Norway's Consumer Council is spearheading an initiative to ban in game currencies and asking for a law to demand game makers to put the prices of skins, bps, etc in euros and to allow consumers to buy the exact amount of money a skin costs in game, they have redacted a pretty detailed and well reasoned document on the topic that's worth a look.
The entire EU needs a law like that it won't happen with the parliament being majority conservative and fascist, and the leadera of the council being neo-liberal/Proto-fascist.
@@wile123456 The don't work for the continent they suppose to represent, actively working to collapse a specific country in the hope it drags the rest of the continent down economically.
Personally, I do have the words to describe what I think of Kotick. But if I voice my thoughts, I would commit a crime in most civilized countries on the planet.
I've called him many words over the years in the WoW forums and I can go on for eternity. That is how vile of a cretin I think he is. Society should shun these type of people.
Live service is a golden goose that executives refuse to believe they can't create intentionally. They see super successful live service games, and they don't see a company that caught lightning in a bottle, they see an alchemical formula. Something that they just have to follow to produce endless gold. If you'll pardon the tortured mixed metaphor.
That's what gets me. Sure, the potential profits are huge, but so are the risks, and while the executives may have golden parachutes, the people who hire them don't. So why do they keep letting themselves get burned? Are the money men at the top that incompetent?
@@jamesb3497 Short answer, yes. Business majors have long been where fools with few wits and fewer plans go to when they're already in the college debt-pit, and just want something they can a) achieve despite being one of the dimmer bulbs in the drawer, and b) will make them money enough to hopefully pay back these debts, something that the arts can't really promise. Thus you get a bunch of stooges with vague degrees that put them on track to middle and upper management, where they blindly make changes, say yes to everything their bosses say, and repeat phrases and buzzwords they never bothered learning the meanings of. They excuse their existence on the company paycheck every week by making promises they neither understand nor *have* to understand, so long as there are lackeys below them to blame the failings on. They also make excellent transmitters, as they parrot the orders of the higher-up executives with remarkable efficiency, as they lack the critical thinking or willful thought that would make them anything more than a mouthpiece of those above them; useful if you have competent higher-ups, but those are almost a unicorn in and of themselves.
Because the executives are gamblers. They got rich selling stocks which is just a non-taboo casino because stock prices have nothing to do with real world value created by companies, only hype. When you're on top of our capitalist society you are no longer human, you are an entitled social demon who only cares about yourself and making more money, despite you already having all the luxury you can need. It's capitalism working as intended. The real people to blame are politicians who passed neoliberal laws and refused to regulate the tech sector in the 80's when it was starting to grow. With proper regulations and consumer protections like every other older market has to some degree, it wouldn't be such a huge problems. Developers having a unioj like actors do for example would also help a lot. Unless a studio and publisher is a worker democracy that holds elections for leadership and keeps their managers in check, abuse will keep happening. Sometimes it's incompetence, sometimes the intern gets r*ped. It's just how the system works under capitalism, aka dictatorship in the private sector.
@@wile123456 "Because the executives are gamblers." really sums it up all by itself. Making a live service is exactly like putting your money in a slot machine. Some people win the jackpot and get back a _lot_ more than they paid in, but for every big winner, there's a lot more people who lose, and even most of the ones who don't are lucky to break even. (Edit) Also a lot like a slot machine, if someone recently won the jackpot, then you have far less of a shot of winning big.
When your industry is run by the pencil pushers lead poisoning is always the eventual result. No joke. Symptoms include: Weight loss (lay-offs) Constipation (Takes a while to get your sh!t released) Short term memory loss (Making the same games over and over even though they usually fail) Muscle weakness (Too weak to pull themselves out of a failing cycle) Loss of coordination (Creatives and money people working toward different ends) Loss of sleep (Bet some Sony execs lost a little sleep over their failed game)
The goal of a company is to make money. Any company that gets big enough exists to continue it's own existence. Businesses exist to make money. Put all that together and it's a damn miracle that art gets made at all. Pray your favorite devs stay small, because the bigger they get, they less they care about the art form.
@@NaturesFlame That's what they keep screwing up. A business doesn't make money without producing a product (tangible or otherwise) that people want to buy or utilize. Making money can't exist by itself in a vacuum, and yet they keep trying.
@@Varmint260 They don't have to produce anything as long as they can control all the methods of consumption. They can resell old stuff til the heat death of the universe. Any time a small player starts looking promising, they just buy them up and kill them. Its the playbook of Google and Amazon, they buy and kill startups all the time. This is not a problem that will just "go away". If you're waiting for the giants to fail, you'll be old and grey. Its a systemic problem that won't go away unless the system itself changes.
@@mr.boneking8970 There's a lot happening around Second Wind. If you have the time or inclination, you can delve deep into it. I'm in no position to talk about it, but Nick Calandra has been doing some shady stuff.
@@mr.boneking8970 tldr: Frost left over disagreements on how to run things. This is the most neutral way to put it. The longer story is about how manipulative the Second Wind's leaders were revealed to be, how they sabotaged themselves, and much juicier info about their shadier dealings in the past, mostly focused on Nick Calandra. It was quite the plot twist to find out that the whole narrative of "Second Wind escaping out of touch executives with unreasonable expectations" was a lie, as Nick was the one who set the expectations to guarantee him a larger paycheck, failed to deliver, and pit the higher ups and the creative up against each other to dodge blame. I recommend watching Frost's previous two videos on the topic. He backs up his accusations with evidence.
The 'success' of Destiny and Star Citizen has been nothing but a complete curse on the industry. Bungie has presented their increasingly anti-consumer anti-art model of turning their games into 'content generation' as a perpetual money machine, hiding the true costs from both their customers and apparently their own corporate overlords. Justin Truman trumpeted the 'velocity over quality' model at GDC when at the same time Bungie already knew that despite being a 'successful' operation for 8 years, Lightfall had flopped so hard it had put the entire game in severe jeopardy and put Bungie at the brink of ruin. The dark truth is Star Citizen only survives because everyone in the industry (both executives and devs) thinks 'if Chris Roberts can do this, why can't we?"
I know people who are actually addicted to Destiny, and it really hurts to watch. I'm talking, "I literally cannot dedicate time to any other entertainment because of Destiny" addicted. I'm glad they're having (perceived) fun, but from the outside-looking-in, it's really depressing to see how little their die-hard loyalty is respected by the devs.
I just can't believe execs get so many second chances; if they were as frightened of failure as they are greedy for lottery-win success, they'd be pushing to make boring, conservative games like they did 20 years ago, but something seems to have taken all the fear out of them and they've just started running around with torches setting things on fire.
I got recommended several videos showing off Squadron 42's cutscenes that I thought it was a released game, which suprised me considering how it's connected to Star Citizen, the forever in development game. Then after minimal digging I realized it was all just a 1 hour 'gameplay' reveal that was 40 minutes of cutscenes and 20 minutes of no doubt pre-rendered gameplay (because it's always pre-rendered!). What's worse is all the videos dickriding this animated movie that it's genuinely difficult to find any information on what the game is actually like to play. Or what it *will* be like to play, since it's not even out yet.
Corpo mentality on trend chasing reminds me of working with Advertisment in Brazil: Clients and Higher Ups want "inovation", so creatives come up with new ideas for a campaign and they refuse. Then, that Ned Flanders Golden Retriever guy comes up with an "idea" of copying something from a foreign campaing, usually something from US, UK or some fancy rich country in Europe and gets aproved an even called an "Inovator". These people don't know what inovation is because they're too averse to risk (unless the workers take all the consequences of the risk.)
Ive worked under these kinds of people too. For them innovation is just an aesthetic and a buzzword, not an actual goal. Real innovation requires bravery and a clarity of vision, something soulless money men will never have. They want sure bets draped in the illusion of creativity, which mostly means copying the surface -level elements of already successful projects. Mediocrity is the best they can ever hope to achieve.
@@numberonedad It's not just any capitalism, it's risk-averse, play-it-safe, commodity capitalism, as opposed to entrepreneurial, innovative, risk-tasking capitalism. It's basically what happens when middle managers take over the boardroom but keep their middle management habits.
@@hailexiao2770 actually it's over-financialized, short-term profit capitalism, which is just capitalism. it's basically what happens when the profit motive is all there is. blaming the "middle managers" is missing the point - it's the very top that are responsible, as all the journalism has borne out.
Brazil is having a moment. I have good friend who lives in the northeast. It seems like Bolsonaro is imitating our own right wing dictator wannabe in Trump and predatory practices like privatizing public utilities on the table. Fortunately seems like there were some losses but also some big wins in the recent elections, but certainly the vultures are circling. Hopefully Brazil can hold them off.
So basically, publishers keep throwing away money on absurdly expensive and polished but bland designed-by-committee live service games because the suits in charge all desperately want to own the next League of Legends or Counterstrike. That explains so much of what's wrong with this industry.
and these idiots don't see anything beyond how much those things cost to capitalize vs what revenue they brought in, because they don't understand games or the history of the industry they purport to lead (or much of anything, really. most of these guys seems like utterly disconnected morons with wealthy parents) you couldn't have LoL without DotA, and DotA was just a custom map made in Warcraft 3. zero revenue at all. fun has to come first, and that's not possible if your first instinct is to look at a balance sheet (which isn't to say it's not important to look at balance sheets, just that if you make those things your primary concern they are quickly going to be covered in red ink) CS:GO grew out of CS which had become a platform for player creativity, hence its popularity. that's how team fortress first got made - it was a CS mod understanding context like that is incredibly fundamental, imho, to being able to succeed as a product manufacturer in the video game industry the industry's big success stories tend to come from either non-commercial products or from people pushing the boundaries of what a video game even is. products that just try to fit within already existing and populated spaces, regardless of their quality or the amount of effort that went into them, almost always fail (look at the huge number of FPS games trying to fit into the hypothetical space created by Doom, or the amount of RTS games that tried to fit into the hypothetical space created by Starcraft)
@@shoopoop21why would the other *12* live service games Sony was promising for 2026 be anything? It's unimaginable that they could be so stupid, but evidently they are
They're also incredibly risk-averse, so they refuse to try anything that hasn't already been proven to work. That's why even the gameplay of all these failed live service games feels bland.
One thing that I think Yahtzee brought up ~2 years ago is that there are only so many live-service players to go around. Even then and especially now it’s not about finding a player base, but attracting existing ones. But with so many live-services, players can only stay with so many. I’m not going to play a game if it’s the third game this year that asks I spend every afternoon playing it.
Not only that, but the players who play live service a lot, who spend money on them? They may not be ready to accept it yet, but their enjoyment of the genre is being gradually eroded from overexposure. It's like if you spend a whole year playing nothing, or almost nothing, other than World of Warcraft. It's a pretty good MMO, there's a lot of options within it, but it's not the only game in the world and some part of you will always remember that and think "Man, I really ought to play some Boneraiser Minions again one of these days!" or "I should replay those Uncharted games" or whatever you used to like. The human brain, or perhaps rather the gamer brain, is not built to play just one type of game all the time, let alone one specific game. People's tastes may vary, sure, but if you eat the most delicious thing in the world for every meal, it will lose all appeal by the end of the third day or so. Even the players who _have_ flocked to the flashy hero-role competitive-shooty live service _thing_ genre, and who've spent a lot of money on cosmetics in it, are going to hit their limit at some point, where they go "This is dumb. I'm not doing this for the rest of my life. I'm gonna go outside, or watch some Netflix or something. Maybe I could learn to play an instrument! Read a book, learn a language. At one point these games were fun, but at this point they have stopped being fun. Time for the next thing." All of which makes it even more ridiculous that the decision-makers just keep piling on the demands for more of the same slop, the same overexposed, market-oversaturated slop, trying to round up a lovely herd of cattle who are one third already slaughtered, one third jumped the fence and escaped, and one third under heavy guard by twitchy cowboys with machine guns who worker hard to keep these cattle and sure as hell aren't going to give 'em up without a fight. That herd's not available, corpos. It's barely even a herd any more. It was a fun opportunity for the people who were there in time, and that time is now well behind us.
I'm still waiting for the other half of that "The Open World is Dead" video to come true. "Someone takes a risk, kicks the 100 million dollar project in the head and breaks it down into four 25 million dollar projects with dedicated teams and more focused design principles and it makes absolute gob loads of cash. A new wave of risk taking artistry at the highest levels. a Stop to the constant push for new graphics hardware. A new age of prosperity for the human race." The sooner these corpo scumbags get reasonable ideas of a return on investment again, the sooner gaming can start to heal. Saying that though, Indies are still doing alright, so maybe Corpo's failure is for the better.
@@hazukichanx408I think this is the perfect analogy, you got it spot on. Just a new wave of industrialists who don't know the concept of overharvesting.
To be honest, I've wondered if the attitudes in the industry isn't just money based, but power based: not wanting to concede that someone else might have a better idea. Doubling down on live service games after Suicide Squad is one example, but another could be the Silent Hills debacle. If you don't remember, Konami was going to make a Silent Hill game helmed by Hideo Kojima, directed by Guillermo Del Toro, and starring Norman Reedus. You don't have to be a math major to tell this would sell like crazy. Despite fans clamoring for it, Konami couldn't let their feud with Kojima slide and cancelled the project. Their response to fans was, "Yeah, but settle down. We've got other games coming." I can't think of any reason besides pulling a power move to having a guaranteed product that customers were sure to buy, only to turn away all the possible money just to snub one guy.
It's no wonder that Kojima then included Del Toro and Reedus into a little game called Death Stranding. While Kojima is only better off being independent, I can't help but wonder what the Konami execs are thinking now that Death Stranding 2 hype is winding up.
@@Rothbart24 They're probably not thinking anything because because they're just like their Pachinko machine: very few moving parts required to make roughly the same money off of some hard coping Salary-men and Boomers
Due to my personality, I realized that competitive games can tend to push my buttons and heavily negatively affect my mentality. But I love some good co-op games. Payday 2 used to be my big one, and then DRG ended up being my big time sink for a good while. It really feels like they respect the players' time and if you don't get everything... that's okay.
Yup, and it keeps getting better. Previously time limited season passes are now freely selectable, meaning FOMO is gone. Seasonal holiday events have gameplay for getting all previous event rewards so there's no FOMO for if you can't play the event this year. And the only monetisation is cosmetic packs that are cheap, unique and ram packed full of content. There's even a Founder's Bundle that lets you get all cosmetic packs, including future ones with an increased discount. Compared to predatory, FOMO ridden monetisation where I almost never spend money on them. Meanwhile I not only have every DRG DLC but I buy them on launch day. Because they're a good value proposition and the devs respect a player's time and money. Why would I spend £15 on a The Finals Premium Pass for the chance to unlock items by excessively grinding the fun out of the game before an arbitrarily artificial deadline, when I can pay £7 to DRG for the same amount of cosmetics that I get access to immediately and a battle pass I can tip away at to my own pace. Another weird one is Borderlands 3's Vault Card DLCs as part of their Director's Cut DLCs. They're basically Battle Passes but with no FOMO and you can choose what reward you want so no need to grind through filler to get to the good stuff.
Something I've been saying a lot lately: Games used to be made by people who just wanted to make a fun game, and it showed. Games these days are produced by people chasing ALL of the money, and it shows. In essence a lot of companies aren't so much interested in making games but rather setting up "revenue streams".
Games are still being made by people who wants to make fun experiences, you have to stop looking only at big studios, indie gaming is where the good stuff is, that's where you find passion and love for the medium, and some of the best games of the last few years have been made by these tiny studios or even single individuals. Triple A gaming is dying due to corporate greed, but the silver lining is that indie gaming is as strong as ever and we will never stop getting good games.
Almost every big game makes me depressed because it's all nonsense like this, but then I went on itch io and got reccomended more indies on Steam and man... Games are good, actually. And there are people out there who still like to make them! The problem is that there's almost nothing left in the AAA fields that's worthwhile. That horse is dead and the bean counters want us to pay $80 to purchase a stick and an additional $19.99 for every swing as we beat it for them. But there's much more to do and look at than their slop. It's just easy to forget that because they pay so much in advertising to have it shoved in our faces...
Disagree. Devs care about fun then, and do now too. The difference is back then making a fun game was the path to profit, as game design was an emerging field. Now making an exploitative game is the path to profit, as game design is better understood and companies know how to maximise profit.
**profit** streams actually, gross revenue is unsustainable for stocks, you need to generate increasing profit margins every quarter to satisfy investors. And if that sounds insanity and completely unobtainable in the long term, the reason is because that is exactly what it is, but they don't care.
@@atimholt Allegedly, Nick Calandra - who joined The Escapist at a time when it was struggling, and then went on to found Second Wind together with people who were laid off alongside him or who quit at that time - is not being honest about a lot of things. Allegations include lying to his bosses at Gamurs or whoever bought Escapist, setting unrealistic targets to justify a pay raise for himself, which supposedly led to his firing. Also exploiting indie devs after pretending to be their ally. Frost's done a few pretty in-depth videos on the topic with what appears to be fairly compelling evidence. The rest of Second Wind responded with, more or less, "We've heard what you're saying, and we don't agree that it is true" or something to that effect. Whether this is because there is no problem at all, or because at this point they're too exhausted to go through more drama and upheaval by getting rid of their managery money guy or whatever role he fills there, is kind of up for debate. At least, that's how I understand it.
These failures are similar to the recent failures of blockbuster movies. It's a bizarre way to approach entertainment. Contrast the Blumhouse model with, for example, Sony Pictures. Sony keeps throwing $150-$250 million budgets at movies that underperform, and they lose money. Blumhouse makes a dozen movies for $2 million each, all of them make a little money, and a couple of them hit and make $100 million. But making $100 million profit on a $2 million investment isn't good enough - these companies want to land the $1 billion hit, so they keep dumping $200 million into movies, but only one in ten of those films is going to make $1 billion, while *all* the $2 million films make a profit. Same with games. Develop a bunch of smaller scale games for $20 million and you probably won't lose money on any of them, you can give the developers more flexibility and freedom from corporate meddling, and a couple of them will probably hit and make $100 million+ But again, it's not enough to just make money. You have to make ALL the money.
It's ironic, really. They'd much prefer to keep going for 2M movies into 100M profit, but it doesn't work for their stupid timescale, because they have billions to invest and it's a waste to not be profitting with all of it, and they just lack the personnel/space to make a thousand 2M movies at the same time. What really should put things in perspective is that a 400M dud is barely registering on their sensors, it's just chump money.
Putting it this way, they sound like gambling addicts. Except unlike most gambling addicts they have the blessing of using someone else's money: the company's. Makes a lot of sense under these lens. They don't know what fun is so they make up for it with the thrill of gambling and whatever silly iddy diddy things they spend their bonus pay on.
I feel like I'm smoking imported cigarettes and drinking middle shelf whiskey while looking over a detective file when I watch your videos. Perfect. I love this.
I hit a wall with 'modern gaming'. I have struggled to engage with any AAA games in the last few years and I thought it was because I'd passed 40 and just no longer enjoying games as much, which was sad as I had been into gaming since I was very young, playing my dad's Atari level of young. Then something clicked. It started with getting a Steam Deck (a decent PC is out of my price range) and starting to play games I enjoyed in the past, enjoying them again even though they are showing their age. Then I randomly started a new Witcher 3 playthrough on console and have been really enjoying that. All this rambling leads me to a point- I haven't fell out of love with gaming, it's this predatory behavior from those big companys, pushing loot boxes, season passes and live service models. I became jaded to all games because all I saw were poor products looking to take all the money they can. Having taken a step back from soulless cash grabs, I have been reminded of the simple joy games have given me. Not a remaster or legacy game from a long running series, mostly looking to cash in on nostalgia, just games made by passionate developers who cared about the art they made. You can feel the care and attention put in before so many middle managers got involved, turning everything into deadlines and making milking machines. Maybe gaming has changed for good. Maybe I have been pushed out by games which aren't aimed at me. I don't care anymore. I've rediscovered the joy in gaming and I hope others can too. Remember the last game that you genuinely enjoyed? Go back to it and give it another playthrough. It's the last thing the suits want you to do (there's no money in playing old games) and it might be the best thing you've done, for both your love of the hobby and the industry at large
Gaming has outgrown us. It's certainly not for kids these days with all the gender and political messaging, so I can't rightly say we've outgrown it. Let's say gaming has outgrown us due to cancerous multiplication in the conference rooms.
There are lots of great indie games out there. They still have soul. I'd also recommend Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 as major games with soul rather than suits. Hell, Baldur's Gate 3 is incredible for its monetisation, a one-time cost for continued patching and now modding support, like how games used to be. I'm also bloody sick of battle passes and paywalled content in 'free' games. As always in this world, you're never alone. There are still good old games and there are still people making new games. You just gotta find the right places to look.
CDPR doesn't have greedy monetizatiin but sorry to inform you they abuse and sexually assault their workers just as much as every other studio. The leaders who are responsible for cyberpunks rushed launch and manipulatiin If the press giving only review codes to positive outlets, are still in power. All the incomoetent people werrent fired. Witcher 4 is going to be bad, simple as.
I am older than you and realised a few years ago that gaming is still fun, the corporate greed, "AAA" industry is the problem. Play indie games. They are at least as good if not better than our favorite games 30 plus years ago. Ravenswatch, Baldur's Gate 3..
Very good point, mate: see, the most recent triple-A game I've played is FFXVI on my PC (mine's only mid-range, but it runs quite well for me after tweaking settings) and I've really enjoyed it. I started to think about why that was, and I came up with a few reasons that seem to align with your own: -It's single-player and doesn't push an egregious monetization system on me -It's story-based and a fairly solid one at that (subjective; I know--I'm not saying it's perfect, I have issues with certain parts, esp time-skips) -The mechanics, while simple, are very well executed and allow for some finesse Before playing this, I'd been playing older games this year. Devil May Cry 5--which is STILL a banger of a game!--Grim Dawn, Dark Souls 3; the list goes on and on, and I've peppered it with both new and old indie games. Like, it blows my mind going back to something as old as, say, One Way Heroics, and still having a blast with it, or finding a newer game like Terminus: Zombie Survivors, or the Soulash series, and realizing that I don't hate games. It's just that the games I really enjoy don't get made often, and never from triple-A. Yeah.. it's fascinating stuff to look into, man, and I still really love it. Heck, even trying to get into Dwarf Fortress (which I seem to do every year for a week or two, then give up--I like complexity, but MAN... even I have a limit) is still a blast to me. Good on you to realize that isn't that you despise gaming, it's that you like GAMES. You're a gamer, mate, not a consumer--you play for the fun and experiences of games, not to be advertised to and treated like a cow to be milked for all your money. Anyway, that's all I have to say, so I'll conclude by wishing you and everyone else well, and hope you all have a pleasant day. Maybe I'll go ahead and start messing around with Cataclysm: DDA again.. that could be fun... cheers, all!
we are *this* close to another industry crash, I think. The indie market will be fine, but the AAA publishers will be either hacked to bits and massively downsized or go belly-up entirely, and it can't come soon enough
We've been "this close" to another industry crash since at the very least 2010 - I only use that cutoff point because that's when I started paying attention to gaming news online, I'd eat my hat if that was the start of this type of doomposting - and yet it keeps just not coming.
We're already in a crash, I'd say. Biggest flops ever back-to-back. Studios that exist right now either don't make video games anymore or only make gambling sites
Nah, I doubt it. Sure, a lot of AAA might crash out because of out of touch mismanagement, but succesfull games are already being rewarded while slop isn't.
@masterplusmargarita Ubisoft is on the brink, Xbox isn't far behind, EA barely makes anything but sports games anymore (and Veilguard isn't looking so hot), the constant layoffs and studio closures seemingly evey week, I could go on. No, it's very reasonable to say the industry is close to crash, it's probally going to happen in 2025 or 2026. We're going to wake up some time next year and hear Ubisoft laid of 10,000 people.
@@carlschrappen9712 THQ is on the brink. PlayStation isn't far behind. EA barely makes anything but sports games anymore (and Dragon Age 2 isn't looking so hot), the constant layoffs and studio closures seemingly every week, I could go on. No, it's very reasonable to say the industry is close to crash, it's probably going to happen in 2011 or 2012. We're going to wake up some time next year and hear THQ laid off 10,000 people. All of this has been going on forever. This is just how the industry operates. Titans fall and get subsumed into other titans who fall in 10 years time. Companies lay off people endlessly. CEOs abandon ship with golden parachutes worth millions. It's all working as intended.
Working as a hardware and firmware developer (in a small tech company) and having my boss holding the greatest share of the company, while the boss of commercials holds the second greatest, but way smaller, share. Is easy to see this contrast between the experienced engineer that worries about making a good and stable product, while seaching for creative and smart solutions, and the commercials guy who wants to put bluetooth in everything without considering other more suitable solutions and how this could negative affect the priorities of the development team. I personally can't imagine how shitty it must to work on a potencial useless feature or product, while being pressed by people who don't understand the difficulty and challenges to implement what they asked. And in the end if everything goes wrong, you know who is getting screwed.
All I have to do is look at the names that these people come up with. Our service was renamed VIBE. I saw people on Linkedin saying things like "Vibe on!" My first thought when I heard the name? Oh this is already dated. Oh this is not good. Oh, wait... You actually like this?
See, the problem is they keep making bad games instead of good games. If they made more good games than bad games, then they'd have more good games instead of bad games
Yeah, I can definitely agree with the premise on this video. We've seen it with numerous titles already, but the biggest 3 for hands-off product creation without involving hired devs always seem to be Valve's big three: Counter Strike (GO/2), Team Fortress 2, and to a lesser extent DOTA 2. There's a core reason why a number of companies are trying to speak out against Valve's market dominance as a company and a digital storefront both despite a number of those same groups complaining also having either tried to diversify with their own storefront or having tried running outside of Valve's framework and then switched to using it later (arguably out of laziness or a desire to cut corners (yes I'm an old Smite player still salty about the standalone client's death, how could ya tell?)). Heck, I could argue that TF2 is even more of a golden egg in the eyes of some of these developers, as the concept of a playerbase so dedicated to a single game as to have TWO separate mass protests come forward to petition the developers to come back and, rather than ask for fresh content, just get rid of the significant amount of fully botted aimbot cheaters in the game actively ruining the gameplay for those still around, all while the company's plan for the game has been upload cosmetics that players design and monetize them hardcore, it almost is the ur example of what these companies want these titles to become.
Companies which complain about Valve are always, ALWAYS worse than Valve. Valve's biggest actual issue is that they don't need such a large cut of the sales.
@smergthedargon8974 and even then, they're usually taking a fairly standard amount from what devs that are open about the back end, like Thor from Pirate Software, can tell us. Arguably less if you sell using Steam keys on other platforms, as Steam doesn't take a cut for game keys. In-game keys in CSGO and TF2 perhaps, but those aren't the topic (and were low hanging fruit for a joke, so I couldn't resist).
The irony is that, CS2, TF2, and DOTA 2 all have something that modern synthetic sensations lack, and it has to do with their shared background. CS2 is the sequel to CS1, a popular mod for Half-Life. TF2 is the sequel to TF1, a popular mod for Quake. DOTA 2 is the sequel to DOTA 1, a popular mod for Warcraft 3. These games were not random accidents or lightning-in-a-bottle, they were professionals and resources given to a proven concept with a pre-existing fanbase to hone it into perfection. The fact they all started as mods isn't the point, it's the fact that all three games were mature the day they were released, both mechanically and socially. The monetization they have today is itself a form of maturation of those games after they were released - DOTA 2 was the only one published as a free-to-play microtransaction-based product, and was also the last one of the three to come out. This is lost on a lot of gamers. To a pencil person who only understands expenses and revenues and secretly thinks all creative people are "fags", it might as well be written in ancient Greek. So we'll keep getting companies who try to get what Valve has with CS2, not realizing that CS2 plays by different rules because it's part of a legacy that's older than many of its players and is basically a cultural institution, and the same cannot be said about an underhyped billion-dollar impending flop designed by the accounting department and made by the best ex-Google webdevs money can buy.
@@smergthedargon8974 it is based on price, it's 30% normally, and if your game sells past certain breakpoints, it gets lower too. There is a $500 price tag for *releasing* the game on Steam, but it's more of a security deposit, and Steam will give it back, again, once you sell past a certain point. It's to incentivise not flooding their platform with games that may not sell or that are blatant asset flips (as readily).
I'm so glad you're back making this kind of content again, Frost. You were easily my favorite personality on SW, and your departing broke my heart, man. Truly. Keep doing what you're doing. Can't wait to see what else you drop.
I said this back during mass effect 3's launch, and i'll say it again. 9/10 pre-order bonuses are cut content. They got you FOMOing and paying an extra 10$ over sh*t that gets installed with the base game files. AAA investor trash has BEEN "70$" for nearly 10 years now, they just spend a few million on ad campaigns to make you think its an optional experience. Total Warhammer 3 is a perfect example. Every single person who buys that game, installs ogre kingdom files that cant be used, until you fork over another 12$. Pay to buy it. Pay to use it. The Capitalists Dream.
If politicans weren't evil boomers, we could have consumer regulations banning more order bonuses and other shitty monitzatiins, but there are no consuemr unions or orgs pushing the politicians t regulate this unrestrained shitty industry
You are mostly correct other than the $70 price point, I'm old enough to remember that SNES game were for the most part $60 (some were $50) and occasionally $70, that would be about 150 today, or 115 a decade ago when the dlc trend got bad, so games have always cost this much unfortunately, they should be cheaper by now, especially digital copies.
@@Kaijudomage AAA games and the 60$ price point was established after the console wars of the 2000s. Any higher and no one bought your game because the vast majority of people who buy your games are working class, any lower and the capital investors arnt happy with profit margins. And for a few years, devs competed to fit the most fulfilling experience for that 60$. Within the past 6-8 years AAA companies have been publicly touting the idea of selling their games for 70$ baseline, instead of the industry standard 60$. This is how you manipulate people. Everyone's BEEN paying 70$+ for the "baseline experience" for nearly 10+ years. Nearly all technology is going to inherently be more expensive at the beginning of its integration into the public market. On the other hand, raising the base price for a product while a company rakes in record profits while constantly firing dev teams right before release and atomizing their player experience for unironic "pay to buy it, pay to use it" ideology, is another topic of discussion entirely.
I agree to some extent, but I think it's really too nuanced to say with certainty that it's something like 9/10. I think anything bigger than some extra skins (maybe those one or two extra missions that you used to see) is absolutely, but with the way that game dev works, the artists are done long before the game itself is so you either reallocate them to a new project (if you have one going on) or you put them on making extra stuff while the programmers and QC are squashing bugs before sending the release version off. At that point, you can't add anything new to the game so all they can do is make some extra costumes and weapon skins or whatever. Live service games take that idea and turn it into a never ending cycle of churning out $15 skins because it's much more profitable than making a brand new game.
Warframe. Regular content updates. Has a premium currency, which you can make entirely with free to play methods, and is used for cosmetics only anyway. And they have been doing it for more than a decade now.
I mean, plat is hardly cosmetics-only since it functions as the main player-to-player currency, buys more inventory space, and is the primary way of skipping interminable amounts of grind for several additional features. You may be able to accomplish mostly everything without spending one red cent on plat, but Warframe is still guilty of platinum offering a solution for an invented problem: rare resource and mod grinds. And they added a *second* premium currency in the form of Royal Aya to buy Prime Access items. And you can't just dial in the amounts of currency if all you want is a handful of items that don't fit neatly within the bundled currency. Warframe is a fun game and all, but just about every criticism of other games' free-to-play models can be rightly applied to it.
@@TransientWitch And there's also the obvious point that besides the movement and combat, Warframe just... isn't a very well-designed game in a lot of aspects.
@@axeknight4653 For all the jank and neglected bits, I find the story/lore and fun I do have (alone or in a group) is worth sending them a bit of cash each year (somewhere between 40-100 USD). I also give to the charity events they work with every year on top of that because of the involvement of DE and them matching they do.
@@axeknight4653It is in many ways a game developers bucket list of features that in some ways are amazing but also equally awful. The amazing outweighs the awful though, just wish the new player experience was better at hooking people and the rest of the game being better at actually explaining itself. After every hiatus I kinda have to relearn the game because there is so much to do.
Part of the problem is that execs (who of course are often delusional in thinking they are creatives) need to answer to investors who now think they are creatives too.
8 years of development time and $400 million isn't bad for an investment. It's an awful lot to pour into one pull of a slot machine. The problem, to my mind, remains that most of these "live service games", by their nature- since, as mentioned, the players basically _are_ the product- are enormous time-sinks. If it's laughable to think players have infinite money to throw at a game, it's slap-your-brain-out-of-your-head dumb to think they have infinite time. No players, no product, no money, "investment" go bye-bye.
@@BestGirlsBiggestFanTo be fair the Original ps3 models while expensive are the best ps3's since they can play ps2 games. To cut cost they removed the ps2 parts from it so all subsequent ps3 models while cheaper are inferior. The ps5 pro has such a small amount of better features it doesn't warrant an extra $200.
@@BestGirlsBiggestFanTo be fair the original 2006-2007 ps3 models are superior than all later models since they can play ps2 games and have more external ports(4 usb ports and a SD card slot). To cost cut all subsequent models lost ps2 functionality and lost 2 usb ports and the SD card slot.
They _know_ why Concord failed, they were literally told why. They made it that way on purpose. They aren't admitting it because they know that admitting they were wrong is cancer for their career.
AND Now they're literally trying to just buy out one of the best remaining Non-Predatory studios ... with money they sure A.F. don't have, while everyone who is an actual gamer is screaming _"NOOOOO, Don't let them take our precious Patches!"_
Okay so first you didn't inform me personally about leaving The Escapist and now you don't inform me personally about leaving SW?! Wtf man I thought we were parasocial friends.
There are so many things rotten at the top of the video game making pyramid. You can tell. The lack of innovation. The chasing of buzzwords. The desire for the New Audience to monopolize (most recently dubbed the “modern audience”). And, most damning, the utter apathy for when the teams working under them act unprofessional in the extreme. Nobody who tells their customers “You’re evil for not buying/not liking our product” should have a job the next day. There’s a reason why I don’t buy almost any AAA games anymore. To put it simply, they aren’t worth it. Indie games may not have the graphics, and there are too many overused tropes and amateur design in them (“cartoony character, morbid situation” trope comes to mind), but it’s in the indies where the right person with the right vision can make the games we used to get all the time in the SNES, PS1, and PS2 eras.
Exactly this. While indies have there own over use stuff and the likes, there atleast more fun to talk about and more memorable then triple aaa game number 401.
It's even worse since they decided they were pushing the $70 price point. When it was $60, I already barely bought AAA. But sometimes, if it was REALLY good, I would go for it. The current stuff, at $10 more just for the entry price? Naw, UFO 50 is right over here for $25, thank you.
I'm pretty sure the hyper professionalizing of video game development is the problem. The entire point is that it's being run by money men now instead of creative passionate people.
I agree with this, but I will fight to have developers able to speak their mind about stuff like that, especially when it's something personal like their own audience. The devs are almost always the ones who are the most passionate about the project, so the last thing you want is to make them afraid to express their experience and wishes for the game, it makes the community less empathetic and more entitled, because no one is there to reassure them or disavow rumours and poor expectations. I'd also like to hear some examples of developers saying what you said. I think I know what you're referring to but I'm not completely sure.
@@AdumbroDeus That is how it is now, but that isn't actually the problem. The problem is these companies are being run by BAD money men. A company should be run by someone who knows how to distribute funds more than the groundwork jobs. The problem is these companies are being run by people who don't know and don't care about the work their company does. The problem isn't game's as business. Games take people and equipment to make, which costs money. Nothing wrong with that. The problem is the leadership being incompetent and immoral.
Letting the suits take over and be in charge just because they can show off how well they balanced the books and cut costs to turn a profit would be like having a suit be in charge of creating the menu for a restaurant: they'll skimp out on the cost for ingredients, either narrow down the selection to the most "efficient" dishes in terms of cost vs profit OR introduce a hundred plus menu items in order to cater to the broadest customer base possible that the kitchen staff must all learn to make, and when the business does fall don't be surprised to find the suit already planned out their exit and locked the door behind them.
There’s a nice irony in getting a nestle ad before the video. I’m about to hear about corpos ruining games after an advertisement for a company run by corpos ruining the world
Not to shill for google but that's why i finally gave in and threw them a few bucks for premium. Some had so many sponsers icwas getting ads every 30 seconds
One thing you can tell how is how telling corpos are pretty out of tounch they are is the stories are the "toxic positive" mentality stories you heard. Lithe fact that any bad news or any complains is seen as something as always toxic. This even extended with the PR as some of developers response to the concerns as "lower haters".
I'm playing Planetside 2 these days, the most modern (2012) MMO-FPS that is still around, and while the paid benefits are pretty standard for the most part like: priority queue, more loadout slots, skipping the grind... there's also pay2win voice packs that make it difficult to tell your allegiance, p2w helmets that hide more skin, p2w camos that blend in better with a specific continent... It's probably not significant enough for a video, it's just what I know about. There's also a turbulent history to who owns the game, develops the game and owns the IP with holding companies, conglomerates, restructuring, subcontracting and all that stuff over the more than 12 years the game existed. At one point it was even used for money laundering for the Russian government... allegedly. They also just brought on a guy named Wrel who made content for the game and asked them: Can I save the game? And they were like: Yeah sure, lmao you can try. And then he did save the game considering it's still around.
Ever notice though how most of the successful battle royal live service games had a base to build on? Fortnite had save the world, cod war zone had the cod systems, apex had titanfall engine and guns and style to an extent, and even pubg was in a way very similar to a mil sim. Basically a battle royal needs an actual fun and engaging gameplay systems before the 99 players can be added
13:00 That sounds like an interesting idea. I don't play live-service games, so hearing somebody else talk about them - and with a somewhat unusal perspective at that - should be interesting.
Which is not to say that pushing ideology, any ideology, can't lead to a worse product. Thing is that in most cases where an ideology is is pushed, specially in a AAA game, it's because of corporate insistence so that they can appeal to certain audiences, not because of genuine authorial intent.
Some people are definitely taking away the wrong lessons and focusing on the "woke" "DEI" bogeyman to explain why something like Concord fails in order to justify their dismissal of people that are different from them. "Unmitigated corporate greed is fine, as long as there's no pronouns!" shouts the terminally online Culture Warrior.
@@RolandTHX Anti "Woke" and "DEI" is just the 'politically correct' version of racism, sexism, transphobia in online spaces. Many of them are the same people who would be dropping slurs in forums and comment sections in the past, and still do in places where they feel safe doing so.
Another great Frosty boy video. And thanks for properly critiquing Concord without using the same old internet drivel. Its very tiring to try and talk about Concord without certain people butting in screeching obscenities about "wokeness."
The part about keeping costs low feels half-true. It makes intuitive sense not to overspend, but I’ve heard it said that execs literally believe that if spending $20,000,000 on a game sells you 1 million copies, spending $200,000,000 should help it sell 10 million. Would explain how budgets have ballooned recently.
For dodgey economies that you mentioned at the end of the video. How do you feel about how Roblox operates? Publisher gets rights to anything produced, the players make the content, extra monetization is sprinkled in. Similar vein to what you discussed here, but you could pick it apart.
You know one game I would absolutely go after for this, that has gotten much adulation from the players is Warhammer 40k Space Marine 2. The devs made a fantastic but flawed game that they were clearly passionate about, but it is also very bare bones content wise (few repetitive missions, and not many weapons, and a lot of grind), and really greedy when you look at the versions of the game sold and how the DLC got carved off for extra greed (particularly the Ultramarines champion pack), and even charging a fair bit extra if you wanted to get the season pass later over the gold edition (which costs just as much as the ultra edition). It clearly has Focus Entertainments greedy paws all over it.
Good stuff Frost, missed Cold Take. I wouldn't mind a look at World of Warcraft's monetizaiton, as far as subscription-based experiences go it is still king, but I'd always wondered if it is as good a deal now when there are plenty of subscriptions for games in general that could offer a lot of bang for one's buck. I don't know why but second guessing about paying the subscription for it now is something I have started doing more often than I used to in the past, despite unlike my teenage years having more disposable income to afford it.
Yeah, I played WoW since I was pretty young, when I could spend the money. I got older and couldn't really justify it anymore, with the amount of other great games for cheaper. "Recently", I rejoined for the Dragonflight expansion, which was amazing (I have no idea what the online reaction to it was, I enjoyed it), but soon my 6 months were up and it was done. The price has always been my sticking point for a game which I would otherwise really enjoy.
It's an awful deal You still need to buy each expansion They added loot boxes and other monetizatiin to the game, mounts that coats as much as expansions They added paid level up skips They added the WOW token, basically pay real money to get gold ingame, ruining the ingame economy. And they added the same greed to wow classic so you can't escape it and all private servers are insta banned. You're addicted and you're fearing withdrawal and fear of missing out, but listen to the millions of people players who left who all said the same thing: "I feel happy now, no longer having to play a game that feels more like a chorse and 9 to 5 job. Now I can actually play stuff that I find fun"
@@wile123456 I mean, I paid for the latest expansion and subscription and am playing it now and I don't feel scammed and am rather enjoying myself. I bought DD2 and I felt scammed. The debate here is not if WoW is good (it is pretty great, especially after adding options for solo players to progress on equal grounds, and as a guy working an 8-5 that often turns into 8-6 being able to play for an hour and still get somewhere feels great), but rather if there are diminishing returns to paying for it continuously at an objective rate.
New Favourite Channel to bookmark and regularly check as to avoid being dependent on lying algorithms! Wonderful breakdown of this side of the industry's failure. Looking forward to that part 2...!
The Age of Wonders series has been pretty good. They know what their audience likes and and have a couple years of good dlc support after, before going fully onto the next game. One of the few series worth getting the season passes for if its your cup of tea.
It's great to see you posting again! I've always appreciated your cold takes. I consider you one of the few true journalists out their for the gaming industry. I look forward to more videos and watching your future success.
On the one hand, nothing he's saying is new. Sterling was already calling this shit out around the time Anita Sarkeesian started her first video ever, and a multitude of individuals who more than likely are and were exclusively focused on their own money-first lifestyles derided every single word to come out of the mouths of those who said the industry was going to be in an unsustainable loop of chasing after profit at the expense of good games. But on the other hand, a short, digestible explanation of how Corpo Suits are a cancer upon the Games Industry is a nice little tool to have in the back pocket when explaining to people how Corpo Suits are a cancer upon the wider economy and upon society as a whole.
I did hear that the attempt to revive the game *did* have issues with polish and asking for more money from players that the playerbase was not on board with. Dunno what's happened with it since - it looked cool when I saw it on a Shammy video.
Great job 👍 Thumbnail could use a bit of work though, I didn't register that it was a new Cold Take video when I scrolled past it at first. Didn't even notice the big black and white text until my brain had decoded that the orange man was from Concord. :p
Glad to hear you again. It will be a treat, I'm sure, to have more Cold Takes to enjoy. It might not be particularly juicy, but the Final Fantasy 14 crowd has always harped on what is good monetization vs bad monetization. There are small $2 cosmetic items and then there are $42 multi-player mounts. Then there is the argument that if you purchase an item, should it made available to every avatar on your account or just a single avatar. The current structure is that any item you purchase is for just a single avatar and that if you want it for multiple avatars, you will have to purchase multiple copies.
He's made 3 videos since going independent lol. 2 of which are all about his vendetta against SW. I do not like second wind or any of the creators on that channel, but Frost has proven himself to not be much better than them. In fact he has proven himself to be a petty child that threw a public tantrum and dragged all of his former friends through the mud in the most mean-spirited and unprofessional way possible.
theres something to be said about how so many games studios feel like the only way foreward is to effectively capture someone elses audience, not realizing what a rediculous uphill battle that is. they see valve games getting big success and they think they cant do the same by making the same type of game, not accounting for how long term and slow the development and continued development of those games really was.
I think it's also that these companies can burn BILLIONS and it end up being a rounding error. When you can spend 800000000 on a failure and not suffer for it, spending that 8 hundred million isn't a risk. More so when you have the console kiddies on "lock" the way Sony does.
@@ichijofestival2576 Instead of making a funny comment at your expense, what exactly qualifies as adult? Video games are the biggest entertainment industry in the world, you basically just insulted someone for watching TV. Like, do you only read books?
@@Darius_Vi I mean, not everyone is on board with all the "Heil Hitler!"-ing thrown around the PC sphere. Not to mention gaming was thrown into disarray partially due to inflated (and fragile egos), cough cough akira torimaggot cough...
The FPS Genre in the past 10 years: Unmitigated failures left and right, predatory mechanics so bad Belgium banned it. The Strategy-Simulation Genre in the past 10 years: Genre defining titles like Anno 1800 and Workers and Resources SR, Cleverly written and executed poli games like Tropico 5, The best balanced management games the genre has ever seen like Project Highrise, Frostpunk 1+2. I could just go on and on and on... SERIOUSLY, if you ignore Violent Video Games completely and zoom in on the PC Gaming sphere then the Video Games Industry is at a better place than EVER before!! I feel so crazy when people say that "games arent fun anymore". No man the games YOU PLAY arent funy anymore😭😭
I KNEW I heard your voice before! Thank you, I wasn't losing my mind! Vaporum! Oh, I completely forgot about that game--it wasn't bad or anything, but I forgot about it after finishing it! Anyway, great video, and you put into words what I've been seeing, where indies and double-A are flourishing, while triple-A chases audiences that either engaged elsewhere (sunk-cost fallacy is strong) or audiences that, while they exist, are only a small minority. If anything big happens, it's going to come out of the indie or double-A scene, and I think most gamers know that nowadays. I am reminded however of the MMO boom of the mid-2000's--anyone else remember that? Where every company was pushing out a new MMO every few weeks or months, and a lot of them were coming from Asian territories? Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to comment on the quality of them, but a lot of them were genuinely quick cash grabs. A lot of them still exist to this day, with near non-existent player-bases, but still have functioning cash shops. Genuinely fascinating to see, since while that is the case, I don't think we're going to have nearly as many live-service games in the coming years. This has been a problem with triple-A for a long while now, where they keep looking for the next "big score" and ignore how the AA and indie scene does it. Instead of releasing quality projects, they declare that single-player or smaller-scale gaming is dead, and start rushing towards the next potential gold-mine, despite the fact that the vein they're eyeing out already has twenty or thirty others mining it hard, already. Things will change, I do believe that, as things are beginning to come to a head. The pendulum is shifting ever so slowly, but I do believe these titans of the industry are going to fall, one by one. Some of them will adapt and survive, transforming into something new, but a lot of them are going to collapse under their own weight. The thing that I have to tell people about this: do not be afraid of it. Yes, a studio that puts out your favorite game series might die, but multiple other studios will spring up in their place, prepared to fill the void that they left. It's a time of change and upheaval, and it is completely normal throughout human history and even the natural world. That's my take on it, at any rate, and it may not reflect your own. Though I am too much of a coward to reply to any comments, I do welcome discourse as it's the only way to truly share ideas among others. Anyway, I'm going to call it here; I conclude as usual with my standard, "I wish you all well and that you may have a pleasant day" in the hopes of spreading just the tiniest bit of positivity, especially after having read through such a lengthy and serious (mostly) post. Thank you for reading this far, and thank you to even those who just jumped to the bottom; I appreciate the time. Cheers, everyone. (ALSO WHY DO I KEEP PLAYING IDLE GAMES, SERIOUSLY?! GAHHHHH!)
I wonder how the time gate in war frame measures up. For people with schedules,being told you can get the rewards for playing and keep playing in 6-12 hours seemed untenable. Glad you to have you back in the fold ace.
I've been playing WarFrame for about 8 years and I've always seen the time gates as a "touch grass meter". When you've filled up your meter, time to turn it off and go do something else. I think it might make new players mad, but it keeps the older players from burning out.
As a player of Warframe help me understand what you mean by this: "For people with schedules,being told you can get the rewards for playing and keep playing in 6-12 hours seemed untenable." Are you talking about daily login rewards or things like how long it takes the forge to build a frame?
Thank you, for striking out into the world and opening our eyes. Looking forward to a lot of stuff I may like seeing. Very consistent track record so far.
@@Emeraldblades "gross profit is your revenue without subtracting your manufacturing or production expenses, while net profit is your gross profit minus the cost of all business operations and non-operations. " Both are the wrong words to use though >.> The game didn't make any profit, it took a loss, a really large one at that.
All those money went into making the cinematics, aside from the character design, to look great. The lighting, the texture, the movement, they’re high quality cinematics. The characters still look like something a first year art student would make tho
The characters are definitely a bit bland, but there were a few that stood out as interesting. The problem is that we don't see what anyone else looks like and that means we don't get any sense of the world or its cultures. If it was a game set outside of empty arenas the action took place in populated areas where it was explicitly shown that the characters were from different cultures a lot of them could work. They're awful for a hero shooter, but for an RPG party in a game with a lot of focus on talking to people (and more distinct personalities for the characters themselves) I reckon they'd come across much better. They don't have any internal purpose or clearly defined relationships with one another, so we perceive them merely as shallow husks that characters could have been inserted into. These characters don't make sense as individuals because they don't exist as part of a group. Who are these people, what do they want, where have they come from? None of that is clear and I do genuinely think that they could be made compelling if they were willing to make them into a collective of rag tag misfits on a grand quest instead of just shooting at each other because they're assigned to either the blue or red team and told to go at it. The cgi trailers are clearly trying to frame them as a scrappy team of outsiders whose personalities create internal conflicts, but the game is just set in arenas where none of that is relevant and the potential that could have been there is wasted.
I'd love to see your take on Neopets. It's not necessarily bad or good in my opinion, but in terms of an economy and in microtransactions it's a variable time capsule of gaming going back to the days of flash games. It honestly may run the gambit on every strategy in some small way for every major development in gaming monetization.
Honestly, spotlighting Neopets as 'patient zero' (or a pretty close cousin) in terms of the way video games are monetized nowadays would be very interesting!
Honestly kinda happy to see cold take on its own channel, I enjoyed yatzee and cold take on second wind but subscribing to the channel just filled my subscription box with a ton of stuff I couldnt care less about. Throwing everything onto one big channel just makes it hard to actually follow the stuff you want
Earlier i would say that these observations were pretty obvious, like introducing suits to a creative field would devoid the industry of its creativity, but after working in a steel producing company myself, this video hits harder than ever
Isn’t that the opposite problem, that people keep finding ways to spend less money on content good enough to hold the attention of the mindless populace?
Loved the video. Dodgy monetization practices? Oh buddy, check out Star Trek Fleet Command. It's nothing new but considering their real target demographic (see: star trek fans, not gamers) they're getting away with a bunch of shit
Norway's Consumer Council is spearheading an initiative to ban in game currencies and asking for a law to demand game makers to put the prices of skins, bps, etc in euros and to allow consumers to buy the exact amount of money a skin costs in game, they have redacted a pretty detailed and well reasoned document on the topic that's worth a look.
Now that sounds like something worth keeping an eye on
Man, I think I need to move. Internationally.
The entire EU needs a law like that it won't happen with the parliament being majority conservative and fascist, and the leadera of the council being neo-liberal/Proto-fascist.
@@wile123456 The don't work for the continent they suppose to represent, actively working to collapse a specific country in the hope it drags the rest of the continent down economically.
@@wile123456I fear you are right.
"The goal ... was to take all the fun out of making video games." I'm lacking the words to describe what I think of Kotick.
Yeah, I really appreciate a good dysphemism, but he definitely landed too close to what people actually think of him there for it to work.
I have a few easy phrases:
"Shitheel"
"Cun*/Skeleton Warriors/*"
"Feculent Scum"
"Wannabe Oligarch"
"Sexual Predator"
"Parasite"
Personally, I do have the words to describe what I think of Kotick. But if I voice my thoughts, I would commit a crime in most civilized countries on the planet.
I have all the words, but they would get my account banned from every website on the internet outside of 4chan
I've called him many words over the years in the WoW forums and I can go on for eternity. That is how vile of a cretin I think he is.
Society should shun these type of people.
Live service is a golden goose that executives refuse to believe they can't create intentionally. They see super successful live service games, and they don't see a company that caught lightning in a bottle, they see an alchemical formula. Something that they just have to follow to produce endless gold. If you'll pardon the tortured mixed metaphor.
That's what gets me. Sure, the potential profits are huge, but so are the risks, and while the executives may have golden parachutes, the people who hire them don't. So why do they keep letting themselves get burned? Are the money men at the top that incompetent?
@@jamesb3497 Short answer, yes. Business majors have long been where fools with few wits and fewer plans go to when they're already in the college debt-pit, and just want something they can a) achieve despite being one of the dimmer bulbs in the drawer, and b) will make them money enough to hopefully pay back these debts, something that the arts can't really promise. Thus you get a bunch of stooges with vague degrees that put them on track to middle and upper management, where they blindly make changes, say yes to everything their bosses say, and repeat phrases and buzzwords they never bothered learning the meanings of. They excuse their existence on the company paycheck every week by making promises they neither understand nor *have* to understand, so long as there are lackeys below them to blame the failings on. They also make excellent transmitters, as they parrot the orders of the higher-up executives with remarkable efficiency, as they lack the critical thinking or willful thought that would make them anything more than a mouthpiece of those above them; useful if you have competent higher-ups, but those are almost a unicorn in and of themselves.
Because the executives are gamblers. They got rich selling stocks which is just a non-taboo casino because stock prices have nothing to do with real world value created by companies, only hype.
When you're on top of our capitalist society you are no longer human, you are an entitled social demon who only cares about yourself and making more money, despite you already having all the luxury you can need.
It's capitalism working as intended. The real people to blame are politicians who passed neoliberal laws and refused to regulate the tech sector in the 80's when it was starting to grow. With proper regulations and consumer protections like every other older market has to some degree, it wouldn't be such a huge problems.
Developers having a unioj like actors do for example would also help a lot.
Unless a studio and publisher is a worker democracy that holds elections for leadership and keeps their managers in check, abuse will keep happening. Sometimes it's incompetence, sometimes the intern gets r*ped. It's just how the system works under capitalism, aka dictatorship in the private sector.
@@wile123456 "Because the executives are gamblers." really sums it up all by itself. Making a live service is exactly like putting your money in a slot machine. Some people win the jackpot and get back a _lot_ more than they paid in, but for every big winner, there's a lot more people who lose, and even most of the ones who don't are lucky to break even.
(Edit) Also a lot like a slot machine, if someone recently won the jackpot, then you have far less of a shot of winning big.
@@KefkeWrenthe worst part is the "money" they are betting is the company itself.
When your industry is run by the pencil pushers lead poisoning is always the eventual result.
No joke.
Symptoms include:
Weight loss (lay-offs)
Constipation (Takes a while to get your sh!t released)
Short term memory loss (Making the same games over and over even though they usually fail)
Muscle weakness (Too weak to pull themselves out of a failing cycle)
Loss of coordination (Creatives and money people working toward different ends)
Loss of sleep (Bet some Sony execs lost a little sleep over their failed game)
Oddly enough most pencils nowadays just use graphite.
The goal of a company is to make money. Any company that gets big enough exists to continue it's own existence. Businesses exist to make money.
Put all that together and it's a damn miracle that art gets made at all.
Pray your favorite devs stay small, because the bigger they get, they less they care about the art form.
@@NaturesFlame That's what they keep screwing up. A business doesn't make money without producing a product (tangible or otherwise) that people want to buy or utilize. Making money can't exist by itself in a vacuum, and yet they keep trying.
@@Varmint260 They don't have to produce anything as long as they can control all the methods of consumption. They can resell old stuff til the heat death of the universe. Any time a small player starts looking promising, they just buy them up and kill them. Its the playbook of Google and Amazon, they buy and kill startups all the time.
This is not a problem that will just "go away". If you're waiting for the giants to fail, you'll be old and grey. Its a systemic problem that won't go away unless the system itself changes.
Loss of sleep (hundreds of devs)
The streets ain't what they used to be toots, Frosty is back, and as alway's, he's the bees knees.
Can someone fill me in why I haven't seen ant Cold Takes on Second Wind as of late? Did Frosty leave them?
@@mr.boneking8970 There's a lot happening around Second Wind. If you have the time or inclination, you can delve deep into it. I'm in no position to talk about it, but Nick Calandra has been doing some shady stuff.
@@mr.boneking8970 tldr: Frost left over disagreements on how to run things. This is the most neutral way to put it.
The longer story is about how manipulative the Second Wind's leaders were revealed to be, how they sabotaged themselves, and much juicier info about their shadier dealings in the past, mostly focused on Nick Calandra. It was quite the plot twist to find out that the whole narrative of "Second Wind escaping out of touch executives with unreasonable expectations" was a lie, as Nick was the one who set the expectations to guarantee him a larger paycheck, failed to deliver, and pit the higher ups and the creative up against each other to dodge blame. I recommend watching Frost's previous two videos on the topic. He backs up his accusations with evidence.
The 'success' of Destiny and Star Citizen has been nothing but a complete curse on the industry. Bungie has presented their increasingly anti-consumer anti-art model of turning their games into 'content generation' as a perpetual money machine, hiding the true costs from both their customers and apparently their own corporate overlords. Justin Truman trumpeted the 'velocity over quality' model at GDC when at the same time Bungie already knew that despite being a 'successful' operation for 8 years, Lightfall had flopped so hard it had put the entire game in severe jeopardy and put Bungie at the brink of ruin.
The dark truth is Star Citizen only survives because everyone in the industry (both executives and devs) thinks 'if Chris Roberts can do this, why can't we?"
I know people who are actually addicted to Destiny, and it really hurts to watch. I'm talking, "I literally cannot dedicate time to any other entertainment because of Destiny" addicted. I'm glad they're having (perceived) fun, but from the outside-looking-in, it's really depressing to see how little their die-hard loyalty is respected by the devs.
"I sure wish I had a game that got lots of new content and rewarded me for the time I spent!"
*The duplicitous monkey's paw:*
I just can't believe execs get so many second chances; if they were as frightened of failure as they are greedy for lottery-win success, they'd be pushing to make boring, conservative games like they did 20 years ago, but something seems to have taken all the fear out of them and they've just started running around with torches setting things on fire.
@@AppleBiscuitsThis is why I love Deep Rock Galactic.
I got recommended several videos showing off Squadron 42's cutscenes that I thought it was a released game, which suprised me considering how it's connected to Star Citizen, the forever in development game. Then after minimal digging I realized it was all just a 1 hour 'gameplay' reveal that was 40 minutes of cutscenes and 20 minutes of no doubt pre-rendered gameplay (because it's always pre-rendered!). What's worse is all the videos dickriding this animated movie that it's genuinely difficult to find any information on what the game is actually like to play. Or what it *will* be like to play, since it's not even out yet.
Corpo mentality on trend chasing reminds me of working with Advertisment in Brazil: Clients and Higher Ups want "inovation", so creatives come up with new ideas for a campaign and they refuse. Then, that Ned Flanders Golden Retriever guy comes up with an "idea" of copying something from a foreign campaing, usually something from US, UK or some fancy rich country in Europe and gets aproved an even called an "Inovator".
These people don't know what inovation is because they're too averse to risk (unless the workers take all the consequences of the risk.)
"corpo mentality" is just capitalism that's all
Ive worked under these kinds of people too. For them innovation is just an aesthetic and a buzzword, not an actual goal. Real innovation requires bravery and a clarity of vision, something soulless money men will never have. They want sure bets draped in the illusion of creativity, which mostly means copying the surface -level elements of already successful projects. Mediocrity is the best they can ever hope to achieve.
@@numberonedad It's not just any capitalism, it's risk-averse, play-it-safe, commodity capitalism, as opposed to entrepreneurial, innovative, risk-tasking capitalism. It's basically what happens when middle managers take over the boardroom but keep their middle management habits.
@@hailexiao2770 actually it's over-financialized, short-term profit capitalism, which is just capitalism. it's basically what happens when the profit motive is all there is.
blaming the "middle managers" is missing the point - it's the very top that are responsible, as all the journalism has borne out.
Brazil is having a moment. I have good friend who lives in the northeast. It seems like Bolsonaro is imitating our own right wing dictator wannabe in Trump and predatory practices like privatizing public utilities on the table. Fortunately seems like there were some losses but also some big wins in the recent elections, but certainly the vultures are circling. Hopefully Brazil can hold them off.
So basically, publishers keep throwing away money on absurdly expensive and polished but bland designed-by-committee live service games because the suits in charge all desperately want to own the next League of Legends or Counterstrike.
That explains so much of what's wrong with this industry.
and these idiots don't see anything beyond how much those things cost to capitalize vs what revenue they brought in, because they don't understand games or the history of the industry they purport to lead (or much of anything, really. most of these guys seems like utterly disconnected morons with wealthy parents)
you couldn't have LoL without DotA, and DotA was just a custom map made in Warcraft 3. zero revenue at all. fun has to come first, and that's not possible if your first instinct is to look at a balance sheet (which isn't to say it's not important to look at balance sheets, just that if you make those things your primary concern they are quickly going to be covered in red ink)
CS:GO grew out of CS which had become a platform for player creativity, hence its popularity. that's how team fortress first got made - it was a CS mod
understanding context like that is incredibly fundamental, imho, to being able to succeed as a product manufacturer in the video game industry
the industry's big success stories tend to come from either non-commercial products or from people pushing the boundaries of what a video game even is. products that just try to fit within already existing and populated spaces, regardless of their quality or the amount of effort that went into them, almost always fail (look at the huge number of FPS games trying to fit into the hypothetical space created by Doom, or the amount of RTS games that tried to fit into the hypothetical space created by Starcraft)
Why would Concord be the next anything?
@@shoopoop21why would the other *12* live service games Sony was promising for 2026 be anything?
It's unimaginable that they could be so stupid, but evidently they are
They're also incredibly risk-averse, so they refuse to try anything that hasn't already been proven to work. That's why even the gameplay of all these failed live service games feels bland.
It’s also the lack of unions and the fact it’s not a creator lead industry like in Hollywood.
One thing that I think Yahtzee brought up ~2 years ago is that there are only so many live-service players to go around. Even then and especially now it’s not about finding a player base, but attracting existing ones. But with so many live-services, players can only stay with so many. I’m not going to play a game if it’s the third game this year that asks I spend every afternoon playing it.
Not only that, but the players who play live service a lot, who spend money on them? They may not be ready to accept it yet, but their enjoyment of the genre is being gradually eroded from overexposure. It's like if you spend a whole year playing nothing, or almost nothing, other than World of Warcraft. It's a pretty good MMO, there's a lot of options within it, but it's not the only game in the world and some part of you will always remember that and think "Man, I really ought to play some Boneraiser Minions again one of these days!" or "I should replay those Uncharted games" or whatever you used to like.
The human brain, or perhaps rather the gamer brain, is not built to play just one type of game all the time, let alone one specific game. People's tastes may vary, sure, but if you eat the most delicious thing in the world for every meal, it will lose all appeal by the end of the third day or so. Even the players who _have_ flocked to the flashy hero-role competitive-shooty live service _thing_ genre, and who've spent a lot of money on cosmetics in it, are going to hit their limit at some point, where they go "This is dumb. I'm not doing this for the rest of my life. I'm gonna go outside, or watch some Netflix or something. Maybe I could learn to play an instrument! Read a book, learn a language. At one point these games were fun, but at this point they have stopped being fun. Time for the next thing."
All of which makes it even more ridiculous that the decision-makers just keep piling on the demands for more of the same slop, the same overexposed, market-oversaturated slop, trying to round up a lovely herd of cattle who are one third already slaughtered, one third jumped the fence and escaped, and one third under heavy guard by twitchy cowboys with machine guns who worker hard to keep these cattle and sure as hell aren't going to give 'em up without a fight. That herd's not available, corpos. It's barely even a herd any more. It was a fun opportunity for the people who were there in time, and that time is now well behind us.
Same thing with wow years ago, with the MMO craze on game after game came out only to be devoured whole by wow.
I'm still waiting for the other half of that "The Open World is Dead" video to come true.
"Someone takes a risk, kicks the 100 million dollar project in the head and breaks it down into four 25 million dollar projects with dedicated teams and more focused design principles and it makes absolute gob loads of cash. A new wave of risk taking artistry at the highest levels. a Stop to the constant push for new graphics hardware. A new age of prosperity for the human race."
The sooner these corpo scumbags get reasonable ideas of a return on investment again, the sooner gaming can start to heal. Saying that though, Indies are still doing alright, so maybe Corpo's failure is for the better.
Yeah, Jim Sterling has also been banging that drum for years now.
@@hazukichanx408I think this is the perfect analogy, you got it spot on. Just a new wave of industrialists who don't know the concept of overharvesting.
To be honest, I've wondered if the attitudes in the industry isn't just money based, but power based: not wanting to concede that someone else might have a better idea. Doubling down on live service games after Suicide Squad is one example, but another could be the Silent Hills debacle.
If you don't remember, Konami was going to make a Silent Hill game helmed by Hideo Kojima, directed by Guillermo Del Toro, and starring Norman Reedus. You don't have to be a math major to tell this would sell like crazy. Despite fans clamoring for it, Konami couldn't let their feud with Kojima slide and cancelled the project. Their response to fans was, "Yeah, but settle down. We've got other games coming."
I can't think of any reason besides pulling a power move to having a guaranteed product that customers were sure to buy, only to turn away all the possible money just to snub one guy.
Good theory. I lean towards your idea. Harder to prove and source though
as a yugioh player, FUCK KONAMI. From the bottom of my heart.
Yes, yes, but you forget... Kojima is a hack, and his idea probably sucked.
It's no wonder that Kojima then included Del Toro and Reedus into a little game called Death Stranding. While Kojima is only better off being independent, I can't help but wonder what the Konami execs are thinking now that Death Stranding 2 hype is winding up.
@@Rothbart24 They're probably not thinking anything because because they're just like their Pachinko machine: very few moving parts required to make roughly the same money off of some hard coping Salary-men and Boomers
Please shine a light on Deep Rock Galactic. It is life service how it's supposed to be.
I second this. Probably the best modern example of a technically live service game.
You mean Cooperative. Instead completive.
Due to my personality, I realized that competitive games can tend to push my buttons and heavily negatively affect my mentality. But I love some good co-op games. Payday 2 used to be my big one, and then DRG ended up being my big time sink for a good while. It really feels like they respect the players' time and if you don't get everything... that's okay.
Yup, and it keeps getting better.
Previously time limited season passes are now freely selectable, meaning FOMO is gone.
Seasonal holiday events have gameplay for getting all previous event rewards so there's no FOMO for if you can't play the event this year.
And the only monetisation is cosmetic packs that are cheap, unique and ram packed full of content. There's even a Founder's Bundle that lets you get all cosmetic packs, including future ones with an increased discount.
Compared to predatory, FOMO ridden monetisation where I almost never spend money on them. Meanwhile I not only have every DRG DLC but I buy them on launch day.
Because they're a good value proposition and the devs respect a player's time and money.
Why would I spend £15 on a The Finals Premium Pass for the chance to unlock items by excessively grinding the fun out of the game before an arbitrarily artificial deadline, when I can pay £7 to DRG for the same amount of cosmetics that I get access to immediately and a battle pass I can tip away at to my own pace.
Another weird one is Borderlands 3's Vault Card DLCs as part of their Director's Cut DLCs. They're basically Battle Passes but with no FOMO and you can choose what reward you want so no need to grind through filler to get to the good stuff.
ROCK AND STONE!
Something I've been saying a lot lately:
Games used to be made by people who just wanted to make a fun game,
and it showed.
Games these days are produced by people chasing ALL of the money,
and it shows.
In essence a lot of companies aren't so much interested in making games but rather setting up "revenue streams".
Games are still being made by people who wants to make fun experiences, you have to stop looking only at big studios, indie gaming is where the good stuff is, that's where you find passion and love for the medium, and some of the best games of the last few years have been made by these tiny studios or even single individuals.
Triple A gaming is dying due to corporate greed, but the silver lining is that indie gaming is as strong as ever and we will never stop getting good games.
@@mango6940 A fair point, in fact, I'm playing an indie game as i write this ^^.
(Space haven, by Bug Byte)
Almost every big game makes me depressed because it's all nonsense like this, but then I went on itch io and got reccomended more indies on Steam and man... Games are good, actually. And there are people out there who still like to make them!
The problem is that there's almost nothing left in the AAA fields that's worthwhile. That horse is dead and the bean counters want us to pay $80 to purchase a stick and an additional $19.99 for every swing as we beat it for them. But there's much more to do and look at than their slop. It's just easy to forget that because they pay so much in advertising to have it shoved in our faces...
Disagree. Devs care about fun then, and do now too.
The difference is back then making a fun game was the path to profit, as game design was an emerging field.
Now making an exploitative game is the path to profit, as game design is better understood and companies know how to maximise profit.
**profit** streams actually, gross revenue is unsustainable for stocks, you need to generate increasing profit margins every quarter to satisfy investors. And if that sounds insanity and completely unobtainable in the long term, the reason is because that is exactly what it is, but they don't care.
Proof that Cold Take was always 100% Frost, no matter under which flag you flew, its still all you.
Glad you’re doing this independently now.
What's the story there? I was just suggested this channel today, via this video.
Same for when he used to be under second wind who had a terrible middle manager who were both malicious and incompetent.
Or Escapist.
@@atimholt Allegedly, Nick Calandra - who joined The Escapist at a time when it was struggling, and then went on to found Second Wind together with people who were laid off alongside him or who quit at that time - is not being honest about a lot of things. Allegations include lying to his bosses at Gamurs or whoever bought Escapist, setting unrealistic targets to justify a pay raise for himself, which supposedly led to his firing. Also exploiting indie devs after pretending to be their ally.
Frost's done a few pretty in-depth videos on the topic with what appears to be fairly compelling evidence. The rest of Second Wind responded with, more or less, "We've heard what you're saying, and we don't agree that it is true" or something to that effect. Whether this is because there is no problem at all, or because at this point they're too exhausted to go through more drama and upheaval by getting rid of their managery money guy or whatever role he fills there, is kind of up for debate. At least, that's how I understand it.
@@hazukichanx408 I don't see where the "he's independent now" part comes in though. You just stated he reported on something.
These failures are similar to the recent failures of blockbuster movies. It's a bizarre way to approach entertainment. Contrast the Blumhouse model with, for example, Sony Pictures. Sony keeps throwing $150-$250 million budgets at movies that underperform, and they lose money. Blumhouse makes a dozen movies for $2 million each, all of them make a little money, and a couple of them hit and make $100 million. But making $100 million profit on a $2 million investment isn't good enough - these companies want to land the $1 billion hit, so they keep dumping $200 million into movies, but only one in ten of those films is going to make $1 billion, while *all* the $2 million films make a profit.
Same with games. Develop a bunch of smaller scale games for $20 million and you probably won't lose money on any of them, you can give the developers more flexibility and freedom from corporate meddling, and a couple of them will probably hit and make $100 million+
But again, it's not enough to just make money. You have to make ALL the money.
They already own about 80% of all money, a greedy minority hoarding it all and at a costly price for the rest of us I most add.
It's ironic, really. They'd much prefer to keep going for 2M movies into 100M profit, but it doesn't work for their stupid timescale, because they have billions to invest and it's a waste to not be profitting with all of it, and they just lack the personnel/space to make a thousand 2M movies at the same time.
What really should put things in perspective is that a 400M dud is barely registering on their sensors, it's just chump money.
Putting it this way, they sound like gambling addicts. Except unlike most gambling addicts they have the blessing of using someone else's money: the company's.
Makes a lot of sense under these lens. They don't know what fun is so they make up for it with the thrill of gambling and whatever silly iddy diddy things they spend their bonus pay on.
@@Green.n.PurpleThat's capitalism in decline for you. Gambling addicts run the show on other people's dime.
I feel like I'm smoking imported cigarettes and drinking middle shelf whiskey while looking over a detective file when I watch your videos. Perfect. I love this.
I hit a wall with 'modern gaming'. I have struggled to engage with any AAA games in the last few years and I thought it was because I'd passed 40 and just no longer enjoying games as much, which was sad as I had been into gaming since I was very young, playing my dad's Atari level of young.
Then something clicked. It started with getting a Steam Deck (a decent PC is out of my price range) and starting to play games I enjoyed in the past, enjoying them again even though they are showing their age. Then I randomly started a new Witcher 3 playthrough on console and have been really enjoying that.
All this rambling leads me to a point- I haven't fell out of love with gaming, it's this predatory behavior from those big companys, pushing loot boxes, season passes and live service models. I became jaded to all games because all I saw were poor products looking to take all the money they can. Having taken a step back from soulless cash grabs, I have been reminded of the simple joy games have given me. Not a remaster or legacy game from a long running series, mostly looking to cash in on nostalgia, just games made by passionate developers who cared about the art they made. You can feel the care and attention put in before so many middle managers got involved, turning everything into deadlines and making milking machines.
Maybe gaming has changed for good. Maybe I have been pushed out by games which aren't aimed at me. I don't care anymore. I've rediscovered the joy in gaming and I hope others can too.
Remember the last game that you genuinely enjoyed? Go back to it and give it another playthrough. It's the last thing the suits want you to do (there's no money in playing old games) and it might be the best thing you've done, for both your love of the hobby and the industry at large
Gaming has outgrown us. It's certainly not for kids these days with all the gender and political messaging, so I can't rightly say we've outgrown it. Let's say gaming has outgrown us due to cancerous multiplication in the conference rooms.
There are lots of great indie games out there. They still have soul. I'd also recommend Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 as major games with soul rather than suits. Hell, Baldur's Gate 3 is incredible for its monetisation, a one-time cost for continued patching and now modding support, like how games used to be. I'm also bloody sick of battle passes and paywalled content in 'free' games.
As always in this world, you're never alone. There are still good old games and there are still people making new games. You just gotta find the right places to look.
CDPR doesn't have greedy monetizatiin but sorry to inform you they abuse and sexually assault their workers just as much as every other studio. The leaders who are responsible for cyberpunks rushed launch and manipulatiin If the press giving only review codes to positive outlets, are still in power. All the incomoetent people werrent fired. Witcher 4 is going to be bad, simple as.
I am older than you and realised a few years ago that gaming is still fun, the corporate greed, "AAA" industry is the problem. Play indie games. They are at least as good if not better than our favorite games 30 plus years ago. Ravenswatch, Baldur's Gate 3..
Very good point, mate: see, the most recent triple-A game I've played is FFXVI on my PC (mine's only mid-range, but it runs quite well for me after tweaking settings) and I've really enjoyed it. I started to think about why that was, and I came up with a few reasons that seem to align with your own:
-It's single-player and doesn't push an egregious monetization system on me
-It's story-based and a fairly solid one at that (subjective; I know--I'm not saying it's perfect, I have issues with certain parts, esp time-skips)
-The mechanics, while simple, are very well executed and allow for some finesse
Before playing this, I'd been playing older games this year. Devil May Cry 5--which is STILL a banger of a game!--Grim Dawn, Dark Souls 3; the list goes on and on, and I've peppered it with both new and old indie games. Like, it blows my mind going back to something as old as, say, One Way Heroics, and still having a blast with it, or finding a newer game like Terminus: Zombie Survivors, or the Soulash series, and realizing that I don't hate games. It's just that the games I really enjoy don't get made often, and never from triple-A.
Yeah.. it's fascinating stuff to look into, man, and I still really love it. Heck, even trying to get into Dwarf Fortress (which I seem to do every year for a week or two, then give up--I like complexity, but MAN... even I have a limit) is still a blast to me.
Good on you to realize that isn't that you despise gaming, it's that you like GAMES. You're a gamer, mate, not a consumer--you play for the fun and experiences of games, not to be advertised to and treated like a cow to be milked for all your money.
Anyway, that's all I have to say, so I'll conclude by wishing you and everyone else well, and hope you all have a pleasant day. Maybe I'll go ahead and start messing around with Cataclysm: DDA again.. that could be fun... cheers, all!
we are *this* close to another industry crash, I think. The indie market will be fine, but the AAA publishers will be either hacked to bits and massively downsized or go belly-up entirely, and it can't come soon enough
We've been "this close" to another industry crash since at the very least 2010 - I only use that cutoff point because that's when I started paying attention to gaming news online, I'd eat my hat if that was the start of this type of doomposting - and yet it keeps just not coming.
We're already in a crash, I'd say. Biggest flops ever back-to-back.
Studios that exist right now either don't make video games anymore or only make gambling sites
Nah, I doubt it. Sure, a lot of AAA might crash out because of out of touch mismanagement, but succesfull games are already being rewarded while slop isn't.
@masterplusmargarita Ubisoft is on the brink, Xbox isn't far behind, EA barely makes anything but sports games anymore (and Veilguard isn't looking so hot), the constant layoffs and studio closures seemingly evey week, I could go on. No, it's very reasonable to say the industry is close to crash, it's probally going to happen in 2025 or 2026. We're going to wake up some time next year and hear Ubisoft laid of 10,000 people.
@@carlschrappen9712 THQ is on the brink. PlayStation isn't far behind. EA barely makes anything but sports games anymore (and Dragon Age 2 isn't looking so hot), the constant layoffs and studio closures seemingly every week, I could go on. No, it's very reasonable to say the industry is close to crash, it's probably going to happen in 2011 or 2012. We're going to wake up some time next year and hear THQ laid off 10,000 people.
All of this has been going on forever. This is just how the industry operates. Titans fall and get subsumed into other titans who fall in 10 years time. Companies lay off people endlessly. CEOs abandon ship with golden parachutes worth millions. It's all working as intended.
Working as a hardware and firmware developer (in a small tech company) and having my boss holding the greatest share of the company, while the boss of commercials holds the second greatest, but way smaller, share. Is easy to see this contrast between the experienced engineer that worries about making a good and stable product, while seaching for creative and smart solutions, and the commercials guy who wants to put bluetooth in everything without considering other more suitable solutions and how this could negative affect the priorities of the development team.
I personally can't imagine how shitty it must to work on a potencial useless feature or product, while being pressed by people who don't understand the difficulty and challenges to implement what they asked. And in the end if everything goes wrong, you know who is getting screwed.
And yours is an addmittely smaller company.
Imagine an army of _the commercial guy's_
All I have to do is look at the names that these people come up with. Our service was renamed VIBE. I saw people on Linkedin saying things like "Vibe on!" My first thought when I heard the name? Oh this is already dated. Oh this is not good. Oh, wait... You actually like this?
YYYYEEEEEAAAAAHHHHHHH BUDDY! Were so back
Verified first
See, the problem is they keep making bad games instead of good games. If they made more good games than bad games, then they'd have more good games instead of bad games
But making good games requires talent, effort and care.
Concepts that are "insulting" to akira toriyama...
This man speaks scripture
Yeah, I can definitely agree with the premise on this video. We've seen it with numerous titles already, but the biggest 3 for hands-off product creation without involving hired devs always seem to be Valve's big three: Counter Strike (GO/2), Team Fortress 2, and to a lesser extent DOTA 2. There's a core reason why a number of companies are trying to speak out against Valve's market dominance as a company and a digital storefront both despite a number of those same groups complaining also having either tried to diversify with their own storefront or having tried running outside of Valve's framework and then switched to using it later (arguably out of laziness or a desire to cut corners (yes I'm an old Smite player still salty about the standalone client's death, how could ya tell?)). Heck, I could argue that TF2 is even more of a golden egg in the eyes of some of these developers, as the concept of a playerbase so dedicated to a single game as to have TWO separate mass protests come forward to petition the developers to come back and, rather than ask for fresh content, just get rid of the significant amount of fully botted aimbot cheaters in the game actively ruining the gameplay for those still around, all while the company's plan for the game has been upload cosmetics that players design and monetize them hardcore, it almost is the ur example of what these companies want these titles to become.
Companies which complain about Valve are always, ALWAYS worse than Valve. Valve's biggest actual issue is that they don't need such a large cut of the sales.
@smergthedargon8974 and even then, they're usually taking a fairly standard amount from what devs that are open about the back end, like Thor from Pirate Software, can tell us. Arguably less if you sell using Steam keys on other platforms, as Steam doesn't take a cut for game keys. In-game keys in CSGO and TF2 perhaps, but those aren't the topic (and were low hanging fruit for a joke, so I couldn't resist).
@@rayhatesu Oh, sure, it is standard, but I think it should be lower, or perhaps based on price.
The irony is that, CS2, TF2, and DOTA 2 all have something that modern synthetic sensations lack, and it has to do with their shared background.
CS2 is the sequel to CS1, a popular mod for Half-Life.
TF2 is the sequel to TF1, a popular mod for Quake.
DOTA 2 is the sequel to DOTA 1, a popular mod for Warcraft 3.
These games were not random accidents or lightning-in-a-bottle, they were professionals and resources given to a proven concept with a pre-existing fanbase to hone it into perfection. The fact they all started as mods isn't the point, it's the fact that all three games were mature the day they were released, both mechanically and socially. The monetization they have today is itself a form of maturation of those games after they were released - DOTA 2 was the only one published as a free-to-play microtransaction-based product, and was also the last one of the three to come out.
This is lost on a lot of gamers. To a pencil person who only understands expenses and revenues and secretly thinks all creative people are "fags", it might as well be written in ancient Greek. So we'll keep getting companies who try to get what Valve has with CS2, not realizing that CS2 plays by different rules because it's part of a legacy that's older than many of its players and is basically a cultural institution, and the same cannot be said about an underhyped billion-dollar impending flop designed by the accounting department and made by the best ex-Google webdevs money can buy.
@@smergthedargon8974 it is based on price, it's 30% normally, and if your game sells past certain breakpoints, it gets lower too. There is a $500 price tag for *releasing* the game on Steam, but it's more of a security deposit, and Steam will give it back, again, once you sell past a certain point. It's to incentivise not flooding their platform with games that may not sell or that are blatant asset flips (as readily).
I'm so glad you're back making this kind of content again, Frost. You were easily my favorite personality on SW, and your departing broke my heart, man. Truly.
Keep doing what you're doing. Can't wait to see what else you drop.
I said this back during mass effect 3's launch, and i'll say it again.
9/10 pre-order bonuses are cut content. They got you FOMOing and paying an extra 10$ over sh*t that gets installed with the base game files. AAA investor trash has BEEN "70$" for nearly 10 years now, they just spend a few million on ad campaigns to make you think its an optional experience.
Total Warhammer 3 is a perfect example. Every single person who buys that game, installs ogre kingdom files that cant be used, until you fork over another 12$.
Pay to buy it. Pay to use it. The Capitalists Dream.
If politicans weren't evil boomers, we could have consumer regulations banning more order bonuses and other shitty monitzatiins, but there are no consuemr unions or orgs pushing the politicians t regulate this unrestrained shitty industry
You are mostly correct other than the $70 price point, I'm old enough to remember that SNES game were for the most part $60 (some were $50) and occasionally $70, that would be about 150 today, or 115 a decade ago when the dlc trend got bad, so games have always cost this much unfortunately, they should be cheaper by now, especially digital copies.
@@Kaijudomage AAA games and the 60$ price point was established after the console wars of the 2000s. Any higher and no one bought your game because the vast majority of people who buy your games are working class, any lower and the capital investors arnt happy with profit margins. And for a few years, devs competed to fit the most fulfilling experience for that 60$. Within the past 6-8 years AAA companies have been publicly touting the idea of selling their games for 70$ baseline, instead of the industry standard 60$. This is how you manipulate people. Everyone's BEEN paying 70$+ for the "baseline experience" for nearly 10+ years.
Nearly all technology is going to inherently be more expensive at the beginning of its integration into the public market. On the other hand, raising the base price for a product while a company rakes in record profits while constantly firing dev teams right before release and atomizing their player experience for unironic "pay to buy it, pay to use it" ideology, is another topic of discussion entirely.
Use creaminstaller for Warhammer, only need to buy the base game.
I agree to some extent, but I think it's really too nuanced to say with certainty that it's something like 9/10. I think anything bigger than some extra skins (maybe those one or two extra missions that you used to see) is absolutely, but with the way that game dev works, the artists are done long before the game itself is so you either reallocate them to a new project (if you have one going on) or you put them on making extra stuff while the programmers and QC are squashing bugs before sending the release version off. At that point, you can't add anything new to the game so all they can do is make some extra costumes and weapon skins or whatever.
Live service games take that idea and turn it into a never ending cycle of churning out $15 skins because it's much more profitable than making a brand new game.
Warframe. Regular content updates. Has a premium currency, which you can make entirely with free to play methods, and is used for cosmetics only anyway. And they have been doing it for more than a decade now.
I mean, plat is hardly cosmetics-only since it functions as the main player-to-player currency, buys more inventory space, and is the primary way of skipping interminable amounts of grind for several additional features. You may be able to accomplish mostly everything without spending one red cent on plat, but Warframe is still guilty of platinum offering a solution for an invented problem: rare resource and mod grinds.
And they added a *second* premium currency in the form of Royal Aya to buy Prime Access items. And you can't just dial in the amounts of currency if all you want is a handful of items that don't fit neatly within the bundled currency. Warframe is a fun game and all, but just about every criticism of other games' free-to-play models can be rightly applied to it.
@@TransientWitch And there's also the obvious point that besides the movement and combat, Warframe just... isn't a very well-designed game in a lot of aspects.
@@axeknight4653 For all the jank and neglected bits, I find the story/lore and fun I do have (alone or in a group) is worth sending them a bit of cash each year (somewhere between 40-100 USD). I also give to the charity events they work with every year on top of that because of the involvement of DE and them matching they do.
@@axeknight4653It is in many ways a game developers bucket list of features that in some ways are amazing but also equally awful.
The amazing outweighs the awful though, just wish the new player experience was better at hooking people and the rest of the game being better at actually explaining itself. After every hiatus I kinda have to relearn the game because there is so much to do.
Part of the problem is that execs (who of course are often delusional in thinking they are creatives) need to answer to investors who now think they are creatives too.
8 years of development time and $400 million isn't bad for an investment. It's an awful lot to pour into one pull of a slot machine.
The problem, to my mind, remains that most of these "live service games", by their nature- since, as mentioned, the players basically _are_ the product- are enormous time-sinks. If it's laughable to think players have infinite money to throw at a game, it's slap-your-brain-out-of-your-head dumb to think they have infinite time. No players, no product, no money, "investment" go bye-bye.
It's crazy Sony learned all the wrong lessons from Concord's failure.
We saw what they've learned from the PS3 launch with the PS5 Pro shortly before this, is Concord really a surprise?
@@BestGirlsBiggestFanTo be fair the Original ps3 models while expensive are the best ps3's since they can play ps2 games. To cut cost they removed the ps2 parts from it so all subsequent ps3 models while cheaper are inferior.
The ps5 pro has such a small amount of better features it doesn't warrant an extra $200.
@@BestGirlsBiggestFanTo be fair the original 2006-2007 ps3 models are superior than all later models since they can play ps2 games and have more external ports(4 usb ports and a SD card slot).
To cost cut all subsequent models lost ps2 functionality and lost 2 usb ports and the SD card slot.
They _know_ why Concord failed, they were literally told why. They made it that way on purpose.
They aren't admitting it because they know that admitting they were wrong is cancer for their career.
AND Now they're literally trying to just buy out one of the best remaining Non-Predatory studios ... with money they sure A.F. don't have, while everyone who is an actual gamer is screaming _"NOOOOO, Don't let them take our precious Patches!"_
Okay so first you didn't inform me personally about leaving The Escapist and now you don't inform me personally about leaving SW?! Wtf man I thought we were parasocial friends.
What's EC?
@mrcreavill oh shit I meant The Escapist*
@@alvin_row ooh, makes sense! I thought I missed some TH-cam lore :P
There are so many things rotten at the top of the video game making pyramid. You can tell. The lack of innovation. The chasing of buzzwords. The desire for the New Audience to monopolize (most recently dubbed the “modern audience”). And, most damning, the utter apathy for when the teams working under them act unprofessional in the extreme. Nobody who tells their customers “You’re evil for not buying/not liking our product” should have a job the next day.
There’s a reason why I don’t buy almost any AAA games anymore. To put it simply, they aren’t worth it. Indie games may not have the graphics, and there are too many overused tropes and amateur design in them (“cartoony character, morbid situation” trope comes to mind), but it’s in the indies where the right person with the right vision can make the games we used to get all the time in the SNES, PS1, and PS2 eras.
Exactly this. While indies have there own over use stuff and the likes, there atleast more fun to talk about and more memorable then triple aaa game number 401.
It's even worse since they decided they were pushing the $70 price point. When it was $60, I already barely bought AAA. But sometimes, if it was REALLY good, I would go for it. The current stuff, at $10 more just for the entry price? Naw, UFO 50 is right over here for $25, thank you.
I'm pretty sure the hyper professionalizing of video game development is the problem.
The entire point is that it's being run by money men now instead of creative passionate people.
I agree with this, but I will fight to have developers able to speak their mind about stuff like that, especially when it's something personal like their own audience.
The devs are almost always the ones who are the most passionate about the project, so the last thing you want is to make them afraid to express their experience and wishes for the game, it makes the community less empathetic and more entitled, because no one is there to reassure them or disavow rumours and poor expectations.
I'd also like to hear some examples of developers saying what you said. I think I know what you're referring to but I'm not completely sure.
@@AdumbroDeus That is how it is now, but that isn't actually the problem. The problem is these companies are being run by BAD money men. A company should be run by someone who knows how to distribute funds more than the groundwork jobs. The problem is these companies are being run by people who don't know and don't care about the work their company does.
The problem isn't game's as business. Games take people and equipment to make, which costs money. Nothing wrong with that. The problem is the leadership being incompetent and immoral.
Letting the suits take over and be in charge just because they can show off how well they balanced the books and cut costs to turn a profit would be like having a suit be in charge of creating the menu for a restaurant: they'll skimp out on the cost for ingredients, either narrow down the selection to the most "efficient" dishes in terms of cost vs profit OR introduce a hundred plus menu items in order to cater to the broadest customer base possible that the kitchen staff must all learn to make, and when the business does fall don't be surprised to find the suit already planned out their exit and locked the door behind them.
There’s a nice irony in getting a nestle ad before the video. I’m about to hear about corpos ruining games after an advertisement for a company run by corpos ruining the world
I got hit by a Sodastream ad 😂😅
The CEO is a sociopath that wants us to pay premium for "clean" water, watch them buying lakes and poisoning drink water.
Not to shill for google but that's why i finally gave in and threw them a few bucks for premium. Some had so many sponsers icwas getting ads every 30 seconds
One thing you can tell how is how telling corpos are pretty out of tounch they are is the stories are the "toxic positive" mentality stories you heard. Lithe fact that any bad news or any complains is seen as something as always toxic. This even extended with the PR as some of developers response to the concerns as "lower haters".
I'm playing Planetside 2 these days, the most modern (2012) MMO-FPS that is still around, and while the paid benefits are pretty standard for the most part like: priority queue, more loadout slots, skipping the grind... there's also pay2win voice packs that make it difficult to tell your allegiance, p2w helmets that hide more skin, p2w camos that blend in better with a specific continent... It's probably not significant enough for a video, it's just what I know about.
There's also a turbulent history to who owns the game, develops the game and owns the IP with holding companies, conglomerates, restructuring, subcontracting and all that stuff over the more than 12 years the game existed.
At one point it was even used for money laundering for the Russian government... allegedly.
They also just brought on a guy named Wrel who made content for the game and asked them: Can I save the game? And they were like: Yeah sure, lmao you can try. And then he did save the game considering it's still around.
Why the hell do you play such trash? Dont reward shitty and evil games with your time
Ever notice though how most of the successful battle royal live service games had a base to build on? Fortnite had save the world, cod war zone had the cod systems, apex had titanfall engine and guns and style to an extent, and even pubg was in a way very similar to a mil sim.
Basically a battle royal needs an actual fun and engaging gameplay systems before the 99 players can be added
Great to hear from you still, sir. Thanks for the connections you find and compiling the "cold" corpses together.
13:00 That sounds like an interesting idea. I don't play live-service games, so hearing somebody else talk about them - and with a somewhat unusal perspective at that - should be interesting.
Go woke go broke ❌
Go corporate go broke ✅
Don't let companies gaslight you into identity politics
Which is not to say that pushing ideology, any ideology, can't lead to a worse product.
Thing is that in most cases where an ideology is is pushed, specially in a AAA game, it's because of corporate insistence so that they can appeal to certain audiences, not because of genuine authorial intent.
💯
Some people are definitely taking away the wrong lessons and focusing on the "woke" "DEI" bogeyman to explain why something like Concord fails in order to justify their dismissal of people that are different from them.
"Unmitigated corporate greed is fine, as long as there's no pronouns!" shouts the terminally online Culture Warrior.
@@RolandTHX spoken like a troon lover
@@RolandTHX Anti "Woke" and "DEI" is just the 'politically correct' version of racism, sexism, transphobia in online spaces. Many of them are the same people who would be dropping slurs in forums and comment sections in the past, and still do in places where they feel safe doing so.
That jazzy beat, the Bogart swagger, the spooky release. Thinking we're back.
Star Citizen will never be seen as a game, it's always gonna be a cult.
Another great Frosty boy video. And thanks for properly critiquing Concord without using the same old internet drivel. Its very tiring to try and talk about Concord without certain people butting in screeching obscenities about "wokeness."
Finally this series is back. My abstinence was getting difficult to deal with.
The part about keeping costs low feels half-true. It makes intuitive sense not to overspend, but I’ve heard it said that execs literally believe that if spending $20,000,000 on a game sells you 1 million copies, spending $200,000,000 should help it sell 10 million. Would explain how budgets have ballooned recently.
Halloween just got Frosty 😅
Something never really added up about concord, so thank you for finally putting those puzzle pieces together.
For dodgey economies that you mentioned at the end of the video. How do you feel about how Roblox operates? Publisher gets rights to anything produced, the players make the content, extra monetization is sprinkled in. Similar vein to what you discussed here, but you could pick it apart.
Unpaid child labour is good for business 🤑 - CEO
You know one game I would absolutely go after for this, that has gotten much adulation from the players is Warhammer 40k Space Marine 2. The devs made a fantastic but flawed game that they were clearly passionate about, but it is also very bare bones content wise (few repetitive missions, and not many weapons, and a lot of grind), and really greedy when you look at the versions of the game sold and how the DLC got carved off for extra greed (particularly the Ultramarines champion pack), and even charging a fair bit extra if you wanted to get the season pass later over the gold edition (which costs just as much as the ultra edition). It clearly has Focus Entertainments greedy paws all over it.
Good stuff Frost, missed Cold Take. I wouldn't mind a look at World of Warcraft's monetizaiton, as far as subscription-based experiences go it is still king, but I'd always wondered if it is as good a deal now when there are plenty of subscriptions for games in general that could offer a lot of bang for one's buck. I don't know why but second guessing about paying the subscription for it now is something I have started doing more often than I used to in the past, despite unlike my teenage years having more disposable income to afford it.
I second this idea and an add-on comparison could be to battle passes which or more less the same thing as a monthly subscription
Yeah, I played WoW since I was pretty young, when I could spend the money. I got older and couldn't really justify it anymore, with the amount of other great games for cheaper. "Recently", I rejoined for the Dragonflight expansion, which was amazing (I have no idea what the online reaction to it was, I enjoyed it), but soon my 6 months were up and it was done. The price has always been my sticking point for a game which I would otherwise really enjoy.
It's an awful deal
You still need to buy each expansion
They added loot boxes and other monetizatiin to the game, mounts that coats as much as expansions
They added paid level up skips
They added the WOW token, basically pay real money to get gold ingame, ruining the ingame economy.
And they added the same greed to wow classic so you can't escape it and all private servers are insta banned.
You're addicted and you're fearing withdrawal and fear of missing out, but listen to the millions of people players who left who all said the same thing:
"I feel happy now, no longer having to play a game that feels more like a chorse and 9 to 5 job. Now I can actually play stuff that I find fun"
@@wile123456 I mean, I paid for the latest expansion and subscription and am playing it now and I don't feel scammed and am rather enjoying myself. I bought DD2 and I felt scammed. The debate here is not if WoW is good (it is pretty great, especially after adding options for solo players to progress on equal grounds, and as a guy working an 8-5 that often turns into 8-6 being able to play for an hour and still get somewhere feels great), but rather if there are diminishing returns to paying for it continuously at an objective rate.
Good to see a usual Cold Take, you've still got a wonderful way to construct your thoughts and present them in a cool way.
8:19 this reminded me of Christopher Walken
Gravelord gives serious Quake 1 meets Nightmare Before Christmas vibes
This is really clean. Like, super clean, incredibly impressive presentation, particularly the script. Keep it up!
New Favourite Channel to bookmark and regularly check as to avoid being dependent on lying algorithms!
Wonderful breakdown of this side of the industry's failure. Looking forward to that part 2...!
The Age of Wonders series has been pretty good. They know what their audience likes and and have a couple years of good dlc support after, before going fully onto the next game. One of the few series worth getting the season passes for if its your cup of tea.
Glad you were able to retain the Cold Take brand, and keep doing them!
Holy fuck, so glad TH-cam recommended me this within the day of, rather than weeks 😅
It's great to see you posting again! I've always appreciated your cold takes. I consider you one of the few true journalists out their for the gaming industry. I look forward to more videos and watching your future success.
The smooth talker with the frozen spirits is back, nice to see ya Frost
On the one hand, nothing he's saying is new. Sterling was already calling this shit out around the time Anita Sarkeesian started her first video ever, and a multitude of individuals who more than likely are and were exclusively focused on their own money-first lifestyles derided every single word to come out of the mouths of those who said the industry was going to be in an unsustainable loop of chasing after profit at the expense of good games. But on the other hand, a short, digestible explanation of how Corpo Suits are a cancer upon the Games Industry is a nice little tool to have in the back pocket when explaining to people how Corpo Suits are a cancer upon the wider economy and upon society as a whole.
11:31 - You forgot Super Monday Night Combat.
I would say Gigantic didn’t die on it’s own merits so much as just died before it got out of the gate do to lack of money
I did hear that the attempt to revive the game *did* have issues with polish and asking for more money from players that the playerbase was not on board with. Dunno what's happened with it since - it looked cool when I saw it on a Shammy video.
Give this video 11 Academy Awards because it marks The Return of the King
Nice. Can't wait to see where this path takes you.
Every single game publisher would own Roblox if they could.
Good Luck going independent Frost, I'll be supporting you on Patreon.
Wow, I literally ranted about this in my discord server a few minutes ago. Frost, of course, as a more measured and informed take than me.
Great job 👍
Thumbnail could use a bit of work though, I didn't register that it was a new Cold Take video when I scrolled past it at first. Didn't even notice the big black and white text until my brain had decoded that the orange man was from Concord. :p
hard agree, the video was top notch but the thumbnail did not grab my attention, looked a bit unpolished.
I'm really glad to see you're moving forward and creating new content. Can't wait to check out your other stuff!
I see for Halloween you chose to treat, thanks for another great vid frost
Kinda feels like a running trend between the big live service successes and the big live services flops is the former are free to play.
Finally, somewhere safe for Frost to settle... Nice to see you again old friend.
Glad to hear you again. It will be a treat, I'm sure, to have more Cold Takes to enjoy.
It might not be particularly juicy, but the Final Fantasy 14 crowd has always harped on what is good monetization vs bad monetization. There are small $2 cosmetic items and then there are $42 multi-player mounts. Then there is the argument that if you purchase an item, should it made available to every avatar on your account or just a single avatar. The current structure is that any item you purchase is for just a single avatar and that if you want it for multiple avatars, you will have to purchase multiple copies.
Frost has always been the draw, buttery smooth vocals, good writing, and a knack for business been loving all your independent work.
He's made 3 videos since going independent lol. 2 of which are all about his vendetta against SW. I do not like second wind or any of the creators on that channel, but Frost has proven himself to not be much better than them. In fact he has proven himself to be a petty child that threw a public tantrum and dragged all of his former friends through the mud in the most mean-spirited and unprofessional way possible.
theres something to be said about how so many games studios feel like the only way foreward is to effectively capture someone elses audience, not realizing what a rediculous uphill battle that is. they see valve games getting big success and they think they cant do the same by making the same type of game, not accounting for how long term and slow the development and continued development of those games really was.
I think it's also that these companies can burn BILLIONS and it end up being a rounding error.
When you can spend 800000000 on a failure and not suffer for it, spending that 8 hundred million isn't a risk.
More so when you have the console kiddies on "lock" the way Sony does.
@@ichijofestival2576 Found the console kiddy lmao
@@ichijofestival2576 Instead of making a funny comment at your expense, what exactly qualifies as adult? Video games are the biggest entertainment industry in the world, you basically just insulted someone for watching TV. Like, do you only read books?
@@ichijofestival2576 wow console peasants still exist
@@Darius_Vi I mean, not everyone is on board with all the "Heil Hitler!"-ing thrown around the PC sphere.
Not to mention gaming was thrown into disarray partially due to inflated (and fragile egos), cough cough akira torimaggot cough...
The FPS Genre in the past 10 years: Unmitigated failures left and right, predatory mechanics so bad Belgium banned it.
The Strategy-Simulation Genre in the past 10 years: Genre defining titles like Anno 1800 and Workers and Resources SR, Cleverly written and executed poli games like Tropico 5, The best balanced management games the genre has ever seen like Project Highrise, Frostpunk 1+2. I could just go on and on and on...
SERIOUSLY, if you ignore Violent Video Games completely and zoom in on the PC Gaming sphere then the Video Games Industry is at a better place than EVER before!! I feel so crazy when people say that "games arent fun anymore". No man the games YOU PLAY arent funy anymore😭😭
Happy Halloween! I see you're celebrating by showcasing one of the scariest things imaginable... CORPORATE GREED!!!
I KNEW I heard your voice before! Thank you, I wasn't losing my mind! Vaporum! Oh, I completely forgot about that game--it wasn't bad or anything, but I forgot about it after finishing it!
Anyway, great video, and you put into words what I've been seeing, where indies and double-A are flourishing, while triple-A chases audiences that either engaged elsewhere (sunk-cost fallacy is strong) or audiences that, while they exist, are only a small minority. If anything big happens, it's going to come out of the indie or double-A scene, and I think most gamers know that nowadays.
I am reminded however of the MMO boom of the mid-2000's--anyone else remember that? Where every company was pushing out a new MMO every few weeks or months, and a lot of them were coming from Asian territories? Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to comment on the quality of them, but a lot of them were genuinely quick cash grabs. A lot of them still exist to this day, with near non-existent player-bases, but still have functioning cash shops. Genuinely fascinating to see, since while that is the case, I don't think we're going to have nearly as many live-service games in the coming years.
This has been a problem with triple-A for a long while now, where they keep looking for the next "big score" and ignore how the AA and indie scene does it. Instead of releasing quality projects, they declare that single-player or smaller-scale gaming is dead, and start rushing towards the next potential gold-mine, despite the fact that the vein they're eyeing out already has twenty or thirty others mining it hard, already.
Things will change, I do believe that, as things are beginning to come to a head. The pendulum is shifting ever so slowly, but I do believe these titans of the industry are going to fall, one by one. Some of them will adapt and survive, transforming into something new, but a lot of them are going to collapse under their own weight. The thing that I have to tell people about this: do not be afraid of it. Yes, a studio that puts out your favorite game series might die, but multiple other studios will spring up in their place, prepared to fill the void that they left. It's a time of change and upheaval, and it is completely normal throughout human history and even the natural world.
That's my take on it, at any rate, and it may not reflect your own. Though I am too much of a coward to reply to any comments, I do welcome discourse as it's the only way to truly share ideas among others.
Anyway, I'm going to call it here; I conclude as usual with my standard, "I wish you all well and that you may have a pleasant day" in the hopes of spreading just the tiniest bit of positivity, especially after having read through such a lengthy and serious (mostly) post. Thank you for reading this far, and thank you to even those who just jumped to the bottom; I appreciate the time.
Cheers, everyone.
(ALSO WHY DO I KEEP PLAYING IDLE GAMES, SERIOUSLY?! GAHHHHH!)
I wonder how the time gate in war frame measures up. For people with schedules,being told you can get the rewards for playing and keep playing in 6-12 hours seemed untenable. Glad you to have you back in the fold ace.
I've been playing WarFrame for about 8 years and I've always seen the time gates as a "touch grass meter". When you've filled up your meter, time to turn it off and go do something else. I think it might make new players mad, but it keeps the older players from burning out.
As a player of Warframe help me understand what you mean by this:
"For people with schedules,being told you can get the rewards for playing and keep playing in 6-12 hours seemed untenable."
Are you talking about daily login rewards or things like how long it takes the forge to build a frame?
So now Digital Extremes is resorting to chatbots for propaganda?
Just when I though they couldn't dig deeper...
Thank you, for striking out into the world and opening our eyes. Looking forward to a lot of stuff I may like seeing. Very consistent track record so far.
So good to hear that intro again. Good to see you rollin Frost!
Haha, love the 'Star Citizen' call-out, much deserved!
0:25 Isn't that revenue, not profit? Profit is after costs, revenue is money taken in.
He said gross profit not net profit. You're thinking net profit.
@@Emeraldblades "gross profit is your revenue without subtracting your manufacturing or production expenses, while net profit is your gross profit minus the cost of all business operations and non-operations. " Both are the wrong words to use though >.> The game didn't make any profit, it took a loss, a really large one at that.
/r/woooosh
That's the joke, and you're right
Worse than that are the devs who make the crap games that think they can preach to the average gamer and that they'll pay for it.
i'd love to see you analyse how warframe does its monetisation, i admit.
All those money went into making the cinematics, aside from the character design, to look great. The lighting, the texture, the movement, they’re high quality cinematics. The characters still look like something a first year art student would make tho
The characters are definitely a bit bland, but there were a few that stood out as interesting.
The problem is that we don't see what anyone else looks like and that means we don't get any sense of the world or its cultures.
If it was a game set outside of empty arenas the action took place in populated areas where it was explicitly shown that the characters were from different cultures a lot of them could work.
They're awful for a hero shooter, but for an RPG party in a game with a lot of focus on talking to people (and more distinct personalities for the characters themselves) I reckon they'd come across much better. They don't have any internal purpose or clearly defined relationships with one another, so we perceive them merely as shallow husks that characters could have been inserted into.
These characters don't make sense as individuals because they don't exist as part of a group. Who are these people, what do they want, where have they come from? None of that is clear and I do genuinely think that they could be made compelling if they were willing to make them into a collective of rag tag misfits on a grand quest instead of just shooting at each other because they're assigned to either the blue or red team and told to go at it.
The cgi trailers are clearly trying to frame them as a scrappy team of outsiders whose personalities create internal conflicts, but the game is just set in arenas where none of that is relevant and the potential that could have been there is wasted.
the characters feel like a first draft
Cold Takes are 100% approved! But can they support?
First time listener, great video. You have a golden voice there sir, keep it the good work
I'd love to see your take on Neopets. It's not necessarily bad or good in my opinion, but in terms of an economy and in microtransactions it's a variable time capsule of gaming going back to the days of flash games.
It honestly may run the gambit on every strategy in some small way for every major development in gaming monetization.
Honestly, spotlighting Neopets as 'patient zero' (or a pretty close cousin) in terms of the way video games are monetized nowadays would be very interesting!
The Investor backed Armor Games was crazy anyway, god I love the Flash Game Industrial Complex 2005 - 2015 lol
@@aturchomicz821 Ah yes, one of the bad boy sites of my school's computer lab lol
another banger. i might hire a thumbnail designer to make you a template or something though because this one honestly looks a little rough
0:18 If it made a gross profit of a million dollars, then how did it fall $399MM short? Short of what? I don't get it.
Definitely a mistake, should have been 1 million in revenue.
Does gross profit exclude R&D(and R&D being the entire cost of developing an IP like a game)? If not, then probably just meant to say gross sales.
Gross profit would be cost of distribution vs money per unit. The operating profit would include the total cost of development, marketing, etc.
This was by far the coldest take I have ever heard. It was so cold, the cup of warm milk I left on my desk turned to ice-cream.
So happy to have you back, Frost. Just keep doing the thing and I’ll keep watching, liking and commenting.
Honestly kinda happy to see cold take on its own channel, I enjoyed yatzee and cold take on second wind but subscribing to the channel just filled my subscription box with a ton of stuff I couldnt care less about. Throwing everything onto one big channel just makes it hard to actually follow the stuff you want
You know its All Hallow's Eve because a legend has returned from the Otherworld. Look alive people 'cause we're getting back to it like we never left.
1:48 Correction, the H1Z1 mod *King of the Kill* was a battle royale gamemode that pre-dated PUBG
Predates, not trendsetter
@@mexdek2061 Fair point.
I love the protracted Snatch clip conveying a subtle, "Proper F-ed" as Frost explains the industry's ignorant practices.
Earlier i would say that these observations were pretty obvious, like introducing suits to a creative field would devoid the industry of its creativity, but after working in a steel producing company myself, this video hits harder than ever
This video should be called How TTS is ruining youtube.
Isn’t that the opposite problem, that people keep finding ways to spend less money on content good enough to hold the attention of the mindless populace?
I’m glad you haven’t abandoned Cold Take!
Loved the video. Dodgy monetization practices? Oh buddy, check out Star Trek Fleet Command. It's nothing new but considering their real target demographic (see: star trek fans, not gamers) they're getting away with a bunch of shit
Another good video, look forward to your future work man. I don't like to use this word much but it's inspiring.