The game industry is broken – can we fix it?

cowlevel

Every industry is broken, because the overarching economic system is broken. The game industry is one of the first to feel the full effects because it's so optional to the world.

servo_sausage

Seems like there have been too many AAA flops, to the point where you can't really say that the launch week of a new title is going to be all that important. It used to be that a big release was reliably interesting with everyone figuring out how to play, and a bit more emergent chaos. Few new titles have captured this. Either they are overly sterile, or buggy live service titles with no real reason to engage at day one. Possible that the size of the teams is part of the problem, but if the industry needs to drop from 500 man to 100 man teams, I can't imagine how the industry will be healthy during that.

jdw64

The problem with the game industry is, honestly, that everyone wants to break into it. The game industry is genuinely terrible, starting with low pay and brutal working hours, but it's interesting and lets you do a lot of fun things. Because everyone wants to do it, there are plenty of people willing to put up with somewhat lower pay.

rewqaz555

It feels like whole business tries to become "the ultimate middle man". Grabbing largest profits possible, but all risks on producers. For clients there are two problems. Lack of people that steer industry in good direction long term, and everything works until it doesn't.

fakwandi_priv

I recently started playing Expedition 33 and was impressed right away by the quality just in the first 10 minutes, hours later and the game just gets better. I count 32 people on their team photo + the dog, and even this seems like a somewhat sizable number of people to manage. When I see news of these lay-offs it’s terrible for those people but at the end of the day I feel like those companies never should have reached those numbers. I fear for Larian

throejdod8393

The US game industry has been broken for decade+, since all those gates. Now just free money ran out. Start producing games players want, and you will do just fine! And do not tell your customers, how much you hate them! Even better: do not hate your customers!

Animats

One big problem is that good GPUs are not getting cheaper. They are both getting more expensive and becoming rarer at the consumer level, because everyone is on laptops of phones. As Sweeney points out, the game industry can't coast on improving hardware performance. Epic is in the over-optimization business. With enough complexity, you can get performance up, at a high development cost. The results are truly impressive. See a GTA VI trailer.[1] The cost is high. Development cost for that game was around US $1.5 billion. That's 3x the cost of the most expensive movie ever made. It's more than the Super Bowl. It will be interesting to see if AI generation can bring costs down. There's endless low-end AI crap, but here's a animation to watch - Kono Express.[1]. This was done by an animator Disney made the mistake of laying off. So he's in the process of replacing Disney Animation. He's turning out about half an hour of finished material per month, all by himself. It's up to Hollywood animation standards. He's combined Unreal Engine and AI to do this. Do we really need Disney's high-cost operation any more? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFwB6gZLRmc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdfJiKACxx4

Razengan

Just saw this very recent interview with the awesome Richard Garriott, Lord British: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m60SbCPdfQI Guy made $150,000 from the precursor game to Ultima… at 19 years old, in 1980. The 1980s were full of kids becoming thousandaires by making games from their bedrooms after school, in just a few weeks or months at most.. Can we bring that back somehow? Those early devs had almost no "prior art" to draw from, just the imagination in their heads (and non-game media). And they had to code on the VERY FIRST home computers and consoles, in assembly language, before many people could master that hardware and explain all its tricks in a consolidated knowledge base like we have on the internet now. Now, we have infinitely easier tools, an infinite amount of inspiration, and there is a lot of incredible creativity in the indie game scene, but the discoverability seems worse: The most popular platforms, iOS, Android, consoles, are notoriously difficult to get a game on and make money from, especially for a kid. On the other hand there's too much low-effort slop to sift through (which was also a problem during the 1980s) Seems like what we need most is better discoverability, filtering, and low-friction monetization that isn't ads..

bigstrat2003

It blows my mind that Sweeney thinks the solution is to make an ecosystem game. First of all, that's not easy to do. Second, the fact that all the AAA studios are trying to do that sort of thing is exactly why AAA games suck! Rather than trying to make cool games that are fun to play, they are trying to make slop that is addictive and keeps you spending money. Turns out that even people who are down for that sort of game don't need more than one (and they already have that one), whereas all kinds of people would be happy to buy something unique and fun. I guess maybe it shouldn't surprise me that someone in his position advocates for "do the thing which is killing the industry, but do it even harder". But it really did catch me off guard.

Fire-Dragon-DoL

I am not a businessman, just a gamer. I find completely absurd that you need a team of 500, and then a team of 7 delivers Hollow Knight. I had way more fun with that game than with any AAA.

ocd

You can't. People who were playing MMOs back in the early to mid 00s can remember when executives who weren't game developers themselves began taking control of these companies, and things only got worse all around. I've always felt that game development companies should be more like a law firm, a medical clinic, architecture collective, fashion house, design firm, etc. where everyone is a practitioner of the same profession and aware of the consequences of decisions only an MBA would make. If AI and piracy end up destroying the game industry as it is today, I will not care one bit even if games stop being developed except for small shops that actually care about what they're doing.

Fordec

The AAA industry is broken. But there is nothing to repair. The indie industry will continue telling new stories without it. Every gamer will have no shortage of finding games to play. The only problem is if your goal is to employ hundreds or thousands of people and extract money from your audience. If you're in the business of making games and entertaining people, you're already just fine.

gandhiandy69

Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 probably kept all those gamers too busy for too long. Same will happen with GTA VI.

mike_tyson

I miss the kind of small, polished games we had on the GBA, DS and PSP. Mobile gaming is just adware-filled games, while Steam is so flooded with releases that finding these games feels accidental. There’s a gap in the market for a platform focused purely on small, high-quality games that max out at around 5-6 hours and which have the polish of a big studio.

majkinetor

Too many woke themed games in recent years. I know bunch off man who refuse to play such games and never will, no matter how good those otherwise are. Internet is full of it.

1potato

I find it interesting that Sam Barlow was interviewed for this piece because, before I saw his name, I was going to comment that I’ll happily buy his next game at whatever the asking price is. It’ll probably be on GOG, which means the installer is mine forever. It won’t have an online component, it won’t have loot boxes, and it’ll most likely have a fun core mechanic and an engaging story. I noped out of AAA games a long time ago because I don’t like where the industry has been heading. I see a lot of the same gameplay with new window dressing and persistent nickel-and-diming of the player base. The smaller studios are the ones doing the really interesting things.

bob1029

> Before we can begin prescribing potential cures, we need a solid diagnosis of the problem, and of its scale. The revitalization of old games via the "classic" release model has demonstrated that simply undoing the MBA damage is an extremely viable option. World of Warcraft and League of Legends are both great examples of this. Blizzard was even forced to drop the "2" from Overwatch and bring back the 6v6 open queue. Heroes of the storm queue times are under 60 seconds now. This last one they said was dead years ago but they just released a big content update and it sent a very strong message to gamers. Every morning I pull up YouTube for the last month has felt like 2016. Blizzcon was a breath of fresh air. Proof we can still do things the right way. We need to clear out the org charts and flatten them. There should be one person who owns each game and then everyone else works for them directly. Putting business people above this and letting them jerk around the directors cannot possibly result in long term gains. Anything involving a non domain expert leading in the gaming industry is a short term extraction play that will inevitably ruin the pie for everyone. For better or worse, some degree of gate keeping is healthy in this industry. I think if you want to be the CEO of Xbox that you must demonstrate some kind of ranked ladder experience in halo or COD. A 1v1 StarCraft match with the interim CEO.

VCFundedGenYer

Using Tim Sweeney (Aka "I AI-slopped a games launcher that doesn't work but think it's better than Steam" guy) as the poster child for this is precisely the wrong way to answer that question.