Games

I feel sorry for the Arrowhead devs.

After seeing a community manager on Discord mistreating on people who voice their concerns with this change, I certainly do not feel sorry for the Arrowhead devs.

Well, to be fair, they did write - in bold letters - on the Steam page that a Playstation network account is required to play.

They simply didn't enforce that rule up until now.

Greed

I don't know when you grew up, but game publishers have a long history of fucking things up. Rushing development, buying studios and firing the core staff were and are frequent stories.

Just a few weeks ago helldivers was one of the poster child dev teams that got gamers and therefore deserve their success. What a turnaround...

They don't need to be connected to their audience. Dumbass people continue to buy loot crates, battle passes, unfinished early access games, overprices skins, etc...

They fund game development where the studio can't afford to, and advertising which makes the difference between being an overnight success, and disappearing onto page 37 of an app store where it will never be seen again.

Like, sure, you don't need them, but the big indie games who made it without them are the exception to the rule.

I sort of work in the industry so I feel like publishers are pretty important in getting your game out there. You, as a developer, want to focus your energies in making the best game possible. To make a game successful, there is a whole gamut of tasks which are necessary but are a pain to do such as finding a QA team, finding someone to do localisation, porting your game to other platforms if needed, marketing, and in a good bunch of cases providing funding.

The last part is where things get ugly. Because publishers are the ones who are giving you the money to complete your game, you are naturally beholden to the timelines and goals that they set. Good publishers listen to the developers because good games make good money. Then there are fucks like Sony management here and whoever was at embracer group who have never played a game in the last ten years and are in the position because of their MBA degree. There are a bunch of decent publishers out there like Devolver but naturally they are going to be picky with their titles. For the vast majority, going with whoever is going to give you the money and support is the way forward.

They find funds and provide marketing, which is astonishingly expensive. I'm not in games, but I do work in a marketing adjacent function. The budgets needed even to do very small marketing exercises are really unbelievable. Campaigns exceed my yearly salary regularly, and we are not doing anything like consumer marketing which I imagine is significantly worse.

Not to justify publisbers' behaviour, but this is partially why they have such stringent demands, I suspect. I assume they are getting some kind of funding or something from the PSN connection, which funds both the game and the marketing needed to make it a success.

The fans are fine with a $40 always online game with kernel level anti-cheat, a battle pass and micro-transactions. Somehow I think they will suck it up as usual and keep playing the game. Gamers are absolute pushovers and negative attention like in this case, is entirely random. If they would have enforced this from day 1, none of these people would have cared.