"An Industry Based On Endless Growth Is Unsustainable | Castle Super Beast 271 Clip"

[kane_magus]

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They don't start talking about the thing in the video title until almost 19 minutes into this, but once they do start talking about it, that's pretty much the entire rest of this 1:15:47 video. And I agree with pretty much all of it.

The gist:

• Stocks, the stock market, shareholders and all that shit suck scabrous scrotum, full stop.
• Square-Enix, and companies on the same path as Square-Enix, spend way too much fucking money on making their games, because the line must go up, always and forever. Except... the line can't and won't go up, always and forever.
• Square-Enix, and companies on the same path, must now compete not just with each other but also with live service games or GaaS/"gas games"/whatever the fuck we're calling them now, such as Fortnite and all that other dogshit.
• AAA and AAAA (and however many more A's you want to use) game development is innately unsustainable and will die, sooner or later. The modern video game industry (or at least that part of the industry) will crash eventually.
• Companies like Larian and Nintendo and Valve who don't have to answer to stockholder bullshit will weather the storm of the modern video game industry crash just fine. As will, apparently, the companies that make all the dogshit "gas games" now (and I don't necessarily disagree with that, either, but I sorely wish to hell it wasn't true).
• Some stuff specifically about Square-Enix and how they should stop taking profits away from the "good games" like (ostensibly) Final Fantasy XIV (you know, a MMO game about which I personally do not give the first, single shit at all) to waste on developing dead-on-arrival shit like Foamstars or Babylon's Fall or fucking Nosgoth or whatever. (What the actual shitting fuck even is Foamstars? Makes sense that I never heard of it before now, because it sounds like complete garbage, just like all the other "gas games.")

You know, back when I started actively wishing for the video game industry to crash, something like a decade ago or whenever, I never really thought of that as anything more than pie in the sky at the time. Now, though, as the years have gone by, it's seeming more and more like the inevitable, inexorable reality of the situation. And I can only say, "Good. The modern video game industry has been terrible for decades now, and it fully deserves to finally reap the whirlwind."

Comments

[owsf2000]

And the best of a modern video game crash is that the video game industry as a whole will pick itself up and chug along fine - minus the bulk of the greedy assholes that brought it to this point. We may end up without "AAA games" for a while but then those are the ones that tend to be the buggiest, most exploitive games that get released. I'm perfectly fine if they go away forever in that case.

There will always be indie devs that will be able to rise up from the ashes so to speak. Heck, they'll have far less competition for a while so they'll likely do far better than they're doing now. They'll *eventually* turn into the next Square/EA/etc, although hopefully it'll take a few decades before the negative side of those types of companies begin to manifest.

[kane_magus]

I can't really recall the last time I bought a "huge" AAA game (at least one that wasn't on, like, a 90% off sale and in the $5-10 range, anyway). Maybe Horizon Zero Dawn, which I bought a couple years ago for around $20? Or maybe Psychonauts 2 which I bought last year for around the same? I guess it depends on if you consider Psychonauts 2 to be a AAA game, I guess. (Of those two, Psychonauts 2 is the only one I've actually bothered to finish, at least as of this comment anyway.)

In any case, I will be totally content, even pleased in a schadenfreude way, if the AAA industry died off, and the sooner the better.

And yeah, what's sad is that the "indies" of today will indeed become the AAA modern industry of tomorrow. I mean, it's not like Electronics Arts or Activision (Blizzard or otherwise) or Square-Enix (or Square or Enix separately) or Capcom or Konami or Bethesda or whoever started out as the massive, money-grubbing blights on gaming that they are today, after all. Hell, even Microsoft started out as two guys in a garage, for what little that's worth now.