The AAA industry is broken. But there is nothing to repair. The indie industry will continue telling new stories without it. Every gamer will have no shortage of finding games to play. The only problem is if your goal is to employ hundreds or thousands of people and extract money from your audience. If you're in the business of making games and entertaining people, you're already just fine.
People who were playing MMOs back in the early to mid 00s can remember when executives who weren't game developers themselves began taking control of these companies, and things only got worse all around. I've always felt that game development companies should be more like a law firm, a medical clinic, architecture collective, fashion house, design firm, etc. where everyone is a practitioner of the same profession and aware of the consequences of decisions only an MBA would make.
If AI and piracy end up destroying the game industry as it is today, I will not care one bit even if games stop being developed except for small shops that actually care about what they're doing.
I am not a businessman, just a gamer.
I find completely absurd that you need a team of 500, and then a team of 7 delivers Hollow Knight. I had way more fun with that game than with any AAA.
Isn't this true for any type of (software) development though? Once the size of an organization grows, everything slows down because processes are formalized, hierarchy is created, etc. This all becomes worse once a company goes public.
When WhatsApp was acquired, they had around 50 employees. By now, it's around 1500. It's still just a messaging app.
Every industry is broken, because the overarching economic system is broken. The game industry is one of the first to feel the full effects because it's so optional to the world.
Seems like there have been too many AAA flops, to the point where you can't really say that the launch week of a new title is going to be all that important.
It used to be that a big release was reliably interesting with everyone figuring out how to play, and a bit more emergent chaos. Few new titles have captured this. Either they are overly sterile, or buggy live service titles with no real reason to engage at day one.
Possible that the size of the teams is part of the problem, but if the industry needs to drop from 500 man to 100 man teams, I can't imagine how the industry will be healthy during that.
The US game industry has been broken for decade+, since all those gates. Now just free money ran out.
Start producing games players want, and you will do just fine! And do not tell your customers, how much you hate them! Even better: do not hate your customers!
I recently started playing Expedition 33 and was impressed right away by the quality just in the first 10 minutes, hours later and the game just gets better.
I count 32 people on their team photo + the dog, and even this seems like a somewhat sizable number of people to manage. When I see news of these lay-offs it’s terrible for those people but at the end of the day I feel like those companies never should have reached those numbers. I fear for Larian
One big problem is that good GPUs are not getting cheaper. They are both getting more expensive and becoming rarer at the consumer level, because everyone is on laptops of phones. As Sweeney points out, the game industry can't coast on improving hardware performance.
Epic is in the over-optimization business. With enough complexity, you can get performance up, at a high development cost. The results are truly impressive. See a GTA VI trailer.[1]
The cost is high. Development cost for that game was around US $1.5 billion.
That's 3x the cost of the most expensive movie ever made. It's more than the Super Bowl.
It will be interesting to see if AI generation can bring costs down. There's endless
low-end AI crap, but here's a animation to watch - Kono Express.[1]. This was done by an animator Disney made the mistake of laying off.
So he's in the process of replacing Disney Animation. He's turning out about half an hour of finished material per month, all by himself. It's up to Hollywood animation standards. He's combined Unreal Engine and AI to do this. Do we really need Disney's high-cost operation any more?
It blows my mind that Sweeney thinks the solution is to make an ecosystem game. First of all, that's not easy to do. Second, the fact that all the AAA studios are trying to do that sort of thing is exactly why AAA games suck! Rather than trying to make cool games that are fun to play, they are trying to make slop that is addictive and keeps you spending money. Turns out that even people who are down for that sort of game don't need more than one (and they already have that one), whereas all kinds of people would be happy to buy something unique and fun.
I guess maybe it shouldn't surprise me that someone in his position advocates for "do the thing which is killing the industry, but do it even harder". But it really did catch me off guard.
Guy made $150,000 from the precursor game to Ultima… at 19 years old, in 1980.
The 1980s were full of kids becoming thousandaires by making games from their bedrooms after school, in just a few weeks or months at most..
Can we bring that back somehow?
Those early devs had almost no "prior art" to draw from, just the imagination in their heads.
And they had to code on the VERY FIRST home computers and consoles, in assembly language, before many people could master that hardware and explain all its tricks in a consolidated knowledge base like we have on the internet now.
The AAA industry is broken. But there is nothing to repair. The indie industry will continue telling new stories without it. Every gamer will have no shortage of finding games to play. The only problem is if your goal is to employ hundreds or thousands of people and extract money from your audience. If you're in the business of making games and entertaining people, you're already just fine.
You can't.
People who were playing MMOs back in the early to mid 00s can remember when executives who weren't game developers themselves began taking control of these companies, and things only got worse all around. I've always felt that game development companies should be more like a law firm, a medical clinic, architecture collective, fashion house, design firm, etc. where everyone is a practitioner of the same profession and aware of the consequences of decisions only an MBA would make.
If AI and piracy end up destroying the game industry as it is today, I will not care one bit even if games stop being developed except for small shops that actually care about what they're doing.
I am not a businessman, just a gamer. I find completely absurd that you need a team of 500, and then a team of 7 delivers Hollow Knight. I had way more fun with that game than with any AAA.
You need the team of 500 to do the "telemetry" and microtransactions parts.
The game industry has merged with the gaming industry.
We need to stop calling gambling gaming. And stop calling internet gambling/betting igaming.
Quern was 4 people and Forgotten City was just a handful as well.
Isn't this true for any type of (software) development though? Once the size of an organization grows, everything slows down because processes are formalized, hierarchy is created, etc. This all becomes worse once a company goes public.
When WhatsApp was acquired, they had around 50 employees. By now, it's around 1500. It's still just a messaging app.
Every industry is broken, because the overarching economic system is broken. The game industry is one of the first to feel the full effects because it's so optional to the world.
How is the economic system broken?
well, for one, the top 10% households drive most discretionary consumption in the US because the other 90% are broke.
Wealth and consumption follow a power law. That's not broken.
The US dollar has lost 20% of value over the past 5 years. You can print money out of thin air, but you can't print industrial output (or good games).
That's pretty near to as intended. Inflation doesn't mean an economy is broken.
Seems like there have been too many AAA flops, to the point where you can't really say that the launch week of a new title is going to be all that important.
It used to be that a big release was reliably interesting with everyone figuring out how to play, and a bit more emergent chaos. Few new titles have captured this. Either they are overly sterile, or buggy live service titles with no real reason to engage at day one.
Possible that the size of the teams is part of the problem, but if the industry needs to drop from 500 man to 100 man teams, I can't imagine how the industry will be healthy during that.
because they're all becoming the same. Just like cars pretty much have the same shape nowadays
software industry get "leaner" with AI, I don't see game industry is any different
The US game industry has been broken for decade+, since all those gates. Now just free money ran out.
Start producing games players want, and you will do just fine! And do not tell your customers, how much you hate them! Even better: do not hate your customers!
It feels like whole business tries to become "the ultimate middle man".
Grabbing largest profits possible, but all risks on producers.
For clients there are two problems. Lack of people that steer industry in good direction long term, and everything works until it doesn't.
I recently started playing Expedition 33 and was impressed right away by the quality just in the first 10 minutes, hours later and the game just gets better.
I count 32 people on their team photo + the dog, and even this seems like a somewhat sizable number of people to manage. When I see news of these lay-offs it’s terrible for those people but at the end of the day I feel like those companies never should have reached those numbers. I fear for Larian
One big problem is that good GPUs are not getting cheaper. They are both getting more expensive and becoming rarer at the consumer level, because everyone is on laptops of phones. As Sweeney points out, the game industry can't coast on improving hardware performance.
Epic is in the over-optimization business. With enough complexity, you can get performance up, at a high development cost. The results are truly impressive. See a GTA VI trailer.[1] The cost is high. Development cost for that game was around US $1.5 billion. That's 3x the cost of the most expensive movie ever made. It's more than the Super Bowl.
It will be interesting to see if AI generation can bring costs down. There's endless low-end AI crap, but here's a animation to watch - Kono Express.[1]. This was done by an animator Disney made the mistake of laying off. So he's in the process of replacing Disney Animation. He's turning out about half an hour of finished material per month, all by himself. It's up to Hollywood animation standards. He's combined Unreal Engine and AI to do this. Do we really need Disney's high-cost operation any more?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFwB6gZLRmc
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdfJiKACxx4
> Development cost for that game was around US $1.5 billion.
but is it making the game any better? Or is it just gold plating?
The problem with the game industry is, honestly, that everyone wants to break into it.
The game industry is genuinely terrible, starting with low pay and brutal working hours, but it's interesting and lets you do a lot of fun things.
Because everyone wants to do it, there are plenty of people willing to put up with somewhat lower pay.
Yeah, I agree with that take. It’s the fashion industry of computers. People will bend over backwards just to be a part of it.
It blows my mind that Sweeney thinks the solution is to make an ecosystem game. First of all, that's not easy to do. Second, the fact that all the AAA studios are trying to do that sort of thing is exactly why AAA games suck! Rather than trying to make cool games that are fun to play, they are trying to make slop that is addictive and keeps you spending money. Turns out that even people who are down for that sort of game don't need more than one (and they already have that one), whereas all kinds of people would be happy to buy something unique and fun.
I guess maybe it shouldn't surprise me that someone in his position advocates for "do the thing which is killing the industry, but do it even harder". But it really did catch me off guard.
Just saw this recent (from this or last month) Richard Garriott interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m60SbCPdfQI
Guy made $150,000 from the precursor game to Ultima… at 19 years old, in 1980.
The 1980s were full of kids becoming thousandaires by making games from their bedrooms after school, in just a few weeks or months at most..
Can we bring that back somehow?
Those early devs had almost no "prior art" to draw from, just the imagination in their heads.
And they had to code on the VERY FIRST home computers and consoles, in assembly language, before many people could master that hardware and explain all its tricks in a consolidated knowledge base like we have on the internet now.
> Can we bring that back somehow?
All the tools are there, and lots of people are doing it already. Literally nothing is stopping anyone from "bringing that back".