So sad how it hapenned to frosoftware too , elden ring has basically all the symptoms of skyrim that only people who played morrowind back in the day could diagnose , sad we will likelly only get 1 or 2 soulslikes before it turns into a slop studio after it is bought by Sony
People just noticed the issue way too late because we are all brainwashed victims of mass psychological manipulation, blinded by a false feeling of endless prosperity.
I personally believe bioware died in 2012, when the founders of the studio left it DA: Inquisition still had some good moments, I would even say it was good, but afterwards
@@MrRafagigapr Skyrim is my first elder scroll game so I don't get all the ruckus from back then. Years later I play oblivion, then morrowind. And boy of boy that was hell a lot of downgrade in so many aspects from previous title
That intro with the pirates was so good. From gamers lowering the game's rating to ign being on the same boat with developers and asking them for orders. It just works to well.
The song that rules my life to this day is "Season Changes" by Exposé. People believe the companies are inmutable beings. Reality is PEOPLE ARE THE COMPANIES. The best example about that are Apple and MS. Jobs died, Gates got retire but the companies are still there cuz many people are working there. And when people come and go the whole things change. Now is Nadella's MS not Gate's MS, today is Cook's Apple not Job's Apple. Tomorrow new CEO will come. And all will change again.
I remember when Starfield came out one of the videos I watched about it the player said "the shooting is even better than fallout 4" and I just thought "what a perilously low bar to cross"
LOL, yeah, and in November 2024, I've heard, "Veilguard runs at 60FPS." That's not a selling feature, when every contemporary game should run that smoothly.
honestly, and maybe this is personal preference, but i prefer the gunplay in fallout 3/NV more than 4. it felt more snappy and crisp, while Fallout 4 felt slow and floaty.
Very true but blizzard from the mid 90s to the late 2000s was a power house in pc gaming industry. When you seen that blizzard logo you knew the game was going to be top tier for years.
In reality is in all industries, for example, boing, when boing was in its golden age to create theyre best airplanes, was when the CEO, in that time was understanding that the workers and engineers are the backbone of the company and allow them to work and pay them acordingly, creating a good enviroment even when they have difficulty if the workers are satisfie and support the company these progress. Nations are the same, China after the great leap foward was at the brink of civilization colapse, but when the great leader kick the bucket and the people were allow to prosper and have a bit of property they prosper and escape misery, and well the great leader back start with the same and everithing is going down again. Is not only in gaming is in all industrys and nations, is the people that make the richness the culture, progress, is the people that make things great, not logos, not brand, not company and definetly not CEOS
I remember Ratchet and Clank a Crack in Time came with a documentary talking about the games development, and a lot of it was just them talking about things they thought was cool and how proud they were about some of the new aliens they came up with. Insomniac nowadays however is the most soulless, corporate _thing._ lacking any human aspect to its creations and much of what you see feels designed by committee or a large, uninterested board of writers, or things designed to cater to that "muh graphics" side of things.
I feel we should follow individuals rather than studios. Like how we are with movies. People don't get excited for the new Lionsgate movie, they get excited for the new Quentin Tarantino movie.
100% Follow the talent, not the studios. I watch all Ryan Gosling movies, same for Jake Gyllenhaall. I love the way they act. Same for games now, I just keep an eye out for small games and small studios.
I go to cinema fairly often, I have an unlimited membership card (this only costs about $12 per month where I live) and there is one studio that I actually like and it consistently produces good movies. It's A24.
@@jakedizzle There's also Koji Igarashi. Konami wasn't making Castlevania games any more, so he made a kickstarter called Blood Stained Ritual of the Night.
Edit: I'm talking about Bethesda Game Studios, because they are the ones with the greatest impact. ---- Every reviewer has Bethesda exactly backwards. The problem isn't that they did not change, because they did. Fundamentally. Their strong suit never was graphics. Not even Morrowind or Oblivion. They never looked great, they looked competently made with a distinct artstyle. No, their strength always was a unique genre mixture within an interesting open world with sorta-okayish worldbuilding. They replaced the world with autogeneration, the missions with autogeneration, the plot with mostly autogeneration and upped the resulotion and size of the maps. That is much change, but all in the wrong areas.
Daggerfall was pretty rough in the autogeneration department, but it seems they learned from that in Morrowind, and then forgot the lesson again after oblivion
the games are really starting to show who they are made by, and never so much than with Toad Howard pet project starfield. the guy is a picture definition low level sociopath, the fact he despise his fanbase and just take them for a bunch of moronic consoooomers is blatantly obvious. he have ZERO passion for what he's making, minimum viable product is the name of the game for him, he truelly beleive we will eat his slop no matter what. well, "who's laughting now" huh Todd ?
Back when Oblivion came out it was a spectacle. I remember I couldn't buy it because my PC wasn't powerful enough to run it. I have the game now and it still looks gorgeous (aside from characters' faces, those are ugly). I agree that Skyrim was never a graphic powerhouse, and I don't know their other games. Oblivion must have been the exception.
Yeah, I was pretty annoyed when he said they were "stuck in the past". They're evolving alright, evolving backwards. People tend to throw around the concept of change as if it's inherently good, it really isn't.
During my last playthrough of Skyrim a few months ago I had to accept the bitter reality that it was probably gonna be the last good Elder Scrolls game we will ever get out of Bethesda. I remember the first time playing Skyrim back when it first released and falling in love with it. Bethesda had their chance to redeem themselves with Starfield but they blew it.
And while Skyrim is a enjoyable game it shows many of the cracks that burst open in the subsequent games. Auto generation, flat and uninspired quests, a never ending hunger for bigger and more over quality.
Skyrim is a castrated version of Oblivion, an already consolified version of Morrowind. Starfield isnt much different from Skyrim and people need to wake up and realize they just happen to enjoy a certain flavor of Bethesda slop more than the other one.
That's the problem, gaming passed from being a niche hobby to a mainstream money maker giant, so , all the good devs that we had in the 90's and 2000's aged and were replaced by goons that didn;t know a thing abour videogames like BK, and thus AAA gaming became ruined forever. We no longer have developers that are gamers and have fun making games, we instead have marketing people that see how profitable it is.
It's sad how this is so heavily pushed on videogames Movies and shows have all sorts of support and extended timelines and somehow GAMES have to be moneymaking fast food products
Not all, but the new generation of professionals can't take a criticism or two and goes romping off to HR immediately. At least, where I've worked and some accounts my friends and acquaintances told me.
@@popcandy44 It's only a matter of time before you lots showed up. You are a perfect example of what I am talking about and you replied to me predictably so. So sad.
That Bioware timeline was well done. Frankly this entire video was well done. What surprises me is how much Microsoft has spent on some of these "Brands" like Bethesda $7.5 Billion and Blizzard $68 Billion. What did they gain for all those billions if the teams can't make games anymore? A handful of tired IP's?
Long-term strategy of snuffing out potential competition, whether they be games, voip, etc. Part of those hefty pricetags might be payoffs to SEC guys and the like.
It surprised the hell out of me that this is only your second vid. As Anderson says to Shepard, 'you did good, son'. Keep going, you are doing very well.
OG devs were nerds that grew up playing tabletop RPGs and reading classic fantasy literature. Modern devs grew up playing Candy Crush and reading posts on Tumblr. Not the same breed of human. The nerds are still out there, but they're not getting hired or promoted. Stakeholder Capitalism pushing their ESG/DEI/BRIDGE mandates make sure of that. The same 5-6 horrible corporations own huge swaths of most of AAA, and they make the rules. It's about pleasing the investors, not the players. Google the top shareholders of the big studios/publishers. You'll see the same names over and over. They are a blight on entertainment and culture.
DEI is misunderstood as a cultural push. It's an efficiency strategy to reduce groupthink and increase innovation, companies do it because it makes money (the singular purpose of all companies). Multicultural groups are more creative->innovation->$$$ DEI is good for culture from a socially left perspective, sure, but the reason it's in these companies is because it's profitable. Games companies have been blustering out for reasons more related to greed in development/publishing, ie deadlines, constraints, stagnation in the field as innovation has leveled off (hence the push for especially innovative teams). More than likely, it was these issues that have damaged the games industry, not any degradation in the collective expertise of the games industry (as people allege DEI has done).
@@Im0nJupiter bull. Companies get funding from organizations like Blackrock and other WEF participants to push dei precisely to change the culture to their ends. Even if they suffer losses for it, they are reimbursed by such groups. Imo, to say that multicultural groups are inherently more creative is false and racist. And that's the problem. Hiring someone to meet a quota rather than because they are talented or capable can only logically lead to lower quality products, as we have seen.
@@Im0nJupiter This is essentially political, not market-related. Everything is being pushed by government power. The company essentially has no better choice. Between individuality and being captured, it chose to surrender directly. The problem is that the people who promote DEI are neither players nor developers in the true sense. Then the problem of lack of skills will become prominent. Because it is obvious that relying on political promotion will completely ignore its own capabilities.
He is good, but, if he wants to succeed he needs to make actual news videos. Polemic videos are fine, but if your every video is like that people lose interest fast.
I’m not sure I agree with this. After 2012, we got The Witcher 3, Persona 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Breath of the Wild, Divinity Original Sin 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, Metaphor ReFantazio, etc. This is the best time to be a gamer, you’re probably just not looking in the right direction.
@@ChaplainJoshua It absolutely is the best time to be a gamer. Today, you can still play the OG masterpieces like KOTOR, Oblivion, DAO, Baldur’s Gate 2, Diablo 2, Halo, etc. with superior technology, and you get all the contemporary masterpieces that I just mentioned above, and all future masterpieces. We have multiple lifetimes of quality games to play, you just have to broaden your horizons. You will find something that you enjoy.
@@justinthomas6617yh lol, i honestly hate this doomer behaviour ravishing comment sections, we objectively live in the best era of gaming while also being in the worst. More games, better games and technical marvels but with more quantity we see more failures. The internet just loves to be hyperbolic to fit their narrative. We have great games in almost every niche.
@@justinthomas6617 Of course there are exceptions. A lot of great games still get made, just not nearly as many as before from the devs we used to love. Now its a struggle to find a game from AAA Devs that isnt drowning in microtransactions, battlepasses, buggy releases, dumbed down game systems, hand holding etc. Thankfully the indie scene is really blowing up, lots of gems coming from them. But GOOD AAA games seem to be rarer and rarer every year.
It’s really telling that phenomenal RPGs Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 were made by BioWare, and 3 by Larian. The former studio were the kings of cRPG genre in the 90’s and 00’s, until that title was taken from them by the latter one.
Larian is far from Bioware. AAA CRPG is dead since DA: O. Arguably CDPR with Witcher 2-3 is the only one since then, not counting BG3. I'm not excited for Larian and AAA CRPG future.
Great analysis, industry vet here. One other thing is that as some companies become bigger people put in place of decision are people who had nothing to do with the company becoming what it did, they didn’t raise from internal team they are brought over. They weren’t there when the great things were done, and they start changing everything, this is also why so many are leaving, so many IP are changing. Went solo this year having working for AAA companies. When I joined we were 400 or so, when I left we were 10,000+, most people who joined didn’t even like the games we were doing or game in general.
As the head of a small studio, I hope to be able to build up an entity that is capable of properly respecting the love that the people who play our games give us.
So long as you reward player intelligence and properly hold onto your core beliefs while understanding you can be wrong, you will have my loyalty. Oblivion wowed me as a little boy and gave me a spark of imagination I'd always carry: like the cold flame of Agnon. Than with Fallout 3 I was able to intertwine that with the melancholy of the wastes which paired perfectly with the realizations of growing up. Eight year old me once looked at a slide and understood years from now I would look back at this memory with sadness because I grew up. With Dragon age I was able to be a hero to others even if I didn't know I could save myself. My fear and cowardice fueled the horrors in I suffered. From an abusive home life and from a social life that was disgustingly abhorrent: it ruined my love of learning and made me withdrawal but still I could give in one small area of my life. My hopes, my dreams, my ambitions; the principals I would follow. I was able to be courageous and stand up for the little guy or finally release my rage and turn on those who trusted me with a smile; all in the hopes I might one day take revenge for my sorrow, my grief. It's petty and it's small and it's worthless but it's the industries backbone; tiny little people living fake lives to feel better about their own. So long as you never forget this and never look at someone like me as a number every failure will only fuel you to greater heights. All those empires who are now crumbling have forgotten me and the role I played: that my voice was theirs to do with and tell me how loudly to shout because that was what my love wished to give. Never forget your humbling beginnings and learn to take those who have falling down up with a guiding hand because you know that deep down what separates you two is merely the paths you've walked in life. Pride is important but true pride is the silent admiration in thanks of knowing that you can now give what you either had or didn't for the choice is yours. Make it a good one and reap the endless bounty of lives joy.
When you're beta testing a game? Don't tell people what they're suppose to feel while playing, find a good pool of open people and make then experience the idea. If you tell the player they're suppose to feel anger the big bad burned the orphanage, you're removing agency from gamers m
12:39 Indie dev here. Trust me, i know that much now. The metroidvania I'm working on may be chopped into 3 chapters and may not have a map as large as Hollow knight, but we've decided to do the opposite, which is to focus on making every moment count, even if the world isn't so big. Which is ironic, given how the map of just the demo ended up costing an average of an hour+ to beat.😅
@@JJsiN84 Thank you. Reviews and feedback would be greatly appreciated as well. As long as it means we get to improve and make something meaningful. 😁🫡🔥
Publisher over reach is easily publicly visible. But it's important to remember a complete lack of financial oversight also routinely leads to disaster.
Humanoid studios was renamed to humanoid origin studios last year and is actually shutting down soon due to lack of funding so just becuae the talent can make a new studio doesnt mean we will every get their glory days
I just find it interesting how origin AND inflexion are struggling right now. I know it's total tin-foil hat country but it feels like a case of too many coincidences.
@@VKillershoebecause game development is hard bruv 😭 it's why you get investors or find a publisher, not to mention a good game can still fail. deciding to just make a studio one day is a huge risk and a lot of people do fail, we only hear about the major ones. The former dev of gears made a new studio and was cocky about making the next generation fps only for it to completely fail and close shop.
@@dr_diddy thanks for the info. It's sad that it seems the only option nowadays for funding is via a publisher or other means. It's like music. I spent years listening to indie acts over the more mainstream ones. I think I'm going to have to apply that to games for a few years.
It took me years to come to terms to this with Bungie. I still miss their Halo games and even Destiny 1 was fun. But Bungie is a shell of their former selves
Yes, they are dead. The reason is quite simple: the original talent has retired left or fired. What we have left is a soulless engine that has been producing whatever the corporate overlords have demanded from the staff. Even in that environment, good things can be made but they chose not to. Exhausting workers with unreasonable deadlines, creating projects that are too ambitious and expensive, pocketing out as much investor money to predatory monetize every single dollar they could with the dead franchises that have been made politically correct and missing the point in their mockery of the artist that used to create those franchises in the first place. When financial expectations are not met they write off it as a tax refund loss and sell the company in an auction house to the highest bidder. Maximizing the profit to the owner but killing any faith or goodwill those franchises used to have to its people.
They've been dead for a good 13 years now. Mass Effect 3 was when we first started to notice. It's just the EA curse. They only buy developers for their IP and then the developer slowly bleeds talent over time. It's happened to pretty much every studio they've bought.
I don't lay all the blame on the evil corporate overlords. In the end, a project has to make a profit, but the cost of creating a product that meets the ever-increasing demands of consumers has become astronomical. If I were one of those overlords and had actual skin in the game, I'd be skittish, too.
@@jimnewl I don't see things as black and white as you might think. I do have a stance for the game developers' side to get product/service customers to pay for value. I tend to focus on healthy and profitable businesses that those companies are capable of. I even praise them when they have done a good job. I say this strongly because I want to game industry business to thrive, but I want to make my statement to the madness of insane spending that serves no purpose to serve customers or business interests. A bigger map doesn't equal a better game design, it only creates a more expensive project.
Probably one of the best examples is Hideo Kojima. There was no hope for Konami to make decent Metal Gear Solid game without the mastermind behind it so they followed the man instead of the company that owns the IP.
>Your faviorite childhood studio is dead I've learned to live with that stabbing ache the day Gas Powered Games shuttered, and I knew we'd never get another Supreme Commander game.
All the OG Devs and talent has left or retired.15 to 20 years is the lenght of the prime of a career for a person. They started in their late 20s and left in their 50s to found their own studios or looked for better pay in other sectors. The other scenerio is devs who were in their 40s, 20 years ago and simply retired. Look at the names of the devs who made the hit games in the 2000s and early 2010s for each studio. They are gone. For Bethesda Ted Peterson, Ken Rolston, Michael Kirkbride, Jeremy Soule and Bruce Nesmith are gone since Oblivion the Shivering Isles in 2007, they were only consulted for Skyrim 2011 with the exception of Bruce Nesmith and Jeremy Soule who workef full time. But then both left Bethesda after Skyrim. Same goes for other studios I know less. Obsidian is also in steep decline since Chris Avellone left the studio in 2015-16. His last work being the story and worldbuiling of Pillars of eternity 1 and Tyranny, Obsidians last good games (Outer Worlds and Grounded are mediocre). Bioware is not the same since David Gaider, Mike Laidlaw, Brent Knowles and Casey Hudsen left. Most of the OG talent for all these gaming studios left between 2010 and 2018. But with dev cycles being so long now, like 4 to 6 years for a game people only know feel their absence and the new devs are just not up to par.
This is what happens when companies are public and must follow the whims of the shareholders. Passionate talent ends up leaving one way or another. Larian knows what's up saying they don't want to go public (when that's usually a goal for most founders because they get more money)
Subscribed. Two videos in and this guy has already succinctly explained the state of the video games industry while also being entertaining. Keep it up my guy
And don't forget Volition. That's the company that gave us the Saints Row games. A franchise that was once compared to and even seen as GTA competitor. But then 2017's Agents of Mayhem and the 2022 Saints Row reboot happened and now it no longer exists.
Bioware died at the end of Mass Effect 3 in 2012 there were attempts at resuscitation, but that was it, after ME3 everything they made was mid at best but mostly shit
I just saw some of the recent news about Avowed from Obsidian and then this video pops up on my feed. The universe is telling me something so I gave a thumbs up.
a lot of the devs in these large studios don't have a passion and love for it, it's a job for them. Look at staff photos from devs today compared to 15 years ago it'll tell you why AAA games are where they're at
Even if they have a love for it, the production teams required are so vast, and each individual component so specialized, that their influence on the final product isn't even noticeable. It's not a Sid Meier world anymore.
Some possible factors: 1. The Holy Grail of Gaming: Getting women to play games, and a failure to market and appeal to women. 2. Corporate Oversight: The board getting involved in every decision. Shortsighted profits for investors. 3. Activism: Writers, creators and investors who want to use the game to make social changes. Creating toxic echo chambers to inflate their own egos. They don't care about money. 4. No Interest in the Source Material And/Or Fanboys: Fanboys can make bad fanfiction. More often though, people with no interest in the source material accept good paying jobs for the experience. Working for the next job, wanting to do something completely different.
But the biggest factor of them all is *corporate consolidation.* The recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft, shows that corporations, not just gaming, but all industries are willing to consolidate the entire economy to maximize cash at the cost of everything else. I love video games, but what's happening around us in reality simply cannot be ignored. Absolutely everything, gaming included is negatively affected. The real reason is the unholy alliance of the mindless regressive activists and and the greedy crony capitalists who are both unilaterally tearing our society apart and turning us against each other.
These are all interrelated factors. DEI hiring gets more women into gaming development and many are not interested in gaming and are more interested in an aloof kind of activism skewed by their privileged background. Most often then not, instead of social change, they directly contribute to hate towards minorities because they’re so detached from reality and it doesn’t really affect them directly from their protected position of power. Edit: Middle class western women to be exact.
I love the fact that you can see the lighting in his room change as the day went on. He started early morning and finished his rant just shy of sunset. Seriously, though. I was obsessed with Mass Effect 2, and to me, it is the game of the decade. Story, gameplay, and music score, the stars truly aligned for that game. I swear, I'm tearing up remembering when the achievement popped up, "Agaisnt All Odds!" The "suicide mission" score blasting in my ears as the Normandy made the ftl jump, escaping the collector base. I was reading articles leading up to Mass Effect 3 and found a video about how the composer left just as ME2 was finished. And yeah, you can tell the score difference. Whoever the new guy was, he made the music more emotional, fitting for the proper send-off to one of the best trilogies in gaming history!
From that list I had played only far cry 3, and stopped in the middle after the first big island. Lots of things to do on the map made me "eh later I do that" later later later, years passed and I still didnt went back. Instead I am now at 38k hours factorio lol
If entertainment media would stop spending so much money when they really don’t need to, their games would be better. If they would be satisfied with making enough to run their company, pay their employees well and that was it, the world would be better.
Imagine my reaction when I finally got to play Warcraft 3 Reforged only to be greeted by a WORSE GAME than the one they released 20 years prior. You can’t do my Warcraft 3 like that.
Damn that algorithm is pushing hard with just two videos I had both of them in my feed. That's 100% saturation in the quality of the videos are good enough that I'm going to stick around.
I never hold on to any company, because it is absolutly foolish, neither should you. One should buy things that are good. You don't buy companys. Don't be a FAN of things. Worship the individual Product.
This is the first video I watched from you and you've earned yourself a subscriber. Great work. The ending montage brings a tear really, not a lot of people mention that part of the video. Thanks!
The people that worked at all of these companies, and shot out banger after banger are all gone. They've left the studios. And all that was left was the reputation of a now talentless company
This has definitely been happening mostly in the western AAA industry whereas the Japanese industry has mostly stayed stable with exception of Sony and Square Enix who have been adopting the western AAA industry mindset and paying for it. Though my favorite Japanese studios from my childhood Monolith Soft, CyberConnect2, and From Software are actually much stronger now than they were back then. Monolith Soft and From Software are still pretty much making the kinds of games they made back then, but they've been building upon their formulas a lot since then. Monolith Soft has also become a major support studio for Nintendo as well, so they've got their hands on series like Zelda, Splatoon, and Animal Crossing on top of still continuing their Xeno series. I was actually concerned about CyberConnect2 for a good while because they were pretty much typecasted into making anime license games by Bandai. For about a decade weren't able to make any of their original IP games that I fell in love with with them. Though they took those lemons and made lemonade with it and had huge success with Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm and DBZ Kakarot to the point that they were able to start self publishing recently. Their current Fuga Melodies of Steel series is a great return to form for their original IP games and I'm glad to see their very mistreated by Bandai Little Tail Bronx series come back in full force because of it. Not to mention Fuga is a very low budget indie level experience, but there's so much love, care, and attention put into it that I can just feel the passion that CC2 has for their games coming from it. Heck with each new entry they're even patching in the quality of life improvements that they added to the new game into the previous games, so the experience just keeps getting better and better as they continue working on this series. Now if they could bring .hack back in some form and do a spiritual successor to Asura's Wrath they would pretty much be like I remember they were when I was younger. I'm very glad to see them give Bandai the finger after neglecting their original IP for so long and say "I'll do it myself." They're the ones I'm looking forward to seeing progress the most with their original games in the future, and I'm happy to see them, Monolith Soft, and From Software thriving today.
The lesson I learned long ago as a sonsumer is to simply vote with your wallet: Never ever pre-order Buy no game with season pass - period DLC only for substancial upgrade I personally prefer indie studios ( Coffee Stain / Hooded Horse) over AAA studios
I keep hearing that “when these people leave, talent and lore and other whatever went with them. That’s not actually wrong. But the full, fair way to put is that the new crop taking over needs to do the work to keep things recognizable whilst progressing forward. The onus is on the newbies to do the work they need to in order to know what they’re supposed to be a part of and what they’re taking over for and why.
All they care about these days is politics. Just like Hollywood and Television and increasingly Sports. Their agenda isn't to entertain its to indoctrinate.
Western consumers are trained to focus on IP rather than who actually makes them. Comics is a good example. People follow Spiderman - rather than the creators who made the Spiderman stories they love. And nowadays most willing choose a sequel rather than risking their money on a new experience. Vicious cycle.
This ended up being a WAAYY bigger video than originally intended so I hope you enjoy the memes! Let me know what your favorite game/game studio was when you were growing up :)
When I was a kid/young teenager my favourite studio was gamefreak (cause I just love Pokemon). But well, although I still love Pokemon (the gameplay and universe are still awesome), gamefreak clearly isn't my fav anymore. They just aren't given enough time to properly polish their games and it saddens me greatly.
i am from the 90´s, game studio names weren´t famous where i grew up. I am mostly commenting to suggest you to pin your own Call to action comment. that makes it the first thing people find when scrolling down. Also i read in another comment that you zoom too much?? nah is fine by me. keep it up !!
You could make it shorter by ditching the memes or at least talk over them. This is the kind of content that I keep running in the background while playing games so the memes are just unnecessary pauses. Apart from that it was good and you made some very valid points.
Dragon Age Inquisition is where I draw the line with this saga. I played for a couple of hours and couldn't keep going. Big names are off the table for me, also, I rarely play any game on release, early releases are also forbidden. Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft, CA... have been dead to me for several years now. I've reached a point where I don't feel like I have to play the latest thing. I have so many great games still to be played that are several years old. Hell, my device is grateful for it xD I don't think I've bought a game that wasn't on sale for a while now. Their business models just don't suit well with me. Live services, hundreds in DLC's and additional content, modern social issues, that I am barely interested in, shoved down my throat at every chance, microtransactions... I remember what was so attractive about this hobby in the first place.
I thought I was the only one that only could play DA:I for only a couple of hours. To me, it felt like a MMO, and I hadn't even unlocked the inquisition yet. I went directly from a MMO (FFXIV) to the game, and it felt the same, but worse. At least FFXIV has a world that felt lived in. DA:I felt like an empty world with a few things here and there. And no one actually lives there.
I'm thankful the algorithm brought me here. I love how you edited the video and chose all the movie-scenen to brilliantly amd hilariously visualize a point. You just earned my subscribtion. Keep up the good work!
Something I think a lot of people don’t think about is that the pioneers of RPG games were people that had other careers and interests and gaming / game creation was a labor of love. Now games are made by people going through the university / college industrial complex which currently seems more interested in turning out activists than anything else. Couple that with the fact that gaming is one of the biggest industries on the planet, it’s no surprise that it’s become what it’s become.
College told me I was SUPPOSED to be an activist and it took years to shake that mentality. I don’t think most gamers are bigoted. Some certainly are, but MOST GAMERS ARE CHILL AND JUST WANT A FUN GAME TO PLAY, and don’t really care about the race, sex, orientation of the characters.
People need to realize this with a lot of franchises and not just within gaming. Continuing supporting some of these studios is just taking money and attention from much more worthy recipients.
Another factor that I only found about recently. Supposedly engines Loke UE is an influence on how people make their games, and things into the games, just like Microsoft does. Like not having attractive females, focusing on not having "gender stereotypes", and I'm sure other things as well. And I don't care which side of the discussion you fall on, if you have an open mind and can think about things clearly, you know that when people create things, the WORST thing that can happen is to put those people's minds and creativity in a box, especially to push agendas. "Unreal Engine does not explicitly dictate how you design characters in terms of sexualization, but their Marketplace Guidelines clearly state that they reserve the right to decline or request changes to content that contains "exploitative" sexual content, meaning they can remove or ask you to modify assets that are considered overly sexualized."
Mass Effect is kind of the perfect analogy to what's happened to Bioware (and countless forgotten studios before them)... Except that in our reality, the Reapers won, and Bioware only lives on as an empty corpofied husk...
Video name is all I needed to see to agree. Even if it hurts, it's true. Though the real question for me? _When_ did they die? We've seen when it was _finally noticed_ of course, but...
That interview with Greg Zeschuk about E.A. is fascinating, thanks for sharing that. Sharing that information alone is what got you my like and subscribe, thanks for doing that research. For real, thank you so much!
People keep saying Todd Howard is the father of TES/Fallout but he's more like a stepfather. He actually came in a bit later than the real fathers/creative drivers - Julian Lefay (aka Julianos), Ted Peterson, Bruce Nesmith (TSR/Dungeons and Dragons, the early ES games and lead designer of Skyrim) and others who have either left or were overshadowed by the Lord Todd.
people has to stop with this take of the evil publishers and the creative geniuses developers, the problem is all the opposite, nobody is making money in videogames as of late unless is mobile or sport franchises. the devs are in fault in here, because they don’t feel that are doing something for gamers at all. The reason why Larian makes good games is because they need to make money to keep the company afloat, on the contrary these AAA studios with blackrock money couldn’t care less about quality. This is how you get Veilguard
Dragon age 2 was a huge disappointment for me when it came out. Especially considering what it's predecessor brought to the table. From what I remember it was initially intended to be DLC for origins. Everyone assumed EA was the one that pushed for that, but after seeing everything that's happened since, it's tough to say.
Well they did, after Origins was finished EA told Brent Knowles they didn't have another game for him and he should move on. They had already decided that they didn't want any more CPRGs from Bioware. Knowles was then replaced by Mike Laidlaw and DA2 ended up a consolitus ridden dumbed down arcadey excuse for an RPG.
Mark Darrah has spoken about this at length. DA2 was supposed to be DA:Exodus, just like the first one was Origins. EA insisted that it be a 2, and also insisted on the short development time because they had a gap in their release schedule that would have messed up a financial quarter for them. That much is on record. Personally I think DA2 is a heroic work given the 14 month delivery.
@@T-Flame Not really, they wasted much of that time "upgrading" the engine for the idiotic change to the art style. Better examples of games made under short dev cycles would be KoTOR II and Fallout New Vegas by Obsidian. Unlike DA2 there was no stripping away of exploration or RPG aspects, they actually added more depth and better writing.
Its funny that people praise Nintendo like theyre the opposite of this. They have just been milking Mario and Luigi since the 80's. They havent made a serious catalog of games that arent for literal children or are just a platformer or 2d fighting game. Nintendo is seriously making bank off of Switch nerds and selling essentially Mario mobile games for full price. SuperSmashBros is probably one of the most popular titles on the Switch, and its literally just a 2d fighting game with Nintendo characters. How is that in any way a decent "AAA" game? I used to play on an old NES that was my moms I believe. I played SuperMarioBros 3 and OG Mario Bros. Even for the time, those games were basic, boring and lacked substance. There were NES games with full blown stories at the time. Lets face it, Nintendo fans are just blindsighted by the flashy characters, bright colors and anime inspired art styles. Theyre time has been up for a while now. Arcade machines are a thing of the past at this point and Nintendo needs to cough up some new IPs.
I feel lucky to have experienced Command and Conquer in its prime. It was probably worth it to sell out to EA in order to raise the budget for those FMVs. We dodged a bullet when C&C died out before we got weird a corpse possessed with monetization.
What an interesting video, thank you. The mess of all the buy ups and consolidations leaves my head reeling, it's clearer now. I rely on my old favourite games and playthroughs on yt for recommendations.
Bethesda's issue is more than just stagnation. If they'd put out a game at Skyrim or Oblivion's quality level it would've succeeded in spite of the ancient, janky engine. People would've very quickly hand-waved the issues if they still felt the kind of magic their old games had. The problem is that the studio has lost all of it's creative talent, and their direction has become corporate, safe, and sterile. Todd's direction for the past 20 years has been to make things dumber and more appealing to the lowest common denominator, because that's what worked for them on the 360. Over a decade of that results in a studio that makes dumb, shallow product. Add the Microsoft acquisition on top of that and you've got another layer of corporate bureaucracy meddling with their product. So many people, including multiple outsourcing studios worked on Starfield, and it feels like a game with barely any content. They've become an idiot behemoth that just inefficiently accomplishes nothing.
The success of Skyrim had a lot to do with Bethesda becoming what they are. A lot of us didn't like how dumbed down it was compared to their older games in order to achieve great success. They took their lessons and money from that and realized that, given a big enough marketing budget, the could sell their new, dumbed down games in buggy states and people would still flock.
Nice editing bro, I watched the PotC bit twice 😆. One thing missing from your account of Bioware is just how beloved those pre-EA games were and are. Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 reinvented CRPGs and people still play them, 25 years later.
A lot of people still love them, but I figure it's a matter of time. Outer Worlds was such a shallow, bare-bones game. I don't use this term very often, but the writing was cringe. I felt like I was browsing the worst parts of Reddit the entire time.
They won't. Those publishers are dominated by corporate elites, and they'd rather divide and conquer us with identity politics to distract us from the real issues created by them. Occupy Wall Street scared them so much that they unleashed a secret psychological weapon on us.
They died five to ten years ago, people only just noticed.
So sad how it hapenned to frosoftware too , elden ring has basically all the symptoms of skyrim that only people who played morrowind back in the day could diagnose , sad we will likelly only get 1 or 2 soulslikes before it turns into a slop studio after it is bought by Sony
People just noticed the issue way too late because we are all brainwashed victims of mass psychological manipulation, blinded by a false feeling of endless prosperity.
casual just noticed
cause they suck so much
I personally believe bioware died in 2012, when the founders of the studio left it
DA: Inquisition still had some good moments, I would even say it was good, but afterwards
@@MrRafagigapr Skyrim is my first elder scroll game so I don't get all the ruckus from back then. Years later I play oblivion, then morrowind. And boy of boy that was hell a lot of downgrade in so many aspects from previous title
That intro with the pirates was so good. From gamers lowering the game's rating to ign being on the same boat with developers and asking them for orders. It just works to well.
I have to concur, great editing here !
Absolute cinema
The song that rules my life to this day is "Season Changes" by Exposé. People believe the companies are inmutable beings. Reality is PEOPLE ARE THE COMPANIES. The best example about that are Apple and MS. Jobs died, Gates got retire but the companies are still there cuz many people are working there. And when people come and go the whole things change. Now is Nadella's MS not Gate's MS, today is Cook's Apple not Job's Apple. Tomorrow new CEO will come. And all will change again.
Art. Pure art.
I agree, that was masterful. 😂😂
I remember when Starfield came out one of the videos I watched about it the player said "the shooting is even better than fallout 4" and I just thought "what a perilously low bar to cross"
LOL, yeah, and in November 2024, I've heard, "Veilguard runs at 60FPS." That's not a selling feature, when every contemporary game should run that smoothly.
Starfield shooting was not better than Fallout 4, I have played both.
honestly, and maybe this is personal preference, but i prefer the gunplay in fallout 3/NV more than 4. it felt more snappy and crisp, while Fallout 4 felt slow and floaty.
“Games are made by people, not studios” so many UA-camrs who cover this topic miss that point
Very true but blizzard from the mid 90s to the late 2000s was a power house in pc gaming industry. When you seen that blizzard logo you knew the game was going to be top tier for years.
In reality is in all industries, for example, boing, when boing was in its golden age to create theyre best airplanes, was when the CEO, in that time was understanding that the workers and engineers are the backbone of the company and allow them to work and pay them acordingly, creating a good enviroment even when they have difficulty if the workers are satisfie and support the company these progress.
Nations are the same, China after the great leap foward was at the brink of civilization colapse, but when the great leader kick the bucket and the people were allow to prosper and have a bit of property they prosper and escape misery, and well the great leader back start with the same and everithing is going down again.
Is not only in gaming is in all industrys and nations, is the people that make the richness the culture, progress, is the people that make things great, not logos, not brand, not company and definetly not CEOS
@@Krysnha Boeing*, great comment though
I remember Ratchet and Clank a Crack in Time came with a documentary talking about the games development, and a lot of it was just them talking about things they thought was cool and how proud they were about some of the new aliens they came up with. Insomniac nowadays however is the most soulless, corporate _thing._ lacking any human aspect to its creations and much of what you see feels designed by committee or a large, uninterested board of writers, or things designed to cater to that "muh graphics" side of things.
Brand name turned from a mark of pride into a way to diffuse and deflect guilt.
Ubisoft, bioware, blizzard, bethesda are all just names.
The time that those names meant something is long gone.
I still can't get over how much EA fucked Maxis over. So much potential wasted
Maxis, Westwood, Bullfrog, and so much other great studios.... I will never forgive them for that
@@nach0x idk how they havent killed bioware yet, its been over a decade of them just creating garbage, their last good game was mass effect 2
@@PedroIgoriSWTOR is still around
Barely @@higherground9888
EA should be sent to federal court for not making another Spore game. straight to the electric chair for that.
I feel we should follow individuals rather than studios. Like how we are with movies. People don't get excited for the new Lionsgate movie, they get excited for the new Quentin Tarantino movie.
100% Follow the talent, not the studios. I watch all Ryan Gosling movies, same for Jake Gyllenhaall. I love the way they act. Same for games now, I just keep an eye out for small games and small studios.
People do to an extent. Hideo Kojima comes to mind.
I go to cinema fairly often, I have an unlimited membership card (this only costs about $12 per month where I live) and there is one studio that I actually like and it consistently produces good movies. It's A24.
Majority of people are going to swarm to lowest common denominator action movies though and gaming corps have that crap on lockdown
@@jakedizzle There's also Koji Igarashi. Konami wasn't making Castlevania games any more, so he made a kickstarter called Blood Stained Ritual of the Night.
Edit: I'm talking about Bethesda Game Studios, because they are the ones with the greatest impact.
----
Every reviewer has Bethesda exactly backwards. The problem isn't that they did not change, because they did. Fundamentally. Their strong suit never was graphics. Not even Morrowind or Oblivion. They never looked great, they looked competently made with a distinct artstyle.
No, their strength always was a unique genre mixture within an interesting open world with sorta-okayish worldbuilding.
They replaced the world with autogeneration, the missions with autogeneration, the plot with mostly autogeneration and upped the resulotion and size of the maps.
That is much change, but all in the wrong areas.
Daggerfall was pretty rough in the autogeneration department, but it seems they learned from that in Morrowind, and then forgot the lesson again after oblivion
the games are really starting to show who they are made by, and never so much than with Toad Howard pet project starfield.
the guy is a picture definition low level sociopath, the fact he despise his fanbase and just take them for a bunch of moronic consoooomers is blatantly obvious.
he have ZERO passion for what he's making, minimum viable product is the name of the game for him, he truelly beleive we will eat his slop no matter what.
well, "who's laughting now" huh Todd ?
Back when Oblivion came out it was a spectacle. I remember I couldn't buy it because my PC wasn't powerful enough to run it.
I have the game now and it still looks gorgeous (aside from characters' faces, those are ugly). I agree that Skyrim was never a graphic powerhouse, and I don't know their other games. Oblivion must have been the exception.
Yeah, I was pretty annoyed when he said they were "stuck in the past". They're evolving alright, evolving backwards. People tend to throw around the concept of change as if it's inherently good, it really isn't.
So tell me why everything was autogenerated in your opinion; they still spent so much time to make Starfield. What were they doing?
During my last playthrough of Skyrim a few months ago I had to accept the bitter reality that it was probably gonna be the last good Elder Scrolls game we will ever get out of Bethesda. I remember the first time playing Skyrim back when it first released and falling in love with it. Bethesda had their chance to redeem themselves with Starfield but they blew it.
And while Skyrim is a enjoyable game it shows many of the cracks that burst open in the subsequent games.
Auto generation, flat and uninspired quests, a never ending hunger for bigger and more over quality.
My second hour (and last) of starfield did that to me
And the more you play Skyrim, you realize Morrowind was the last good “elder scrolls” game.
Skyrim is a castrated version of Oblivion, an already consolified version of Morrowind. Starfield isnt much different from Skyrim and people need to wake up and realize they just happen to enjoy a certain flavor of Bethesda slop more than the other one.
It never was a good tes game
That's the problem, gaming passed from being a niche hobby to a mainstream money maker giant, so , all the good devs that we had in the 90's and 2000's aged and were replaced by goons that didn;t know a thing abour videogames like BK, and thus AAA gaming became ruined forever. We no longer have developers that are gamers and have fun making games, we instead have marketing people that see how profitable it is.
It's sad how this is so heavily pushed on videogames
Movies and shows have all sorts of support and extended timelines and somehow GAMES have to be moneymaking fast food products
Not all, but the new generation of professionals can't take a criticism or two and goes romping off to HR immediately. At least, where I've worked and some accounts my friends and acquaintances told me.
@@ze-ph9774wtf are you on about old man?
@@popcandy44 It's only a matter of time before you lots showed up. You are a perfect example of what I am talking about and you replied to me predictably so. So sad.
Y'all just complaining that the "niche" now doesn't include you.
You are not overly dramatic that was very accurate actually
Wow that went really emotional at the end 😢 you just broke me
That Bioware timeline was well done. Frankly this entire video was well done. What surprises me is how much Microsoft has spent on some of these "Brands" like Bethesda $7.5 Billion and Blizzard $68 Billion. What did they gain for all those billions if the teams can't make games anymore? A handful of tired IP's?
Long-term strategy of snuffing out potential competition, whether they be games, voip, etc. Part of those hefty pricetags might be payoffs to SEC guys and the like.
Honestly I think half of their struggle came from Microsoft buying them and malnourishing them
They spent it on King(Candy Crush), and CoD, not Blizzard
It surprised the hell out of me that this is only your second vid. As Anderson says to Shepard, 'you did good, son'. Keep going, you are doing very well.
OG devs were nerds that grew up playing tabletop RPGs and reading classic fantasy literature. Modern devs grew up playing Candy Crush and reading posts on Tumblr. Not the same breed of human. The nerds are still out there, but they're not getting hired or promoted. Stakeholder Capitalism pushing their ESG/DEI/BRIDGE mandates make sure of that. The same 5-6 horrible corporations own huge swaths of most of AAA, and they make the rules. It's about pleasing the investors, not the players. Google the top shareholders of the big studios/publishers. You'll see the same names over and over. They are a blight on entertainment and culture.
Blackrock. Don't really need to say more.
DEI is misunderstood as a cultural push. It's an efficiency strategy to reduce groupthink and increase innovation, companies do it because it makes money (the singular purpose of all companies). Multicultural groups are more creative->innovation->$$$
DEI is good for culture from a socially left perspective, sure, but the reason it's in these companies is because it's profitable. Games companies have been blustering out for reasons more related to greed in development/publishing, ie deadlines, constraints, stagnation in the field as innovation has leveled off (hence the push for especially innovative teams). More than likely, it was these issues that have damaged the games industry, not any degradation in the collective expertise of the games industry (as people allege DEI has done).
@@Im0nJupiter bull. Companies get funding from organizations like Blackrock and other WEF participants to push dei precisely to change the culture to their ends. Even if they suffer losses for it, they are reimbursed by such groups.
Imo, to say that multicultural groups are inherently more creative is false and racist. And that's the problem. Hiring someone to meet a quota rather than because they are talented or capable can only logically lead to lower quality products, as we have seen.
@@Im0nJupiter This is essentially political, not market-related. Everything is being pushed by government power. The company essentially has no better choice. Between individuality and being captured, it chose to surrender directly. The problem is that the people who promote DEI are neither players nor developers in the true sense. Then the problem of lack of skills will become prominent. Because it is obvious that relying on political promotion will completely ignore its own capabilities.
@@Im0nJupiterselecting for diversity is not selecting for competence. QED
Todd Howard feels like he’s in his Jerry Jones era
Only 2 videos and bro is already better than 99% of other gaming "news" channels. Hell yeah keep it up man
When UA-cam recommended him to me I saw his first bid and literally thought this guy had at least thousands of subs. The quality is excellent.
It's good bro but this glazing mentality has gotta stop.
@@REDEEMERWOLF How is saying "good job" glazing? Relax man its not that deep
He is good, but, if he wants to succeed he needs to make actual news videos. Polemic videos are fine, but if your every video is like that people lose interest fast.
@@AgagaSnsnsyeah, youtubers reading from news articles is top-tier content. He should do more of that.
Everything's been going downhill since 2012.
I’m not sure I agree with this. After 2012, we got The Witcher 3, Persona 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Breath of the Wild, Divinity Original Sin 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, Metaphor ReFantazio, etc. This is the best time to be a gamer, you’re probably just not looking in the right direction.
@@justinthomas6617 best time to be a gamer?? Lol ok
@@ChaplainJoshua It absolutely is the best time to be a gamer. Today, you can still play the OG masterpieces like KOTOR, Oblivion, DAO, Baldur’s Gate 2, Diablo 2, Halo, etc. with superior technology, and you get all the contemporary masterpieces that I just mentioned above, and all future masterpieces. We have multiple lifetimes of quality games to play, you just have to broaden your horizons. You will find something that you enjoy.
@@justinthomas6617yh lol, i honestly hate this doomer behaviour ravishing comment sections, we objectively live in the best era of gaming while also being in the worst.
More games, better games and technical marvels but with more quantity we see more failures.
The internet just loves to be hyperbolic to fit their narrative.
We have great games in almost every niche.
@@justinthomas6617 Of course there are exceptions. A lot of great games still get made, just not nearly as many as before from the devs we used to love.
Now its a struggle to find a game from AAA Devs that isnt drowning in microtransactions, battlepasses, buggy releases, dumbed down game systems, hand holding etc.
Thankfully the indie scene is really blowing up, lots of gems coming from them. But GOOD AAA games seem to be rarer and rarer every year.
Bethesda, BioWare, Obsidian, Lucas Arts, Blizzard, etc.,
Such a damn shame
Nah Obsidian is still fire edit this post right now
@ULTRAOutdoorsman Obsidian is a dumpster fire. Chris Avellone is spilling the tea on the crap that's going on there
@@ellatgrasso2096 Obsidian is a woke mess
i really miss Westwood studios. They made historic games like C&C, Lands of Lore, Kyrandia and many others
@ellatgrasso2096 their art dev is activley atacking anyone who criticizes avowed
Love the beginning where SkillUp is Jack Sparrow. Keep em coming.
What a legend. Remember us when you hit 1 billion subscribers
It’s really telling that phenomenal RPGs Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 were made by BioWare, and 3 by Larian. The former studio were the kings of cRPG genre in the 90’s and 00’s, until that title was taken from them by the latter one.
Bg3 was only what it is because of tencent troll bot review farms
Larian is far from Bioware. AAA CRPG is dead since DA: O. Arguably CDPR with Witcher 2-3 is the only one since then, not counting BG3.
I'm not excited for Larian and AAA CRPG future.
Great analysis, industry vet here. One other thing is that as some companies become bigger people put in place of decision are people who had nothing to do with the company becoming what it did, they didn’t raise from internal team they are brought over. They weren’t there when the great things were done, and they start changing everything, this is also why so many are leaving, so many IP are changing. Went solo this year having working for AAA companies. When I joined we were 400 or so, when I left we were 10,000+, most people who joined didn’t even like the games we were doing or game in general.
As the head of a small studio, I hope to be able to build up an entity that is capable of properly respecting the love that the people who play our games give us.
So long as you reward player intelligence and properly hold onto your core beliefs while understanding you can be wrong, you will have my loyalty.
Oblivion wowed me as a little boy and gave me a spark of imagination I'd always carry: like the cold flame of Agnon.
Than with Fallout 3 I was able to intertwine that with the melancholy of the wastes which paired perfectly with the realizations of growing up. Eight year old me once looked at a slide and understood years from now I would look back at this memory with sadness because I grew up.
With Dragon age I was able to be a hero to others even if I didn't know I could save myself. My fear and cowardice fueled the horrors in I suffered. From an abusive home life and from a social life that was disgustingly abhorrent: it ruined my love of learning and made me withdrawal but still I could give in one small area of my life. My hopes, my dreams, my ambitions; the principals I would follow.
I was able to be courageous and stand up for the little guy or finally release my rage and turn on those who trusted me with a smile; all in the hopes I might one day take revenge for my sorrow, my grief.
It's petty and it's small and it's worthless but it's the industries backbone; tiny little people living fake lives to feel better about their own. So long as you never forget this and never look at someone like me as a number every failure will only fuel you to greater heights. All those empires who are now crumbling have forgotten me and the role I played: that my voice was theirs to do with and tell me how loudly to shout because that was what my love wished to give.
Never forget your humbling beginnings and learn to take those who have falling down up with a guiding hand because you know that deep down what separates you two is merely the paths you've walked in life. Pride is important but true pride is the silent admiration in thanks of knowing that you can now give what you either had or didn't for the choice is yours. Make it a good one and reap the endless bounty of lives joy.
When you're beta testing a game? Don't tell people what they're suppose to feel while playing, find a good pool of open people and make then experience the idea. If you tell the player they're suppose to feel anger the big bad burned the orphanage, you're removing agency from gamers m
Don’t have activists in the office
milk tf out of players, each player is your walking bank account.
milk it babes
12:39 Indie dev here.
Trust me, i know that much now.
The metroidvania I'm working on may be chopped into 3 chapters and may not have a map as large as Hollow knight, but we've decided to do the opposite, which is to focus on making every moment count, even if the world isn't so big.
Which is ironic, given how the map of just the demo ended up costing an average of an hour+ to beat.😅
What's your game? I may try out the demo
@@comradecatbug5289The InBetween, an Undertale-inspired metroidvania about choices.
There's a demo on Steam.🙂
@vcdgamer The title gives off a vibe like "The NeverHood"... 😁😉
@@vcdgamer I'll check it out because Indy developers and double A developers as well have been keeping gaming alive for me lately.
@@JJsiN84 Thank you.
Reviews and feedback would be greatly appreciated as well.
As long as it means we get to improve and make something meaningful. 😁🫡🔥
Publisher over reach is easily publicly visible. But it's important to remember a complete lack of financial oversight also routinely leads to disaster.
It's important to strike a balance, yes. The issue is not the exustence of publishers, but their excessive control.
*cough cough* Chris Roberts *cough*
Humanoid studios was renamed to humanoid origin studios last year and is actually shutting down soon due to lack of funding so just becuae the talent can make a new studio doesnt mean we will every get their glory days
I just find it interesting how origin AND inflexion are struggling right now. I know it's total tin-foil hat country but it feels like a case of too many coincidences.
@@VKillershoebecause game development is hard bruv 😭
it's why you get investors or find a publisher, not to mention a good game can still fail.
deciding to just make a studio one day is a huge risk and a lot of people do fail, we only hear about the major ones.
The former dev of gears made a new studio and was cocky about making the next generation fps only for it to completely fail and close shop.
@@dr_diddy thanks for the info. It's sad that it seems the only option nowadays for funding is via a publisher or other means. It's like music. I spent years listening to indie acts over the more mainstream ones. I think I'm going to have to apply that to games for a few years.
It took me years to come to terms to this with Bungie. I still miss their Halo games and even Destiny 1 was fun. But Bungie is a shell of their former selves
Yes, they are dead. The reason is quite simple: the original talent has retired left or fired. What we have left is a soulless engine that has been producing whatever the corporate overlords have demanded from the staff. Even in that environment, good things can be made but they chose not to. Exhausting workers with unreasonable deadlines, creating projects that are too ambitious and expensive, pocketing out as much investor money to predatory monetize every single dollar they could with the dead franchises that have been made politically correct and missing the point in their mockery of the artist that used to create those franchises in the first place. When financial expectations are not met they write off it as a tax refund loss and sell the company in an auction house to the highest bidder. Maximizing the profit to the owner but killing any faith or goodwill those franchises used to have to its people.
They've been dead for a good 13 years now. Mass Effect 3 was when we first started to notice. It's just the EA curse. They only buy developers for their IP and then the developer slowly bleeds talent over time. It's happened to pretty much every studio they've bought.
I don't lay all the blame on the evil corporate overlords. In the end, a project has to make a profit, but the cost of creating a product that meets the ever-increasing demands of consumers has become astronomical. If I were one of those overlords and had actual skin in the game, I'd be skittish, too.
@@jimnewl I don't see things as black and white as you might think. I do have a stance for the game developers' side to get product/service customers to pay for value. I tend to focus on healthy and profitable businesses that those companies are capable of. I even praise them when they have done a good job. I say this strongly because I want to game industry business to thrive, but I want to make my statement to the madness of insane spending that serves no purpose to serve customers or business interests. A bigger map doesn't equal a better game design, it only creates a more expensive project.
Probably one of the best examples is Hideo Kojima. There was no hope for Konami to make decent Metal Gear Solid game without the mastermind behind it so they followed the man instead of the company that owns the IP.
>Your faviorite childhood studio is dead
I've learned to live with that stabbing ache the day Gas Powered Games shuttered, and I knew we'd never get another Supreme Commander game.
follow the creators of the things you love, not the corporations who own them. what an important lesson that was REALLY painful to learn.
All the OG Devs and talent has left or retired.15 to 20 years is the lenght of the prime of a career for a person. They started in their late 20s and left in their 50s to found their own studios or looked for better pay in other sectors. The other scenerio is devs who were in their 40s, 20 years ago and simply retired. Look at the names of the devs who made the hit games in the 2000s and early 2010s for each studio. They are gone. For Bethesda Ted Peterson, Ken Rolston, Michael Kirkbride, Jeremy Soule and Bruce Nesmith are gone since Oblivion the Shivering Isles in 2007, they were only consulted for Skyrim 2011 with the exception of Bruce Nesmith and Jeremy Soule who workef full time. But then both left Bethesda after Skyrim. Same goes for other studios I know less. Obsidian is also in steep decline since Chris Avellone left the studio in 2015-16. His last work being the story and worldbuiling of Pillars of eternity 1 and Tyranny, Obsidians last good games (Outer Worlds and Grounded are mediocre). Bioware is not the same since David Gaider, Mike Laidlaw, Brent Knowles and Casey Hudsen left. Most of the OG talent for all these gaming studios left between 2010 and 2018. But with dev cycles being so long now, like 4 to 6 years for a game people only know feel their absence and the new devs are just not up to par.
This is what happens when companies are public and must follow the whims of the shareholders. Passionate talent ends up leaving one way or another. Larian knows what's up saying they don't want to go public (when that's usually a goal for most founders because they get more money)
Subscribed. Two videos in and this guy has already succinctly explained the state of the video games industry while also being entertaining. Keep it up my guy
And don't forget Volition. That's the company that gave us the Saints Row games. A franchise that was once compared to and even seen as GTA competitor. But then 2017's Agents of Mayhem and the 2022 Saints Row reboot happened and now it no longer exists.
Bioware died at the end of Mass Effect 3 in 2012
there were attempts at resuscitation, but that was it, after ME3 everything they made was mid at best but mostly shit
I just saw some of the recent news about Avowed from Obsidian and then this video pops up on my feed. The universe is telling me something so I gave a thumbs up.
a lot of the devs in these large studios don't have a passion and love for it, it's a job for them. Look at staff photos from devs today compared to 15 years ago it'll tell you why AAA games are where they're at
Even if they have a love for it, the production teams required are so vast, and each individual component so specialized, that their influence on the final product isn't even noticeable. It's not a Sid Meier world anymore.
Some possible factors:
1. The Holy Grail of Gaming: Getting women to play games, and a failure to market and appeal to women.
2. Corporate Oversight: The board getting involved in every decision. Shortsighted profits for investors.
3. Activism: Writers, creators and investors who want to use the game to make social changes. Creating toxic echo chambers to inflate their own egos. They don't care about money.
4. No Interest in the Source Material And/Or Fanboys: Fanboys can make bad fanfiction. More often though, people with no interest in the source material accept good paying jobs for the experience. Working for the next job, wanting to do something completely different.
3 is the main one. People are sick and tired of studios pandering to literally 0.1% of the worlds population by shoving agendas down our throats.
As a woman I am utterly disappointed how LACKING these games of appealing looking males...All I get from Veilguard is ugly characters.
But the biggest factor of them all is *corporate consolidation.* The recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft, shows that corporations, not just gaming, but all industries are willing to consolidate the entire economy to maximize cash at the cost of everything else.
I love video games, but what's happening around us in reality simply cannot be ignored. Absolutely everything, gaming included is negatively affected. The real reason is the unholy alliance of the mindless regressive activists and and the greedy crony capitalists who are both unilaterally tearing our society apart and turning us against each other.
Erm, do you know that Pac-Man, one of most successful arcade game franchises, was made to get women to play games
☝🤓
These are all interrelated factors. DEI hiring gets more women into gaming development and many are not interested in gaming and are more interested in an aloof kind of activism skewed by their privileged background. Most often then not, instead of social change, they directly contribute to hate towards minorities because they’re so detached from reality and it doesn’t really affect them directly from their protected position of power.
Edit: Middle class western women to be exact.
I don't give a fuck about BioWare, but I really love the Dragon Age series. They've gone and killed it.
I love the fact that you can see the lighting in his room change as the day went on. He started early morning and finished his rant just shy of sunset.
Seriously, though. I was obsessed with Mass Effect 2, and to me, it is the game of the decade. Story, gameplay, and music score, the stars truly aligned for that game. I swear, I'm tearing up remembering when the achievement popped up, "Agaisnt All Odds!" The "suicide mission" score blasting in my ears as the Normandy made the ftl jump, escaping the collector base.
I was reading articles leading up to Mass Effect 3 and found a video about how the composer left just as ME2 was finished. And yeah, you can tell the score difference. Whoever the new guy was, he made the music more emotional, fitting for the proper send-off to one of the best trilogies in gaming history!
I quit "AAA" like a decade ago. Indie or old games for me.
I've just came to this conclusion myself, after wasting the past 10 years in anticipation for sequels that never came.
From that list I had played only far cry 3, and stopped in the middle after the first big island. Lots of things to do on the map made me "eh later I do that" later later later, years passed and I still didnt went back. Instead I am now at 38k hours factorio lol
If entertainment media would stop spending so much money when they really don’t need to, their games would be better. If they would be satisfied with making enough to run their company, pay their employees well and that was it, the world would be better.
Imagine my reaction when I finally got to play Warcraft 3 Reforged only to be greeted by a WORSE GAME than the one they released 20 years prior. You can’t do my Warcraft 3 like that.
Damn that algorithm is pushing hard with just two videos I had both of them in my feed. That's 100% saturation in the quality of the videos are good enough that I'm going to stick around.
I never hold on to any company, because it is absolutly foolish, neither should you. One should buy things that are good. You don't buy companys. Don't be a FAN of things. Worship the individual Product.
This is the first video I watched from you and you've earned yourself a subscriber. Great work. The ending montage brings a tear really, not a lot of people mention that part of the video. Thanks!
12:50 Your example of pausing between every word - compared to huge, empty open worlds - is the best I've seen to date!
Maybe we shouldn't blame Todd alone for Bethesdas faliure ... but it just works.
The people that worked at all of these companies, and shot out banger after banger are all gone. They've left the studios. And all that was left was the reputation of a now talentless company
This was a much needed video, fun, informative and wholesome. It wasn't antagonistic but mournful in a way and it ended on a hopeful note.
This has definitely been happening mostly in the western AAA industry whereas the Japanese industry has mostly stayed stable with exception of Sony and Square Enix who have been adopting the western AAA industry mindset and paying for it.
Though my favorite Japanese studios from my childhood Monolith Soft, CyberConnect2, and From Software are actually much stronger now than they were back then. Monolith Soft and From Software are still pretty much making the kinds of games they made back then, but they've been building upon their formulas a lot since then. Monolith Soft has also become a major support studio for Nintendo as well, so they've got their hands on series like Zelda, Splatoon, and Animal Crossing on top of still continuing their Xeno series.
I was actually concerned about CyberConnect2 for a good while because they were pretty much typecasted into making anime license games by Bandai. For about a decade weren't able to make any of their original IP games that I fell in love with with them. Though they took those lemons and made lemonade with it and had huge success with Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm and DBZ Kakarot to the point that they were able to start self publishing recently.
Their current Fuga Melodies of Steel series is a great return to form for their original IP games and I'm glad to see their very mistreated by Bandai Little Tail Bronx series come back in full force because of it. Not to mention Fuga is a very low budget indie level experience, but there's so much love, care, and attention put into it that I can just feel the passion that CC2 has for their games coming from it. Heck with each new entry they're even patching in the quality of life improvements that they added to the new game into the previous games, so the experience just keeps getting better and better as they continue working on this series.
Now if they could bring .hack back in some form and do a spiritual successor to Asura's Wrath they would pretty much be like I remember they were when I was younger. I'm very glad to see them give Bandai the finger after neglecting their original IP for so long and say "I'll do it myself." They're the ones I'm looking forward to seeing progress the most with their original games in the future, and I'm happy to see them, Monolith Soft, and From Software thriving today.
Excellent piece of work. Hysterical and great analysis. Grateful.
“Mmm looks average, I can’t wait to eat them” LMFAO
The lesson I learned long ago as a sonsumer is to simply vote with your wallet:
Never ever pre-order
Buy no game with season pass - period
DLC only for substancial upgrade
I personally prefer indie studios ( Coffee Stain / Hooded Horse) over AAA studios
I keep hearing that “when these people leave, talent and lore and other whatever went with them. That’s not actually wrong. But the full, fair way to put is that the new crop taking over needs to do the work to keep things recognizable whilst progressing forward. The onus is on the newbies to do the work they need to in order to know what they’re supposed to be a part of and what they’re taking over for and why.
All they care about these days is politics. Just like Hollywood and Television and increasingly Sports. Their agenda isn't to entertain its to indoctrinate.
Wait, why is this channel not yet that big, this deserves way more vieuws. Hope the best for yeah, amazing video!
Gotta love Bioware being in the thumbnail as if they hadn't been making pure slop since 2006
Western consumers are trained to focus on IP rather than who actually makes them. Comics is a good example. People follow Spiderman - rather than the creators who made the Spiderman stories they love. And nowadays most willing choose a sequel rather than risking their money on a new experience. Vicious cycle.
Even though Veilguard had semi decent numbers I don't think after this anybody is going to be excited about anything new they make ever again.
This is me but for Rockstar after learning the founders and the original team that made GTA before the upcoming 6th game have already left.
This ended up being a WAAYY bigger video than originally intended so I hope you enjoy the memes!
Let me know what your favorite game/game studio was when you were growing up :)
When I was a kid/young teenager my favourite studio was gamefreak (cause I just love Pokemon).
But well, although I still love Pokemon (the gameplay and universe are still awesome), gamefreak clearly isn't my fav anymore. They just aren't given enough time to properly polish their games and it saddens me greatly.
Jazz Jackrabbit 2.
i am from the 90´s, game studio names weren´t famous where i grew up. I am mostly commenting to suggest you to pin your own Call to action comment. that makes it the first thing people find when scrolling down. Also i read in another comment that you zoom too much?? nah is fine by me. keep it up !!
You could make it shorter by ditching the memes or at least talk over them. This is the kind of content that I keep running in the background while playing games so the memes are just unnecessary pauses.
Apart from that it was good and you made some very valid points.
@@IvaN-cf7qt Thanks, I'm a bit of a UA-cam newbie, appreciate your comment!
Your editing makes these videos unique, don't change it, it's refreshing
Dragon Age Inquisition is where I draw the line with this saga. I played for a couple of hours and couldn't keep going. Big names are off the table for me, also, I rarely play any game on release, early releases are also forbidden. Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft, CA... have been dead to me for several years now. I've reached a point where I don't feel like I have to play the latest thing. I have so many great games still to be played that are several years old. Hell, my device is grateful for it xD I don't think I've bought a game that wasn't on sale for a while now. Their business models just don't suit well with me. Live services, hundreds in DLC's and additional content, modern social issues, that I am barely interested in, shoved down my throat at every chance, microtransactions... I remember what was so attractive about this hobby in the first place.
I thought I was the only one that only could play DA:I for only a couple of hours. To me, it felt like a MMO, and I hadn't even unlocked the inquisition yet. I went directly from a MMO (FFXIV) to the game, and it felt the same, but worse. At least FFXIV has a world that felt lived in. DA:I felt like an empty world with a few things here and there. And no one actually lives there.
I'm thankful the algorithm brought me here. I love how you edited the video and chose all the movie-scenen to brilliantly amd hilariously visualize a point. You just earned my subscribtion. Keep up the good work!
(Plays long clip of an epic scene) "ok maybe I'm being dramatic" that got me 😂
Less memes, more discussion.
Great video! Modern gaming is just so predatory. Also, what kind of camera are you using, crystal clear.
Something I think a lot of people don’t think about is that the pioneers of RPG games were people that had other careers and interests and gaming / game creation was a labor of love. Now games are made by people going through the university / college industrial complex which currently seems more interested in turning out activists than anything else. Couple that with the fact that gaming is one of the biggest industries on the planet, it’s no surprise that it’s become what it’s become.
College told me I was SUPPOSED to be an activist and it took years to shake that mentality. I don’t think most gamers are bigoted. Some certainly are, but MOST GAMERS ARE CHILL AND JUST WANT A FUN GAME TO PLAY, and don’t really care about the race, sex, orientation of the characters.
0:35 Bro I'm gonna rewatch these movies now instead of playing these trash games 😂
People need to realize this with a lot of franchises and not just within gaming. Continuing supporting some of these studios is just taking money and attention from much more worthy recipients.
Time to let go.
Brand names in general.
Time to start seeing with our eyes and not our ears.
GREAT video and analysis of the industry at the moment.
Another factor that I only found about recently. Supposedly engines Loke UE is an influence on how people make their games, and things into the games, just like Microsoft does. Like not having attractive females, focusing on not having "gender stereotypes", and I'm sure other things as well. And I don't care which side of the discussion you fall on, if you have an open mind and can think about things clearly, you know that when people create things, the WORST thing that can happen is to put those people's minds and creativity in a box, especially to push agendas.
"Unreal Engine does not explicitly dictate how you design characters in terms of sexualization, but their Marketplace Guidelines clearly state that they reserve the right to decline or request changes to content that contains "exploitative" sexual content, meaning they can remove or ask you to modify assets that are considered overly sexualized."
The intro was so fucking funny I had no choice but to like and subscribe 😂
Mass Effect is kind of the perfect analogy to what's happened to Bioware (and countless forgotten studios before them)... Except that in our reality, the Reapers won, and Bioware only lives on as an empty corpofied husk...
Video name is all I needed to see to agree. Even if it hurts, it's true.
Though the real question for me? _When_ did they die? We've seen when it was _finally noticed_ of course, but...
That background melody at the end, what is it called?
Obsidian next?
That interview with Greg Zeschuk about E.A. is fascinating, thanks for sharing that. Sharing that information alone is what got you my like and subscribe, thanks for doing that research. For real, thank you so much!
Second vid and on 🔥 Awesome intro and overall message well presented with lit memes. Keep it up!🎉
People keep saying Todd Howard is the father of TES/Fallout but he's more like a stepfather. He actually came in a bit later than the real fathers/creative drivers - Julian Lefay (aka Julianos), Ted Peterson, Bruce Nesmith (TSR/Dungeons and Dragons, the early ES games and lead designer of Skyrim) and others who have either left or were overshadowed by the Lord Todd.
people has to stop with this take of the evil publishers and the creative geniuses developers, the problem is all the opposite, nobody is making money in videogames as of late unless is mobile or sport franchises.
the devs are in fault in here, because they don’t feel that are doing something for gamers at all.
The reason why Larian makes good games is because they need to make money to keep the company afloat, on the contrary these AAA studios with blackrock money couldn’t care less about quality. This is how you get Veilguard
They are all gone. None exist. They are all gone...
Dragon age 2 was a huge disappointment for me when it came out. Especially considering what it's predecessor brought to the table. From what I remember it was initially intended to be DLC for origins. Everyone assumed EA was the one that pushed for that, but after seeing everything that's happened since, it's tough to say.
Well they did, after Origins was finished EA told Brent Knowles they didn't have another game for him and he should move on. They had already decided that they didn't want any more CPRGs from Bioware.
Knowles was then replaced by Mike Laidlaw and DA2 ended up a consolitus ridden dumbed down arcadey excuse for an RPG.
Mark Darrah has spoken about this at length. DA2 was supposed to be DA:Exodus, just like the first one was Origins. EA insisted that it be a 2, and also insisted on the short development time because they had a gap in their release schedule that would have messed up a financial quarter for them. That much is on record. Personally I think DA2 is a heroic work given the 14 month delivery.
@@T-Flame Not really, they wasted much of that time "upgrading" the engine for the idiotic change to the art style. Better examples of games made under short dev cycles would be KoTOR II and Fallout New Vegas by Obsidian. Unlike DA2 there was no stripping away of exploration or RPG aspects, they actually added more depth and better writing.
Its funny that people praise Nintendo like theyre the opposite of this. They have just been milking Mario and Luigi since the 80's. They havent made a serious catalog of games that arent for literal children or are just a platformer or 2d fighting game. Nintendo is seriously making bank off of Switch nerds and selling essentially Mario mobile games for full price.
SuperSmashBros is probably one of the most popular titles on the Switch, and its literally just a 2d fighting game with Nintendo characters. How is that in any way a decent "AAA" game?
I used to play on an old NES that was my moms I believe. I played SuperMarioBros 3 and OG Mario Bros. Even for the time, those games were basic, boring and lacked substance. There were NES games with full blown stories at the time.
Lets face it, Nintendo fans are just blindsighted by the flashy characters, bright colors and anime inspired art styles. Theyre time has been up for a while now. Arcade machines are a thing of the past at this point and Nintendo needs to cough up some new IPs.
Damn, that was a great intro /metaphor
And it wasn't even the EA acquisition of them that did it like we all expected back when it happened. Man this one hurts.
I feel lucky to have experienced Command and Conquer in its prime. It was probably worth it to sell out to EA in order to raise the budget for those FMVs. We dodged a bullet when C&C died out before we got weird a corpse possessed with monetization.
What an interesting video, thank you. The mess of all the buy ups and consolidations leaves my head reeling, it's clearer now. I rely on my old favourite games and playthroughs on yt for recommendations.
Bethesda's issue is more than just stagnation. If they'd put out a game at Skyrim or Oblivion's quality level it would've succeeded in spite of the ancient, janky engine. People would've very quickly hand-waved the issues if they still felt the kind of magic their old games had. The problem is that the studio has lost all of it's creative talent, and their direction has become corporate, safe, and sterile. Todd's direction for the past 20 years has been to make things dumber and more appealing to the lowest common denominator, because that's what worked for them on the 360. Over a decade of that results in a studio that makes dumb, shallow product. Add the Microsoft acquisition on top of that and you've got another layer of corporate bureaucracy meddling with their product. So many people, including multiple outsourcing studios worked on Starfield, and it feels like a game with barely any content. They've become an idiot behemoth that just inefficiently accomplishes nothing.
It's the same thing with Riot Games at this point. I have moved on from Runeterra lore because I'm burnt out & numb.
1:18 Oh bro, I am definitely stealing this idea. No way. 😂
Dude. I am so glad I found your channel. Hell yeah.
Casey Hudson announced the closing of Humanoid Origin yesterday.
The success of Skyrim had a lot to do with Bethesda becoming what they are. A lot of us didn't like how dumbed down it was compared to their older games in order to achieve great success. They took their lessons and money from that and realized that, given a big enough marketing budget, the could sell their new, dumbed down games in buggy states and people would still flock.
Many of the great developers are now like the Ship of theseus literally everyone has left and new people in so no longer the same companies
Nice editing bro, I watched the PotC bit twice 😆. One thing missing from your account of Bioware is just how beloved those pre-EA games were and are. Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 reinvented CRPGs and people still play them, 25 years later.
Obsidian should be on the list
A lot of people still love them, but I figure it's a matter of time. Outer Worlds was such a shallow, bare-bones game. I don't use this term very often, but the writing was cringe. I felt like I was browsing the worst parts of Reddit the entire time.
Let's add Riot Games as well, as they become greedy over the years.
Very nice video & analysis .. looking for more
Maybe if the publishers didn't inject politics, these studios would have retained the good creator's.
They won't. Those publishers are dominated by corporate elites, and they'd rather divide and conquer us with identity politics to distract us from the real issues created by them. Occupy Wall Street scared them so much that they unleashed a secret psychological weapon on us.