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99% of gamers knew this years ago.
It's always been a race to gobble up the handful of whales that keep the mobile game industry alive. Now add hundreds more desktop and console games to that list. Sure, there are lots of people that will happily spend thousands of dollars on any shitty game, but once you've got the entire industry spending billions fighting over those players, the well runs dry eventually.
Underrated comment honestly. That's nailed on the head, greed drove billions in investments to compete for whales and now it looks like a wasteland....compounded by the fact that the whales were always unsustainable users in the first place. Sometimes rich people were whales but the majority of the time they were users who didn't have a pot to piss in, in the first place.
There was an article from years back, I want to say around 2019 or so on then-Gamasutra, about how it was already too late to stop the bubble from bursting because all of these games are trying to get everyone's attention (I'm having trouble finding it now). Now the bubble is bursting, and big games these days have dev cycles of about 5 years, putting us right here in 2024. Get dev cycles to 3 years or less so that you can actually react to changing market conditions, and charge a fair price for a good product. Maybe sequel it or otherwise make regular old expansion DLC. That was sustainable. No one even makes a multiplayer game anymore unless it's intended to be rigorously competitively balanced or suck up all of your time and money through grinding.
Everyone wants WoW levels of income without WoW levels of effort.
I also don't think companies realized how competitive live services are, very few people will buy in to more than one live service at a time.
It took WoW near a decade to make as much as it does though. MMO's aren't exactly profitable in the early years.
You've described the AA/indie scene which took the chunk of the market big publishers abandoned including whole genres of games.
The problem is investors saw the line go way up, passing even Hollywood so to keep it riding forever they apply Hollywood-sized solutions.
Except you can't just shuffle live services a few weeks around another so you can milk the box office. They want us to spend all our time in their game services so people will pick one game for a time so they are cannibalizing each other and eroding trust as games fail and abandon the players that did buy into them.
And what you're describing is the economic realities of a bubble bursting, which means they have to pivot to making something sustainable that the market actually wants. That doesn't mean AA or indie exclusively. It does mean smaller scope. Halo and Gears of War could be created much faster when they were linear games, and now they're both open world and arguably worse off for it.
Get dev cycles to 3 years or less so that you can actually react to changing market conditions, and charge a fair price for a good product.
This industry's already killing people with overwork and stress. Increasing the time pressure isn't going to improve the quality or bring the price down.
We don't need faster game development, there are already more games out there than anyone could play. We (the market) need to encourage quality over quantity.
The industry kept making games bigger that would have been better off if they'd stayed smaller. I'm not saying to make the games they make now in less time. I'm saying stop making games that take 5 years to make and instead make games that take 3 years to make.
We (the market) need to encourage quality over quantity.
But how will I get the dopamine hit and instant gratification the first time I start a new game?
I've been saying GaaS is horrible forever. (well okay I've been saying Anything as a Service sucks and I've been dying on this hill. The only GaaS shit I "own" I got for free). Now that I've got that hipster shit out of my system, can the games industry go back to releasing finished games please? I said please this time dammit.
Who cares what devs think? The room full of suits says live service makes money so it shall be.
But I want to be exploited indefinitely!
I just want games made by people who are trying to make a good game, and not games made by people or companies that are only trying to make money. Not one GaaS game is actually special enough to warrant spending more than the base price of the game on (and many aren't even worth that when their next best competitor is fuckin' free to play.)
The ONLY GaaS game i have ever liked is genshin impact. I like that there is a ton of content that is completely free. And i don't really care about having strong maxed out characters so I'm just enjoying the world and story.
Besides that, i hate GaaS. Every company wants to make one and they all fail. Just give me my nice stories and gameplay and I'm good.