@@devizesolstice4617go back and watch videos from 2013 (and prior years) and you will see several rants about on-disc DLC in capcom games, stupid cosmetic DLC for Fable III and Final Fantasy, and server instability for Sim City and Diablo III. Maybe also actually listen to people next time.
I’m going to quote EmpLemon here because he summed it up brilliantly “People are so focused on making a product Profitable, that they forget to make it Valuable”
That's a great quote. There is this thing with late stage capitalism, that profit gain in the short term tends to put firms into this death spiral because they completely destroy their long-term legacy.
tv show industry as well with how many shows are getting too expensive for their own good in order to offer a maximum of 8 episodes of story content. I consider that a ripoff tbh
same with almost every type of media, games, movies, shows, music, general websites, programs, not even just media, but even real physical products like cars, houses, phones. It's only getting worse all across the consumerist capitalistic world.
i will never forget about a video i saw. A streamer was playing a game and a bug happened, a developer was watching the stream and said on the chat that it was a bug and that he would fix it. 5 mins later the developer said to the guy try to do the same thing again in the game and it worked. That´s how easy things are when you´re indie and i think it proves the point you brought in the video
Just like the vtuber fighting game. Some vtubers featured didn't like the voices used in game so they sent new high quality recording and he quickly implemented them
Yep. I recall reading one guys comment where a bug was found and he was asked how long it would take to fix it. The tech said less than 5 minutes and the showed the super fast process to his supervisor. The supervisor returned from speaking with the corporate heads and said that their response and instructions was to drag it out for 2 weeks and NOT immediately fix it. The tech did state that he was able to get them to narrow the timeframe by one week. It’s insane how the bigger/corporate companies operate.
AAA Publishers do not want to pay their employees. They have very tight deadlines, and once the game is finished, they move on to the next thing. If the game is buggy or terrible, too bad. The executives don't want to pay employees to continue working on the game so it just stays as it is forever. Especially Japanese developers.
I miss getting a game, beating the story, playing the MP for a couple weeks, then moving on to the next game. Now every game wants me to make it my life, with unrealistic chore like grinds.
It has an effect on the core gameplay too. Like the gameplay itself isn't prioritized as much as everything else. They cut corners, get lazy, focus more on how to increase engagement (make you addicted to mundane shit)
After finishing FF7 Rebirth I never want to play another modern game again lol. That game followed the ubisoft formula to a T. By Chapter 12 I just wanted the game to end and was going through the motions. Now I'm just really burnt out by modern games. The last thing I want to do is invest another 60 to 80 hours in another open world game. I just don't have the time and energy for these types of games anymore. I might go back to these types of open world games in the future but right now I am only playing games that respect my time. I am actually going back and playing a lot of older games on the PS2 and 360.
Not just that, but they can and will take it all away in a few years because its not making profit anymore and and shut the servers down, so all the time and effort is lost to time.
AAA games are all morphing into the same game. Battlepass ✅ Crossover ✅ Cosmetic store ✅ Macrotransactions ✅ Excessive in game advertising ✅ Horribly goofy cosmetics ✅ Content paywalls ✅
These are literally the biggest and only issues affecting gaming right now. It’s insane how simple it is, yet so many people just scream wokeness and ignore the issues you pointed out
Well, they do want to build the metaverse, or Ready Player One - the actual game. Nobody else really wants that, but they sure do. The amount of cashflow they could gain from it would be... insurmountable.
Don't forget about every game twisting their established models into 'hero shooters' or 'commanders' in RTS so they can sell a bunch of cosmetics for them specifically. Bonus points for making every one of your heroes insufferable douches.
I hate so much the fact that Ubisoft is now just as bad as Activision and EA. I'm not even mad, just incredibly disappointed by how they fell down. They used to be one of my favorite videogame companies.
This same thing happened with Minecraft in the last few updates. They are afraid to make big, creative changes to the game because it has to be approved by Microsoft. This is why the April Fools snapshots are always so good, the developers have so much creative choice.
@@RandomPerson-cf3gt on java(pc) you can play the old versions but console and mobile players are forced to use the corporate --bedrock-- bedbug edition, which doesnt let you play older versions and forces you to pay microtransactions for skins and mods, which are free in java. badrock edition is the sh!tty AAA version of minecraft
there's a video on youtube that dives into nether upgrade and why it really stands out among the last 10 or so updates. The reason being that mojang were allowed so much more creativity and, overall, could shake the core of the nether much more. Why? Because nether isn't the face of the game, it's overworld. Hence Microsoft didn't care that much and went along with most ideas that mojang had. It shows that somewhere deep there is "old" mojang who used to change the game month to month and wasn't afraid of risky ideas.
@RandomPerson-cf3gt Not for Realms. You must update the game to continue playing on those.....and Realms only exists because instead of fixing the multiplayer problems with Minecraft, they sold us the solution via subscription. Mind you. Games had this figured out 10+ years prior to Minecraft. It's a great thing that the industry had that figured out before the sociopathic suits took over, else you'd have to pay to play with friends in way more games.
Greed is one of the reasons why modern gaming isn’t fun anymore. Edit: No I don’t play Fortnite and COD. Even the recent COD games suck. I don’t play live service games in general. Yes there are good games that have came out last year in this year. But I mainly avoid the bad or mediocre ones.
Just play good games man.. There is more than enough out there, modern gaming is better than ever just don't always look at the biggest TripleA companies and you can find some awesome gems..
I saw a tweet a couple months ago that said something along the lines of how because of all the layoffs, employees are now competing against each other in an attepmt to keep their job, rather than working together as a team, which is cultivating a toxic and non-productive work enviroment
@@rabbitcreative Competition is AMAZING in a marketplace where similar products exist and offer difference features at different price points where a consumer can make a decision based on their choice of which one to buy. Competition within your company creates this, where nobody can agree on anything and are trying to 1-up each other in order to keep their jobs. Creating terrible products where no vision exists and hoping that the die-hard fans buy it. It's toxic and un-needed and I hope these companies eventually realize this or the indies are gonna come and take their places very fast.
Thing is gaming is making more money than ever but thanks to both advance in technology and AAA sucking, smaller studios are thriving. In reality AAA are cannibalizing themselves with LIVE SERVICE like streaming wars. People just don't have enough time. You will also notice alot of DEI firings, which 9/10 times is just redundant HR. This is mostly due to ESG funding which is failing because the grifters who it attracted divided playerbases and more often then naught were too incompetent too make successful products.
We're also at fault for continuously purchasing their overpriced games, and the quality of AAA games has declined in recent years. Oh, wait. AAAA games : /
Nah, fam, never blame the customer, the system is rigged to sell any garbage to everyone. By blaming consumers, you only increase your own guilt and hopelessness. It's like victimblaming, but for gamers honestly
Honestly I think one of the main problems is that people keep buying the pre-orders, which helps exacerbate the problem as it's telling these studious who make awful games that they make money by just generating hype, make false promise and/or lie. Not only that, but by pre-ordering, this can cause a company to have their unfinished game stay unfinished cause they already got the money from pre-orders. If players stop buying pre-orders, and wait for the game-day release, I think this would cause studios to be more careful with how they make their games, and force them to have their games finished. Star Wars Battlefront Collection is a very good example of why no one should be pre-ordering anymore, a game that came out in 2005 got revamped in 2024 and was worse than 2005 in almost every aspect, with gameplay somehow broken. We as players need to collectively stop buying pre-orders, else nothing will really change much.
The unbelievable part is all these AAA games need to do is read the comments on TH-cam to figure out what their fans want. This is like business marketing 101. Instead they just decide we like to eat dog shit.
Whales dictates the market, not us killing time on youtube while practicing english and french. It's the sad reality, there are some idiots out there willing to pay $60 for a Peach game on the Switch, others paying the same $60 on a Overwatch "bundle" of skins (textures and jpegs, something you can design yourself in a weekend, on photoshop, with a box of scraps!), then others paying $60 on Baldur's Gate 3... it's ugly and sad
@@Ienteredmynamecorrectly-lt3nuI was just about to say this. They're very aware of our opinions but all they see is the money continuing to flow in and that's all that matters.
I am an indie dev. The amount of bureaucracy and red tape in AAA studios is mind-boggling to me. If we encounter an issue, we fix it. Or if it requires more thought or collaboration, we make a trello card and talk about it in our weekly meeting. That's the beginning and end of the process. I mever want to work for a AAA studio if they won't let me do my job.
I think actman is just repeating things he heard about the absolute worst case scenarios. As someone who works in 3A I can tell you that the only paper work is your Jira tasks and sprints. Developers have free hands in how they want to fix issues and Ive seen them being even encouraged to fix low priority issues if they have time. The corporate process is mainly connected to game design and direction - that is heavily enforced by publisher and management. But not the individual work of a dev.
The future is with Indie devs, by far the best games in the past decade. Rust, Tarkov, Dark and Darker, Terraria, the list goes on. Keep doing what you do.
@@silvach2in ActMan’s example - it was a very simple request that the initial dev was probably thinking: I can’t touch it if it ain’t in Jira and we’re mid sprint and next sprint is already locked in so…4 weeks. Makes sense when you’ve had to work in those environments. Most companies doing “agile” do it wrong.
In the movie industry the exact same thing is happening. But one studio that goes against the grain is Blumhouse Productions who only spends a few million dollars per movie so when they bomb they barely loose money, but when they succeed, they make their money back upwards of 100 times over. Their studio has been very profitable. I'd like to see some game developers try this approach.
I don't think the game industry need more companies shitting out dozens of awful titles just to hope one hits gold. We already have been over saturated with slop for 10+ years
@@Hyperiumon You don't understand. Less people working on it and less money doesn't mean a worse game by necessity. If they aren't stupid, they will reduce the scope of the game, and/or plan for a longer development time, and it will be easier for them to make their intended product because they won't have to deal with the problems that Act Man brought up in this video that large development teams face.
It's not a paradox really. There is a pivot in every industry whoih happens when you become big enough that your primary stakeholder changes from customer to investor. Your goal goes from quality product at any cost so you stay relevant in the market, to ensuring you that you keep increasing value to shareholders. Basically there is a point of critical mass of capital. Mass which when it is reached shifts the primary target from consumer to investor, from creating product for A consumer to accumulation and generation of capital. This is also a point where a company becomes oddly self sustaining, no person in it is critical for the existence of the company. When you are below this point a loss of a key figure basically means you are out of business. So... what ruined video games? Capital did... no... not "capitalism" or "capitalists", but capital itself. Games market became so capital heavy that it started to collapse under it's own weight. It started to pull other markets into it (hardware and tangential software sectors) and started to be pulled into the even bigger market of finance. There is a odd case to be made for that if gaming was less "valuable", games could be better. There is a reason for the smaller capital or no-capital companies are able to make better games than big capital. (No-capital is the... 1 dude in their bedroom making a passion project and releasing it).
The higher budget you have, the more you have to cater to casuals and the lowest common denominator just to break even. So you make a game for "everybody" which is just another word for generic.
He is absolutely right, the corporate structure ruining games. Its such a massive problem, its hard for me to even get excited for any AAA games now because they are just such uninspired trash. Devs cant create anymore at these massive corporate companies, all they do is put terrible managers terrible ideas into games. What could possibly be more uninspiring than that. Each of those devs probably has a fantastic idea for a game that they got into the business to get an opportunity to create but never will because they have no freedom to make anything beyond what Billy wrote on the board today. I honestly dont even blame that dev that said it would take 4 weeks to write 10 lines of code, first off he could not give a fuck less about those lines that you could have written by the afternoon. That's straight up job security right there in a market that is super volatil for devs. That dev probably could have written it in the afternoon as well but why should he when he will get canned the second the job is finished.
can you describe a possible process why it would take 4 weeks to implement the AI Change ? I have a few Ideas because I know people developing business software but I would like to hear your take. ( my ideas revolve mainly around time management, change request ticketing and ticket based billing also versioning, milestones and testing and finally the length of the ticket pipeline the programmer has .. . )
Can you explain why games come out so unpolished if every single change has go to through multiple quality checks? Its so controversial and I never understood why.
I used to work in Programming. Once when the client asked for a change, I was assigned to add the code for it and it took me 1 hour with the testing (being generous). My supervisor told me I should not report right away it’s done because I had to take 2 business days to do it and now I (we) had to pretend we were still working on it to make the client realize the code was not that easy to work on therefore we should still be paid to be on hold for future changes. I realized a lot that day about “business”.
Do the same in fabrication. Not all the time but if it’s like a project for the city, or a large company. the finish product will sit in the shop for days or a week plus if we finish to fast.
This is the case for every software development outsource/outstaff company that all AAA studios employ and even their own developers. As my team lead said once, it’s better for client/PO/PM to think that you are working on something, than know that you are sitting around waiting for specifications for a new feature, because this one took less than expected.
well...sounds like a lack of project management and BA staff. your manager most likely doesn't want business to get used to changing requirements mid development. we have a rule where if they do change requirements we push it to next release. it forces business to focus more on what they want instead of putting in a random ticket without thought
As someone who LOVES the scale of Elite Dangerous and the exploration; if they made 10 banger planets in Starfield that were crazy diverse and fully explorable at the beginning, then continued to slowly introduce more fully fledged planets; I'd still be playing it
They’re conditioning the younger generation to think this is how games are at launch these days and it wasn’t ever different. We’re the old guard, it feels like we’re losing 😢
@ElvenRaptor No, it won't. Kids are the majority of the consumer base. The adults have more important things to do, like feed those kids. All it shows is that kids now are dumber than we were because our education system has become a political indoctrination camp.
If you want to win, don’t support mediocre releases, and don’t pre order games. Get over the FOMO of not owning a game the night of release. A bad game will expose itself rather quickly.
@@lutherheggs451 Let me help, you pay extra for physical media because it's someone's job to drive to your house and give you the game 1 week early. You pay extra for digital media because the game company makes more money and they get to test out their first draft on you.
I always thought it was so multiplayer games could gage interest and how many servers they needed... which is laughable when the games come out and their is not enough server capacity.
The only reason I like pre-order is if they allow you to pre-install the game before it is officially released. It allows me to play the game the day it is released rather than waiting like 35 hours for an 100gb game to download. Doesn't super matter if it is a single player game, but live service multiplayer games it can matter a little.
I'm an indie dev myself. I keep looking at how impressive all these character movements and interactions are made, but only to realize that a single player linear game with a team of 500 employees takes them years to make. If they actually stopped overthinking everything to the degree of "will HR approve of my code?", they would be released in months. It's really sad.
Hell no. Adding more people doesn't magically make things progress faster. This is literally the corner stone of software development. After certain point adding more people just slows project down since you can't have too many people smoothly work on the same project.
@@JushakFdebatable. As someone who’s worked in the industry game devs issues come from the culture that’s developed recently. Because you’re working on a 100 million dollar game nobody wants to fuck anything up, so most people try and dodge responsibilities or take more time than necessary to make it 100% perfect. Tim Cain did a video talking about this as well if you’re interested, he told a story where this exact scenario played out with a dev saying something that should take a few hours would take a week or two, and Tim calling them out and having to go through middle management to barter with them about it. I’ve experienced the same with coworkers. Not saying that too many cooks doesn’t hurt things, but it isn’t that simple
@@oldylad Not really debatable. That is just basics of software development, literally some of the first things we were taught in university that has stayed true for the software industry as a whole for decades. Also, developers are notoriously bad at estimating time spent, especially anything below one day and anything above one week. It's a half-joke with pretty much every developer I've talked with is that you first make an estimate and then multiply it by your preferred magic number (2,5 usually for me) to account for all the things you didn't expect going wrong, testing that it actually works and so on. It's a half-joke because of how often it ends up being true.
.@@oldyladWhat you said is really hard to believe. "They want it to be 100% perfect" but the games, and generally software, was never in a worse and more broken state at launch than it is today.
It takes years because of all of the red tape they have to go through. But, the games are only made properly with said red tape. Without the red tape, communication stops.
Big corporations ruin everything. Hollywood is experiencing the exact same issues. It's actually kind of insane just how similar their declines are. They'd rather dump a gazillion dollars into the same ip over and over rather than invest a fraction of it into smaller games/movies that could ultimately turn into massive franchises if they gave them a chance.
Hollywood is failing because they make dumb shit nobody wants to see. The game industry isn't really failing. Companies just make live service games because everyone plays them
For years money men have been trying to crack the creative process problem. The video game space is definitely the creative industry they've come the closest.
It’s crazy that it took skull & bones, what people call the 1st “Quadruple A game”, took 11 fucking years and your ship has a fucking stamina bar on it. Incredible
11 fucking years to copy the AC4 boat bits into another story without assassins in it. And they still fucked it up. At the end the poor bastard was just spawned out of contractual obligation and it shows
@@sebastianvroom7595 Skull & Bones was funded by the government of Singapore and like most government projects the execs at Ubisoft just embezzled the money until it ran out and had to release something.
Wait wat?! Your ship has a stamina bar??? Just do Black Flag with some QOL improvements, implement multi-player and BOOM, but no, let's put a fucking STAMINA BAR on your SHIP. Good Lord.
A What! How the ever-loving Fuck does a Ship have a STAMINA BAR? IT'S A SHIP! It's an inanimate object, a vehicle. Like I get having a Health meter so we know how much Health we got left before the ship is destroyed. Oh my brain hurts.
Ubisoft is also the same company that wanted gamers to get comfortable not owning their games while, at the same time, also shutting down The Crew while also removing access to the game.
"An executive at Assassin’s Creed maker Ubisoft has said gamers will need to get “comfortable” not owning their games before video game subscriptions truly take off." ... this is taken way out of context. It looks shitty with them removing the crew, but that's not what the guy meant when he said it.
Don't worry, this same youtuber and others will be selling you that idea in 2-4 years. Mark my words. "Oh, it's great guys. You get a free battle pass access if you revoke your rights."
@@makoaki9071 Lol you're a Ubisoft apologist. It's not taken out of context, the context is obvious to everyone with a brain. He was complaining that people have accepted Netflix and not owning movies, and they wanted to replicate that business model in video games. That was the context and everybody is aware of it.
Imagine telling Timothy Cain, the man who used to be a programmer / lead programmer since 1997 that he doesn't know how to do his job, and what he's asking is impossible. The nerve of these people.
@@Double-Dubz Yeah, he's nice until you're Chris Avellone and he refuse to pay you and your entire writing staff for over an entire year. Tim Cain is a bad dude, he doesn't deserve to be pedestalized.
@@Eye_Of_Odin978 that's actually the first I've ever heard of this, and I can't find any sources anywhere for it Got anywhere I can read more about it, or know any of the particulars?
Ive worked for many pest control companies over the years, and the bureaucracy is the exact same. At the larger companies any time I asked for a specific tool or chemical for a job it could take weeks to get it, or never at all. At my current mom and pop job the difference is incredible. If I need something I buy it myself and get reimbursed instantly, or they order and it's delivered to me within the week. No questions asked, they'll tell me to get what I need to do the best job I can. The quality my customers receive is night and day.
I will offer a counter argument: I work in cyber security for a health care provider in the USA. Any change to an application/system etc needs to be presented to a Change Approval Board. The board meets twice per week. Changes must also be performed after close of business in order to limit the impact to patient care etc. We can't have Joe Blow "making a quick change" in the middle of the day, finding out that he "goofed," and having servers/applications offline while he "tries to figure out what he did wrong." We have "test environments" but our network team is currently fighting an issue that "works in the test environment but fails every time it's deployed into production." The change has had to be rolled back 3 times now. They're going to re-test but will not be able to deploy until the go before the board again because we can't have them upgrading out routers in the middle of the day. Especially when "whoops! It's not working." It sucks that it takes a long time to get approval, but it's often to keep cowboys from getting gung-ho. I worked at a hospital where in the middle of the day the director of IT decided he was going to "test" the fail over circuit for the internet without planning or announcing it. He simply went to the server room, disconnected the primary internet and "Waited to a few minutes" to see if the fail over circuit came online. It didn't. Then it took several more minutes for the primary to be restored. The entire regional hospital was without internet all because this guy had a hair up his ass and didn't want to "wait for corporate" to approve. Hell brook loose but it wasn't the IT director that got in trouble for it. He threw his subordinate, the network admin, under the bus. The networking admin quit the job a few months later. It sucks, but sometimes there are very good reasons these safeguards are in place.
If AAA studios will continue as they have been doing, they'll cease to exist sooner or later. Then when Indie-studios grow and become the new AAA studios, they'll suffer the same faith and someone else will take their place. Thus completing the cycle.
Agreed. I believe that will be the cylce eventually. Greedy AAA fell, indie grow due to more employee coming to them, they become big, eventually they (might) lose their head and become greedy, then eventually fall, so on and so on.
I think you are confused.Since we live on planet earth and not your brain place , AAA studios continue to make money and get bigger and bigger no matter what a youtube video or a comment on it says.AA studios get bought out and dismantled by big companies because in the end its all about the money.
No they won’t people keep buying their shit including me and probably you and everyone that watched this video that why developers haven’t changed anything
helldivers 2 is not worth buying on pc after the recent controversy. sony is trying to force people to make playstation accounts just to play the game. even if you have never owned a ps5
@@Healer0079a Not arrow heads fault ppl need to use a psn account. Its forced by Sony. They even demand ppl give the game bad reviews so they can force Sonys hand...
The ridiculous thing is the banal mediocrity of standout titles like BG3. That a title that steeped in virtue signalling and poor writing is considered a modern masterpiece is a testament to the depths to which we've declined.
Twenty years ago, a game called GTA San Andreas was released. Even today, I still play it for its arcade-style car physics, six-star wanted level, RPG elements, and the ability to use lots of cheats. I enjoy playing it offline because it's a single-player game.
During the lockdown I decided to try Oblivion & Morrowind, having only previously experienced Skyrim. And despite going in blind and consequently creating a trash build. Kind of, awful early game with a silver lining; but set up to have a neat late game. Even in the early game I still had more fun and with Morrowind than I did with Skyrim. I was consistently baffled by how much more fleshed out everything was (well except for smithing and some quality of life features).
Meanwhile 10 years ago, a game called The Crew was released. The game had weighty, but fun vehicle handling and a fun open world to race through. Even today I'd like to play it, since it has a fun single player experience, but Ubisoft took down the servers and nobody can play it anymore since the game was always online. Thanks Ubisoft for turning my $60 physical copy of your game into a coaster.
@@1mariomaniac Are you aware of Ross Scott's campaign to set legal president so video game companies won't get away with this? I bet you are since you're watching this channel but just crossing my t's and doting my i's.
Remember everyone for an $120 Star Wars Game, you can also buy KOTOR 1&2, Forced Unleached 1&2, OG Battlefront 1&2, Republic Commando, AND the entire Jedi Academy collection, and still have about $4 left over. And this list isn't even counting the Lego or the EA Games.
Star Wars Outlaw Gold Edition is $159.90 (Digitally) where Im from and with that kinda of money, I can literally buy Stellar Blade AND Helldivers 2 (Digitally ofc). Physical discs is sometimes cheaper where Im from too.
Bingo. It has become all about what the corporate suits want as opposed to what the actual audience wants. Heck the "modern audience" has basically become the corporate ideal audience, not exactly one that actually exists. It's all about big corporate ego and investor pandering these days.
@@Mrmidknight-yx9pg Yes, they are out of touch with reality and their consumers. Halo forgetting what Halo even is, 343i making "their" own Halo and it is on every platform know to humans and nobody cares. It's like the game is having an Identity Crisis, it doesn't even know what it is or wants for that matter. The ostracized adopted kid nobody likes nor wanted for that matter. Out of time because they are outdated by now. Just like "Girl Boss" term dying the Live Service games is just a crap shoot and fake just for MUNNEH. Fortnite got it right, problem is that too many people copy/paste that shit like it is candy. Had they read even one fucking book from the source material, the Halo Encyclopedia, Halo Legends, Halo The Fall of Reach, The Cole Protocol, or just simply anything at all they would have had a great series. Hear a lot of people are liking the Fallout Series and it is actually good. Never mind Kenobi and The Rings of Power from the past, The Mandalorian falling off, Bad Batch being great, Survivor and Fallen Order. Sick ass SW games. Do they hold up to Kotor and stuff, no but you can actually jump finally, and video game trope Double Jump/Air-Dash. Playing with the Force Push/Pull was better in Fallen Order, you just don't have the boxes around to do that anymore, exploiting the slow down on a box that is thrown you can do some real black magic with that kind of exploit in Fallen Order. I have even seen Survivor broken to all means by just skipping whole sections on the map and sequence breaking it all to shit.
With the success of Helldivers, BG3, and now Manor Lords and hopefully Kingmakers, idk how the hell AAA producers haven’t even started to learn their lesson yet.
Because they said setting standards based on those games are unrealistic and they will continue to push slobs out because a lot of people will still buy them
@@Foxfire_forty-nine there's nothing wrong with live service in fact live service means year and years of content it's when they go and charge you for EVERY LITTLE THING that it becomes a problem helldovers doesn't push its battle pass in your face every chance it gets you don't get out of a mission to get a huge pop up saying BUY OUR SPECIAL EDITION FOR A FREE MONTH OF BATTLE PASS!!! you don't have skins shoved down your throat at every possible moment and they also do balance patches and additive patches often and for free
Yet the combat is bland and casual focused, clearly showing they are throwing as wide as possible net with it... Peak of gaming is farming season passes BUT hey they are cheap(free if you farm hard)!😮😂
@@pullthatup2973bro the grind on helldivers is extremely easy what are you on about? Are you playing on easy difficulty expecting it to be more then casual?
Helldivers 2 is owned by Sony....It literally says at the start up screen Sony Interactive Entertainment, Licensed to Arrowhead games.....Its Sony's IP licensed to Arrowhead, they have ZERO say over what happens with the game, they have to get Sony's approval for everything.
@TheActMan Thanks for the heads up on Kingmakers! that game looks dope, didn't know about it til this video now i'm hyped. Also the other stuff you said was cool. But Kingmakers.
From a personal perspective, the $70 price tag doesn't help. Unless it's on steam where I can get a refund if I don't like the game, $70 makes me hesitant to buy games anymore, let alone pre order. I have to see it first then decide.
I quit pre-ordering anything once I got good enough internet to buy digital. I used to pre order games because some big releases my local Gamestop would sell out so the pre order guaranteed me a copy. And back then I bought a lot more games in general because I had the time to play them
Actually no, this proves how out of touch consumers are. With the cost of making games, the development time, staff over heads and everything you factor in to market the game, games are technically meant to cost $200 each 😂. In fact that $200 is actually a bit out of date too, based on figures from the previous generation, not even from this current generation. "$70 iS ToO mUcH" 😂
@@rezarfarTechnology evolved so much that half of the money invested in an AAA is just wasted. Modern AAA games run so bad, have so many bugs and are so anti-fun that is surprising people still buy them for 70$.
@@nasfoda_gamerbrbigproducti5375 thats actually partly our fault though, let me show you why. Do you expect the PS6 to be more powerful than the PS5? Yes you do, not only do you expect it to be more powerful, but you also expect it to have a modern chipset thats made in the year it was released. These are all expectations you have, i even have the same expectations. But this has become a problem, it's caused a bottleneck, the technology has advanced faster than what developers are able to reliably develop for, the risk factor also gets too big, the bigger the cost of the gake, the less risks developers are able to take and the less innovative games become, this is why Indie games are so popular now. Our expectations for more powerful hardware is actually the root cause of this issue in the gaming industry, technically we should still be using PS4 and Xbox One technology to make video games, the PS5 and Xbox Series shouldn't be on the market, at least not since 2020, maybe by end of 2023 or even end of 2024. We jumped from one generation to the next faster than we were supposed too, hence why we now have this situation with AAA games. It's also why Nintendo are doing so well, because they recognised this problem and they planned for it.
21:34 this is honestly the same exact thing that happens in construction in, it used to be “oh its broke lets fix it before lunch” now its “ oh its broke well we have to get it fixed by having it approved by 19 different corporations and just maybe it will be fixed”
I used to love exploring open world games, but these days they’re just so big for the sole purpose of being big. It became really exhausting traversing these games which is conflicting because I’ll be invested in the story, but get bored from exploring.
Yeah I think that's why I lost interest in most modern open worlds, especially ever since they decided they needed to become online games. I just like to explore the worlds in these games and play them at my own pace, doing what I want to do. When it goes online, a lot of that seems to go away and you're forced to play at other people's pace. Only so many games just let you relax and enjoy them.
I found a solution in some of the open world games like the massive assassin's creed rpg trilogy with Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla. Remove the compass from your HUD and remove the map markers for question marks and then only do quest and whatever open world activity you come over while travelling to said quest, I didn't do this during origins and got burned out by exploring ancient Egypt, but I did this during Odyssey and am still enjoying Odyssey and Valhalla by replaying them a lot as I always discover something cool and new.
@@zombrexozelexi9069 Yeah but you forgor you can't just simply DO THAT in other games. Fallout 4 doesn't let you remove quest markers and stuff, unless you mod it in there or get a mod for that.
@@zombrexozelexi9069 Lol, AC Origins is the one I always think about. I loved it and I loved the scenery and settings but those damn question mark markers on the maps were just too much. I couldn't stop playing until I went to one more area...well, one more after that one...just one more then I am done...
It’s like they’re skipping all the important parts and just rushing to get the money from the customer and once you buy it and pay for it or play it and it breaks and you asked for a refund and they basically say sorry you can’t
I'd say most of the time, it's why we see publishers focus so heavily on marketing of a game. If they can drum up enough hype, they can sell enough copies of the game either through pre-orders or on day 1 enough to potentially make a profit before players even realize what they actually bought.
As someone who works for a major tech company, the way I see games come out looks a lot like how other major corporations release products: It's just a product and we're completely disconnected from the customer. The company I work for is trying to release a new product right now, and it is so disjointed, terribly put together. And we're selling it! It's in ALPHA and we're selling it. It's not just gaming corporations, It's ALL corporations. This is just how they do things now. "I want my money and I want it now"
Thanks for the insight. Been thinking the same for some time...Games as an industry have only recently become the focus of shareholders and investors, in contrast to, say, Chemicals or Cinema. It is pretty jarring sometimes to watch Capitalism turn your passion into soulless profit :( We are learning, though.
... Thx for the honesty, sadly it's obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub.. the thing is.. it's MY money.. and y'all will never get any it - if I'm not getting something of solid quality.. 🤷🏻♀️ lol
I got a D in english and writing class so my grammar and spelling is worse than a child, but I have something to say about AAA gaming if you could hear me out. Act Man really put it on the table. Big release games have felt lackluster and not too good or creative for years now. I would say somewhere around 2010 and 2011 were the last years I truly enjoyed most games. After that I started to notice softer narratives and creative decisions, controlled speech and dialogue. Desexualization of women, more female main (strong woman) characters. Less curse words. Less blood and gore in M rated games. Lack of dark unsettling themes that challenge the norm. Basically games lost there balls. And then once the 8th gen hit, we had to pay even more money for online play, loot boxes and other micro transactions started to become standard. They got so bad, they even tried to implement them in single player story games. Im looking at you Middle Earth: Shadow of War. They even thought at one point that Single Player games are dead, all hail the multiplayer experience. Yeah, they were wrong on that. Sure a-lot of people play Multiplayer, but games like Elden Ring, Baldurs Gate 3, Sekiero, Witcher III, God of War, Red Dead Redemption before online released, Horizon Zero Dawn and Zelda Breath of the Wild prove that the gaming community will always have love for single player games. That is, if they are good, creative, do they challenge the norms, are we immersed, are we surprised, and are we captivated in this gameplay experience. Now a days, like Act Man said, creativity is drowned underneath big budget, too many workers, to many bosses on the floor, big investors, and an overcrowded Market Place. What I mean by an overcrowded market place in this particular instance is, too many rich guys investing in games and wanting large returns from the same player base. The player base as a whole are real life working people who have jobs and family’s. We only get so much time to play games. And we only have so much money to spend on them. So it comes to no surprise that we the player base are upset and want a change. And I hope it comes…soon! Thank you for reading my long message with poor grammar!
AAA Games = Monetization is the main priority and gameplay was the afterthought. I've played some games where my thought was "I bet they spent 95% of their board meetings on microtransactions and live service and only 5% on gameplay".
My take on the "game as content" approach that started with CD-based consoles: 1995: We doubled the budget for our next game, and our profits increased 100x! 2005: We doubled the budget for our next game, and our profits increased 50x! 2015: We doubled the budget for our next game, and our profits increased 2x! 2023: We doubled the budget for our next game, and our profits is half of the previous game!
Over the past decade, it has ben seen by the (non-Nintendo/non-indie) game industry that it is more risky trying to make a game that requires talent than simply dumping more and more content into games. It requires more talent to get it right to produce a great story and great gameplay. Whereas mindlessly adding more and more items, visual effects, sound effects, , things to distract you, quests, epic soundtrack, voice lines, maps, weapons etc simply equals more success. But now story and gameplay is getting more repetitive and consumers are tired of it.
That’s because despite more and more investment by game devs the customers keep on refusing to pay for the games because they expect them to be cheaper but not lesser. Doesn’t sound like it’s a dev problem sounds like a freeloader problem.
@@ironhell813 Not hardly. Computers are far more capable and graphically things are modelled extremely well. But the stories suck, the gameplay is wooden, and usually a lot of shit gets gutted. Easiest thing to look at is EA's Sims franchises-- SimCity 4 was solid, SimCity (2013) was a broken buggy mess with limited gameplay, limited map sizes, and was a single player only always-online game. It took a full YEAR for EA to offer a stinkin' offline mode! If you were on an airplane or out in the country, you simply couldn't play it.
@@aboutwhat1930 yeah that sounds great except sim city stopped being a triple a license decades ago, unlike The Sims, which is where all of the dev time was being spent. This is why I’ve advocated against hostile take overs for years, because if you’re aren’t aware, maxis is part of EA but it’s still a separate company (team) within EA, and EA only gives them so Much as a budget. To understand how the industry works is to understand why it is the way it currently is, and it’s all based on monopolies and consumer demand. So in other words, it is you the customer buying games from monopolies that does this.
Here's why: 1) CEOs can only fail up because they are hitting really good numbers via cutting corners and exploiting live service 2) CEOs have a great exit: golden parachute 3) CEOs actually get a higher paying job lined up after they get fired because of the stats that they have 4) consumerist mentality: they just whine but still buy 5) despite being informed about the dangers of spending money unnecessarily, they still do it because they're addicted In other words, consumers are to blame for making CEOs look good on paper which attracts investors which attracts more of this.
Also, corporations tend to promote to your level of incompetence. For example, a good worker might get promoted to team lead, a good lead might get promoted to management, but once you get promoted to a job you're no longer good at, you'll stop catching promotions and find yourself stuck at a position you suck at. Skills don't always transfer between positions, a good worker might be a garbage manager but they'll be promoted based on their good work and now you're down a good worker and you have a subpar manager instead.
It's the consumers fault companies are allowed to operate like this? Is it also the victims of scammers faults for getting scammed? Or addicts faults for becoming addicted? What colour is the sky in your world?
@@toolittletoolate Comparing drug addiction to somebody willingly supporting a company is wild. Then again, considering you play DI2, you're probably insulted that we're laughing at you for buying slop.
Shareholders. The reason major studios are doing it is because if they don't show growth, or at least the illusion of growth then the shareholders don't make profit on their shares. Shareholders who aren't profiting tend to leave, causing the estimated value of the studio to decline, meaning that management can't get 7 figure bonuses.
The pandemic ruined growth forecasts. They made more money than ever during that time and they still expect lockdown profits, despite the fact we're all back to work. It is disgusting greed.
@@spankyjeffro5320Yes but if you’re expectations aren’t based in reality you’re just bankrupting your company for no reason. If I owned a small chain of bakeries that do close to $1 million in sales every year, why would I set the profit growth to $5 billion?! That’s what companies did after COVID and I know from experience because I work for one.
@@spankyjeffro5320 not just that, it’s the fact that these companies set unrealistic expectations in order to attract investors. They inflate the companies worth and have to inflate game budgets to match the hype they have created for investors. The corporate world wants unsustainable growth out of every company they invest in and it’s ridiculous.
It's not just triple A games, it's big budget movies, music... Hell even just house/kitchen appliances, electronics etc. In 80s,90s people got what they paid for and things worked for decades...
We can't forget gems like Final fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, Elden Ring, Baldur's gate 3, and The Breath of The Wild series for being gems of the modern gaming era. People complained about FF7 rebirth having "too much content", "too much variety", "too much quality of life" in the game but when lackluster games that actman mentioned comes out or greedy games that are pointed out in the video, people gobble it up like left over dunkin donuts. Honestly FF7 rebirth is Game of this year. Can't forget Elden ring and BG3 for being revolutionary, BG3 was so ahead of last year other game devs admit they can't compete. Shoutouts to the FGCs devs for making great games, Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, Guilty Gear Strive and Grandblue fantasy versus rising are Fighting games I recommend, personally it's Tekken and Guilty gear for me. At the end of the day, we can point out more flops than gems like I mentioned. But it's never too late to appreciate these AAA games. The gaming devs should learn from RPGs are FGs if they want to make a change, have a great one.
@@ambrosianapier7545 lol are you under the impression greed didn't exist in the 80's and 90's? The issue is that greed used to actually be the right motivation, as in, give the people what they want and carry your money home on a flatbed. But now, thanks to ESG, it's not about giving people what they want, it's about promoting THE MESSAGE. Either toe the line, or don't get the big funding from groups like Vanguard and Blackrock. THAT'S the difference today.
This f*ckin' guy who's only experiences with Fallout are New Vegas and the show even manages to differentiate Interplay/Obsidian RPG's with Bethesda RPG's. Love this guy.
Eh, I remember selling Bumble to Eulogy Jones, and then eating a ghoul after selling his ear to a wandering merchant. Can't sell a kid drugs if you already sold the kid
I was just talking about this with my wife. I don’t even want to buy a next gen console because companies are only releasing one game every decade. It’s ridiculous.
One thing they do that I know they are scamming us on, and I am pissed about is the controllers and the joysticks. I don’t know how long you’ve been gaming, but I was five when I got an NES and I’ve been a gamer ever since and I’ve had almost every major console or at least access to it in the house. My brother had a few I didn’t vice versa anyway I bought a controller to play games on my computer and I learned what “stick drift” is. It happened on my oculus and it’s unbearable and unfixable apparently And it’s apparently because these companies are buying el cheapo joysticks not hall sensor joysticks … Growing up, no console with sticks had fucking “ stick drift”. They worked until they were chewed up by the dog or smashed or soaked in water and even then they worked --perfectly … What the fuck is up with these companies thinking they charge $70 $80 for a controller and then not have the stick work forever minus forced damage like throwing at the wall or repeatedly dropping it off the second story?!?
@@NineS5 im still updagring cause even intdie needs more power than it used to but its why i go for mid tier GPus rather than high end and I dont get why anyone would pay 1500 for 4090 or 1100 for 4080 when a 4060ti will do just fine for every single indie game even at 4k
This is why I consider the 2000’s to be the the era where gaming peaked. The 6th generation(ps2,xbox, gamecube, and dreamcast) had some of the best releases where we got new IPs and new entries from older IPs. There was more risk=reward when it came to game development and gaming culture was the perfect balance between niche and mainstream. This was also present in the first few years of the 7th generation(ps3,x360, and wii) but gaming started to get bigger and more mainstream towards the end of that generation where we entered the dark ages where there was less risk, more monetization, and the franchises were going in directions that muddied their reputation
A bit of context on dev work and timelines etc; I work in dev though not in games, most dev teams work in sprints of 1-2 weeks with with tasks scoped (time/difficulty), tracked and queued based in priority so it’s not so easy to makes changes as you would in a solo or really small team. Not to mention that each tasks estimate usually includes testing by the devs outside/before QA
listening to grummz the guy who has scammed his fanbase multiple times and cant even release his own game without milking it dry. dudes just trying to profit not make good games. he is a grifter.
Not all games which are made by passionate developers turn into great games, but all great games are made by passionate developers. Without passion you're never gonna create magic, and without creative liberty you're not gonna have passion.
"AAA is derived from the US system of grading where A is the highest possible mark. Each A has a different meaning: the first A denotes “critical success”, the second A marks “innovative gameplay”, and the third is meant to signify commercial success." None of these "AAA" companies even deserve a single A anymore. Hell, demote them to B and even that will be a disservice to indie game companies.
So, I've always been in favour of ditching "AAA." I've been lobbying to get people to call them "big corporation games." AAA implies a great product or great company, but the meaning has changed. Nowadays, people use it to mean something with a huge budget. Ergo, something backed or produced by a big corporation.
Is it me or people mix what "Indie" and AAA means. An indie developper like Larian had AAA budget thanks to partners like Google Stadia. Helldivers 2 is not an indie game, it's a Playstation and Sony IP, funded by Sony investors with a AA budget. Arrowhead is an indie developper hired by Sony. At 16:15 he mentions HD2 monetization and makes it like it was Arrowhead who had the last word on monetization, how is that, can someone please educate me ?
Indie games are definitely valuing creativity and innovation more these days. It's disappointing to see the AAA space getting so constrained by financial goals rather than the passion of making fun and interesting games.
Especialy when budgets are so big one flop can tank entire studio. Look at GTA 6 and 2 Bilion budget or Spiderman 2 with 300k $. They simply cant afford to lose so they play safe.
Having fun doesn't pay the bills. The real reason games are getting worse for some people is because it doesn't appeal to their tastes. No humans are the same, we all like different things in games. 2042 for example, I personally enjoy it. I like the stealth helis (not many people like them because of the bombs and not able to lock on when it's stealth), I like free classes (putting an anti material rifle and a javelin in the same loadout), and I like the maps (I'm more of a vehicle player). As you may have guessed others have different tastes. Some hate the helis and want them removed, others love how the class system locks out variety, and a large amount hate open maps and want more infantry focused ones. Studios can't cater to everyone so they pick common ground from each or just side with the majority.
It surprises me that Square Enix released FF7 Rebirth: -80 hour campaign -Tons of minigames -Incredibly huge open world -7+ playable characters -High quality cutscenes -Really good sidequests -New Game Plus at release And yet; -No DLC -No season pass -Single player, no internet connection needed -No 100GB day one patches
Not to sound biased, but i think it has to do with how japan makes video games in comparison to the west. They tend to have more creativity behind their work and not flood their games with predatory business practices, not saying all. But i think that may be one of reasons why Japanese/eastern developers don’t get nearly as much flag as the west
it doesn't surprise me. It's the remake of their biggest game in the history of the company. They could take a dump on all the discs they deliver to retail and it would still sell. Also, there will likely be 1 (maybe 2) DLC, as were with the remake. Season pass doesn't make sense for a SP game and same applies for internet. Unsure if you are just trolling.
@@DDViking True. I also tend to like japanese games more. Sounds like this AAA videogame quality issue is mostly reserved for Western studios and companies.
@@DDViking My bet is that a Japanese person would say the same about western games, or maybe not. I think they are creative and they are not. It depends on the game, Resident Evil games are not that creative for example (at least the later games).
Arrowhead Games needs to be the reference point we judge companies by from now on. Because they aren’t even doing anything that crazy they’re just being ethical and chill.
Thank god for Sony Playstation for creating Helldivers….. yet Act Man is so pro-xbox he never even mentioned Sony owns Helldivers in his 2 video reviews of Helldivers. H1 and H2 are such good and fun games that put a smile on people who play them…. yet he’s lumping in Sony Playstation with MICROSOFT TRASH…….
@@LyonPercival No. Wrong. Sony financed Arrowhead. Arrowhead created Helldivers. Sony simply owns the ip. Without the creators at Arrowhead, Sony would open the floodgates to activists. God bless, Arrowhead.
@@LyonPercival Pipe down Sony pony, no one asked you to meat ride a corporation. You're exactly part of the problem why gaming is going the way it is.
this is exactly what happened in the 80s when the gaming market crashed. the big studios lost favour. lost millions and indie devs rose from the ashes to become the new aaa studios. we are entering a new golden age of gaming and unlike last time the market wont crash because indie devs have an easier route of publishing thier games via steam and such.
well the PC market wont crash the current console market might... but new consoles that have real innovation will take the polace of the current ones that amount to gimped PCs
@@PW-zs2yx the first home console came out in 72 and they had arcades before that. the industry wasnt infantile in fact it was booming. the sheer volume of games being made wasnt seen again until steam became big. just flat out your wrong. because all the biggest selling games of the past 5 years were made under the same conditions as doom or halo. by a small team putting it all on the line. stardew valley, minecraft, lethal company, among us, pal world, the list goes on and on. but yeah know keep huffing the copium.
The thing you said about fallout new Vegas hit close because playing fallout 4 even back then left me with the taste of where the crazy things you can do, the brutality and the humor, it felt like a game made for kids. And why talk about Starfeild, even worse. It's all very disappointing, yet there are still games like Baldurs Gate 3 that give hope.
The 'too many cooks in the kitchen" analogy works really well. When one person makes a game, its their expression and theirs alone. When 50 people make a game, it's a mesh of a small, like-minded group's ideas and expressions, making something entirely new but still personal. When 10k people make a game, its a incoherent mess of conflicting ideas, desires, and misplaced priorities. So much so that the finished product has no real identity of it's own. And this is especially apparent when you can clearly see that, the main purpose of a creative project, is not the production of the creation itself.
Another awful part of having so many people is that some will poison the game with their personal agendas or ideology when the few people who came up with and pitched the concept initially were like, " Let's make something fun that WE would want to play."
Large teams have leads for each division who are responsible for making sure everything their division puts out meets a design brief that will have been predetermined in the planning phases of each project. Games are made alongside something called a game design document (GDD), which serves as a guide for everyone to stick to. The lead signs off everything people put out, to ensure consistency. The reason a lot of AAA games feel soulless is because they're made to be safe, with the belief that this appeals to more people. It's the same reason Hollywood franchise films all feel the same. Risks aren't taken enough, creative exploration is almost zero, and so all these types of games start to feel like the exact same thing in a different skin.
Yeah and throw in some millionnaire CEO who barely understands anything about games to manage those 10k people teams with their trusted friends in suits to call the shots and no matter how talented the 10k people are, it's going to be a disjointed effort that'll need luck to gain any sort of a coherent vision...
@@MC_HammerpantsMinorities having jobs has no negative impact, quite the opposite even since there are more perspectives and hobbies to help diversify the pool of experience to pull from. Greed, on the other hand…
It’s funny how whenever I show my younger cousins indie games and such, they say “why are the graphics so trash?” Or “this game looks like ass why would I play it.” We officially live in a world where kids are being brought up in AAA garbage and when something of actual quality comes up, they think the opposite
Because the exterior appearance is being valued more than gameplay quality, wrap a shit in shiny gold foil and you can sell to people who see graphical quality as the main denominator of quality
This is an interesting point and for example Final Fantasy 13 was a terrible title because most of the maps were just straight lines, the writing was trash, gameplay was lackluster but for the time it had the best graphics around. Squaresoft sunk a lot of money towards the graphics alone and everything else got heavily cut and this strategy seems to be the predominant one used. Corporations and large budgets are typically needed for the high polish and CGI, same goes for hollywood, but it will often be heavily sanitized. Theres more to a game than how it looks, polish a turd all you want, put sprinkles on it, its still a turd. But with indie games, its a chocolate icecream that to these kids, just looks like a turd but tastes great haha indie games make up for the lack of graphics with epic retro gaming features. But when all you know is crap, and don't give high quality a chance theres no reference point for these kids to realize the new games are trash.
There is a very high quality bar games need to hit before they can even have the chance to be successful now. There is also an appeal factor that the game needs to be communicated right away in a clip they might scroll by in social to be even considered. Attention economy is tough right now for entertainment.
You nailed it. The biggest problem is the game companies want to make sure their investors get a return rather than make the best game possible. That's why everything has microtransactions, DLC, loot boxes etc. The crazy thing is if they just made the best game they could then that would have success.
It's more than a just a return , they want big bucks going on. Because certainly if investors aren't aholes and greedy and invest in a safe way and let studios handle and develop at their own pace. There's more chance for it to gain profit. It's like investors these days don't even trust human creativity and talent and only wanted the quickest way to get money. By scamming and half assing everyone. This is more than just greed at this point
@@pauloazuela8488 oh I agree with you. You see it in film and games. Those industries are dependent on investors to help increase budgets but investing in art like that is a risk. No one knows what will be a success and won't. Where I think the problem is is that those investors don't want to lose their money so only invest in what they think will be a success (hence why we have so many sequels as they can see if its been successful or not). Investors are the worst possible people to be having any influence over the creative process as they have no idea what makes a game or film good or what people want. As you say, they can make crazy amounts of money a lot of ways now so taking a risk just isn't worth it to them but the big studios are desperate to make them happy so just trample all over the actual game designers and creatives just to make the investors happy and a profit.
@@pauloazuela8488 Additionally the money from investors doesn't come for free, if you make an FPS game and take money from the US army, you can be sure they want the devs to paint the US army in the best light possible, rather than make a good game, since the US army doesn't need a return from this game, they need recruitment numbers.
Well yeah because in 1994 your average AAA video game cost you $40-50 and would take 30-50 people about 2 years to make. In 2024 your average AAA video game takes 150-200 people 4-5 years to develop, with the game costing you 60-70 dollars. See the huge cost disparity? See how the math isn't mathing up? Never mind the fact that on inflation ALONE, without additional development time and overhead costs, you should be paying $110, just based on INFLATION alone. Want to blame someone? Blame yourself for the current state of the gaming industry. Out of touch consumer expectations.
Going through the video made me realize how much fun it was to grind a game like Halo Reach to get cosmetics that inserted dominance over other players. Now they are symbols of how much debt you have in your credit card. Great video Act Man! Keep up the good work.
Moral of the story AAA is corporate spoiling gaming for us. I played suicide squad for all of 10 mins and deleted it. How could they put out a game that is so bad. No developer comes away thinking that they did a great job.
I heard the Rocksteady team that worked on SS KTJL had little experience making a live-service game. The guys responsible for Rocksteady's earlier Batman titles left the company in 2022. They probably saw the writing on the wall. My guess: the publishers were trying to please investors again.
It's not that AAA games are getting worse, it's that many of the established AAA companies are getting worse as they overvalue themselves and their products and think they can get away with selling trash and thinking players will eat it up. Not realizing that smaller studios are now able to compete with them
I heard someone the other day saying that the biggest difference is the shift to monetisation within the game. Previously the entire focus was on getting that customer to buy your game which meant it was either good or it wasn’t. Now it’s about getting them in and to keep paying
@darthconquerus I think that's half right but most of the monetization isn't a problem, just the prices are. like there's nothing wrong with OW2 selling skins, there is a problem selling them for $25 dollars. there's nothing wrong with say skull n bones as a game. but there is a problem with being $70
@@grimsdol4665 if you’re monetising within the game though then gameplay has likely been affected in one way or another. The most common way is to make it grindier to get ‘free’ XP/rewards because they want you to pay more. The amount of hours you have to put into completing a season’s battle pass in whatever game is deliberately lengthy to try and encourage people with less time or patience into paying for that skin they really want
I doubt that's the case (them overvaluing themself). I think we will see them revert back to basics in the coming years, or they will be eaten by the smaller studios.
The wild thing with indie vs AAA is that people are saying Larian isnt indie because they had 100 people making BG3, but then Helldivers is a bastion of indie development, with 100 devs
The answer is quite easy : AAA games are for moneh, and indie games are made out of passion. Back in the days AAA too. But not anymore unfortunately. See how Bungie turned out for example.
@@joeykeilholz925 Well until those companies understand that they aren't the market but we consumers are the market they will fail and trust me the next big fall will be GTA 6 . Meanwhile indies will continue to carry gaming along with Asian games . Western AAA gaming is dead and they killed it
Triple A gaming died when valve stopped caring. When they gave up on TF2. When they released half life aleks. When they didn't give any attention to Portal 2 in rtx.
When trying to appeal to everyone they appeal to no one. That’s one of the biggest issues, besides greed, stifling creativity, and decisions about games not being made by developers but executives who are so disconnected from reality and gamers as a whole
That's why I love games like Ultrakill. Made by one guy (initially, he has a team now but he's still in charge) who had a very clear vision and wasn't trying to spread a particularly large net. It's a niche game with a ridiculously high skill ceiling, but it's still done very well and it's one of the highest rated games on steam
@cabnbeeschurgr6440 ULTRAKILL isn't niche anymore, though. That doesn't change the fact that it's the perfect example of not losing your creative vision to greed!
It's like trying to create the ideal color of paint by combining everyone else's favorite colors. The end result is just something ugly that nobody likes.
The gaming industry right now reminds me of that scene in Chef where Carl wants to cook good food for the food critic but Riva won't let him because he owns the restaurant and Carl is basically there to make food, not art. All the investors care about is making a profit, but they don't trust the artists they hire to do it.
It's not even a trust issue, but too many corporate suits wanting to dictate everything. They have their graphs and presentations and make all sorts of lame decisions they want everyone to stick with.
But Act Man, if you want those 10 lines of code, you first have to put in a feature request in an app that has to be approved by stakeholders, then signed off by the release train architect, then it will be discussed at the next quarterly release train planning session, then the ticket has to be scheduled into a sprint by the scrum team, and then the ticket will have to be further specified during a refinement sessions, and all that before we can even write a single line of code! This is not an exeaggeration, this is how modern software development works in large corporations.
It’s extremely sad to know that game companies won’t take risks because CALL OF DUTY ZOMBIES WAS A RISK AND AN ACCIDENT but they let Jason implement it and look at zombies now
10/10 video!! I 100% agree with basically everything you said. Ever since I built my PC during covid, I have been enjoying all kinds of indie games. It's gotten to the point that a few months ago I reflected on my Steam purchases and realized I haven't bought a AAA game in years at this point lmaooo
I think the last AAA games I bought since covid was god of war and horizon forbidden west. I can’t tell you how many indie games I’ve thrown money at in the same time period though lmao.
Corpo rats never learn, do they? Spending easily a 100m $ on marketing, yet the only time I ever hear about their game is when it flops. It's hilarious how 21st century investors have no idea about how the markets they invest into work. If they had any idea about investment, they would know: games don't need marketing, a good game sells itself. Gaming is an interconnected hobby, a nearly endless web of millions playing games and telling each other to do so, the first worldwide "community" if it can be called as such, naturally since gaming required a set of skills connected to computing and thus, telecommunication.
They would do it anyway. I’m sure their research has shown a person who preorders is less likely to ask for a refund because of a bad launch, and that’s all they really need to hear.
20:09 As an indieDev I never expected to learn a better way to program agression in AI enemies in one of your videos, this is actually pretty simple and much better than just attacking the last one who attack you or just selecting a random player to attack;
I dont game dev but am a dev who has played around with very simple games and always figured that would be the way to do it. WoW accomplished this 2 decades ago and i always thought it should just be pretty standard. List of potential target options with an aggro value in a list, you can weight things differently like damage is 1 to 1, healing could be .5 to 1, taunts just add a big number that drops off after x seconds. Like everything in coding its definitely easier said than done but never thought it would be too bad or a novel idea. And if youre making any party based or multiplayer pve game essentially a necessity.
@@imALazyPanda I guess is not a novel idea in general, but it is for me. Specially because I don't play or make party or coop games, so I haven't had the neccesity to make enemies focus on more than one player at a time.
But... that algorithm was just a place holder. He wasn't joking when he said it could be done before lunch. If you want to get deeper, you can use that list to store a "target points" variable per player that represents the combination of other values as well, such as distance, current stamina, estimated time to kill, target health left, etc. This can make it so that the AI can decide if it's worth killing a weaker player to be in a 1v1 with the strongest or not, like we do in games.
@chuckdude514 the problem is nowadays everything is done within a framework, and also you need to fit all of them to the existing codes, you need to follow the design patterns. Yes writing the algorithm is easy af, can do it before lunch. But the tedious part is fitting that into the existing code
@@qwertyrewtywyterty This is true for the most part, but often not for placeholders, which should only be used for basic testing while you develop more important features. For example, he might have needed a functioning AI so he could see how enemies are moving around and/or using their guns. But indeed, these decisions depend on how long you plan to use these placeholders.
1)Not enough communication between higher ups and game devs. 2) Money hungry companies only caring about monetization 3) There is too much emphasis on graphics and way less on gameplay. 4) What the players want =/= what the company/devs want 5) They set unrealistic expectations and in the end they fail to meet most of them and the game can't even be considered good. 6) People paying encourages the companies to use even more predatory monetization tactics
For Number 3, while that is true, I speculate that game devs are pressured into one-upping the graphics from the previous game otherwise the graphics will be deemed "worse than the previous game that came out X years ago" and either they or the publishers will think it won't sell well
@@d-turn3314 It is possible to make a beautiful game without it having the best graphics. The Arkham games and DS3 are prime examples. They look better than a lot of modern games despite being a decade old
@@xethos1204also games 2 console gens ago like portal 2, bioshock, gears of war 1-3 why do they still hold up?, I’m guessing the art direction and attention to detail
I deal with similar situations at work... when it comes to (it will take about 4 weeks to have this done.) An example: I work at a retail store and a few of the staff members wanted to move this small island of shelves that are in the middle of the store because people kept bumping into them, knocking product onto the floor and it was kind of annoying to deal with due to it's positioning as they hindered vision at times. We asked if we could move them and Management said they'd have to ask the higher ups if we could, it took us 3 weeks before they answered us and said no. Till one day one of the managers to came to our store with family and their youngest daughter bumped into the shelves knocking a product off and causing it to land on them, they immediately began complaining and demanded the staff members on duty move them as their child could have been hurt.
Eeyup. It's never a problem until the managers get a taste of what everyone's been getting so now it's suddenly a high priority. At least it only took your company weeks, not A WHOLE YEAR like mine, to fix a similar issue!
If another game like Pokemon Scarlet and Violet comes out, which is so buggy and poorly executed that it's giving people eye strain, dizziness, nausea and VOMITING when playing... I'm boycotting the entire franchise, because that game shouldn't have come out with a DAY 1 PATCH.
As a software engineer(not game dev) I can say throwing more people at a project doesn't work. Too many cooks in the kitchen, too many moving pieces at once, leads to bugs, bloat, and breaks the budget for little to no gains. Smaller teams, longer dev cycles produces quality. Also, did I hear a Rock and Stone?
The mythical man-month came out 50 goddamn years ago, there shouldn't be any excuse not to know this already. Particularly MBA-types who should have covered it in school.
@@Arphemius The thesis is essentially that adding extra staff to a software project that's behind will often slow it down rather than speed it up. The titular "man-month" is about the notion of a unit of work done by one person in one month, and the book argues that this is a myth, in terms of measuring useful work. Adding 2x the people to a project doesn't make it 2x quicker, or 2x better. It's a seminal work in software project management, but despite that it's basically a recurring joke that managers are generally incapable of actually learning anything from it.
Ye The internet connection where I live just isn't great. It's enough to use a streaming service or whatever, but it takes like three days to download 100 gigs, and if anything happens to the connection over 3 days, it has to restart. If something is 100+ gigs, I'm just not buying and downloading it unless I have a rare opportunity to use better internet for a few days.
Games are not un-optimized, computer systems and games are much more complicated. Go to a community college and learn about game development before you comment on this again, you lack the understanding.
@spankyjeffro5320 that's not the point though is it. Why are they using these new complicated systems if it's bloating game files relative to platform memory? It's on devs to optimize within the context of all market factors, getting tunnel vision re graphics and processing power is nobody else's fault.
@@spankyjeffro5320 Only partially true, but if I have 2 weeks to get the sprint done, why would I spend time on more efficiently channel packing my textures, and writing the shader to interpret that packed texture, when I can just save out several individual .tga's and assign them to several sampler slots?
Call of Duty's biggest success was that up until Black Ops 2, the development teams although high budget- operated like Middle Market development teams: relatively small, efficent, and working under a cohesive vision. You can also tell: Visuals, presentation, tone, music, etc... it all felt "in house" until Black Ops 2 and that magic was gone after that game. Same with Halo, Halo is another example of a team that had the budget of AAA but still operated like middle market until Halo 4. Old Bungie is the ultimate example of that style.
![[#2024MAMA] ROSÉ (로제), Bruno Mars - APT. | Mnet 241122 방송](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/dgGqD28J6aQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Pre-order a like for this video, only $10!! What a steal!!
Join The Act Clan Discord ➤ discord.gg/yBABtkh
Will there be gold and ultimate editions for preorder too?
Why would I do that if you haven't already made 2 dlcs
I like how he's talking shit about PlayStation even though he made a video about enjoying helldivers 2 MADE by PlayStation aka SONY.
Join the server today!!
@@gizmo2006 not made. PUBLISHED
It’s actually insane that people had to get completely burned 11 years in a row just to actually realise there was a huge fire going on.
The power of denial is strong my friend. Too strong I'm afraid.....
11 years? 11 years ago we had great games. It's more over the last 5 or 6 at least not 11 lmao
@@G_54-GMGsadly, it will get worse.
@@devizesolstice4617go back and watch videos from 2013 (and prior years) and you will see several rants about on-disc DLC in capcom games, stupid cosmetic DLC for Fable III and Final Fantasy, and server instability for Sim City and Diablo III. Maybe also actually listen to people next time.
@@devizesolstice4617go look up videos from 2013 and prior. Several rants about DLC, server instability, and patch dependency are still up.
I’m going to quote EmpLemon here because he summed it up brilliantly
“People are so focused on making a product Profitable, that they forget to make it Valuable”
That's a great quote.
There is this thing with late stage capitalism, that profit gain in the short term tends to put firms into this death spiral because they completely destroy their long-term legacy.
Reminds me of Steve Job's product people vs marketing people explanation.
That is a dynamite quote, imma put it on a tee, please buy it! (Sleeves as DLC)
Which video did he say that on?
Not "forget", it's on purpose. They know it's not worth trying, that people will buy it anyway
It's funny how the movie industry is paralleling the video game industry during the same time period. Big budgets, lots of greed, zero inspiration.
I thought the same thing while watching this. It's truly a shame
At the end of the day, it makes them money. More money than they did when they “tried”
tv show industry as well with how many shows are getting too expensive for their own good in order to offer a maximum of 8 episodes of story content. I consider that a ripoff tbh
same with almost every type of media, games, movies, shows, music, general websites, programs, not even just media, but even real physical products like cars, houses, phones. It's only getting worse all across the consumerist capitalistic world.
if they lose profits it'll add up, but if you buy the slop they can keep doing it.
i will never forget about a video i saw. A streamer was playing a game and a bug happened, a developer was watching the stream and said on the chat that it was a bug and that he would fix it. 5 mins later the developer said to the guy try to do the same thing again in the game and it worked. That´s how easy things are when you´re indie and i think it proves the point you brought in the video
Just like the vtuber fighting game. Some vtubers featured didn't like the voices used in game so they sent new high quality recording and he quickly implemented them
Yep. I recall reading one guys comment where a bug was found and he was asked how long it would take to fix it. The tech said less than 5 minutes and the showed the super fast process to his supervisor. The supervisor returned from speaking with the corporate heads and said that their response and instructions was to drag it out for 2 weeks and NOT immediately fix it. The tech did state that he was able to get them to narrow the timeframe by one week. It’s insane how the bigger/corporate companies operate.
AAA Publishers do not want to pay their employees. They have very tight deadlines, and once the game is finished, they move on to the next thing. If the game is buggy or terrible, too bad. The executives don't want to pay employees to continue working on the game so it just stays as it is forever. Especially Japanese developers.
I miss getting a game, beating the story, playing the MP for a couple weeks, then moving on to the next game. Now every game wants me to make it my life, with unrealistic chore like grinds.
This. It's like the games are being made by drug peddlers.
It has an effect on the core gameplay too. Like the gameplay itself isn't prioritized as much as everything else. They cut corners, get lazy, focus more on how to increase engagement (make you addicted to mundane shit)
Plague Tale: Innocence and Plague Tale: Requiem are perfect examples of this style of game.
After finishing FF7 Rebirth I never want to play another modern game again lol. That game followed the ubisoft formula to a T. By Chapter 12 I just wanted the game to end and was going through the motions. Now I'm just really burnt out by modern games. The last thing I want to do is invest another 60 to 80 hours in another open world game. I just don't have the time and energy for these types of games anymore. I might go back to these types of open world games in the future but right now I am only playing games that respect my time. I am actually going back and playing a lot of older games on the PS2 and 360.
Not just that, but they can and will take it all away in a few years because its not making profit anymore and and shut the servers down, so all the time and effort is lost to time.
AAA games are all morphing into the same game.
Battlepass ✅
Crossover ✅
Cosmetic store ✅
Macrotransactions ✅
Excessive in game advertising ✅
Horribly goofy cosmetics ✅
Content paywalls ✅
These are literally the biggest and only issues affecting gaming right now. It’s insane how simple it is, yet so many people just scream wokeness and ignore the issues you pointed out
Network connection requirement for solo game ✅
Well, they do want to build the metaverse, or Ready Player One - the actual game.
Nobody else really wants that, but they sure do. The amount of cashflow they could gain from it would be... insurmountable.
There’s a reason games keep releasing like this, it’s because like it or not it’s what the masses want
Don't forget about every game twisting their established models into 'hero shooters' or 'commanders' in RTS so they can sell a bunch of cosmetics for them specifically. Bonus points for making every one of your heroes insufferable douches.
Ubisoft got a Pass. Since they create AAAA games nowadays.
we are all so blessed
I hate so much the fact that Ubisoft is now just as bad as Activision and EA. I'm not even mad, just incredibly disappointed by how they fell down. They used to be one of my favorite videogame companies.
@@omega6749 yeah that’s a shame. They want faster downhill than France during the 2nd world war 🏳️
@@TheActMan You are blessed my man. Your video content pipeline should be stacked for years to come 😎
It's categorized as AAAA since they wasted more budget than AAA all these years 😂
This same thing happened with Minecraft in the last few updates. They are afraid to make big, creative changes to the game because it has to be approved by Microsoft. This is why the April Fools snapshots are always so good, the developers have so much creative choice.
It's not like you can just revert to a previous version of Minecraft
@@RandomPerson-cf3gt exactly
@@RandomPerson-cf3gt on java(pc) you can play the old versions but console and mobile players are forced to use the corporate --bedrock-- bedbug edition, which doesnt let you play older versions and forces you to pay microtransactions for skins and mods, which are free in java. badrock edition is the sh!tty AAA version of minecraft
there's a video on youtube that dives into nether upgrade and why it really stands out among the last 10 or so updates. The reason being that mojang were allowed so much more creativity and, overall, could shake the core of the nether much more. Why? Because nether isn't the face of the game, it's overworld. Hence Microsoft didn't care that much and went along with most ideas that mojang had. It shows that somewhere deep there is "old" mojang who used to change the game month to month and wasn't afraid of risky ideas.
@RandomPerson-cf3gt Not for Realms. You must update the game to continue playing on those.....and Realms only exists because instead of fixing the multiplayer problems with Minecraft, they sold us the solution via subscription.
Mind you. Games had this figured out 10+ years prior to Minecraft. It's a great thing that the industry had that figured out before the sociopathic suits took over, else you'd have to pay to play with friends in way more games.
Greed is one of the reasons why modern gaming isn’t fun anymore.
Edit: No I don’t play Fortnite and COD. Even the recent COD games suck. I don’t play live service games in general. Yes there are good games that have came out last year in this year. But I mainly avoid the bad or mediocre ones.
Agreed👍
Obviously
Just play good games man.. There is more than enough out there, modern gaming is better than ever just don't always look at the biggest TripleA companies and you can find some awesome gems..
Yep 🙂↕️
@@deliriushunter I agree but that is copium, the state of the game industry its shit even If u play good games or not
I saw a tweet a couple months ago that said something along the lines of how because of all the layoffs, employees are now competing against each other in an attepmt to keep their job, rather than working together as a team, which is cultivating a toxic and non-productive work enviroment
Competition is inherently destructive. See "No Contest" by Alfie Kohn.
No it's not, there is so such thing as healthy competition. It's just the kind that's fostered in the modern workplace is toxic.@@rabbitcreative
@@rabbitcreative Competition is AMAZING in a marketplace where similar products exist and offer difference features at different price points where a consumer can make a decision based on their choice of which one to buy.
Competition within your company creates this, where nobody can agree on anything and are trying to 1-up each other in order to keep their jobs. Creating terrible products where no vision exists and hoping that the die-hard fans buy it. It's toxic and un-needed and I hope these companies eventually realize this or the indies are gonna come and take their places very fast.
Yep it's all a pointless thing. I hate capitalism
Thing is gaming is making more money than ever but thanks to both advance in technology and AAA sucking, smaller studios are thriving.
In reality AAA are cannibalizing themselves with LIVE SERVICE like streaming wars. People just don't have enough time.
You will also notice alot of DEI firings, which 9/10 times is just redundant HR. This is mostly due to ESG funding which is failing because the grifters who it attracted divided playerbases and more often then naught were too incompetent too make successful products.
We're also at fault for continuously purchasing their overpriced games, and the quality of AAA games has declined in recent years. Oh, wait. AAAA games : /
"We"
Speak for yourself, consoomer.
@@jffry890I don't think you understood what he was saying
Nah, fam, never blame the customer, the system is rigged to sell any garbage to everyone. By blaming consumers, you only increase your own guilt and hopelessness. It's like victimblaming, but for gamers honestly
Speak with our wallets guys 👋
Honestly I think one of the main problems is that people keep buying the pre-orders, which helps exacerbate the problem as it's telling these studious who make awful games that they make money by just generating hype, make false promise and/or lie. Not only that, but by pre-ordering, this can cause a company to have their unfinished game stay unfinished cause they already got the money from pre-orders. If players stop buying pre-orders, and wait for the game-day release, I think this would cause studios to be more careful with how they make their games, and force them to have their games finished.
Star Wars Battlefront Collection is a very good example of why no one should be pre-ordering anymore, a game that came out in 2005 got revamped in 2024 and was worse than 2005 in almost every aspect, with gameplay somehow broken. We as players need to collectively stop buying pre-orders, else nothing will really change much.
The unbelievable part is all these AAA games need to do is read the comments on TH-cam to figure out what their fans want. This is like business marketing 101. Instead they just decide we like to eat dog shit.
Most of us hate eating dogshit. Too many of us still eat the dogshit. Our standards are too low.
Whales dictates the market, not us killing time on youtube while practicing english and french. It's the sad reality, there are some idiots out there willing to pay $60 for a Peach game on the Switch, others paying the same $60 on a Overwatch "bundle" of skins (textures and jpegs, something you can design yourself in a weekend, on photoshop, with a box of scraps!), then others paying $60 on Baldur's Gate 3... it's ugly and sad
@@Ienteredmynamecorrectly-lt3nuI was just about to say this. They're very aware of our opinions but all they see is the money continuing to flow in and that's all that matters.
I am an indie dev. The amount of bureaucracy and red tape in AAA studios is mind-boggling to me. If we encounter an issue, we fix it. Or if it requires more thought or collaboration, we make a trello card and talk about it in our weekly meeting. That's the beginning and end of the process.
I mever want to work for a AAA studio if they won't let me do my job.
You guys are the real heroes.
I think actman is just repeating things he heard about the absolute worst case scenarios.
As someone who works in 3A I can tell you that the only paper work is your Jira tasks and sprints. Developers have free hands in how they want to fix issues and Ive seen them being even encouraged to fix low priority issues if they have time.
The corporate process is mainly connected to game design and direction - that is heavily enforced by publisher and management. But not the individual work of a dev.
The future is with Indie devs, by far the best games in the past decade. Rust, Tarkov, Dark and Darker, Terraria, the list goes on. Keep doing what you do.
Sounds like government work. There's just too many employees, off in their own silos.
@@silvach2in ActMan’s example - it was a very simple request that the initial dev was probably thinking: I can’t touch it if it ain’t in Jira and we’re mid sprint and next sprint is already locked in so…4 weeks.
Makes sense when you’ve had to work in those environments. Most companies doing “agile” do it wrong.
In the movie industry the exact same thing is happening. But one studio that goes against the grain is Blumhouse Productions who only spends a few million dollars per movie so when they bomb they barely loose money, but when they succeed, they make their money back upwards of 100 times over. Their studio has been very profitable. I'd like to see some game developers try this approach.
I agree let's go back to ps2/ps3 times and actually make good games with less time and way cheaper
I don't think the game industry need more companies shitting out dozens of awful titles just to hope one hits gold. We already have been over saturated with slop for 10+ years
@@Hyperiumon You don't understand. Less people working on it and less money doesn't mean a worse game by necessity.
If they aren't stupid, they will reduce the scope of the game, and/or plan for a longer development time, and it will be easier for them to make their intended product because they won't have to deal with the problems that Act Man brought up in this video that large development teams face.
How very hipster off you.
@@redridingcape what ? What you said has nothing to do with what I said ?
There's almost a paradox of success where something goes from too big to fail, to too big to afford to fail.
Makes sense, what started off as something popular by creative design, becomes corrupted by committee design.
It's not a paradox really. There is a pivot in every industry whoih happens when you become big enough that your primary stakeholder changes from customer to investor. Your goal goes from quality product at any cost so you stay relevant in the market, to ensuring you that you keep increasing value to shareholders.
Basically there is a point of critical mass of capital. Mass which when it is reached shifts the primary target from consumer to investor, from creating product for A consumer to accumulation and generation of capital. This is also a point where a company becomes oddly self sustaining, no person in it is critical for the existence of the company. When you are below this point a loss of a key figure basically means you are out of business.
So... what ruined video games? Capital did... no... not "capitalism" or "capitalists", but capital itself. Games market became so capital heavy that it started to collapse under it's own weight. It started to pull other markets into it (hardware and tangential software sectors) and started to be pulled into the even bigger market of finance.
There is a odd case to be made for that if gaming was less "valuable", games could be better. There is a reason for the smaller capital or no-capital companies are able to make better games than big capital. (No-capital is the... 1 dude in their bedroom making a passion project and releasing it).
Sounds like Pokemon
The higher budget you have, the more you have to cater to casuals and the lowest common denominator just to break even. So you make a game for "everybody" which is just another word for generic.
@@One.Zero.One101Companies cater to the majority and the casuals are the majority.
As a senior engineer that worked in the gaming industry for over a decade, I can say one thing: You hit the nail on the head.
He is absolutely right, the corporate structure ruining games. Its such a massive problem, its hard for me to even get excited for any AAA games now because they are just such uninspired trash. Devs cant create anymore at these massive corporate companies, all they do is put terrible managers terrible ideas into games. What could possibly be more uninspiring than that. Each of those devs probably has a fantastic idea for a game that they got into the business to get an opportunity to create but never will because they have no freedom to make anything beyond what Billy wrote on the board today. I honestly dont even blame that dev that said it would take 4 weeks to write 10 lines of code, first off he could not give a fuck less about those lines that you could have written by the afternoon. That's straight up job security right there in a market that is super volatil for devs. That dev probably could have written it in the afternoon as well but why should he when he will get canned the second the job is finished.
Hey what kind of work did you accomplish
can you describe a possible process why it would take 4 weeks to implement the AI Change ?
I have a few Ideas because I know people developing business software but I would like to hear your take.
( my ideas revolve mainly around time management, change request ticketing and ticket based billing
also versioning, milestones and testing
and finally the length of the ticket pipeline the programmer has .. . )
Can you explain why games come out so unpolished if every single change has go to through multiple quality checks? Its so controversial and I never understood why.
playstation putting bangers after bangers... still PS in the thumbnail 👏👏
DID I HEAR A ROCK AND STONE?!
ROCK AND STONE!!!!!!
ROCK AND STONE!!!!
ROCK AND STONE!
ROCKITY ROCK AND STONE! ⛏️
IF YOU DON'T ROCK AND STONE, YOU AIN'T GOING HOME!!!
I used to work in Programming. Once when the client asked for a change, I was assigned to add the code for it and it took me 1 hour with the testing (being generous). My supervisor told me I should not report right away it’s done because I had to take 2 business days to do it and now I (we) had to pretend we were still working on it to make the client realize the code was not that easy to work on therefore we should still be paid to be on hold for future changes. I realized a lot that day about “business”.
Do the same in fabrication. Not all the time but if it’s like a project for the city, or a large company. the finish product will sit in the shop for days or a week plus if we finish to fast.
I'm glad you were able to fix a bug in 1 hour... takes me quite a bit longer to fix bugs in my programmes😂
@@JaDanBar97 it was not a big it was a new function, super basic, literally just letting the user add a variable to a formula
This is the case for every software development outsource/outstaff company that all AAA studios employ and even their own developers. As my team lead said once, it’s better for client/PO/PM to think that you are working on something, than know that you are sitting around waiting for specifications for a new feature, because this one took less than expected.
well...sounds like a lack of project management and BA staff.
your manager most likely doesn't want business to get used to changing requirements mid development.
we have a rule where if they do change requirements we push it to next release. it forces business to focus more on what they want instead of putting in a random ticket without thought
As someone who LOVES the scale of Elite Dangerous and the exploration; if they made 10 banger planets in Starfield that were crazy diverse and fully explorable at the beginning, then continued to slowly introduce more fully fledged planets; I'd still be playing it
They’re conditioning the younger generation to think this is how games are at launch these days and it wasn’t ever different. We’re the old guard, it feels like we’re losing 😢
We're not. Dude, AAA games are collapsing. The industry is likely going to implode and restart again very soon.
@ElvenRaptor No, it won't. Kids are the majority of the consumer base. The adults have more important things to do, like feed those kids. All it shows is that kids now are dumber than we were because our education system has become a political indoctrination camp.
@@ElvenRaptorlike the 80s but on a much larger scale 😂
If you want to win, don’t support mediocre releases, and don’t pre order games. Get over the FOMO of not owning a game the night of release. A bad game will expose itself rather quickly.
@@ElvenRaptor many of us are working to ensure exactly that. ;)
If you give a studio millions of dollars, its like removing the limits that normally breed creativity. It just leads to inefficiency.
WERE RICH
Tbf that game was a shit concept to begin with. Shoot dudes with hand cannon? Wow, amazing...
People are acting like they didn’t just get done shitting all over AC and Farcry. Why would anything they put out be good
No it’s dei consulting ruining gaming
@@thetrashcanman7537 lmaoooooo what a clown
The entire point of a pre order is to secure your physical copy of a game before it comes out. Pre order for digital content makes zero sense.
Its literally why they have started doing things like early access. To offer something extra.
@@lutherheggs451 Let me help, you pay extra for physical media because it's someone's job to drive to your house and give you the game 1 week early. You pay extra for digital media because the game company makes more money and they get to test out their first draft on you.
I always thought it was so multiplayer games could gage interest and how many servers they needed... which is laughable when the games come out and their is not enough server capacity.
@@arkalileSo a beta tester?
The only reason I like pre-order is if they allow you to pre-install the game before it is officially released. It allows me to play the game the day it is released rather than waiting like 35 hours for an 100gb game to download. Doesn't super matter if it is a single player game, but live service multiplayer games it can matter a little.
the exact same thing happened to me, about requesting a quick tool to design levels, 2 weeks, vs me one day...
I'm an indie dev myself. I keep looking at how impressive all these character movements and interactions are made, but only to realize that a single player linear game with a team of 500 employees takes them years to make. If they actually stopped overthinking everything to the degree of "will HR approve of my code?", they would be released in months. It's really sad.
Hell no. Adding more people doesn't magically make things progress faster. This is literally the corner stone of software development. After certain point adding more people just slows project down since you can't have too many people smoothly work on the same project.
@@JushakFdebatable. As someone who’s worked in the industry game devs issues come from the culture that’s developed recently. Because you’re working on a 100 million dollar game nobody wants to fuck anything up, so most people try and dodge responsibilities or take more time than necessary to make it 100% perfect. Tim Cain did a video talking about this as well if you’re interested, he told a story where this exact scenario played out with a dev saying something that should take a few hours would take a week or two, and Tim calling them out and having to go through middle management to barter with them about it. I’ve experienced the same with coworkers. Not saying that too many cooks doesn’t hurt things, but it isn’t that simple
@@oldylad Not really debatable. That is just basics of software development, literally some of the first things we were taught in university that has stayed true for the software industry as a whole for decades.
Also, developers are notoriously bad at estimating time spent, especially anything below one day and anything above one week. It's a half-joke with pretty much every developer I've talked with is that you first make an estimate and then multiply it by your preferred magic number (2,5 usually for me) to account for all the things you didn't expect going wrong, testing that it actually works and so on. It's a half-joke because of how often it ends up being true.
.@@oldyladWhat you said is really hard to believe.
"They want it to be 100% perfect" but the games, and generally software, was never in a worse and more broken state at launch than it is today.
It takes years because of all of the red tape they have to go through. But, the games are only made properly with said red tape. Without the red tape, communication stops.
Big corporations ruin everything. Hollywood is experiencing the exact same issues. It's actually kind of insane just how similar their declines are. They'd rather dump a gazillion dollars into the same ip over and over rather than invest a fraction of it into smaller games/movies that could ultimately turn into massive franchises if they gave them a chance.
It's the same with the mainstream music industry. It's almost as if that's not how art is supposed to be created.
same investors that really like people pushing "good thing" on to projects they fund
Only one to be blamed is us, we dictate the market with our money.
Hollywood is failing because they make dumb shit nobody wants to see.
The game industry isn't really failing. Companies just make live service games because everyone plays them
For years money men have been trying to crack the creative process problem. The video game space is definitely the creative industry they've come the closest.
It’s crazy that it took skull & bones, what people call the 1st “Quadruple A game”, took 11 fucking years and your ship has a fucking stamina bar on it. Incredible
11 fucking years to copy the AC4 boat bits into another story without assassins in it. And they still fucked it up.
At the end the poor bastard was just spawned out of contractual obligation and it shows
@@sebastianvroom7595 Skull & Bones was funded by the government of Singapore and like most government projects the execs at Ubisoft just embezzled the money until it ran out and had to release something.
Wait, is this real? It sounds like a joke
Wait wat?! Your ship has a stamina bar??? Just do Black Flag with some QOL improvements, implement multi-player and BOOM, but no, let's put a fucking STAMINA BAR on your SHIP. Good Lord.
A What! How the ever-loving Fuck does a Ship have a STAMINA BAR? IT'S A SHIP! It's an inanimate object, a vehicle. Like I get having a Health meter so we know how much Health we got left before the ship is destroyed. Oh my brain hurts.
Dude, your vids are so good and I know you put in so much work man. It’s always a great watch. Thnx for making your vids!
Ubisoft is also the same company that wanted gamers to get comfortable not owning their games while, at the same time, also shutting down The Crew while also removing access to the game.
"An executive at Assassin’s Creed maker Ubisoft has said gamers will need to get “comfortable” not owning their games before video game subscriptions truly take off." ... this is taken way out of context. It looks shitty with them removing the crew, but that's not what the guy meant when he said it.
@@makoaki9071 Well Ubisoft has to get comfortable not selling anything then.
Just think about how comfortable you'd have been in that situation if you never owned that game to begin with 😂
Don't worry, this same youtuber and others will be selling you that idea in 2-4 years. Mark my words. "Oh, it's great guys. You get a free battle pass access if you revoke your rights."
@@makoaki9071 Lol you're a Ubisoft apologist. It's not taken out of context, the context is obvious to everyone with a brain. He was complaining that people have accepted Netflix and not owning movies, and they wanted to replicate that business model in video games. That was the context and everybody is aware of it.
Imagine telling Timothy Cain, the man who used to be a programmer / lead programmer since 1997 that he doesn't know how to do his job, and what he's asking is impossible. The nerve of these people.
Imagine yelling at Tim Cain for asking you to do your job, he seems like a pretty nice dude
Go ahead. He has a TH-cam channel /s
@@Double-Dubz Yeah, he's nice until you're Chris Avellone and he refuse to pay you and your entire writing staff for over an entire year.
Tim Cain is a bad dude, he doesn't deserve to be pedestalized.
@@Eye_Of_Odin978 that's actually the first I've ever heard of this, and I can't find any sources anywhere for it
Got anywhere I can read more about it, or know any of the particulars?
Guarantee the person was a DEI hire.
Ive worked for many pest control companies over the years, and the bureaucracy is the exact same. At the larger companies any time I asked for a specific tool or chemical for a job it could take weeks to get it, or never at all. At my current mom and pop job the difference is incredible. If I need something I buy it myself and get reimbursed instantly, or they order and it's delivered to me within the week. No questions asked, they'll tell me to get what I need to do the best job I can. The quality my customers receive is night and day.
I will offer a counter argument: I work in cyber security for a health care provider in the USA. Any change to an application/system etc needs to be presented to a Change Approval Board. The board meets twice per week. Changes must also be performed after close of business in order to limit the impact to patient care etc. We can't have Joe Blow "making a quick change" in the middle of the day, finding out that he "goofed," and having servers/applications offline while he "tries to figure out what he did wrong." We have "test environments" but our network team is currently fighting an issue that "works in the test environment but fails every time it's deployed into production." The change has had to be rolled back 3 times now. They're going to re-test but will not be able to deploy until the go before the board again because we can't have them upgrading out routers in the middle of the day. Especially when "whoops! It's not working." It sucks that it takes a long time to get approval, but it's often to keep cowboys from getting gung-ho. I worked at a hospital where in the middle of the day the director of IT decided he was going to "test" the fail over circuit for the internet without planning or announcing it. He simply went to the server room, disconnected the primary internet and "Waited to a few minutes" to see if the fail over circuit came online. It didn't. Then it took several more minutes for the primary to be restored. The entire regional hospital was without internet all because this guy had a hair up his ass and didn't want to "wait for corporate" to approve. Hell brook loose but it wasn't the IT director that got in trouble for it. He threw his subordinate, the network admin, under the bus. The networking admin quit the job a few months later.
It sucks, but sometimes there are very good reasons these safeguards are in place.
If AAA studios will continue as they have been doing, they'll cease to exist sooner or later. Then when Indie-studios grow and become the new AAA studios, they'll suffer the same faith and someone else will take their place. Thus completing the cycle.
Weak men make hard times. Hard times make strong men, strong men make peaceful times. Peaceful times make weak men. Or something like that
Agreed. I believe that will be the cylce eventually.
Greedy AAA fell, indie grow due to more employee coming to them, they become big, eventually they (might) lose their head and become greedy, then eventually fall, so on and so on.
I think you are confused.Since we live on planet earth and not your brain place , AAA studios continue to make money and get bigger and bigger no matter what a youtube video or a comment on it says.AA studios get bought out and dismantled by big companies because in the end its all about the money.
This, Sooner or later Larian will fall just like CDPR before it
No they won’t people keep buying their shit including me and probably you and everyone that watched this video that why developers haven’t changed anything
They said Skull & Bones was a AAAA game. I suggest that Helldivers 2 is a AAAAA game. And not just because my Democracy Officer told me to.
Yeah but it's not even A game tbh who makes a pirates game solely focussed on boats
helldivers 2 is not worth buying on pc after the recent controversy. sony is trying to force people to make playstation accounts just to play the game. even if you have never owned a ps5
Hoo boy. This isn't aging well like you think it is.
@@Healer0079a Not arrow heads fault ppl need to use a psn account. Its forced by Sony. They even demand ppl give the game bad reviews so they can force Sonys hand...
@@thestar37 I know it's not their fault but it will damage the game regardless as unfortunate as it is..
16:21 "Because they don't have these "investors" hanging over their heads"
yeah, never let investors get into your passion guys
It’s ironic, the more devs try to make a game safe and profitable, the more skeptical I am of its quality.
“Hey, megasean3000, wanna check out this game? It’s helluh profitable!” You’re telling me that isn’t a convincing sales pitch?
~Andrew Wilson
They want to play it safe, but somehow make it worse lmao.
playstation putting bangers after bangers... still PS in the thumbnail 👏👏
Simple. Shareholders. Agenda. Destroying the White race. BlackRock. VanGuard.
The ridiculous thing is the banal mediocrity of standout titles like BG3. That a title that steeped in virtue signalling and poor writing is considered a modern masterpiece is a testament to the depths to which we've declined.
Twenty years ago, a game called GTA San Andreas was released. Even today, I still play it for its arcade-style car physics, six-star wanted level, RPG elements, and the ability to use lots of cheats. I enjoy playing it offline because it's a single-player game.
Yep, I still play the older games too.
During the lockdown I decided to try Oblivion & Morrowind, having only previously experienced Skyrim. And despite going in blind and consequently creating a trash build. Kind of, awful early game with a silver lining; but set up to have a neat late game. Even in the early game I still had more fun and with Morrowind than I did with Skyrim. I was consistently baffled by how much more fleshed out everything was (well except for smithing and some quality of life features).
Meanwhile 10 years ago, a game called The Crew was released. The game had weighty, but fun vehicle handling and a fun open world to race through. Even today I'd like to play it, since it has a fun single player experience, but Ubisoft took down the servers and nobody can play it anymore since the game was always online.
Thanks Ubisoft for turning my $60 physical copy of your game into a coaster.
@@1mariomaniac Are you aware of Ross Scott's campaign to set legal president so video game companies won't get away with this?
I bet you are since you're watching this channel but just crossing my t's and doting my i's.
@@theelusivepyroshark5119 The guy who started the Stop Killing Games initiative right? Yeah I've been keeping an eye on that.
Remember everyone for an $120 Star Wars Game, you can also buy KOTOR 1&2, Forced Unleached 1&2, OG Battlefront 1&2, Republic Commando, AND the entire Jedi Academy collection, and still have about $4 left over. And this list isn't even counting the Lego or the EA Games.
KOTOR KOTORRRR GANG KOTORRR *froths at the mouth and dies
(I heavily agree with this comment)
Star Wars Outlaw Gold Edition is $159.90 (Digitally) where Im from and with that kinda of money, I can literally buy Stellar Blade AND Helldivers 2 (Digitally ofc).
Physical discs is sometimes cheaper where Im from too.
People that are big enough fans to get the 120 dollar version probably have those other ones 😂 nobody drops 120 on a game they're not familiar with
@@nickguzman1734 They do it all the time, for some people money like that isn't an issue.
I work in software development. Not games, but still. All the worst managers I've encountered talk exactly like Todd Howard.
They're completely out of touch. They don't know what gamers want. But the companies know that they want money. That's the one thing they know.
Bingo. It has become all about what the corporate suits want as opposed to what the actual audience wants. Heck the "modern audience" has basically become the corporate ideal audience, not exactly one that actually exists. It's all about big corporate ego and investor pandering these days.
But are they outta time?
@@Mrmidknight-yx9pg Yes, they are out of touch with reality and their consumers. Halo forgetting what Halo even is, 343i making "their" own Halo and it is on every platform know to humans and nobody cares. It's like the game is having an Identity Crisis, it doesn't even know what it is or wants for that matter. The ostracized adopted kid nobody likes nor wanted for that matter. Out of time because they are outdated by now. Just like "Girl Boss" term dying the Live Service games is just a crap shoot and fake just for MUNNEH. Fortnite got it right, problem is that too many people copy/paste that shit like it is candy. Had they read even one fucking book from the source material, the Halo Encyclopedia, Halo Legends, Halo The Fall of Reach, The Cole Protocol, or just simply anything at all they would have had a great series. Hear a lot of people are liking the Fallout Series and it is actually good. Never mind Kenobi and The Rings of Power from the past, The Mandalorian falling off, Bad Batch being great, Survivor and Fallen Order. Sick ass SW games. Do they hold up to Kotor and stuff, no but you can actually jump finally, and video game trope Double Jump/Air-Dash. Playing with the Force Push/Pull was better in Fallen Order, you just don't have the boxes around to do that anymore, exploiting the slow down on a box that is thrown you can do some real black magic with that kind of exploit in Fallen Order. I have even seen Survivor broken to all means by just skipping whole sections on the map and sequence breaking it all to shit.
It's always been like that.
With the success of Helldivers, BG3, and now Manor Lords and hopefully Kingmakers, idk how the hell AAA producers haven’t even started to learn their lesson yet.
Because they said setting standards based on those games are unrealistic and they will continue to push slobs out because a lot of people will still buy them
Helldivers is live service something which AAA games have long done and you cried over
@@Foxfire_forty-nine yea. Actual decent live service.
@tearex8688 but still live service. Your praises for this particular instance only encourages its presence even further
@@Foxfire_forty-nine there's nothing wrong with live service in fact live service means year and years of content it's when they go and charge you for EVERY LITTLE THING that it becomes a problem helldovers doesn't push its battle pass in your face every chance it gets you don't get out of a mission to get a huge pop up saying BUY OUR SPECIAL EDITION FOR A FREE MONTH OF BATTLE PASS!!! you don't have skins shoved down your throat at every possible moment and they also do balance patches and additive patches often and for free
"A game for everyone, is a game for no one." - Arrowhead company motto
Yet the combat is bland and casual focused, clearly showing they are throwing as wide as possible net with it...
Peak of gaming is farming season passes BUT hey they are cheap(free if you farm hard)!😮😂
@@pullthatup2973 real
@@pullthatup2973 Oh, if you haven't played Helldivers 2, then I highly recommend it!
@@pullthatup2973bro the grind on helldivers is extremely easy what are you on about? Are you playing on easy difficulty expecting it to be more then casual?
Helldivers 2 is owned by Sony....It literally says at the start up screen Sony Interactive Entertainment, Licensed to Arrowhead games.....Its Sony's IP licensed to Arrowhead, they have ZERO say over what happens with the game, they have to get Sony's approval for everything.
@TheActMan Thanks for the heads up on Kingmakers! that game looks dope, didn't know about it til this video now i'm hyped. Also the other stuff you said was cool. But Kingmakers.
From a personal perspective, the $70 price tag doesn't help. Unless it's on steam where I can get a refund if I don't like the game, $70 makes me hesitant to buy games anymore, let alone pre order. I have to see it first then decide.
I quit pre-ordering anything once I got good enough internet to buy digital. I used to pre order games because some big releases my local Gamestop would sell out so the pre order guaranteed me a copy. And back then I bought a lot more games in general because I had the time to play them
Tbf, games have always been so expensive. A 30 dollar game in 1991 would be 70 dollars today
Actually no, this proves how out of touch consumers are. With the cost of making games, the development time, staff over heads and everything you factor in to market the game, games are technically meant to cost $200 each 😂.
In fact that $200 is actually a bit out of date too, based on figures from the previous generation, not even from this current generation.
"$70 iS ToO mUcH" 😂
@@rezarfarTechnology evolved so much that half of the money invested in an AAA is just wasted. Modern AAA games run so bad, have so many bugs and are so anti-fun that is surprising people still buy them for 70$.
@@nasfoda_gamerbrbigproducti5375 thats actually partly our fault though, let me show you why.
Do you expect the PS6 to be more powerful than the PS5? Yes you do, not only do you expect it to be more powerful, but you also expect it to have a modern chipset thats made in the year it was released.
These are all expectations you have, i even have the same expectations. But this has become a problem, it's caused a bottleneck, the technology has advanced faster than what developers are able to reliably develop for, the risk factor also gets too big, the bigger the cost of the gake, the less risks developers are able to take and the less innovative games become, this is why Indie games are so popular now.
Our expectations for more powerful hardware is actually the root cause of this issue in the gaming industry, technically we should still be using PS4 and Xbox One technology to make video games, the PS5 and Xbox Series shouldn't be on the market, at least not since 2020, maybe by end of 2023 or even end of 2024.
We jumped from one generation to the next faster than we were supposed too, hence why we now have this situation with AAA games. It's also why Nintendo are doing so well, because they recognised this problem and they planned for it.
21:34 this is honestly the same exact thing that happens in construction in, it used to be “oh its broke lets fix it before lunch” now its “ oh its broke well we have to get it fixed by having it approved by 19 different corporations and just maybe it will be fixed”
Bro this is why I have to fix things in secret by myself if I can or it may nerver be fixed. Complete nonsense
@@sv-et7gq lol yeah I do that alot, knock off early then come back later to finish it while no safety inspectors are present
Do you think that's why infrastructure has gone to shit? And if not would the government increasing funding solve that?
lol honestly at that point, Just fix it in secret and nobody has to know haha They wouldn't even realise it.
I used to love exploring open world games, but these days they’re just so big for the sole purpose of being big. It became really exhausting traversing these games which is conflicting because I’ll be invested in the story, but get bored from exploring.
Yeah I think that's why I lost interest in most modern open worlds, especially ever since they decided they needed to become online games. I just like to explore the worlds in these games and play them at my own pace, doing what I want to do. When it goes online, a lot of that seems to go away and you're forced to play at other people's pace. Only so many games just let you relax and enjoy them.
I found a solution in some of the open world games like the massive assassin's creed rpg trilogy with Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla.
Remove the compass from your HUD and remove the map markers for question marks and then only do quest and whatever open world activity you come over while travelling to said quest, I didn't do this during origins and got burned out by exploring ancient Egypt, but I did this during Odyssey and am still enjoying Odyssey and Valhalla by replaying them a lot as I always discover something cool and new.
@@zombrexozelexi9069 Yeah but you forgor you can't just simply DO THAT in other games. Fallout 4 doesn't let you remove quest markers and stuff, unless you mod it in there or get a mod for that.
@@zombrexozelexi9069
Lol, AC Origins is the one I always think about. I loved it and I loved the scenery and settings but those damn question mark markers on the maps were just too much. I couldn't stop playing until I went to one more area...well, one more after that one...just one more then I am done...
Yeah Big empty and lifeless same with corpa practice 😂
It’s like they’re skipping all the important parts and just rushing to get the money from the customer and once you buy it and pay for it or play it and it breaks and you asked for a refund and they basically say sorry you can’t
10:20 DID I HEAR A ROCK AND STONE? ⛏️
IF YOU DON'T ROCK AND STONE YOU AINT GOING HOME
Rock and Stone!
YOU BET YOUR SWEET GODDAMN BEARD YOU DID
ROCK AND STONE!
If you dont rock and stone, you ain't coming home
I'd say most of the time, it's why we see publishers focus so heavily on marketing of a game. If they can drum up enough hype, they can sell enough copies of the game either through pre-orders or on day 1 enough to potentially make a profit before players even realize what they actually bought.
Just one of the many ways in which companies choose to compete on literally _anything_ except quality
And sunken cost fallacy drives them the way.
Then, when they get defunct, start a new studio or get absorbed by a bigger one and start all over again.
As someone who works for a major tech company, the way I see games come out looks a lot like how other major corporations release products: It's just a product and we're completely disconnected from the customer. The company I work for is trying to release a new product right now, and it is so disjointed, terribly put together. And we're selling it! It's in ALPHA and we're selling it. It's not just gaming corporations, It's ALL corporations. This is just how they do things now. "I want my money and I want it now"
Thanks for the insight. Been thinking the same for some time...Games as an industry have only recently become the focus of shareholders and investors, in contrast to, say, Chemicals or Cinema. It is pretty jarring sometimes to watch Capitalism turn your passion into soulless profit :(
We are learning, though.
... Thx for the honesty, sadly it's obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub..
the thing is.. it's MY money.. and y'all will never get any it - if I'm not getting something of solid quality.. 🤷🏻♀️ lol
Can't see one downside to everyone in every industry having that same attitude at once. Not one.......
I got a D in english and writing class so my grammar and spelling is worse than a child, but I have something to say about AAA gaming if you could hear me out. Act Man really put it on the table. Big release games have felt lackluster and not too good or creative for years now. I would say somewhere around 2010 and 2011 were the last years I truly enjoyed most games. After that I started to notice softer narratives and creative decisions, controlled speech and dialogue. Desexualization of women, more female main (strong woman) characters. Less curse words. Less blood and gore in M rated games. Lack of dark unsettling themes that challenge the norm. Basically games lost there balls. And then once the 8th gen hit, we had to pay even more money for online play, loot boxes and other micro transactions started to become standard. They got so bad, they even tried to implement them in single player story games. Im looking at you Middle Earth: Shadow of War. They even thought at one point that Single Player games are dead, all hail the multiplayer experience. Yeah, they were wrong on that. Sure a-lot of people play Multiplayer, but games like Elden Ring, Baldurs Gate 3, Sekiero, Witcher III, God of War, Red Dead Redemption before online released, Horizon Zero Dawn and Zelda Breath of the Wild prove that the gaming community will always have love for single player games. That is, if they are good, creative, do they challenge the norms, are we immersed, are we surprised, and are we captivated in this gameplay experience. Now a days, like Act Man said, creativity is drowned underneath big budget, too many workers, to many bosses on the floor, big investors, and an overcrowded Market Place. What I mean by an overcrowded market place in this particular instance is, too many rich guys investing in games and wanting large returns from the same player base. The player base as a whole are real life working people who have jobs and family’s. We only get so much time to play games. And we only have so much money to spend on them. So it comes to no surprise that we the player base are upset and want a change. And I hope it comes…soon! Thank you for reading my long message with poor grammar!
"Why is (thing) getting worse?"
Greedy companies and dumb consumers.
It's like democracy, except everyone is spending their money on predatory slop.
Oh, wait...
AAA Games = Monetization is the main priority and gameplay was the afterthought. I've played some games where my thought was "I bet they spent 95% of their board meetings on microtransactions and live service and only 5% on gameplay".
And wokeism that infected the whole entertainment industry.
@@One.Zero.One101 And the only discussion on gameplay is: "Will this end in a lawsuit?"
Capitalism.
My take on the "game as content" approach that started with CD-based consoles:
1995: We doubled the budget for our next game, and our profits increased 100x!
2005: We doubled the budget for our next game, and our profits increased 50x!
2015: We doubled the budget for our next game, and our profits increased 2x!
2023: We doubled the budget for our next game, and our profits is half of the previous game!
Over the past decade, it has ben seen by the (non-Nintendo/non-indie) game industry that it is more risky trying to make a game that requires talent than simply dumping more and more content into games. It requires more talent to get it right to produce a great story and great gameplay. Whereas mindlessly adding more and more items, visual effects, sound effects, , things to distract you, quests, epic soundtrack, voice lines, maps, weapons etc simply equals more success. But now story and gameplay is getting more repetitive and consumers are tired of it.
you it the nail on the head some time in the 00s the law of deminshing returns started to hit hard
That’s because despite more and more investment by game devs the customers keep on refusing to pay for the games because they expect them to be cheaper but not lesser. Doesn’t sound like it’s a dev problem sounds like a freeloader problem.
@@ironhell813 Not hardly. Computers are far more capable and graphically things are modelled extremely well. But the stories suck, the gameplay is wooden, and usually a lot of shit gets gutted. Easiest thing to look at is EA's Sims franchises-- SimCity 4 was solid, SimCity (2013) was a broken buggy mess with limited gameplay, limited map sizes, and was a single player only always-online game. It took a full YEAR for EA to offer a stinkin' offline mode! If you were on an airplane or out in the country, you simply couldn't play it.
@@aboutwhat1930 yeah that sounds great except sim city stopped being a triple a license decades ago, unlike The Sims, which is where all of the dev time was being spent. This is why I’ve advocated against hostile take overs for years, because if you’re aren’t aware, maxis is part of EA but it’s still a separate company (team) within EA, and EA only gives them so
Much as a budget.
To understand how the industry works is to understand why it is the way it currently is, and it’s all based on monopolies and consumer demand. So in other words, it is you the customer buying games from monopolies that does this.
Here's why:
1) CEOs can only fail up because they are hitting really good numbers via cutting corners and exploiting live service
2) CEOs have a great exit: golden parachute
3) CEOs actually get a higher paying job lined up after they get fired because of the stats that they have
4) consumerist mentality: they just whine but still buy
5) despite being informed about the dangers of spending money unnecessarily, they still do it because they're addicted
In other words, consumers are to blame for making CEOs look good on paper which attracts investors which attracts more of this.
Also, corporations tend to promote to your level of incompetence. For example, a good worker might get promoted to team lead, a good lead might get promoted to management, but once you get promoted to a job you're no longer good at, you'll stop catching promotions and find yourself stuck at a position you suck at. Skills don't always transfer between positions, a good worker might be a garbage manager but they'll be promoted based on their good work and now you're down a good worker and you have a subpar manager instead.
🐑🐑🐑🐑
It's the consumers fault companies are allowed to operate like this? Is it also the victims of scammers faults for getting scammed? Or addicts faults for becoming addicted? What colour is the sky in your world?
@@toolittletoolate Comparing drug addiction to somebody willingly supporting a company is wild. Then again, considering you play DI2, you're probably insulted that we're laughing at you for buying slop.
yessir :DDDDD, you know and i know most will cope to these facts, but I'm fortutantly we weren' born as a male hypogonadism, AHmen
Drops keehaul key for the music. Respect big homie
Shareholders. The reason major studios are doing it is because if they don't show growth, or at least the illusion of growth then the shareholders don't make profit on their shares. Shareholders who aren't profiting tend to leave, causing the estimated value of the studio to decline, meaning that management can't get 7 figure bonuses.
The pandemic ruined growth forecasts. They made more money than ever during that time and they still expect lockdown profits, despite the fact we're all back to work. It is disgusting greed.
Yes, businesses need to make money to survive and shareholders want to see gains in shares. Not a hard concept to grasp.
@@spankyjeffro5320Yes but if you’re expectations aren’t based in reality you’re just bankrupting your company for no reason. If I owned a small chain of bakeries that do close to $1 million in sales every year, why would I set the profit growth to $5 billion?! That’s what companies did after COVID and I know from experience because I work for one.
@@spankyjeffro5320 not just that, it’s the fact that these companies set unrealistic expectations in order to attract investors. They inflate the companies worth and have to inflate game budgets to match the hype they have created for investors. The corporate world wants unsustainable growth out of every company they invest in and it’s ridiculous.
It's not just triple A games, it's big budget movies, music...
Hell even just house/kitchen appliances, electronics etc.
In 80s,90s people got what they paid for and things worked for decades...
Yeah without greed the world would look very different. And work more efficiently.
We can't forget gems like Final fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, Elden Ring, Baldur's gate 3, and The Breath of The Wild series for being gems of the modern gaming era. People complained about FF7 rebirth having "too much content", "too much variety", "too much quality of life" in the game but when lackluster games that actman mentioned comes out or greedy games that are pointed out in the video, people gobble it up like left over dunkin donuts. Honestly FF7 rebirth is Game of this year. Can't forget Elden ring and BG3 for being revolutionary, BG3 was so ahead of last year other game devs admit they can't compete. Shoutouts to the FGCs devs for making great games, Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, Guilty Gear Strive and Grandblue fantasy versus rising are Fighting games I recommend, personally it's Tekken and Guilty gear for me. At the end of the day, we can point out more flops than gems like I mentioned. But it's never too late to appreciate these AAA games. The gaming devs should learn from RPGs are FGs if they want to make a change, have a great one.
Greed is killing everything. Welcome to the end.
I had actual metal Tonka Toys that my dad got for me, best toys ever.
@@ambrosianapier7545 lol are you under the impression greed didn't exist in the 80's and 90's?
The issue is that greed used to actually be the right motivation, as in, give the people what they want and carry your money home on a flatbed.
But now, thanks to ESG, it's not about giving people what they want, it's about promoting THE MESSAGE. Either toe the line, or don't get the big funding from groups like Vanguard and Blackrock. THAT'S the difference today.
This f*ckin' guy who's only experiences with Fallout are New Vegas and the show even manages to differentiate Interplay/Obsidian RPG's with Bethesda RPG's. Love this guy.
Love you too man
He should play Fallout 4. It doesn’t deserve to get lumped in with 76 as the “new fallout”. (Also Fallout 3 isn’t too bad)
Eh, I remember selling Bumble to Eulogy Jones, and then eating a ghoul after selling his ear to a wandering merchant. Can't sell a kid drugs if you already sold the kid
@@TS111WASD4 is a bit worse from what I've heard, but not bad. Fallout 3 is great
@irarelyupload6930 fallout 4 sucks lol yeah sure if you add 1000 mods it's fun but that's a complete overhaul of the game
Yep, this is great. First couple minutes and yep. Totally right. Great guy for his intro and humour. Legend. There is a pattern here.
I was just talking about this with my wife. I don’t even want to buy a next gen console because companies are only releasing one game every decade. It’s ridiculous.
ikr
One thing they do that I know they are scamming us on, and I am pissed about is the controllers and the joysticks.
I don’t know how long you’ve been gaming, but I was five when I got an NES and I’ve been a gamer ever since and I’ve had almost every major console or at least access to it in the house. My brother had a few I didn’t vice versa anyway I bought a controller to play games on my computer and I learned what “stick drift” is. It happened on my oculus and it’s unbearable and unfixable apparently
And it’s apparently because these companies are buying el cheapo joysticks not hall sensor joysticks …
Growing up, no console with sticks had fucking “ stick drift”. They worked until they were chewed up by the dog or smashed or soaked in water and even then they worked --perfectly …
What the fuck is up with these companies thinking they charge $70 $80 for a controller and then not have the stick work forever minus forced damage like throwing at the wall or repeatedly dropping it off the second story?!?
Buy an Xbox Series X and just play the old games you already have.
@@NineS5 im still updagring cause even intdie needs more power than it used to but its why i go for mid tier GPus rather than high end and I dont get why anyone would pay 1500 for 4090 or 1100 for 4080 when a 4060ti will do just fine for every single indie game even at 4k
This is why I consider the 2000’s to be the the era where gaming peaked. The 6th generation(ps2,xbox, gamecube, and dreamcast) had some of the best releases where we got new IPs and new entries from older IPs. There was more risk=reward when it came to game development and gaming culture was the perfect balance between niche and mainstream. This was also present in the first few years of the 7th generation(ps3,x360, and wii) but gaming started to get bigger and more mainstream towards the end of that generation where we entered the dark ages where there was less risk, more monetization, and the franchises were going in directions that muddied their reputation
"... Game didn't just die, it was murdered." Thanks for bringing it back, Act Man. I'm elevated
A bit of context on dev work and timelines etc; I work in dev though not in games, most dev teams work in sprints of 1-2 weeks with with tasks scoped (time/difficulty), tracked and queued based in priority so it’s not so easy to makes changes as you would in a solo or really small team. Not to mention that each tasks estimate usually includes testing by the devs outside/before QA
listening to grummz the guy who has scammed his fanbase multiple times and cant even release his own game without milking it dry. dudes just trying to profit not make good games. he is a grifter.
Not all games which are made by passionate developers turn into great games, but all great games are made by passionate developers.
Without passion you're never gonna create magic, and without creative liberty you're not gonna have passion.
Creative liber-tea.
Which is why AAA games are garbage. Capitalism cannot inspire passion.
@@thomasnielsen5580i wish i could like that comment twice !
@@thomasnielsen5580Not all.
@@Diogo85 Almost always the case. The exceptions are where the management is healthy.
"AAA is derived from the US system of grading where A is the highest possible mark. Each A has a different meaning: the first A denotes “critical success”, the second A marks “innovative gameplay”, and the third is meant to signify commercial success."
None of these "AAA" companies even deserve a single A anymore. Hell, demote them to B and even that will be a disservice to indie game companies.
And nowadays they added a fourth A to it, what does that fourth A stand for?
@@WokioWolfyAss-blAsst
@ss
@sinine
So, I've always been in favour of ditching "AAA." I've been lobbying to get people to call them "big corporation games."
AAA implies a great product or great company, but the meaning has changed. Nowadays, people use it to mean something with a huge budget. Ergo, something backed or produced by a big corporation.
Is it me or people mix what "Indie" and AAA means. An indie developper like Larian had AAA budget thanks to partners like Google Stadia. Helldivers 2 is not an indie game, it's a Playstation and Sony IP, funded by Sony investors with a AA budget. Arrowhead is an indie developper hired by Sony.
At 16:15 he mentions HD2 monetization and makes it like it was Arrowhead who had the last word on monetization, how is that, can someone please educate me ?
Indie games are definitely valuing creativity and innovation more these days. It's disappointing to see the AAA space getting so constrained by financial goals rather than the passion of making fun and interesting games.
Yes despite it being obvious it’s not often discussed or at least seen in popular arguments as to why triple A games are dying and indies are rising
Especialy when budgets are so big one flop can tank entire studio. Look at GTA 6 and 2 Bilion budget or Spiderman 2 with 300k $. They simply cant afford to lose so they play safe.
Real answer, corporate greed and also they own popular IP's that people will buy it regardless.
Having fun doesn't pay the bills. The real reason games are getting worse for some people is because it doesn't appeal to their tastes. No humans are the same, we all like different things in games.
2042 for example, I personally enjoy it. I like the stealth helis (not many people like them because of the bombs and not able to lock on when it's stealth), I like free classes (putting an anti material rifle and a javelin in the same loadout), and I like the maps (I'm more of a vehicle player). As you may have guessed others have different tastes. Some hate the helis and want them removed, others love how the class system locks out variety, and a large amount hate open maps and want more infantry focused ones. Studios can't cater to everyone so they pick common ground from each or just side with the majority.
There is too many people involved in the project. It becomes a product, not a game.
I agree with you 100%. Really. Every argument you make is solid.
It surprises me that Square Enix released FF7 Rebirth:
-80 hour campaign
-Tons of minigames
-Incredibly huge open world
-7+ playable characters
-High quality cutscenes
-Really good sidequests
-New Game Plus at release
And yet;
-No DLC
-No season pass
-Single player, no internet connection needed
-No 100GB day one patches
it's next on my list to get haven't played a good ff game in a while
Not to sound biased, but i think it has to do with how japan makes video games in comparison to the west. They tend to have more creativity behind their work and not flood their games with predatory business practices, not saying all. But i think that may be one of reasons why Japanese/eastern developers don’t get nearly as much flag as the west
it doesn't surprise me. It's the remake of their biggest game in the history of the company. They could take a dump on all the discs they deliver to retail and it would still sell. Also, there will likely be 1 (maybe 2) DLC, as were with the remake. Season pass doesn't make sense for a SP game and same applies for internet. Unsure if you are just trolling.
@@DDViking True. I also tend to like japanese games more. Sounds like this AAA videogame quality issue is mostly reserved for Western studios and companies.
@@DDViking My bet is that a Japanese person would say the same about western games, or maybe not. I think they are creative and they are not. It depends on the game, Resident Evil games are not that creative for example (at least the later games).
Arrowhead Games needs to be the reference point we judge companies by from now on.
Because they aren’t even doing anything that crazy they’re just being ethical and chill.
Thank god for Sony Playstation for creating Helldivers….. yet Act Man is so pro-xbox he never even mentioned Sony owns Helldivers in his 2 video reviews of Helldivers. H1 and H2 are such good and fun games that put a smile on people who play them…. yet he’s lumping in Sony Playstation with MICROSOFT TRASH…….
@@LyonPercival console wars are for fucking idiots grow up.
Do you have to make everything negative in life?
@@LyonPercival No. Wrong.
Sony financed Arrowhead.
Arrowhead created Helldivers.
Sony simply owns the ip. Without the creators at Arrowhead, Sony would open the floodgates to activists. God bless, Arrowhead.
@@LyonPercival Pipe down Sony pony, no one asked you to meat ride a corporation. You're exactly part of the problem why gaming is going the way it is.
@@LyonPercival This might shatter your world but I think you need to hear this; Not everything is a console war
this is exactly what happened in the 80s when the gaming market crashed. the big studios lost favour. lost millions and indie devs rose from the ashes to become the new aaa studios. we are entering a new golden age of gaming and unlike last time the market wont crash because indie devs have an easier route of publishing thier games via steam and such.
Gonna rock It with Forgive me Father tonight, It’s been years since I felt like playing a fresh title.
well the PC market wont crash the current console market might... but new consoles that have real innovation will take the polace of the current ones that amount to gimped PCs
Your talking about almost 50 years ago the industry was infantile back then, don’t expect the same outcome when the mixture has been changed.
@@PW-zs2yxthe fact that 1980 is nearing “50 years ago” is absolutely mind blowing to me. Time flies.
@@PW-zs2yx the first home console came out in 72 and they had arcades before that. the industry wasnt infantile in fact it was booming. the sheer volume of games being made wasnt seen again until steam became big. just flat out your wrong. because all the biggest selling games of the past 5 years were made under the same conditions as doom or halo. by a small team putting it all on the line. stardew valley, minecraft, lethal company, among us, pal world, the list goes on and on. but yeah know keep huffing the copium.
The thing you said about fallout new Vegas hit close because playing fallout 4 even back then left me with the taste of where the crazy things you can do, the brutality and the humor, it felt like a game made for kids. And why talk about Starfeild, even worse. It's all very disappointing, yet there are still games like Baldurs Gate 3 that give hope.
The 'too many cooks in the kitchen" analogy works really well.
When one person makes a game, its their expression and theirs alone.
When 50 people make a game, it's a mesh of a small, like-minded group's ideas and expressions, making something entirely new but still personal.
When 10k people make a game, its a incoherent mess of conflicting ideas, desires, and misplaced priorities. So much so that the finished product has no real identity of it's own.
And this is especially apparent when you can clearly see that, the main purpose of a creative project, is not the production of the creation itself.
Another awful part of having so many people is that some will poison the game with their personal agendas or ideology when the few people who came up with and pitched the concept initially were like, " Let's make something fun that WE would want to play."
Too many incompetent DEI cooks to be exact
Large teams have leads for each division who are responsible for making sure everything their division puts out meets a design brief that will have been predetermined in the planning phases of each project.
Games are made alongside something called a game design document (GDD), which serves as a guide for everyone to stick to. The lead signs off everything people put out, to ensure consistency.
The reason a lot of AAA games feel soulless is because they're made to be safe, with the belief that this appeals to more people.
It's the same reason Hollywood franchise films all feel the same. Risks aren't taken enough, creative exploration is almost zero, and so all these types of games start to feel like the exact same thing in a different skin.
Yeah and throw in some millionnaire CEO who barely understands anything about games to manage those 10k people teams with their trusted friends in suits to call the shots and no matter how talented the 10k people are, it's going to be a disjointed effort that'll need luck to gain any sort of a coherent vision...
@@MC_HammerpantsMinorities having jobs has no negative impact, quite the opposite even since there are more perspectives and hobbies to help diversify the pool of experience to pull from.
Greed, on the other hand…
It’s funny how whenever I show my younger cousins indie games and such, they say “why are the graphics so trash?” Or “this game looks like ass why would I play it.”
We officially live in a world where kids are being brought up in AAA garbage and when something of actual quality comes up, they think the opposite
Because the exterior appearance is being valued more than gameplay quality, wrap a shit in shiny gold foil and you can sell to people who see graphical quality as the main denominator of quality
This is an interesting point and for example Final Fantasy 13 was a terrible title because most of the maps were just straight lines, the writing was trash, gameplay was lackluster but for the time it had the best graphics around. Squaresoft sunk a lot of money towards the graphics alone and everything else got heavily cut and this strategy seems to be the predominant one used. Corporations and large budgets are typically needed for the high polish and CGI, same goes for hollywood, but it will often be heavily sanitized. Theres more to a game than how it looks, polish a turd all you want, put sprinkles on it, its still a turd. But with indie games, its a chocolate icecream that to these kids, just looks like a turd but tastes great haha indie games make up for the lack of graphics with epic retro gaming features. But when all you know is crap, and don't give high quality a chance theres no reference point for these kids to realize the new games are trash.
There is a very high quality bar games need to hit before they can even have the chance to be successful now. There is also an appeal factor that the game needs to be communicated right away in a clip they might scroll by in social to be even considered. Attention economy is tough right now for entertainment.
We shouldn't have to compromise on Gameplay, Performance and Graphics.
Makes me glad mew and my cousins grew up playing on trash school pcs so bad graphics is just a part of life lmao
You nailed it. The biggest problem is the game companies want to make sure their investors get a return rather than make the best game possible. That's why everything has microtransactions, DLC, loot boxes etc. The crazy thing is if they just made the best game they could then that would have success.
It's more than a just a return , they want big bucks going on. Because certainly if investors aren't aholes and greedy and invest in a safe way and let studios handle and develop at their own pace. There's more chance for it to gain profit. It's like investors these days don't even trust human creativity and talent and only wanted the quickest way to get money. By scamming and half assing everyone. This is more than just greed at this point
@@pauloazuela8488 oh I agree with you. You see it in film and games. Those industries are dependent on investors to help increase budgets but investing in art like that is a risk. No one knows what will be a success and won't. Where I think the problem is is that those investors don't want to lose their money so only invest in what they think will be a success (hence why we have so many sequels as they can see if its been successful or not). Investors are the worst possible people to be having any influence over the creative process as they have no idea what makes a game or film good or what people want.
As you say, they can make crazy amounts of money a lot of ways now so taking a risk just isn't worth it to them but the big studios are desperate to make them happy so just trample all over the actual game designers and creatives just to make the investors happy and a profit.
@@pauloazuela8488 Additionally the money from investors doesn't come for free, if you make an FPS game and take money from the US army, you can be sure they want the devs to paint the US army in the best light possible, rather than make a good game, since the US army doesn't need a return from this game, they need recruitment numbers.
Well yeah because in 1994 your average AAA video game cost you $40-50 and would take 30-50 people about 2 years to make.
In 2024 your average AAA video game takes 150-200 people 4-5 years to develop, with the game costing you 60-70 dollars. See the huge cost disparity? See how the math isn't mathing up?
Never mind the fact that on inflation ALONE, without additional development time and overhead costs, you should be paying $110, just based on INFLATION alone.
Want to blame someone? Blame yourself for the current state of the gaming industry. Out of touch consumer expectations.
ROCK AND STONE TO THE BONE!
And good video, sir!
Going through the video made me realize how much fun it was to grind a game like Halo Reach to get cosmetics that inserted dominance over other players. Now they are symbols of how much debt you have in your credit card.
Great video Act Man! Keep up the good work.
Moral of the story AAA is corporate spoiling gaming for us. I played suicide squad for all of 10 mins and deleted it. How could they put out a game that is so bad. No developer comes away thinking that they did a great job.
I heard the Rocksteady team that worked on SS KTJL had little experience making a live-service game. The guys responsible for Rocksteady's earlier Batman titles left the company in 2022. They probably saw the writing on the wall. My guess: the publishers were trying to please investors again.
PRE ORDERS are the reason why
as someone who has way too many hours in drg:
ROCK AND STONE OR YER' AINT COMIN' HOME
for Karl!!!!!!!
IF YOU DONT ROCK STONE, YOU'LL NEVER COMING HOME
ROCK AND STONE BROTHA
One of these days I hope you and Tim Cain can do an interview about the state of the games industry and how it can improve.
Back then games were made by passionate small teams, Now they are made by hundreds of overworked devs micromaged by large publishers
And temporary contracted employees, don't forget them
@@Klepto2322 Are those the consultant firms?
This, Actman only eludes to the demoralizing effects the AAA game space, but that is why these games suck.
It's not that AAA games are getting worse, it's that many of the established AAA companies are getting worse as they overvalue themselves and their products and think they can get away with selling trash and thinking players will eat it up. Not realizing that smaller studios are now able to compete with them
I heard someone the other day saying that the biggest difference is the shift to monetisation within the game. Previously the entire focus was on getting that customer to buy your game which meant it was either good or it wasn’t. Now it’s about getting them in and to keep paying
@darthconquerus I think that's half right but most of the monetization isn't a problem, just the prices are. like there's nothing wrong with OW2 selling skins, there is a problem selling them for $25 dollars. there's nothing wrong with say skull n bones as a game. but there is a problem with being $70
@@grimsdol4665 if you’re monetising within the game though then gameplay has likely been affected in one way or another. The most common way is to make it grindier to get ‘free’ XP/rewards because they want you to pay more. The amount of hours you have to put into completing a season’s battle pass in whatever game is deliberately lengthy to try and encourage people with less time or patience into paying for that skin they really want
I doubt that's the case (them overvaluing themself). I think we will see them revert back to basics in the coming years, or they will be eaten by the smaller studios.
they definitely are getting away with it tho
The wild thing with indie vs AAA is that people are saying Larian isnt indie because they had 100 people making BG3, but then Helldivers is a bastion of indie development, with 100 devs
I've thought Indie meant like 1-5 ppl who are just like friends making a game rather than like an actual studio
The answer is quite easy : AAA games are for moneh, and indie games are made out of passion. Back in the days AAA too. But not anymore unfortunately. See how Bungie turned out for example.
Man bungie fell hard
Bungie is a massive turd. It's crazy how blatantly their strategy shifted to "fuck over the community as much as possible".
@@joeykeilholz925 back in the days they weren't
@@joeykeilholz925 Well until those companies understand that they aren't the market but we consumers are the market they will fail and trust me the next big fall will be GTA 6 . Meanwhile indies will continue to carry gaming along with Asian games . Western AAA gaming is dead and they killed it
Triple A gaming died when valve stopped caring.
When they gave up on TF2.
When they released half life aleks.
When they didn't give any attention to Portal 2 in rtx.
When trying to appeal to everyone they appeal to no one. That’s one of the biggest issues, besides greed, stifling creativity, and decisions about games not being made by developers but executives who are so disconnected from reality and gamers as a whole
That's why I love games like Ultrakill. Made by one guy (initially, he has a team now but he's still in charge) who had a very clear vision and wasn't trying to spread a particularly large net. It's a niche game with a ridiculously high skill ceiling, but it's still done very well and it's one of the highest rated games on steam
@cabnbeeschurgr6440 ULTRAKILL isn't niche anymore, though. That doesn't change the fact that it's the perfect example of not losing your creative vision to greed!
It's like trying to create the ideal color of paint by combining everyone else's favorite colors. The end result is just something ugly that nobody likes.
The gaming industry right now reminds me of that scene in Chef where Carl wants to cook good food for the food critic but Riva won't let him because he owns the restaurant and Carl is basically there to make food, not art. All the investors care about is making a profit, but they don't trust the artists they hire to do it.
It's not even a trust issue, but too many corporate suits wanting to dictate everything. They have their graphs and presentations and make all sorts of lame decisions they want everyone to stick with.
But Act Man, if you want those 10 lines of code, you first have to put in a feature request in an app that has to be approved by stakeholders, then signed off by the release train architect, then it will be discussed at the next quarterly release train planning session, then the ticket has to be scheduled into a sprint by the scrum team, and then the ticket will have to be further specified during a refinement sessions, and all that before we can even write a single line of code!
This is not an exeaggeration, this is how modern software development works in large corporations.
I hate how completely accurate this is lol.
😊
😊😊😅😂😅😊😊😊
Thats exactly the reason why you shouldnt have economists in the lead
@@theinfamousundispute 😭😂👌
It’s extremely sad to know that game companies won’t take risks because CALL OF DUTY ZOMBIES WAS A RISK AND AN ACCIDENT but they let Jason implement it and look at zombies now
10/10 video!! I 100% agree with basically everything you said.
Ever since I built my PC during covid, I have been enjoying all kinds of indie games. It's gotten to the point that a few months ago I reflected on my Steam purchases and realized I haven't bought a AAA game in years at this point lmaooo
AA is the new AAA.
Because they are unfinished, unfun, unreplayable trash
I think the last AAA games I bought since covid was god of war and horizon forbidden west. I can’t tell you how many indie games I’ve thrown money at in the same time period though lmao.
@@jjay350 Yeah but AAA is now AAAA.
Corpo rats never learn, do they?
Spending easily a 100m $ on marketing, yet the only time I ever hear about their game is when it flops. It's hilarious how 21st century investors have no idea about how the markets they invest into work.
If they had any idea about investment, they would know: games don't need marketing, a good game sells itself. Gaming is an interconnected hobby, a nearly endless web of millions playing games and telling each other to do so, the first worldwide "community" if it can be called as such, naturally since gaming required a set of skills connected to computing and thus, telecommunication.
Then streaming came from Broadcasts and TV Live News. THAT is the Meta now, streaming even the corpos are trying to get a piece of that pie.
Great now I want a game where you play as an anthropomorphic rat in a business suit that tries to squeeze out profit
I love how companies have to push pre-orders out like crazy because that's the only way to get money from an inevitable bad launch.
Yeah the only sales that happen are before word of mouth spreads
No most companies make their money after launch
@@ni9274it's to show numbers to shareholders.
@ni9274 launch day sales + pre orders dictate whether its a financial loss or they should keep pushing for the pay dirt.
They would do it anyway. I’m sure their research has shown a person who preorders is less likely to ask for a refund because of a bad launch, and that’s all they really need to hear.
Good Vid, Bro! I agree with every word, Brother! 😊👍
20:09 As an indieDev I never expected to learn a better way to program agression in AI enemies in one of your videos, this is actually pretty simple and much better than just attacking the last one who attack you or just selecting a random player to attack;
I dont game dev but am a dev who has played around with very simple games and always figured that would be the way to do it. WoW accomplished this 2 decades ago and i always thought it should just be pretty standard.
List of potential target options with an aggro value in a list, you can weight things differently like damage is 1 to 1, healing could be .5 to 1, taunts just add a big number that drops off after x seconds. Like everything in coding its definitely easier said than done but never thought it would be too bad or a novel idea. And if youre making any party based or multiplayer pve game essentially a necessity.
@@imALazyPanda I guess is not a novel idea in general, but it is for me. Specially because I don't play or make party or coop games, so I haven't had the neccesity to make enemies focus on more than one player at a time.
But... that algorithm was just a place holder. He wasn't joking when he said it could be done before lunch.
If you want to get deeper, you can use that list to store a "target points" variable per player that represents the combination of other values as well, such as distance, current stamina, estimated time to kill, target health left, etc.
This can make it so that the AI can decide if it's worth killing a weaker player to be in a 1v1 with the strongest or not, like we do in games.
@chuckdude514 the problem is nowadays everything is done within a framework, and also you need to fit all of them to the existing codes, you need to follow the design patterns. Yes writing the algorithm is easy af, can do it before lunch. But the tedious part is fitting that into the existing code
@@qwertyrewtywyterty This is true for the most part, but often not for placeholders, which should only be used for basic testing while you develop more important features.
For example, he might have needed a functioning AI so he could see how enemies are moving around and/or using their guns.
But indeed, these decisions depend on how long you plan to use these placeholders.
1)Not enough communication between higher ups and game devs.
2) Money hungry companies only caring about monetization
3) There is too much emphasis on graphics and way less on gameplay.
4) What the players want =/= what the company/devs want
5) They set unrealistic expectations and in the end they fail to meet most of them and the game can't even be considered good.
6) People paying encourages the companies to use even more predatory monetization tactics
For Number 3, while that is true, I speculate that game devs are pressured into one-upping the graphics from the previous game otherwise the graphics will be deemed "worse than the previous game that came out X years ago" and either they or the publishers will think it won't sell well
@@d-turn3314 and then there's Pokemon; the highest grossing media franchise of all time and a license to basically print money.
@@mightza3781 Scarlet and Violet don't have emphasis on graphics NOR gameplay
@@d-turn3314 It is possible to make a beautiful game without it having the best graphics. The Arkham games and DS3 are prime examples. They look better than a lot of modern games despite being a decade old
@@xethos1204also games 2 console gens ago like portal 2, bioshock, gears of war 1-3 why do they still hold up?, I’m guessing the art direction and attention to detail
I deal with similar situations at work... when it comes to (it will take about 4 weeks to have this done.)
An example: I work at a retail store and a few of the staff members wanted to move this small island of shelves that are in the middle of the store because people kept bumping into them, knocking product onto the floor and it was kind of annoying to deal with due to it's positioning as they hindered vision at times.
We asked if we could move them and Management said they'd have to ask the higher ups if we could, it took us 3 weeks before they answered us and said no.
Till one day one of the managers to came to our store with family and their youngest daughter bumped into the shelves knocking a product off and causing it to land on them, they immediately began complaining and demanded the staff members on duty move them as their child could have been hurt.
Eeyup. It's never a problem until the managers get a taste of what everyone's been getting so now it's suddenly a high priority.
At least it only took your company weeks, not A WHOLE YEAR like mine, to fix a similar issue!
Sometimes it's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.
If another game like Pokemon Scarlet and Violet comes out, which is so buggy and poorly executed that it's giving people eye strain, dizziness, nausea and VOMITING when playing... I'm boycotting the entire franchise, because that game shouldn't have come out with a DAY 1 PATCH.
As a software engineer(not game dev) I can say throwing more people at a project doesn't work. Too many cooks in the kitchen, too many moving pieces at once, leads to bugs, bloat, and breaks the budget for little to no gains. Smaller teams, longer dev cycles produces quality.
Also, did I hear a Rock and Stone?
The mythical man-month came out 50 goddamn years ago, there shouldn't be any excuse not to know this already. Particularly MBA-types who should have covered it in school.
@@adawoo5494 What's that about?
@@Arphemius The thesis is essentially that adding extra staff to a software project that's behind will often slow it down rather than speed it up. The titular "man-month" is about the notion of a unit of work done by one person in one month, and the book argues that this is a myth, in terms of measuring useful work. Adding 2x the people to a project doesn't make it 2x quicker, or 2x better.
It's a seminal work in software project management, but despite that it's basically a recurring joke that managers are generally incapable of actually learning anything from it.
Rock and stone!
@@adawoo5494 Ah okay, thanks for informing me! If only the world were as neat as a simple statistic sometimes, but it never works that way.
First step is: they gotta stop with 120GB + sizes and unoptimized games..lazy to compress and optimize games nowdays.
Ye
The internet connection where I live just isn't great.
It's enough to use a streaming service or whatever, but it takes like three days to download 100 gigs, and if anything happens to the connection over 3 days, it has to restart.
If something is 100+ gigs, I'm just not buying and downloading it unless I have a rare opportunity to use better internet for a few days.
There's gotta be a way to have non-repetitive high quality assets that don't take up this much space
Games are not un-optimized, computer systems and games are much more complicated. Go to a community college and learn about game development before you comment on this again, you lack the understanding.
@spankyjeffro5320 that's not the point though is it.
Why are they using these new complicated systems if it's bloating game files relative to platform memory?
It's on devs to optimize within the context of all market factors, getting tunnel vision re graphics and processing power is nobody else's fault.
@@spankyjeffro5320 Only partially true, but if I have 2 weeks to get the sprint done, why would I spend time on more efficiently channel packing my textures, and writing the shader to interpret that packed texture, when I can just save out several individual .tga's and assign them to several sampler slots?
Call of Duty's biggest success was that up until Black Ops 2, the development teams although high budget- operated like Middle Market development teams: relatively small, efficent, and working under a cohesive vision. You can also tell: Visuals, presentation, tone, music, etc... it all felt "in house" until Black Ops 2 and that magic was gone after that game.
Same with Halo, Halo is another example of a team that had the budget of AAA but still operated like middle market until Halo 4. Old Bungie is the ultimate example of that style.
MW and BO felt so distinctive back then every different Cod series had its own character
Ok, the pre-order bit at the start gets you a sub. I loved it.