The elephant in the room here is that hardly anyone has a disposable income to spend $90 on an AAA game title and potentially thousands in hardware on which to play it.
Shelter, food, healthcare and power costs have increased too much. When the basics can’t be met, people stop spending money on these additional things because it makes the difference between eating or not for a week.
Disclaimer: this is my opinion as an IT worker and dev, not fact. Please be constructive.
I feel with the folks losing their jobs or seeing their indie studio crash and burn.
That said, I feel like they’re starting to pay the price for letting a monopoly dictate game sales (as benevolent and popular this monopolist is, I know I will again be brigaded for this).
As another commenter said, the industry still tries to go ahead with triple or even quadruple A games, push hype and sell to underage gamers practically gambling games with hero faces.
Then there arent enough unions to hold companies to a standard because in the IT world as a whole, people are used to their privilege. „Trust me bro“ is still seen as a valid strategy in this business.
All while customers get put on pink glasses to make them oblivious to the fact that IT work is just a craft, like carpentry, but less known. The amount of buzz words and bullshit in the industry is appalling and needs to go, double time.
A dev should be judged by their ability to develop, not play corporate mindgames or „speak the lingo“.
While I agree with just about all of your points, there’s one thing I’m not clear on. Who’s the monopolist in your scenario? The console space has 3 competitors and on the PC side, you’ve got several more. I don’t see any of the big PC or console companies dictating game development trends. That seems to me to come from the publishers chasing the next big thing, or trying to make their own version of the last big thing. The rest of what you said is spot on, though. We need stronger unions and we need to demystify what developers do. And we absolutely need to tell the tech bro types to fuck off and stop stinking up the place.
The monopolist in this case sells the games to the gamers. It is steam. You have practically no chance to sell games outside of steam and although there is good reason for it being popular, its not healthy.
But the barrier to entry for publishing a game on Steam is super-low, it’s honestly dead simple. And even though Steam takes a sizeable cut, they do tons of work in exchange w.r.t. promotion, distribution, community management, the modding workshop, Steam Input, testing Steam Deck compatibility, etc…
For indies it’s one of the easiest routes to publish a game. And given the relative success of indies on Steam, it seems to work quite well.
Although I agree that steam has done a lot for indies, the issue remains, no matter how many stans downvote me.
But then perhaps you could articulate what the exact issue is? Like, what ill effects is Steam being a very major player having on the gaming industry as a whole?
Steam being larger than all their PC competitors out together is certainly a problem, but I don’t think it’s a problem that’s affecting the topic the article discusses. That seems to be an entirely different issue.
Its so interesting how averse all of lemmy (and reddit before) reacts when someone dares to challenge their dopamine fix.
Monopolies = bad
No two ways about it.
You’ve said nothing and refuse to elaborate.
Maybe the pushback isn’t because you’re criticising Steam but because your criticism lacks substance and you refuse to provide any.
I honestly can’t tell how your comment applies to what I said. Yes, monopolies are bad. That’s why I said that Steam being so much larger than their competitors is a problem. I’m pretty sure we agree on that point, but your comment seems antagonistic and I don’t know why.
So consoles don’t exist?
Also, what exactly is the problem with Steam in your opinion, apart from “monopoly bad.”
Yeah no. Not discussing with stans. Monopolies are bad. That is irrefutable, scientific fact. They erode the markets they are in.
To put it bluntly, if they made something I want to buy, I’ll participate, but this live service shit isn’t anything I want to buy, so.
They’ll learn eventually, I don’t care what they make. It’s all mostly cookie cutter garbage. Support devs going against the grain like GSC and indie devs. Let AAA die. What’s it alive for, constant disappointment?
Let AAA die.
I don’t give a shit generally about AAA games but the value of having large stable game development studios goes beyond the direct games they create, this is a crucial stepping stone for would be indie game development studio founders detonated and destroyed and mark my words the collapse of stable, consistent employment in the game development industry will play right into a brutal deleveraging of worker’s negotiating power and lead to further consolidation in the industry around AAA studios that have to try less and less hard (and pay their developers less and less) because very few indie studios will be able to weather these manufactured and designed shocks to the system.
This is the same old strategy cut throat robber barons/capitalist oligarchs always use to steal from workers.
This. There are very few major games that remotely get my attention nowadays. I’ve spend most of my gaming time and money on indies
I think you mean the front fell off.
That doesn’t count. That’s outside the environment.
That’s not a normal thing, I’d just like to point out. Sometimes we have years where the front doesn’t fall off at all.
For the lucky 10,000 today who don’t get the reference:
This is what I hate with the state of the gaming industry now. They’ve instilled the mindset in me, where there are games I would’ve ideally love to get and play. But, the skepticism of my mind is ever-churning, so I’m working around to find out what about the game that I will not like about it than there is to like about it. Like whether the game was made by a studio who’ll be shut down later because of unrealistic expectancies. Whether the game is going to one day be free-to-play.
Just so many guesses and it’s robbed me of the simple concept of just getting a game, playing it and enjoying it. That’s what the gaming industry has done, is bastardize what I should be looking for out of games. Because the industry just fucks one thing up after another every damn year from shutting down studios, passing up on better projects in favor of this shitty ass live-service, MTX ridden one and flaunting how well they’ve taken advantage of every gullible “GAMURRR” that wastes their money on feeding into the shit that is served to them.
Did it? I bought a shitload of amazing indie games this year.
Indie games are the only games worth buying.
AAA is dead in the water for the most part, maybe exept the occasional fromsoft banger
