How many times do the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 need to explain the basics of how to make a popular game and we all treat it like deep wisdom?
Not that there’s anything wrong with what they’re saying. I just feel like it only sounds like deep wisdom because the industry is so fucking broken.
How many times do the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 need to explain the basics of how to make a popular game and we all treat it like deep wisdom?
I mean, I grew up basically raised by PBS and even saturday morning cartoons and thought that it would be basic, fundamental knowledge in the world today that reason and knowledge are power, that con-men will tell you what you want to hear, and not to believe people who say they’re “the best” and instead look at empirical evidence of all claims.
I thought “wow the future is going to be amazing, we have all these programs that are telling us kids how to live, how to navigate a complex world, we will have a future of starships and science and wonders!”
Now I’m here every day talking to the team I manage when they share obviously AI-generated “news articles” about scientists discovering mermaid cities and trying to get permission to spread their essential oil pyramid scheme through the company.
As a species, we are far, far stupider than we want to admit. As individuals, sure we each have great potential, but when you get more than one person in any kind of situation, the intelligence levels drop to the lowest common-denominator, and the more people, the lower that level drops.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with what they’re saying. I just feel like it only sounds like deep wisdom because the industry is so fucking broken.”
-Competent soldiers commenting on the Art of War.
Truth. A big chunk of that book is explaining to nobels that war is expensive, and maybe you just shouldn’t.
I believe Sven Vincke just likes to dunk on them. Can’t really blame him for it either. I’d do the same.
thats exactly why, if it wasn’t broken no one would be saying anything.
its like a bunch of people running a marathon and a few take the bridge across while most others jump into the river because its moving faster
Gonna have to do it forever until businesses figure out that half of what makes a game good is that it needs to be a literal passion/art project, and not just a checklist of shit that needs to get done.
The fuck he talking about? Obviously it has worked before. How else can you explain yearly COD releases making billions in revenue?
That it’s a losing strategy in the long term was always obvious, but get this: whomever’s in charge only cares about the numbers of the following quarter. That the company will go under in 10 years is literally not his problem, that’s the next schmoe’s problem.
Yearly CoD releases are taking longer to make and costing more to produce though; the most recent CoD we have numbers for, which was a number of years ago at this point, cost $700M to make, and that was the most expensive one at the time. They used to have two studios alternating releases every other year. Now there are three studios on a rotation with about a dozen support studios that all used to make other games, and now they just make CoD.
“Charging more” is where this gets ambiguous though. A game like Assassin’s Creed charges less these days than it used to, relative to how much content they put in the box. I’m long since checked out of Assassin’s Creed, but I think the average game could stand to be leaner and cost the same in the interest of coming out faster and for less money to produce. That would be called shrinkflation in any other industry, which is the same as charging more.
I don’t think this is quite right. CoD titles do take a long time to develop. They‘re just rotating studios, so they can achieve a yearly release cadence (the last six entries in the series had five different studios working on them). Also, they are by no means getting cheaper. According to court documents development costs rose from $450 million to over $700 million from 2015 to 2020 alone.
Aren’t the cod games made by 3 different studios that take turns with their releases? Or did they stop doing that? I remember infinity ward, Treyarchand I can’t recall the 3rd
It’s weird to me that game devs don’t experiment with alternative organizational structures more often, kind of like Motion Twin; or how they’re only just beginning to unionize in some places. The “capital” in game development is a little bit computer hardware, but otherwise the vast majority of value in a game design studio is the human beings and their talent and skills.
I cannot think of any other industry where the workers are more essential, and management more superfluous and replaceable.
A lot of the value is in the IP or existing assets/engine/codebase.
If you are starting a new IP then fuck it you may as well go with an alternative structure over a giant corp.
Yeah, but have you considered the fact that this gives Saudi Arabia &/or Jared Kushner “anti-cheat” level access to millions & millions of PCs in the USA?
That is reason enough to never buy another EA game.
Ahead of the curve, never bought one :3
It’s been about 11 years. Dragon Age: Inquisition was the last one for me.
I mean, all due respect, to the guy, but this doesn’t go down until 2027. At least give them a minute to get in the position where they could feasibly fuck up before you berate them for it.
If you look at the Internet they are apparently definitely dismantling the company to sell the pieces but also definitely continuing to make what they make but with MAGA politics but also as a muslim theocracy and trimming down and speeding up but also doubling down on live service at the same time somehow.
And man, one or multiple of those may happen, but almost certainly not all of them and none have happened yet. Given how much of a public-ass public company chasing short term gains they’ve been historically I can’t help but think there’s a fair amount of projection going on.
Here’s my stance: I have no idea what this means and I have no idea what they’re going to do. This is all weird and I have zero frame of reference for how the new owners are going to gel with that organization or what their new objectives are going to be when compared to the old “make more money this quarter than last quarter” thing.
Tobias Funke “But it just might work this time!”
Is this what experts generally refer to as the “Fucking Around” phase?
they gotta make that 55b back now
Seems kinda stupid to say right after EA just made $55 billion doing exactly that.
