In the PC gaming world has also experienced a big drop in quality lately. A lot of games are released prematurely and feel like Betas, lacking polish and filled with bugs. Online delivery of Games made things worse, there's no reason to wait to make things right when the game can be patched easily. I believe this will have a big impact on game sales in the near future if it hasn't already with many consequences for the industry.
Because TBH when that last 10% of the game is going to take as much time as the first 90%, you can release the game at 90%, make up some money, and hopefully finish the game if its good, or at least recoup some of your investment.
There are more good quality especially indy games coming out right now than probably ever before, but the envelope pushing games and especially those with new an interesting gameplay is lowering. Genres are starting to really find their limits, and a huge amount of games are just hyper specializations of one mechanic or another, and the rest are playgrounds for many many different mechanics (but most/all of them already invented). Games then need to lean on maximizing story, art style, or precision mechanics and production quality to set themselves apart. Online delivery has made "light" publishers possible which is only a good thing IMO. Games like undertale, minecraft, stardew valley, rez, etc would have been extremely difficult to get going initially without online delivery.
VR can open up some new pathways for sure, but we'll see how that goes.
So, everything as usual. There always were many games maturing with the user. But yes, online-patching made things worse, but that happend 20 years ago.
Games are risky. Only very few people are competent enough to create an entertaining game that is viable from a technical, creative and financial perspective in a sustainable manner.
Hundreds of quality games are released every day. You could be releasing your game, and simultaneously, a similar and superior game is released and claims all of the user base.
A studio can produce a hit game, have a large hiring push, then fail to follow up with another hit and go under.
Risky, true, but also one where outsized profits are taken by the platform holders - Apple, Google, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Valve all take 30%. Whilst the console makers do deliver subsidised hardware to the masses and a lot of technical support, the PC and mobile commissions are pure cream.
If a decent PC store game through which mimicked Steams' featureset and charged only 12%, I think you'd see a renaissance in the industry. Hopefully Epic can deliver this on the back of Fortnite's success.
The good thing about software development is that there are basically no capital costs, mostly labour and rent. I'm surprised there aren't more games studios in Asia and Eastern Europe, where those things are cheap.
The most obvious success (of the sort you describe) that I can think of is the Polish _CD Projekt Red_, the studio behind the Witcher series of games and the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077. They also operate the GOG.com (good old games) store/platform. Poland can technically be part of either Central or Eastern Europe depending on how you define those terms, but the exchange rate for Dollar and Euro sales of games online (relative to the Polish Złoty) probably makes hiring large numbers of good local developers more affordable.
Sadly this is unlikely to happen for anything above indie/niche games, unless the newcomer has some sort of groundbreaking advantage: first, these platforms also act as ad/exposure for game studios with limited advertisement budget by giving them access to a massive existing audience, which you're just not gonna get at this point from a new platform, and second (and more pernicious) they all have some sort of price matching clause, so if you want to take advantage of lower fees to cut the prices on the new platform and attract more people there, by contract the incumbents can adjust the price of your app unilaterally, cancelling out this move. There is also the fact that not all 30% are equal, so to speak : for example, Steam gets a lot less bad rap than the others due to the amount of tooling/services they provide. There is no easy fix to this situation.
I'm not aware of any price-matching clause. None of the key resellers would exist if that was the case. Retail stores would be unable to offer sales.
For Steam and Mobile, you need to create your own playerbase. Merely launching onto the platform will get you nowhere. If you are putting a huge effort into advertising and PR to generate an audience - you must think, why not direct them to a platform that charges me less than 30%? Android and iOS are effectively closed shops, but for PC I think its simply that no decent competitor has ever come along.
I can't find a source for the price-matching clause (I'm on my phone, sorry) but have read it several times. The lower-priced keys typically come from cheaper markets/regions (e.g. Russia), which AFAIK is kind of a grey area depending on jurisdiction, or from time-limited offers.
> I'm surprised there aren't more games studios in Asia and Eastern Europe
Aren't they?
> Belarus still relies on state-run manufacturers and Soviet-era collective farms. The European Union prefers not to buy food from those farms because one-fifth of Belarus was contaminated by fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. Video games, however, are another matter, as are mobile phone apps and software products. All these are being produced in a drab industrial park on the northeastern outskirts of Minsk, an unlikely but booming high-tech hub.
How many new studios and jobs created? A Unity study from earlier this year looked at over a thousand studios and almost 50% of the studios were less than 2 years old. Sounds like an industry with high turnover and fluidity, which makes sense given the nature of games.
Anecdotally the number of incidences of zero severance pay on being made redundant in the game industry seems way above the software industry norm to me. You read so many accounts of young people who love games building relatively risky careers fuelled by their passion being really pretty badly screwed over.
Just this week Telltale games announces a major studio closure, assured fans that one of their popular product lines will see further instalments all the while again paying zero severance to the humans who formerly made the game in question. It’s not a good look.
Another pretty bad example is the whole “will I actually get paid this month?” fiasco that dogged Crytek for years, repeatedly failing to meet payroll on time over and over again.
This wouldn’t be half as bad if the working conditions were reasonable, but it seems like working in games dev almost inevitably leads to constant crunch time to hit shipping deadlines.
Yes. I think of the triple-A game industry as a mirror image of the film industry. Many of those who work on games tend to be hired on a per-project basis. When viewed this way, the lack of unions to represent game developers is a glaring issue.
I have high doubts that a quarter of Take Two was involved in the development of RDR even if you count all the internal testers, marketing and non technical support staff.
Last few years have been incredibly rough for the industry, after the amazing growth with social games and mobile games. Will be interesting to see what the industry looks like 3-5 years from now...
Not personal to the jobholders, but the market has clearly shown a healthy appetite for hastily thrown together games on every platform. There's no need for artistry or polish or craft.
In the digital age, there's just one big landfill and every eyeball and click is monetized equally.
Just wait until we can synthesize all music and video in a blink.
