. All of the C-levels still think it's the early 2000s where you could shit out anything that looked like a popular game and make 20 billion dollars from it. They think their entire market is dumb kids who will mindlessly play whatever is put in front of them without regard to polish, story, or even playability.

I mean... You could make a knock-off Fortnite with Minecraft level graphics, make the cosmetics unlocked by just playing, and give it away for free. That would probably be enough to topple Fortnite. It just also would net you exactly 0 profit.

Sure but when you have an established successful franchises with a working recipe. Like. Just release the next ace combat I swear to God it's been 6 years without a peep about ace combat 8 despite ace combat 7 being by far the best selling in the franchise.

Heres a gamer-brained analogy:

You know how all the manosphere types describe 90% of women as only being willing to date the top 10% of men?

This is that.

90% of all the money in gaming is going toward developing a game with a 10% chance of being rhe next Minecraft, the next Fortnite, the next big huge thing that will generate a stupid amount of money by functionally acting as its own MTX ecosystem with widespread adoption.

It is: We don't sell consumer model economy cars because our financial situation is so wound up in financing (read: debt obligations) that we can actually only afford to sell high end luxury models, otherwise our profit margin is too small, and then we can't afford our operating costs and debt obligations, so then we have to downsize and fire everyone and most importantly, our shareholders don't get as much ~~wealth extraction~~, I mean profit.)

The ... problem with this obviously is that if 90% of the money in gaming is shooting for making basically the same kind of game... well then it is all competing with itself, thus causing a gametheortic prisoners dilemma situation where everyone acting out of maximum self interest actually results in the worst possible outcome.

Another problem with this is that these games are very expensive to make, and they must be made very fast... so, everything other than the MTX system in these games will be buggy and sloppy and garbage tier...

So, yeah. Game companies are the same kind of delulu that the manosphere thinks 90% of women are, chasing a wildly unrealistic outcome via wildly unlikely to work means.

(Disclaimer: I am not saying I endorse or believe in this manosphere idea, I am using it as a gamer-brained analogy, assuming it is true for sake of argument and comparison.)

I'd hate to say it, but look at any big publishers quarterly reports. Compare how much base games sell compared to micro transactions.

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They would all like to take the lead and have "the" live service game but unfortunately even their bland attempts still bring in a lot of cash. This is why the push to live service is so aggressive.

The only thing that's been slowing the push down is these big live service failures, which is making big publishers a little stingy on what games to push.

You are correct though, the big franchises have a lot of name recognition and its really hard for a competitor to muscle in on that established space (though they do try). Established IPs is a safe bet that often pays off, despite gamers lamenting it.

That and everything now needs to be "disruptive". An idea doesn't see the light of day in a tech board room without explaining how it's going to disrupt the market and create space for itself. So unless the game is pitched as a killer of whatever the competition has it won't move forward. It's the whole silicon valley mindset of move fast and break things in action.

"I don't understand what you're calling the wallet piggies" - executives and the whole marketing dept

This one, right here OP.

Capitalism is, at its core: Profits > all

Profit is more important to these chucklefucks than the customers happiness, their loyalty, the staff that make the product, hell, even the product they're selling... This includes your life; profit is more important than your life. If they can bump their quarterly earnings with you doing something dangerous that turns you into a fucking grease stain, they'll fucking do it. They're psychopaths.

Only because of laws does any company do "the right thing". Everything else they do is to reduce expenses, or increase profits.

They wouldn't try to make the next fortnite, if fortnite didn't make its creators disgusting amounts of money. Games wouldn't become micro transaction hell if microtransactions didn't rake in shitloads of cash steadily.

Video Games are simply their tool to extract the maximum possible value they can from you. First it was stupid one-off horse cosmetics, then it was paid DLC, then they started shipping half of a game before it was ready (cutting dev costs so they could get their payout faster), then releasing paid "DLC" which was the rest of the fucking game.... To now, when we have little more than an idea, some mechanics, and somewhat unique art design before the steaming pile that they call a game gets to be "released", and they'll literally add everything later.

Look at halo. Let's use it as a case study. The original game had its share of problems on release, but it was at least pretending to be a full game when it came out. Full single player and multi player, with a fully fleshed out campaign, complete with working cutscenes. Halo 2 followed a similar path, for the most part... Eventually, the Halo dev team became beholden to the almighty shareholder and now we have halo infinite with an infinite amount of bullshit and no single player campaign... Unless you want to pay extra for it, or for these skins, or for.... You get the idea.

I played, and liked Halo. I fell away from it after Halo 2/3 due to life stuff, and at this point, I picked up the master chief collection for the nostalgia, but that's probably the last money I'm putting into the franchise. I just can't be bothered. It was good while it lasted.

Halo is hardly unique in this. I only used them as an example because it was easy. I could have also used Diablo....

The profit incentive is toxic to creativity. Try to imagine how much cultural value is lost every single day because of no UBI and having to worry about a survival job.

AA is a game that is a normal full sized game, but was made on a budget that limited scope. Good examples are the Metro series or Balatro. AAA is your normal games with big budgets. AAAA is a special title for Skull and Bones, it means you spend a gigantic amount of money and make sure the whole thing sucks.

Which would you rather have 1 million dollars or 100 million dollars?

It's not that straightforward, unfortunately. The real culprit is allowing all giant public companies to hoover up all the small companies. Now you're not a 3 person team with a side job trying to pay the bills and getting lucky. Office rent, Unity/Unreal want their cut, app stores want their cut, Salary, IT, Healthcare. You end up needing to support quite a lot of infrastructure to make that 1 Mil game. That no longer 'moves the needle' on your company's yearly income and the stock suffers.

Then, you can't just make a game and release it anymore, you need live ops, sales, events, campaigns, otherwise you're leaving money on the table.