@@GreyWolfLeaderTW That's incorrect. While it's true that opinions are held by people, an opinion also has to be a statement that is either impossible or very difficult to scientifically establish as true or false (often because the statement itself relates to something that can only ever be individually subjective). Let me give some examples: "I think strawberries are the tastiest of all berries and fruits." This is an opinion, because it's subjective to the person saying it, and cannot be established as "objectively" true or false. "I think/believe/know that the world is flat". This is not an opinion, it is an (incorrect) statement of fact. The world is provably not flat. "I think Boris Johnson secretly wishes he could drink nothing but whole milk." This is an opinion, because while it may be objectively true or false, it is (nigh) impossible to confirm or reject the veracity of that belief.
"There is money to be made in failing products, but that's another talk for another time." Oh you tease! Also, this isn't a cold take, this is an _absolute zero_ temperature take.
The bit at 6:47 resonated with me. Me and my colleagues do very good work at a massive organisation in the UK. But our jobs are gone or at risk because some consultants and senior managers, who never met us, decided that the organisation should be restructured. So they are keeping their decision-making managers and laying off most of the admins who work to keep the projects running. My last day is on Monday, and I feel so sorry for my colleagues who will either be shown the door after me or who will be struggling to make the projects work with decimated support. It's a shame that this is happening with video games too.
I have a friend working for an agency that's been letting a tonne of people go, but only at the lower levels. He said that at this stage, management are just using the other employees as means to subsidize the people doing the firing. Eventually they'll run out of cannon fodder because they won't be able to produce actual work anymore, thus no longer generate income at a sustainable rate, at which point all the bloated salaries will get their golden parachutes and the agency will finally be allowed to die. All the people who were let go for cost-cutting ("restructuring") reasons will struggle for a while, maybe start over at another agency, or completely change industries after being burned out. But the management, despite their objective failures, will be allowed to move in to other organisations and repeat the cannibalisation process. This is what business management is at that level. They're just vultures.
@@blinkin78 I want to say goodbye to some colleagues, also I have to give a big presentation that day and it's a massive in-person meeting so I can't just run away 😭 they are apparently giving us food though! Which I think is worth it, I can spend my last day getting seconds and eating them on company time xD
Corporate decision making based on numbers is even more bizarre if you consider the actual world of business is usually decided on subjective decisions and unpredictable results, and then the megacorps that started as unpredictable startups abandon the innovative values that got them there, until someone else steals their throne.
The trouble is that unpredictable startup's success isn't replicable - that's half the point of this video, that people trying to replicate it fail. There are big rewards for winning the lottery, but if you have a more reliable choice for making money you should usually prefer that over buying tickets - behind that startup is at least 9 others that went bankrupt, and none of them knew at the outset which one they were gonna be. You can't just choose to be lucky. That's not to say there aren't more reliable methodologies that work for a creative industry, or ways to lower the stakes of creative/subjective calls, but the bottom line is that you can't reliably make a money printer - if you happen to already have one, making sure it doesn't break down is the surest path forward to printing money than risking it to build a second.
They abandon pure innovation because they know they're unlikely to replicate it. Because they know that the main recipe for explosive success isn't business savvy or technical expertise. It's luck. And you can't control luck. Business is just a giant lottery except the house is letting all the big players win if they don't fuck up too badly (and sometimes even if they do).
I worked as a pop-in QA tester at Ubisoft a few times. They tried to pay us in games instead of cash... like really pushed that we could take home 4 ancient rabbids games or whatever en lieu of payment. I needed the cash to pay my rent, so I declined and was paid $75 for a day of testing. When I applied to work there as an in-house tester, one of the perks we were offered was bagels. On Fridays. If you got there fast enough. Wowy zowie. I chose to work elsewhere and have been in and out of the games industry since. Some people really loved their time at Ubi, some really hated it. I've found that my happiest times have been at smaller game studios, but they all consistently care about the bottom line. That's the cost of doing business, I guess - but it's the execs that care about the money, the devs and creatives are usually very passionate about the content.
It's still a relatively well phrased version of a Cold Take. "Business is ruining video games" is not a tough pill to swallow. "Business majors are not fundamentally evil and knowingly rubbing their hands together knowing how much money they're gonna steal making a purposefully bad product" is a different pill and one you'll find most people don't necessarily want to swallow. Of course, when said like that, it's obvious, but biases make it so that you're more likely to at least implicitly believe that suits are just bumbling fools who thoroughly hate capital G Gamers and aren't just mostly ambivalent towards them.
@@untemperance I'll admit that I never really thought of this issue as "the right competence in the wrong industry" until now; it certainly paints a clearer picture on why the industry's been slowly degrading over the last 2 decades though, as the chief creative upstarts gradually pass the torch to traditional executives who are clearly out of their depth.
@@goldtorizo2294 Indeed. His understanding that consumer loyalty is a priceless resource worth cultivating and _never_ spending in hopes of making more money that way is simply a wisdom long lost to modern businessmen.
@@goldtorizo2294 The very first thing that will happen, mark my words, they will start adding a monthly/yearly price to keep games in your library, per game. That is instantly the way I'd go to monetizing Steam further and I have a bachelors in business administration with a minor in psychology. The platform already does massive price cuts on games throughout the year and people then don't play these games in their library for years until they randomly just decide to play it again. Rather than leave all that money on the table it's just smarter business sense to make game purchases only last a year or half a year and then start charging a renewal fee monthly/yearly to keep the game in your library. It's a double dip too as it means steam sales REALLY matter to businesses who will cut deals with Steam to be on the front page. They will proclaim it as "This is the best service to buy your games for cheap and try out new ones as sales pop up, for the sake of keeping this service online we are simply reducing the load on servers needing to keep your list of games saved and making it easier for you to choose the ones you *really* want to keep". This message will then, just like lootboxes and everything else, have a group of loyal fanboys saying how this is necessary and it only makes sense. The service will start cheap, something like $1.00/year per game in your library, charged monthly/yearly with a price reduction on the yearly. To feed into the sunk cost fallacy and maintain whales they will price cap it to something like $500 a year to not only incentivize people to have TONS of games to get the most bang for their buck, but also to make them feel special for having so many games. After 2 years the service will start price increases to $2.00 per and so on with increasing caps to $600 and so on. Make the most out of steam now.
Which is also bad because Valve had a money printer on their hands, authored the very microtransaction model we have today (battle pass), and is barely making games anymore.
Well said. These corporate suits don't understand that the games industry in and of itself is high risk. There's ways to better your odds though... Hire creative people and LET THEM DO THEIR WORK. Stop MEDDLING with creative people's visions. And there is no "step by step guaranteed method to making a banger of a game."
Problem is really that is costs so much for the shiney new graphics we’ve forced upon ourselves that game studios have to play it safe and just release the same games over and over with another number stuck in front of it
There's no step by step guarantied method for making a banger, there is however a step by step guarantied method of making a steady income: microtransactions :(
@@Micras08you're on to something there. That's how we can measure how good the game was, how much money it made. Furthermore, making a "banger" just means it needs more guns, right? Guns go bang. Add in microtransactions and maybe a season pass and boom, it's a successful game. It really is just that easy. I have no idea what game I'm talking about.
@@heinrichdubloon3139it's why there's been such a push for battle passes in games whether we like it or not. A wave of money coming in every couple of months for little effort and keeps the playerbase there for any additions to the separate shop. It's the perfect money making scheme, really. Especially since lootboxes are becoming more scarce outside of gacha systems. Nowadays most people aren't playing games for fun, they're playing it to fill in a battle pass. Especially when you consider the fact that if you buy the pass early, you better hope you can finish it because once the season is over... that's it. Everything you didn't get disappears into the ether. If you buy a battle pass youre pretty much forced to play to get them shiny cosmetics you paid for the privilege to earn in a limited span of time.
The whole "cut off something expensive and hope it wasn't important" thing being bad seems like it should be obvious. Then again I have never studied business. Edit: grammar
It's not that they don't understand the damage they might be causing, so long as they can blame the damage on someone else and/or have a golden parachute, they just don't care. Accountability matters, but accountants are especially good at avoiding it.
Yes, yes please talk about this. I am someone in the Industry and I am scared looking at how the companies are massively shifting perspectives. I saw multiple studios being engulfed by giant corps that in turn got engulf by humongous ones. Their values, aims everything broken and trashed.
I mean, to a point many industries can benefit from businesspeople. But sooner or later alignment problems outweigh any value that their perspective might have, and it was definitely sooner for video games.
@@GreyWolfLeaderTW Pushing ones own interest is not precisely "greed", it's selfishness. With moderation and consideration it works well enough. That we have _capacity_ for greed does not mean we must define our way of living to make being greediest around _beneficial._ Why amplify something that is horrible in large amounts?
Many mega-corpse industries are really forgetting the old rule of "if the product is good, people will buy it" because they are afraid of taking a risk, even if that risk is a guaranteed profit... I also miss when AAA games were complete before release instead of 3 moths after the fact... Please use your money game industry, that's what it was made for.
If you ask me (or even if you don't), _Star Citizen_ is a perfect example of what happens when you don't have one of those "business heads" holding the reins: A development cycle consisting of an ever-expanding list of "wouldn't it be cool if", and nobody putting their foot down and demanding that it actually be _finished._
A very good point. Look at all the companies in the early 2000s that had to file for bankruptcy just before finishing games that are now critically acclaimed (or at least have a VERY dedicated following). There needs to be balance. But what we have now isn't balance either :(
Speaking as somebody was the operations manager in a creative industry, it's also to keep the Creatives on task and focused on actually getting a product out the door. If they don't have somebody watching the numbers, a lot of them won't make payroll, let alone generate enough of a profit to ever create a second game. Nobody likes the suits, but without them the Creatives would be doing this as a hobby after work instead of a career.
This resonates so hard. Much of "the entertainment industry" seems to not be even about "design by committee" anymore, it's more like "design by flowchart". The Amazon formula in particular is so true it hurts. I wasn't an indie hipster parody of a person 15 years ago, but I sure am now. Yeah yeah of course money runs the world, it always has, and of course there are laws and rules to effective writing, but come on. It wasn't always as suffocating as it is now.
1:52 Hard disagree. As noted, competence not absolute, it's relative to a field or subject. No matter how excellent a landscaper a contractor is, it doesn't make them qualified to be an electrician - or a dentist. Someone might be a wizard at optimising assembly lines or the logistics of just-in-time production, but it doesn't make them competent at overseeing new product development or the tangled mayhem of large-scale creative enterprises like AA/AAA game development. Arguably, if the business mugs can't see that their business strategy is harming or hampering their business, even if it boosts the next quarterly earnings report, then they're incompetent there too.
Calling it now: there might be another gaming industry recession, but Nintendo, as well as Valve and indie developers, would likely survive it. Or so I presume at this rate.
I have sucessfully quit playing all Blizzard games, even though it's probably the company I played the most ever since SC Brood War way back in the day. Their games are absolute classics and I love them and owe my childhood/teens to them, but it has become completely impossible to keep playing games by them. Sooner or later they fuck you over, not to mention the quality, which used to be sky high, has also dropped considerably. All of this is easily blamed in the suits up top, no surprises there.
I remember loving overwatch, valuing it "one if not the best fps there is on market", the last week of overwatch my heart was being broken by the constant leak that became truth about the monetization and how everything is terrible :(. to know they've been screwing with us for a good 2 years....
Do ever wonder why there is no warcraft 4 or starcraft 3, or at least prequels but world of warcraft is exist ? Because they don't wanna hear players, they want money, they couldn't even finish warcraft 3 properly, you finished main story in dlc. Right now blizzard is fully milking WOW.
You know, this might also explain why so many games have gear scores and the like now. Because everyone with talent and dreams at those studios left, so all the managerial-types had to come up with their own ideas, and so they made games revolving around the only thing they care about: making numbers bigger. You get gear with bigger numbers to do bigger numbers to enemies so you can afford things that let you make and do bigger numbers.
I call them "bean counters" not "Business-Heads" but it's a problem everywhere, they can only think a quarter ahead and only in numbers and they don't understand that some actions don't have direct number reactions.
Games are getting bigger and bigger, mostly in terms of amount of work that is required to be put into them and the technology that allows them to be made in the first place. The AAA industry has found itself in a place where they need a huge profit margin to stay afloat, hence we see that most of the games that are now being produced need a longterm monetization prospect, rely on an existing non-game IP or a successful legacy game title or artificially shortened development periods (basically releasing game in bugged state and deciding whether to fix it based on sales), this is a self-propelling sewage generator which leaves nobody satisfied apart from the people who make those decisions in the first place since their investments are safe with this setup. This saturates the market with mediocre products and has people leaving for the smaller games, but do not be mistaken, behind even the smallest games, "indies", they have a publisher or yet another investor which also wants the product to be safe enough to yield profit, it's nothing bad ofc, but you can see where those productions go next, small games can only remains small for 1-2 titles, the pressure is to grow and their next game has to be bigger and better because it seems like the market won't get it otherwise. This perpetual growth hurts the industry and unless the crowd, and I really mean the mainstream sunday gamers to accept something that's not another CoD or lootbox driven gameplay we have little hope of things changing. All the outrage and nagging combined will not replace a simple wallet vote at the end of the day.
@2:00 "The issue is the businessmen are incredibly competent in the wrong industry." Ahh, the other side of "the right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world" coin; truly a fact that tickles Irony's judgment. Also, big respect for the callback to the video game crash of '83, cause that's definitely where the industry looks like it's heading towards.
Yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if several triple-a publishers, Microsoft, and Sony eventually bowed out of the gaming business. But at the same time, I’d be equally unsurprised if indie devs, Valve, and Nintendo all managed to survive. Would be funny to see Nintendo survive a second gaming industry recession.
The industry technically already is there, it's just corporate has successfully de-popularized physical media just to keep the bottom line running, while the digital-internet age of "convenience" has allowed them more control over consumers and products.
@@joshuahunt3032 Oh it will likely be that. Nintendo has an older style of business culture where loyalty isn't to your personal wallet as much as the business as a whole, for the long term. It's that long term that is going to see them through. Better to be second or third place, than dead.
The trouble with having an AI write 10,000 scripts in the time it would take a human to write one, is that you now need 10,000 editors to review each script and pick out the 1 that is any good.
The bit about saturation rings true to me. It feels like everyone is trying to make a 1000 hour game that becomes THE game you play to the exclusion of all else, and there is only so much market for that kind of game. And as I get older, I have other responsibilities and interests vying for attention that I just don't have the willpower or time to sink into another game that requires too much commitment.
Having a video talking about being tired of money and the corporate side of the gaming industry being sponsored by a game's store is one hell of whiplash.
Businessmen always pursue profit above all else, hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they could eat money so they wouldn’t have to care about ruining things for the little people like us.
Does anyone else remember when companies told the fans to stop asking for features and whatnot in games because they said that we, as fans, did not know what we really wanted? Like the company knew better than us what we would enjoy playing.
Gonna be the punching bag here, but there's honestly some truth to the statement of, "the fans don't always know what they want." It's more-so a give-and-take rather than a black and white issue. I've witnessed newcomers enthusiastically flock to a fandom/franchise, begging (in a hive-mind-like chorus) for changes to be made with no regard to what drew them to the fandom in the first place. Then, when the company inevitably bends backwards to the whims of their new fans, the final product ends up unappealing to nearly everyone and the product fails as a result. I've also witnessed fandoms that claim they know better than the creators when in reality the fans have very little insight into all of the considerations and discussions the creators have when adding or updating certain features. One small gameplay change can make a drastic difference that most fans may not have considered, and certain suggestions may already have been attempted behind the scenes with limited success. That being said, there are plenty of times where companies are simply stubborn or ignorant to the fans, and continue down a road of self-destruction by ignoring everyone. Or, the company makes a change that would objectively be good game design but it's not received well by fans because they failed to consider what fans enjoyed about it in the first place. Ultimately, it really is a give-and-take. A product cannot be entirely driven by the fans, or it will lack a coherent and consistent direction. Inversely, a product cannot be created in isolation of its fans, otherwise it ends up being made for no-one in particular.
I'm pretty sure Reaganomics and the saturation of brands is what helped demystify and discouraged the value of human expression and recognition of art.
Art is communication between two or more humans. You can make art as a product to be consumed, but it still has to say something to that consumer other than "Buy my product."
The fact that Nintendo spent an entire year polishing TotK when they could've just released it in March 2022 is proof positive that putting quality first is still a valid business strategy. That plus the incredible success of many indie games makes me believe that the gaming industry will never totally lose its direction, even if AAA games go completely down the toilet over time.
This brings up two great points that go well outside of just video games. Exponential growth is a fairy tale. It doesn't matter what industry you are in you can't grow every year forever. The fact that pretty much every major industry doesn't understand this is deeply troubling. This leads to a second good point which is that these people aren't evil, they are just in the wrong industry. We can't ask a corporation to make moral choices because it doesn't HAVE any morality. Corporations act as their own entity, larger then any individual person that makes them up, and their only goal is to make more money. Being angry at a business for trying to make more money is like getting angry at a bacteria for splitting. It has no mind to make choices, it only has an inherit intent to do what it does. For a bacteria that is consuming and growing. For a business it is to make as much money as possible. When the mom and pop shop's owners retire or die the place closes down. But if you get a company big enough to employ 25 or more people there's a pretty good chance that even if you cut off the head, the creator, the rest will still shamble on in some capacity, sometimes indefinitely. It makes a lot of sense when you think of a business like an organism. All its employees are the individual cells. Just like an animal we believe that the brain, the people in control, control how the animal acts. This is only half true because without all the other cells the brain can't function, and also many of the fundamental functions of the organism are outside the direct control of the brain. The brain has to answer to the stomach as much as the muscles have to answer to the brain. If you don't think this is true that just think back to all the times you didn't do something a manager asked you to do because you knew it was a stupid or bad idea.
Nail. On. The. Head. Sooo much of the problems across the entertainment industry could be solved by just removing business minds from the decision making process. How to do that? I dunno, but man we need to figure out something soon. Otherwise, to paraphrase Orwell, imagine MCU and Call of Duty in your face; forever.
Wow. Just wow. I have so much more respect for Frost, I had no idea he was such an insightful individual. I usually only have time to watch Yahtz's content and adventure is nigh.... I now have a new thing to look forward to. Thank you Frost ❤
Profit motive will only ever create things that can make money. It will never, ever be any more complicated than that, no matter how pro-capitalists try to spin it. If making something that helps people will make money, they will do it, but only as well as they need to in order to make the most money. If something that harms people will make money they will do that too, if only because it will make them money. If running an industry into the ground will be profitable, they will also do that, until it ceases to be profitable. The only thing that the profit motive is willing to actively lose money on is protecting the systems of profit motive. Because if that happened… rich people wouldn’t have as much power to exploit the rest of us. Tanking the economy is costly in the short term, but the workers and the people gaining more power through pro-democracy and pro-union legislation?
I've mentioned this several times before, but I blame the failure of Daikatana. The games industry was really starting to boom as it began to break back into the mainstream again in the late 90s/early 2000s, and Daikatana was one of the most hyped-up games of its generation, being sold on the cred of its auteur mastermind John Romero as the spearhead of his personal philosophy of "design is law". When the development of the game turned into a mismanaged nightmare and the game released years late as an outdated, broken, lame, boring, unplayable mess, this killed "design is law" in the crib and severely hurt the value of games auteurism (although it didn't kill it by a long shot), leading to the industry being taken over by suits, who displaced the game designers to ensure that nothing like Daikatana would ever happen again and gaming development could be refocused on what _actually_ mattered: MONEY! It was a long slow process, but over the two decades since you can see it unfold as creativity is stamped out, costs are cut wherever possible (even as budgets for marketable graphics that can be used to make hype-generation trailers skyrocket), developers are exploited, crunched and spat out, quality control is disregarded, and monetisation has grown to be more important than gameplay, while prick CEOs like Bobby Kotick award themselves higher and higher salaries for doing basically nothing of value except ruining things. If Daikatana had lived up to the hype and been the greatest FPS ever made, I don't think we'd be in this quagmire right now.
Or we would be in a whole other quagmire of unmanaged messes of projects that had promise because no one was willing to reign the auteur leadership in. Because there needs to be a balance. Frankly, I think the problem is ultimately one of scale and scope. Every large scale developer/publisher is trying to make a Ferrari or a Geo, without trying to have anything in-between. The problem being that there is only a small market for Ferrari's and they're expensive to make. Meanwhile, a Geo might have a wide market, but it's so bottom of the line there really isn't anything to improve on. They need to start doing a wider verity of project scales, with a wider verity of budgets. Film/TV/Streaming are in the same place. Everything is on either a shoestring budget or the insane budget of 'The Rings of Power'. No one can take risks, either because they don't have the budget/capacity (Geo) or because no one can afford to with so much invested (Ferrari) in it.
What absolutely kills me is that most AAA games don't seem to have any executives at any point, asking themselves "hey, is what we are doing *actually* fun to play?"
D4 is a prime example amongst many. Trying to cast the widest net disregarding game design expertise. It's already difficult to design a good game and having business-suits and marketeers calling the shots makes it near impossible task.
Well of course big business is ruining gaming. They ruin everything. They did it to music in the 90s. They did it to tv in the 2000s. And they've been trying to do it to gaming for over a decade now. Theres really nothing we can do about it.
You can stop making the series now, you've won. This truely is the coldest take possible. Colder than an antarctic research station. Near absolute zero take.
I hope one day that after the collapse of the industry that we will see new companies arise that will have leadership willing to say "Let's not go down this road again." when it comes to these business practices.
@@anna-flora999 I think you misunderstood my point. Those companies are as seen in the video spearheading these destructive practices that are costing them sales and flooding the market with low quality and bug ridden games.
@@Hybris51129 yes they are. And back in the day, they were the ones arising from the big crash. It's cyclical. Yes, the original leadership might have had noble intentions. But it won't be around forever
Fun fact, the creative process has more or less been solved from a business prospective, but most companies do not want to do it for one reason or another. Call it, the Chaotic Creative Ceaseless Cheap process or 4Cs for short. Think of the bottom level of the 4Cs process as a knuckle down fist fight bar brawl from your favorite action movie in some cheap alley way. The winner moves on to a more classy place, like an Applebee's, or if he did really well, an Olive Garden, and fight against better fighters. If he wins there, he moves on up to cheap pay per view venues. If he wins there, then he sits with the big boys on the big markets with all of that glamour and support that comes with it. Two examples of said process is the Asian IP market, and Cartoon network. In English, a huge number of novels enter publication within the Asian market. Most float over to the US on fan translation websites for free or at some cost. Out of these thousands of books, comic companies take notes, then contact the author of said work. This winner moves into the comic scene, and fights against other comics. If the comic does well, then the anime or a movie ends up being bankrolled by a studio, and the author becomes more well know, or at least his work does. If the anime or movie does well, then merchandise starts to flow, as the big name investors pour all of that capital into this author's IP. Most folks only see this IP at the anime level, or at the merchandise level. Some folks see it at the comic level. Only a few folks see it at the novel level. This is why most foreign media seems really good or enjoyable for some unexplainable reason: it won fights that you did not see, and continues to train to hit the big leagues that One Piece created. Cartoon Network did this in the 90s and 00s with its WhatACartoon show. They stuck something like a hundred creatives together in a single studio, gave the supervisors the ability to green light test shows for up to 100k, or even less. These tests shows would air in the WhatACartoon show's block, and viewing numbers were taken. Multiple big name cartoons that many still remember to this day came from this format: Kids Next Door, Power Puff Girls, Ed, Edd, and Eddy, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and Dexter's Lab are all the ones I remember. Many other shows ended up being scrapped during the process, or being retooled into other shows. In addition, other concepts from the original pilots were scrapped or changed. For example, I don't think another episode of the Power Puff Girls had them being turned into meat, going on a rampage, and killing the guy who did it. The movie industry used to do this with directors. I believe in the 70s and 80s, there was a singular producer who launched the careers of most if not all famous and popular Hollywood directors. The man would spend 100k on a production process, then make 150k on the B movie or C movie listings. So every director that came to him, and that he liked, would receive 100k and two instructions: one the movie had to have at least one topless scene in it, and two he expected change, that is, something left in the budget. So with a million dollars, he'd produce 10 B quality or worse movies, which would make him back that million and little more. I hope this proves my point that the process has been solved for a long while, and that companies just don't do this for one reason or another.
That process is alien to companies focused on established products with expansive scope which is what triple a has become. Fostering a competitive yet cooperative environment is about the hardest thing to do from a company culture standpoint. What is missing from the indie discussion is that they are the proof market mechanisms and business theory work. Provide an environment that is competitive with strict budgets and certain projects for whatever reason will work and become popular. Whatever company figures out how to simulate that environment internally and leans into smaller but more numerous projects will come up on top.
Agree with the history but this is the same cartoon network who then went away from cartoons for a while and then broadcasted 8+ hour blocks of Teen Titans Go 6-7 days a week for months
@@mcstrategist Leadership changed. At one time, Sam Hyde worked with them, and they made interesting content on Adult Swim. However, higher changed, and new blood decided for a new direction. So older works which took risks, or were considered risky assets, were chopped in exchange for more stable products.
I think a problem with Sterling is that they cried wolf a bit too much. They became their own caricature, and repeated their message till no one would listen anymore.
@@roderik1990 Their message is becoming more true every year. What did they cry wolf about? That every shady or exploitative monetization gimmick, once proven to work, will then worm its way into very IP possible and ruin it? They were right when they said it for micro-transactions, then for loot boxes, then for live services. And they were spot on every single time. Or were they crying wolf about the abuse (mental and sexual) workers endure in some of the biggest businesses in the industry? That shit was spot on, and should be remembered every time when Bobby Fuckin Kotick is mentioned. Or any other prick like him that infests gaming.
People focused on the business and financial side do not have to be enemies of creatives if active dialogue is a goal of a company. The walling off of departments and lack of cooperation between the business and creative side until disasters strike is the byproduct of development teams reaching into hundreds and low thousands for the biggest games. The biggest duds of the past decade would have benefited from harsher and more involved business side in their development. Management and finance departments that are reactive fail to provide the structure that allows projects and creatives to succeed. While it is easy to critique the over reliance on metrics and business jargon like KPI they are useful tools in managing very large projects like game development on the high end has become. Getting creatives into the finance side of games and the finance types into the creative side is what is needed.
Devil's Advocate Star Citizen will always be the shiny example of why business heads are necessary. One man built up a cult around himself, and desires to build the best video game ever. The problem is, it has been something like two decades and it still is not out. Yet, his cultists continue to throw money on the ever growing pile. The man did have a game prior, but it took Microsoft stepping in, and basically kicking him out for the game to be released. Even if it was in a half-finished state, that game made it to the consumers. In other words, the man had a history of being overly ambitious with his art, and the money man had to drag him back down.
I agree that business heads are necessary, but there do need to be serious checks and balances on them. After all, what we're seeing in most of AAA gaming is what happens when the business heads demand that their games grow too large. It's a balancing act, and the business heads are overall outweighing the artists, which is something I hope changes soon.
absolutely freezing, room-temperature in the middle of winter with the windows open, hasn't seen a source of heat in decades unfinished ice cream take. (I agree)
As a Business-head I feel you missed the giant, gold plated, diamond encrusted elephant in the room, Risk. There is no objective fun measuring algorithm and so when we have to fork over millions of dollars we want some assurance you’re not just gonna blow it on pretty skyboxes and motion capture only to sell about six copies because your art didn’t hit the right spot for people. Risk Mitigation is the name of the game, and when there’s millions of dollars on the line the company that keeps taking risks is only ever going to be a couple bombs away from bankruptcy.
I hat the way that business heads try to treat games as some kind of assembly line, where each game has specific parts that need to fit in, so that they can somehow try and create an objective value for art. They slave away trying to figure out exactly how something is going to perform, and in the process completely forget that the game needs to be good in the first place. Nintendo releases a game like Breath of the Wild, and suddenly all of the business execs of other studios try to make some bulleted list of things that made it click, without considering that the reason that it worked so well is because Nintendo puts quality first and allows developers the creative freedom to make the best game that they can. It's like Bezos' list of what makes A Game of Thrones. He picks the things that he thinks made it successful, then shoehorns them into other projects, without thinking about the fact that the reason the GoT was so successful is because it was a good show (at least until the last couple seasons). Then he tries to force those rules in a show like The Wheel of Time or The Rings of Power, that has a completely different style and basis to Game of Thrones, and wonders why the show came out absolutely god awful. Just hire good writers and leave them the fuck alone. We see time and time again that when you let the artists make the things they want to make, they end up being commercial successes. Then execs step in and want to recreate that success through statistics and rigid guidelines, only to have later projects bomb and receive massive public criticism
I spent 14 years in the industry, mainly with EA, left about ten years ago. It's no different now than it was then - an industry run by bean counters who have never had a creative thought in their lives, to whom everything must fit neatly on a spreadsheet to keep the investors happy. It's anathema to a creative industry, and it'll only get worse.
"Business heads get paid too much money to not know what's gonna happen" - I think you can safely say business heads get paid too much money, full stop! (period)
You should do a video on how the team at that company is important, not the company itself. You see so many companies say "From the creators of ___", but it's a lie because those people that worked on the previous work are no longer there and so you aren't going to get the same passion and creativity from these new people potentially. A UA-camr made a great video about it with Back 4 Blood and Left 4 Dead. There were only like 4-5 original people on the team that didn't really matter in the first place.
Honestly there one other thing which probably doesn't get a lot of talk about but it's the "Fine I'll make my own theme park with black jack and hookers!" Just in this case instead of it being black jack and hookers it's a video game made by the people to match or be better then call of duty without all the frustrations/greed.
One of the problems with the Activision-Blizzard/Microsoft acquisition, and by extension having as concentrated a video game market as we have, is they are too big to fail. You see the same thing in the movie industry from the big film studios, it's too much of a risk to try anything outside of the set formula. If you invest 200 million dollars you want to reduce the chance of losing it all as much as possible. If you invest 200k dollars you might be a little more willing to take risks. The market concentration we already have is too much with the half dozen or so major powers and only three console developers (four now that Steam has entered the race). The reason we've only seen one stab at a new console manufacturer in the past 25 years is because the three giants found their equilibrium. You can buy a laptop for less than $100, but the last generation of console will run you more than $200. Yes, it will be significantly lower powered but there is a huge swath of consumers not wanting the greatest graphical fidelity - they just want to play Minecraft. It feels like there are no options because there are none. Prices are going up because competition is going down.
I really think the EA move was to more easily show how the sports games make them money for investors. If they can show "hey we're making the games that gamers want" to make gamers happy and "hey we're making ungodly amounts of money over here with the sports games still" for investors they might make money on stock price increases
It could be for tax purposes though. If say EA Sports makes losses, but is kept afloat by the parent company, it's a tax deduction for the parent company. The company overall could still make a profit, but the sister company not doing well could make them even more money.
It sounds less like business-heads are ruining video games, and more like clueless CEOs are ruining video games, honestly. Like, for 2042, apparently everyone and their mother, which I assume included business-heads who had eyeballs that could look at a market, were telling the people in charge that just cramming in whatever seems most popular was a bad idea, but, competent people aren't the final arbiters for important decisions, people who happen to own things are.
There is a side to the video game industry that just wants to make really really cool stuff. Part of me does believe even some are in that high executive level, but they are overshadowed far too much by the people that are in true power and capitalism. As a game dev myself, I find myself just making small lil games and attending game jams because every story that I've heard since graduating high school about the video game industry just sounds like hell.
I never understood the need for better graphics. I mean, the tops of the big companies are smart enough to see that graphics are not the main necessity in games, so why bother with it? Most games that exploded in popularity were simple and interesting. Roblox(calm down, I know that it is a publishing platform), Minecraft, FNaF, Undertale, Team Fortress 2, Half Life and so on. They all have their own unique style, as well as an interesting plot and fun gameplay. If you wanna see super realistic graphics then go outside and look at how much detail there is on the grass, and you might as well touch some of it while you are there. Graphics are important, but there are more important things like finishing the game and making sure there are no major glitches. No matter how great the graphics are, if the game is bugged and has no plot noone will play it.
Finance and art are inherently incompatible- especially these days, where "enough" is a profane word in the financial world and shareholders expect unending growth in violation of reality. Fortunately we now have something that we didn't have back in the days of the Atari 2800: A burgeoning independent and "double-A" development scene with the means to produce and distribute games completely divorced from the AAA infrastructure.
That will mean that a healthy part of the industry carries on when the gangrenous part finally is cut off... because some of those studios will know better than to sell out.
Logistics with money funneling towards the top in a saturated media industry has been inevitable, sadly. The digital-online age has allowed corporate to offload the costs of it all onto the workers and consumers by "de-popularizing" physical media, while also allowing them to control their products that you, the consumer, has already paid for.
Thank you to Robot Cache for sponsoring this video. Download Wasteland 3 for free courtesy of Robot Cache using this link: bit.ly/coldtake
That's an ironic choice for a sponsor.
Is this a blockchain thing? It feels like a blockchain thing.
@@Mopman43 It is a blockchain thing. Even has its own scam coin to mine.
@@SecretRaginMan It is not a crypto thing at all.
@@Mopman43 It's not a crypto thing. It's kosher.
This isn't even a take, a take implies opinion, this is just fact.
Your comment is the definition of an accurate statement
Fax
The absolute best comment I read today.
This doesn’t apply just to video games but also most media this day TV, movies, social media, politics, technology/electronics, ect…
@@GreyWolfLeaderTW
That's incorrect. While it's true that opinions are held by people, an opinion also has to be a statement that is either impossible or very difficult to scientifically establish as true or false (often because the statement itself relates to something that can only ever be individually subjective).
Let me give some examples:
"I think strawberries are the tastiest of all berries and fruits."
This is an opinion, because it's subjective to the person saying it, and cannot be established as "objectively" true or false.
"I think/believe/know that the world is flat".
This is not an opinion, it is an (incorrect) statement of fact. The world is provably not flat.
"I think Boris Johnson secretly wishes he could drink nothing but whole milk."
This is an opinion, because while it may be objectively true or false, it is (nigh) impossible to confirm or reject the veracity of that belief.
Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee hee hee
Zero punctuation?
Yep! ua-cam.com/play/PLgnzafD9OxTb5Mu0ezh_yDAknGDzsUzqN.html
@@rayzerotit is!
Jesus that's a throw back
@@midnightwolf9314give it a year, it'll probably be back
"There is money to be made in failing products, but that's another talk for another time."
Oh you tease!
Also, this isn't a cold take, this is an _absolute zero_ temperature take.
The bit at 6:47 resonated with me. Me and my colleagues do very good work at a massive organisation in the UK. But our jobs are gone or at risk because some consultants and senior managers, who never met us, decided that the organisation should be restructured. So they are keeping their decision-making managers and laying off most of the admins who work to keep the projects running. My last day is on Monday, and I feel so sorry for my colleagues who will either be shown the door after me or who will be struggling to make the projects work with decimated support. It's a shame that this is happening with video games too.
I have a friend working for an agency that's been letting a tonne of people go, but only at the lower levels. He said that at this stage, management are just using the other employees as means to subsidize the people doing the firing. Eventually they'll run out of cannon fodder because they won't be able to produce actual work anymore, thus no longer generate income at a sustainable rate, at which point all the bloated salaries will get their golden parachutes and the agency will finally be allowed to die.
All the people who were let go for cost-cutting ("restructuring") reasons will struggle for a while, maybe start over at another agency, or completely change industries after being burned out. But the management, despite their objective failures, will be allowed to move in to other organisations and repeat the cannibalisation process. This is what business management is at that level. They're just vultures.
Last day on a Monday?! I would not be arsed showing up for one day of work I’d be out the door Friday🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@blinkin78 at least after Monday I can sleep for the rest of the week 😂😴
@@sky1846 don’t go in Monday what can they do sack you? 😅
@@blinkin78 I want to say goodbye to some colleagues, also I have to give a big presentation that day and it's a massive in-person meeting so I can't just run away 😭 they are apparently giving us food though! Which I think is worth it, I can spend my last day getting seconds and eating them on company time xD
Corporate decision making based on numbers is even more bizarre if you consider the actual world of business is usually decided on subjective decisions and unpredictable results, and then the megacorps that started as unpredictable startups abandon the innovative values that got them there, until someone else steals their throne.
Thats why masterpiece can create only small team 10 people. Not huge ass corruption company's with useless employees.
@@VITAS874pretty sure that there are plenty of small business that are dead on arrival. The only ones that get noticed are the successful ones.
The trouble is that unpredictable startup's success isn't replicable - that's half the point of this video, that people trying to replicate it fail. There are big rewards for winning the lottery, but if you have a more reliable choice for making money you should usually prefer that over buying tickets - behind that startup is at least 9 others that went bankrupt, and none of them knew at the outset which one they were gonna be. You can't just choose to be lucky.
That's not to say there aren't more reliable methodologies that work for a creative industry, or ways to lower the stakes of creative/subjective calls, but the bottom line is that you can't reliably make a money printer - if you happen to already have one, making sure it doesn't break down is the surest path forward to printing money than risking it to build a second.
They abandon pure innovation because they know they're unlikely to replicate it. Because they know that the main recipe for explosive success isn't business savvy or technical expertise. It's luck. And you can't control luck. Business is just a giant lottery except the house is letting all the big players win if they don't fuck up too badly (and sometimes even if they do).
@@triadwarfare they one is with lies and bad quality. Easy money on fools.
I worked as a pop-in QA tester at Ubisoft a few times. They tried to pay us in games instead of cash... like really pushed that we could take home 4 ancient rabbids games or whatever en lieu of payment. I needed the cash to pay my rent, so I declined and was paid $75 for a day of testing.
When I applied to work there as an in-house tester, one of the perks we were offered was bagels. On Fridays. If you got there fast enough. Wowy zowie.
I chose to work elsewhere and have been in and out of the games industry since. Some people really loved their time at Ubi, some really hated it. I've found that my happiest times have been at smaller game studios, but they all consistently care about the bottom line. That's the cost of doing business, I guess - but it's the execs that care about the money, the devs and creatives are usually very passionate about the content.
Ubi is worse choice you made. Today they just greedy. My advice don't walk on that company. They even saying that now they only do money on people.
Yeah this is definitely the coldest take ever lmao
My thoughts exactly
Unfortunately, some people will still shill corporations
It's still a relatively well phrased version of a Cold Take. "Business is ruining video games" is not a tough pill to swallow. "Business majors are not fundamentally evil and knowingly rubbing their hands together knowing how much money they're gonna steal making a purposefully bad product" is a different pill and one you'll find most people don't necessarily want to swallow. Of course, when said like that, it's obvious, but biases make it so that you're more likely to at least implicitly believe that suits are just bumbling fools who thoroughly hate capital G Gamers and aren't just mostly ambivalent towards them.
It's a cold as a glacier in the Arctic ocean, but they never learn anything (tee-hee-hee)
@@untemperance
I'll admit that I never really thought of this issue as "the right competence in the wrong industry" until now; it certainly paints a clearer picture on why the industry's been slowly degrading over the last 2 decades though, as the chief creative upstarts gradually pass the torch to traditional executives who are clearly out of their depth.
Steam not being a publicly-traded company may well be the one pillar holding up the entire industry
when Gabe Newell dies woe be upon us, the sky will split asunder and we will be in hell because steam will go to shit.
@@goldtorizo2294 Indeed. His understanding that consumer loyalty is a priceless resource worth cultivating and _never_ spending in hopes of making more money that way is simply a wisdom long lost to modern businessmen.
Yeah, it'd be great if they actually made games again.
@@goldtorizo2294 The very first thing that will happen, mark my words, they will start adding a monthly/yearly price to keep games in your library, per game. That is instantly the way I'd go to monetizing Steam further and I have a bachelors in business administration with a minor in psychology. The platform already does massive price cuts on games throughout the year and people then don't play these games in their library for years until they randomly just decide to play it again. Rather than leave all that money on the table it's just smarter business sense to make game purchases only last a year or half a year and then start charging a renewal fee monthly/yearly to keep the game in your library. It's a double dip too as it means steam sales REALLY matter to businesses who will cut deals with Steam to be on the front page. They will proclaim it as "This is the best service to buy your games for cheap and try out new ones as sales pop up, for the sake of keeping this service online we are simply reducing the load on servers needing to keep your list of games saved and making it easier for you to choose the ones you *really* want to keep". This message will then, just like lootboxes and everything else, have a group of loyal fanboys saying how this is necessary and it only makes sense. The service will start cheap, something like $1.00/year per game in your library, charged monthly/yearly with a price reduction on the yearly. To feed into the sunk cost fallacy and maintain whales they will price cap it to something like $500 a year to not only incentivize people to have TONS of games to get the most bang for their buck, but also to make them feel special for having so many games. After 2 years the service will start price increases to $2.00 per and so on with increasing caps to $600 and so on.
Make the most out of steam now.
Which is also bad because Valve had a money printer on their hands, authored the very microtransaction model we have today (battle pass), and is barely making games anymore.
Well said.
These corporate suits don't understand that the games industry in and of itself is high risk. There's ways to better your odds though... Hire creative people and LET THEM DO THEIR WORK. Stop MEDDLING with creative people's visions. And there is no "step by step guaranteed method to making a banger of a game."
Almost completely agree except the ones sticking point goes by the name of George Romero's Diakatana.
Problem is really that is costs so much for the shiney new graphics we’ve forced upon ourselves that game studios have to play it safe and just release the same games over and over with another number stuck in front of it
There's no step by step guarantied method for making a banger, there is however a step by step guarantied method of making a steady income: microtransactions :(
@@Micras08you're on to something there. That's how we can measure how good the game was, how much money it made. Furthermore, making a "banger" just means it needs more guns, right? Guns go bang. Add in microtransactions and maybe a season pass and boom, it's a successful game. It really is just that easy. I have no idea what game I'm talking about.
@@heinrichdubloon3139it's why there's been such a push for battle passes in games whether we like it or not. A wave of money coming in every couple of months for little effort and keeps the playerbase there for any additions to the separate shop. It's the perfect money making scheme, really. Especially since lootboxes are becoming more scarce outside of gacha systems.
Nowadays most people aren't playing games for fun, they're playing it to fill in a battle pass. Especially when you consider the fact that if you buy the pass early, you better hope you can finish it because once the season is over... that's it. Everything you didn't get disappears into the ether. If you buy a battle pass youre pretty much forced to play to get them shiny cosmetics you paid for the privilege to earn in a limited span of time.
The whole "cut off something expensive and hope it wasn't important" thing being bad seems like it should be obvious. Then again I have never studied business.
Edit: grammar
no, you just think as a person actually working, producing goods, not manglement
It's not that they don't understand the damage they might be causing, so long as they can blame the damage on someone else and/or have a golden parachute, they just don't care. Accountability matters, but accountants are especially good at avoiding it.
Yes, yes please talk about this. I am someone in the Industry and I am scared looking at how the companies are massively shifting perspectives. I saw multiple studios being engulfed by giant corps that in turn got engulf by humongous ones. Their values, aims everything broken and trashed.
Their game is exploitation. No matter the script or the cast, the story's the same.
I mean, to a point many industries can benefit from businesspeople. But sooner or later alignment problems outweigh any value that their perspective might have, and it was definitely sooner for video games.
We've known that for at the very least 15 years. Greed kills all things it touches. This take is 0 Kelvin.
Welcome to capitalism, when if you don't grow endlessly - you die.
There is no force more destructive than “the shareholders”.
"Alas, desire for profit is surely the beginning of ruin."- Sima Qian, over 2000 years ago
@@GreyWolfLeaderTW
Pushing ones own interest is not precisely "greed", it's selfishness. With moderation and consideration it works well enough. That we have _capacity_ for greed does not mean we must define our way of living to make being greediest around _beneficial._ Why amplify something that is horrible in large amounts?
@@GreyWolfLeaderTW >Milton Friedman
L
At this point, I see Frost, I click Frost. Have a good weekend, man.
Many mega-corpse industries are really forgetting the old rule of "if the product is good, people will buy it" because they are afraid of taking a risk, even if that risk is a guaranteed profit...
I also miss when AAA games were complete before release instead of 3 moths after the fact... Please use your money game industry, that's what it was made for.
3 months?
*looks at CP77*
man, those 3 months are taking a couple decades.
Truckers are on strike, writers are on strike, France is on strike. Maybe we should do something pop this bubble ourselves
Well shit, sag-aftra is on it now. What a year huh. Union Strong as hell, love to see it.
This was really, really well reasoned and expressed. You didn't even touch on ego and hubris which play a big part as well.
The only use a business head has in a creative space is to moderate the Vision.
If you ask me (or even if you don't), _Star Citizen_ is a perfect example of what happens when you don't have one of those "business heads" holding the reins: A development cycle consisting of an ever-expanding list of "wouldn't it be cool if", and nobody putting their foot down and demanding that it actually be _finished._
Yup- the business head is also there to make sure the creative doesn't run out of cash before the game is completed
A very good point. Look at all the companies in the early 2000s that had to file for bankruptcy just before finishing games that are now critically acclaimed (or at least have a VERY dedicated following). There needs to be balance. But what we have now isn't balance either :(
@@TheRogueWolfthey business is corruption. They good liars
Speaking as somebody was the operations manager in a creative industry, it's also to keep the Creatives on task and focused on actually getting a product out the door. If they don't have somebody watching the numbers, a lot of them won't make payroll, let alone generate enough of a profit to ever create a second game. Nobody likes the suits, but without them the Creatives would be doing this as a hobby after work instead of a career.
I love the voice in this voiceover. That mixed with the music makes me feel like I’m in a noir detectives office.
That's the idea!
This resonates so hard. Much of "the entertainment industry" seems to not be even about "design by committee" anymore, it's more like "design by flowchart". The Amazon formula in particular is so true it hurts. I wasn't an indie hipster parody of a person 15 years ago, but I sure am now.
Yeah yeah of course money runs the world, it always has, and of course there are laws and rules to effective writing, but come on. It wasn't always as suffocating as it is now.
1:52 Hard disagree. As noted, competence not absolute, it's relative to a field or subject. No matter how excellent a landscaper a contractor is, it doesn't make them qualified to be an electrician - or a dentist.
Someone might be a wizard at optimising assembly lines or the logistics of just-in-time production, but it doesn't make them competent at overseeing new product development or the tangled mayhem of large-scale creative enterprises like AA/AAA game development.
Arguably, if the business mugs can't see that their business strategy is harming or hampering their business, even if it boosts the next quarterly earnings report, then they're incompetent there too.
Calling it now: there might be another gaming industry recession, but Nintendo, as well as Valve and indie developers, would likely survive it. Or so I presume at this rate.
I doubt there will be. The quality of the product doesn't corelate with how much it's being bought - think of your CoDs, your FIFAs and Maddens.
yeah, id thought that to but insted, its just going to be microsoft and sony eating up the dying compines insted
i might have to watch this like 2-3 more times over the course of this and next week for all of it to sink in
I have sucessfully quit playing all Blizzard games, even though it's probably the company I played the most ever since SC Brood War way back in the day. Their games are absolute classics and I love them and owe my childhood/teens to them, but it has become completely impossible to keep playing games by them. Sooner or later they fuck you over, not to mention the quality, which used to be sky high, has also dropped considerably. All of this is easily blamed in the suits up top, no surprises there.
I've heard good things about Diablo 4
I remember loving overwatch, valuing it "one if not the best fps there is on market", the last week of overwatch my heart was being broken by the constant leak that became truth about the monetization and how everything is terrible :(.
to know they've been screwing with us for a good 2 years....
It’s not hard to stop playing them their games suck now
Blizzard never good actually. They very love china for some reason and choiced worse policy for players.
Do ever wonder why there is no warcraft 4 or starcraft 3, or at least prequels but world of warcraft is exist ? Because they don't wanna hear players, they want money, they couldn't even finish warcraft 3 properly, you finished main story in dlc. Right now blizzard is fully milking WOW.
"Business-Heads Are Ruining Video Games"
new headline: "Escapist-Heads ruin their own company | Fact"
This video is not just exceptionally well-written and produced; it's downright important.
Great analysis of a fascinating topic. Would love to hear Frost explore this further.
You know, this might also explain why so many games have gear scores and the like now. Because everyone with talent and dreams at those studios left, so all the managerial-types had to come up with their own ideas, and so they made games revolving around the only thing they care about: making numbers bigger. You get gear with bigger numbers to do bigger numbers to enemies so you can afford things that let you make and do bigger numbers.
even if the effictive numbers either remain static or worsen over time.
This feels like it's talking about The Escapist's crippling management that caused them to all quit.
I call them "bean counters" not "Business-Heads" but it's a problem everywhere, they can only think a quarter ahead and only in numbers and they don't understand that some actions don't have direct number reactions.
Games are getting bigger and bigger, mostly in terms of amount of work that is required to be put into them and the technology that allows them to be made in the first place. The AAA industry has found itself in a place where they need a huge profit margin to stay afloat, hence we see that most of the games that are now being produced need a longterm monetization prospect, rely on an existing non-game IP or a successful legacy game title or artificially shortened development periods (basically releasing game in bugged state and deciding whether to fix it based on sales), this is a self-propelling sewage generator which leaves nobody satisfied apart from the people who make those decisions in the first place since their investments are safe with this setup.
This saturates the market with mediocre products and has people leaving for the smaller games, but do not be mistaken, behind even the smallest games, "indies", they have a publisher or yet another investor which also wants the product to be safe enough to yield profit, it's nothing bad ofc, but you can see where those productions go next, small games can only remains small for 1-2 titles, the pressure is to grow and their next game has to be bigger and better because it seems like the market won't get it otherwise.
This perpetual growth hurts the industry and unless the crowd, and I really mean the mainstream sunday gamers to accept something that's not another CoD or lootbox driven gameplay we have little hope of things changing. All the outrage and nagging combined will not replace a simple wallet vote at the end of the day.
Industry and the media have the same problem: They give us exactly what we want.
@@TheRogueWolfyou not correct. They give because of wrong vision and policy, they love hear agenda and ignored true
@2:00
"The issue is the businessmen are incredibly competent in the wrong industry."
Ahh, the other side of "the right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world" coin; truly a fact that tickles Irony's judgment.
Also, big respect for the callback to the video game crash of '83, cause that's definitely where the industry looks like it's heading towards.
to paraphrase: "Wake up, wake up and smell the ashes, Canada is burning"
Yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if several triple-a publishers, Microsoft, and Sony eventually bowed out of the gaming business. But at the same time, I’d be equally unsurprised if indie devs, Valve, and Nintendo all managed to survive. Would be funny to see Nintendo survive a second gaming industry recession.
The industry technically already is there, it's just corporate has successfully de-popularized physical media just to keep the bottom line running, while the digital-internet age of "convenience" has allowed them more control over consumers and products.
@@joshuahunt3032 Oh it will likely be that. Nintendo has an older style of business culture where loyalty isn't to your personal wallet as much as the business as a whole, for the long term. It's that long term that is going to see them through. Better to be second or third place, than dead.
This is phenomenally written and delivered. A refreshingly honest take on the state of the industry.
The fact that so many of the higher ups think writers can be replaced by AI shows just how out of touch they are with how any of that works.
The trouble with having an AI write 10,000 scripts in the time it would take a human to write one, is that you now need 10,000 editors to review each script and pick out the 1 that is any good.
The bit about saturation rings true to me. It feels like everyone is trying to make a 1000 hour game that becomes THE game you play to the exclusion of all else, and there is only so much market for that kind of game.
And as I get older, I have other responsibilities and interests vying for attention that I just don't have the willpower or time to sink into another game that requires too much commitment.
Breaking news: business-heads did in fact ruin it. Goodbye escapist, hello Second Wind
Having a video talking about being tired of money and the corporate side of the gaming industry being sponsored by a game's store is one hell of whiplash.
overplayed, multi-move😂
Businessmen always pursue profit above all else, hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they could eat money so they wouldn’t have to care about ruining things for the little people like us.
Until they get hit in nose.
Does anyone else remember when companies told the fans to stop asking for features and whatnot in games because they said that we, as fans, did not know what we really wanted? Like the company knew better than us what we would enjoy playing.
Gonna be the punching bag here, but there's honestly some truth to the statement of, "the fans don't always know what they want." It's more-so a give-and-take rather than a black and white issue.
I've witnessed newcomers enthusiastically flock to a fandom/franchise, begging (in a hive-mind-like chorus) for changes to be made with no regard to what drew them to the fandom in the first place. Then, when the company inevitably bends backwards to the whims of their new fans, the final product ends up unappealing to nearly everyone and the product fails as a result.
I've also witnessed fandoms that claim they know better than the creators when in reality the fans have very little insight into all of the considerations and discussions the creators have when adding or updating certain features. One small gameplay change can make a drastic difference that most fans may not have considered, and certain suggestions may already have been attempted behind the scenes with limited success.
That being said, there are plenty of times where companies are simply stubborn or ignorant to the fans, and continue down a road of self-destruction by ignoring everyone. Or, the company makes a change that would objectively be good game design but it's not received well by fans because they failed to consider what fans enjoyed about it in the first place.
Ultimately, it really is a give-and-take. A product cannot be entirely driven by the fans, or it will lack a coherent and consistent direction. Inversely, a product cannot be created in isolation of its fans, otherwise it ends up being made for no-one in particular.
I had to turn up my thermostat in Texas summer to accommodate this take.
"You don't make it this far being incompetent."
Ehhh...I can think of a few counter-examples.
Damn we don't get analysis like this on youtube anymore, for the same reasons XD
The moment creating art turns into making consumer product is the exact moment when a studio goes to shit
I'm pretty sure Reaganomics and the saturation of brands is what helped demystify and discouraged the value of human expression and recognition of art.
Art is communication between two or more humans. You can make art as a product to be consumed, but it still has to say something to that consumer other than "Buy my product."
The fact that Nintendo spent an entire year polishing TotK when they could've just released it in March 2022 is proof positive that putting quality first is still a valid business strategy. That plus the incredible success of many indie games makes me believe that the gaming industry will never totally lose its direction, even if AAA games go completely down the toilet over time.
This brings up two great points that go well outside of just video games. Exponential growth is a fairy tale. It doesn't matter what industry you are in you can't grow every year forever. The fact that pretty much every major industry doesn't understand this is deeply troubling. This leads to a second good point which is that these people aren't evil, they are just in the wrong industry.
We can't ask a corporation to make moral choices because it doesn't HAVE any morality. Corporations act as their own entity, larger then any individual person that makes them up, and their only goal is to make more money. Being angry at a business for trying to make more money is like getting angry at a bacteria for splitting. It has no mind to make choices, it only has an inherit intent to do what it does. For a bacteria that is consuming and growing. For a business it is to make as much money as possible.
When the mom and pop shop's owners retire or die the place closes down. But if you get a company big enough to employ 25 or more people there's a pretty good chance that even if you cut off the head, the creator, the rest will still shamble on in some capacity, sometimes indefinitely. It makes a lot of sense when you think of a business like an organism. All its employees are the individual cells. Just like an animal we believe that the brain, the people in control, control how the animal acts. This is only half true because without all the other cells the brain can't function, and also many of the fundamental functions of the organism are outside the direct control of the brain. The brain has to answer to the stomach as much as the muscles have to answer to the brain. If you don't think this is true that just think back to all the times you didn't do something a manager asked you to do because you knew it was a stupid or bad idea.
Nail. On. The. Head. Sooo much of the problems across the entertainment industry could be solved by just removing business minds from the decision making process. How to do that? I dunno, but man we need to figure out something soon. Otherwise, to paraphrase Orwell, imagine MCU and Call of Duty in your face; forever.
Wow.
Just wow.
I have so much more respect for Frost, I had no idea he was such an insightful individual.
I usually only have time to watch Yahtz's content and adventure is nigh.... I now have a new thing to look forward to.
Thank you Frost ❤
Profit motive will only ever create things that can make money. It will never, ever be any more complicated than that, no matter how pro-capitalists try to spin it.
If making something that helps people will make money, they will do it, but only as well as they need to in order to make the most money.
If something that harms people will make money they will do that too, if only because it will make them money.
If running an industry into the ground will be profitable, they will also do that, until it ceases to be profitable.
The only thing that the profit motive is willing to actively lose money on is protecting the systems of profit motive.
Because if that happened… rich people wouldn’t have as much power to exploit the rest of us.
Tanking the economy is costly in the short term, but the workers and the people gaining more power through pro-democracy and pro-union legislation?
I don't care how many times it gets said, fucking say it again. This applies to so many things it almost gives me an existential crisis
I'm pretty sure it's true for ANY industry in 2023, at least in the west. It sure is when it comes to cinema, TV and music
Didn't even need a video about this. You had me at "business-heads are ruining video games."
Correction; Valve _used_ to prop up indie titles the same as AAA titles. Now Valve does the same thing they've done since Steam Greenlight; _nothing._
To shut down Steam Greenlight was be mistake
I've mentioned this several times before, but I blame the failure of Daikatana. The games industry was really starting to boom as it began to break back into the mainstream again in the late 90s/early 2000s, and Daikatana was one of the most hyped-up games of its generation, being sold on the cred of its auteur mastermind John Romero as the spearhead of his personal philosophy of "design is law". When the development of the game turned into a mismanaged nightmare and the game released years late as an outdated, broken, lame, boring, unplayable mess, this killed "design is law" in the crib and severely hurt the value of games auteurism (although it didn't kill it by a long shot), leading to the industry being taken over by suits, who displaced the game designers to ensure that nothing like Daikatana would ever happen again and gaming development could be refocused on what _actually_ mattered: MONEY! It was a long slow process, but over the two decades since you can see it unfold as creativity is stamped out, costs are cut wherever possible (even as budgets for marketable graphics that can be used to make hype-generation trailers skyrocket), developers are exploited, crunched and spat out, quality control is disregarded, and monetisation has grown to be more important than gameplay, while prick CEOs like Bobby Kotick award themselves higher and higher salaries for doing basically nothing of value except ruining things. If Daikatana had lived up to the hype and been the greatest FPS ever made, I don't think we'd be in this quagmire right now.
Or we would be in a whole other quagmire of unmanaged messes of projects that had promise because no one was willing to reign the auteur leadership in. Because there needs to be a balance. Frankly, I think the problem is ultimately one of scale and scope. Every large scale developer/publisher is trying to make a Ferrari or a Geo, without trying to have anything in-between. The problem being that there is only a small market for Ferrari's and they're expensive to make. Meanwhile, a Geo might have a wide market, but it's so bottom of the line there really isn't anything to improve on. They need to start doing a wider verity of project scales, with a wider verity of budgets. Film/TV/Streaming are in the same place. Everything is on either a shoestring budget or the insane budget of 'The Rings of Power'. No one can take risks, either because they don't have the budget/capacity (Geo) or because no one can afford to with so much invested (Ferrari) in it.
What absolutely kills me is that most AAA games don't seem to have any executives at any point, asking themselves "hey, is what we are doing *actually* fun to play?"
Or even, "Is there *actually demand* for this version of the product?
D4 is a prime example amongst many. Trying to cast the widest net disregarding game design expertise. It's already difficult to design a good game and having business-suits and marketeers calling the shots makes it near impossible task.
Well of course big business is ruining gaming.
They ruin everything.
They did it to music in the 90s.
They did it to tv in the 2000s.
And they've been trying to do it to gaming for over a decade now. Theres really nothing we can do about it.
"Wait, remakes are all the rage right now, right? ET: The Video Game Remake! EVERYBODY WANTS THIS RIGHT?!"
You can stop making the series now, you've won. This truely is the coldest take possible. Colder than an antarctic research station. Near absolute zero take.
Fixed title: "Business-Heads Are Ruining _Everything,_ and That Includes Video Games"
I hope one day that after the collapse of the industry that we will see new companies arise that will have leadership willing to say "Let's not go down this road again." when it comes to these business practices.
It's a real shame the history of failure is easy for them to see since it's so close to now, yet people don't want to learn.
You already see those companies
Ea, ubisoft, Activision...
@@anna-flora999 I think you misunderstood my point. Those companies are as seen in the video spearheading these destructive practices that are costing them sales and flooding the market with low quality and bug ridden games.
@@Hybris51129 yes they are. And back in the day, they were the ones arising from the big crash. It's cyclical. Yes, the original leadership might have had noble intentions. But it won't be around forever
nah the cycle gon repeate
Unless each of these companies do 1 thing; DO NOT GO PUBLIC
"We are proud to announce that we will be developing a faithful re-make of ET the Video Game."
Oh how this video rings with a self fulfilling prophecy all these months later! 😂
You definitely struck home on this one. Professionally, I needed to hear this.
Fun fact, the creative process has more or less been solved from a business prospective, but most companies do not want to do it for one reason or another.
Call it, the Chaotic Creative Ceaseless Cheap process or 4Cs for short.
Think of the bottom level of the 4Cs process as a knuckle down fist fight bar brawl from your favorite action movie in some cheap alley way. The winner moves on to a more classy place, like an Applebee's, or if he did really well, an Olive Garden, and fight against better fighters. If he wins there, he moves on up to cheap pay per view venues. If he wins there, then he sits with the big boys on the big markets with all of that glamour and support that comes with it.
Two examples of said process is the Asian IP market, and Cartoon network.
In English, a huge number of novels enter publication within the Asian market. Most float over to the US on fan translation websites for free or at some cost. Out of these thousands of books, comic companies take notes, then contact the author of said work. This winner moves into the comic scene, and fights against other comics. If the comic does well, then the anime or a movie ends up being bankrolled by a studio, and the author becomes more well know, or at least his work does. If the anime or movie does well, then merchandise starts to flow, as the big name investors pour all of that capital into this author's IP.
Most folks only see this IP at the anime level, or at the merchandise level. Some folks see it at the comic level. Only a few folks see it at the novel level. This is why most foreign media seems really good or enjoyable for some unexplainable reason: it won fights that you did not see, and continues to train to hit the big leagues that One Piece created.
Cartoon Network did this in the 90s and 00s with its WhatACartoon show. They stuck something like a hundred creatives together in a single studio, gave the supervisors the ability to green light test shows for up to 100k, or even less. These tests shows would air in the WhatACartoon show's block, and viewing numbers were taken. Multiple big name cartoons that many still remember to this day came from this format: Kids Next Door, Power Puff Girls, Ed, Edd, and Eddy, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and Dexter's Lab are all the ones I remember. Many other shows ended up being scrapped during the process, or being retooled into other shows. In addition, other concepts from the original pilots were scrapped or changed. For example, I don't think another episode of the Power Puff Girls had them being turned into meat, going on a rampage, and killing the guy who did it.
The movie industry used to do this with directors. I believe in the 70s and 80s, there was a singular producer who launched the careers of most if not all famous and popular Hollywood directors. The man would spend 100k on a production process, then make 150k on the B movie or C movie listings. So every director that came to him, and that he liked, would receive 100k and two instructions: one the movie had to have at least one topless scene in it, and two he expected change, that is, something left in the budget. So with a million dollars, he'd produce 10 B quality or worse movies, which would make him back that million and little more.
I hope this proves my point that the process has been solved for a long while, and that companies just don't do this for one reason or another.
That process is alien to companies focused on established products with expansive scope which is what triple a has become. Fostering a competitive yet cooperative environment is about the hardest thing to do from a company culture standpoint. What is missing from the indie discussion is that they are the proof market mechanisms and business theory work. Provide an environment that is competitive with strict budgets and certain projects for whatever reason will work and become popular. Whatever company figures out how to simulate that environment internally and leans into smaller but more numerous projects will come up on top.
Agree with the history but this is the same cartoon network who then went away from cartoons for a while and then broadcasted 8+ hour blocks of Teen Titans Go 6-7 days a week for months
@@mcstrategist Leadership changed. At one time, Sam Hyde worked with them, and they made interesting content on Adult Swim. However, higher changed, and new blood decided for a new direction. So older works which took risks, or were considered risky assets, were chopped in exchange for more stable products.
All I'm gonna say is thank God for JS Sterling. They don't just want a lot of money, they want all the money.
I think a problem with Sterling is that they cried wolf a bit too much. They became their own caricature, and repeated their message till no one would listen anymore.
@@roderik1990 Their message is becoming more true every year. What did they cry wolf about? That every shady or exploitative monetization gimmick, once proven to work, will then worm its way into very IP possible and ruin it? They were right when they said it for micro-transactions, then for loot boxes, then for live services. And they were spot on every single time.
Or were they crying wolf about the abuse (mental and sexual) workers endure in some of the biggest businesses in the industry? That shit was spot on, and should be remembered every time when Bobby Fuckin Kotick is mentioned. Or any other prick like him that infests gaming.
@@roderik1990 Crying wolf implies that they were ever wrong about it though. The doom and gloom did get a bit repetitive though.
@@roderik1990 There's nothing wrong with crying wolf if there are actually wolves.
ENDLESS REVENUE!
Cold Take videos should be released on Sundays, the cult of cold . . . to me they make more sense than most sermons I have heard.
People focused on the business and financial side do not have to be enemies of creatives if active dialogue is a goal of a company. The walling off of departments and lack of cooperation between the business and creative side until disasters strike is the byproduct of development teams reaching into hundreds and low thousands for the biggest games. The biggest duds of the past decade would have benefited from harsher and more involved business side in their development. Management and finance departments that are reactive fail to provide the structure that allows projects and creatives to succeed. While it is easy to critique the over reliance on metrics and business jargon like KPI they are useful tools in managing very large projects like game development on the high end has become. Getting creatives into the finance side of games and the finance types into the creative side is what is needed.
Devil's Advocate
Star Citizen will always be the shiny example of why business heads are necessary. One man built up a cult around himself, and desires to build the best video game ever. The problem is, it has been something like two decades and it still is not out. Yet, his cultists continue to throw money on the ever growing pile.
The man did have a game prior, but it took Microsoft stepping in, and basically kicking him out for the game to be released. Even if it was in a half-finished state, that game made it to the consumers. In other words, the man had a history of being overly ambitious with his art, and the money man had to drag him back down.
I agree that business heads are necessary, but there do need to be serious checks and balances on them. After all, what we're seeing in most of AAA gaming is what happens when the business heads demand that their games grow too large. It's a balancing act, and the business heads are overall outweighing the artists, which is something I hope changes soon.
This guy is why I'm subbed. Love this guy's take on the games industry
absolutely freezing, room-temperature in the middle of winter with the windows open, hasn't seen a source of heat in decades unfinished ice cream take. (I agree)
How prophetic.
Seeing Mr. Hurph from The Incredibles in the thumbnail says it all.
😂 true
As a Business-head I feel you missed the giant, gold plated, diamond encrusted elephant in the room, Risk. There is no objective fun measuring algorithm and so when we have to fork over millions of dollars we want some assurance you’re not just gonna blow it on pretty skyboxes and motion capture only to sell about six copies because your art didn’t hit the right spot for people. Risk Mitigation is the name of the game, and when there’s millions of dollars on the line the company that keeps taking risks is only ever going to be a couple bombs away from bankruptcy.
I hat the way that business heads try to treat games as some kind of assembly line, where each game has specific parts that need to fit in, so that they can somehow try and create an objective value for art. They slave away trying to figure out exactly how something is going to perform, and in the process completely forget that the game needs to be good in the first place. Nintendo releases a game like Breath of the Wild, and suddenly all of the business execs of other studios try to make some bulleted list of things that made it click, without considering that the reason that it worked so well is because Nintendo puts quality first and allows developers the creative freedom to make the best game that they can.
It's like Bezos' list of what makes A Game of Thrones. He picks the things that he thinks made it successful, then shoehorns them into other projects, without thinking about the fact that the reason the GoT was so successful is because it was a good show (at least until the last couple seasons). Then he tries to force those rules in a show like The Wheel of Time or The Rings of Power, that has a completely different style and basis to Game of Thrones, and wonders why the show came out absolutely god awful. Just hire good writers and leave them the fuck alone.
We see time and time again that when you let the artists make the things they want to make, they end up being commercial successes. Then execs step in and want to recreate that success through statistics and rigid guidelines, only to have later projects bomb and receive massive public criticism
I spent 14 years in the industry, mainly with EA, left about ten years ago. It's no different now than it was then - an industry run by bean counters who have never had a creative thought in their lives, to whom everything must fit neatly on a spreadsheet to keep the investors happy. It's anathema to a creative industry, and it'll only get worse.
"Business heads get paid too much money to not know what's gonna happen" - I think you can safely say business heads get paid too much money, full stop! (period)
You should do a video on how the team at that company is important, not the company itself. You see so many companies say "From the creators of ___", but it's a lie because those people that worked on the previous work are no longer there and so you aren't going to get the same passion and creativity from these new people potentially. A UA-camr made a great video about it with Back 4 Blood and Left 4 Dead. There were only like 4-5 original people on the team that didn't really matter in the first place.
No need for a video now. They’re living it lol
haven't watched the video yet but I would ammend the title: Business-Heads Are Ruining Everything, Always
Hire more pimps, more pushers.
UA-cam "influencers" are a dozen a dime.
No dearth there.
Honestly there one other thing which probably doesn't get a lot of talk about but it's the "Fine I'll make my own theme park with black jack and hookers!" Just in this case instead of it being black jack and hookers it's a video game made by the people to match or be better then call of duty without all the frustrations/greed.
So glad to see The Last Worker getting some visibility!
One of the problems with the Activision-Blizzard/Microsoft acquisition, and by extension having as concentrated a video game market as we have, is they are too big to fail. You see the same thing in the movie industry from the big film studios, it's too much of a risk to try anything outside of the set formula. If you invest 200 million dollars you want to reduce the chance of losing it all as much as possible. If you invest 200k dollars you might be a little more willing to take risks.
The market concentration we already have is too much with the half dozen or so major powers and only three console developers (four now that Steam has entered the race). The reason we've only seen one stab at a new console manufacturer in the past 25 years is because the three giants found their equilibrium.
You can buy a laptop for less than $100, but the last generation of console will run you more than $200.
Yes, it will be significantly lower powered but there is a huge swath of consumers not wanting the greatest graphical fidelity - they just want to play Minecraft. It feels like there are no options because there are none.
Prices are going up because competition is going down.
games don't have to be like Hollywood movies as one developer from 90x used to say. this is the main mistake
Agreed. It's a problem of scale and project scope.
I really think the EA move was to more easily show how the sports games make them money for investors. If they can show "hey we're making the games that gamers want" to make gamers happy and "hey we're making ungodly amounts of money over here with the sports games still" for investors they might make money on stock price increases
It could be for tax purposes though. If say EA Sports makes losses, but is kept afloat by the parent company, it's a tax deduction for the parent company. The company overall could still make a profit, but the sister company not doing well could make them even more money.
This is an excellent vocalization of a feeling I have had a hard time putting into words.
ENDLESS REVENUE! ENDLESS GROWTH!
I dont mind the escapist having ads but they have the worst things to advertise in my opinion
ET videogame sequel already happened, it's called Funko Pop
That 12 step plan gave me an aneurysm.
It sounds less like business-heads are ruining video games, and more like clueless CEOs are ruining video games, honestly. Like, for 2042, apparently everyone and their mother, which I assume included business-heads who had eyeballs that could look at a market, were telling the people in charge that just cramming in whatever seems most popular was a bad idea, but, competent people aren't the final arbiters for important decisions, people who happen to own things are.
There is a side to the video game industry that just wants to make really really cool stuff. Part of me does believe even some are in that high executive level, but they are overshadowed far too much by the people that are in true power and capitalism. As a game dev myself, I find myself just making small lil games and attending game jams because every story that I've heard since graduating high school about the video game industry just sounds like hell.
Business heads have ruined the escapist.
Yahtzee has really upped the Starstruck Vagabond graphics game. 1:53
I never understood the need for better graphics. I mean, the tops of the big companies are smart enough to see that graphics are not the main necessity in games, so why bother with it? Most games that exploded in popularity were simple and interesting. Roblox(calm down, I know that it is a publishing platform), Minecraft, FNaF, Undertale, Team Fortress 2, Half Life and so on. They all have their own unique style, as well as an interesting plot and fun gameplay. If you wanna see super realistic graphics then go outside and look at how much detail there is on the grass, and you might as well touch some of it while you are there. Graphics are important, but there are more important things like finishing the game and making sure there are no major glitches.
No matter how great the graphics are, if the game is bugged and has no plot noone will play it.
"My spreadsheets say the game is fun! Why is nobody buying it?!" some suit with a Master of Business Administration probably
Finance and art are inherently incompatible- especially these days, where "enough" is a profane word in the financial world and shareholders expect unending growth in violation of reality. Fortunately we now have something that we didn't have back in the days of the Atari 2800: A burgeoning independent and "double-A" development scene with the means to produce and distribute games completely divorced from the AAA infrastructure.
That will mean that a healthy part of the industry carries on when the gangrenous part finally is cut off... because some of those studios will know better than to sell out.
They'll never learn, not until it finally hits their wallets hard enough.
This ought to be required material for every new game dev.
This topic after the 70 second ad
Perfection ❤️
Logistics with money funneling towards the top in a saturated media industry has been inevitable, sadly. The digital-online age has allowed corporate to offload the costs of it all onto the workers and consumers by "de-popularizing" physical media, while also allowing them to control their products that you, the consumer, has already paid for.