Comment on It's official: EA is going private.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 5 days agoIt’s a problem only for the AAA industry,
No, it really isn’t. Rather than just regurgitate what the “video game devs hate you but I love you so give me money” twitch streamers continue to say, actually listen to some developers.
Xalavier Nelson Jr has been pretty vocal about how incredibly hard it is to be an indie dev these days. And Strange Scaffold (his studio) is pretty much exactly what everyone says they want: They release REALLY interesting games on budget with no DLC. And people “wait for sales”. Which makes pitch meetings REALLY difficult which, in turn, makes getting more funding to keep making games REALLY difficult. And that is for a very established studio with a solid portfolio. Let alone actual new developers who are finding their funding cut or cancelled over the past five or six years.
I’ll also add on: What you are seeing are not “AAA games”. At this point? You basically have the GTAs and Call of Duties and Star Citizen and MAYBE some of the higher profile Sony games that fit that bucket. The AAA market more or less died with THQ where they released a string of games that were REALLY good but just couldn’t justify the development costs.
What we are mostly seeing are what would historically be considered AA/A games. Large scale games made by (ass pulling) O(10) headcounts with a LOT of money and MAYBE a support studio if they are more AA. And that is the market that is increasingly being destroyed. Which mostly leaves the “B Game” studios and the “I spent the past 10 years making this in my free time” indie studios and… I shouldn’t have to explain why the latter is not sustainable.
And just to highlight this: Geoff Keighley has decided his latest obsession is bragging about how small studios are because he is, and always has been, an obnoxious prick who actively hurts the industry. And one of his favorite things to bang on is Sandfall’s Clair Obscur. Which is a truly amazing game… that increasingly can’t be made anymore.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Clair_Obscur:_Expedition_33#De…
Founded by devs who had been heavily trained by the Ubisoft pipeline and all the benefits of working for a massive super studio. Questionable amounts of funding from Kepler Interactive in 2023 (right before the pandemic) that was used to headhunt LOTS of developers from major super-studios/publishers. And then they used said funding to hire “dozens” more contractors.
Clair Obscur is an “indie” game in the sense that Sandfall don’t have long term obligations. But it was made by easily over a hundred people with major publisher investments. And, much like with my example of Larian above, much of the staff and techniques were trained on other games over the course of literally decades.
As more and more of those publishers die off or are only interested in VERY short term investments? That money goes out the window. And as the major studios/super-studios like EA get shuttered? That pipeline that allowed Broche et al to understand enough about large scale project management to make their own games goes out the window. And more and more developers leave the industry because they need to live. Which means all the “I’ve been animating for 12 years” are gone and it is just the fiver crowd who need to “build out a portfolio” for one of the very few remaining jobs.
kartoffelsaft@programming.dev 5 days ago
Honestly to me it seems like nothing has actually changed, except the names of the teams behind critically acclaimed games.
Like, your point about being an indie developer being hard is, well, just ask anyone who was making indie games 1, 2, or even 3 decades ago. It’s always been a lottery where 1-3 games a year hit it big and the rest can only barely fund themselves.
Though I do think you have a good point about asking what PP considers AAA. Something I’ve noticed is that there’s a bunch of people who, for whatever reason, see some big AAA release and act like it’s not AAA because it’s the first time they’ve heard of the studio / publisher. BG3 is the most obvious example of this (~400 people from my search). Expedition 33 also outsourced a ton of it’s work so it also gets paraded around as “only 30 devs!”. It’s especially frustrating that people will call these games a “wake up call” for AAA studios as if it’s not a huge risk.
Though I don’t think EA (and from what I’ve seen Ubisoft) dying this slow death is a herald of the industry at large dying. We’re seeng a lot more publishers that try to carve out their own little corner of the industry, such as NewBlood, Iron Gate, Hooded Horse, and as you mention Kepler. They’re funding and releasing plenty of successful titles. I think there’s space for, and already space taken, for various publishers to fill the same position as EA did in it’s prime.
You also seem to take this argument that these megapublishers are a prerequisite to having people with proper gamedev skills? As I see it, that’s either not changing, is effecting nearly every industry in NA & EU, or just not a thing. Valve, for example, when making Half Life, realized their game sucked when they were most of the way through development because they were learning as they went. So they scrapped most of what they built and what they remade is what we know as HL1, and that’s well over 2 decades ago. To my understanding Sandfall did a similar thing with E33 but what I saw on the subject might have been embellished and/or I’m misremembering.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
No, it really hasn’t. At least, on the PC side.
if we go back to the 80s and 90s? SO much of what has defined video games actually were indie games. You just needed to call up a magazine and ask if you could put your game on their demo disk (often actually a floppy at those points…) or let the ten people on usenet know you had a BBS with games on it. Probably the most famous example of that is fricking DOOM but so much of what EA would acquire, fail to make a good sequel to, and kill, came out of that mindset.
Then the early 00s were heavily characterized by mods being heavily platformed by the larger studios (a decent number of modern day studios actually came out of Make Something Unreal), demo discs getting even bigger (because now they were CDs), and the rise of The Internet meaning that it was possible for small publishers (fucking Strategy First) to do direct to consumer sales and games like Mount & Blade and later Minecraft being directly sold as direct downloads to sickos.
Then we had Steam and… okay let’s ignore the Steam Greenlight program because that was just bad. But it mostly removed the barrier and made direct to consumer sales almost trivial. And it made it REALLY “easy” to show that you had a solid game to make that pitch meeting for the “last few years” of development a lot easier. More on that in a bit.
And as games became more expensive to create (if you tried to sell Soldat today… well, just go look at Soldat on Steam), publishers were more and more needed. Sometimes as blatant “Embracer published this” and sometimes as “just” investments that never really get disclosed but leads to weirdness where one pissy investor means a game can never be sold again.
Which gets back to the 2020s. Economic uncertainty and the realization that “just fund this studio for 10 years” guarantees nothing have made it a wasteland. Again, plenty of developers have been very open about this. NoClip even did a series of lite documentaries about their attempts to go through the process of making a game and it is bleak (Danny repeatedly compared it to being on Tinder… Which raises a few questions but I am sure somebody told him how much being single sucks). There is less and less money to go around and it is more and more going to the surest of sure things. All but guaranteed to make back the money and then some? Yeah, but this studio is promising us a 5x return so…
Which gets to Hooded Horse et al. I fucking LOVE Hooded Horse and Kitfox and so forth (still not sure how Microprose suddenly came out of nowhere to become just as big a part of my entertainment as they were… 30 years ago). It is also very worth understanding that they are mostly swooping in on games that have been in development for 4-10 years and just need some money to dedicate time to polishing things up and making assets (Caves of Qud and Dwarf Fortress are great examples of this). Or are devs/studios with MASSIVE pedigrees and, quite often, the rights to remaster/re-sell their back catalog (this is more a Microprose thing).
Which gets back to the role of major studios.
HL1 was published by Sierra and fronted by former Microsoft devs (you ever wonder why GabeN gets off on sticking it to Windows?). They had a start-up funded by independently wealthy developers and, according to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_(video_game)#Deve…, one million (1990s) dollars advance and STILL involved going into potentially serious debt to make.
Which, again: Technical abilities developed on someone else’s dime. Good chunk of cash from getting in early on the rise of frigging Microsoft. And publishers who would throw (doing rough inflation math) about 2 million dollars at a project because “why not”.
And… you know how publishers got the money to do that? Sierra was a frigging powerhouse in the 90s. So much of the adventure genre was kinda just them and they had already branched out to strategy, party games, delicious copaganda, etc. Like… en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_Sierra_Entertainment_v…
Everyone loves the idea of someone making something truly ground breaking in their basement with scraps. The reality is that we mostly see evolutions and deep dives on existing games. But what people often forget is that the thing that takes a game to the next level is almost always very experienced developers. And… most of them tend to have some time at a major studio under their belt where they can learn the dos and don’ts and so forth. Get rid of those major studios and suddenly everyone is dependent on finding the right online tutorial and not realizing that the old hats who make said tutorials and come in to “take things to the next level” are all retiring or changing industries for the same reasons those major studios are getting gutted.
And also… the reality is that the Terrarias and Quds of the world are incredibly rare. Mostly we get complete jank fests that barely function and are clearly just someone’s wank fantasy.
I am not saying people need to feel horrible over the death of EA (although… you probably SHOULD considering how many people they employ and how they still make some certified bangers). But this “Fuck it, this massive industry pillar collapsing will have no impact on the industry as a whole” is just plain naivety.