this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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This was due to something that happened between (roughly, very roughly) 2005 and 2015. Games went from being made by a bunch of nerds who really wanted to make games, to a more corporate setting, to a marketing setting.
Fifteen years ago QA would declare Alpha, Beta, etc, in that the build fit the criteria for each state. Then, marketing would set a date, and on that date, Alpha, Beta, etc would be 'ready.'
This lead to huge problems. There was a time where Alpha meant Feature Complete, and that there were only a few major crashes. Beta meant you had no, or virtually no, reproable crashes, game ending bugs, etc. (Then later) once marketing took over, it didn't matter. Instead of Beta being a checklist, it was just 'March 10th.'
In addition to this, innovative and cool game design ideas are harder to sell visually than 'we doubled the poly's!' So more and more focus was put on visuals to the point where marketing would assign things to the design team, IE. "It has to have ~~battlefield~~ ~~COD~~ ~~tarkov~~ ~~CSGO~~ ~~TF2~~ Popular Game-like mechanics, gameplay, etc."
So now you get games shipped with incredible graphics and garbage stability. I've been on projects where crashes later in the campaign were changed from P1 to P2 because reviewers likely wouldn't make it to the point where those would come up. (This is called 'punting'.) In addition, having arbitrary dates decide major milestones means that builds are constantly broken, all through the process of creating them. You know how people get that 'beta' build of a game and ask why it's so crash happy, why it runs like shit, etc? It's because the game has literally never been stable. It's been assigned Alpha and Beta based on a calendar, and time is never allowed to delay to fix issues. Add to that that the owners of game companies will give publishers absolutely asinine claims about how long a game will take. Most franchise games, 'AAA'-wise, are made in 18 months. However, they often also had six months of pre-production before that. Marketing took that out, and focused on a game every 12 months. They used a secondary studio for the 'B-Team' and thus every second game in the series was made by said 'B-Team'. B-Teams were given even less time, and often no pre-production, so the entire game would effectively be made in 12 months.
Then they lay off 50-70% of the staff, and start all over.
So if I may end this way, do not go into games. If you like them make them in your free time. You will be treated like an animal and be unemployed about 1/4 of the time if you choose the industry. Of all the people who I worked with in my first company, maybe six are still in games.
Stay away.
Maybe the most fucking disgusting part of all of this is that it doesn't even lead to more money. The shitty western companies are all fucking floundering right now because they have no institutional knowledge, there's no way to become a veteran game dev at a company that churns through their workforce every 12 months, and suddenly you have out of touch execs at Ubisoft and EA wondering why people don't play their games. All the innovation that comes from pouring your soul into a project for the long-term comes from indie developers now, and it's left AAA games feeling as soulless to play as they are to make.
Meanwhile in the east you have companies like FromSoftware and Capcom who are just laughing all the way to the bank, because their competition is all run by idiots.
The worst part is the CEO's/whatever of each company know each other, too. You'll get C-suites come into game companies who not only have never played a game before, but don't even remotely understand how software development works. I worked for a company where the owner made himself Project Manager and ran that project straight into the ground. Tens of millions on worthless overtime while we sat around waiting for another build that would fail, on a weekend, for months.
Larian sounds like some sort of a bizarro-world company. They even have awful investors but managed to keep creative/overall control.
Counterpoint, you also gave Nintendo in the East pouring kerosene over their accumulated goodwill and lighting it on fire.
Oh don't get me wrong, the execs in the east aren't immune to doing batshit insane things. Capcom is on some wild shit with their microtransactions. Konami really feels like they're just taking a shovel to Kojima's legacy and pulling out whatever they can. Nintendo is trying to find out if they can legally punch developers in the face.
But they aren't putting out multi-million dollar flops. They're not decimating their workforce to increase CEO compensation packages. They're not getting swallowed up by the handful of fish who are too big for the pond. They're just being kinda weird, which is a fine change of pace.
If you allow for some cultural differences Nintendo is not really acting all that weird. It's a conservative (in the original meaning) company in a very conservative country. They play it close to the vest and are very careful about protecting what they feel is theirs to protect.
Don't get me wrong though, I dislike what they've been doing as well and I'm not defending them. From their perspective they probably don't look at it like that though. For them it's mostly what they feel like is defensive measures to protect their stuff. I'm certain they won't stop until they've done their best to utterly destroy the emulator market at large. For me at least that's the only reason I need to completely boycott them.
It fucking sucks, but this is what capitalism comes down to. Hopefully they get some sense slapped into them at some point soon by a judge somewhere.
Konami on the other hand, that shit just boggles my mind. I don't understand any of the choices they've made for a while now.
Nintendo hates their fans, not their developers. They're actually one of the better game companies to work for.
Even Nintendo games have recently been dropping in Quality. Especially Gamefreak.
If you like games, work on a crowd-sourced game like Endless Sky.
Or FOSS games like Xonotic
Thank you for putting all these pieces together.
No worries. I see a lot of posts about what's happening that are close, but don't quite understand this is a managerial issue. The devs themselves are (mostly) good people who want to make games. The owners of smaller companies don't get called out enough though, in my opinion. Every time you see 'EA just bought and closed another...' keep in mind the vast majority of the time the company didn't need to be sold. Some guy who inherited a bunch of money created a company of people who do the actual work, then waited till the worth of the company was high enough for them to sell. It happens constantly and it's easily the most disheartening part of game development.
Imagine spending 80 hour weeks and 30-90 days without a single day off, making a breakout game that is beloved... and realising you're not going to make it to 5 years at a company, because they're selling it to Activision.
Then do that every 2 years.
Lol