As a 20 year video game professional I think this was a great overview. I even learned a thing. If there one thing I would want to build on is that as the hardware had gotten more powerful, the creation of assets have gotten much more time consuming. My early PS2 games it took one person about a week to make a character's model (no animation, no behaviors). Now that work is multiple people asking up to several man months.
I only do PC gaming, no console, and I can add that for PC games, the big companies are competing against hundreds of small (sometimes one-person) game studios who work out of their house crafting a labor of love in their spare time because they have a vision of the game they would like to make. They are working for free, and if the game hits it big and earns them a few hundred thousand dollars, awesome. It's another thing driving the profitability down if you want to form a big game studio and pay people full time to design and code for you.
I spent a half a thousand dollars on a next-gen console anticipating next-gen content. I thought maybe, the visually stunning and technically intricate Red Dead Redemption 2 would be the baseline standard which the next gen would necessarily exceed. Since i purchased my Series X i've almost exclusively played 10 to 15 year old games because they are superior to anything coming out now.
Starfield? No. Star Wars Outlaws? No. Skull and Bones? Hell to the no.
Fallout New Vegas, Assassin's Creed Black Flag, Far Cry 3? Yes. Bioshock, The Witcher 3, GTA4? Hell to the yes.
It's a long time coming but my last hope is that Rockstar once again shames the rest of the studios so badly that it shocks them into... idk... competence, at least. But by then my next-gen investment will be almost obsolete.
Y'all might have a point about the inflation-adjusted price. I would pay a hundred bucks for GTA6 if it's up to Rockstar snuff. But i seriously doubt more money will improve quality in general. As it is they can't raise prices because the games suck. Maybe that's circular. Maybe.
Also let's don't forget that GTA5 makes $800 million/yr off Shark Cards for its online mode. Kinda ironic since they are unironically exploitative.
The core audience is young (ages 12–27), mostly (75%) White, and Male. That cohort has been moving Right for a while and went hard for Trump in 2024. The next biggest slice are Latino and Asians, who are also more Conservative on cultural stuff than they were.
The developers have gone the other way. They are delivering a ton of product that appeals to a shrinking minority of their customer base. Classic mismatch of supply and demand.
Not really. The fastest growing segments are the "outside the norm" gamers. 45+ is actually over a third of gamers now, and women now make up something like 40% of gamers, and that number is growing. Catering to the "core" audience you mentioned is actually catering to the shrinking/stagnating market at this point, and a lot of what people are complaining about with "too far left" complaints is just normal stuff that people who make money off making people angry have told other people to be mad about.
The AAA studios are abusing their developers(look up "crunch") to churn out sequels of copies of sequels filled with exploitative microtransactions, bugs, and predatory mechanics, for which they still want people to pay sixty dollars.
The AAA industry is dying because they've lost touch with with customers, and are just hammering them for a quick buck.
Indie studios are where people interested in reporting on games should be looking.
I don't know if I would call working five to 10 years on a project a path to a quick buck. I wish Microsoft, with their acquisitions, turned the devs loose on the old IP. Is Steve Meretzky still out there to script a new Wishbringer?
Development time for a game notwithstanding, the prevailing current in the AAA industry right now is to release now, fix later, create annoyances, and sell solutions. Post-purchase monetization is a top priority, regardless(or more likely heedless) of the degenerative effect it has on customers.
I don't really play those games. God of War, Spiderman, Borderlands, Diablo, Palworld, Balder's Gate. Some of them let you buy non-game changing things, but nothing required (expansions notwithstanding). I don't play games that have annual versions.
I wish everyone had proper management so that crunch didn't exist. Unfortunately good management is rare. Folks need to be fairly compensated for their time and efforts, especially if crunch exists. I previously worked in a field where there was crunch three times a day with advertisers involved. Happily, with a small team and clear deadlines, I didn't break them. But it does suck every time.
The AAA industry in terms of bugs and crunch hasn't really gotten any worse than it was 10 years ago, but the exploitation aspects are absolutely worse, but a huge issue there is just short-sighted management. Game development costs have blown up, and some of it is higher production values, some of it is bad management. Need people with actual long-term thinking and proper vision beyond "chase the thing".
Enjoying or immersing yourself in any kind of art can be a time sink or a revitalizing experience. It also provides the opportunity to experience things from another perspective. It works the same for paintings, photography, fiction books, movies, TV, sports, or videogames.
As a 20 year video game professional I think this was a great overview. I even learned a thing. If there one thing I would want to build on is that as the hardware had gotten more powerful, the creation of assets have gotten much more time consuming. My early PS2 games it took one person about a week to make a character's model (no animation, no behaviors). Now that work is multiple people asking up to several man months.
I only do PC gaming, no console, and I can add that for PC games, the big companies are competing against hundreds of small (sometimes one-person) game studios who work out of their house crafting a labor of love in their spare time because they have a vision of the game they would like to make. They are working for free, and if the game hits it big and earns them a few hundred thousand dollars, awesome. It's another thing driving the profitability down if you want to form a big game studio and pay people full time to design and code for you.
Perhaps gamers are moving on to sports betting. Also, in the US the big drop in college age kids is about to hit.
I spent a half a thousand dollars on a next-gen console anticipating next-gen content. I thought maybe, the visually stunning and technically intricate Red Dead Redemption 2 would be the baseline standard which the next gen would necessarily exceed. Since i purchased my Series X i've almost exclusively played 10 to 15 year old games because they are superior to anything coming out now.
Starfield? No. Star Wars Outlaws? No. Skull and Bones? Hell to the no.
Fallout New Vegas, Assassin's Creed Black Flag, Far Cry 3? Yes. Bioshock, The Witcher 3, GTA4? Hell to the yes.
It's a long time coming but my last hope is that Rockstar once again shames the rest of the studios so badly that it shocks them into... idk... competence, at least. But by then my next-gen investment will be almost obsolete.
Y'all might have a point about the inflation-adjusted price. I would pay a hundred bucks for GTA6 if it's up to Rockstar snuff. But i seriously doubt more money will improve quality in general. As it is they can't raise prices because the games suck. Maybe that's circular. Maybe.
Also let's don't forget that GTA5 makes $800 million/yr off Shark Cards for its online mode. Kinda ironic since they are unironically exploitative.
Not a mystery.
The core audience is young (ages 12–27), mostly (75%) White, and Male. That cohort has been moving Right for a while and went hard for Trump in 2024. The next biggest slice are Latino and Asians, who are also more Conservative on cultural stuff than they were.
The developers have gone the other way. They are delivering a ton of product that appeals to a shrinking minority of their customer base. Classic mismatch of supply and demand.
Not really. The fastest growing segments are the "outside the norm" gamers. 45+ is actually over a third of gamers now, and women now make up something like 40% of gamers, and that number is growing. Catering to the "core" audience you mentioned is actually catering to the shrinking/stagnating market at this point, and a lot of what people are complaining about with "too far left" complaints is just normal stuff that people who make money off making people angry have told other people to be mad about.
Today I learned that there is a thing called Roblox.
Today I ordered a book on making roblox content because my eight year old wants to make an obby.
The AAA studios are abusing their developers(look up "crunch") to churn out sequels of copies of sequels filled with exploitative microtransactions, bugs, and predatory mechanics, for which they still want people to pay sixty dollars.
The AAA industry is dying because they've lost touch with with customers, and are just hammering them for a quick buck.
Indie studios are where people interested in reporting on games should be looking.
I don't know if I would call working five to 10 years on a project a path to a quick buck. I wish Microsoft, with their acquisitions, turned the devs loose on the old IP. Is Steve Meretzky still out there to script a new Wishbringer?
Development time for a game notwithstanding, the prevailing current in the AAA industry right now is to release now, fix later, create annoyances, and sell solutions. Post-purchase monetization is a top priority, regardless(or more likely heedless) of the degenerative effect it has on customers.
I don't really play those games. God of War, Spiderman, Borderlands, Diablo, Palworld, Balder's Gate. Some of them let you buy non-game changing things, but nothing required (expansions notwithstanding). I don't play games that have annual versions.
I wish everyone had proper management so that crunch didn't exist. Unfortunately good management is rare. Folks need to be fairly compensated for their time and efforts, especially if crunch exists. I previously worked in a field where there was crunch three times a day with advertisers involved. Happily, with a small team and clear deadlines, I didn't break them. But it does suck every time.
The AAA industry in terms of bugs and crunch hasn't really gotten any worse than it was 10 years ago, but the exploitation aspects are absolutely worse, but a huge issue there is just short-sighted management. Game development costs have blown up, and some of it is higher production values, some of it is bad management. Need people with actual long-term thinking and proper vision beyond "chase the thing".
Agreed.
Maybe people are waking up to the fact that gaming is a pointless time suck.
Enjoying or immersing yourself in any kind of art can be a time sink or a revitalizing experience. It also provides the opportunity to experience things from another perspective. It works the same for paintings, photography, fiction books, movies, TV, sports, or videogames.
Most things people do for enjoyment are a "pointless time suck", though. If someone plays games instead of doing something else, why judge them?
I don’t think Ollie did judge them
"pointless time suck" is judgmental language, and to present it as a "fact" only makes it more so.