Comment on EA flop Immortals of Aveum reportedly cost around $125 million, former dev says "a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea"

FontMasterFlex@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Case in point. Baldurs gate 3.

  Single player (with optional co op multiplayer) but massively successful.

  Not to beat a dead horse. Its just the first example that came to mind.

  A huge amount of very successful indie games are single-player and even other AAA games.

  They talk about the genre being dead but they forget that most games dont charge you to play them anymore. They make money through in game purchases selling cosmetics and battle pasees.

  These game genres could be described as dead by the same criteria if they cost actual money.

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  • guacupado@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Its just the first example that came to mind.

    Uh, in this case it’s a single-player, shooter, from a brand new IP. I’m probably just commenting just to argue but I don’t think Baldur’s Gate 3 is a good comparison at all.

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    • Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I think you might be, haha.

      But in the i terest of a fairer comparison, i had a quick google and found this game “atomic heart,” a generally well received game with high ratings and the following from Steam Revenue calculator

      “We estimate that Atomic Heart made $55,756,625.68in gross revenue since its release. Out of this, the developer had an estimated net revenue of $16,448,204.58.”

      New ip, single-player, shooter.

      Comparatively, immortals lost money and tbey apparently laid of 45% of the staff who made it to avoid losses.

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• dumpsterlid@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The thing that we all keep missing about this is even though the reason EA sucks is because of late stage capitalism hollowing out everything for profit, doesn’t actually mean the choices the idiots with MBAs from Harvard or whatever running the company are actually making intelligent choices about profit.

  The system of capitalism actually perpetuates itself better when things periodically catastrophically fail since it keeps worker power from organizing, wipes out competitors that aren’t also massive corporations that can be easily colluded with, and provides a perfect backdrop for the rich to say “sorrrrrry it all broke again, guess we are the only ones that can fix it, so we will maybe take this chance to buy up more of the economy :) “.

  So yes in a very real way I think EA functions as much to devalue the labor of game developers, keep competition of smaller game development studios categorically unable to create products like EA, and serve as a vessel to ritualistically dissect smaller game companies so that companies like EA have an infinite, desperate workforce and consumers have no better choice for video games.

  That is the thing about ideologies, whether they have any connection to reality or not is actually not very important at all.

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  • space@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s why AAA+ is failing and indie games are getting better than ever. It’s insane how good the tools and engines have gotten. Making games had become much more accessible than ever.

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    • dumpsterlid@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Making games had become much more accessible than ever.

      Making music has become MASSIVELY more accessible than ever, but you know what? It’s just a hobby now, capitalism has destroyed making and recording music as a livelihood unless you manage to get a handful unicorn jobs.

      Just because it is easy for a company to enter a market doesn’t mean that structural, toxic issues with that market magically are nullified as problems. Gamers as a category, seem to have a REALLY hard time wrapping their head around this.

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  • ampersandrew@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    When a company like this catastrophically fails and Baldur's Gate 3 or Palworld do gangbusters, that signals to others who also want to make money what they should be making in order to make money. Where the money does go, like a Larian or a Pocket Pair, now has profit to spend on growing their studios and making more of what actually works. They end up hiring the talent that was let go. Not all of them; this is less efficient than if the first studio that imploded had instead made something that the market actually wanted, but this is not a situation so dire that the industry will feel it for decades like you say. New studios form all the time from mismanaged large companies that lay people off after making bad bets.

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    • dumpsterlid@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Look, you are describing a perfectly rational theory for how events could play out in a theoretical universe, but you are just stependously, horrifically wrong if you think this story corresponds to reality in a meaningful way.

      The truth is these companies have so much power (money) behind them that they don’t just keel over and die when they fail, they annihilate entire industries, cause entire industries to fold up and collapse with regulatory capture and most importantly utterly dominate the material reality of being a worker in that industry, even if the worker doesn’t work at the company.

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      • ampersandrew@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        No, this is the reality. The likes of Activision, EA, Ubisoft, and Take Two rule the industry by market cap, but that's because their games notable sell to the type of person who only buys a few video games per year at most. If they utterly dominated the material reality of the industry, how on earth could Baldur's Gate 3 or Palworld even happen? How could Hades or No Man's Sky, made by former EA devs, happen? Your view of reality is quite overly pessimistic. How can you even measure some of the claims you're making?

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• space@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  No, AAA+ blockbuster games are dead. The 150 million budget is insane. Spending that much on a game, you end up having to minimize the risks and having to cater to the widest audience possible.

  If you split that budget into maybe 2 larger and a few smaller games, you don’t put all your eggs in the same basket. You can take more risk, experiment with new mechanics and ideas. You can target different types of players. You can give a chance to smaller, lesser known writers who might have potential.

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• HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Part of it is that modern games are getting too expensive to make, especially with all the assets to the fidelity given by current technology.

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  • c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I doubt it, this kind of logic is the same as “medical costs are insane because modern medical tech is expensive.”

    It completely ignores the entire economy all functioning under advanced technology to create and produce advanced goods more cheaply with the technology that costs money. It’s also mismanagement in the same way the movie and TV industry has seen, they don’t want to hire writers cause they don’t want to pay them, so instead they just spend hundreds of millions on reshoots because having a writer being paid 60k on staff 24/7 was too costly apparently and some suit got a promotion for “saving” that money.

    Someone made a better version of “the day before” with a few grand in purchased assets and a couple months using UE5. If you were creating your own resources instead of buying them and you had an actual vision then you absolutely can make a game for less than hundreds of millions that will return that money back to you. How much did pal world take in? How much is helldivers 2 currently making? What were their production costs?

    Just because some inept studio run by corporate bean counters can only churn out tech demos for millions of bucks doesn’t mean that’s the actual standard for cost and production of gaming.

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  • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s only expensive to make if studios decide to make them incredibly expensive. There are plenty of high quality indie games made by a single person.

    The problem here is they went all in on “THE BEST GRAPHICS EVAR!!!” And it flopped because of the lack of story and gameplay. The lesson here is to not make it incredibly expensive to develop by focusing all efforts on graphics, and instead focus on gameplay and story and people will tolerate much less flashy visuals.

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  • guacupado@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Games are getting too expensive to make because they’re adding extra shit that no one cares about, not because of the cost it takes to make a decent game.

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