SubjectNerd

Vertices Are Pain

  • He/Him

Game programmer, former technical artist, sometimes low-spec artist


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.


Unangbangkay
@Unangbangkay

Things seem only slightly more sustainable on mobile because most mobile games that aren't Genshin Impact have lower overhead than a AAA console/PC release, and, crucially, are deliberately designed to maintain a relatively small footprint in most players' lives. Not so with any PC/console-native service game I've yet seen, which shows me that no one in the space learned from the MOBA frenzy of the previous age (i.e. that the saturation threshold for live games that eat your whole day is extremely low)

by comparison, lots of players can play multiple mobile games at a time, dipping in and out regularly just to do dailies or catch up with an event and ducking out. Even mihoyo seems cognizant of these limits: Both of their newer f2ps, honkai star rail and zenless zone zero, are noticeably smaller in scale and somewhat less demanding on time than genshin impact - so much so that avid players have noticed and are beginning to resent genshin for being slow to back-port their "quality-of-life" mechanisms

anyway, it also "helps' that mobile games do not take half a decade to just to develop and, if they hit, punch well above their weight (due to being casinos)

But even with that in mind mobile service games are becoming even more competitive and cutthroat. A new gacha has more chance of dying out once the content runway expires (say a year?) than keeping it up unless the publisher has deep enough pockets to back it while it builds an audience of whales with sunk costs. Otherwise most players who do play these things have their own limits, and have had, by now, years to pick their "main", which they'll support till the lights are shut off.

don't really have a solution here (if I did i'd be a highly paid consultant), but i feel like AAA devs still out to make a service game not aiming to become players' second or third jobs would be a start towards having something more sustainable.


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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

in reply to @Unangbangkay's post:

Even mihoyo seems cognizant of these limits: Both of their newer f2ps, honkai star rail and zenless zone zero, are noticeably smaller in scale and somewhat less demanding on time than genshin impact - so much so that avid players have noticed and are beginning to resent genshin for being slow to back-port their "quality-of-life" mechanisms

It's true and I kinda hate it because, as someone who plays gacha (vs people who avoid it like the plague, those folks will still hate it), Genshin does so many things different and better than other gacha.

  • It has BotW style exploration, except it rewards random wandering and exploration with chests and puzzles more complex than Koroks. It also has significantly more varied environments (due to having way more time to make them, obviously).
  • It's stingy about giving out primogems vs other games, but conversely it gives you pity at less pulls and retains pity between banners.
  • It requires way less equipment and grinding to max out a character than other games, and doesn't introduce hyper-specific equipment that is required for specific fights and otherwise useless. Once a character is built you almost never have to rebuild them for something else.
  • 4 star free characters are fully capable of clearing all content except the endgame monthly challenge fights. 5 stars make fights go faster and easier but you are never blocked from progressing the story just because of bad drops or pulls.

Some things would be great to port over (specifically being able to choose a 5 star from the standard banner after X amount of pulls on a new account) but I'm basically not interested in MiHoYo's other games precisely because of the reduced scale.

Absolutely valid, and i totally get why you wouldn't be interested precisely because HSR and ZZZ are definitely more "typical" of gacha games in terms of size and scope (rn they're mainly distinguished by having mihoyo-class visuals), though from their perspective i think this is the right call: instead of having their own products compete with each other and potentially cannibalize each other, they've left enough room for the theoretical person out there who could say "I have enough time to commit to playing three mihoyo F2Ps".

Yup, my partner plays both and was worried about seeing anything about ZZZ for fear of wanting to play it and having 3 games to juggle LOL

The real test is how they plan to handle the endgame; does Genshin have another 10 year plan like FFXIV did? Or do they try and have some sort of stasis mode for a bit and then wait for end-of-service? And if so, do they kick off a Genshin replacement?

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