'YOU WANT A MODERATELY FUNDED AA-GAME FOR A NICHE BUT LOYAL PLAYERBASE THAT WOULD TURN A SAFE BUT MODEST PROFIT WITHOUT EXCESSIVE MONETAZATION?!!?! GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY OFFICE RIGHT NOW! YOURE FIRED! WE ONLY DO HALF-BILLION DOLLAR PROJECTS TO BECOME THE NEXT FORTNITE AROUND HERE!!!!!"
Why are they all like this?
They aren't. Thousands of games release a year but you only hyperfixate on the shittiest wokest piles of shit.
Greed and being out of touch. Why make a million dollars when you can make ten million dollars?
They also believe that making the next Minecraft or Fortnite is something you can just magically do through focus testing.
I DON'T CARE IF THE GAME WASN'T PROFITABLE! SLAP ON SOME RAY TRACING AND CALL IT A NEXT GEN REMASTER!
AA > Indie > AAA
Prove me wrong
Our patron deity will not accept anything less than absolute. Failure to acquire the necessary amount of wealth as tribute will incur a generational blood price paid out by members of your own line. You have been warned.
It's not just the higher ups who aren't interested in those kind of games, it's also the developers.
Millennials are only interested in either making the next concord or some indie derivative garbage.
Why make a million dollars when you can make ten million dollars?
While losing 100 million in the process.
The problem with AAA is that it implies thousands of people in different buildings and countries all trying to work together. You can't be creative in that kind of environment.
A MODERATELY FUNDED AA-GAME FOR A NICHE BUT LOYAL PLAYERBASE THAT WOULD TURN A SAFE BUT MODEST PROFIT WITHOUT EXCESSIVE MONETAZATION
It probably was like that at one point for a very brief period in gaming history before graphics had to meet a certain fake degree of goodness.
But numbers had to go up.
those kinds of games get made by they fail and get ignored
for every success like expedition 33 you get a failure like prey 2017
Line must go up
Billions of sales must be lost
they didn't lose anything, some gambling investors with more money than brain cells got a tax writeoff
they employed a lot of people and money changed hands many times
if the studio goes down the no-name devs will just get shuffled to some other job
economic sorts see this as a very good prospect
Those are from small independent companies. Or one or two dudes in a basement in the third world.
That's how crapitalism is. You can't just make a modest profit, you have to make line go up or die trying.
They have shareholders. They don't want to make some money. They want to make all the money.
letting some dumb shareholding suits have any voting power has to be one of the most retarded ideas one could think of.
shittiest wokest
polshit
Opinion Discarded
OP jests through hyperbole, but this happens in a fashion.
But instead of an outburst whichever higher up hears you pitch something not useful to the portfolio or profits will simply suggest someone else or shake their head whenever the topic of anything that would result in your upwards moment is brought up.
This may be due to not having the energy to wrangle every faceless problem that wanders their way or to avoid you retaliating through reporting them to HR, but either way once you make a bad impression you're not long for the career unless you can get in bed with someone of equal or higher standing.
Those are the games that get a billion twitter screenshot threads here you absolute moron
Because the guys making these decisions aren't from the games industry but from other tech related business who bought shares into the company.
They see how much money big IPs make and want some of their own. If it fails they drop the stocks like an ugly baby and let it become someone's else problem.
Also:
NICHE BUT LOYAL PLAYERBASE
No business wants to limit itself to a small consumer base, if you sell for a small base, you sell at premium, otherwise you want the more consumers possible (hence companies always looking for the mythical wider audience).
Investors. Either private equity, or hedge funds, doesn't really matter which though. Basically modern investors are short sighted and greedy, prioritizing a quick return on investment above all else, so it's not good enough to make a moderate profit on a niche release. Every new release has to maximize appeal and chase trends in hope of being the next money printer. Executives don't want to play ball? The investors elect new board members that will replace executives until they get what they want.
in communism you dont have video games tranny
Shill me your favorite AA games
What was the last AA game that was actually successful? Capcom made Kunitsu-gami last year and it was a big flop.
tetris
genshin
gfl
wukong
Just to name the big ones off the top of my head.
Gal Gun remains a bright point in a world of darkness.
I’m not a fan of how Capitalism demands infinite growth but I don’t think I like the idea of becoming a slave to the state as in Communism. We should have a different, third thing instead.
There technically are a lot of other political ideologies but for some reason we got duped into thinking everything is capitalism and communism.
You're a slave to the state right now
Stop paying taxes and watch what happens
I think it would be badass if fun video games were made. Somebody should try to invent that some day
if your taxes pay for public services you're a slave to the state
Bruh.
While losing 100 million in the process
Just make ten $10 million games and make your $100 million that way. The simple fact is the 'we only need one to become the next Fortnite' strategy is killing studios in droves. Publishers are at risk of bankrupcy BECAUSE THEY WANT TO MAKE MONEY.
If they stayed poor, they'd be richer. It's the desire to make money that is making them lose money. Publically traded companies being what they are, they are legally required to make the most money possible so naturally the idiots in charge look for the fastest and laziest way possible to make as much money as possible, ignoring that developing a live service mainstream game is so retardly expansive that you could release 10-20 singleplayer games for the budgets these live service games make, produce 100x the content for these games, and reliably make more money because you are not going to be the next Fortnite. All those games you make will be dead in a year, period. The next big thing near always comes from indie or AA studios.
We are at the point where the desire to succeed has raised budgets too high for them to succeed, like a snake eating its own tail. Everyone agrees you need to spend money to make money, but no one who spends all their money is going to live long enough to make any of it back. The industry is retarded. Raising prices during a recession will KILL studios. They need to slash budgets to 1/5th of what they are AT MOST. Fire all the excess weight, trim the fat. Fire all DEI consultance. Fire all HR departments. Hire nothing but rapey college boys and pay them in free beer and pizza and have them develop your game for pennies on the dollar and fire all women so there aren't any harassment complaints or gay ass workplace drama. Women make everything more expensive because they are high mantainence. Hire dude bros. Downsize regulations. Do the work out of a garage. Tear down the offices, work in a warehouse and have the other half print the discs.
Infinite growth appeals to shareholders. How can you justify ten modestly budgeted projects that will earn thrice their money back compared to one large project with on-going costs that could (theoretically) earn an infinite amount of profit?
Trolling is supposed to be funny, buddy.
Sovereign citizens are fags though...
Capitalism doesn't actually demand infinite growth. That's an emergent property of the specific economy we've built where growth itself is a product that's actively dismantled other, healthier wealth preservation and accumulation methods in the face of extreme inflation.
Boomers putting all their money in these huge, gestalt entities to invest it in aggregate on their behalf is what caused this. It decoupled investment from the quality of the product and made the only criterion for investment the continued promise of growth.
It's Ronald Reagan's fault, as usual.
lol and the creator of tetris was contacted by le evil capitalist Americans and then moved to LA
if you think modern china is communist you're retarded
tranny
LA
oops i meant washington
the capital of evil capitalist america
Is there such a thing as single A?
TAKE YOUR DAMN CLOTHES OFF
I think something like Killer Instinct 2013 is single A. Tiny game from a studio that mostly made licensed trash that got a small budget project that was still a first party thing. Corporate backing from a huge publisher yet very little money.
Maybe crowdfunded games? More money than two guys in a garage doing it on their free time but less than an actual company?
Probably, I've always figured it would be serviceable library fillers.
The sort of games youtubers use as material for their hidden gem/underrated vids.
youtube.com
the chinese model of planned economy is different from the soviet model of planned economy so its actually not communism
This is like everyone who tells me Mexico is communist because we have socialized healthcare.
Good. I'll take the unemployment checks.
Why would growth stop where we are right now? You could have made the same retarded "surely things can't improve" speech 500 years ago and feel just as smug about yourself.
Because they made a contract with kyubey long ago, and the kyubey demands em to.
It's the price of getting your wish granted.
There is a difference between "New wealth is constantly generated due to innovation and new ideas" and "LINE MUST GO UP" autism.
Meanwhile Ubisoft is pumping out AAAA titles and getting 3 million players, you just can't compete with that.
It probably was like that at one point for a very brief period in gaming history
This was the default state of the gaming market for the vast majority of its existence and pretty much how all publishers came to be in the first place. The standard strategy of video game publishers was to just publish a shitload of games because they only needed hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce and could break even on tens or hundreds of thousands of copies.
Video game budgets only really spiral out of control in 7th gen; the death of midbudget game development, the consolidation of the surviving major publishers into focusing on key tentpole franchises, the digital distribution revolution and ultimately the development of the live service market is all fairly young, only within the last 15-20 years.
Stuff like Final Fantasy 7 and Shenmue costing tens of millions of dollars were insane outliers for the 90s, not the default state of the industry.
as others have pointed out with serious posts earlier, it's the "gay portfolio" theory where investors don't want a lot of small scrimblo bramblo type games that will almost certainly work out, they want a singular 1 gigagame that looks badass and has the potential to sell like hotcakes. that's how we got concord: suits thought marvel: video game would be a sure blockbuster and they were only proven otherwise 6 years later when it turned out as a total bomb (obvious to anyone who had actually touched a game before)
this is just what happens when speculation and capital ownership drives games development, not profit
As someone too stupid to think up a real solution to this, what would happen if a few investment firms were to be bombed with the investors still inside? Nothing or economic collapse?
PAYING SALARIES FOR HUNDREDS OF HIGH SKILLED WORKERS OVER YEARS???
WHO CARES?? WHAT ABOUT SHAREHOLDER YACHTS??????
investors
A lot of "investors" are just people putting shit in a mutual fund from their 401k, not some dude going up to Nintendo in a business meeting and demanding they put Mario in Fortnite.
Yeah if you start fucking with people's retirement you can cause short-term/long-term economic problems because they're tied to the stock market.
There's no way for a publisher to scale down, the closest thing you have is Nintendo who's always opted for lateral movement and actively resisted pressure to try to jump into the AAA budget space, or Microsoft who's generally given a lot of leeway to its acquisitions for the sake of talent retention so somebody like Compulsion Games can make the 12 hour long, linear action-adventure South of Midnight instead of a giant 80 open world game or live service title.
The realistic way forward is that smaller publishers and indie productions grow to fill the gap and can make production deals with larger publishers, e.g. Nintendo or Microsoft who put a lot of effort into indie outreach, to expand their scale rapidly.
We should have a different, third thing instead.
That's antisemitism
Sound explanation and suggestion, the small scale Gamefreak snowballed into the Pokemon Company from that sort of approach. Whether or not that's a good thing is another matter.
if you think you can compare modern chinese economy with soviet economy then you are a spic yes
Shareholders, unironically. It's illegal for companies to persue anything other than what can produce the most maximum profit imaginable.
I just said their planned economies are different.
You can read right?
AA is essentially indie with funding, so yeah. Rare indie quality does show up from time to time but it's like a couple really good ones per year, sometimes less. AA companies usually consist of people who have already worked in the industry and have the skills and capital to put into making a real game.
AAA and indie generally put out quality products at about the same pace (despite the difference in the amount of games being released), but AA games are just infrequent period because there aren't that many AA studios.
Isn't this against the 1st amendment? What if you say something that loses your company money?
Game Freak didn't grow which is its own problem.
The Pokemon Company manages the Pokemon IP as a whole, that means games, animation, movies, merchandising, etc. They are their own beast and that beast is ravenous.
Game Freak's sole concern is the games. They have less people than Monolith Soft, trying to shit out games on a near-annual basis, not just pokemon but random side projects because someone at Game Freak thinks they can be more than just a pokemon studio.
Shigeru Miyamoto has a producer credit on the first two gens of Pokemon. I imagine if Nintendo still could exert significant pressure on Game Freak they'd have like 600-800 employees instead of 200 and all of them would be dedicated to making pokemon.
growth =/= improvement
growth = growth
more =/= better
The primary reason companies are focused on growth is because the stone is already rolling down the hill. If they don't keep up, they'll be left behind and go bankrupt. Because everybody thinks like this, the pace just keeps getting faster and faster until we're just throwing all caution to the wind in the name of "growth". They aren't looking at the bigger picture or what's best for humans as a whole, they're just looking at what's best for them in their own lifetimes within their own business. While that's understandable, it's ultimately detrimental for basically everybody in the long-term. Infinite, uncontrolled growth is not sustainable, we call that "cancer".
Yeah you can voted out by your shareholders or board of directors if they think you're being too much of a spaz. That's why Elon's moving away from politics now, because everything he says is rancid shit and it's starting to affect his brands like Tesla.
Not ALL of them are but all it takes is one greedy out of touch guy not paying attention to allow shit like this to happen. It just so happens that nobody pays attention to a train unless it's on fire and crashes. Hell, Concord was a billion dollar flop and Sony suffered 0 repercussions from it and it's already forgotten by the public at large. People I know never even heard of the game.
But Henry Ford was a genuine hero and one of the greatest men of all time. And Elon is... not that, but DOGE is certainly a good thing. But that law goes against both of them?
screaming about trannies because someone criticized an economic system that only benefits wealthy and mostly jewish people
Keep licking those boots and telling yourself your masters will make you rich like them someday, you dumb cuck.
Fantasy Life i came out two days ago and it's been extremely successful so far despite Inafagne sabotaging the fuck out of its development
You don't understand, if they don't continue to grow, they'll have to pay back the loans that the banks allow them not to pay because their company keeps growing, they HAVE to keep growing.