"You can’t make AAA games for just one platform anymore"

[kane_magus]

"Costs are rising but the audience isn’t growing. That can only mean one thing"

Sure, it can only mean one thing, but it isn't the "one thing" that articles like this seem to think it is. The "one thing" isn't "going multiplatform," because "going multiplatform" is only a temporary fix at best. It's the game industry equivalent of sticking one's finger into a crack in a dam to try to prevent it from bursting. The "one thing" is inevitable and inexorable irrelevance and, then, nonexistence. Being washed away when the dam finally breaks.

Let's say it happens, for real. Now, you can play all the Xbox games on Playstation. Playstation games on Xbox. Both of those on PC. Let's say that maybe, shock of shocks, even Nintendo gets in on the act and puts their games on all these other platforms (and scaled down versions of the others' games on Nintendo consoles), too. Let's throw them all on smartphones and toasters and watches and graphing calculators and pregnancy tests and Amicos and whatever else, too, while we're at it.

And... then what?[1]

You think that AAAAA game devs/pubs are suddenly going to become sensible? That they're going to somehow stop throwing ever increasing amounts of money and people at making ever larger games? You think that clueless shareholders who only ever care about their own bank accounts will somehow cease to have unrealistic expectations that the line will continue to go up, always and forever? No, they won't. And then, once the sheen of "going multiplatform" has worn off, we'll be right back to where we are now, which is that modern AAAAAAAAAA game development/publishing is unsustainable and will crash entirely, sooner or later. And this time, they won't even have the "exclusivity" boogeyman to blame it on.

And as for Nintendo being golden through all of this... I'm not so sure. Nintendo has been relying on pure gimmicks for the past almost two decades now. The Wiimote, the Switch portability, the... ...whatever the fuck was up with the Wii U. Sooner or later, they're going to run out of gimmicks to exploit. And they've also been relying on the fact that they can just arbitrarily turn off support for "older" consoles after a decade or so and then repackage/remaster/remake all the older games that are no longer easily available and just resell all that shit (at full price, of course) on their new console, whatever that happens to be at the time. Support for which, of course, will be turned off arbitrarily after another decade or less, starting the cycle all over again. How long do you think that particular business model will remain sustainable? (It's at least part of the reason why I have next to no interest in ever buying a Switch or a Switch 2 or whatever may come after those.)

And all of this, of course, is also ignoring all the other modern video game industry horseshit that is self-strangling the industry, like all the draconian DRM schemes (e.g. Denuvo, Epic Online Services, etc.), the ever growing percentages of games being chopped out and chopped up to be sold piecemeal as DLC, the forced inclusion of online/multiplayer into what used to be traditionally offline/singleplayer games, the ever increasing prices in general (which won't suddenly and magically stop being a thing if they all "go multiplatform" either), the fact that too many game creators are going the shitty "live service" "forever game" route, and other such things I've ranted about over the past decades.

[1] - Ignoring the fact that, once all those games are available on all those platforms, gamers will begin to wonder why we even need all these different platforms in the first place. Assuming we aren't already doing that, of course, which many of us most definitely are.

Comments

[owsf2000]

A part of me actually questions the whole "The costs are rising!" horseshit excuse. Sure, inflation happens, but that's not what's really going on here. What's -really- rising are the *expectations*. That whole "The bar never goes back down" mentality - no matter how much of a fluke you may have had in sales in a particular year.

For instance, say you made 100 billion dollars in 2020 for your corporate powered game company. Let's further say that was the highest you had ever made in a single year for your company. Why, the highest you had ever made in a year before that barely hit 60 billion! You give a few words of praise, maybe, to your staff, then shove all the profits off to your shareholders.

The following year, you make 80 billion dollars... cuts begin to be made, projects cancelled, people fired, all because you didn't hit your sales goals of at -least- 105 billion. Keep in mind that in this scenario the company is still operating at a net profit. Just not a BIG enough profit to satisfy shareholders who now expect a lot more.

Expectations (ie: greed) honestly are probably more of a driving force for the downfall of the video game industry than actual operational costs. Honestly we can drag marketing BS into this mess as well. There's a problem that needs to be addressed if you feel you need to spend 300-500 million dollars promoting your game just to make people think they want to play it. This is doubly true for the companies that actually spend that kind of cash on marketing - they obviously have the name recognition and following to spread their games via word of mouth, distributing some free copies to the video game websites that do reviews, and in general just self advertising on their website where all their fans would likely already be checking regularly. That is... if they had games worth playing.

[kane_magus]

I'd say that it's a little of both. I'd say that "costs" are definitely rising, but it's as you say completely a consequence of unrealistic expectations. These companies are spending way more money on these new games (i.e. the "costs" are "rising"), purely on the expectation that they will be making mad bank on the game when it is released. Because, obviously, the more money they spend on it and the more people they throw at it and the more they advertise it, the better it has to be, right? Or, perhaps more accurately, the better it has to sell, right? Because it doesn't actually matter if the game is any good (an increasingly rare thing in the modern video game industry), just so long as it sells well enough. And then, when the game ends up selling only reasonably well, rather than ridiculously, ludicrously well, the companies (and, more importantly, the shareholders in those companies) see all that money "wasted" on "under-performing" products as bad investments, and as such they start pulling their investment money out of that company. Because the line didn't go up, always and forever. Thus all the layoffs and studio closures and cut corners in a futile attempt to "recoup losses." And all that means is that whatever next projects they try to do in the future (assuming they even still exist at all by that point) are going to perform even worse, and it's all a self-inflicted doom spiral.

In other words, "costs" are indeed rising, but it's an entirely unforced error on the part of all these idiot companies and their moronic "expectations." It's actually not some kind of innate attribute of the real-world economy or anything approaching objective reality at all, i.e. not something that can just be explained away by the nebulous phrase "costs are rising" like that's some kind of truism, rather than, in fact, a horseshit excuse. Any "costs" that are "rising" are doing so only because the dumbshit companies falsely and wrongly believe that they "need" to spend so much fucking money, when in actual reality they really, really don't. The only reason they feel they need to do so is because they made the horrific mistake of making their company publicly traded, and now they have to answer to shareholders who don't give a single solitary shit and/or fuck about their company or their games, except insofar as how much bigger their company and their games can make the shareholders' bank accounts. And when that obviously doesn't happen, because of all the fucking imbecilic expectations, the company dies. And then the shareholding vultures move on to the next soon-to-be corpse of a company.

[goldpseudo]

tl;dr apparently gamers prefer cheap/free games that they can continue to play for as long as they like over spending hundreds of dollars on new games that they have to keep replacing every four months.

Nobody could've forseen this.

And apparently the solution to this is to keep making overpriced games that fewer people want, and just distribute them to more people who don't want them.

CAPITALISM HO!