this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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I am curious if the games community has anything positive to say about major publishers at this point.
It’s fun to laugh at one failure, and it’s nice we still get occasional great indie hits. But when most major publishers fail to turn out anything of interest, and even Sony is kind of reaching vanishing expectations amid remasters of remasters, it becomes hard to even suggest what to buy an unknowledgeable kid for Christmas.
I appreciate them for the effort they put into bankrupting companies that make AAA corpo slop. Ubisoft could not have stopped Ubisoft without the help of Ubisoft. If were lucky EA could hop on board and bankrupt EA by acting like EA.
I'd say I'm happy that AAA companies are reaping what they sow from listening to their dumbass stakeholders.
The point is that it’s not just them paying the price, though. With continuous years of NO publishers putting out anything interesting, we’re at a point where people are just less interested in anything that’s coming out.
It’s a carrot and stick problem to some degree. They know now we hate microtransaction-laden live service games, but it’s harder to define what players would enjoy. Keep in mind, there’s many cases of simply letting the developers cook that haven’t worked out either.
There's plenty of publishers putting out interesting games.
They're just not the traditional AAA / "AAAA" games companies because they've grown so big they're hidebound.
I agree when it comes to taste-specific stuff. I'm playing Steamworld Heist 2 and have Tactical Breach Wizards in my wishlist, so indie tactics games have been satisfying me - they're certainly good and interesting, as you say.
But, those aren't games I'd recommend to everyone. It does mean not much water cooler discussion since no one is playing the "same" games in most social circles. It used to be, a big release like Halo came out and everyone was talking about it, playing it, and discovering things together.
I mean that's everything. There isn't a "movie of the summer" anymore really, no I Love Lucy / Cheers / Friends / Simpsons that basically everyone is watching or familiar with. It's been true for longer with books/music because of the lower gateways to entry and being able to be a "local artist", but not by much, and even for them it's exploded since the Internet became mainstream.
The democratization of publication has dramatically broadened the type and quality of things being made and no industry titans really have figured out how to promote around that. At least not consistently.
I fully understand your first point and that is how I feel. That's why I made my comment; I and others have been dealing with endless AAA slop that mostly hasn't been intriguing for a long time. Even if its a certain game franchise I'm not interested in, I understand other people's pain of it been driven into the ground with micro transactions and buggier and buggier games.
Valve is pretty well liked. not sure you can really call them a games publisher any more though.
Right - they don’t even make a game a decade anymore, and even Deadlock is in a genre many people aren’t interested in.
God deadlock is so good though I have to say. I have hundreds of hours already. This is coming from someone who HATED mobas and would still probably never touch dota or League
Agreed. As someone who doesn't really like shooters and never got into League or DOTA, I had mixed feelings about playing a 'hero shooter/moba'. I'm actually blown away at how good it is. They did phenomenal job. 10/10.
It's a invite only alpha and as I write this it's #7 on the steam rankings of current players, 6 if you wanna exclude Banana which is it's own hilarious thing
Dota 2 is #2 and has 565k right now
I'm buying my son Xbox 360 and PS2 games
I'm laughing a lot, is that a positive? These are all self-inflicted wounds because they mistook "shareholders" for the customers.
90% of the games I play are now made by indie or medium sized studios/publishers. I've bought several AAA games in that time frame, but almost universally they've failed to hold my interest and I typically regret my purchase. I can't remember the last AAA I bought that I would consider a 'favorite'.
Also I'm growing more and more detached from what modern, AAA games even feel like. Opening up a game like fortnite or COD where they've shoved dozens of different game modes into an all in one program is confusing and overwhelming. It's off putting to me and I feel like having a 'get off my lawn' moment.
Capcom has been pretty consistent.
Unless you care about their use of Denuvo
I don't think there's that many big-budget releases you can invest in if you care about Denuvo. Even the Ace Attorney games, re-releases of old DS visual novels, have been getting Denuvo'd.
Japanese publishers retain staff because every Japanese company does, they don't pay as well but you get life time job stability. Capcom is on a roll, Sega still has RGG, Bandai Namco has Fromsoft. They have the chokehold on jrpgs. And finally Nintendo is still king
There's probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.
The "traditional" AAA pipeline is "make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS". Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R* formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).
That's not to say there aren't good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I'd say we're nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won't want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.
I regret buying my ps5 so much.
I'm not saying this to be a dick, I would just like to add, no regrets on building my PC.