As Tim Willis from Space Marine 2 said:
“We don’t need to sell four million units to make it [Space Marine 2] a success,” Willits said. “There are many games, sadly, especially out of North American developers, where if you do not sell five million copies you are a failure. I mean, what business are we in where you fail if you sell less than five million?”
No guys, don’t you understand, it’s all that DEI that’s ruining games, trust. /s
I’ve played the original “Deus Ex” for years and I’m still discovering new things about it. I don’t even have to worry about Windows anymore. I can play it with Wine on Linux.
God I hope the gaming industry collapses just like in 1982. We have more than enough retro and indie games to get by until a new business model arises
Also, machiens capable of gaming are ubiquitous. Say the console market collapses because people recognize that Playstation and Xbox offer less entertainment per dollar than lighting $20 bills on fire. PCs, phones, tablets, maybe even smart televisions are everywhere. It’s not like the early 80’s when having a computer in your house is a new idea people were still figuring out.
It would be fun watching some of the bigger studios fart themselves to death though. I don’t know if we need Ubisoft, EA or Activision anymore.
Unfortunately that may well make them double down on the F2P mobile market.
They’re cheaper to make, and success tends to be tied directly to marketing efforts and exploitation.
It won’t collapse in the same way because, like you said, we have tons of indies and they have easy access to publishing now. Hopefully the AAA space collapses though. It looks like it’s going that direction. They’ve forgotten why they exist.
I’m curious if it would expand past games to tech. So many businesses aim for AI to take most of their programming role and fire their staff. Assuming that fails in some hilarious public ways over the next five years, I’m wondering what the old guard that knew the technologies well will do.
So, the scheme is basically to have you, the publisher, invest some money into marketing the game, to get potential players aware of it, then have them pay a one-time premium to actually play it, if they’re interested.
Sorry that doesn’t drive MAU, DAU, or ARPPU. Also we want users on our walled garden data harvesting service that’s just “Steam but Worse”, so I’m afraid you need to close your studio. What’s that? Sorry you’re breaking up, must be something wrong with the phone here in the Swiss Alps. Ok ta ta.
There’s more to game development than that. Setting, art style, gameplay loop, interface…
The argument being made is that a “proven” mechanism for monetization is getting in the way of developing other attributes of gameplay, as the
- get potential players aware of it
and
- then have them pay
Steps are made the focus of design, and only known existing formulas for the above encourage the
- invest some money
step.
If that’s not the business model, then I’m honestly not playing it.
And while I may be outnumbered by children playing Fortnite obsessively, at this stage of life I do have more money than gaming time.