Interesting video, anytime you have an hour to share your thoughts about gaming, I’ll always be interested in listening. I agree very much with your closing sentiment- hopefully the industry can get back to a place of wanting to make great products. Id love to see some games doing interesting things with collision and physics, feels like very little progress has been made in that department for years.
Michael doing what Michael does. Being the smartest most knowledgeable voice in gaming. Year after year. So much respect. What I’d like to see is the rise of the high quality AA. Talented and committed medium-sized teams making polished entertaining games for under $50m. Rebellion being a good example. More of that. And less of Suicide Squad.
Now I love Digital Foundry, but you just don’t get this kind of commentary and narrative on the gaming industry in any of their videos. Excellent stuff.
@@marcbridgewater1562 that's because DF is a channel about graphics and the evolution of gaming. Not an insight on the industry per se. Be nice, dockhead.
I hope that the notion of "Growth Growth Growth" is recognised for the sheer insanity that it is in the coming years. It only results in overall destruction, with a few people who get in and out at the right moments very well off. We've seen it in Hollywood films, with absolute dross with in-efficient, untalented peoples working on films that are now costing $300 million to produce, and having to make over a billion dollars to turn a profit, we're seeing it in the video games' industry, and I've been seeing it here in Cambridge, where I was born, with new housing development (the size of a small village at a time sometime) popping up year after year, whilst our roads become ever more crowded, riddled with potholes, crime, litter, and anti-social behaviour ballooning etc... The entire world needs to return to a place of sanity, and take a step back for once. Here in the UK, as I'm sure you know, we can't even produce 50% of the food we consume, yet our governments and housing developers are hell-bent upon building hundreds of thousands of new homes on prime farm land, whilst bringing in over a million people a year into our tiny country - it's not sustainable, it's not desirable for anyone but those who profit from it, and it's not sane.
Its always an interesting dynamic when companies, instead of telling investors what to do, instead follow what investors tell them to. What a bizarre situation.
Great vid, like you I’ve been gaming since Space Invaders and it’s been an incredible journey to see games grow and evolve. Like you say though it’s becoming ever more clear that the corporate suits are getting more and more involved and games are suffering. I felt this intuitively and I think it first became evident with Xbox and Gamepass. I said a good few years ago to my mates that there was something wrong in the dressing room at Xbox, I could just imagine the big suits in there and the small voices not being heard. Like you say this is happening everywhere to some degree, I feel though that Sony do seem to be the least infected by this, they have released games that you feel are still made with passion and that the developers at least have a certain amount of autonomy. Then you look at the fact that Days Gone 2 didn’t happen which I find to be a crazy lost opportunity for Sony as it was one of the best games of the past decade in my opinion. The games industry is now suffering from its own success as you pointed out, it’s now the biggest media business there is I think. An example of the kind of idiots coming into the industry was from an E3 a few years ago when some suit came on stage, prob a CEO to demonstrate a game and it was quite obvious he’d never used a game pad before, you know the type, they try to run and are looking directly up lol, embarrassing but that’s when I realised what was starting to happen in the industry. Greed is destroying it, like it destroys everything. I miss the days of the PS1 with the creativeness and passion that we had then. I can see a time in the near future where we won’t need movie makers and Games companies, a time where we will have AI and we just tell it what we want it to create, a game or a movie from a favourite book. It will get to the point where you will tell it to replace an actor in a film with another actor and it will do it. Another 20 years and things will be unrecognisable to what we have been used to I think.
Great commentary on the games industry, i felt like it turned into a ted talk which I didn’t expect made me reflect on my personal working habits and expectations ha! Very insightful and meaningful commentary, thank you
Thank you for sharing your view and thoughts. It really resonated with my idea of how a lot of companies and employees are acting in this day and age. Fair criticism is totally absent now a days and it is hurting our ability to improve together. Greetings from Norway 🇳🇴
Thank you for the video! As someone who has been a PC gamer for 20-something years, and who has for a couple of years worked semi-professionaly at a small site where we benchmarked new games and hardware I get where you're coming from for a lot of the stuff. Thankfully I don't do free beta testing for companies nowadays, I think I knew when to bail. 😅 I am under the impression that the best years for gaming were 2005-2011 period after that it's a complete copy-paste shitshow where every new iteration of games brings less than the previous one. My favorite example for this, and there are truly many of them, is the Battlefield series where Battlefield 3 despite all its flaws at launch, netcode, vehicle imbalance etc, managed to deliver an excellent experience when the stars managed to align. However, despite DICE acknowledging that it has learned its lesson, BF4 and every subsequent Battlefield iteration became worse. No one from my Battlefield group of friends plays this game anymore and a lot of them were the best players in the world in their categories. What I think it's happened (and again I don't have any evidence to support it) is that the devs and the publishers somehow agreed never to deliver this one great game because they want us to buy their games every year or two. Not just one. What we got instead is 25% of old good, 50% of old bad and 50% of new bad that no one asked for. You can see a similar trend in the Assassins Creed franchise. This is not just the publishers. Publishers don't have an intrinsic idea what in the game is good or bad, they're just interested in maybe some gimmick and their quarterly balance sheet. It's the devs who have their own politics and whatnot that passes under the radar for many of the publishers, at least in my opinion. On a seemingly unrelated note, have you thought about maybe making a video on Intel vs AMD and Nvidia vs AMD (ATI) wars in PC gaming for the past twenty years? That would be one hell of a video!
Agree. Remember - FED can lend out more money than it has in reserve, and prints money out of thin air. Then charges interest on top of it that is also created out of thin air. This expands the money supply, which in turn devaluates money value. FED is as federal as Federal laundry. It's a private company that LENDS money to government and wants interest back. M Money = debt. If every debt in the world was paid out, there would be virtually no money in circulation. It's also not backed up by any resources (no gold, no nothing). That's why all these economic booms and busts are literally mathematical inevitabilities. Humanity basically became enslaved by its own contrivance, where only a small minuscule ‰ of the population profiteer off the back of billions of people.
Any free market society will have booms and busts in investment, this was true before the fed existed. Im not convinced that central banking actually increases economic inequality, you could argue the exact opposite.
The bubble already burst, of course the repercussions aren’t what everybody thinks, but something popped nonetheless. Also watching deviation studio clips is just sad.
True! Logically it seems that starting as an indie would be best and steadily grow to a reasonable size only. Maybe start as someone making a small game in their spare time. Trying to gather a large team quickly as a full time position expecting money right away isn't a stable way of doing it.
There is another disaster in the making. With information so easily available, people are starting to rely on AI to think for them and lack knowledge of fundamentals.
Id love to hear your "takes" on embracer( they brought board game & comics companies even....), Naughty Dog( wtf are they doing), Japan Dev vs Western dev, and sprouting China dev and its future. PLUS do you see the modular nature of UE 5.0 helping on dev turnaround( other engines also). your the only Games "journalist" I respect
That's a good thing, we need more experienced people on UA-cam who have been around long enough to have witnessed gaming evolve since its inception. I wish there more were more UA-camrs in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. There would be a lot less drama and more valuable content.
The industry is filled with people with no talent and companies that don't know their customers. Bad ideas, badly implemented and with technical deficiencies. It's their own doing. I'll give you an example of a technically brilliant game made by people that don't know their customer. Alan Wake 2 was technically brilliant but incredibly boring and had a nonsense story(even for a remedy game). Nobody bought it and they lost money, if they made the game enjoyable to play that wouldn't have been the case. Hiring Sweet Baby Inc probably didn't help either. Immortals of Aveum used cutting edge graphics tech but made a game so bland and unimaginative that is still looked crap. They have forgotten that they have customers that want to enjoy playing the game and exploring interesting worlds and ideas.
Well sewer side squad probably cost nearly 350m since they spent a decade on it with more than 300 devs and flushed it down the toilet. The old talented team made 3 iconic games in the sameframe timeframe.
@@TheBean87How much of that "development cost" is actually advertising though? Like the other guy pointed out as well, how much of that 300 mill is due to scrapped projects? Truth is, as someone outside the industry I have no clue if any of the figures being published are accurate.
Sega arcade games are great. FPS COD style also very good. SNK arcade fighter games also good. High-paced racer games also good if using missiles & drop mines etc similar to Sony's Wipeout series & EA's Need for Speed. Open world games are the pits. The jokes on you when you play that junk.
@@captaincrunch1707 yes? they can't even release their games on their own console anymore, the console they make doesn't sell.... so they gonna bow out of making consoles eventually.... writing is on the wall, denial much? might make one more console but that's about it
Hey NX Gamer, I'd love to your your thoughts on ARM entering the industry on the PC side. Do you think any of the consoles will join Nintendo with an ARM chip? maybe Nvidia too. Microsoft had ARM written down as a possibility on their leaked documents.
why would this be a bad thimg?? imagine a world with 70 percent less studios and the the 30% left all had the best designers and coders and imagination = fewer and better games
I would say alot of it is this DEI in gaming , you cant hire people based on race and gender , we are seeing real world consequences as of late , even the RAF was trying to illegally hire based on race and gender , if you are not getting the best for the job your company suffers, alot of DEI jobs are being lost in the USA at the moment but in the UK we seem to be embracing this American way of thinking, which is ultimately destroying companys from the inside out , please do some research on the BRIDGE group, they are a DEI focused company that wants to inject far left progressive wokness into every job role and at every company. Very scary times we live in.
@@TheBean87please explain why the gaming industry is DEI hiring and losing billions, and why the movie industry is doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time and with the exact same result? Its not a coincidence. All entertainment has had this weird ideology shoved into it of late and both are suffering same fate. Bud light did the same ,another coincidence? I myself are proof as me and my friends stay away from "woke" games and if me and my friends do i can safely say others do , then there is the anti white racism in gaming , as show lately by lots of developers and games industry workers due to gamer gate 2. There is plenty of evidence of this if you care to look. I can say to you i and many others dont want to fund people who hate us. Not very business 101 from these hateful people.
Reactionaries always live in scary times. Their amygdalas always processing fear to cope with their massive stupidity. They can't grasp sociology even at a fundamental level, so they substitute it with racism and map it to the appearance of structural thought. "The problems are caused by Black people (ofc they want to say the n-word), Jewish people, Woman, Queer, Politically correct, Arab people, other religions, Queer people, immigrants, wokeness, DEI, etc, etc." A tale as old as civilization itself.
@@jeanlepage4264 I don’t think he is and I’ve never seen evidence of it. He’s smart enough not to inject political topics into his content, which is about the technical aspects of video games, console, PCs, hardware and realtime rendering. Even if people think games are political, the aspects he is covering has nothing to do with any of that. I’ve watched a lot of his videos and would say that he quite rightly keeps his political beliefs a mystery. I’m not political, but anyone with a brain can see that channels building their identity around anti-“woke” are not to be trusted. They are only trying to simply topics that are very complex and only seek to farm outrage and paranoia. I would hope intelligent people on the left and the right would not fall for such nonsense.
Interesting video, anytime you have an hour to share your thoughts about gaming, I’ll always be interested in listening. I agree very much with your closing sentiment- hopefully the industry can get back to a place of wanting to make great products. Id love to see some games doing interesting things with collision and physics, feels like very little progress has been made in that department for years.
Michael doing what Michael does. Being the smartest most knowledgeable voice in gaming. Year after year. So much respect.
What I’d like to see is the rise of the high quality AA. Talented and committed medium-sized teams making polished entertaining games for under $50m. Rebellion being a good example. More of that. And less of Suicide Squad.
Now I love Digital Foundry, but you just don’t get this kind of commentary and narrative on the gaming industry in any of their videos. Excellent stuff.
Absolutely, loving it!
DF especially Alex and John are two woke turds.
You do in DF weekly. Try listening.
@@Shaki123no you don’t, not in this amount of detail. try not being an idiot
@@marcbridgewater1562 that's because DF is a channel about graphics and the evolution of gaming. Not an insight on the industry per se. Be nice, dockhead.
I hope that the notion of "Growth Growth Growth" is recognised for the sheer insanity that it is in the coming years. It only results in overall destruction, with a few people who get in and out at the right moments very well off. We've seen it in Hollywood films, with absolute dross with in-efficient, untalented peoples working on films that are now costing $300 million to produce, and having to make over a billion dollars to turn a profit, we're seeing it in the video games' industry, and I've been seeing it here in Cambridge, where I was born, with new housing development (the size of a small village at a time sometime) popping up year after year, whilst our roads become ever more crowded, riddled with potholes, crime, litter, and anti-social behaviour ballooning etc...
The entire world needs to return to a place of sanity, and take a step back for once. Here in the UK, as I'm sure you know, we can't even produce 50% of the food we consume, yet our governments and housing developers are hell-bent upon building hundreds of thousands of new homes on prime farm land, whilst bringing in over a million people a year into our tiny country - it's not sustainable, it's not desirable for anyone but those who profit from it, and it's not sane.
I could listen to you talk gaming daily, your insights Are top shelf.
Similar things are happening in Hollywood as well right now
Its always an interesting dynamic when companies, instead of telling investors what to do, instead follow what investors tell them to. What a bizarre situation.
This video was great to listen to, Thanks for using your experiences as a tool to explain what could be happening in the industry.
Great vid, like you I’ve been gaming since Space Invaders and it’s been an incredible journey to see games grow and evolve. Like you say though it’s becoming ever more clear that the corporate suits are getting more and more involved and games are suffering. I felt this intuitively and I think it first became evident with Xbox and Gamepass. I said a good few years ago to my mates that there was something wrong in the dressing room at Xbox, I could just imagine the big suits in there and the small voices not being heard. Like you say this is happening everywhere to some degree, I feel though that Sony do seem to be the least infected by this, they have released games that you feel are still made with passion and that the developers at least have a certain amount of autonomy.
Then you look at the fact that Days Gone 2 didn’t happen which I find to be a crazy lost opportunity for Sony as it was one of the best games of the past decade in my opinion. The games industry is now suffering from its own success as you pointed out, it’s now the biggest media business there is I think. An example of the kind of idiots coming into the industry was from an E3 a few years ago when some suit came on stage, prob a CEO to demonstrate a game and it was quite obvious he’d never used a game pad before, you know the type, they try to run and are looking directly up lol, embarrassing but that’s when I realised what was starting to happen in the industry. Greed is destroying it, like it destroys everything. I miss the days of the PS1 with the creativeness and passion that we had then.
I can see a time in the near future where we won’t need movie makers and Games companies, a time where we will have AI and we just tell it what we want it to create, a game or a movie from a favourite book. It will get to the point where you will tell it to replace an actor in a film with another actor and it will do it.
Another 20 years and things will be unrecognisable to what we have been used to I think.
Great commentary on the games industry, i felt like it turned into a ted talk which I didn’t expect made me reflect on my personal working habits and expectations ha! Very insightful and meaningful commentary, thank you
Thank you for sharing your view and thoughts. It really resonated with my idea of how a lot of companies and employees are acting in this day and age. Fair criticism is totally absent now a days and it is hurting our ability to improve together. Greetings from Norway 🇳🇴
Thank you for the video!
As someone who has been a PC gamer for 20-something years, and who has for a couple of years worked semi-professionaly at a small site where we benchmarked new games and hardware I get where you're coming from for a lot of the stuff. Thankfully I don't do free beta testing for companies nowadays, I think I knew when to bail. 😅
I am under the impression that the best years for gaming were 2005-2011 period after that it's a complete copy-paste shitshow where every new iteration of games brings less than the previous one. My favorite example for this, and there are truly many of them, is the Battlefield series where Battlefield 3 despite all its flaws at launch, netcode, vehicle imbalance etc, managed to deliver an excellent experience when the stars managed to align. However, despite DICE acknowledging that it has learned its lesson, BF4 and every subsequent Battlefield iteration became worse. No one from my Battlefield group of friends plays this game anymore and a lot of them were the best players in the world in their categories. What I think it's happened (and again I don't have any evidence to support it) is that the devs and the publishers somehow agreed never to deliver this one great game because they want us to buy their games every year or two. Not just one. What we got instead is 25% of old good, 50% of old bad and 50% of new bad that no one asked for. You can see a similar trend in the Assassins Creed franchise. This is not just the publishers. Publishers don't have an intrinsic idea what in the game is good or bad, they're just interested in maybe some gimmick and their quarterly balance sheet. It's the devs who have their own politics and whatnot that passes under the radar for many of the publishers, at least in my opinion.
On a seemingly unrelated note, have you thought about maybe making a video on Intel vs AMD and Nvidia vs AMD (ATI) wars in PC gaming for the past twenty years? That would be one hell of a video!
Agree. Remember - FED can lend out more money than it has in reserve, and prints money out of thin air. Then charges interest on top of it that is also created out of thin air. This expands the money supply, which in turn devaluates money value. FED is as federal as Federal laundry. It's a private company that LENDS money to government and wants interest back. M
Money = debt. If every debt in the world was paid out, there would be virtually no money in circulation. It's also not backed up by any resources (no gold, no nothing).
That's why all these economic booms and busts are literally mathematical inevitabilities. Humanity basically became enslaved by its own contrivance, where only a small minuscule ‰ of the population profiteer off the back of billions of people.
Any free market society will have booms and busts in investment, this was true before the fed existed. Im not convinced that central banking actually increases economic inequality, you could argue the exact opposite.
The bubble already burst, of course the repercussions aren’t what everybody thinks, but something popped nonetheless. Also watching deviation studio clips is just sad.
I don't know enough to meaningfully add to this discussion, but thank you for the insight provided.
True! Logically it seems that starting as an indie would be best and steadily grow to a reasonable size only. Maybe start as someone making a small game in their spare time. Trying to gather a large team quickly as a full time position expecting money right away isn't a stable way of doing it.
There is another disaster in the making. With information so easily available, people are starting to rely on AI to think for them and lack knowledge of fundamentals.
Id love to hear your "takes" on embracer( they brought board game & comics companies even....), Naughty Dog( wtf are they doing), Japan Dev vs Western dev, and sprouting China dev and its future. PLUS do you see the modular nature of UE 5.0 helping on dev turnaround( other engines also). your the only Games "journalist" I respect
Brilliantly explained 👍
Amazin commentary about the industry
Michael Thompson is a 60 year old!?? 😳
That's a good thing, we need more experienced people on UA-cam who have been around long enough to have witnessed gaming evolve since its inception. I wish there more were more UA-camrs in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. There would be a lot less drama and more valuable content.
I’ve been gaming since the mid 1970’s and am approaching sixty. It’s clear Michael knows his onions.
I'll be half-century this year.... I had thought Michael was younger than me. 🤭
@@freddywayne Judging by his voice, I would not guess 60 either! 🤔 (never seen him though!)
Been a fan of your content for almost a decade Michael, would be very cool to put a face to the NXGamer persona.
The industry is filled with people with no talent and companies that don't know their customers. Bad ideas, badly implemented and with technical deficiencies.
It's their own doing.
I'll give you an example of a technically brilliant game made by people that don't know their customer. Alan Wake 2 was technically brilliant but incredibly boring and had a nonsense story(even for a remedy game). Nobody bought it and they lost money, if they made the game enjoyable to play that wouldn't have been the case. Hiring Sweet Baby Inc probably didn't help either. Immortals of Aveum used cutting edge graphics tech but made a game so bland and unimaginative that is still looked crap.
They have forgotten that they have customers that want to enjoy playing the game and exploring interesting worlds and ideas.
What's your opinion on Spider-Man 2 apparently costing $300 million in development costs?
Well sewer side squad probably cost nearly 350m since they spent a decade on it with more than 300 devs and flushed it down the toilet.
The old talented team made 3 iconic games in the sameframe timeframe.
@@WayStedYouway to just ignore the question.
@@TheBean87How much of that "development cost" is actually advertising though?
Like the other guy pointed out as well, how much of that 300 mill is due to scrapped projects?
Truth is, as someone outside the industry I have no clue if any of the figures being published are accurate.
More of this!!!!
Sega arcade games are great. FPS COD style also very good.
SNK arcade fighter games also good.
High-paced racer games also good if using missiles & drop mines etc similar to Sony's Wipeout series & EA's Need for Speed.
Open world games are the pits. The jokes on you when you play that junk.
All of these companies spend way too much money on advertising and marketing.
Sega was one of those companies that went 5:11
Explain Star Citizen kickstater 10:30
how many good games have you not got round to playing yet?
Interest must not even exist. Loan repayment must be generational tied to family.
already did burst, that's why one of the console makers is about to bow out, same thing happened when atari or sega had to bow out as well
The maker who just spent 80 billion on two large gaming publisher acquisitions is about to bow out ? #🤡
@@captaincrunch1707 yes? they can't even release their games on their own console anymore, the console they make doesn't sell.... so they gonna bow out of making consoles eventually.... writing is on the wall, denial much? might make one more console but that's about it
The industry got overly greedy way too fast. It is not sustainable and users are a lot pickier and critical because of it.
You will test horzion forbidden west ps5 vs rtx 2070?
Hey NX Gamer, I'd love to your your thoughts on ARM entering the industry on the PC side. Do you think any of the consoles will join Nintendo with an ARM chip? maybe Nvidia too. Microsoft had ARM written down as a possibility on their leaked documents.
video games ,electric vehicles are losing out to the gold rush that is AI
Short answer: no
why would this be a bad thimg?? imagine a world with 70 percent less studios and the the 30% left all had the best designers and coders and imagination = fewer and better games
sony did devation games dirty.. poached half their workforce and pulled their funding to the rest.. ruthless..
Definitely an ongoing problem with them.
Disagree , they didn’t hit their milestones & Sony salvaged whatever was viable for future business.
I think so.
It may already have done.
We need a hard reset.
I would say alot of it is this DEI in gaming , you cant hire people based on race and gender , we are seeing real world consequences as of late , even the RAF was trying to illegally hire based on race and gender , if you are not getting the best for the job your company suffers, alot of DEI jobs are being lost in the USA at the moment but in the UK we seem to be embracing this American way of thinking, which is ultimately destroying companys from the inside out , please do some research on the BRIDGE group, they are a DEI focused company that wants to inject far left progressive wokness into every job role and at every company. Very scary times we live in.
Lots of misunderstanding here.
@@TheBean87please explain why the gaming industry is DEI hiring and losing billions, and why the movie industry is doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time and with the exact same result? Its not a coincidence. All entertainment has had this weird ideology shoved into it of late and both are suffering same fate. Bud light did the same ,another coincidence? I myself are proof as me and my friends stay away from "woke" games and if me and my friends do i can safely say others do , then there is the anti white racism in gaming , as show lately by lots of developers and games industry workers due to gamer gate 2. There is plenty of evidence of this if you care to look. I can say to you i and many others dont want to fund people who hate us. Not very business 101 from these hateful people.
Reactionaries always live in scary times.
Their amygdalas always processing fear to cope with their massive stupidity. They can't grasp sociology even at a fundamental level, so they substitute it with racism and map it to the appearance of structural thought.
"The problems are caused by Black people (ofc they want to say the n-word), Jewish people, Woman, Queer, Politically correct, Arab people, other religions, Queer people, immigrants, wokeness, DEI, etc, etc."
A tale as old as civilization itself.
@@Roundhead75 I think you're on the wrong UA-cam channel. But glad you’re watching Michael instead of anti-“woke” outrage channels.
@@jeanlepage4264 I don’t think he is and I’ve never seen evidence of it. He’s smart enough not to inject political topics into his content, which is about the technical aspects of video games, console, PCs, hardware and realtime rendering. Even if people think games are political, the aspects he is covering has nothing to do with any of that. I’ve watched a lot of his videos and would say that he quite rightly keeps his political beliefs a mystery. I’m not political, but anyone with a brain can see that channels building their identity around anti-“woke” are not to be trusted. They are only trying to simply topics that are very complex and only seek to farm outrage and paranoia. I would hope intelligent people on the left and the right would not fall for such nonsense.