Feels like a lot of catastrophizing. The games industry seems to be doing fine? Plenty of great games are made every year, including this year. There is a contraction in employment, but after a...
Feels like a lot of catastrophizing. The games industry seems to be doing fine? Plenty of great games are made every year, including this year. There is a contraction in employment, but after a boom cycle during COVID, that's to be expected.
There's a lot of reasons to not make only live service or multiplayer games. For one, it's much harder, technology-wise. They also require an active development team even after launch, making them more expensive. Their market is especially competitive as well, since players only have enough free time to be active on in a couple of live service games, whereas they can fit many single player one-and-dones. There's no lack of live service games which didn't have the chops and many single player games from smaller developers that have been hits which wouldn't have been possible if they went for a live service game.
I think the assertion that multiplayer games are popular mainly because of "venture capitalists" (which, as an aside, mildly irks me - there are few to no VCs in the games industry, you probably mean something else, words have meanings!) has no evidence, and doesn't pass occam's razor. Multiplayer games have always been more popular - soccer/football is more popular than solitaire. Humans are social animals.
Yeah. As it turns out, large companies trying to make a profit will continue to do so. Unlike almost every other industry on the planet, the barrier to entry for a game reaching 80% of the world...
Yeah.
As it turns out, large companies trying to make a profit will continue to do so. Unlike almost every other industry on the planet, the barrier to entry for a game reaching 80% of the world is shockingly small, so you don't need to just focus on AAA/Major company titles.
So yes, big companies will chase easy and reliable profits (sex, gambling, downsizing, etc), but a single dev/small team can still make mega hits that will blow up on steam, or even the switch. That's just not a thing in most other industries (although I'm curious how long before we see more disruption in TV/Movies as I think there's similar opportunities).
I don't really mind the content they're discussing, but I despise the hyperbole.
The call to action to SKG seems to suggest that we can bring them under control so they can't harm society by doing so. Otherwise they'd still be using child slaves working 90 hours a week with...
As it turns out, large companies trying to make a profit will continue to do so.
The call to action to SKG seems to suggest that we can bring them under control so they can't harm society by doing so. Otherwise they'd still be using child slaves working 90 hours a week with minimal food and lodging to make such profit.
It's a bit of a shame that we're in such a state where we can say something as a dismissal, though. Already conceding defeat prematurely. But I guess that's on brand for 2025.
I’m not against SKG, nor trying to be dismissive, but I’d say equating its call to action with child slavery it’s a similar level of unhelpful hyperbole. The game industry by many many metrics is...
I’m not against SKG, nor trying to be dismissive, but I’d say equating its call to action with child slavery it’s a similar level of unhelpful hyperbole.
The game industry by many many metrics is stronger than it has been for most of its existence. The fact that just about anyone with the inclination can get something out to the world is fantastic and means there will always be pressure on AAA because they can’t totally lock up the market like say with film.
In the meantime though I’m not sure why people still buy these games. I agree they’re shortsighted garbage for the most part, so I don’t give them my money if I think so
It was more for the general idea of labor laws than SKG specifically. I simply don't like the dismissal of "of course businesses will try to profit no matter what". That justification can be used...
but I’d say equating its call to action with child slavery it’s a similar level of unhelpful hyperbole.
It was more for the general idea of labor laws than SKG specifically. I simply don't like the dismissal of "of course businesses will try to profit no matter what". That justification can be used on 2025 or 1825.
The game industry by many many metrics is stronger than it has been for most of its existence.
Okay. What about by the right metrics? Again, by many metrics the cotton industry was also strong. Then pesky labor laws came in.
This is absurdly bad faith, hyperbolic, and continues to ignore points already raised. So for the final time, yes there are both more jobs in the industry than throughout most of its existence AND...
Okay. What about by the right metrics? Again, by many metrics the cotton industry was also strong. Then pesky labor laws came in.
This is absurdly bad faith, hyperbolic, and continues to ignore points already raised. So for the final time, yes there are both more jobs in the industry than throughout most of its existence AND greater access for independents to enter the industry. There's a HELL of a lot more awareness of abusive practices like crunch, but yes it's also still a problem.
How about instead of instantly jumping to slavery as some sort of reasonable comparison point you provide what you actually think should be better. People seem to treat making games like being famous, where they wind up upset that the majority of the routes aren't glamorous, suck compared to jobs that require similar skill sets, and are unlikely to actually succeed.
My understanding is: Games produced today are generally better than ever. The game developer career is worse than ever. Getting into a big company is hard and you'll be overworked, underpaid, and...
My understanding is:
Games produced today are generally better than ever.
The game developer career is worse than ever. Getting into a big company is hard and you'll be overworked, underpaid, and assigned projects that get cancelled. As an indie, you have an astronomically low chance of making profit (factoring in living expenses during development), because games produced today are generally better than ever. Working for a small company is in-between; you may or may not have better working conditions (although you're probably still not paid well), and you risk the company going bankrupt.
Some AAA franchises and companies produce bad games: uninspired, buggy, and with microtransactions that affect gameplay. Not all though, e.g. some of Nintendo's recent games. However, some of the best games produced today are by AA studios, whose capabilities are comparable to AAA thanks to better tooling like Unreal Engine 5.
There's an oversupply of game developers. Companies get away with overworking and underpaying because most game devs have no labor power: if they say no, then there's a looong line of developers...
The game developer career is worse than ever.
There's an oversupply of game developers. Companies get away with overworking and underpaying because most game devs have no labor power: if they say no, then there's a looong line of developers who grew up playing video games and now they're pursuing their Lifelong Dream and Passion of Making Video Games, snaking out the door and wrapping 20 city blocks.
Few companies/devs will make a lot of money. Most will struggle or fail because...
There's an oversupply of games. Steam saw 15.4k games released on its platform last year, and yearly release totals keep shooting going up every year. Steam has 100k games. Google Play Store and the Apple App Store are estimated to have 700k games altogether.
All the titles you know and love—the Halos, Battlefields, the Witchers, the Elderly Scrolls, the Fallouts, the Super Marios, the Call of Duty's, the Animal Crossings, the GTA's, the Pokemon's, the Minecrafts and Robloxes, the Fortnites, the League of Legends, the FIFAs, the Street Fighters, the Madden's, the Sims, the Horizons, the EVEs, the Final Fantasy's, the Counter Strikes, DoTAs, etc. etc.—probably make up less than 0.1% of all titles and soak up most of the attention and money.
There's an "oversupply" of game devs the same way there's an "oversupply" of good games. There's an undersupply of experienced developers, because some 20 years of high turnover and lack of...
There's an oversupply of game developers.
There's an "oversupply" of game devs the same way there's an "oversupply" of good games.
There's an undersupply of experienced developers, because some 20 years of high turnover and lack of training is finally starting to show its cracks. The quality control isn't just a matter of cutting corners (though that is a huge factor), it's because more and more people are being thrown into the fire as systems get more complex and talent wanes. Passion can't teach you have to be a good designer, or maintain a world class codebase, or simply get you past the politics so you can be listened to.
All the titles you know and love—probably make up less than 0.1% of all titles and soak up most of the attention and money.
Kinds of. You may be underestimating it if youre basing it on every game released on steam. The average game released makes nothing, but also probably has zero budget. I think it's less productive to look at total game revenue than look at if a company can remain profitable and sustain itself.
As with other media, we've completely diversified tastes, genres, and even mediums within mediums. It's pretty hard to answer the question of "is the games industry doing okay" definitively. Like,...
The games industry seems to be doing fine?
As with other media, we've completely diversified tastes, genres, and even mediums within mediums. It's pretty hard to answer the question of "is the games industry doing okay" definitively. Like, if you work in the industry, it is absolutely not fine. tends of thousands of laid off devs, students who can't break in with stellar resumes that would have had them headhunted 4-5 years prior, a low morale workforce that remains with executives threatning to replace them with AI.
If you're an indie dev, you're probably unchanged if you already released a game or are about to. The market is "fine" for now in terms of consumers and audiences and sales. If you are early and trying to get funding, you are looking in arid plains (unless you pitch with "AI" somehow). If you got funding but are still too early, you might be in the layoff territory as publisher cuts funds. If you have zero funding then it goes back to nothing much changing you were likely screwed as is
And those are all some of the more objective situations from people with skin in the game. Try to divide the health of the industry among consumers based on vibes, genres, and individual series, and you'll get 200 answers if you ask 100 gamers.
Multiplayer games have always been more popular - soccer/football is more popular than solitaire. Humans are social animals.
Ehh, it's more like the Pareto Principle (if we're beign generous). Live service and multiplayer games fail harder than single player games. That's because they need more budget and more players to keep the game "alive". But a popular single player game can be more profitable if it takes off, especially with maintenance costs to consider.
I don't think the comparison is very helpful without a bunch of data we will never have access to. The only real grain of trith there is that yes: VC's do appeal more to live service games. That's just common business of trying to get continual income. It has little to do with games at all.
Really good video, unfortunate title. But I guess YouTubers also need to eat and have their own dark patterns. A more honest title would be "the rise and (lack of) fall of the live service game"...
Really good video, unfortunate title. But I guess YouTubers also need to eat and have their own dark patterns. A more honest title would be "the rise and (lack of) fall of the live service game" (if I had to keep the witty engagement title).
The first half is honestly one of the best overviews into the area that the gaming community seem to have a huge blind spot for: the mobile/hypercasual industry and how it would eventually impact the monetization of the console industry games as they started seeking the "lifetime game". It even kept up with Asia and how its version of lootboxes drove the mobile market into overdrive.
Second half is more of a business breakdown (and a deep dive into a modern gacha if you want to learn way too much about anime horse girls) of the profit incentives and why games are funded this way and take so long (spoilers: a lot of AAA game dev is not in fact about developing a focused, artistic vision), ending with a talk about Stop Killing Games. A bit more standard in the current discourse, but well explained. I don't think SKG will solve everything, but it's a good banner to rally around for now.
Outside of SKG I do wish there was a bit more call to action after this deep dive. It all just feels pretty hopeless as of now. But I guess the issues there are much larger than the game industry:
The obvious US problem but: a company shouldn't just be able to layoff 10's of thousands with zero prior notice just to report record profits. At best we need to protect against layoffs like the EU and Asia unless a company is in the red for mtille quarters. At the very least, we should have proper advanced notice to both delay the layoff (aka they can't lay someone off in June to look good for July Earnings calls) and give proper time for employees to transition. I can go on all day about a dozen job protections needed these days and antitrust needed.
Investment is a bit broken. The author compared it to a literal slot machine. I don't know if there's anyway to really "fix" this, but there needs to a) have investments available for non-AAA level budgets (there's an article I read about this somewhere on how "no one invests in AA" . And b) investments made based on confidence in the product and not its ability to market an alpha product as a full release. Fortunately, b) may be slowly correcting itself as these high profile fallouts of projects shutter nearly instantly.
Feels like a lot of catastrophizing. The games industry seems to be doing fine? Plenty of great games are made every year, including this year. There is a contraction in employment, but after a boom cycle during COVID, that's to be expected.
There's a lot of reasons to not make only live service or multiplayer games. For one, it's much harder, technology-wise. They also require an active development team even after launch, making them more expensive. Their market is especially competitive as well, since players only have enough free time to be active on in a couple of live service games, whereas they can fit many single player one-and-dones. There's no lack of live service games which didn't have the chops and many single player games from smaller developers that have been hits which wouldn't have been possible if they went for a live service game.
I think the assertion that multiplayer games are popular mainly because of "venture capitalists" (which, as an aside, mildly irks me - there are few to no VCs in the games industry, you probably mean something else, words have meanings!) has no evidence, and doesn't pass occam's razor. Multiplayer games have always been more popular - soccer/football is more popular than solitaire. Humans are social animals.
Yeah.
As it turns out, large companies trying to make a profit will continue to do so. Unlike almost every other industry on the planet, the barrier to entry for a game reaching 80% of the world is shockingly small, so you don't need to just focus on AAA/Major company titles.
So yes, big companies will chase easy and reliable profits (sex, gambling, downsizing, etc), but a single dev/small team can still make mega hits that will blow up on steam, or even the switch. That's just not a thing in most other industries (although I'm curious how long before we see more disruption in TV/Movies as I think there's similar opportunities).
I don't really mind the content they're discussing, but I despise the hyperbole.
The call to action to SKG seems to suggest that we can bring them under control so they can't harm society by doing so. Otherwise they'd still be using child slaves working 90 hours a week with minimal food and lodging to make such profit.
It's a bit of a shame that we're in such a state where we can say something as a dismissal, though. Already conceding defeat prematurely. But I guess that's on brand for 2025.
I’m not against SKG, nor trying to be dismissive, but I’d say equating its call to action with child slavery it’s a similar level of unhelpful hyperbole.
The game industry by many many metrics is stronger than it has been for most of its existence. The fact that just about anyone with the inclination can get something out to the world is fantastic and means there will always be pressure on AAA because they can’t totally lock up the market like say with film.
In the meantime though I’m not sure why people still buy these games. I agree they’re shortsighted garbage for the most part, so I don’t give them my money if I think so
It was more for the general idea of labor laws than SKG specifically. I simply don't like the dismissal of "of course businesses will try to profit no matter what". That justification can be used on 2025 or 1825.
Okay. What about by the right metrics? Again, by many metrics the cotton industry was also strong. Then pesky labor laws came in.
This is absurdly bad faith, hyperbolic, and continues to ignore points already raised. So for the final time, yes there are both more jobs in the industry than throughout most of its existence AND greater access for independents to enter the industry. There's a HELL of a lot more awareness of abusive practices like crunch, but yes it's also still a problem.
How about instead of instantly jumping to slavery as some sort of reasonable comparison point you provide what you actually think should be better. People seem to treat making games like being famous, where they wind up upset that the majority of the routes aren't glamorous, suck compared to jobs that require similar skill sets, and are unlikely to actually succeed.
My understanding is:
Games produced today are generally better than ever.
The game developer career is worse than ever. Getting into a big company is hard and you'll be overworked, underpaid, and assigned projects that get cancelled. As an indie, you have an astronomically low chance of making profit (factoring in living expenses during development), because games produced today are generally better than ever. Working for a small company is in-between; you may or may not have better working conditions (although you're probably still not paid well), and you risk the company going bankrupt.
Some AAA franchises and companies produce bad games: uninspired, buggy, and with microtransactions that affect gameplay. Not all though, e.g. some of Nintendo's recent games. However, some of the best games produced today are by AA studios, whose capabilities are comparable to AAA thanks to better tooling like Unreal Engine 5.
There's an oversupply of game developers. Companies get away with overworking and underpaying because most game devs have no labor power: if they say no, then there's a looong line of developers who grew up playing video games and now they're pursuing their Lifelong Dream and Passion of Making Video Games, snaking out the door and wrapping 20 city blocks.
Few companies/devs will make a lot of money. Most will struggle or fail because...
There's an oversupply of games. Steam saw 15.4k games released on its platform last year, and yearly release totals keep shooting going up every year. Steam has 100k games. Google Play Store and the Apple App Store are estimated to have 700k games altogether.
All the titles you know and love—the Halos, Battlefields, the Witchers, the Elderly Scrolls, the Fallouts, the Super Marios, the Call of Duty's, the Animal Crossings, the GTA's, the Pokemon's, the Minecrafts and Robloxes, the Fortnites, the League of Legends, the FIFAs, the Street Fighters, the Madden's, the Sims, the Horizons, the EVEs, the Final Fantasy's, the Counter Strikes, DoTAs, etc. etc.—probably make up less than 0.1% of all titles and soak up most of the attention and money.
There's an "oversupply" of game devs the same way there's an "oversupply" of good games.
There's an undersupply of experienced developers, because some 20 years of high turnover and lack of training is finally starting to show its cracks. The quality control isn't just a matter of cutting corners (though that is a huge factor), it's because more and more people are being thrown into the fire as systems get more complex and talent wanes. Passion can't teach you have to be a good designer, or maintain a world class codebase, or simply get you past the politics so you can be listened to.
Kinds of. You may be underestimating it if youre basing it on every game released on steam. The average game released makes nothing, but also probably has zero budget. I think it's less productive to look at total game revenue than look at if a company can remain profitable and sustain itself.
As with other media, we've completely diversified tastes, genres, and even mediums within mediums. It's pretty hard to answer the question of "is the games industry doing okay" definitively. Like, if you work in the industry, it is absolutely not fine. tends of thousands of laid off devs, students who can't break in with stellar resumes that would have had them headhunted 4-5 years prior, a low morale workforce that remains with executives threatning to replace them with AI.
If you're an indie dev, you're probably unchanged if you already released a game or are about to. The market is "fine" for now in terms of consumers and audiences and sales. If you are early and trying to get funding, you are looking in arid plains (unless you pitch with "AI" somehow). If you got funding but are still too early, you might be in the layoff territory as publisher cuts funds. If you have zero funding then it goes back to nothing much changing
you were likely screwed as isAnd those are all some of the more objective situations from people with skin in the game. Try to divide the health of the industry among consumers based on vibes, genres, and individual series, and you'll get 200 answers if you ask 100 gamers.
Ehh, it's more like the Pareto Principle (if we're beign generous). Live service and multiplayer games fail harder than single player games. That's because they need more budget and more players to keep the game "alive". But a popular single player game can be more profitable if it takes off, especially with maintenance costs to consider.
I don't think the comparison is very helpful without a bunch of data we will never have access to. The only real grain of trith there is that yes: VC's do appeal more to live service games. That's just common business of trying to get continual income. It has little to do with games at all.
The title is clickbait, which is why I didn't click on it. To suggest that the games industry is in "absolute collapse" is just an absurd take.
Really good video, unfortunate title. But I guess YouTubers also need to eat and have their own dark patterns. A more honest title would be "the rise and (lack of) fall of the live service game" (if I had to keep the witty engagement title).
The first half is honestly one of the best overviews into the area that the gaming community seem to have a huge blind spot for: the mobile/hypercasual industry and how it would eventually impact the monetization of the console industry games as they started seeking the "lifetime game". It even kept up with Asia and how its version of lootboxes drove the mobile market into overdrive.
Second half is more of a business breakdown (and a deep dive into a modern gacha if you want to learn way too much about anime horse girls) of the profit incentives and why games are funded this way and take so long (spoilers: a lot of AAA game dev is not in fact about developing a focused, artistic vision), ending with a talk about Stop Killing Games. A bit more standard in the current discourse, but well explained. I don't think SKG will solve everything, but it's a good banner to rally around for now.
Outside of SKG I do wish there was a bit more call to action after this deep dive. It all just feels pretty hopeless as of now. But I guess the issues there are much larger than the game industry:
The obvious US problem but: a company shouldn't just be able to layoff 10's of thousands with zero prior notice just to report record profits. At best we need to protect against layoffs like the EU and Asia unless a company is in the red for mtille quarters. At the very least, we should have proper advanced notice to both delay the layoff (aka they can't lay someone off in June to look good for July Earnings calls) and give proper time for employees to transition. I can go on all day about a dozen job protections needed these days and antitrust needed.
Investment is a bit broken. The author compared it to a literal slot machine. I don't know if there's anyway to really "fix" this, but there needs to a) have investments available for non-AAA level budgets (there's an article I read about this somewhere on how "no one invests in AA" . And b) investments made based on confidence in the product and not its ability to market an alpha product as a full release. Fortunately, b) may be slowly correcting itself as these high profile fallouts of projects shutter nearly instantly.