The email: Spencer writes,
Over the past 5-7 years, the AAA publishers have tried to use production scale as their new moat. Very few companies can afford to spend the $200M an Activision or Take 2 spend to put a title like Call of Duty or Red Dead Redemption on the shelf. These AAA publishers have, mostly, used this production scale to keep their top franchises in the top selling games each year. The issue these publishers have run into is these same production scale/cost approach hurts their ability to create new IP. The hurdle rate on new IP at these high production levels have led to risk aversion by big publishers on new IP. You’ve seen a rise of AAA publishers using rented IP to try to offset the risk (Star Wars with EA, Spiderman with Sony, Avatar with Ubisoft etc). This same dynamic has obviously played out in Hollywood as well with Netflix creating more new IP than any of the movie studios.
Specifically, the AAA game publishers, starting from a position of strength driven from physical retail have failed to create any real platform effect for themselves. They effectively continue to build their scale through aggregated per game P&Ls hoping to maximize each new release of their existing IP.
In the new world where a AAA publisher don’t have real distribution leverage with consumers, they don’t have production efficiencies and their new IP hit rate is not disproportionately higher than the industry average we see that the top franchises today were mostly not created by AAA game publishers. Games like Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, Candy Crush, Clash Royale, DOTA2 etc. were all created by independent studios with full access to distribution. Overall this, imo, is a good thing for the industry but does put AAA publishers, in a precarious spot moving forward. AAA publishers are milking their top franchises but struggling to refill their portfolio of hit franchises, most AAA publishers are riding the success of franchises created 10+ years ago.
Fight anything that prevents you from owning and controlling your content. Reward, companies and groups that allow you to truly own what you purchase.
It’s a noble stance, but literally everything is digital these days. Even disk based games are requiring day 1 updates (or aren’t coming with the content on the disk in the first place), meaning you’re at the behest of the platform to keep your content available.
Digital is not the problem. Lack of true ownership is the problem. GoG is DRM free. Steam isn’t great on this, but it’s better than other alternatives for now. Sailing the high seas is the best option in many cases.
It’s not all or nothing, you can take small steps to stop supporting the worst offenses. First step, don’t use any game streaming services where you just subscribe to a rolling catalogue each month/year. PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass are examples of this.
Nintendo is awful too, their games should be ripped from physical media if possible and emulated, or otherwise aquired on the seven seas and emulated. It’s a great way to play their games without supporting their evil practices.
Support FOSS games and FOSS-friendly companies. Valve is a good example. Although not perfect by any means, they have proven to be far friendlier to FOSS apps, games, and platforms than most other companies. If you have to get DRM-locked games, get them through Steam. At least they have offline mode and allow full access to all your game files so you can save them to a separate location for archives/backups.
It starts with small things, but if lots of people start doing this, it will have a noticable effect.
Nintendo Switch carts have actual content on them - they’re more than just fancy unlock keys.
Kingdom hearts has entered the chat
Yeah, cloud versions (which are stupid) require an internet connection… do they even sell the cloud version as a cart? If they do and it’s not advertised as such, that’s obviously a problem.
That’s the problem though, most Switch games are not available on carts.
If you count eShop shovelware, sure. Most Switch games worth owning are available on carts.
I won’t argue that the eshop isn’t full of shovelware because it is - but even shovelware needs to be preserved.
The problem with this line of debate is that there are some games worth having that are only on the eshop and it’s still a digital barrier to you truly owning the software. Saying most games are available on a physical medium doesn’t help those that aren’t and it’s a situation that’s only going to get worse.
Essentially what I am saying is that none of the big 3 are innocent here and just because some are slightly better than others doesn’t make it okay.
Most games come on the disk and don’t require an internet connection (unlike some Xbox titles like Halo Infinite). Day 1 updates only matter for PC because performance can be hit or miss. On consoles, it’s not such a painful prospect. My PS4 has been offline since I bought it and every game has run fine after installation. I’m aware that Cyberpunk doesn’t run well but it never should’ve been on PS4 in the first place.
Digital storefronts like GoG do allow you to own your game by giving you the ability to download DRM free versions of games. It’s possible to do but publishers like EA have primarily live service games which means DRM is their bread and butter.
Game preservation is important to me so GoG is a godsend for the work they do.
All those games may run fine for you, but you’re still missing day one patches for most games. Maybe even some content you wanted and didn’t realize was even there without being online to download patches and hot fixes. Also more and more reports of console discs not having any data on them and just being a code to allow you to download the game.
I’m not saying this is a good thing, but it is the reality of gaming today.
It sucks. I’ve been backing up PS3 games on my hard drive for a while now and I’d like to be able to do that for the PS4 too.
My contention is why we need day one patches in the first place. Surely, if games were properly tested, they wouldn’t need to be patched as soon as they release. Just seems weird to me that they release a patch immediately following release when that could’ve been done before release?
I don’t disagree. But these days going gold doesn’t mean the same. They all seem to take the last month or two to still iron things out before it really releases.
The suggestion here is that the type of game that can thrive on a subscription service is either a small one that benefits from better curation and visibility or a live-service one that can make up revenue on the backend by charging all the new players microtransactions (the new store shelves are inside the games themselves).
I’ve been saying this since Game Pass launched: it encourages scummy monetization. The kind of games that come to it are going to have more and more content locked away behind microtransactions to make up the money lost by not selling copies. It’s going to gradually become full of “free” to play garbage, and people will accept it because they didn’t pay for an individual game outright.
Of the two options that Phil says Game Pass encourages (and I agree with his analysis), one is the opposite of scummy and something the market could use more of.
How about fix the ballooning development costs? Games dont need $200 million plus to be good. Maybe start with that problem.
We don’t need super high quality graphics for every AAA production. Sometimes, Just good enough graphics, but with better interactivity with the environment like ToTK and Baldurs Gate 3. I mean , I love RDR2, but honestly, shrinking horse testicles is a bit too much attention to detail.
As an example, cell shading of ToTK still looks amazing and far more enduring as a graphics style. Also, Elden Ring, arguably has worse graphics than RDR2 or the latest CoD. But, because of it’s amazing art direction it will age pretty well.
This can help really reduce the high dev costs.
The horse testicle physics are the heart of the game, and we should be boycotting any game that doesn’t have them!
Game developers are scared of having to put horse testicle physics in their games but they need to understand this is the new standard!
They just are scared of having to actually watch horse testicles and truly understand what makes them work but that’s just laziness talking!
I’m done giving developers a pass for not even putting in the minimum. Larian and Bethesda didn’t even put horses in their games because they’re so afraid of rendering the sack.
Everyone says Phantom Liberty will finally redeem Cyberpunk, so I can only assume CD Projekt has spent the past three years creating a perfect horse with the most dazzling balls we’ve ever seen. Can’t wait for those RTX and DLSS 3.5 rendered oysters.
Thats what this Spencer guy says in the email:
Over the past 5-7 years, the AAA publishers have tried to use production scale as their new moat. Very few companies can afford to spend the $200M an Activision or Take 2 spend to put a title like Call of Duty or Red Dead Redemption on the shelf. These AAA publishers have, mostly, used this production scale to keep their top franchises in the top selling games each year. The issue these publishers have run into is these same production scale/cost approach hurts their ability to create new IP.
I think a lot of that also gets spent on marketing.
Even if it does, thats still too much money. How much money did Hollow Knight spend on marketing? Or what about Terraria? Or Minecraft pre-buyout? How much was spent on marketing for games like Deep Rock Galactic? I can guess probably less than $100 million each. Maybe even less than $10 million.
You’re listing outliers that did well despite their smaller marketing budget. There are tons of great games from smaller studios that get buried because nobody knows about them.
Hollow Knight sold 2.8m copies as of 2019
Modern Warfare (2019) sold 31m copies
They are at the point where they equate video games with Hollywood.
AAA video game budgets have surpassed Hollywood years ago.
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Yeah, way more work went into something like GTA V than any movie. The script alone is orders of magnitude longer.
Well I don’t know how long the GTAV script is, but A Girl Who Chants Love At the Bound Of This World: YU-NO came out in like, 1996 and its script has ~1,300,000 words in it.
That’s more words than Mass Effect 1-3’s scripts combined.
That’s about 100,000 words less than the combined scripts of the entire Metal Gear Solid series excluding MGS5.
And YUNO was made by like, 25 or less people I think. At a time when making computer games was not so easy. They didn’t have the tools that make game development easy like we do these days, they mostly had to write their own software and had to deal with a lot of hardware limitations.
Effort to make good games these days has actually gone down a lot. There is really no excuse to have such a massive budget and still release a bug ridden, unfinished mess.
Or collectivize game studios.
They can still have similar production value and not be open world games that take 80 hours to finish. It just makes far more sense to me to bet small with tons of projects than to bet big with only a few, because then you’ll find the PUBGs and the DOTAs that Phil is talking about eventually.
So, Microsofts suggestion for the problem of studios beating old IP to death isn’t to support smaller indie projects that are developing new IP.
Doesn’t gamepass make this problem worse? It makes it affordable and incentivizes people to try many of those big AAA games so studios still get paid (maybe less than if it’s bought outright, but still i imagine it’s still compensated).
