Seems like a good thing? People have been complaining all the time about how game studios are too bloated and forced to play too safe because of the bloat. It's probably for the best that it's...
PAX East 2025 highlighted a concerning trend in video game development: the rise of successful solo developers and small teams, potentially leading to the 'deprofessionalization' of the industry.
Seems like a good thing? People have been complaining all the time about how game studios are too bloated and forced to play too safe because of the bloat. It's probably for the best that it's deprofessionalizing.
I consider it a good thing. Have a look a t Stardew Valley , a game made by one person (up to some version well past v1.0 when he got more people on). Or games made by Zachtronics (by Zach). Or...
I consider it a good thing. Have a look a t Stardew Valley , a game made by one person (up to some version well past v1.0 when he got more people on). Or games made by Zachtronics (by Zach). Or Knuckle Cracker (Creeper World games series). I believe FTL and Into the breach were also made by really small team.
There are great games that are not made by big studios. I'd almost say that there are more great games made by small studios than there are by big ones. Big studios can make great games but it's not that common nowadays in my opinion.
I'd call this take technically correct. By definition, large teams developing big games cannot hope to compete with thousands of smaller developers producing thousands of more focused games in a...
I'd almost say that there are more great games made by small studios than there are by big ones. Big studios can make great games but it's not that common nowadays in my opinion.
I'd call this take technically correct. By definition, large teams developing big games cannot hope to compete with thousands of smaller developers producing thousands of more focused games in a short amount of time, but the smaller devs aren't necessarily producing an overall higher percentage of better titles so much as the sheer quantity of titles means by definition, more good games will come out of those indie efforts than the big studios.
For every smash-hit Witcher or Baldur's Gate there are multiple FIFA and Call of Duty titles, and likewise, for every FTL or Stardew Valley there are 100 low-effort asset flips infested with NFTs and other anti-consumer cash grabs pushed onto Steam and the Nintendo eShop that will never see more than 100 daily active players.
The difference is that, with AAA games, you hear about them whether you want to or not simply because they have the marketing budgets to consume the gaming press with well-timed "leaks", ad buys, and paid industry events. The only times you hear about indie titles are because a review copy actually made it into a journalist's hands (and keep in mind there are thousands of devs hoping for a real review in any given year, so just getting selected is like winning the lottery) or because it is that unexpected smash hit like Stardew Valley.
TL;DR - It's survivorship bias. You hear all about AAA failures because AAA studios pay to saturate the airwaves and that leads people to ask "what happened to <title we were hearing all about for the past year>?" when things don't pan out, but all the indie studios that just mass-produce shovelware or pour their hearts and souls into genuinely great games that never exceed 100 daily active players fly under the radar.
You are right. There are likely hundreds of indie games for each AAA title, if not more. The thing is that with their absurd busgets, I expect big studios to make really good games, yet they don't...
You are right. There are likely hundreds of indie games for each AAA title, if not more.
The thing is that with their absurd busgets, I expect big studios to make really good games, yet they don't often deliver even with big budget. While there is a single guy that can do small indie game that becomes legendary.
If we have a look quite some years ago: Blizzard, Westwood - they were small studios that made great games! Then they started getting bigger and bigger eventually swallowing other smaller studios or being swallowed themselves and becoming (part of) big corporations. And nowadays they are simply too big.
If you watched movie Ford vs. Ferrari (Le Mans 66 in Europe) there was a scene where Carol Shelby said to Ford that the envelope passed five pairs of hands before it arrived to Ford. And I think this perfectly describes big gaming studios as well - they are too big to steer themselves the right way. Sometimes they are on the right course but they may lose their way the next year (for next five years).
Warhorse Studios (Kingdom Come: Deliverance I & II) came to be from solo experts that were gathered by (controversial, yet) great lead developer at the right time. And I think this is the way forward - disband the big ones and let the people get intermixed and create new studios - freshen up the pond of game developers. Many of them may be up to something but the corporate structure may not allow them to press forward, maybe they just need to form the right team (of people from other big corporations).
Hades (25 employees) and BG3 (450 employees) are a couple more examples of smaller studios making hugely successful games. Slay the Spire only had two full-time devs! Nintendo is one of the few...
Hades (25 employees) and BG3 (450 employees) are a couple more examples of smaller studios making hugely successful games. Slay the Spire only had two full-time devs!
Nintendo is one of the few big companies that successfully uses more focused teams. Mario Wonder had about 435 people working on it.
I mean if 450 counts as “small”, Bethesda is practically an indie company. They barely employ over 100 people. Fallout 3 was made when they had just 80 people working on it. Not sure many people...
I mean if 450 counts as “small”, Bethesda is practically an indie company. They barely employ over 100 people. Fallout 3 was made when they had just 80 people working on it.
Not sure many people are counting Skyrim as a small, artisan release, though.
IIRC it's true that when Skyrim was made Bethesda had about 80-100 employees, but in 2023 they had around 450. That said, no way I'd count Larian as a small developer. 🙂
IIRC it's true that when Skyrim was made Bethesda had about 80-100 employees, but in 2023 they had around 450.
That said, no way I'd count Larian as a small developer. 🙂
I consider 450 bigger than small, actually. But they are still far from being behemoth that doesn't know what it's doing. I actually played Divinity: Origina Sin which was also made by Larian. And...
I consider 450 bigger than small, actually. But they are still far from being behemoth that doesn't know what it's doing. I actually played Divinity: Origina Sin which was also made by Larian. And I still have Original Sin 2 to play... They are great studio, they care about player and gaming experience more than they care about money (or at least I feel it that way).
Games I have more than 300 hours in: World of Warcraft/Hearthstone/Diablo/StarCraft (untracked but impossible to be less) FTL, at around 700. Stardew Valley, despite never playing beyond two years...
Games I have more than 300 hours in:
World of Warcraft/Hearthstone/Diablo/StarCraft (untracked but impossible to be less)
FTL, at around 700.
Stardew Valley, despite never playing beyond two years on any farm.
7 days to die
I paid less for those three indie titles. But I also know development and perpetual costs were much lower.
I have probably 200-300 hours in FTL. I have played Stardew Valley on PS Vita, Nintendo Switch Lite and Steam Deck. I have finished the game once but just as you, I have put many hours in it....
I have probably 200-300 hours in FTL.
I have played Stardew Valley on PS Vita, Nintendo Switch Lite and Steam Deck. I have finished the game once but just as you, I have put many hours in it. Probably 150.
My most played game by hours on Steam is Creeper World 3.
On the other hand, I have played Uncharted collection (not 1, 2, 3, theother on with two games) that normally costs 50€ and I finished it in around 35 hours. Don't get me wrong - it was great! But in price/value, it's mediocre.
And then there are games like GTA5 that you can't even start without internet connection. Not even singleplayer (maybe you can now, but I'm over it already).
I think the author is bemoaning the overall shrinking of the industry, but spent a long while talking in circles about basically nothing. The end is where they reveal they are a game writer...
I think the author is bemoaning the overall shrinking of the industry, but spent a long while talking in circles about basically nothing.
The end is where they reveal they are a game writer themselves and that music, art, and narration jobs are seeing the most shrink and contract work.
I dunno, I don't think it's a bad article per say, but it is definitely not saying what I think it means to say, perhaps in an effort to be different from yet another ,"games industry dying oh no!" Article.
I can understand why this is bad for people in the industry that are actually trying to make a consistent living. But as a gamer that enjoys smaller games with quirky or experimentalmechanics,...
I can understand why this is bad for people in the industry that are actually trying to make a consistent living.
But as a gamer that enjoys smaller games with quirky or experimentalmechanics, this seems like one of the best things that could be happening to the industry.
It's a good thing unless you're a person who is personally invested in video games being a professionalized industry, like game journalists or game studio executives.
It's a good thing unless you're a person who is personally invested in video games being a professionalized industry, like game journalists or game studio executives.
Just going to say what's been said a million times as of late: Most of the best games I've played in the last several years have been Indie Games or so-called AA games.
Just going to say what's been said a million times as of late: Most of the best games I've played in the last several years have been Indie Games or so-called AA games.
Yeah, I've watched many beloved franchises get swallowed whole by AAA studios. In my own personal opinion, big budget game development has never been good for gamers. I'm not sad to see it...
Yeah, I've watched many beloved franchises get swallowed whole by AAA studios. In my own personal opinion, big budget game development has never been good for gamers. I'm not sad to see it struggling. Maybe gaming doesn't need to be a megaindustry caught in a cycle of bloating itself so it can fund its bloat.
I like this take, with some conditions applied. There are seasons for everything, the pendulum trope made real. The failures of massive, overbudget AAA games of the last few years, to me,...
I like this take, with some conditions applied. There are seasons for everything, the pendulum trope made real. The failures of massive, overbudget AAA games of the last few years, to me, indicates that the time is right for the "deprofessionalization" that we are seeing. There's a constant cycle of entrepreneurial seeds being planted, sprouting, then being consumed into larger enterprises. There's a golden age, then a decline. People leave, spinning off their own projects and studios, and the cycle begins anew. This, to me is a healthy process and its definitely about time. The film industry today is a perfect example of what happens when you lose access to this cycle of creative destruction.
It frustrates me when people only buy AAA and complain about how bad gaming is. There's so many games it's impossible to keep up. The gaming industry is bursting at the seams right now. There's...
It frustrates me when people only buy AAA and complain about how bad gaming is. There's so many games it's impossible to keep up. The gaming industry is bursting at the seams right now. There's new games in every genre pretty much.
It also seems like Unreal 5 is becoming dominant over Unity for the indy dev space and it's letting indy devs make higher quality games too. Now we all know Epic doesn't exactly have a clean rap sheet, but they have some good guy points.
What I'm saying is, if you're playing Assassins Creed 26 and you're pissed off about how bland it is, you could spend like an hour looking and find a dozen games that do something different.
Unreal also has, from my observations of the end products, the highest bang for your buck for graphical fidelity and performance out of the box. If you're looking to make a eye-candy 3D title,...
Unreal also has, from my observations of the end products, the highest bang for your buck for graphical fidelity and performance out of the box. If you're looking to make a eye-candy 3D title, it's probably the correct starting point unless you want to customize the bejesus out of the engine.
It does seem like things are quickly bifurcating into Unreal and Godot. Godot is great for people wanting a lightweight engine, Unreal is perfect for the exact opposite. Both need a bit more...
It does seem like things are quickly bifurcating into Unreal and Godot. Godot is great for people wanting a lightweight engine, Unreal is perfect for the exact opposite. Both need a bit more development, Godot moreso, but I think it's a healthy direction things are headed in.
In no particular order, I can think of: Dwarf Fortress had only two developers for almost 20 years Factorio had three developers Cuphead had two developers FTL had two developers Balatro had one...
In no particular order, I can think of:
Dwarf Fortress had only two developers for almost 20 years
Factorio had three developers
Cuphead had two developers
FTL had two developers
Balatro had one developer
Celeste had two developers
Hotline Miami had two developers
Minecraft started with only one developer
Of course they often ended up as a team of a half dozen including artists, musicians, etc, and often once they became popular they expanded to a couple dozen people, but still. Some of my favourite and most replayed video games of all time came out of tiny studios of a small handful of people on a shoestring budget.
Only one person writing code, too! It was a big deal when they hired their second person to write code for the game after the Steam release (and afaik that part of development is still just those...
Dwarf Fortress had only two developers for almost 20 years
Only one person writing code, too! It was a big deal when they hired their second person to write code for the game after the Steam release (and afaik that part of development is still just those two!)
Tarn wrote most of the code, but Zach did more than just mailing people crayon drawings. He did contribute code over the years. Anyway, I guess I should have said it was a two-person team instead...
Tarn wrote most of the code, but Zach did more than just mailing people crayon drawings. He did contribute code over the years. Anyway, I guess I should have said it was a two-person team instead of two developers.
I didn't wanna throw Zach under the bus or anything -- he's absolutely been developing the game alongside Tarn all these years! I just wanted to add more details that show how impressive it was...
I didn't wanna throw Zach under the bus or anything -- he's absolutely been developing the game alongside Tarn all these years! I just wanted to add more details that show how impressive it was (and still is). I didn't know Zach ever contributed code, though! The news when they hired Putnam all phrased it as "Dwarf Fortress hires second programmer." I'm curious how they handled that, since Tarn has said he didn't use any version control until they hired Putnam.
Don't quote me but I'm pretty sure Zach was contributing like a third of the code from like 2010 to almost a decade later. I don't think he's contributed directly to the code since then, but has...
Don't quote me but I'm pretty sure Zach was contributing like a third of the code from like 2010 to almost a decade later. I don't think he's contributed directly to the code since then, but has mostly just done research about the weights of different animals and their ignition temperatures, etc.
I still think it's fair to call him a co-developer.
I understand the position of the author and I do agree that it's sad that the changing job market is leaving people behind. But at the same time, this "deprofessionalization" phenomenon has...
I understand the position of the author and I do agree that it's sad that the changing job market is leaving people behind.
But at the same time, this "deprofessionalization" phenomenon has created games that I actually care about and feel are worth playing. These people are leaving giant machines that are designed to mash a thousand peoples' ideas into something that is then put it through a sieve to make it appeal to the greatest common denominator. And while the result might not be terrible, it is without character or texture. While the indie games might not be as likely as AAA games to be good, that is more than made up for how much more interesting they are. And I'd rather play an interesting "bad" game than a boring "good" game.
It seems to me that being part of these large teams introduces too many creative constraints. When you're on a big team, you're dealing with a lot of money, and when you're dealing with a lot of money, you can't afford to take as many risks, and that results in those uninteresting games I don't care for.
I played through Lifeless Planet. It was, by all accounts, terrible. It was cliche and predictable, the physics and puzzles were terrible and easy. Yet it was interesting enough that I hate-played...
I played through Lifeless Planet. It was, by all accounts, terrible. It was cliche and predictable, the physics and puzzles were terrible and easy.
Yet it was interesting enough that I hate-played it.
By contrast, Skyrim has never grasped my interest for more than 2-3 hours.
The Skyrim zeitgeist has mostly passed and saying something bad about the game was like cursing in church. I'm no longer worried about speaking up. It, and frankly most Bethesda games, have been...
The Skyrim zeitgeist has mostly passed and saying something bad about the game was like cursing in church. I'm no longer worried about speaking up.
It, and frankly most Bethesda games, have been overrated for as long as I can remember. Skyrim is no exception.
I'm with @vord, never held me for more than a couple of hours.
None of their games besides Skyrim and Oblivion have ever gotten me invested. They have a lot of issues, but they excel at absolutely prioritizing player agency. Similar games like Red Dead...
None of their games besides Skyrim and Oblivion have ever gotten me invested.
They have a lot of issues, but they excel at absolutely prioritizing player agency. Similar games like Red Dead Redemption 2 fail with player agency because they’re prioritizing other things (story, system rigidity). For example, I went on a quest that involved retrieving a stash of treasure from a hiding spot. There was a glitch (plenty of those in Elder Scrolls as well to be fair) and even when I went to the spot and saw the location that obviously was meant to store the loot I couldn’t retrieve it. Not sure why, but because they wanted to make sure I’d done the right things in advanced I couldn’t withdraw the treasure even though in the story of the game it was already there. In Skyrim you’d be able to take that loot even if you’d cheated your way there. There aren’t as many magic doors that need quest progression to unlock.
An open world RPG should primarily be about agency. They all feature it, but in my opinion only Bethesda manages it at scale. It’s why the main quests are famously forgotten by players. Just fucking about in the world is more fun than the gameplay in most other games. I didn’t beat the main quest in Skyrim until I was 300 hours in. I’m waiting for the day they have the balls to not even include a main quest in one of their major games.
For me, I think it's just I never 'got' the appeal of Bethesda RPGs. On top of Skyrim, Fallout 3, made it to like the first town, dropped a nuke on it, then got bored at stopped playing. Fallout...
For me, I think it's just I never 'got' the appeal of Bethesda RPGs. On top of Skyrim, Fallout 3, made it to like the first town, dropped a nuke on it, then got bored at stopped playing. Fallout NV, made it like 3 hours then got bored.
I think I tend to lose interest in the open world RPGs when the exploration becomes a chore and a struggle rather than the fun.
I have played many other RPGs and ARPGs, and enjoyed them immensely. But the titles listed above just always fell flat.
Ha, to me it seems like a few years ago it was somewhat fashionable to talk shit about Skyrim but nowadays we're back to nostalgia and everyone seemingly loves it. I'm with you, though I'm a fan...
Ha, to me it seems like a few years ago it was somewhat fashionable to talk shit about Skyrim but nowadays we're back to nostalgia and everyone seemingly loves it.
I'm with you, though I'm a fan of Morrowind despite its flaws (and I don't think its fighting system is any worse than whatever Oblivion and Skyrim does, another hot take). I think Oblivion may be even more overrated than Skyrim.
For me personally New Vegas killed Fallout 3 and 4, and Enderal completely killed Skyrim. Enderal especially is absurd, being a completely free game made by a hobbyist studio. It is flawed, but simultaneously it does so many things so much better it puts Bethesda to shame.
The guy quoted in what makes up the majority of the text in this article, Ryan K. Rigney, works for a venture capital company. So yes, of course he's pissed that if a larger chunk of developers...
The guy quoted in what makes up the majority of the text in this article, Ryan K. Rigney, works for a venture capital company. So yes, of course he's pissed that if a larger chunk of developers stay small, it's less likely they'll seek out VCs.
And it's clear he's blinded by his rage as he makes objectively wrong statements.
This is the only creative industry on the planet where one person can make $100 million making something by themselves.
Except for, you know... music artists, modern artists (physical media), streamers and content creators, and depending on how loose your definition is - perhaps even OnlyFans creators. Yes, in all of these cases, it takes a lot of luck (in addition to skill that I don't want to devalue). But that holds true for indie games that make it big, too.
"People are paying for these games!," he exclaimed. "This is not happening for indie filmmakers. This isn't happening for books."
I assure you, people do pay for these things... indie filmmakers have a better chance of getting their film picked up now that there's tons of competing streaming services.
The list is updated every week and contains 10 categories, each with 10 or 15 titles. So in principle, you could have about 6,500 New York Times Best Sellers in a year. But it is typically considerably fewer.
I was surprised this guy got so much virtual "airtime," until I looked into this site's ownership. Informa TechTarget owns the site now and is some kind of B2B marketing research company. This very much feels like an "influencer" post targeting a specific sector of business executives or investors.
Venture capital firms like a16z are a huge part of what's wrong with the industry right now. Budgets for AAA games started getting so out of control when venture capitalists came into the space...
Venture capital firms like a16z are a huge part of what's wrong with the industry right now. Budgets for AAA games started getting so out of control when venture capitalists came into the space and started pulling the slot machine hoping to get the next Fortnite. They invest huge amounts of money on high-budget games and in exchange demand massive returns. Games that are only moderately successful get their development teams fired.
If companies like a16z are unhappy, that's a great sign for the future of the industry. Hopefully game budgets will go back down to a manageable level and we'll see more fresh ideas. Maybe we'll see more games targeting an artistic vision instead of a market demographic. Games have always been a business and they'll continue to be a business, but when you run them only as a business, they produce unloved, generic crap. Venture capital is the worst form of that.
I want to disagree. These kinds of people do fund projects and let creators focus all their time on creating. Then I read accounts on their last accelerator and how 90+% of the projects are just...
Venture capital firms like a16z are a huge part of what's wrong with the industry right now
I want to disagree. These kinds of people do fund projects and let creators focus all their time on creating.
Then I read accounts on their last accelerator and how 90+% of the projects are just "AI" and you realize they are no longer a gaming VC but yet another tech VC trying to cash in on the latest trend. And no, they aren't even "games but we used LLM's to streamline X", it's a lot more focused on tooling to sell to other studios than actual games made to be played.
Hopefully game budgets will go back down to a manageable level and we'll see more fresh ideas.
Hard to say. No one wants to play penny slots these days, so to speak. instead of throwing 50k here and there to keep small teams fed, they wanna go all in and throw millions on hope of the "next big thing". That's a phenomenon all over tech right now. Very few want to fund actual art.
When was the last time a VC company invested in a gaming company? Epic is the only example I can think of. Are you sure you’re not thinking of something else?
When was the last time a VC company invested in a gaming company? Epic is the only example I can think of.
Are you sure you’re not thinking of something else?
This chart shows hundreds of millions of dollars in investments every quarter, with a substantial prior peak around COVID. Video games are definitely a higher risk category investment, though.
This chart shows hundreds of millions of dollars in investments every quarter, with a substantial prior peak around COVID.
Video games are definitely a higher risk category investment, though.
I mean, that kinda proves the point. 100m is nothing. Most SaaS startup seed go over 100m alone. A single AAA game usually cost in the realm of 300m today. For that to be the sum amount of the...
I mean, that kinda proves the point. 100m is nothing. Most SaaS startup seed go over 100m alone. A single AAA game usually cost in the realm of 300m today. For that to be the sum amount of the peak of VC interest in the gaming industry, shows how little there is. I also wouldn't be surprised if almost of those are either a) from the "crypto NFT gaming" period, or game development tooling - which is just another flavor of SaaS.
In the end, VCs do not like gaming. It's a high risk, low reward industry. Even highlysuccessful gaming startups are still barely in the green, and their success is constantly up in the air and up the whims of how their next release goes.
Whatever ills the gaming industry have, it has nothing to do with the paltry sums on that chart.
Isn't that exactly what people here want to avoid? Unless you're doing a live service launch, you don't need 9 figures to ramp up a scrappy team and get a game off the ground. But that's the exact...
I mean, that kinda proves the point. 100m is nothing.
Isn't that exactly what people here want to avoid? Unless you're doing a live service launch, you don't need 9 figures to ramp up a scrappy team and get a game off the ground.
But that's the exact problem. You're right in that VC's don't like gaming. They mostly see it as an extension of tech and a continual skinner box to grab money from a hyperactive demographic. They do that and then wonder why no one wants to play a game like Concord that was probably focus testetd to death. Games are much too plentiful to assume you can just advertise retention.
Not really. We're talking the scale of an industry. 100m in the global gaming market is a drop in the bucket. It doesn't matter if it's all indies, at that kind of scale it's just not a lot of...
Not really. We're talking the scale of an industry. 100m in the global gaming market is a drop in the bucket. It doesn't matter if it's all indies, at that kind of scale it's just not a lot of money.
They do that and then wonder why no one wants to play a game like Concord that was probably focus testetd to death.
That's exactly my point - that isn't VCs, definitionally. A VC would never be involved with a AAA release, by definition. VCs are exclusively early-stage investors that buy minority equity positions in very, very early stage, non-public companies.
It's like when people say that VCs ruined Toys-R-US - I don't think you know what a VC is.
They almost never invest in gaming, because investing in game studio startups is insanity - investing minority equity positions in gaming studio startups is just stupid.
People here are talking about why modern games feel soulless, and how he scale of the industry is not accomplishing the goal of a video game in their eyes. I'm not really here to nitpick about...
Not really. We're talking the scale of an industry.
People here are talking about why modern games feel soulless, and how he scale of the industry is not accomplishing the goal of a video game in their eyes.
VCs are exclusively early-stage investors that buy minority equity positions in very, very early stage, non-public companies.
I'm not really here to nitpick about business definitions. The point is money being poured in does not feel like it is leading to quality games. Hence the frustration among the comments that has a distrust for these larger budget projects.
I don't think you know what a VC is.
I don't think you understand how Concord was made. I'd normally be happy to explain but with that dismissal you're free to research it yourself. I 100% do blame the VC in that case.
Concord was entirely funded by Sony themselves, what on earth are you talking about lol. There are no VCs remotely related to the development of Concord. VC does not mean “rich people”.
Concord was entirely funded by Sony themselves, what on earth are you talking about lol. There are no VCs remotely related to the development of Concord.
Simpleminded takes from a senior editor of an outfit as old and reputable as Game Developer (Gamasutra). I hope they're not... losing the plot (har, har). Well, I don't want writers to struggle....
Simpleminded takes from a senior editor of an outfit as old and reputable as Game Developer (Gamasutra). I hope they're not... losing the plot (har, har).
Well, I don't want writers to struggle. I'm an aspiring writer myself! (That's just a writer who knows his work isn't ready to be published, I guess.) So what does Gamasutra say is hurting writers?
the growth of successful games that don't feature much narrative (either focusing on deep game mechanics or story-lite multiplayer) and the spread of story-driven games authored by the creative director and maybe one or two collaborators
The entire history of the videogame industry is built on top of games like this. How do they not know this? The growth of this market segment? This was every game in the 90s! And when writing started becoming a thing, it was always common for the creative leader to take on this role. Tim Schafer is an example of an excellent comedic videogame writer who was, simultaneously (and still is) a game designer. Even to this day we have a strong correlation between these fields, for better or worse. We know what "Hideo Kojima" stories are like. We know what "David Cage" stories are like.
Which leads me to my second point: Videogame writing has never not had a terrible reputation, and for the most part it's well deserved. Simplistic, rehashed plots, stiff dialogue, annoying lore and nonsensical audiologs. A lot of people are very open about skipping everything - because it's just not interesting. This isn't necessarily the fault of a writer, but of a professional studio that sees writing as something unnecessary, an add-on to the experience. Is this what we're trying to protect?
If anything, the problem with the writing industry is more closely related to the loss of literacy and of attention spans, and the declining popularity of reading as a hobby.
Ah, but this article's writer had other concerns.
Every artist in games knows how hard it is to make a living doing what you love. In-house artist positions have faded away as companies look overseas to produce as many assets as humanly possible at the lowest living wage. Enthusiasm for AI-generated assets (that look like dogshit) are nudging this trend along.
Indeed, AAA studios are drooling at the prospect of being able to offload all asset creation to some kind of AI in the near future. And yes, they were already doing this minus the AI. Why exactly are we expecting this industry to ever be good to artists, again? I don't follow the logic.
Conversely, we have some excellent artist-led indie games out there with beautiful, unique art. A lot never find success. Some do. That's more of a saturation and competition problem, isn't it?
Finally, game audio and music professionals both produce work that can be bundled (...) their labor could be deprioritized by true talent that deserves to reap the benefits of game design.
Not only do indie games with minuscule teams often have some of the best soundtracks I've ever heard (sometimes a single developer is responsible for the game and the soundtrack) - it has always been the case that a single talented person is responsible for a memorable, enduring soundtrack, even before the rise of indie gaming, and yet those soundtracks were never not part of videogames. Everybody knows names like Koji Kondo or Nobuo Uematsu, right? They could have gone anywhere, done anything, and they still would have been Koji Kondo and Nobuo Uematsu. If anything, what prevented that kind of fluidity in those days was japanese work culture more than anything else.
I understand that we're all best served if the industry has access to a pool of talented musicians who have stable employment that allows them to subsist throughout the ups and downs of the market. You know the best way to accomplish this? It's if those musicians are working as a specialized music production outfit serving various projects, rather than for a single game studio. The videogame industry has been shit for decades. Crunch is not new. Mass layoffs are not new. It's capitalism, right? The big studios have no artistic concerns. They just need to outdo each other when it comes to generating profits and capturing the market. So saying things like:
improve management at large organizations and make sure games make it out the door
is like saying that if the sky was green it wouldn't be blue. I don't want a videogame developer to have to be everything and to know every skill in order to succeed. I don't want them to have to sacrifice their passion and energy by being in a precarious situation for most of their working lives. But I have absolutely no reason to believe the "professional videogame industry" has any interest in solving these problems. They're the ones who created them, because they wanted to, and no amount of wishful thinking will change them. The labor was never valued.
There are tons of memorable single-composer soundtracks from back in the era, but there are also - pun very intended - scores of notable joint effort soundtracks. Uematsu collaborated for Final...
it has always been the case that a single talented person is responsible for a memorable, enduring soundtrack
There are tons of memorable single-composer soundtracks from back in the era, but there are also - pun very intended - scores of notable joint effort soundtracks. Uematsu collaborated for Final Fantasy starting with X and helped Yasunori Mitsuda on Chrono Trigger; Kondo did joint work on everything post OoT.
All of HAL's work between Kirby and Smash has been both Hirokazu Ando and Jun Ishikawa, not to mention dozens of collaborations for re-arrangement. Pokémon has a pretty big history of composers. Everyone praises Tim Follins's work, deservedly, but he worked with his brother a lot. Castlevania was two composers. Once you start getting out of sequencing and into more complex streamed orchestral arrangements, like Halo, the credits get more and more collaborative.
I totally agree with the sentiment that you don't need a live orchestra for everything, and a single vision is frequently a good path to a successful soundtrack, but it depends on the aim of the game. The common person doesn't have the appreciation for things like the history of video game music, or how difficult it was to sample or program your own instruments on 16-bit hardware, or how Yuzo Koshiro was using glitches to create effects. They want something approachable, and traditional music is the way to appeal to them.
I love orchestral soundtracks. But I think we're both saying the same thing here - if it's OK for a lot of games to have something simpler (as it always has been), how is it rational to expect...
I love orchestral soundtracks. But I think we're both saying the same thing here - if it's OK for a lot of games to have something simpler (as it always has been), how is it rational to expect studios to sustainably keep something like an in-house orchestra? Substitute for anything "non-necessary."
The safer/stable way for the not-strictly-required specializations to navigate a capitalist videogame industry seems to be trade unions and third party service provision.
Uematsu did have some work on Chrono Trigger but it was Mitsuda that did the vast majority of the music. IIRC Uematsu only composed a few jingles. It was Mitsuda’s first soundtrack so it’s not...
Uematsu did have some work on Chrono Trigger but it was Mitsuda that did the vast majority of the music. IIRC Uematsu only composed a few jingles. It was Mitsuda’s first soundtrack so it’s not surprising that his boss would come in and help him with the work.
In any case a lot of the most lauded modern soundtracks these days often have many composers. Keiichi Okabe is often the only one credited for Nier and Nier: Automata but in reality it was three composers as part of his production company MONACA. Heck, today Mitsuda’s production company, Procyon, primarily produces music he did not write, and it’s been like that for decades.
But weather soundtracks need to have many people working on the soundtracks, I think it’s safe to say the answer is no. There are plenty of examples of iconic soundtracks that were touched entirely by a single person.
well, it was also built on top of arcade-y games with brutal difficulty to hide that there's maybe 3 hours of actual content. It's not a bad thing that games could evolve to also tell stories and...
The entire history of the videogame industry is built on top of games like this. How do they not know this?
well, it was also built on top of arcade-y games with brutal difficulty to hide that there's maybe 3 hours of actual content. It's not a bad thing that games could evolve to also tell stories and have narratives, no?
We definitely wouldn't have the Kojimas of the world if it wasn't for better presentation and more demand out of writers, instead of going by the mentality of Carmack with story.
Which leads me to my second point: Videogame writing has never not had a terrible reputation, and for the most part it's well deserved.
Seems like a death spiral. If you don't care about stories you don't get writers who can make an intersting story, which in turn makes for less intersting stories.
I'm an RPG player, so I see it as a shame that people have this mentality. Not all games need some carefully crafted narrative, but I certainly feel we leave a huge void if we choose to abandon such kinds of works because of this self-defeating prophecy.
Not only do indie games with minuscule teams often have some of the best soundtracks I've ever heard (sometimes a single developer is responsible for the game and the soundtrack) - it has always been the case that a single talented person is responsible for a memorable, enduring soundtrack
Sound track is only half the battle of game audio. The sounds of footsteps on different surfaces, spatial audio balancing, a variety of sound effects in response to events, etc. These all combine to give a game its identity.
But I feel that's part of the author's concern. Few indies can afford a dedcaded sound designer. They may throw a few thousand for a bespoke sound track, but as "asset producers" many devs will just search out those sound effects and throw them into the game. It's the other half of why a game may not feel truly polished even if the game loop is fun; it either has some issues with its art or art direction, or it's missing those satisfying sounds to really sell the scene.
I don't want a videogame developer to have to be everything and to know every skill in order to succeed
That's just the reality of being an indie. You either have a lot of money to pay for talent to help you with your game, or you learn multiple skills and get as far as you can. The economy sucks but I'm still considering taking classes at some art studios for a while just so I can nail down another discipline and really bring my game to life. I'd rather just be able to hire an artist, but the money's not there.
Real shame most of the people with the money tend to be ones who just want more money, not to create art. Business is always there for business, but some actual labor protections can help reel them in and not just let them toss out talent the second a project finishes.
I disagree. Part of what I was trying to say is that writing in videogames originated out of an industry of small teams, and large studio projects were never a guarantee of good writing. Writing...
We definitely wouldn't have the Kojimas of the world if it wasn't for better presentation and more demand out of writers
I disagree. Part of what I was trying to say is that writing in videogames originated out of an industry of small teams, and large studio projects were never a guarantee of good writing. Writing has never been respected by most big money projects.
sound designer
That's a very good point.
That's just the reality of being an indie.
Absolutely, yes. I meant that it's not ideal, but we're not going to fix the industry by asking studio managers to pretty please be less mean.
Everything originated out of an industry of small teams. The idea of a "AAA game" wasn't really a concept until the mid-late 90's. And those early AAA games had staffing in the dozens. But it...
writing in videogames originated out of an industry of small team
Everything originated out of an industry of small teams. The idea of a "AAA game" wasn't really a concept until the mid-late 90's. And those early AAA games had staffing in the dozens. But it built up, got funding, and transformed.
These days, we'd still consider even a 30-dev team more on the indie side. Very different dynamic from a team of 1-3 people, but still much closer to that than this 1000+ persona amalgamation.
we're not going to fix the industry by asking studio managers to pretty please be less mean.
Nope, just the government. Well, not this government.
Maybe we can think about actual labor laws in 2029.
Local governments are always a good start though. My state was ahead of the curve on banning non-competes and at least keeps pushing for higher minimum wages.
My point exactly! It's not "deprofessionalization" so much as going back to more sane, sustainable team sizes. I applaud any attempts to make things better legislatively, but am very cynical about...
These days, we'd still consider even a 30-dev team more on the indie side. Very different dynamic from a team of 1-3 people, but still much closer to that than this 1000+ persona amalgamation.
My point exactly! It's not "deprofessionalization" so much as going back to more sane, sustainable team sizes.
I applaud any attempts to make things better legislatively, but am very cynical about expecting governments to act against the interests of wealthy, large corporations.
I'm not sure, but I feel there's an aspect that's just ignored by the article: AAA or 'big teams' simply can't deliver everything video games can offer, while more and more people seek for more...
I'm not sure, but I feel there's an aspect that's just ignored by the article: AAA or 'big teams' simply can't deliver everything video games can offer, while more and more people seek for more varied experiences.
The obvious reason is that big companies have a hard time with experimentation and are risk-averse due to financial pressure and shareholders.
But the other aspect is that there's a huge mismatch between the strengths of AAA-teams and what's actually necessary for great game design. E.g. I'd say Balatro could not have been made by a huge team, and it wouldn't win anything if it had more manpower behind it. Similarly many indie hits like Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Factorio, Noita, Slay the Spire, etc. work so well because they were designed by dedicated, passionate solo devs or small teams.
AAA simply couldn't come up with games like Terraria, Minecraft, Stardew Valley or Vampire Survivors. It's a creative/technical/financial mismatch.
And so whole genres (basebuilders, tycoon games, (traditional) roguelikes, arcade/retro games, deckbuilders, visual novels, tower defense games, survivor-likes, 'walking sims', puzzlers, experimental games, etc.) are loved by millions of players, but rarely made by bigger teams.
Gaming is just much much more than what AAA can deliver.
Isn't that a huge reason why the small dev teams flourish right now? Corporations, even AA, just can't compete here.
I think you nailed it with this comment. AAA games are a huge upfront investment with the massive number of people working on the project, usually for years. And they rely on making the majority...
I think you nailed it with this comment. AAA games are a huge upfront investment with the massive number of people working on the project, usually for years. And they rely on making the majority of their income in the first couple weeks after release. Both of these lead AAA games to be developed with a very large audience in mind. And this isn't inherently bad! I've enjoyed the Fallout games, and in the past have been a fan of Call of Duty and other AAA FPS games.
But anything too niche doesn't make sense from an investment perspective. It's a risk at that point. However, an indie dev just building something as a side gig doesn't have that level of pressure. They can do so at their own pace, and invest nothing other than time (and potentially the purchase of assets, etc).
And I wouldn't be surprised if this deters big studios from excluding certain genres from their plans. Simulation games seem to be pretty dicey, when indie ones like Factorio blow up.
Indeed. Design is core but designers don't often get that "weight" to do their job unless they are held in high esteem (your Carmacks, Kojimas, etc). Design also needs to iterate, but the larger...
But the other aspect is that there's a huge mismatch between the strengths of AAA-teams and what's actually necessary for great game design.
Indeed. Design is core but designers don't often get that "weight" to do their job unless they are held in high esteem (your Carmacks, Kojimas, etc). Design also needs to iterate, but the larger the ship, the longer it takes to steer. We hear all these issues with Marathon in its alpha, but the design there can't truly respond to feedback without a major delay at this point.
That and business factors often clash with design. Balatro makes a lot of sense as a mobile game, but when you see how you'd normally monetize a "native" mobile title you start to ruin the core loop thst makes Balatro addicting. But releasing it on phones as a premium $5 title is doomed to fail without previous recognition.
The most fun game in the world will simply stay buried without thinking about these factors. But these factors also compromise the very fun you want to deliver.
Isn't that a huge reason why the small dev teams flourish right now? Corporations, even AA, just can't compete here.
It's economy of scales issue. Or lack thereof. Games don't really get "cheaper to produce" as you get more people on it. 2 programmers won't get a game out in half the time, and 3 programmers may actually take longer than 2 depending on the type or game worked on. It takes a lot of planning to pull that off, but game design still needs that room to breathe and iterate (as described above).
Even experienced designs sometimes realize that an idea, even a core idea, is bad and you need to be able to pivot off that. That may mean taking time to redo all that planning. Trying to scale around "fun" is hard unless you already have a hit on your hands.
Despite the sound of the word: "de-professionalization" isn't necessarily a bad phenomenon. It essentially comes down to veteran devs who, by their own volition or forced out, end up pushing to...
As A16z marketing partner Ryan K. Rigney defines it, deprofessionalization is a phenomenon driven by the overperformance of older titles (particularly free-to-play live service games), large studios struggling to drive sales, and the outsized success of some solo developers and small teams.
These three forces, he argues, will combine to "drive career professionals from the traditional, professionalized side of the games industry."
"Some of these people will decide to go indie," he continues. "Others will leave gaming altogether. And in between there’s a vast spectrum of irregular working arrangements available."
Despite the sound of the word: "de-professionalization" isn't necessarily a bad phenomenon. It essentially comes down to veteran devs who, by their own volition or forced out, end up pushing to make games in small teams. Additionally, it talks about the other end of the spectrum where some developers essentially become "AAA consultants", taking roles that give them more control over their own schedule by leveraging their knowledge.
However I do share the author's reservations about the whole situation. Later in the article revealed part of the apprehensions I had explained concisely: not everyone gets out cleanly:
My PAX trip validated my fear that three professions are especially vulnerable in this deprofessionalized world: artists, writers, and those working in game audio or music. These roles seemed vulnerable because on these small teams, they were the roles developers mentioned doing in some kind of shared or joint fashion.
All three risk compartmentalization as "asset creators," their work treated as products you can purchase off the store shelf....In the "gun for hire" mindset, working artists aren't worth anything to game development because they're producing goods to be used, not participants in the process.
This clearly isn't true, but if AAA wants to treat these aspects as an assembly line and small teams can't afford to pay for bespoke assets, you can see the result. AAA games feel mechanical and soulless, many indies may feel unpolished or incomplete.
Still, there seems to be optimism overall on the fact that indie games can still in fact sell, compared to other art forms. So maybe things can work out for the best overall if AAA studios keep stumbling over themselves. I'm of two minds, so I'd love to hear others' thoughts on if this really is a thing, if it's good, and if it'll sustain.
The biggest issue is game dev has two issues: Difficulty of entering the industry professionally Difficulty of staying in a game dev job. If you work your ass off on (1) only to be laid off...
The biggest issue is game dev has two issues:
Difficulty of entering the industry professionally
Difficulty of staying in a game dev job.
If you work your ass off on (1) only to be laid off shortly after release, anybody with the drive may want to work on their own stuff, and the repetitive carrying out of layoffs certainly makes people realize that a career in game dev will be fraught with risks.
Anybody not interested in doing (1) because of (2) (localthunk, poncle, concernedape to name a few) will have to make their game as a work of love. I think this leads to indies largely making better games: Small teams or even individuals with an idea, and the means and drive to execute it.
I see "deprofessionalization" as a major benefit to the industry, at least as an industry endeavoring for creativity. If "the industry" wants to "survive" with more "professionals" (that's a lot of quotes), then they can nurture these professionals' careers and not lay them off at the drop of a hat, ensure stability, so more people will go through the shit to enter for a hopefully more stable career as a game dev. The industry is very unhealthy right now, and if indies are taking over (they aren't, really), there is likely a reason.
Game development has become substantially more accessible in the last decade. Therefore, it’s much easier for a small team or solo developer to build a game that competes with AAA titles, at least...
Game development has become substantially more accessible in the last decade. Therefore, it’s much easier for a small team or solo developer to build a game that competes with AAA titles, at least for attention.
More accessibility means more competition. Lots of commenters in this thread are saying things like “games are way more fun now” and whatnot.
Competition has always been, on average, bad for owners, a mixed bag for laborers, and good for consumers.
Yes, games are better now, but largely because you can pick from more games. I’m sure there are plenty of indie game developers pouring their soul and their savings into their dream only to have it get a hundred purchases on Steam.
Game development is a high-risk, high-reward industry now. It’ll reward people who are creative, industrious, and lucky. The number of stable careers will decline in both quantity and pay, and capital owners will slowly pivot to buying out game IP instead of developing in-house. The only way to maintain dominance in a cutthroat, high-risk industry is to outsource the risk.
Consumers will win and producers will lose. Such is the nature of competition.
I guess that explains the sentiment here from what I assume is consumers. While I'm over here, as a laborer, very mixed on the whole ordeal. I went in understanding the instability of the...
Competition has always been, on average, bad for owners, a mixed bag for laborers, and good for consumers.
I guess that explains the sentiment here from what I assume is consumers. While I'm over here, as a laborer, very mixed on the whole ordeal. I went in understanding the instability of the industry, but I was always hoping to specialize into a niche and secure myself that way.
As I approach a decade in the industry, that has gone fairly poorly. You can't specialize when you're jumping jobs every 2-3 years because people keep laying you off anyway. Leaving me at a crossroads of sorts.
My end goal was always to try and go indie. I just really wanted maybe 4-5 more years to really secure my name and role. Now I'm just trying to survive out the year.
I think so too. Many of the commenters here are bringing up their favorite games with 1-3 people developing. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of 1-3 person teams trying to do indie game...
I guess that explains the sentiment here from what I assume is consumers.
I think so too. Many of the commenters here are bringing up their favorite games with 1-3 people developing. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of 1-3 person teams trying to do indie game development. Gamers get to play the best of them, while many teams lose their investments.
You can't specialize when you're jumping jobs every 2-3 years because people keep laying you off anyway. Leaving me at a crossroads of sorts.
I’m sorry to hear that it’s been difficult. I don’t have a lot to say to alleviate those concerns. I do want to acknowledge that it’s a hard industry, no matter who you are.
Seems like a good thing? People have been complaining all the time about how game studios are too bloated and forced to play too safe because of the bloat. It's probably for the best that it's deprofessionalizing.
I consider it a good thing. Have a look a t Stardew Valley , a game made by one person (up to some version well past v1.0 when he got more people on). Or games made by Zachtronics (by Zach). Or Knuckle Cracker (Creeper World games series). I believe FTL and Into the breach were also made by really small team.
There are great games that are not made by big studios. I'd almost say that there are more great games made by small studios than there are by big ones. Big studios can make great games but it's not that common nowadays in my opinion.
I'd call this take technically correct. By definition, large teams developing big games cannot hope to compete with thousands of smaller developers producing thousands of more focused games in a short amount of time, but the smaller devs aren't necessarily producing an overall higher percentage of better titles so much as the sheer quantity of titles means by definition, more good games will come out of those indie efforts than the big studios.
For every smash-hit Witcher or Baldur's Gate there are multiple FIFA and Call of Duty titles, and likewise, for every FTL or Stardew Valley there are 100 low-effort asset flips infested with NFTs and other anti-consumer cash grabs pushed onto Steam and the Nintendo eShop that will never see more than 100 daily active players.
The difference is that, with AAA games, you hear about them whether you want to or not simply because they have the marketing budgets to consume the gaming press with well-timed "leaks", ad buys, and paid industry events. The only times you hear about indie titles are because a review copy actually made it into a journalist's hands (and keep in mind there are thousands of devs hoping for a real review in any given year, so just getting selected is like winning the lottery) or because it is that unexpected smash hit like Stardew Valley.
TL;DR - It's survivorship bias. You hear all about AAA failures because AAA studios pay to saturate the airwaves and that leads people to ask "what happened to <title we were hearing all about for the past year>?" when things don't pan out, but all the indie studios that just mass-produce shovelware or pour their hearts and souls into genuinely great games that never exceed 100 daily active players fly under the radar.
You are right. There are likely hundreds of indie games for each AAA title, if not more.
The thing is that with their absurd busgets, I expect big studios to make really good games, yet they don't often deliver even with big budget. While there is a single guy that can do small indie game that becomes legendary.
If we have a look quite some years ago: Blizzard, Westwood - they were small studios that made great games! Then they started getting bigger and bigger eventually swallowing other smaller studios or being swallowed themselves and becoming (part of) big corporations. And nowadays they are simply too big.
If you watched movie Ford vs. Ferrari (Le Mans 66 in Europe) there was a scene where Carol Shelby said to Ford that the envelope passed five pairs of hands before it arrived to Ford. And I think this perfectly describes big gaming studios as well - they are too big to steer themselves the right way. Sometimes they are on the right course but they may lose their way the next year (for next five years).
Warhorse Studios (Kingdom Come: Deliverance I & II) came to be from solo experts that were gathered by (controversial, yet) great lead developer at the right time. And I think this is the way forward - disband the big ones and let the people get intermixed and create new studios - freshen up the pond of game developers. Many of them may be up to something but the corporate structure may not allow them to press forward, maybe they just need to form the right team (of people from other big corporations).
Hades (25 employees) and BG3 (450 employees) are a couple more examples of smaller studios making hugely successful games. Slay the Spire only had two full-time devs!
Nintendo is one of the few big companies that successfully uses more focused teams. Mario Wonder had about 435 people working on it.
I mean if 450 counts as “small”, Bethesda is practically an indie company. They barely employ over 100 people. Fallout 3 was made when they had just 80 people working on it.
Not sure many people are counting Skyrim as a small, artisan release, though.
IIRC it's true that when Skyrim was made Bethesda had about 80-100 employees, but in 2023 they had around 450.
That said, no way I'd count Larian as a small developer. 🙂
I consider 450 bigger than small, actually. But they are still far from being behemoth that doesn't know what it's doing. I actually played Divinity: Origina Sin which was also made by Larian. And I still have Original Sin 2 to play... They are great studio, they care about player and gaming experience more than they care about money (or at least I feel it that way).
Games I have more than 300 hours in:
I paid less for those three indie titles. But I also know development and perpetual costs were much lower.
I have probably 200-300 hours in FTL.
I have played Stardew Valley on PS Vita, Nintendo Switch Lite and Steam Deck. I have finished the game once but just as you, I have put many hours in it. Probably 150.
My most played game by hours on Steam is Creeper World 3.
On the other hand, I have played Uncharted collection (not 1, 2, 3, theother on with two games) that normally costs 50€ and I finished it in around 35 hours. Don't get me wrong - it was great! But in price/value, it's mediocre.
And then there are games like GTA5 that you can't even start without internet connection. Not even singleplayer (maybe you can now, but I'm over it already).
I think the author is bemoaning the overall shrinking of the industry, but spent a long while talking in circles about basically nothing.
The end is where they reveal they are a game writer themselves and that music, art, and narration jobs are seeing the most shrink and contract work.
I dunno, I don't think it's a bad article per say, but it is definitely not saying what I think it means to say, perhaps in an effort to be different from yet another ,"games industry dying oh no!" Article.
I can understand why this is bad for people in the industry that are actually trying to make a consistent living.
But as a gamer that enjoys smaller games with quirky or experimentalmechanics, this seems like one of the best things that could be happening to the industry.
It's a good thing unless you're a person who is personally invested in video games being a professionalized industry, like game journalists or game studio executives.
Just going to say what's been said a million times as of late: Most of the best games I've played in the last several years have been Indie Games or so-called AA games.
Yeah, I've watched many beloved franchises get swallowed whole by AAA studios. In my own personal opinion, big budget game development has never been good for gamers. I'm not sad to see it struggling. Maybe gaming doesn't need to be a megaindustry caught in a cycle of bloating itself so it can fund its bloat.
I like this take, with some conditions applied. There are seasons for everything, the pendulum trope made real. The failures of massive, overbudget AAA games of the last few years, to me, indicates that the time is right for the "deprofessionalization" that we are seeing. There's a constant cycle of entrepreneurial seeds being planted, sprouting, then being consumed into larger enterprises. There's a golden age, then a decline. People leave, spinning off their own projects and studios, and the cycle begins anew. This, to me is a healthy process and its definitely about time. The film industry today is a perfect example of what happens when you lose access to this cycle of creative destruction.
It frustrates me when people only buy AAA and complain about how bad gaming is. There's so many games it's impossible to keep up. The gaming industry is bursting at the seams right now. There's new games in every genre pretty much.
It also seems like Unreal 5 is becoming dominant over Unity for the indy dev space and it's letting indy devs make higher quality games too. Now we all know Epic doesn't exactly have a clean rap sheet, but they have some good guy points.
What I'm saying is, if you're playing Assassins Creed 26 and you're pissed off about how bland it is, you could spend like an hour looking and find a dozen games that do something different.
Unreal also has, from my observations of the end products, the highest bang for your buck for graphical fidelity and performance out of the box. If you're looking to make a eye-candy 3D title, it's probably the correct starting point unless you want to customize the bejesus out of the engine.
It does seem like things are quickly bifurcating into Unreal and Godot. Godot is great for people wanting a lightweight engine, Unreal is perfect for the exact opposite. Both need a bit more development, Godot moreso, but I think it's a healthy direction things are headed in.
In no particular order, I can think of:
Dwarf Fortress had only two developers for almost 20 years
Factorio had three developers
Cuphead had two developers
FTL had two developers
Balatro had one developer
Celeste had two developers
Hotline Miami had two developers
Minecraft started with only one developer
Of course they often ended up as a team of a half dozen including artists, musicians, etc, and often once they became popular they expanded to a couple dozen people, but still. Some of my favourite and most replayed video games of all time came out of tiny studios of a small handful of people on a shoestring budget.
Only one person writing code, too! It was a big deal when they hired their second person to write code for the game after the Steam release (and afaik that part of development is still just those two!)
Tarn wrote most of the code, but Zach did more than just mailing people crayon drawings. He did contribute code over the years. Anyway, I guess I should have said it was a two-person team instead of two developers.
I didn't wanna throw Zach under the bus or anything -- he's absolutely been developing the game alongside Tarn all these years! I just wanted to add more details that show how impressive it was (and still is). I didn't know Zach ever contributed code, though! The news when they hired Putnam all phrased it as "Dwarf Fortress hires second programmer." I'm curious how they handled that, since Tarn has said he didn't use any version control until they hired Putnam.
Don't quote me but I'm pretty sure Zach was contributing like a third of the code from like 2010 to almost a decade later. I don't think he's contributed directly to the code since then, but has mostly just done research about the weights of different animals and their ignition temperatures, etc.
I still think it's fair to call him a co-developer.
To be clear, I think he's inarguably a co-developer even if he didn't write a line of code.
I understand the position of the author and I do agree that it's sad that the changing job market is leaving people behind.
But at the same time, this "deprofessionalization" phenomenon has created games that I actually care about and feel are worth playing. These people are leaving giant machines that are designed to mash a thousand peoples' ideas into something that is then put it through a sieve to make it appeal to the greatest common denominator. And while the result might not be terrible, it is without character or texture. While the indie games might not be as likely as AAA games to be good, that is more than made up for how much more interesting they are. And I'd rather play an interesting "bad" game than a boring "good" game.
It seems to me that being part of these large teams introduces too many creative constraints. When you're on a big team, you're dealing with a lot of money, and when you're dealing with a lot of money, you can't afford to take as many risks, and that results in those uninteresting games I don't care for.
I played through Lifeless Planet. It was, by all accounts, terrible. It was cliche and predictable, the physics and puzzles were terrible and easy.
Yet it was interesting enough that I hate-played it.
By contrast, Skyrim has never grasped my interest for more than 2-3 hours.
Gonna go ahead and disagree with your taste in games there
The Skyrim zeitgeist has mostly passed and saying something bad about the game was like cursing in church. I'm no longer worried about speaking up.
It, and frankly most Bethesda games, have been overrated for as long as I can remember. Skyrim is no exception.
I'm with @vord, never held me for more than a couple of hours.
None of their games besides Skyrim and Oblivion have ever gotten me invested.
They have a lot of issues, but they excel at absolutely prioritizing player agency. Similar games like Red Dead Redemption 2 fail with player agency because they’re prioritizing other things (story, system rigidity). For example, I went on a quest that involved retrieving a stash of treasure from a hiding spot. There was a glitch (plenty of those in Elder Scrolls as well to be fair) and even when I went to the spot and saw the location that obviously was meant to store the loot I couldn’t retrieve it. Not sure why, but because they wanted to make sure I’d done the right things in advanced I couldn’t withdraw the treasure even though in the story of the game it was already there. In Skyrim you’d be able to take that loot even if you’d cheated your way there. There aren’t as many magic doors that need quest progression to unlock.
An open world RPG should primarily be about agency. They all feature it, but in my opinion only Bethesda manages it at scale. It’s why the main quests are famously forgotten by players. Just fucking about in the world is more fun than the gameplay in most other games. I didn’t beat the main quest in Skyrim until I was 300 hours in. I’m waiting for the day they have the balls to not even include a main quest in one of their major games.
Do you like western open world RPGs?
For me, I think it's just I never 'got' the appeal of Bethesda RPGs. On top of Skyrim, Fallout 3, made it to like the first town, dropped a nuke on it, then got bored at stopped playing. Fallout NV, made it like 3 hours then got bored.
I think I tend to lose interest in the open world RPGs when the exploration becomes a chore and a struggle rather than the fun.
I have played many other RPGs and ARPGs, and enjoyed them immensely. But the titles listed above just always fell flat.
Ha, to me it seems like a few years ago it was somewhat fashionable to talk shit about Skyrim but nowadays we're back to nostalgia and everyone seemingly loves it.
I'm with you, though I'm a fan of Morrowind despite its flaws (and I don't think its fighting system is any worse than whatever Oblivion and Skyrim does, another hot take). I think Oblivion may be even more overrated than Skyrim.
For me personally New Vegas killed Fallout 3 and 4, and Enderal completely killed Skyrim. Enderal especially is absurd, being a completely free game made by a hobbyist studio. It is flawed, but simultaneously it does so many things so much better it puts Bethesda to shame.
The guy quoted in what makes up the majority of the text in this article, Ryan K. Rigney, works for a venture capital company. So yes, of course he's pissed that if a larger chunk of developers stay small, it's less likely they'll seek out VCs.
And it's clear he's blinded by his rage as he makes objectively wrong statements.
Except for, you know... music artists, modern artists (physical media), streamers and content creators, and depending on how loose your definition is - perhaps even OnlyFans creators. Yes, in all of these cases, it takes a lot of luck (in addition to skill that I don't want to devalue). But that holds true for indie games that make it big, too.
I assure you, people do pay for these things... indie filmmakers have a better chance of getting their film picked up now that there's tons of competing streaming services.
And for books, stealing a Reddit comment about the NYT best sellers list here to make my point:
I was surprised this guy got so much virtual "airtime," until I looked into this site's ownership. Informa TechTarget owns the site now and is some kind of B2B marketing research company. This very much feels like an "influencer" post targeting a specific sector of business executives or investors.
Venture capital firms like a16z are a huge part of what's wrong with the industry right now. Budgets for AAA games started getting so out of control when venture capitalists came into the space and started pulling the slot machine hoping to get the next Fortnite. They invest huge amounts of money on high-budget games and in exchange demand massive returns. Games that are only moderately successful get their development teams fired.
If companies like a16z are unhappy, that's a great sign for the future of the industry. Hopefully game budgets will go back down to a manageable level and we'll see more fresh ideas. Maybe we'll see more games targeting an artistic vision instead of a market demographic. Games have always been a business and they'll continue to be a business, but when you run them only as a business, they produce unloved, generic crap. Venture capital is the worst form of that.
I want to disagree. These kinds of people do fund projects and let creators focus all their time on creating.
Then I read accounts on their last accelerator and how 90+% of the projects are just "AI" and you realize they are no longer a gaming VC but yet another tech VC trying to cash in on the latest trend. And no, they aren't even "games but we used LLM's to streamline X", it's a lot more focused on tooling to sell to other studios than actual games made to be played.
Hard to say. No one wants to play penny slots these days, so to speak. instead of throwing 50k here and there to keep small teams fed, they wanna go all in and throw millions on hope of the "next big thing". That's a phenomenon all over tech right now. Very few want to fund actual art.
When was the last time a VC company invested in a gaming company? Epic is the only example I can think of.
Are you sure you’re not thinking of something else?
This chart shows hundreds of millions of dollars in investments every quarter, with a substantial prior peak around COVID.
Video games are definitely a higher risk category investment, though.
I mean, that kinda proves the point. 100m is nothing. Most SaaS startup seed go over 100m alone. A single AAA game usually cost in the realm of 300m today. For that to be the sum amount of the peak of VC interest in the gaming industry, shows how little there is. I also wouldn't be surprised if almost of those are either a) from the "crypto NFT gaming" period, or game development tooling - which is just another flavor of SaaS.
In the end, VCs do not like gaming. It's a high risk, low reward industry. Even highlysuccessful gaming startups are still barely in the green, and their success is constantly up in the air and up the whims of how their next release goes.
Whatever ills the gaming industry have, it has nothing to do with the paltry sums on that chart.
Isn't that exactly what people here want to avoid? Unless you're doing a live service launch, you don't need 9 figures to ramp up a scrappy team and get a game off the ground.
But that's the exact problem. You're right in that VC's don't like gaming. They mostly see it as an extension of tech and a continual skinner box to grab money from a hyperactive demographic. They do that and then wonder why no one wants to play a game like Concord that was probably focus testetd to death. Games are much too plentiful to assume you can just advertise retention.
Not really. We're talking the scale of an industry. 100m in the global gaming market is a drop in the bucket. It doesn't matter if it's all indies, at that kind of scale it's just not a lot of money.
That's exactly my point - that isn't VCs, definitionally. A VC would never be involved with a AAA release, by definition. VCs are exclusively early-stage investors that buy minority equity positions in very, very early stage, non-public companies.
It's like when people say that VCs ruined Toys-R-US - I don't think you know what a VC is.
They almost never invest in gaming, because investing in game studio startups is insanity - investing minority equity positions in gaming studio startups is just stupid.
People here are talking about why modern games feel soulless, and how he scale of the industry is not accomplishing the goal of a video game in their eyes.
I'm not really here to nitpick about business definitions. The point is money being poured in does not feel like it is leading to quality games. Hence the frustration among the comments that has a distrust for these larger budget projects.
I don't think you understand how Concord was made. I'd normally be happy to explain but with that dismissal you're free to research it yourself. I 100% do blame the VC in that case.
Concord was entirely funded by Sony themselves, what on earth are you talking about lol. There are no VCs remotely related to the development of Concord.
VC does not mean “rich people”.
Simpleminded takes from a senior editor of an outfit as old and reputable as Game Developer (Gamasutra). I hope they're not... losing the plot (har, har).
Well, I don't want writers to struggle. I'm an aspiring writer myself! (That's just a writer who knows his work isn't ready to be published, I guess.) So what does Gamasutra say is hurting writers?
The entire history of the videogame industry is built on top of games like this. How do they not know this? The growth of this market segment? This was every game in the 90s! And when writing started becoming a thing, it was always common for the creative leader to take on this role. Tim Schafer is an example of an excellent comedic videogame writer who was, simultaneously (and still is) a game designer. Even to this day we have a strong correlation between these fields, for better or worse. We know what "Hideo Kojima" stories are like. We know what "David Cage" stories are like.
Which leads me to my second point: Videogame writing has never not had a terrible reputation, and for the most part it's well deserved. Simplistic, rehashed plots, stiff dialogue, annoying lore and nonsensical audiologs. A lot of people are very open about skipping everything - because it's just not interesting. This isn't necessarily the fault of a writer, but of a professional studio that sees writing as something unnecessary, an add-on to the experience. Is this what we're trying to protect?
If anything, the problem with the writing industry is more closely related to the loss of literacy and of attention spans, and the declining popularity of reading as a hobby.
Ah, but this article's writer had other concerns.
Indeed, AAA studios are drooling at the prospect of being able to offload all asset creation to some kind of AI in the near future. And yes, they were already doing this minus the AI. Why exactly are we expecting this industry to ever be good to artists, again? I don't follow the logic.
Conversely, we have some excellent artist-led indie games out there with beautiful, unique art. A lot never find success. Some do. That's more of a saturation and competition problem, isn't it?
Not only do indie games with minuscule teams often have some of the best soundtracks I've ever heard (sometimes a single developer is responsible for the game and the soundtrack) - it has always been the case that a single talented person is responsible for a memorable, enduring soundtrack, even before the rise of indie gaming, and yet those soundtracks were never not part of videogames. Everybody knows names like Koji Kondo or Nobuo Uematsu, right? They could have gone anywhere, done anything, and they still would have been Koji Kondo and Nobuo Uematsu. If anything, what prevented that kind of fluidity in those days was japanese work culture more than anything else.
I understand that we're all best served if the industry has access to a pool of talented musicians who have stable employment that allows them to subsist throughout the ups and downs of the market. You know the best way to accomplish this? It's if those musicians are working as a specialized music production outfit serving various projects, rather than for a single game studio. The videogame industry has been shit for decades. Crunch is not new. Mass layoffs are not new. It's capitalism, right? The big studios have no artistic concerns. They just need to outdo each other when it comes to generating profits and capturing the market. So saying things like:
is like saying that if the sky was green it wouldn't be blue. I don't want a videogame developer to have to be everything and to know every skill in order to succeed. I don't want them to have to sacrifice their passion and energy by being in a precarious situation for most of their working lives. But I have absolutely no reason to believe the "professional videogame industry" has any interest in solving these problems. They're the ones who created them, because they wanted to, and no amount of wishful thinking will change them. The labor was never valued.
There are tons of memorable single-composer soundtracks from back in the era, but there are also - pun very intended - scores of notable joint effort soundtracks. Uematsu collaborated for Final Fantasy starting with X and helped Yasunori Mitsuda on Chrono Trigger; Kondo did joint work on everything post OoT.
All of HAL's work between Kirby and Smash has been both Hirokazu Ando and Jun Ishikawa, not to mention dozens of collaborations for re-arrangement. Pokémon has a pretty big history of composers. Everyone praises Tim Follins's work, deservedly, but he worked with his brother a lot. Castlevania was two composers. Once you start getting out of sequencing and into more complex streamed orchestral arrangements, like Halo, the credits get more and more collaborative.
I totally agree with the sentiment that you don't need a live orchestra for everything, and a single vision is frequently a good path to a successful soundtrack, but it depends on the aim of the game. The common person doesn't have the appreciation for things like the history of video game music, or how difficult it was to sample or program your own instruments on 16-bit hardware, or how Yuzo Koshiro was using glitches to create effects. They want something approachable, and traditional music is the way to appeal to them.
I love orchestral soundtracks. But I think we're both saying the same thing here - if it's OK for a lot of games to have something simpler (as it always has been), how is it rational to expect studios to sustainably keep something like an in-house orchestra? Substitute for anything "non-necessary."
The safer/stable way for the not-strictly-required specializations to navigate a capitalist videogame industry seems to be trade unions and third party service provision.
Uematsu did have some work on Chrono Trigger but it was Mitsuda that did the vast majority of the music. IIRC Uematsu only composed a few jingles. It was Mitsuda’s first soundtrack so it’s not surprising that his boss would come in and help him with the work.
In any case a lot of the most lauded modern soundtracks these days often have many composers. Keiichi Okabe is often the only one credited for Nier and Nier: Automata but in reality it was three composers as part of his production company MONACA. Heck, today Mitsuda’s production company, Procyon, primarily produces music he did not write, and it’s been like that for decades.
But weather soundtracks need to have many people working on the soundtracks, I think it’s safe to say the answer is no. There are plenty of examples of iconic soundtracks that were touched entirely by a single person.
well, it was also built on top of arcade-y games with brutal difficulty to hide that there's maybe 3 hours of actual content. It's not a bad thing that games could evolve to also tell stories and have narratives, no?
We definitely wouldn't have the Kojimas of the world if it wasn't for better presentation and more demand out of writers, instead of going by the mentality of Carmack with story.
Seems like a death spiral. If you don't care about stories you don't get writers who can make an intersting story, which in turn makes for less intersting stories.
I'm an RPG player, so I see it as a shame that people have this mentality. Not all games need some carefully crafted narrative, but I certainly feel we leave a huge void if we choose to abandon such kinds of works because of this self-defeating prophecy.
Sound track is only half the battle of game audio. The sounds of footsteps on different surfaces, spatial audio balancing, a variety of sound effects in response to events, etc. These all combine to give a game its identity.
But I feel that's part of the author's concern. Few indies can afford a dedcaded sound designer. They may throw a few thousand for a bespoke sound track, but as "asset producers" many devs will just search out those sound effects and throw them into the game. It's the other half of why a game may not feel truly polished even if the game loop is fun; it either has some issues with its art or art direction, or it's missing those satisfying sounds to really sell the scene.
That's just the reality of being an indie. You either have a lot of money to pay for talent to help you with your game, or you learn multiple skills and get as far as you can. The economy sucks but I'm still considering taking classes at some art studios for a while just so I can nail down another discipline and really bring my game to life. I'd rather just be able to hire an artist, but the money's not there.
Real shame most of the people with the money tend to be ones who just want more money, not to create art. Business is always there for business, but some actual labor protections can help reel them in and not just let them toss out talent the second a project finishes.
I disagree. Part of what I was trying to say is that writing in videogames originated out of an industry of small teams, and large studio projects were never a guarantee of good writing. Writing has never been respected by most big money projects.
That's a very good point.
Absolutely, yes. I meant that it's not ideal, but we're not going to fix the industry by asking studio managers to pretty please be less mean.
Everything originated out of an industry of small teams. The idea of a "AAA game" wasn't really a concept until the mid-late 90's. And those early AAA games had staffing in the dozens. But it built up, got funding, and transformed.
These days, we'd still consider even a 30-dev team more on the indie side. Very different dynamic from a team of 1-3 people, but still much closer to that than this 1000+ persona amalgamation.
Nope, just the government. Well, not this government.
Maybe we can think about actual labor laws in 2029.
Local governments are always a good start though. My state was ahead of the curve on banning non-competes and at least keeps pushing for higher minimum wages.
My point exactly! It's not "deprofessionalization" so much as going back to more sane, sustainable team sizes.
I applaud any attempts to make things better legislatively, but am very cynical about expecting governments to act against the interests of wealthy, large corporations.
I'm not sure, but I feel there's an aspect that's just ignored by the article: AAA or 'big teams' simply can't deliver everything video games can offer, while more and more people seek for more varied experiences.
The obvious reason is that big companies have a hard time with experimentation and are risk-averse due to financial pressure and shareholders.
But the other aspect is that there's a huge mismatch between the strengths of AAA-teams and what's actually necessary for great game design. E.g. I'd say Balatro could not have been made by a huge team, and it wouldn't win anything if it had more manpower behind it. Similarly many indie hits like Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Factorio, Noita, Slay the Spire, etc. work so well because they were designed by dedicated, passionate solo devs or small teams.
AAA simply couldn't come up with games like Terraria, Minecraft, Stardew Valley or Vampire Survivors. It's a creative/technical/financial mismatch.
And so whole genres (basebuilders, tycoon games, (traditional) roguelikes, arcade/retro games, deckbuilders, visual novels, tower defense games, survivor-likes, 'walking sims', puzzlers, experimental games, etc.) are loved by millions of players, but rarely made by bigger teams.
Gaming is just much much more than what AAA can deliver.
Isn't that a huge reason why the small dev teams flourish right now? Corporations, even AA, just can't compete here.
e: spelling
I think you nailed it with this comment. AAA games are a huge upfront investment with the massive number of people working on the project, usually for years. And they rely on making the majority of their income in the first couple weeks after release. Both of these lead AAA games to be developed with a very large audience in mind. And this isn't inherently bad! I've enjoyed the Fallout games, and in the past have been a fan of Call of Duty and other AAA FPS games.
But anything too niche doesn't make sense from an investment perspective. It's a risk at that point. However, an indie dev just building something as a side gig doesn't have that level of pressure. They can do so at their own pace, and invest nothing other than time (and potentially the purchase of assets, etc).
And I wouldn't be surprised if this deters big studios from excluding certain genres from their plans. Simulation games seem to be pretty dicey, when indie ones like Factorio blow up.
Indeed. Design is core but designers don't often get that "weight" to do their job unless they are held in high esteem (your Carmacks, Kojimas, etc). Design also needs to iterate, but the larger the ship, the longer it takes to steer. We hear all these issues with Marathon in its alpha, but the design there can't truly respond to feedback without a major delay at this point.
That and business factors often clash with design. Balatro makes a lot of sense as a mobile game, but when you see how you'd normally monetize a "native" mobile title you start to ruin the core loop thst makes Balatro addicting. But releasing it on phones as a premium $5 title is doomed to fail without previous recognition.
The most fun game in the world will simply stay buried without thinking about these factors. But these factors also compromise the very fun you want to deliver.
It's economy of scales issue. Or lack thereof. Games don't really get "cheaper to produce" as you get more people on it. 2 programmers won't get a game out in half the time, and 3 programmers may actually take longer than 2 depending on the type or game worked on. It takes a lot of planning to pull that off, but game design still needs that room to breathe and iterate (as described above).
Even experienced designs sometimes realize that an idea, even a core idea, is bad and you need to be able to pivot off that. That may mean taking time to redo all that planning. Trying to scale around "fun" is hard unless you already have a hit on your hands.
Despite the sound of the word: "de-professionalization" isn't necessarily a bad phenomenon. It essentially comes down to veteran devs who, by their own volition or forced out, end up pushing to make games in small teams. Additionally, it talks about the other end of the spectrum where some developers essentially become "AAA consultants", taking roles that give them more control over their own schedule by leveraging their knowledge.
However I do share the author's reservations about the whole situation. Later in the article revealed part of the apprehensions I had explained concisely: not everyone gets out cleanly:
This clearly isn't true, but if AAA wants to treat these aspects as an assembly line and small teams can't afford to pay for bespoke assets, you can see the result. AAA games feel mechanical and soulless, many indies may feel unpolished or incomplete.
Still, there seems to be optimism overall on the fact that indie games can still in fact sell, compared to other art forms. So maybe things can work out for the best overall if AAA studios keep stumbling over themselves. I'm of two minds, so I'd love to hear others' thoughts on if this really is a thing, if it's good, and if it'll sustain.
The biggest issue is game dev has two issues:
Difficulty of entering the industry professionally
Difficulty of staying in a game dev job.
If you work your ass off on (1) only to be laid off shortly after release, anybody with the drive may want to work on their own stuff, and the repetitive carrying out of layoffs certainly makes people realize that a career in game dev will be fraught with risks.
Anybody not interested in doing (1) because of (2) (localthunk, poncle, concernedape to name a few) will have to make their game as a work of love. I think this leads to indies largely making better games: Small teams or even individuals with an idea, and the means and drive to execute it.
I see "deprofessionalization" as a major benefit to the industry, at least as an industry endeavoring for creativity. If "the industry" wants to "survive" with more "professionals" (that's a lot of quotes), then they can nurture these professionals' careers and not lay them off at the drop of a hat, ensure stability, so more people will go through the shit to enter for a hopefully more stable career as a game dev. The industry is very unhealthy right now, and if indies are taking over (they aren't, really), there is likely a reason.
Game development has become substantially more accessible in the last decade. Therefore, it’s much easier for a small team or solo developer to build a game that competes with AAA titles, at least for attention.
More accessibility means more competition. Lots of commenters in this thread are saying things like “games are way more fun now” and whatnot.
Competition has always been, on average, bad for owners, a mixed bag for laborers, and good for consumers.
Yes, games are better now, but largely because you can pick from more games. I’m sure there are plenty of indie game developers pouring their soul and their savings into their dream only to have it get a hundred purchases on Steam.
Game development is a high-risk, high-reward industry now. It’ll reward people who are creative, industrious, and lucky. The number of stable careers will decline in both quantity and pay, and capital owners will slowly pivot to buying out game IP instead of developing in-house. The only way to maintain dominance in a cutthroat, high-risk industry is to outsource the risk.
Consumers will win and producers will lose. Such is the nature of competition.
I guess that explains the sentiment here from what I assume is consumers. While I'm over here, as a laborer, very mixed on the whole ordeal. I went in understanding the instability of the industry, but I was always hoping to specialize into a niche and secure myself that way.
As I approach a decade in the industry, that has gone fairly poorly. You can't specialize when you're jumping jobs every 2-3 years because people keep laying you off anyway. Leaving me at a crossroads of sorts.
My end goal was always to try and go indie. I just really wanted maybe 4-5 more years to really secure my name and role. Now I'm just trying to survive out the year.
I think so too. Many of the commenters here are bringing up their favorite games with 1-3 people developing. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of 1-3 person teams trying to do indie game development. Gamers get to play the best of them, while many teams lose their investments.
I’m sorry to hear that it’s been difficult. I don’t have a lot to say to alleviate those concerns. I do want to acknowledge that it’s a hard industry, no matter who you are.