Working in hell... is hell.

Game: Heretic's Fork

There's a Twitter thread on revenue expectations for AAA games that I (as a not-a-professional-gamedev-so-dont-trust-me) like. It matches up with how I know other types of software dev companies think about budgeting.

The biggest blindspot in it is the claim that budgets for games will continue to rise because of customer expectations paired with the claim that small bangers like Balatro are not predictable enough to chase. In other words, big companies can only afford to make gigantic sure bets.

But like, you don't have to make Balatro every time. The corollary to "making worse games with better paid devs" is that you can afford to make a lot of them. If you know that some games can be breakout hits without spending a bajillion dollars to make, you can maximize your dice roll attempts instead of maximizing your hit chances.

Of course, following this to its conclusion makes a big publisher like Square Enix into basically a gamedev venture capitalist (and the incentives usually lead to the same labor theft and other evils that that system produces). And I don't feel like this is a particularly insightful thought, but I dunno if it's been tried before competently, or if there's some big obvious reason why you wouldn't do this. So, like, why wouldn't this work?

Sticker: Cuphead, available from The Yetee.

Card:

• "Ace of Wands" (Rengin Tümer, 2021), from the Corrupted Tarot.
• "Untitled" (M81 Studio, 2020), from Mysterium Park, game by Oleksandr Nevskiy & Oleg Sidorenko, published by Libellud.