These big companies have it all backwards. We don’t need them; they need us. I don’t suddenly like slot machine video games just because their fucking bean counters say so. Ever since I bought a Steam Deck, I’ve played nothing but indie and old games, and I ain’t going back. You can keep your 3 bundles and your $70-110 price tags. I’ll play 500 hours of Vampire Survivors before I’ll buy another casino that they happened to build a game around.
In the wise words of the Soulsbourne community: GIT GUD (at not making shitty games).
Because budget alone doesn’t make a good game. It’s a lack of creative vision and churning out safe bets that mean people just aren’t excited anymore.
Teams of thousands working on a game designed by committee means no single group really has a vision of the creative vision of the project.
I get it that the marketing budget is important, they need big flashy games to justify the marketing budget required to get cut-through.
Ultimately I think it’s the case that these dev teams are too large, and aren’t making true art anymore, because true art is risky.
Small studios are the ones making art, and some of them are getting cut through into the mainstream. This is where good games exist now.
Umm 🤔, they have weekly free games. Epic games had effectively trained me to not pay for games.
It’s because the games are mid or worse. Took me one google search to find a plethora of games released in the last few years that had high budgets and sold very well. God of War: Ragnarok, Ghost of Tsushima, Elden Ring, Horizon: Forbidden West, Doom Eternal, Hogwarts Legacy, Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, The Last Of Us Part II, and so many more. These are just the ones I played. Just because the only game you guys make is Fortnite after abandoning all your IPs and that your Epic Games Store money isn’t as high as you thought it would be doesn’t mean other people aren’t making amazing games. It’s just you, my guy. I consider myself a patient gamer and I’ve bought more full price games over the last 5 years than I ever have.
They aren’t selling because they are designed as money machines first and games second.
Do I get to be the next Tim Sweeney now? As far as I can tell the bar is pretty low.
They could make so many moderate games that would sell amazingly if they just tried to… Make games instead of casinos. But no, profits must only go up, can’t have a flat year with only great success - they have to outdo themselves financially every year and squeeze everything
They could make so many moderate games that would sell amazingly if they just tried to…
100%. That’s the kind of nuanced thinking you won’t get from corporate America at this point.
You have to sue every single storefront first as well and go cry to the press that companies don’t want to do business with you when you break their ToS.
Actually I just need to stop buying garbage (which I have done). The power sits with the purchasers in this case.
Has nothing to do with ‘generation’ anything and everything to do with bean counters. The fact that Minecraft is still beating them all is everything they need to know but refuse to listen to.
Two reasons:
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The money is mostly spent on visual production, graphics, and big name actors to voice characters, which doesn’t automatically make a game good.
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Season passes, MTX and other bullshit being shoved down our throats in big budget games is getting even worse.
I will always choose a smaller project of passion over a lackluster, watered-down AAA game with an overinflated budget.
When I open a steam page for a game that looks interesting to me, and I find out it has 3 versions at wildly different prices and 10+ other DLC, I just pass and move on. I’m not doing external research to find out what is the difference between the complete and ultra complete and definitive deluxe director’s cut editions and whether it’s worth it, or whether I “need” such and such DLC to get the full experience. I’m instantly and thoroughly turned off by it, and I’m just not bothering. Fuck that whole mess.
For real! I have the biggest issue on that with the PlayStation store. The main list of titles only shows the most expensive version and you have to dig deeper to find the regular, lowest priced option. I swear, when I first got my PS5 and was interested in getting NHL23 I damn near had a heart attack seeing it priced over $100. Ended up just going to GameStop and picking up a used physical copy for $10.
I wish I could get it through to my dumbass friend. She says that a game must have good graphics or else she won’t play it.
Stardew valley? Nope. It’s too blocky. Undertale? Nope. Might as well be an NES game.
My god, the games she’s missing out on…
Your friend is entitled to her own opinion and I somewhat get her. Good graphics are really nice and can add greatly to a game.
Ultimately it is about the money and effort being put into the wrong parts of the game, which coincidentally is the part that is easiest to show off to investors and C levels.
Yeah honestly AA games deliver the experience AAA games gave 15 years ago, and that’s what I want way more than whatever AAA is today.
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Well then. Why not make them not shitty?
It’s the players’ fault for not buying our game.
Dear Mr. Sweeney, I fixed your words, thank me later:
A lot of games are released with CEOs earning more money than all developers of the game including outsourced work together, that makes the games too expensive. If the budget would actually go into the game we could have great games that sell.
Unfortunately you rather lay off your employees, pay them less, crunch them and burn them out, save on quality control, sell road-maps instead of a finished game and give your customers a lesser and lesser experience instead of accepting a pay cut.
And I have not mentioned the money you throw out of the window and burn because of your dreams of an “EPIC metaverse”.
F you Mr, Sweeney.
How’s about you guys spend some of that budget on QA?
Or like the game instead of the credit card collection form.
Or how about they start making games people want to actually buy?
How about truly new games instead of zero-risk remakes/reboots/sequels or truly awful slop like Concord?
Gee, I wonder fucking why Tim. What a clown.
This is the part of the capitalist grift where they manufacture apathy and indifference towards the gutting of a (relatively) decent career, in this case videogame development, as a skilled highly paid profession in a way they hope permanently damages the perceived societal value of the career.
Anything out of his mouth you need to take with a giant grain of salt. But exclusive salt.
Maybe if they ran on Linux, people would buy it. Give it a shot there, Timbo
I’m with you as a Linux user but let’s be real, Linux support has an abysmal ROI: you put a lot of effort for less than a 1% increase in sales, it’s a no brainer.
One of the gifts that valve gave to the Linux ecosystem is having freed developers from the Linux burden. They just make windows games and voila for the most part they run on Linux. They spend less money, we get more games - win/win.
There are a bunch of games that had half-baked Linux ports and got so much better once you could just run the main build through proton, it doesn’t make sense to push developers to go back to native.
Yeah, people need to start reading past the headline.
He’s not complaining, he’s bragging.
His point is that people aren’t buying Sony’s big, expensive games, they’re playing Fortnite.
Yea, did he mention all the other successful epic games? No. There aren’t any. Or they’re dying.
Gotta read between the lines.
He did. Fortnite actually grew this year and hit 110 million monthly active users, according to him.
Fortnite isn’t dying, it’s killing everything else by absorbing the rest of gaming into itself like an alien blob. I don’t like it, but it’s happening and that’s what he’s talking about.
No, the other epic games. He only mentions one game, not the others.
Fortnite is all the Epic games. As in, there is a kart racing game, a survival Lego-licensed game and a Harmonix rhythm game in there, besides the bunch of shooters.
It’s a weird store-ception thing, but at this point if Epic is going to make a new game they won’t put it as a stand-alone thing in the Epic store, they’ll put it inside Fortnite. And it’s working, which is… kinda scary.
So it’s like Roblox?
