Gwen

Dumbass in a dumb land

  • She/Her

I was born in the late Holocene and I've seen some shit



MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

this is a genuinely really interesting post in that it's a rare acknowledgement that modern AAA live-game dev is totally unsustainable if you ever want to make anything else, ever again


MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

to expand on this slightly; I think it's become pretty clear that the Fortnites and Genshin Impacts of the world have reached a pace of gigantic updates and self-remakes that is unsustainable without a dev team literally thousands strong, and that has now Set the Standard for pretty much everyone else who's competing in that space. AAA genres have always been dangerous to try and compete in, but the live service shooter/rpg is now basically a flaming money hole for anyone who isn't the sole winner. I feel like this is going to manifest as an acceleration on the crash-n-burn speed of new live games until people figure out a way to pull back on player demands, assuming that can even happen anymore.


bruno
@bruno

The game business is traditionally one where you ship a product and sell units, and if you pick your spots correctly your product gets to almost stand alone on its own merit.

In live games, however, you are perpetually competing with every other live game in the same genre. The only way to succeed is to be not merely good but best in class. There’s room for only one looter shooter and it’s Destiny. There’s room for only one mmo and it’s wow.

Multiply that by ballooning budgets that require games to be succesful for years to recoup the initial investment and you have a recipe for a lot of bad risk and a lot of disappointment.


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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

Which is interesting because I feel like live service games are assumed by players to be easy content treadmills that take less work and make more money as opposed to a very different model of development entirely.

This is honestly really only true of mobile games (and sometimes not even then, i.e. genshin), simply because gachas and the like usually have a lower overhead and are deliberately designed not to eat your whole day the way a destiny can.

in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

in reply to @bruno's post:

As an aside, it's always been interesting to me that no one has really managed to corner the Diablo ARPG market this way. I wonder if the single player campaign focus means it's just too expensive and not viral enough? Diablo and Path of Exile and various KMMOs (and grim dawn getting a new update once every 4 years) have been going at it for ages but there never quite seems to be a winner. That's probably for the best.

Hunt Showdown has chugged along for a while just selling copies + slow drip cosmetic DLC packs so as long as your game is good it seems perfectly doable.

This just feels like yet another "we are only satisifed if we get ALL the money" scenario rather than a "it can't be done" one.

Makes me so nervous to see so many dev studios try to get into live service games nowadays. I worry it's going to sink them if it doesn't take off, but I guess these things print money if they do take off to make it worth the risk.

There's also this very specific kind of brain worms that business types seem to get infected with every 3-4 years: a game is a runaway success in a new genre, and the numbers are so enticing that it makes the suits think "we could develop a similar game on the cheap; if we grab even a small fraction of that market share, we'll have a runaway success!"

Which is one of those fantasy scenarios that sounds plausible but never actually pans out. Because by the time it takes your studio 1-2 years (very optimistically) to get anything playable out the door:
a) the original game you decided to compete with has spent the same amount of time refining and polishing their product, which means you have even more catching up to do, and
b) a dozen other studios have all tried the same strategy as you and now you're all fighting over the same very tiny piece of pie