Amazing fucking game that Ubisoft decided to kill on release:
EGS/Uplay exclusivity for a long time
Zero marketing
Delusional sales projection
Should be 30 bucks not 40
This game only got traction because of word-of-mouth, but in the current state of the industry it couldn't survive with just that. Ubi managers decided to let this piece of joy die because their name was already muddy and they did nothing to change that, even with a great fucking game in their sea of slop.
That game was actually good? I wrote it off because, a) it's Ubisoft, and b) they were obviously trying to Yamanba it up as much as possible.
If it has actual good gameplay and structure, then that's both hilarious and sad. Another reason for Ubisoft to eat shit (also because they're Ubisoft).
Yeah, the whole central point is to kill overbudgeted games. While it is nice to see some of these AAA games pumped out with extreme details in every aspect like RDR2, they're the minority in that part of the industry. More often than not, the budget is spent on unnecessary 4k textures and endless committees to ensure the game appeals to everyone it can. A game trying to market to everyone is often a game that appeals to no one and is likely going to be a less creative or unique game. It's a sick cycle of studios banking 7+ years of their life on a game that buys the studio more time or causes their studio to implode. And that's assuming the publisher doesn't layoff the staff anyways because the game only did $200 million in profit, not $500 million because they were expecting it to do GTA5 release numbers.
The worst part about these budgets is that it has caused dev cycles to balloon out to that 7+ year dev time, which is inherently worse for the industry. Instead of taking 2-3 years on a game and having the experience of multiple games under their belt, the current devs are mainly experienced with just that 1 game and maybe their experience on that project was hyperfocused on just 1 area, so their overall experience is absolutely dogshit compared to past devs that has been working on multiple projects over those years. In some cases in the past, those devs may have been sent over to help work on a sister studio's project while their personal involvement on their studio's project is pretty much complete.
In the past, you'd see a game studio release like 2 good games and you'd feel you could trust them to deliver on their next games. Nowadays you'll see a studio develop 1 good game and then the next game is dogshit because the people that worked on the last game aren't there anymore and that studio is just a skeleton crew ran by retards working for cheap. It isn't the same studio, the brand name of a studio means nothing anymore. There's countless stories in the past decade of "wow, this game sucks, I thought this studio was good!" and then you find out that like 70% of the people that mattered at the studio left to form their own studio.
The industry was already starting to get out of control as the success of Halo 3 and Modern Warfare 2, which made a lot of market investors realize gaming is an untapped gold mine. Then GTA5 buck broke the entire gaming industry when it popped off and sold a gajillion dollars, resulting in every AAA trying to replicate that. Every investor wants the company they're invested in to pump out THE GAME that sells a gajillion copies and then continues to print easy money for a decade straight. The overall change has resulted in more inexperienced devs, less consumer confidence, and an incredibly unstable industry that has less interest in creative endeavors.
A big question is if the gaming industry can even
have a big crash, since, well, people keep spending money on these games. Could perhaps most of AAA gaming go under and that creates a total crash? I'm unsure. But I have trouble right now seeing the likes of
Fortnite and
Call of Duty no longer pulling in the dough - and GTA VI will likely also bring in a steady, large amount of money, and not for GTA VI, but for the next version of GTA Online.
Maybe we'd see only a very small handful of Games as a Service (
Fortnite, GTAO), with a few seasonal games (
Call of Duty, Madden) - that are also GaaS? That plus Gacha games. Maybe that's the near future of gaming. Still, that'd open up a much bigger return to a gaming scene of the past, even if not entirely.
Man, I loved how there basically was no such thing as AAA gaming in the 90s. The closest there was were Nintendo and Sega, and even that's a stretch to call them that. I know it's almost entirely due to technological limitations, and how it didn't matter how much resources and personnel you had, you're not making a Genesis or N64 game look or play all that much better than just having a handful of guys. Hell, the most important factor when drawing eyeballs (and thus money) in the 90s and 00s was visual fidelity, and in the 90s alone it was driven by id software (more specifically, just John Carmack); in the late 90s and early-to-mid 00s it was Carmack, Sweeney, and the guys who modified Carmack's work to make GoldSrc and Source (just realized I've never thought about who exactly at Valve were the main engine programmers). In the early 00s, AAA really started coming about, and publishers started throwing around money to get the best graphics. Creating all those assets requires a lot of people, which is a lot of money.
We're at an odd point, however, where graphics are no longer the main draw, but so is... nothing. For the AAA games, it's running almost entirely on name recognition, which helps explain in part all the remakes. Visuals just have to be reaching a certain threshold, and that itself isn't such a big deal these days, as a lot of these AAA games look worse than ones from a decade ago. These still require a ton of asset work, however...
...which is where AI could really shake things up. If one artist or programmer could do the work of a hundred, or even a thousand? Well damn, we could have the same visuals we see today with the team size being just a handful of guys. That is, unless AI skips asset generation and we go right to the full game generation, but that's another wonder/horror topic.
But to get to what I want to see - a wide but more tightly knit gaming scene/community - a shit ton of people will have to just want to not play video games any more. We got the Normies in the AAA scene feeding the beast to churn out watered down slop (and worse, so much of it is being dug up graves of fondly remembered titles), and then we got the Hipsters in the indie scene that are some how even more unbearable (oh, right, because they're hipsters). We'd need a small indie scene with a larger (but not too large) actual games industry that caters to a specific culture - the gamer nerd culture. I'll probably never see this again, but I can dream.
www.bbc.com
