It's a misconception about indie, in indie game development there are literally 99 games that flop and die for 1 that succeeds, and you don't even hear about those that died having 100 players peak on release day.
In many places you can live alright without luxury on $300-500 a month. I'm talking modern comfortable cities, not shacks.
A game with 100 peak players may bring you at the very least $15k, but heavily depends on genre and pricing. I know people with like 90 peak players and their game earned 100k+ lifetime.
yeah, even for studios that already have one success under the belt, like one game that doesn't quite work out means everyone could lose their jobs. nobody can get discovered in a sea of shit, the AI slop problem has made it even worse as nonsense that had no effort put itno it is made equally as visible as something some poor fuck has spent the past five years of their life making. marketing is unfortunately way more important for indies than for big name studios where the mere fact they're working on a game is going to get it noticed.
like fuck, for all concord gets mocked people knew it failed. it was newsworthy that people didn't know about it, that's just how unusual it is to be completely ignorant of a game of that scale, and even then it got a ton of attention after it got shuttered. that's so much more attention for something that sony basically put zero effort into advertising than something someone has put their life savings into.
Even Mojang the studio behind the biggest game of all time (Minecraft) couldn't get much success from their second game Scrolls
Wdym Sony didn't advertise Concord? They went hard on it and invested heaps into marketing, they funded an animated cartoons series and an entire behind the scenes documentary about it too. It was supposed to be their biggest & best live service game that lasts the next 10yrs.
People nowadays complain about broken releases, but I remember my copy of KOTOR crashing about every 2 hours in the loadscreen along with some broken scripting not triggering some quest states. And there was no way for patching that automatically back in the day.
Yeah I was typically getting one game for Christmas in the 90s and one for my birthday. Definitely had one or two that were a struggle to even get playing. The access and choice is crazy these days.
Steam new releases at this point are like 50% pornography, 40% early access open world survival crafting games that will never leave early access, 9% actually trying to be unique but not really succeeding, and 1% games that may be worth playing.
The every now and then part is you having to find the non-garbage. The successful discovery only happens now and then when there's only 200 in a sea of shit.
1% of 19000 games released in a year is 190 games worth playing. Do you play 190 games in a year? Or even 19? I'd say that's fucking plenty of quality games even if there is a lot of trash. Steam lets anyone sell games so of course there is going to be a lot of trash. Doesn't mean we dont still get way more from indies worth playing than AAA.
No game is for every single person — save for maybe Stardew Valley. Games have a TA. Solo-deving a game for a couple of years and selling 20,000 copies at $10 a pop is a good time investment, even if you lose over a half of that to Steam's cut, taxes and eventual sales. And 20,000 copies really isn't that much compared to what major indie successes sell. So if you have a great idea, the patience and the know-how to make a good indie game, the audience is there, and it's worth doing.
Edit: Remember a few months ago someone posted a video on this sub of this German indie dev crying on camera when he opened his Steam sale stats after a week of releasing his game? It was a fantasy tower defense I'd never heard of before and a game I would never consider playing or making myself, but there he was, a few hundred thousand big ones richer a week after release. My point is, your own taste, monetary situation and amount of free time do not define what the indie video game market is like.
Frankly my backlog of games to play is already so large, I am absolutely satisfied with the state of gaming personally. I have literally hundreds, likely thousands of hours of entertainment already in my steam library, and there are always at LEAST 2-3 games a year I'm really excited for even in the current state.
Personally i have over 150 games in my library. No pornography, only ever bought two games in early access and i fucking hate open world survival craft so none of that.
I have literally 6 times as many games as in my teens and twenties, ranging from any genre, triple a to indies, retro and recent and beautifull remasters and remakes.
I have games for years to play and all that for propably the same money spent on PS1, PS2 and N64 games. Only much more high value content, more replayability, visuals 17 year old me wouldn't have dreamed of.
I really don't get all the glooming about todays gaming industry, just ignore the garbage, there's too many jewels too choose from to play them all as it is.
And all 100 of those games cost less to produce than a single AAA title, were made by fewer total people, and probably involved significantly fewer rounds of layoffs after months of crunch. Indie games get churned out because people can make them in their downtime, not because they're inherently higher risk.
A ton of them are made by adults basically living in their parents basement and eating nothing but ramen for years. If they were paid an actual income like more established studios then those indie games actually have a way higher cost than people think. The cost to develop doesnt show dollars lost during those years from them living without an income.
And plenty of them are adults with jobs, and they make games as a hobby. Some of them are small teams taking a risk, it's all over. Point still is that anyone can do them for any budget, and with digital distribution being so accessible there's not really anything to crash in the indie space. It's the same people taking the same risk either way. Giant AAA publishers can't really say that.
I was going to post almost the exact same thing. Canceled then scrolled and found your post. That's the thing. Many of these Indie games are passion projects. If they start gaining traction and allow the developer(s) to be financially stable they can dedicate real time to them.
There's only so much people and so much attention. And it doesn't help that some indie games are functionally just a slightly different flavor of the same type of games.
1% might be generous tbh. Probably more like .1%. But that's all media in an age where making and selling things is accessible to more people than ever. A blessing and a curse, but definitely more of a curse with the addition of AI.
It's not even out of a hundred. Steam gets thousands of new games every month
Only a couple break through to gain a small audience and an even smaller amount (usually singular at a time) get to top the charts
Sure, as an indie dev you need to make a good game (with an audience in mind) but it's basically just a lottery
We only need 1 out of a 100 at the rate they are releasing games.
But AA's been improving as I'm sure they have AAA talent working with them now and much smaller teams.
It probably wont happen at all, these people have the younger generations by the balls and the people don't care they are used to being treated like shit
pretty sure no, many communities are self aware . in gacha though no matter how specific you word it to avoid any misunderstanding that you are criticizing the company and not the players or whatever they will still treat it as a personal attack and become hostile like it's a cult.
the ppl (children) are being manipulated by alot of psychological tactics with alot of money/research behind it to get you/them to buy those AAA games. fomo, gambling, all the tricks
I think about this a lot when I’m playing live service games. None of the ones I sink money into are triple A games I think. Even still I can’t say I like how susceptible I am to the fomo of a battle pass or the like.
the money sink is just one part of it. the time sink is way bigger than you think, they use all sort of tactics to keep you coming back with timed resources and drip feeding content, then eventually the sunk cost become too large and you can't quit anymore even if you stopped enjoying the game for a while now.
This is the most disturbing thing to me. All of us that “know better” will eventually die off and all the young kids that grew up with microtransactions as a normal thing won’t think twice about it. People don’t often question the things that have just always been that way during their lifespan. I’m sure there are things that my millennial generation also don’t take into account in the same way.
Nah people aren't the investor class that buys and violates studios destroying their creativity. People aren't the executives that override underpay and lay off the devs. People are poor tired and sad and will find joy where they can.
The amount of people that bitch about COD, NBA2K, Madden, and all these other low effort slop and then turn around and buy on day one next release is def part of the problem.
Meh... yea, money talks, but I'd actually sooner blame investors and capitalist. Most of these AAA developers would be making way better games if they weren't being told what to do by the kind of people who care more about rising profits than the art of it.
Yeah, that’s what it feels like to me too. Like we’re heading towards another gaming market crash because of how much it cost to make video games now among other things
Absolutely but video game themselves are costing like hundreds of millions of dollars now and that’s not viable either. Like wolverine cost like 300 million to make and they have to sell at least 5 million to break even. There’s a lot of problem with the gaming industry that just seems to keep getting worse.
1983 and strictly USA. Many similar systems, offering very similar games, and, often, of poor quality. Not just "bad", this was practically the dark ages after all, but barely functioning. An analyst for Goldman-Sachs stated demand was up 100%, but production was up 175%.
Massive surplus and falling consumer trust crashed the market in America. If there is another crash, it will be because (IMO) of anti-consumer practices. Primarily because of the average consumer being priced out because "line must always go up"
Edit; it tickles me that whenever I say something that's even the most softball phrasing of "late-stage capitalism/ corporation bad", there's always at least one downvote from corpo-simps.
The ET game for Atari is often cited as a perfect microcosm of what happened. They were so confident in the Atari that they ordered more copies of ET than there even were Ataris on the market, so they not only needed to sell every game, but also had to sell more consoles to do it. And idk if you're seen that game but killer app it is not. Even by Atari standards.
It's like the exact opposite reason there'd be a crash today, instead of producing too many games for people to possibly purchse, they're not letting people buy games at all, just a glorified rental with an indeterminate end date.
Of note, the super cheap and independent British home micro scene gave zero fucks and grew a ton during that time. Guess games being 20 quid at the highest end helped.
1983 I think. The market was just shovelware and people lost faith in the industry in the US. It wasn't until Nintendo reached America with the NES that it started growing again.
Atari, it’s why the nes had the whole “Nintendo seal of approval” thing, because Atari shovelware had been such an issue. It’s also why it initially sold itself as a toy via R.O.B. because retailers didn’t want to sell video games after the crash.
Late 1980s the market crashed and all the previous big players died or pivoted, Atari is the most famous. Atari owned the console market for decades but never again after the crash.
Nintendo was originally marketed as a way to control Rob the robot so investors didn't think of it as another video game console after the crash. (The plane was always to immediately pivot to regular games after release but a few nes release titles used the Rob Robot accessory)
Nintendo's success basically revived video games for most of the world (PC players still were doing fine, but home consoles had died) and in the 80's and early 90s most kids did not have access to a home PC as they were $500+ vs a $100 console. Ironic that now consoles are catching up to PCs in price when their big selling point early on was being cheap.
It was early 80s. Atari release low quality games, and they had poor licensing so that anyone/everyone could flood the market with cheaply made titles. Atari themselves made cheap versus polish. Atari's system were either underpowered, or overengineered. Nintendo and Sega took up the slack quickly and learned from those missteps.
As I understand it, Atari didn't own patents on a lot of the underlying technology in the 2600, including the game cartridges. A lot of the early technology was developed at universities and Atari was just using the technology.
This meant they had no quality control, anyone who could buy or make the cartridges, was allowed to buy, make and sell Atari 2600 games.
Then Atari also wasn't doing a great job making particularly worthwhile games on top of that.
Nintendo and Sega both had patents on their cartridges, meaning they got to pick who they sold to, which they limited to publishers who were actually making functional games (not necessarily good games, but they'd actually start correctly). Made a bigger effort to have high quality home games, and then marketed better to push better quality games.
Kind of. The problem is that it’s not a good long term thing for the industry. It’s like indie films. You’ll have one director make some highly acclaimed thing. Sometimes they might make a few but most just have one thing and drop off the map.
You need AAA for the funding to push the tech. To push what’s capable and have the big budgets. I don’t want to play games without AAAs out there.
Eh...right now the tech push is to defer basic optimizations to AI especially since real optimizations are kept like trade secrets.
Like I would say the only thing they have going is they forget to go lean so they make more jobs than indie due to funding, though that's a shrinking window.
Otherwise AAA living or dying is kinda irrelevant, though at least Eastern studios mostly understand how to make a game for their audience rather than a game for everyone.
Which is why the complaints are bullshit and the real reason is greed, incompetence, and mismanagement.
Mihoyo has like a dozen games in development atm, and none of them sound massively delayed or mired in problems. And all of their output has been of high quality and effort, even if people don't care for gacha as a revenue method.
For the most part I concur. They know when to turn back. They have done greedy traps a lot like with Genshin and Lunar Reactions be locked behind gacha units without non spending ways to access and making a meta out of it. Mihoyo did backpedal that for now.
What happened with HSR lately? I liked the game, but haven't had time for it since Penacony ended. I did hear the dmg inflated massively in Amphoreus, but there is also a ton of content to do every week between weeklies, monthlies, and time-limited stuff.
Tbf, I wouldn't even say it's a "cult". Most of their players are fairly casual, and they make pretty good games very consistently. The few hardcore fans who worship them are a loud minority across the internet.
Yep, login to Steam. Gaming has never been better.
$300 million dollar budget games a with a studio of 400 people are over - these have all now been private equitied into making live service slop that mostly dies after a month and then kills the studio. There are a few established studios that can do this (Rockstar etc) but we're not going to have 100 studios be able to churn out games that each need a million concurrent players not to go bankrupt.
In their defense, I don't think From is going to accept 15 million for another BB tho. That's going to be in the 200 mill range as well.
Still a way better investment than Concord obviously.
What's also interesting is how suddenly the hero shooter ship sailed. Highguard also failed rather spectacularly. And I'm not too confident Deadlock will ever take off, or be completed for that matter...
I think deadlock will be fine honestly. It's averaged 80k or more daily peak concurrents since July and like you said it's not "out" yet and valve don't advertise it at all.
99% of studios would kill for those player counts for a fully finished game nevermind what's effectively an early access one.
There are a lot of people like myself that tried it when they expanded access and thought "this is cool but I'll wait for it to be finished" and put it on the shelf for now.
What they never seem to consider is; their are so many excellent live services and hero shooters already that people have poured hours (and cash) into - what does your game offer or do different that would make someone abandon that?
Crazy too see cause Capcom was doing really bad from 2010-2017 but after RE7 they’ve consistently done very well, albeit blunders like MH:Wilds & DD3 launch.
Also happy they’re still taking risk with new IP like Pragmata.
Yeah, Nintendo is absolutely looking like they'll be winning above the other big competition for the next few years at least. Not sure that's saying much considering all they have to do to be above Sony and Microsoft is not shoot themselves in the foot a thousand times but hey, a win's a win.
For those not sure what I mean, there's a lot to be excited for with Nintendo rn. Ocarina of Time Remake, Metroid Ravenous, open world Kirby game, Pokemon Winds and Waves next year. That last one is the one I'm most unsure about but even as someone who hasn't played Pokemon since Sun and Moon, I have to admit it looks like it has promise. Whether it'll meet that promise is what I'm unsure about.
Yeah, Duskbloods is a weird game—an unusual mix of ideas—and among all the consoles, Nintendo is the place where creative game ideas have the best chance.
While at the same time keeping those same franchises fresh. They’ll do fan service, followed by reinvention, more fan service, etc. The time lapse between each fan service game is usually enough time to have fans ready for another “same-y” type game. Those “same-y” type games also cost less to make, allowing it to be a healthy business. Without a healthy gaming business, they cannot continue doing business since they have nothing else propping up their company.
I just had this conversation with my wife and Nintendo’s problem is the old guard. Everyone in Nintendo is really old and the company will experience a wave of staffing changes at once that might make or break them.
Miyamoto is in his 70s, the producers of every other games are in their 60s and maybe the Smash Bros and Animal crossing guys are in their 50s. I hope they’ve been priming their next gen talent and replacements for brand leaders to follow their key success models.
I would say they have been pretty good at that. Its hard to replace Miyamoto, Aonuma or Sakurai but they already did well when they gave Kozumi the Mario series and are letting young and talented minds like Ito, Terada and Sano direct their own Spinoffs of major titles like Splatoon and Zelda which both where really great.
So i would say they are pretty aware that they cant rely on the old guard and need fresh air in the big positions.
"What are you going to do now you're retired, honey?"
"Well the garden gate needs fixing for a start. And I've a mind that maybe we'll get a chicken coop for the garden. I can fix my lawnmower and I don't know start a small franchise of theme parks and be involved with creating some multi-billion dollar movies and remain the public glad-handing face of arguably the biggest gaming company on the face of the Earth, setting up a successful museum to further celebratetheir vision. Oh and maybe potter about in the shed a bit and spend more time with the grandkids."
They've been training new staff to replace the old guard for years. A lot of the direction of newer games is specifically because they've hired people who grew up playing the originals.
Before anyone mentions their strictness with fan projects/emulation in general, Japanese law is especially strict in terms of protecting IPs, copyright, and patents, so if they aren’t being litigious, they run the risk of losing ownership of their properties (although I doubt anyone in Japan’s government would have the balls to do so even if that weren’t the case)
I do have my quibbles with some of that, and their lawsuit against Palworld was just absurd, but this was generally the direction I wondered they might be going in by saying Nintendo is also not innocent.
They're not perfect, buuuuuuut they're also the only console maker in the last decade who sold over 150M units, and with zero official price cuts to their console during its run and the Switch 2 still seems to be selling very well. Folks were legit pissed when the new Zelda 40th Anniversary model sold out and was already being scalped, but Nintendo have confirmed more will be made available, and that system is priced at $520 which is a bit more than the new MSRP of $500, and folks still want the damn thing.
I do not see folks clamoring for Xbox Series X/S and/or the PS5 in the same manner.
Not really, It’s mostly just the biggest AAA studios that are so greedy they’re hurting themselves, everyone else is doing good/well; ie Capcom, CDPR, Nintendo, Indies, AA, ect,ect.
But that’s sensationalist headlines and Reddit fear mongering for you.
Beyond shit at this point. Never thought I'd see the day. I just keep thinking "What type of company culture exists within those studios where such mediocrity at that scale gets green-lit and no one says this is a very bad idea?"
Turns out you can make much better games for cheaper when your per dev hour cost is just several times lower, and there's literally no downside to chasing lower dev costs when there's no marginal costs to selling more games, nor tariffs on selling games overseas.
I'm so glad I don't care for GTA hah. Even if I did I only play new games like 3-4 years later. I can tell you for a fact that the only game since COVID I've bought in its launch year was Lego Skywalker Saga
I picked a random year 1999. In that year, we had: Soulcalibur, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Unreal Tournment, Age of Empires II, Crash Team Racing, Pokemon Gold/Silver, RE3, FF8, Rayman 2, DK 64, Shenmue, Roller Coaster Tycoon, etc.
Another random year 2005: RE4, Ninja Gaiden Black, GoW, Metal Gear Solid 3, Forza Motorsport, GTA San Andreas, Guitar Hero, Shadow of the Colossus, Psychonauts, Civ 4, Burnout Revenge, etc.
2025: Expedition 33, Doom Dark Ages, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Split Fiction, Silksong, Dispatch, Yakuza Pirate game, Donkey Kong Bonanza, Death Stranding 2, Hades 2, Arc Raiders, Blue Prince, Ghost of Yotei, and more remakes, and more niche games that won't appeal to everyone.
This is a common cognitive trap from cherry picking and time compression. People do the same with music, cinema, TV, books etc. The past is somehow always where all the good stuff is... Because only the good stuff from the past gets remembered en masse. Meanwhile in the present things seem average because all the mediocre and bad stuff is very apparent.
Edit: also, a lot of what would have been AAA in the past would not be of sufficient scope and production value to be considered AAA now.
I’m not talking about there being fewer great games, I’m talking about how publishers I starting to pump 100s of millions of dollars into their games, making them too big to fail. How every years, there are more and more layoffs and studio closure, how they invest in live service games because that’s what the stock investors want along with pushing AI, and how they take longer and longer to make now
They should just push these newer generation consoles aside and extend support for the current gen. Gaming hardware is unattainable for most consumers right now, and it'll only get worse.
Crazy thing is that 2 years ago things were looking great for them. XBOX was just handing over their lunch money. Even the Concord debacle was relatively short considering how bad of a fumble it was. Then all of the sudden it’s been a constant fuck up after fuck up.
The thing is, for Playstation to be continuously fucking up and making poor choices that alienate their customers it really isn't a good sign. They have got it right for decades, or got it "righter" than their competition at least and always managed to be a net positive in the industry.
Sure they made their own games and supported developers, but ultimately they are a platform and while Sony made mistakes along the way they always seemed to make many more good choices over a few bad ones which kept them on top and established loyal customers that were happy to be a part of their ecosystem.
Xbox does what Microsoft does, always fucking things up. Nintendo seems to be getting it right in some ways, then be as dumb as ever with their IP and countless other consumer shafting choices. Sony/Playstation seem to be entering a new era of corporate blindness.
PS5 was the first generation of Playstation I didn't take part in, and I had the PS1 back when I was a wee lad. Even GTA VI isn't tempting enough for me to get a PS5.
Gaming is hitting a peak for sure. Every generation is getting less and less impressive. So many retro games and remakes is good enough for a lot of people. Black Ops II being at the top of the charts proves that.
I don’t even listen to new music. Thousands of bangers from back in the day feel endless already.
Agreed. Games take so long to develop they feel few and far in between; no more discs; new consoles come out before it feels like we didn't get full use of the previous generation
Triple A western industry specifically, and I feel no sympathy because nobody asked them to start then cancel or put out some of these garbage live service projects or just spam remasters and remakes.
So many of these wounds were self inflicted - and since some of these studios, devs or journalists have a habit of dismissing certain types of criticism they never learn anything and then oops - there goes another $400 million dollar budget game down the drain.
As far as i’m concerned? It’s just natural selection, they lost the fucking plot at some point and i’m more than happy to continue investing my money and attention to indie, double A or Eastern games while the whole triple A structure burns 😁.
Honestly I feel like that’s just the gaming industry in a nutshell
It's really everything. Movies are worse. Music is worse. Gaming is worse. Books are worse. Fuck, even shit around the house like washers and dryers are worse. Restaurants are worse. Vehicles are worse.
HIGHER PROFITS NOW! MORE MORE MORE! LAYOFFS LAYOFFS! LESS QUALITY! LESS BENEFITS FOR EMPLOYEES! THINK ABOUT OUR CORPORATE PROFITS!!!! MORE MORE MORE PROFITS!
The highlight of the article is the Kojima incident and how that lets a rare title with near-guaranteed identity and distinction to slip through the fingers of a platform hellbent on shoring up exclusivity as their main selling point.
One of those exclusive titles recently falling to the misguided priorities of the studio that developed it? Not off-topic either.
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u/Pleasant_Expert7329 15h ago
Honestly I feel like that’s just the gaming industry in a nutshell