Triple A gaming is like Hollywood now. No original thought. Everything is a sequel, a prequel, or a remake. Some of the best games on market are from small indy developers.
It’s all about money. So much money is wrapped up into these creative projects they can no longer actually be creative. They have to go the safest broadest root no matter what.
It's all a money scam imo. So much wastage and deliberately antagonizing the people that are supposed to be buying their products. It makes no sense to me.
CDPR was a Polish studio working in Poland on a Polish IP using local Polish talent. They were doing fine. With Cyberpunk they had to go big and it took them a while to sort themselves out.
Making witcher 3 a 2 button combat game, with a ff8 card game, and WoW smelting tier crafting still blows my mind that it was slurped up by people fawning over graphics and its (admittedly great) story. The fact that we've sat on our hands playing different versions of 2004 WoW in single player and multiplayer with "xp levels," talent trees that are locked by previous talents, quest or level locked content, and now most recently p2w and p2becoolcosmetics slathered onto slower versions of Starcraft mobile games, FPS games where every game has ESP cheating, is just getting annoying to be a player. TEKKEN 8 wanting a subscription or an extra $150 to buy all the characters is tripe and POE2 not sharing stash tabs (remove only) between sub accounts between PS5 and Steam etc despite putting up hundreds for early access is just exhausting. It's getting to the point you feel you need to lawyer up just for the burden of paying to waste your free time being force fed everyone else's ideals while they censor you.
We were told $70-$100 price tags for games were necessary because games were getting more expensive to make. It turns out they were correct; overbloated marketing teams and layers of middle management turned out to be unsustainable and they wanted to foot us the bill.
Raising prices was never about the cost of development, it was about increasing profit margins. They could be happy and the company sustainable making 10's of millions more than production cost, but increasing prices is their pursuit to make 100's of millions more than investment. Audiences willing to buy games has increased and was reliably increasing year on year, I think it still is. Each unit cost doesn't have to go up when more people are buying games overall.
That was a load of bull anyway. Games have gotten cheaper and easier to make year after year with new and better tools being released constantly. Not to mention physical manufacturing, which was a large part of development costs in the past, has been removed almost completely. The only reason prices have gone up is because the investors demand it.
@smithynoir9980 No, you're just jaded. Game designers deserve a livable wage too. Gotta pay to play. If you look at the price of games throughout the lifetime of home gaming you'd see the price of games vs inflation has actually been very generous. Jaded and ignorant take ran on pure pathos. Not to take away from the validity fo corporate greed but truth is truth.
If Ubisoft was a shirt company; they would make shirts with either 1 arm hole or 3 arm holes to be inclusive. While making no shirts with 2 arm holes because that’s ableist.
There is a huge Steam sale going on right now! Older AAA games for 80-95% off, lots of already cheap Indie games ~30% off. Treat yourselfes intead of wasting 70$ on some new game that you might not even enjoy that much. Even if you don't play or enjoy all of the 1-15$ games, it still feels better than wasting all on a single game.
Yeah, better get yourself an older triple A games instead of the new ones, it's Christmas already, there's probably be a lot of games that are on sale rn
@@kalvonI already bought like 20 games in the last weeks from older AAA games, old classics to many cheap Indie games. It's really worth it to browse through the steam sale list and look what you will find.
Hot take: I do not think most gamers hate trans people. I brought this up on a Reddit and got banned. Majority of gamers do not care about identity. We have been given so many bad games over the past couple of years and every single one had black women or trans in them. So at what point is it just pattern recognition, and not simply bigotry… when I asked this question of Reddit they banned me…
always supported trans people. But these days it is impossible to separate them from radical ideology. If you see it somewhere it is NEVER there just because. There is always a reason, a message or a purpose. Either its corporate pandering or its activists infiltrating a medium they never cared about. All for the message, rather than the game or the media. That makes most people start to react immediately when they see any signs of "wokeness", and here we are.
I think you might enjoy this little indie game I love called "Outer Wilds". Do NOT confuse it with "the Outer Worlds" though. Very different games despite the similar titles.
After invention of the printing press it took a while for proven "classics" to accumulate. There's been a lot of hack schlock sold to unsuspecting readers over the last few centuries, and the crap continues. But now you can pick from an inexhaustible catalogue of irrefutably worthwhile gems 12 or 200 years old, zero chance of feeling cheated that _Conan the Buccaneer_ does not live up to expectations. There's just so much quality and niche accumulated that reading a novel today because it's _new and trending_ is for a certain type of person only.
@@pong9000 You're not wrong, but there is also still great new books being written. Same is true for gaming. You just probably shouldn't expect it from the giants with the deep pockets. Look at smaller writers/devs. And no, indie doesn't have to mean pixel art. Have a peek at Satisfactory and tell me that game looks bad, I dare you.
@@Atlessa Thanks, I've heard mention of _Satisfactory_ long enough to have a look. But a few years ago I tuned out the buzz of that title because it had not proved itself. The successor _Unsatisfactory_ I'll likewise wait and see if people nostalgically recommend it even years after release.
Ubisoft having 20K employees is just nuts... If my memory serves correct I remember Rockstar saying that they only had 200 people working for them when they created Vice City.... This is why these larger companies will all fail in the end. Especially now that they're literally making games that people dislike on purpose.
@@xithappens well consider the volume of the games they're releasing, rockstar focuses most of the employees on one or two games, while ubisoft has like 30 games they're working on simultaneously, obviously there will be a lot more employees working, but it's probably less per game.
ubisoft has 18.6k as of 2024. activison-blizzard has 17k as of 2023. rockstar has atleast 2000 as of 2018. gearbox has 1300 as of 2022. now consider the following studios: valve, arrowhead, 4a, larian, fromsoftware, fatshark, firaxis, respawn, gsc game world, ghostshipgames, bioware, all of those companies ***PUT TOGETHER*** are under 3000 humans. edit: added more companies.
Triple A corporations took Blackrock ESG, DEI money. They have sown the seeds of their own destruction. Let them fail and make room for new, more worthy companies.
A little compromise for a lot of money. They just needed to make some... minor changes. To their games. To their companies. To their hiring policies. It's good, yeah? Only, to keep getting that money, they then needed to make some... less minor changes. Then some major changes. Now they're wholly dependent on the ESG money because no one is buying their games. And they're at the point where they can't afford to make a game _without_ the ESG money. IMO, if they want to survive in any form, then they need to drastically cut back their workforce and focus on smaller, cheaper games, and swear off that toxic ESG money.
New games are boring, photo realism makes every game look the same. I might be in the minority but I love how in older games the developers had to be creative with their graphics and were forced to be unique, in a way and create their own art style. Nowadays most games feel like the same game but a different paint.
I was thinking about this the other day and it feels like older games had less graphics wise, so the developers had to be more creative to tell a story, or world build and drive the narrative home. So all the creative artistic highlights that made so many games and their environment amazing is lost on modern gaming. Everything looks, "good and realistic" now, so they stopped trying and just pump out hot vanilla poop slop all the time. It's sad really. Then you go back to something like Silent Hill 1 on the original playstation and it's like magic, sure the graphics sucked, the control scheme left something to be desired, but the atmosphere, the feel, and everything else is amazing.
@@zefferss Yes, the lore told and the entertainment value are more important than bugs or other issues. Diablo 2 still has it's fans. Titan Quest and Grim Dawn are running lap after lap. They could be better for the eyes, but they are still good gaming.
I feel the same. Realism has no charm for me. Btw, steam has a huge sale right now. So many older AAA games are 80-95% off, already cheap Indie games ~30% off.
It’s also gives accessibility to people with potato pcs and have smaller download sizes, effectively upping the profits even more by a large margin if the game is good.
I feel you, but to me what matters to me the most is the gameplay and the overall quality of the game. I'm more on the whatever side when it comes to graphics because just because the graphics is good that doesn't mean the game is good, but if i were to choose a side, i'd probably be on your side here. sometimes, some games doesn't translate well if it were to have 4K support, Global Illumination, whatever shits that makes the game looks realistic.
At this point I’m only buying games on sale. Theirs tons of old great games on sale that are $5-$10. Just add them to the wishlist or save for later and just wait.
I'm doing that for years now and I still have a backlog of way too many amazing games. I always end up buying too many games, even when I set a limit to $100. Then I end up with 10+ games.
There is also what I like to call the No man's sky or Fallout76 paradox. Games that get updates, the price goes down but the amount of content for the game goes up. It's crazy people spent 60 for FO76 when I got it for free with twitch prime and it had way more content... So why were there so many people playing it in the early days? It was in it's worse state and was the most expensive. New has always been bad trait for me. Everyone back then knew it was a bad game and willingly scammed themselves or they just took a blind leap and pre order it. I will say some games retain their price for longer. There are times when you will wait for a few years and not get that much off. other times the game will completely crash into nearly nothing. Good game tend to retain value for longer. But yeah wait for sale, the more you wait the better deals you are going to get. Since around 2010 lots of games get better with age too. But buying nothing and just mining your backlog is the best value move.
@@mow123 I completely agree. I’ve had tons of happy purchases where I spend $10-$20 for the deluxe edition of an older game that has everything included. Plus at that point all the major bugs have pretty much been worked out to.
To me what's odd is that in corporate, we're constantly looking for ways to maintain clientele and to expand if the industry allows it. The entertainment industry doesn't really operate around that axiom, in fact, I'd say they are taking a great deal of risk by trying to completely switch costumer bases while taking on massive budgets, that's completely counterintuitive in financial language. If investors are putting down 200 mil upfront, then, yes, I'd probably go for a popular established franchise but I'd also try to cater to the so called chuds and gamers because they are the ones that are invested in the market and then introduce small, incremental options for newer, untapped demographics but not do a complete 180, alienate the hand that feeds you and then act perplexed when their products sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Yes but for 30 years the way to sell your game was win mainstream media support and awards. So to them, they are still (essentially) trying to sell to the same customers (that being the mainstream media/award crowd). It's just media/award crowd COMPLETELY shifted around 10-12 years ago. And that crowd doesn't sell games (tbh). Which means MORE games have to fail before the lesson is finally learned. Having "trustworthy" award show/mainstream media would help, but personally I feel like that model is just dead.
It is worse than that. Risk isn't even the right term for what they are doing. Risk implies that there is a chance of success, in many cases they are just making an obviously idiotic decision that is certain to fail. They are actively going out of their way to intentionally alienate their existing audience without doing anything that any reasonable person would think would attract a new audience. Betting a lot of money on a poker game is a risk, betting a ton of money on surviving a round of russian roulette with all 6 rounds loaded in the revolver is just stupid, and that is more analogous to what the entertainment industry is doing.
@@spsawyer22 If you hate your current gamers and try to win the "modern audience" (which simply does not exist outside of twitter / reddit / bluesky), you will fail. How do I decide to buy new games? I watch youtubers playing the game. Those guys / girls are honest and I can see several things: 1. Is it running. 2. Do I like lore and entertainment. 3. Finally: can I play it. 4. Does it have stuff I hate (male looking females, top chest scars, pronouns)
You are correct, it is financially counterintuitive. That's why I think it could be because either; 1) The people that are in charge of financial decisions within media (gaming, film etc.) companies are incompetent and inefficient, whether deliberately so or not and/or 2) Said institutions are just part of a wider money laundering scheme. This makes more sense when you realise that most of these 'big' media companies are owned and funded by less than a handful of bigger management/investment firms. Just by the sheer amounts of money that are clearly lost in these failed media ventures across several different industries is enough to question either competency at the highest levels, or a sustained effort to 'waste' money most likely for tax avoidance or some other financial reason, but it does also happen in other industries, e.g. construction/real estate. It's probably a bit of both though, maybe incompetent people are put in charge of these media companies to mismanage financial investments. I will say I don't think this applies to all situations and examples, it's mainly just speculation. I don't know why or how Blackrock/Vanguard want to waste their money but clearly do.
@@rainyzack8134 Helldivers, at least, feels more AA+ than AAA. Between the price, and relatively tight gameplay loop (which leads to production cost 1/5-1/3 of typical AAA games), it kind of fits between the classic AA and AAA categories.
I think the biggest surprise of the Game of the Year nominations wasn't Elden Ring's DLC but Balatro. We've seen lots of non-triple A indie titles like Vampire Survivor and Lethal Company get popular but for a game to get popular enough where the industry itself is forced to recognise it is amazing. That said, I don't know if it's a sign of the rising quality of indie and AA titles or the declining quality of AAA (and AAAA) ones.
As a gamer since the 90s, I can tell ya one thing: You can feel the heart and soul on a great game. Every second you play you enjoy it. Your time is not being wasted, your intelligence not insulted and your investment respected by the devs. This is something that keeps getting lost to rather chase trends and please investors, like Swen Vincke said and like we all already knew. The future of gaming lies in indi studios of all kind, because they are driven by actual passion, the drive needed to create games.
I think the reason budgets are so bloated for IP's is because of the amount of laundering going on. There is no way companies would be handing out money hand over fist if it wasn't somehow ending up back in the hands of the stakeholders. Except now they can write off the loses.
they paid the employees a salary and move on..usually they get between 70k to 250k ...depending the dept to work in...art or programming ...programming last longest vs art dept always shift folks in and out projects ...meaning layoffs ...same for audio dept...they only keep managers only in art and audio dept....while programmers relax all they want after code the game engine is all they do ...basically they owned their owned office now for next 40 years
My interests have NOT changed. I loved Baldur's Gate 1, 2, and 3. I loved Diablo 2 and I now I'm rocking POE2. (Having skipped Diablo 3 and 4). What has changed is big studios focused more on making money through nefarious tactics instead of simply making a great game. The US gaming industry is dead, dead, dead. The only good games are coming from part of Europe and Asia.
Yeah I cannot remember the last time I bought a new AAA game made in the US. Maybe Grounded, back when Obsidian was a good company. Us Europeans aren't much better, apart from a select few exceptions. I am ashamed to say that Dustborn came from my home country.
I wouldn’t put CDPR in there too early, we don’t know how the next Witcher will be. Activists playing roles in that studio and game aren’t a good thing.
I do not think gamers moved on or changed the studios did. We wanted TES6 and BGS made whatever Starfield was. We wanted Dragon Age and they made whatever Fail Hard was. Prime example is Skyrim with 23,000+ players on Steam in 24 hours for a 13 year old game. Studios should have looked at Skyrim and said, lets do something similar but not a copy and paste. Studios started off with engines that do not let you interact with the environment. I do not want BGS to change the engine because I want to move everything and enter every building, not walk through a museum. UE5 is trash but it simplifies production of games you cannot interact with. Red Engine was the same. CP 2077 was a city of a million locked doors. Glitch through a wall and realize the building is fake completely. Use a mod that let you have a follower and she would fall through the elevator. Game studios have become fast food stores that charge gourmet prices.
Companies are directed to such consultants for the sole purpose of increasing the companies ESG score. That's litterly the only reason they exist in the first place. Without ESG there wouldn't be DEI. DEI is the "S" (Social) in ESG and it is the main way for companies to boost their ESG scores. Big companies with their shareholders can't say no to that sweet ESG-money. They never cared about the long term consequences but now it catches up to them after replacing all of their original talent for DEI hires / activists, especially with consumers noticing the quality drop and Idiological push.
Its good that first they need to hire SBI and second they can get ESG money. If it was vice versa it could be worse because they could get ESG money and hire SBI with it. But they need money first to hire SBI because SBI doesn't work for free lol
@KazaiTV Stakeholder economy (ESG) had tried in the past and it always failed miserably because it is anti-profit, anti-shareholders and anti-customers. Let these AAA developers eat cake. Indie games is the only way forward. Try that woke politics, lets see how you pay rent.
Well, it's because they are private companies, they did not go public. The problem is with the current ESG promoting financial system that forces publicly traded companies to adopt ESG.
Stop saying they are trying to make games that target everyone. That isnt true at all. They are activists that do this intentionally. They do the same thing over and over even though it loses money. Games are a political/cultural tool at this point
That's the natural result of hiring based on DEI for like a decade now. In the process they have replaced / forced out all of their old talent, while bringing the wrong people in, especially all of the activists that only care about pushing their Idiology. To them the game is just a tool for that and then such people are even put into leadership positions, because that's another quota to fill for a better ESG-score of the company to get a even bigger pie of that sweet sweet ESG-money.
Who do you think really plays R6? Blue haired leftist teenagers from liberal cities or normal people from all over the world where people don't have that politics at all? Stopped playing it long time ago. All the new caracters coming out in last 3 years had to tick one (at least) of these: POC, LGBT, Strong Mary Sue. They had gazillion complaints about that shit they were pushing.
10 games like ultrakill and titanfall are better then 100 games that are supposed to appeal to everyone. you pick a market and you make some good shit to sell to them. its not rocket science.
As a dev, after a year of 13k layoff, I see a lot of people in the industry realized that the AAA model isn't sustainable and some are trying to shift towards indie or AA projects. I don't necessarily agree with the change of consumer's interests. I think it's more about how games are being funded in recent years, the trend nowadays is to rely on data first, and that kills creativity, investors want a surefire quick return of their investments, and I think this is where a lot of the slop comes from, this is why the indie scene is much more creative since they don't have to give up on their agenda when they get funding. Btw, this is not new, it just took the entire industry, before that one good example was gadget based rhythm games, basically Guitar Hero and Rock Band, they flooded the market thinking everyone will keep buying peripherals and the same game over and over just because it has a couple of new songs. People just got tired of that and no one cares about those anymore outside specific circles, and they already went the smaller game route, and even free game, and open source ones long ago.
and what consumers need to understand is that games are the catalyst to the shareholder profit and investment return. The ONLY priority of a AAA company now is to make sure it breaks it's profit records, not create a good product.
I spaced out and 0:20 caught me completely off guard Edit: These comments are wild. Sorry my english is bad. Yes I was space out because UA-cam has an autoplay feature so I use asmonds and charlies videos as background noise while dooing other things. didnt think so many people would care for a strangers comment on the internet but thanks i guess.
@@jakecarter1264 Sorry my english is bad, I mean I was already spaced out. I use asmonds and charlies videos as background noise alot while working on other stuff. Also never used tiktok so idk what thats all about lol
the biggest problem with the industry was the overwhelming success of call of duty, world of warcraft, overwatch, league of legends, and mobile games. game companies now understand that they can do 10 things wrong, but one thing right, and they make bank. so every game company is on purpose trying to find that one thing, and going out of their way to ignore the glaring holes. the other issue is... game developers were never smart when it came to making multiplayer games. it was always the modders who made all of the games that people enjoyed. some of the most popular games were all forked from community made mods. but now, mod tools are gone, and the game companies refuse to take risks, so what you're left with is a hollow experience.
Fortnite has got to be the worst success in gaming history, toppling _everything else before it_ through the simple introduction of the gamepass concept alone.
Naw the problem is just letting business people make decisions in a creative industry. Those games existing aren't inherently a problem if you let creatives make creative decisions.
Elden Ring is AAA. Baldur's Gate 3 is AAA. Red Dead 2 is AAA. So are the Final Fantasy 7 Remakes, all of the Resident Evil remakes and the new RE games which have all been loved by the community, so is Metaphor Refantasio, the Insomniac Spiderman Games, the new Ratchet and Clank, Bloodborne, all of the Dark Souls, Sekiro, Doom Eternal, the open world Zelda games, Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 which has very positive reviews now on Steam, Warhammer 40K, Helldivers 2, the God of War games, Metro Exodus, Control, every Mario game ever, the Yakuza franchise, Armored Core 6, Dead Space Remake, Monster Hunter World/Wilds, A Plague Tale 2, Total War: Warhammer 1/2/3, Xenoblade Chronicles, Tekken 8, Street Fighter 6, Lies of P, FF16, Hitman 1/2/3, Silent Hill 2, Stellar Blade, and I could go on especially if I open up the criteria to games MADE BY AAA studios instead of just the huge AAA games. Anyways, it's okay to criticize, and ideally give the industry constructive feedback, but AAA gaming isn't dead and there's plenty of good AAA games that we all enjoy so please stfu.
Another thing. A small company makes a game that one of the devs was passionate about. The large corp makes a game based on meetings and spreadsheets and messages
Yeah, the sooner attention is put on smaller companies the better. The indies are pumping out hit after hit. It's just the market isn't ready to bother looking for it yet.
Veteran graphic designer here. I have watched 20 person teams shrink to 3 people. Take notes from my industry big teams are dead and take too long to shift. Scope creep in these projects is crazy and they are not designing what the customer wants they are designing what the shareholders want.
This has nothing to do with shareholders. Shareholders aren't shareholders with a smile on their faces watching their investment turn to dust and them losing every cent they put in. This ideology is part and parcel why gamers are bad consumers as a whole. You all need to start blaming the ACTUAL developers who make these awful games and try to peddle them as quality products. The easiest example to prove this point was CDPRs disastrous launch with CP2077. If you honestly believe the shareholders knew the trailer/showcase wasnt real gameplay and that the lie was driven by them and NOT the development team, you're wholly misguided.
But how can these people not see this coming? If the consumers are not consuming, what is there for the shareholders? Basically, the company AND the shareholders are losing money if there are no consumers. I mean, it doesn't take a scientist to figure this out. Well, unless they don't want big money to come in, their choice.
@@kalvon it's not the shareholders responsibility to create the product that makes them money. That falls on the development team and studio leadership. The shareholders are there to ensure they make their money back + profit. It would only make sense to believe their moral compass is centered around maximizing their $ regardless. There's no social issue grandstanding coming from the board. These types of decisions are made on the studio level. All the poor decisions being installed in the development process are on the studio level. It's not hard to see this.
The three companies he listed- Rockstar, Fromsoftware, and Capcom- DO NOT have 20,000 employees. The most is rockstar with 6,000 but they have like ~7 studios across 6 continents… Ubisoft does have over 45 studios… but wtf are they doing with them? They aren’t making GTA 5, RDR2, or GTA 6, that’s for damn sure.
The problem isn't these gaming companies trying to find the "broadest possible audience". It's the opposite. They're trying to cater to the most fringe tiny minority audience possible while excluding the vast majority of humanity. The slop they are putting out is literally offensive to 98% of humans on earth.
I think he is right with that, because the "broadest possible audience" is casual, but casual gamers are usually not deeply invested into gaming as a hobby and will just spend their money on something else instead, so catering to that customer group can be very hit & miss. Actual gamers, still a minority, have been openly disregarded by the major publishers as customers, but it's these people who keep games alive in the end.
Idk man. I don’t see “trying to make the game for a broad audience” as the main reason for why these AAA games fail. It’s one of them. They fail because of the hacktivists they hire that are ruining their games. They fail to realize that gaming is predominantly an 80/20 split and Most males (the self respecting ones) don’t like the flavor of “activism” they push. Amongst other things as well. Dismissing micro transactions/ loot boxes. Remember Assassins Creed Odyssey and Battlefront II? Shifting the focus to “diversity”. Too many games to count for this one but heres a few off the top of my head. The last of us 2, Battlefield 5, COD CW, and final fantasy 7 remake. The accusation of toxic masculinity any time gamers pushed back on the BS. Overwatch and Destiny 2. The oversimplification of gameplay is another doozy. Remember Mass Effect Andromeda? GTA V online? It sucks but the bubble has bursted. That’s why we keep seeing day one flops.
15 years from now we're going to look back at this not only for historical purposes but also to see how well this video quality has aged in feeling like it's from the 2000's but it's 2039 lol.
An "inclusive" product is the one that diminishes or removes whatever is enjoyed by the biggest customer because a tiny group might take offence. That "tiny group" becomes the lowest common denominator, and everyone else essentially has to follow its rules. The Minority is empowered to police the preference of the entire customer base, meanwhile the Majority is the one still paying the lion's share, supporting the very existence of the "inclusive" product.
Not just that, as Asmon has said (and I agree), ART DIRECTION is actually more important than graphics (I mean, assuming you aren't using 1990s graphics etc).
Just because ppl sensitive on agenda sht doesnt mean game is bad. Talking about apocalyptic theme tlou series is by far best game if u enjoy cutscenes with some gameplay. Art and overal details is amazing. And about that new game where they annouced, i just hate galactic theme so i pass eather way.
This is only a western thing. Mihoyo and Tencent making money hand over fist with multiple IPs. Asian gaming is booming. Let’s be real: the problem with AAA Western gaming is cultural and ignoring it won’t make it disappear. Indie western gaming also has the same woke bullshit. It’s just that Western indies are more varied than the handful of AAA Western publishers. Being indie doesn’t necessarily fix the problem with Western cultural politics.
10:48 This sort of flies in the face of his opinion in the Threat Interactive reactions where he claims that people will care about good graphics, even if unconsciously. But it's really the graphics to hardware requirement ratio. These developers are asking us to have such outrageous specs and 120gb of SSD storage. All for games that simply don't look or play that much better than the 12gb Skyrim that could run on a toaster.
I think Asmon was talking more about the hierarchy of importance to a gamer rather than outright claiming that graphics aren't important at all to games. Graphics are absolutely important as both Threat Interactive and Asmongold himself have claimed in the past, but they aren't the first priority. A great example is the game "Cube Chaos" on Steam, which has extremely simple graphics but incredible gameplay depth and has earned a bit of a cult following.
There is also the more "in your face" style activism happening in video games. Like you see people showing how folk didn't have any issues with lgbtq+ representation in Dragon Age but then have a problem with Veil Guard for "no good reason". It's not that there is "no good reason", it's that the representation previously wasn't immersion breaking. For instance, a great example of doing that level of activism without ruining immersion is how BG3 did it, where you as the player could explore it if you so desired, rather than it being forced upon you. Or how Hogwarts Legacy did it, where they had an openly trans character in the story that you had to interact with, but, the story didn't go into an explicit winded explanation that forced your character into uncomfortable situations. Rather, Hogwarts Legacy treated the trans character as a human being and all of your interactions with her felt normal and natural. Veil Guard on the other hand had an explicit scene where a daughter of a reptilian race tries to come out to their parents as non-binary.... in a medieval fantasy world.... where such language probably had never came to be, actively breaking immersion for even the most left leaning of gamers. No attempt to show any reason why such a time period has such language, no attempt to show any middle ground for a compromise utilizing the reptilian race's own native tongues, nothing, no creativity past an extreme 4th wall break into a real-world callout to real world word usage. The mother in that scene did try to say that they already had a word for "not feeling quite like a man and not feeling quite like a woman", but the daughter rejected that saying it had negative connotations. They could have made that scene more natural by having the mother kindly embrace her child and say "no, it doesn't have any negative connotations, it simply means you are neither" and that would have been a much MUCH more natural way of coming out as non-binary in the Dragon-Age universe, but no, they chose to break immersion. And this is one of the many issues that are also causing big corps to die, they push the agenda so hard to a point that they forget they are trying to represent humans and/or personifications of humans and/or human culture.
It’s also worth noting that companies like Ubisoft are trying to get those same returns but with the least amount of effort required, rather than going that extra mile for the players.
My biggest question is how is Twitter going to take this out of context. I am all for more studios like Warhorse and Larian that focus on *One* game that is not chasing a trend but what their player base is expecting
I don’t understand why a company like Ubisoft doesn’t fund let’s say 30 small in-house development studios of 30 developers each that work on 50 million dollar games each. Allow each studio to have an individual creative lead with a vision for each individual game. If a game is successful, put slightly more money into its sequel. If the game doesn’t do well, give another creative lead a chance. You take risks, yes, but they’re controlled risks with a high possibility of innovation and positive reputation building for the company brand.
Sweet Baby Inc is the blessing in disguise gamers needed. They've single-handedly destroyed AAA companies within 18 months, and we're going to see a shift to solid games that aren't destroyed by inclusivity.
It’s not always the fault of game developers. Even big companies, like Ubisoft, have to take out a loan to finance a game. The companies that control the money (Backrock, Vanguard, and StateStreet) give incentive loans for companies that push a DEI agenda. Game developers are pretty much forced to hire woke DEI advisors (i.e. Sweet Baby Inc.) in order to get financing. Unfortunately, games will continue to push an ultra left agenda for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, we’ll see a rise in small to moderately size private game studios.
"One size fits none" is like when they said "this game isn't for you" That's fine, but don't complain when the people you told that to don't play your game & your studio shuts down
This is a problem with so many businesses. Look at restaurants that have too much variety. Everything they make sucks, instead of focusing on a a few items and making them really well.
That's why Astrobot winning goty was a huge deal. It's a AA from a AAA company, with a 65 people team, with no woke, all free DLC. And for the budget? It was a huge huge success. It's a phenomenal game even if Asmongold thinks it's an ad, which is weird because you don't make an ad for 20 year old games and hardware lol it's more of a love letter for past generations, it's also a slap in the face of a their own company: we have no ip said Sony, here's all the ip we have says Astro bot. But more importantly it shows big companies that you can have a indie sized team producing quality games at a faster pace than throwing millions of dollars into AAAA that are probably going to flop even if they are a moderate success. I know it upset a lot of people, but Astrobot way of doing things could very well be the thing that saves gaming. It was an important win, to kickstart this very same conversation. Weirdly enough Ubisoft tried to do the same with prince of Persia, another banger but it wasn't successful because they fell short of adopting gamer friendly policies. Hints of apparent woke, distribution nightmares presented the game in a negative light when in reality is an outstanding game. Another that fell pray to the pitfalls of presenting the game to the modern audience even if the game itself is not woke at all, it's a great, cheap to make, easy to pick up, hard to master Metroidvania. I feel the success of Astro and what it means and the conversation it will start for instance inside Sony but surely on other companies too is being overshadowed by 20 million upset gamers. Even if they have all the right to be upset Wukong is not as important as Astro bot in the long run.
After what happened with The Crew 1 and Ubisoft saying that "the players should get used to not owning their games", I never bought anything made by them again, even if I liked it. I refuse to be part of this until they change their policy.
Tbf when he does videos like this I'm 99 percent certain he doesn't record it on his PC through obs, because if you watch him reacting to content or playing a game his audio is nice and crisp, so I'm pretty sure he's either recording on his phone or just recording audio straight from his camera which is evident by the fact at the end of the video he ruched towards the camera to stop the recording
There is something to be said for a guy who is clearly wealthy and presents this way and looks like he is in his mother's attic. I love it- it's not as fake or pretentious as other creators.
free markets works perfectly in gaming. just don't buy games you don't like, and buy games you do like and the developers and publishers will follow the money. there's no need for outrage or protests or video essays.
7:30 for Hellblade she was originally a part of the development team, she isn't an outsider who drastically raised costs. Also they explain how they keep costs down in the documentaries on their official channel.
The Hellblade example is just Asmon talking out of his ass without any knowledge. Ninja Theory's Hellblade 1 was the poster child example of a AA studio making a shorter AAA quality release. That success enabled them to continue on that path and ended up with Hellblade 2 (which I do think is incredible in many ways, but not really the game I wish it was).
What I think people don't realise is that many franchises are popular because of the very certain vision of the original creator. This vision builds a lot popularity over the years. Eventually, the creator is fired or simply leaves, and the big CEO that has no experience in anything besides fleecing cash and cutting costs starts decomposing that reputation over time. Ubisoft has built itself on the back of a few visionaries, and has somehow managed to trudge on for at least 10 years of installments without caring about or understanding what was at the core of said franchises. Now, the reputation has been fully eroded, and Ubisoft is exposed for what it is: a corporation-wide scam operation.
Why so much hate on Ubisoft? I played the last 3 AC instalments and I had fun in all of them... not perfect but definetly good games. I have friends that also liked them.
@dariuslukacs4128 Ubisoft is one the few companies that wants to follow every trend that comes its way, but won't go all in to create something new (probably because everyone with skill and talent left). Instead, they try to slap that newest trend to its own old and nearly irrelevant franchises. Overall, people are mad (and rightly so) that we haven't had an actual AC installment, or a Splinter Cell installment, or [insert any Ubisoft IP here] in almost ten years.
the people making games right now are neither scientists nor artists speaking as a game dev, they simply are the products of corporatism and corrupt money hungry people, great games and original ideas are much harder today because anyone with talent is quickly swallowed and paid tons of cash to be mediocre and do less and then deliver mediocrity for big paychecks that is the current culture in gaming, it simply can't be solved unless blackrock and other demons stop funding failed propaganda games and corporations fail and we go back to small passionate studios.
No science here. Scientists would be looking at the data and realizing that what they're doing isnt working and shift strategies. The videogames are being made by ideologs.
Great video, and he didn't even mention how no one wants to play unattractive characters in video games. We play games to have fun, become better versions of ourselves, and escape from the crap we have to deal with in real life. Don't put that shit in our games! As Thor/PirateSoftware stated, Asmongold represents the target audience and game developers who ignore him do so at their peril. I concur.
There definitely is a market saturation. What I've noticed over the last couple years for myself and many of my friends is that we often stick to games with a lot of replayability and have some favourite titles that we often return to. We rarely buy a new game outside of an expansion or a new version of a game that we previously played.
You know recently I actually bought Metal Gear Solid 5 on sale and never have really played any of the Metal Gear Solid games until that one and I have to sincerely say that I spent more hours on MGSV than I have on any game lately, much less any AAA game. (And that also includes multiplayer AAA titles like Call of Duty which I have since uninstalled and will only play them for the story at this point.) The fact that I have cherished, had more fun, and sincerely reinvigorated my love of Gaming with a game that's 10 years old is really sad.
Wait until you find out that Konami never let Kojima finish the game. MGSV is still a great game. The mechanics in it still rival current games like it. You might like Death Stranding.
@SoberAddiction yeah just recently started getting into this training as well. And yeah I also heard that they apparently didn't end up finishing the game like they wanted
I have a huge steam games library. A little hint : don't buy games for full price on release ( ever). Just wait next Christmas once its half a price. Work through you steam backlog....
People were mad there wasn’t a Resident Evil 9 announcement at the game wards and it’s like guys…you’re why Assassin Creed has 30 games 🤣🤣🤣🤣 you’re young or casual Instead based Capcom brought back Onimusha and Okami two franchises dead on PS2 and GameCube, they’re even doubling down and plan to bring back more forgotten or untouched past IPs of theirs. I’ll take that over Street Fighter 20 with minimal changes. Build a crop of many vegetables not farm one vegetable because it was popular. This is simply the way of gaming. In the PS2 days there was a new IP every week, it may’ve been a clone of something else, but it was a different brand, different characters different everything. Modern day saturation is tiring
Sequels are not inherently bad. Resident Evil games consistently improved and evolved with each iteration while AC stagnated. Two Sequel driven IPs with vastly different outcomes. The problem isn't sequels, though I agree with you about having a diverse roster of titles making for a better gaming environment.
One reason I respect Fromsoft is that they could’ve easily make more money with another dark souls game but instead they made Armored Core 6, and people were pissed and making fun of them because it didn’t sell as much as the dark souls games, but that game was a passion project for the devs, they made that game because they wanted to
I think most of what you said is absolutely true. But there are still some things where game developers just make bad decisions. Ghost Recon for example. I think Wildlands (Third person shooter) was very successful. So then Ubisoft added a bunch of undesirable features when they made Breakpoint (Third Person shooter). There was a big backlash over the changes made in Breakpoint. So what do they do? They decide to make the next version a first person shooter instead of just leaving out the undesirable features (Or making them optional). Another thing that confuses me. Red Dead 2 for example created this big expensive open world for their story. They made massive amounts of money off the game. Then they shelf it when they could've had a dev team make more story lines that could be played within the same open world area that they've already created. I personally would've absolutely bought a DLC story involving Sadie Adler or someone. And why doesn't Rockstar have an Red Dead team and a GTA team? They leave one IP dead for years while they work on the other...
7:10 I would say that Senua is a niche game and made for that niche, I dont think they were never made to the general public or thought to be to the general public. Senua is an amazing game. It's great for ppl from the niche, and I love that we have niches in the gaming industry and not everyone trying to do things to appeal to everyone.
The issue with Hellblade is that it's made for a niche audience, but it's likely not made with a niche budget. We know the original game had a budget of around 10 million USD. I don't think we know the sequel's budget, but from what I've heard, Hellblade 2 had about 4x the amount of developers and took about 1.5x longer to make compared to the first game. So it probably had about 6x the budget which would place it around 60 million USD, as a "guesstimate" (the real number could either be much lower or higher) Seeing as Hellblade 2 was only the 37th best-selling game the month it released in the US... I don't think there's even the slightest chance it made back its budget. If it kept a similar budget to the original, maybe it'd be financially viable, but it doesn't seem that way
@@kev1nno that's the consequences of being bought by a big greedy corporation. Microsoft thought if they just toss a bunch of money at Ninja Theory the game will give more profit
@the_udmurt agreed, I just hope that Microsoft don't cut the liberty of the studio because of a loss that they made, I don't care if next game from them is a AA, the problem happens when they force a AAA and limit the creativity of the studio to try to make more money and in the end producing a shit product that makes everyone sad about it, the devs, the players and the VC's
I think the single, main reason why games are making severe losses these days is because of the forced politics and social issues being crammed in, where they have no place and completely break immersion. DEI policies and the like are totally ruining what, on paper, would be great games had they been made 10+ years ago. The industry has been subverted for a long while now unfortunately but money talks... The recipe for a successful game hasn't actually changed and I doubt it ever will.
6:50 Oh, overstaffing is an understatement. I mean, look at games like Kingdom Come Deliverance (someone reminds Asmon to play that lol). The company who made the first game started out with 11 people. 11! And now, the second game will be releasing in February and they have around 350. And do you see the quality of these games?! You do not need thousands of people. Not unless they are working on like 4+ different games at the same time. Bigger companies have divisions spread across the map. But I have to imagine, you only need a maximum of 400 people for a single triple A quality game (even if its not a triple A studio). You certainly don't need all these HR departments and woke sensitivity workers that critique every aspect of the game for things random people might find offensive. Just hire the skilled workers with the best demo reels / portfolios.
Pass a certain point you start seeing diminishing returns I think the optimum number is probably somewhere around 100 to 150 so that the person in charge can actually know everybody's name and what they do put past a certain point you start having way too many moving parts and the more complex system is the more likely it is to break or malfunction and right now those big 20,000 people companies literally are incapable of producing anything good because they can't just pick a direction and go in it
As a consumer i can only do one thing which is vote with my money. It has been nice to see this shift hsppening the last few years and i have been supporting every smaller developer that has been making amazing games by buying and playing there games, and getting my friends to as well. My grouo of friends has honestly pretty much only played non-AAA games this year and we have had so much fun, and we dont feel like we are getting taken advantage of or just wasting our money. We are all playing POE2 right now and couldnt be happier with the devs reception to the player base and how fast they have acted so far. Blizzard could never lol they havent gotten a dollar from me in a very long time, and thats all we can do... vote with our dollar.
You also have CDPR, though they are walking a fine line about to fall on the wrong side it it looking like. And Nintendo is still fine, they have always just focused on games and nothing else
11:00 word of the decade is "gameplay". Too many studios focus solely on graphics like games are only useful for benchmark tests when in reality graphics are something that should always come secondary to the notion of gameplay. Too many U5 users masked as game developer studios.
I reinstalled Force Unleashed Ultimate Sith Edition and I am enjoying it like the first time. I played so many games since 2008. this is such a breath of fresh air to revisit.
Trends don’t always change as quickly as you say. You mention 4 years ago we were in Covid and everyone was addicted to Genshin impact… but they have MORE players now they did then. The reality is some trends end up being short lived fads others end up being a genre or similar and stick around for longer. It’s hard to know which each will be, and you have to take risks here, just as you take risks trying new ideas.
It very much was a AAA product. W2 was a cultural milestone in Poland, and financial boon. It brought in $13 billion gross. By the time W3 rolled around, they were the second-largest dev in Europe. They had a staff of 1500 alone working on Witcher 3 - and almost another 1000 voice actors. This was a vast project, funded in the hundreds of millions, by a AAA company.
The moment the CD Project created GOG, they were no longer indy studio. Red is AAA studio since Witcher 2, CD Project is parent company, GOG is publisher.
There has never been a better time than now to work through your steam back log instead of buying anything new
This is exactly what i have been doing. So many gems. Glad I had them to fill in these boring times of nonsense political messaging.
It’s what I’m doing, and when I finish something I look for mods to tailor it to my liking then I move to the next one :D it’s fun so far
Yea this works out pretty well, not to mention how much money I save these days from all the games I don’t buy
Make them work for your dollar.
@@getcarter4dynamo Thankfully half of the they/them "developers" will remove themselves and the problems will start to sort themselves out
Triple A gaming is like Hollywood now. No original thought. Everything is a sequel, a prequel, or a remake. Some of the best games on market are from small indy developers.
and woke
It’s all about money. So much money is wrapped up into these creative projects they can no longer actually be creative. They have to go the safest broadest root no matter what.
It's all a money scam imo. So much wastage and deliberately antagonizing the people that are supposed to be buying their products. It makes no sense to me.
@@FiNN-- Yeah, woke stuff is like cancer to a game.
That's not true at all! There are a lot of new AAA games!
CD Project red wasn't AAA when it made Witchers 1-3. AA is the way to go
CDPR was a Polish studio working in Poland on a Polish IP using local Polish talent. They were doing fine. With Cyberpunk they had to go big and it took them a while to sort themselves out.
moving to canada didn't help
outsourcing QA test to india didn't help
Making witcher 3 a 2 button combat game, with a ff8 card game, and WoW smelting tier crafting still blows my mind that it was slurped up by people fawning over graphics and its (admittedly great) story. The fact that we've sat on our hands playing different versions of 2004 WoW in single player and multiplayer with "xp levels," talent trees that are locked by previous talents, quest or level locked content, and now most recently p2w and p2becoolcosmetics slathered onto slower versions of Starcraft mobile games, FPS games where every game has ESP cheating, is just getting annoying to be a player. TEKKEN 8 wanting a subscription or an extra $150 to buy all the characters is tripe and POE2 not sharing stash tabs (remove only) between sub accounts between PS5 and Steam etc despite putting up hundreds for early access is just exhausting. It's getting to the point you feel you need to lawyer up just for the burden of paying to waste your free time being force fed everyone else's ideals while they censor you.
Witcher 3 first year was very buggy. These community hated IT.
We were told $70-$100 price tags for games were necessary because games were getting more expensive to make. It turns out they were correct; overbloated marketing teams and layers of middle management turned out to be unsustainable and they wanted to foot us the bill.
Raising prices was never about the cost of development, it was about increasing profit margins. They could be happy and the company sustainable making 10's of millions more than production cost, but increasing prices is their pursuit to make 100's of millions more than investment. Audiences willing to buy games has increased and was reliably increasing year on year, I think it still is. Each unit cost doesn't have to go up when more people are buying games overall.
That was a load of bull anyway. Games have gotten cheaper and easier to make year after year with new and better tools being released constantly. Not to mention physical manufacturing, which was a large part of development costs in the past, has been removed almost completely. The only reason prices have gone up is because the investors demand it.
@@petrichorsdream the only reason? Really?
@smithynoir9980
No, you're just jaded. Game designers deserve a livable wage too. Gotta pay to play. If you look at the price of games throughout the lifetime of home gaming you'd see the price of games vs inflation has actually been very generous.
Jaded and ignorant take ran on pure pathos. Not to take away from the validity fo corporate greed but truth is truth.
AstroBot the GOTY is on sale for 50 rn :D
If Ubisoft was a shirt company; they would make shirts with either 1 arm hole or 3 arm holes to be inclusive. While making no shirts with 2 arm holes because that’s ableist.
Ikr
They would instead make halter-tank-tops with waist and sleeve dlc.
UA-cam should add a laugh button 😂😂
Or their shirts is rainbow only and people asking for single color shirts are called bigots
@@moonlightuwu3252 No they'd sell digital clothing irl. Here's a shirt you can't wear..
I swear, every time Asmon records one of these videos he intentionally lowers the bitrate even further.
Birthrate or bitrate?
yall overreacting. This is almost no different to his react videos. Just slightly worse quality. Nothing more.
At least he finally cleaned the damn lens
@@KitsuneShapeShifter yes
@@yhwach1 I don't know if you have ears but you should maybe get your eyes and such checked out at a doctor if you don't notice the difference.
There is a huge Steam sale going on right now!
Older AAA games for 80-95% off, lots of already cheap Indie games ~30% off.
Treat yourselfes intead of wasting 70$ on some new game that you might not even enjoy that much. Even if you don't play or enjoy all of the 1-15$ games, it still feels better than wasting all on a single game.
Yep! I just bought Grim Dawn, Titanfall 2 and Divinity Original Sin for less than 15€. And those games are all actually great!
Be carefull not to buy shitty triple A games that are on sale like borderlands 3 and mass effect Andromeda. Make sure to look at revieuws
Yeah, better get yourself an older triple A games instead of the new ones, it's Christmas already, there's probably be a lot of games that are on sale rn
@@kalvonI already bought like 20 games in the last weeks from older AAA games, old classics to many cheap Indie games.
It's really worth it to browse through the steam sale list and look what you will find.
I got neir replicant and neir automata 60% off and I'm so happy. Replicant is so underrated and im having a good time with it so far (3 hours in)
"Quadruple A games, one A for each player." 🔥😂
Asmon is a lyrical wordsmith with these. Let him cook.
XXX much better
Had me dying 😂
@DinoDisguised i guess we are the few that fell apart on this one 😂
Hot take: I do not think most gamers hate trans people. I brought this up on a Reddit and got banned. Majority of gamers do not care about identity. We have been given so many bad games over the past couple of years and every single one had black women or trans in them. So at what point is it just pattern recognition, and not simply bigotry… when I asked this question of Reddit they banned me…
Hating an individual and an ideology are not the same.
That describes me several years ago. We said to leave the kids alone. They didn't. We don't forget.
Speak for yourself bud
You went to the wrong place to have a proper discussion
always supported trans people. But these days it is impossible to separate them from radical ideology. If you see it somewhere it is NEVER there just because. There is always a reason, a message or a purpose. Either its corporate pandering or its activists infiltrating a medium they never cared about. All for the message, rather than the game or the media. That makes most people start to react immediately when they see any signs of "wokeness", and here we are.
"If you suck 100 dicks and build 1 bridge, you're Ubisoft."
Is absolutely fantastic, that's a crazy ass line.
this is why we like asmon! he will not paint you a pretty picture. we get the facts.
Has he said it before or am I losing my mind?
Timestamp?
had me weak 33 seconds in, sheesh, tf!
Proud to be the 100th like
Ubisoft signed its death warrant the moment they said to get comfortable not owning our games, heh well Ubisoft get comfortable becoming a footnote.
Sounds like Steam
uplay also didnt help
Wait till you find out you don't own the games you buy on steam too
Wait till you find out Roblox can take everything youve spent money on too
They told us to get comfortable with not owning our games,
So we're getting comfortable with not owning *THEIR* games.
I hate modern gaming.
What happened to good writing that drew you in and kept you invested enough you couldn't wait for the next one to come out?
I think you might enjoy this little indie game I love called "Outer Wilds".
Do NOT confuse it with "the Outer Worlds" though. Very different games despite the similar titles.
After invention of the printing press it took a while for proven "classics" to accumulate. There's been a lot of hack schlock sold to unsuspecting readers over the last few centuries, and the crap continues. But now you can pick from an inexhaustible catalogue of irrefutably worthwhile gems 12 or 200 years old, zero chance of feeling cheated that _Conan the Buccaneer_ does not live up to expectations. There's just so much quality and niche accumulated that reading a novel today because it's _new and trending_ is for a certain type of person only.
@@pong9000 You're not wrong, but there is also still great new books being written.
Same is true for gaming. You just probably shouldn't expect it from the giants with the deep pockets. Look at smaller writers/devs.
And no, indie doesn't have to mean pixel art. Have a peek at Satisfactory and tell me that game looks bad, I dare you.
@@Atlessa Thanks, I've heard mention of _Satisfactory_ long enough to have a look. But a few years ago I tuned out the buzz of that title because it had not proved itself. The successor _Unsatisfactory_ I'll likewise wait and see if people nostalgically recommend it even years after release.
they started hiring liberal women who hate men
Ubisoft having 20K employees is just nuts... If my memory serves correct I remember Rockstar saying that they only had 200 people working for them when they created Vice City.... This is why these larger companies will all fail in the end. Especially now that they're literally making games that people dislike on purpose.
Dude that's vice city. How many people you think made red dead 2
@@arkkrogue3870It's nowhere near 20.000 people, that's for sure. Maybe a thousand or a bit more.
@@arkkrogue3870 1,600 according to Google
@@xithappens well consider the volume of the games they're releasing, rockstar focuses most of the employees on one or two games, while ubisoft has like 30 games they're working on simultaneously, obviously there will be a lot more employees working, but it's probably less per game.
ubisoft has 18.6k as of 2024. activison-blizzard has 17k as of 2023. rockstar has atleast 2000 as of 2018. gearbox has 1300 as of 2022.
now consider the following studios: valve, arrowhead, 4a, larian, fromsoftware, fatshark, firaxis, respawn, gsc game world, ghostshipgames, bioware, all of those companies ***PUT TOGETHER*** are under 3000 humans.
edit: added more companies.
Triple A corporations took Blackrock ESG, DEI money. They have sown the seeds of their own destruction. Let them fail and make room for new, more worthy companies.
A little compromise for a lot of money. They just needed to make some... minor changes. To their games. To their companies. To their hiring policies. It's good, yeah? Only, to keep getting that money, they then needed to make some... less minor changes. Then some major changes. Now they're wholly dependent on the ESG money because no one is buying their games. And they're at the point where they can't afford to make a game _without_ the ESG money.
IMO, if they want to survive in any form, then they need to drastically cut back their workforce and focus on smaller, cheaper games, and swear off that toxic ESG money.
Yep, couldn't have said it better myself
I feel like there is a democrats gives incentive for these company. Is just weird you still creating a game that doesn't sell.
Can't serve two masters
Why did Blackrock do that? What was their goal?
Is funny how those massive hollow and empty games reflect perfectly their companies.
This mf spittin
New games are boring, photo realism makes every game look the same. I might be in the minority but I love how in older games the developers had to be creative with their graphics and were forced to be unique, in a way and create their own art style. Nowadays most games feel like the same game but a different paint.
I was thinking about this the other day and it feels like older games had less graphics wise, so the developers had to be more creative to tell a story, or world build and drive the narrative home. So all the creative artistic highlights that made so many games and their environment amazing is lost on modern gaming. Everything looks, "good and realistic" now, so they stopped trying and just pump out hot vanilla poop slop all the time. It's sad really. Then you go back to something like Silent Hill 1 on the original playstation and it's like magic, sure the graphics sucked, the control scheme left something to be desired, but the atmosphere, the feel, and everything else is amazing.
@@zefferss Yes, the lore told and the entertainment value are more important than bugs or other issues.
Diablo 2 still has it's fans. Titan Quest and Grim Dawn are running lap after lap. They could be better for the eyes, but they are still good gaming.
I feel the same. Realism has no charm for me.
Btw, steam has a huge sale right now. So many older AAA games are 80-95% off, already cheap Indie games ~30% off.
It’s also gives accessibility to people with potato pcs and have smaller download sizes, effectively upping the profits even more by a large margin if the game is good.
I feel you, but to me what matters to me the most is the gameplay and the overall quality of the game.
I'm more on the whatever side when it comes to graphics because just because the graphics is good that doesn't mean the game is good, but if i were to choose a side, i'd probably be on your side here.
sometimes, some games doesn't translate well if it were to have 4K support, Global Illumination, whatever shits that makes the game looks realistic.
At this point I’m only buying games on sale. Theirs tons of old great games on sale that are $5-$10. Just add them to the wishlist or save for later and just wait.
The best decision I did was purchase cyberpunk 2077 for 50% off. Way better experience than dragon veil guard
I'm doing that for years now and I still have a backlog of way too many amazing games.
I always end up buying too many games, even when I set a limit to $100. Then I end up with 10+ games.
@@Astelch i canceled my download of pirated veilguard after checking reviews. I dont even wan't that shii for free lmao
There is also what I like to call the No man's sky or Fallout76 paradox. Games that get updates, the price goes down but the amount of content for the game goes up. It's crazy people spent 60 for FO76 when I got it for free with twitch prime and it had way more content... So why were there so many people playing it in the early days? It was in it's worse state and was the most expensive. New has always been bad trait for me. Everyone back then knew it was a bad game and willingly scammed themselves or they just took a blind leap and pre order it.
I will say some games retain their price for longer. There are times when you will wait for a few years and not get that much off. other times the game will completely crash into nearly nothing. Good game tend to retain value for longer.
But yeah wait for sale, the more you wait the better deals you are going to get. Since around 2010 lots of games get better with age too. But buying nothing and just mining your backlog is the best value move.
@@mow123 I completely agree. I’ve had tons of happy purchases where I spend $10-$20 for the deluxe edition of an older game that has everything included. Plus at that point all the major bugs have pretty much been worked out to.
It’s kinda crazy how nobody wants to get out of the rabbit hole and read the book Whispers of Manifestation on Borlest
Ubisoft is in the “Find out stage”
Hope so. Simultaneously we need to encourage the studios doing things right.
They need to learn the hard way like other comps
yea cus they been "Fk around too long"
I'm looking forward to the bankruptcy stage
fr
To me what's odd is that in corporate, we're constantly looking for ways to maintain clientele and to expand if the industry allows it. The entertainment industry doesn't really operate around that axiom, in fact, I'd say they are taking a great deal of risk by trying to completely switch costumer bases while taking on massive budgets, that's completely counterintuitive in financial language. If investors are putting down 200 mil upfront, then, yes, I'd probably go for a popular established franchise but I'd also try to cater to the so called chuds and gamers because they are the ones that are invested in the market and then introduce small, incremental options for newer, untapped demographics but not do a complete 180, alienate the hand that feeds you and then act perplexed when their products sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Yes but for 30 years the way to sell your game was win mainstream media support and awards.
So to them, they are still (essentially) trying to sell to the same customers (that being the mainstream media/award crowd).
It's just media/award crowd COMPLETELY shifted around 10-12 years ago. And that crowd doesn't sell games (tbh).
Which means MORE games have to fail before the lesson is finally learned. Having "trustworthy" award show/mainstream media would help, but personally I feel like that model is just dead.
It is worse than that. Risk isn't even the right term for what they are doing. Risk implies that there is a chance of success, in many cases they are just making an obviously idiotic decision that is certain to fail. They are actively going out of their way to intentionally alienate their existing audience without doing anything that any reasonable person would think would attract a new audience. Betting a lot of money on a poker game is a risk, betting a ton of money on surviving a round of russian roulette with all 6 rounds loaded in the revolver is just stupid, and that is more analogous to what the entertainment industry is doing.
@@spsawyer22 If you hate your current gamers and try to win the "modern audience" (which simply does not exist outside of twitter / reddit / bluesky), you will fail.
How do I decide to buy new games? I watch youtubers playing the game. Those guys / girls are honest and I can see several things:
1. Is it running.
2. Do I like lore and entertainment.
3. Finally: can I play it.
4. Does it have stuff I hate (male looking females, top chest scars, pronouns)
Oh its simple, because entertainment shapes culture and minds. If people cannot relate to that, they are easier to brainwash and control with fear.
You are correct, it is financially counterintuitive. That's why I think it could be because either;
1) The people that are in charge of financial decisions within media (gaming, film etc.) companies are incompetent and inefficient, whether deliberately so or not
and/or
2) Said institutions are just part of a wider money laundering scheme. This makes more sense when you realise that most of these 'big' media companies are owned and funded by less than a handful of bigger management/investment firms.
Just by the sheer amounts of money that are clearly lost in these failed media ventures across several different industries is enough to question either competency at the highest levels, or a sustained effort to 'waste' money most likely for tax avoidance or some other financial reason, but it does also happen in other industries, e.g. construction/real estate. It's probably a bit of both though, maybe incompetent people are put in charge of these media companies to mismanage financial investments. I will say I don't think this applies to all situations and examples, it's mainly just speculation. I don't know why or how Blackrock/Vanguard want to waste their money but clearly do.
Stellar blade, wukong, helldivers, POE. All great games made by none aaa studios
Hair he goes again constraditing hypocritical all of the games he plays 😂 Only he looks like a fool that y we Tolerate him
Aren’t all those games triple a though?
@@rainyzack8134 Helldivers, at least, feels more AA+ than AAA. Between the price, and relatively tight gameplay loop (which leads to production cost 1/5-1/3 of typical AAA games), it kind of fits between the classic AA and AAA categories.
I know that guy on the camera
Same 🤨
Why is the audio so garb?
You would, n3rd.
Tell him to never wear that ghost shirt again lol
Artistic choice @@iamwhoiam7887
Massive uprising of the gamer, the voter, the people.
We’re, thoroughly, sick of it all. I’m proud of us, for the first time in 40 years.
I think the biggest surprise of the Game of the Year nominations wasn't Elden Ring's DLC but Balatro. We've seen lots of non-triple A indie titles like Vampire Survivor and Lethal Company get popular but for a game to get popular enough where the industry itself is forced to recognise it is amazing.
That said, I don't know if it's a sign of the rising quality of indie and AA titles or the declining quality of AAA (and AAAA) ones.
As a gamer since the 90s, I can tell ya one thing: You can feel the heart and soul on a great game. Every second you play you enjoy it. Your time is not being wasted, your intelligence not insulted and your investment respected by the devs.
This is something that keeps getting lost to rather chase trends and please investors, like Swen Vincke said and like we all already knew. The future of gaming lies in indi studios of all kind, because they are driven by actual passion, the drive needed to create games.
Sympathize; thinking of the first time I played Diablo I.
This! So true.
I think the reason budgets are so bloated for IP's is because of the amount of laundering going on. There is no way companies would be handing out money hand over fist if it wasn't somehow ending up back in the hands of the stakeholders. Except now they can write off the loses.
they paid the employees a salary and move on..usually they get between 70k to 250k ...depending the dept to work in...art or programming ...programming last longest vs art dept always shift folks in and out projects ...meaning layoffs ...same for audio dept...they only keep managers only in art and audio dept....while programmers relax all they want after code the game engine is all they do ...basically they owned their owned office now for next 40 years
My interests have NOT changed. I loved Baldur's Gate 1, 2, and 3. I loved Diablo 2 and I now I'm rocking POE2. (Having skipped Diablo 3 and 4). What has changed is big studios focused more on making money through nefarious tactics instead of simply making a great game. The US gaming industry is dead, dead, dead. The only good games are coming from part of Europe and Asia.
But Ubisoft comes from France
@misaldi2743 larian and cd project are both europe.
@@misaldi2743Their main focus is very much usa and maybe Canada markets now, though. Has been for quite a while now.
Yeah I cannot remember the last time I bought a new AAA game made in the US. Maybe Grounded, back when Obsidian was a good company. Us Europeans aren't much better, apart from a select few exceptions.
I am ashamed to say that Dustborn came from my home country.
I wouldn’t put CDPR in there too early, we don’t know how the next Witcher will be. Activists playing roles in that studio and game aren’t a good thing.
I do not think gamers moved on or changed the studios did. We wanted TES6 and BGS made whatever Starfield was. We wanted Dragon Age and they made whatever Fail Hard was. Prime example is Skyrim with 23,000+ players on Steam in 24 hours for a 13 year old game. Studios should have looked at Skyrim and said, lets do something similar but not a copy and paste.
Studios started off with engines that do not let you interact with the environment. I do not want BGS to change the engine because I want to move everything and enter every building, not walk through a museum. UE5 is trash but it simplifies production of games you cannot interact with. Red Engine was the same. CP 2077 was a city of a million locked doors. Glitch through a wall and realize the building is fake completely. Use a mod that let you have a follower and she would fall through the elevator.
Game studios have become fast food stores that charge gourmet prices.
It's still an old, buggy engine that needs updating.
AA studios are great because they don't have money to buy SBI and DEI consultancy and special departments eating money doing nothing.
Companies are directed to such consultants for the sole purpose of increasing the companies ESG score. That's litterly the only reason they exist in the first place.
Without ESG there wouldn't be DEI. DEI is the "S" (Social) in ESG and it is the main way for companies to boost their ESG scores. Big companies with their shareholders can't say no to that sweet ESG-money.
They never cared about the long term consequences but now it catches up to them after replacing all of their original talent for DEI hires / activists, especially with consumers noticing the quality drop and Idiological push.
Its good that first they need to hire SBI and second they can get ESG money. If it was vice versa it could be worse because they could get ESG money and hire SBI with it. But they need money first to hire SBI because SBI doesn't work for free lol
@@gizkadasha3989 So what ESG money did Ubisoft Get?
@KazaiTV Stakeholder economy (ESG) had tried in the past and it always failed miserably because it is anti-profit, anti-shareholders and anti-customers. Let these AAA developers eat cake.
Indie games is the only way forward. Try that woke politics, lets see how you pay rent.
Well, it's because they are private companies, they did not go public. The problem is with the current ESG promoting financial system that forces publicly traded companies to adopt ESG.
Stop saying they are trying to make games that target everyone. That isnt true at all. They are activists that do this intentionally. They do the same thing over and over even though it loses money. Games are a political/cultural tool at this point
🤗🤗🤗🤭
That's the natural result of hiring based on DEI for like a decade now. In the process they have replaced / forced out all of their old talent, while bringing the wrong people in, especially all of the activists that only care about pushing their Idiology.
To them the game is just a tool for that and then such people are even put into leadership positions, because that's another quota to fill for a better ESG-score of the company to get a even bigger pie of that sweet sweet ESG-money.
Who do you think really plays R6? Blue haired leftist teenagers from liberal cities or normal people from all over the world where people don't have that politics at all? Stopped playing it long time ago. All the new caracters coming out in last 3 years had to tick one (at least) of these: POC, LGBT, Strong Mary Sue.
They had gazillion complaints about that shit they were pushing.
10 games like ultrakill and titanfall are better then 100 games that are supposed to appeal to everyone.
you pick a market and you make some good shit to sell to them. its not rocket science.
You are right!
As a dev, after a year of 13k layoff, I see a lot of people in the industry realized that the AAA model isn't sustainable and some are trying to shift towards indie or AA projects.
I don't necessarily agree with the change of consumer's interests. I think it's more about how games are being funded in recent years, the trend nowadays is to rely on data first, and that kills creativity, investors want a surefire quick return of their investments, and I think this is where a lot of the slop comes from, this is why the indie scene is much more creative since they don't have to give up on their agenda when they get funding.
Btw, this is not new, it just took the entire industry, before that one good example was gadget based rhythm games, basically Guitar Hero and Rock Band, they flooded the market thinking everyone will keep buying peripherals and the same game over and over just because it has a couple of new songs. People just got tired of that and no one cares about those anymore outside specific circles, and they already went the smaller game route, and even free game, and open source ones long ago.
Yes big corpos tried to moviefy how games are made but it's a complete date diferent medium...
The problem began when gaming became mainstream. That made jews go after it to subvert, as they do in all cultural fronts
off topic but asmon is really good at communicating his ideas.
100%
Particularly after he's just had a shower
Id say he's one of the best. Not quite as good as Charlie at putting pictures into words, but communicating ideas he's definitely the best
@@CALAMITY0FHYRULE agreed 👍🏻
he does it all in one take too, it's pretty impressive
Injecting your games full of polarizing personal politics certainly osnt doing these devs any favors.
What AAA studios needs to understand, Bigger is NOT always better.
and what consumers need to understand is that games are the catalyst to the shareholder profit and investment return. The ONLY priority of a AAA company now is to make sure it breaks it's profit records, not create a good product.
I spaced out and 0:20 caught me completely off guard
Edit: These comments are wild. Sorry my english is bad. Yes I was space out because UA-cam has an autoplay feature so I use asmonds and charlies videos as background noise while dooing other things. didnt think so many people would care for a strangers comment on the internet but thanks i guess.
That killed me 😂
bruh wtf😂😂😂
Spacing out 20 seconds in? What has happened to us, TikTok has ruined our society.
@@jakecarter1264 Sorry my english is bad, I mean I was already spaced out. I use asmonds and charlies videos as background noise alot while working on other stuff. Also never used tiktok so idk what thats all about lol
😂😂😂
the biggest problem with the industry was the overwhelming success of call of duty, world of warcraft, overwatch, league of legends, and mobile games. game companies now understand that they can do 10 things wrong, but one thing right, and they make bank. so every game company is on purpose trying to find that one thing, and going out of their way to ignore the glaring holes. the other issue is... game developers were never smart when it came to making multiplayer games. it was always the modders who made all of the games that people enjoyed. some of the most popular games were all forked from community made mods. but now, mod tools are gone, and the game companies refuse to take risks, so what you're left with is a hollow experience.
Those multiplayer games are so popular and addictive ppl don't want to play some bs game too. Needs to stand out.
Yeah too many people paying and paying for bad games
Fortnite has got to be the worst success in gaming history, toppling _everything else before it_ through the simple introduction of the gamepass concept alone.
But you can't make a popular MP mod if the game was not popular in the first place.
Naw the problem is just letting business people make decisions in a creative industry. Those games existing aren't inherently a problem if you let creatives make creative decisions.
Elden Ring is AAA. Baldur's Gate 3 is AAA. Red Dead 2 is AAA. So are the Final Fantasy 7 Remakes, all of the Resident Evil remakes and the new RE games which have all been loved by the community, so is Metaphor Refantasio, the Insomniac Spiderman Games, the new Ratchet and Clank, Bloodborne, all of the Dark Souls, Sekiro, Doom Eternal, the open world Zelda games, Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 which has very positive reviews now on Steam, Warhammer 40K, Helldivers 2, the God of War games, Metro Exodus, Control, every Mario game ever, the Yakuza franchise, Armored Core 6, Dead Space Remake, Monster Hunter World/Wilds, A Plague Tale 2, Total War: Warhammer 1/2/3, Xenoblade Chronicles, Tekken 8, Street Fighter 6, Lies of P, FF16, Hitman 1/2/3, Silent Hill 2, Stellar Blade, and I could go on especially if I open up the criteria to games MADE BY AAA studios instead of just the huge AAA games. Anyways, it's okay to criticize, and ideally give the industry constructive feedback, but AAA gaming isn't dead and there's plenty of good AAA games that we all enjoy so please stfu.
Another thing. A small company makes a game that one of the devs was passionate about. The large corp makes a game based on meetings and spreadsheets and messages
How right you are, a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
Yeah, the sooner attention is put on smaller companies the better. The indies are pumping out hit after hit. It's just the market isn't ready to bother looking for it yet.
It's all about being passionate and sincere. Who would have thought..
Veteran graphic designer here. I have watched 20 person teams shrink to 3 people. Take notes from my industry big teams are dead and take too long to shift. Scope creep in these projects is crazy and they are not designing what the customer wants they are designing what the shareholders want.
big middle finger towards the shareholders , eff them !
Yeah, you need more industry disruption to change most shareholders minds.
In general investors are very cautious.
This has nothing to do with shareholders. Shareholders aren't shareholders with a smile on their faces watching their investment turn to dust and them losing every cent they put in. This ideology is part and parcel why gamers are bad consumers as a whole. You all need to start blaming the ACTUAL developers who make these awful games and try to peddle them as quality products. The easiest example to prove this point was CDPRs disastrous launch with CP2077. If you honestly believe the shareholders knew the trailer/showcase wasnt real gameplay and that the lie was driven by them and NOT the development team, you're wholly misguided.
But how can these people not see this coming? If the consumers are not consuming, what is there for the shareholders? Basically, the company AND the shareholders are losing money if there are no consumers.
I mean, it doesn't take a scientist to figure this out.
Well, unless they don't want big money to come in, their choice.
@@kalvon it's not the shareholders responsibility to create the product that makes them money. That falls on the development team and studio leadership. The shareholders are there to ensure they make their money back + profit. It would only make sense to believe their moral compass is centered around maximizing their $ regardless. There's no social issue grandstanding coming from the board. These types of decisions are made on the studio level. All the poor decisions being installed in the development process are on the studio level. It's not hard to see this.
The three companies he listed- Rockstar, Fromsoftware, and Capcom- DO NOT have 20,000 employees. The most is rockstar with 6,000 but they have like ~7 studios across 6 continents… Ubisoft does have over 45 studios… but wtf are they doing with them? They aren’t making GTA 5, RDR2, or GTA 6, that’s for damn sure.
GTA 6 will flop, it's infected with dea
The sound of the mic, the soft smudge look of the camera and 0:17 - 0:25 is peak 2003 content
More like 2006-2007. Filming with a 3 year old camera. 2003 I wasn't gonna waste data on a FTP download for some dude rambling.
The problem isn't these gaming companies trying to find the "broadest possible audience". It's the opposite. They're trying to cater to the most fringe tiny minority audience possible while excluding the vast majority of humanity. The slop they are putting out is literally offensive to 98% of humans on earth.
And the people they're catering to doesn't even care about video games.
yeah, I think they are chasing the safest, not broadest
No.
I think he is right with that, because the "broadest possible audience" is casual, but casual gamers are usually not deeply invested into gaming as a hobby and will just spend their money on something else instead, so catering to that customer group can be very hit & miss. Actual gamers, still a minority, have been openly disregarded by the major publishers as customers, but it's these people who keep games alive in the end.
It's the finger wagging people can't stand. Who wants to pay $90 dollars to be lectured for dozen of hours about identity politics....
Idk man. I don’t see “trying to make the game for a broad audience” as the main reason for why these AAA games fail. It’s one of them. They fail because of the hacktivists they hire that are ruining their games. They fail to realize that gaming is predominantly an 80/20 split and Most males (the self respecting ones) don’t like the flavor of “activism” they push. Amongst other things as well.
Dismissing micro transactions/ loot boxes. Remember Assassins Creed Odyssey and Battlefront II?
Shifting the focus to “diversity”. Too many games to count for this one but heres a few off the top of my head. The last of us 2, Battlefield 5, COD CW, and final fantasy 7 remake.
The accusation of toxic masculinity any time gamers pushed back on the BS. Overwatch and Destiny 2.
The oversimplification of gameplay is another doozy. Remember Mass Effect Andromeda? GTA V online?
It sucks but the bubble has bursted. That’s why we keep seeing day one flops.
15 years from now we're going to look back at this not only for historical purposes but also to see how well this video quality has aged in feeling like it's from the 2000's but it's 2039 lol.
Its says a lot that a GSC can make a better game during a war than Ubisoft can make in America with 20,000 people.
An "inclusive" product is the one that diminishes or removes whatever is enjoyed by the biggest customer because a tiny group might take offence. That "tiny group" becomes the lowest common denominator, and everyone else essentially has to follow its rules. The Minority is empowered to police the preference of the entire customer base, meanwhile the Majority is the one still paying the lion's share, supporting the very existence of the "inclusive" product.
Middle Earth Shadow of war is mythical quality greatness.
Gameplay, not graphics, wins the day.
And we're getting neither.
Only a few rare gems, Stella blade, rebirth, black myth. Can get both.
Not just that, as Asmon has said (and I agree), ART DIRECTION is actually more important than graphics (I mean, assuming you aren't using 1990s graphics etc).
Idk i want my games to run better than 30fps
No way man, graphics are EVERYTHING💁♂️
1:44 still laughing at Ubisoft bridge joke!😂😂😂😂
The jokes also on 343 to Halo Studios
@ so dead😂😂😂😂😂😂
😂 Can we say that they went "a bridge too far"?
@@mirokuaec 😂😂😂😂😂
_If you attempt to satisfy everyone, you satisfy no one_ - Japanese Proverb
I've seen some Japanese movies with the opposite message.
Yup, if the Last of Us 2 was good people wouldn’t be complaining as much about Intergalactic.
Last of Us Part 2 won game of the year, it was good.
@ That game was garbage. That game of year was literally a participation trophy for all the woke bullshit going on in 2020
It was good if u ignore agenda sht.
@@dennisdimambrojr2375Imagine taking TGA seriously.
Just because ppl sensitive on agenda sht doesnt mean game is bad. Talking about apocalyptic theme tlou series is by far best game if u enjoy cutscenes with some gameplay. Art and overal details is amazing. And about that new game where they annouced, i just hate galactic theme so i pass eather way.
This is only a western thing. Mihoyo and Tencent making money hand over fist with multiple IPs. Asian gaming is booming. Let’s be real: the problem with AAA Western gaming is cultural and ignoring it won’t make it disappear. Indie western gaming also has the same woke bullshit. It’s just that Western indies are more varied than the handful of AAA Western publishers. Being indie doesn’t necessarily fix the problem with Western cultural politics.
Exactly. People "don't want to get political" and point out the obvious, well good luck with that!
12:35 I was wondering where you still were going with that?
😂😂😂😂
😂
😂😂😂
was lookin' for this hahahhaa
10:48 This sort of flies in the face of his opinion in the Threat Interactive reactions where he claims that people will care about good graphics, even if unconsciously. But it's really the graphics to hardware requirement ratio. These developers are asking us to have such outrageous specs and 120gb of SSD storage. All for games that simply don't look or play that much better than the 12gb Skyrim that could run on a toaster.
I think Asmon was talking more about the hierarchy of importance to a gamer rather than outright claiming that graphics aren't important at all to games. Graphics are absolutely important as both Threat Interactive and Asmongold himself have claimed in the past, but they aren't the first priority. A great example is the game "Cube Chaos" on Steam, which has extremely simple graphics but incredible gameplay depth and has earned a bit of a cult following.
graphics/hardware ratio is so real
There is also the more "in your face" style activism happening in video games. Like you see people showing how folk didn't have any issues with lgbtq+ representation in Dragon Age but then have a problem with Veil Guard for "no good reason". It's not that there is "no good reason", it's that the representation previously wasn't immersion breaking. For instance, a great example of doing that level of activism without ruining immersion is how BG3 did it, where you as the player could explore it if you so desired, rather than it being forced upon you. Or how Hogwarts Legacy did it, where they had an openly trans character in the story that you had to interact with, but, the story didn't go into an explicit winded explanation that forced your character into uncomfortable situations. Rather, Hogwarts Legacy treated the trans character as a human being and all of your interactions with her felt normal and natural. Veil Guard on the other hand had an explicit scene where a daughter of a reptilian race tries to come out to their parents as non-binary.... in a medieval fantasy world.... where such language probably had never came to be, actively breaking immersion for even the most left leaning of gamers. No attempt to show any reason why such a time period has such language, no attempt to show any middle ground for a compromise utilizing the reptilian race's own native tongues, nothing, no creativity past an extreme 4th wall break into a real-world callout to real world word usage. The mother in that scene did try to say that they already had a word for "not feeling quite like a man and not feeling quite like a woman", but the daughter rejected that saying it had negative connotations. They could have made that scene more natural by having the mother kindly embrace her child and say "no, it doesn't have any negative connotations, it simply means you are neither" and that would have been a much MUCH more natural way of coming out as non-binary in the Dragon-Age universe, but no, they chose to break immersion. And this is one of the many issues that are also causing big corps to die, they push the agenda so hard to a point that they forget they are trying to represent humans and/or personifications of humans and/or human culture.
It’s also worth noting that companies like Ubisoft are trying to get those same returns but with the least amount of effort required, rather than going that extra mile for the players.
My biggest question is how is Twitter going to take this out of context. I am all for more studios like Warhorse and Larian that focus on *One* game that is not chasing a trend but what their player base is expecting
I don’t understand why a company like Ubisoft doesn’t fund let’s say 30 small in-house development studios of 30 developers each that work on 50 million dollar games each. Allow each studio to have an individual creative lead with a vision for each individual game. If a game is successful, put slightly more money into its sequel. If the game doesn’t do well, give another creative lead a chance.
You take risks, yes, but they’re controlled risks with a high possibility of innovation and positive reputation building for the company brand.
need more games with gothic horror and dark fantasy atmosphere
RIP the CCP Games World of Darkness MMO. One of the greatest tragedies of our time.
Sweet Baby Inc is the blessing in disguise gamers needed. They've single-handedly destroyed AAA companies within 18 months, and we're going to see a shift to solid games that aren't destroyed by inclusivity.
It’s not always the fault of game developers. Even big companies, like Ubisoft, have to take out a loan to finance a game. The companies that control the money (Backrock, Vanguard, and StateStreet) give incentive loans for companies that push a DEI agenda. Game developers are pretty much forced to hire woke DEI advisors (i.e. Sweet Baby Inc.) in order to get financing.
Unfortunately, games will continue to push an ultra left agenda for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, we’ll see a rise in small to moderately size private game studios.
"One size fits none" is like when they said "this game isn't for you"
That's fine, but don't complain when the people you told that to don't play your game & your studio shuts down
This is a problem with so many businesses. Look at restaurants that have too much variety. Everything they make sucks, instead of focusing on a a few items and making them really well.
Look at In-N-Out. Literally has like 3 simple items on the menu but what they make is worth the value.
That's why Astrobot winning goty was a huge deal. It's a AA from a AAA company, with a 65 people team, with no woke, all free DLC. And for the budget? It was a huge huge success. It's a phenomenal game even if Asmongold thinks it's an ad, which is weird because you don't make an ad for 20 year old games and hardware lol it's more of a love letter for past generations, it's also a slap in the face of a their own company: we have no ip said Sony, here's all the ip we have says Astro bot.
But more importantly it shows big companies that you can have a indie sized team producing quality games at a faster pace than throwing millions of dollars into AAAA that are probably going to flop even if they are a moderate success.
I know it upset a lot of people, but Astrobot way of doing things could very well be the thing that saves gaming. It was an important win, to kickstart this very same conversation.
Weirdly enough Ubisoft tried to do the same with prince of Persia, another banger but it wasn't successful because they fell short of adopting gamer friendly policies. Hints of apparent woke, distribution nightmares presented the game in a negative light when in reality is an outstanding game. Another that fell pray to the pitfalls of presenting the game to the modern audience even if the game itself is not woke at all, it's a great, cheap to make, easy to pick up, hard to master Metroidvania.
I feel the success of Astro and what it means and the conversation it will start for instance inside Sony but surely on other companies too is being overshadowed by 20 million upset gamers.
Even if they have all the right to be upset Wukong is not as important as Astro bot in the long run.
After what happened with The Crew 1 and Ubisoft saying that "the players should get used to not owning their games", I never bought anything made by them again, even if I liked it.
I refuse to be part of this until they change their policy.
Asmon’s audio is so bad I thought the sound was coming from my phone with headphones on
Tbf when he does videos like this I'm 99 percent certain he doesn't record it on his PC through obs, because if you watch him reacting to content or playing a game his audio is nice and crisp, so I'm pretty sure he's either recording on his phone or just recording audio straight from his camera which is evident by the fact at the end of the video he ruched towards the camera to stop the recording
There is something to be said for a guy who is clearly wealthy and presents this way and looks like he is in his mother's attic. I love it- it's not as fake or pretentious as other creators.
@@RomanK-x4i fr he's just chilling and comfortable
@@RomanK-x4i He actually is in his mothers attic lol
free markets works perfectly in gaming. just don't buy games you don't like, and buy games you do like and the developers and publishers will follow the money. there's no need for outrage or protests or video essays.
7:30 for Hellblade she was originally a part of the development team, she isn't an outsider who drastically raised costs. Also they explain how they keep costs down in the documentaries on their official channel.
The Hellblade example is just Asmon talking out of his ass without any knowledge. Ninja Theory's Hellblade 1 was the poster child example of a AA studio making a shorter AAA quality release. That success enabled them to continue on that path and ended up with Hellblade 2 (which I do think is incredible in many ways, but not really the game I wish it was).
What I think people don't realise is that many franchises are popular because of the very certain vision of the original creator. This vision builds a lot popularity over the years. Eventually, the creator is fired or simply leaves, and the big CEO that has no experience in anything besides fleecing cash and cutting costs starts decomposing that reputation over time. Ubisoft has built itself on the back of a few visionaries, and has somehow managed to trudge on for at least 10 years of installments without caring about or understanding what was at the core of said franchises. Now, the reputation has been fully eroded, and Ubisoft is exposed for what it is: a corporation-wide scam operation.
Why so much hate on Ubisoft?
I played the last 3 AC instalments and I had fun in all of them... not perfect but definetly good games. I have friends that also liked them.
@dariuslukacs4128 Ubisoft is one the few companies that wants to follow every trend that comes its way, but won't go all in to create something new (probably because everyone with skill and talent left). Instead, they try to slap that newest trend to its own old and nearly irrelevant franchises. Overall, people are mad (and rightly so) that we haven't had an actual AC installment, or a Splinter Cell installment, or [insert any Ubisoft IP here] in almost ten years.
Mark my words, I will make the Skyrim of zombie games some day.
games are an art not a science, to many scientists making video games.
preach
the people making games right now are neither scientists nor artists speaking as a game dev, they simply are the products of corporatism and corrupt money hungry people, great games and original ideas are much harder today because anyone with talent is quickly swallowed and paid tons of cash to be mediocre and do less and then deliver mediocrity for big paychecks that is the current culture in gaming, it simply can't be solved unless blackrock and other demons stop funding failed propaganda games and corporations fail and we go back to small passionate studios.
No science here. Scientists would be looking at the data and realizing that what they're doing isnt working and shift strategies.
The videogames are being made by ideologs.
Too many artsy leftists
Too many activists...
Great video, and he didn't even mention how no one wants to play unattractive characters in video games.
We play games to have fun, become better versions of ourselves, and escape from the crap we have to deal with in real life. Don't put that shit in our games!
As Thor/PirateSoftware stated, Asmongold represents the target audience and game developers who ignore him do so at their peril. I concur.
There definitely is a market saturation. What I've noticed over the last couple years for myself and many of my friends is that we often stick to games with a lot of replayability and have some favourite titles that we often return to. We rarely buy a new game outside of an expansion or a new version of a game that we previously played.
Missed a "don't hate the player, hate the game" opportunity
You know recently I actually bought Metal Gear Solid 5 on sale and never have really played any of the Metal Gear Solid games until that one and I have to sincerely say that I spent more hours on MGSV than I have on any game lately, much less any AAA game. (And that also includes multiplayer AAA titles like Call of Duty which I have since uninstalled and will only play them for the story at this point.)
The fact that I have cherished, had more fun, and sincerely reinvigorated my love of Gaming with a game that's 10 years old is really sad.
Wait until you find out that Konami never let Kojima finish the game. MGSV is still a great game. The mechanics in it still rival current games like it. You might like Death Stranding.
@SoberAddiction yeah just recently started getting into this training as well. And yeah I also heard that they apparently didn't end up finishing the game like they wanted
I have a huge steam games library. A little hint : don't buy games for full price on release ( ever). Just wait next Christmas once its half a price. Work through you steam backlog....
Gamers don't actually own Steam games. GOG is best. They don't scam their customers with false ownership.
Gamers rise up
I read that in Chris Metzen.
Rise up, wallets down
🤓
@Tijuanabill I readed that as Megatron
I didn't really do anything special. Just didn't spend money on things that didn't appeal to me :/
People were mad there wasn’t a Resident Evil 9 announcement at the game wards and it’s like guys…you’re why Assassin Creed has 30 games 🤣🤣🤣🤣 you’re young or casual
Instead based Capcom brought back Onimusha and Okami two franchises dead on PS2 and GameCube, they’re even doubling down and plan to bring back more forgotten or untouched past IPs of theirs. I’ll take that over Street Fighter 20 with minimal changes. Build a crop of many vegetables not farm one vegetable because it was popular. This is simply the way of gaming. In the PS2 days there was a new IP every week, it may’ve been a clone of something else, but it was a different brand, different characters different everything. Modern day saturation is tiring
Sequels are not inherently bad. Resident Evil games consistently improved and evolved with each iteration while AC stagnated. Two Sequel driven IPs with vastly different outcomes. The problem isn't sequels, though I agree with you about having a diverse roster of titles making for a better gaming environment.
One reason I respect Fromsoft is that they could’ve easily make more money with another dark souls game but instead they made Armored Core 6, and people were pissed and making fun of them because it didn’t sell as much as the dark souls games, but that game was a passion project for the devs, they made that game because they wanted to
I think most of what you said is absolutely true. But there are still some things where game developers just make bad decisions. Ghost Recon for example. I think Wildlands (Third person shooter) was very successful. So then Ubisoft added a bunch of undesirable features when they made Breakpoint (Third Person shooter). There was a big backlash over the changes made in Breakpoint. So what do they do? They decide to make the next version a first person shooter instead of just leaving out the undesirable features (Or making them optional).
Another thing that confuses me. Red Dead 2 for example created this big expensive open world for their story. They made massive amounts of money off the game. Then they shelf it when they could've had a dev team make more story lines that could be played within the same open world area that they've already created. I personally would've absolutely bought a DLC story involving Sadie Adler or someone. And why doesn't Rockstar have an Red Dead team and a GTA team? They leave one IP dead for years while they work on the other...
And companies like Fromsfoft just sit there like "Huh? Bloodborne sequel? Nah."
Hi guys, it's me again. Today I'm using the PS5 controller mic!
7:10 I would say that Senua is a niche game and made for that niche, I dont think they were never made to the general public or thought to be to the general public. Senua is an amazing game. It's great for ppl from the niche, and I love that we have niches in the gaming industry and not everyone trying to do things to appeal to everyone.
As a fan of the Hellblade series, I approve of this message
The issue with Hellblade is that it's made for a niche audience, but it's likely not made with a niche budget. We know the original game had a budget of around 10 million USD. I don't think we know the sequel's budget, but from what I've heard, Hellblade 2 had about 4x the amount of developers and took about 1.5x longer to make compared to the first game. So it probably had about 6x the budget which would place it around 60 million USD, as a "guesstimate" (the real number could either be much lower or higher)
Seeing as Hellblade 2 was only the 37th best-selling game the month it released in the US... I don't think there's even the slightest chance it made back its budget. If it kept a similar budget to the original, maybe it'd be financially viable, but it doesn't seem that way
@@kev1nno that's the consequences of being bought by a big greedy corporation. Microsoft thought if they just toss a bunch of money at Ninja Theory the game will give more profit
@the_udmurt agreed, I just hope that Microsoft don't cut the liberty of the studio because of a loss that they made, I don't care if next game from them is a AA, the problem happens when they force a AAA and limit the creativity of the studio to try to make more money and in the end producing a shit product that makes everyone sad about it, the devs, the players and the VC's
I think the single, main reason why games are making severe losses these days is because of the forced politics and social issues being crammed in, where they have no place and completely break immersion. DEI policies and the like are totally ruining what, on paper, would be great games had they been made 10+ years ago. The industry has been subverted for a long while now unfortunately but money talks...
The recipe for a successful game hasn't actually changed and I doubt it ever will.
Simply put they need to focus on what the customers want and not what the ideology of their activists employs want.
Blackrock ia forcing changes. It is about the message, they already have $$$.
We're your biggest fans on UTube bro.❤
Allaho akbar We're heading to Texas
Yeah we love asmon
@@Ayatulah_irny lmaooo bro chill
True
We've experienced the Gaming Boom
Now it's time for the Gaming Renaissance
6:50 Oh, overstaffing is an understatement. I mean, look at games like Kingdom Come Deliverance (someone reminds Asmon to play that lol). The company who made the first game started out with 11 people. 11! And now, the second game will be releasing in February and they have around 350. And do you see the quality of these games?! You do not need thousands of people. Not unless they are working on like 4+ different games at the same time. Bigger companies have divisions spread across the map. But I have to imagine, you only need a maximum of 400 people for a single triple A quality game (even if its not a triple A studio). You certainly don't need all these HR departments and woke sensitivity workers that critique every aspect of the game for things random people might find offensive. Just hire the skilled workers with the best demo reels / portfolios.
I just started kingdom come today. Its god tier
Pass a certain point you start seeing diminishing returns I think the optimum number is probably somewhere around 100 to 150 so that the person in charge can actually know everybody's name and what they do put past a certain point you start having way too many moving parts and the more complex system is the more likely it is to break or malfunction and right now those big 20,000 people companies literally are incapable of producing anything good because they can't just pick a direction and go in it
Agree with your opinion 100%. AA studios are the way forward.
look at the mold growing on his bed room ceiling!!!!!!!!
AAA? I Thought "modern audiences" had more letters than that!? 😂
As a consumer i can only do one thing which is vote with my money. It has been nice to see this shift hsppening the last few years and i have been supporting every smaller developer that has been making amazing games by buying and playing there games, and getting my friends to as well. My grouo of friends has honestly pretty much only played non-AAA games this year and we have had so much fun, and we dont feel like we are getting taken advantage of or just wasting our money. We are all playing POE2 right now and couldnt be happier with the devs reception to the player base and how fast they have acted so far. Blizzard could never lol they havent gotten a dollar from me in a very long time, and thats all we can do... vote with our dollar.
Please everyone stop identifying as consumers. consumers are slaves.
You paid $30 to beta-test a free game. How do you not feel ripped off?
I remember back in the day when you saw the Ubisoft logo and thought "This is going to be good!" Now it's the complete oposite.
The only AAA studio I trust right now is Capcom
They running the business thanks to RE, street fighter and marvel vs Capcom crossovers
Based. Sega isnt too far behind Thank God
@IdRadical if their dreamcast era gets the remasters they will be holding hands with Capcom
You also have CDPR, though they are walking a fine line about to fall on the wrong side it it looking like.
And Nintendo is still fine, they have always just focused on games and nothing else
HELLO BALDY I'M FROM SAUDI ARABIA BEEN WATCHING YOU FOR FUCKING YEARS AND I LOVE HOW BASED YOU ARE LOL
Based
It's already in the toilet waiting for the mercy flush.
20k employees?? holy...
Nuke-level layoffs inbound.
2:51 Superman remake 😂
11:00 word of the decade is "gameplay".
Too many studios focus solely on graphics like games are only useful for benchmark tests when in reality graphics are something that should always come secondary to the notion of gameplay.
Too many U5 users masked as game developer studios.
I reinstalled Force Unleashed Ultimate Sith Edition and I am enjoying it like the first time. I played so many games since 2008. this is such a breath of fresh air to revisit.
14:24 I'm literally playing Valheim right now. I love this game so much. I'm currently through the plains
I miss playing that. It was fun.
I’m in plains to
Those mosquitos make me so mad ngl
Trends don’t always change as quickly as you say. You mention 4 years ago we were in Covid and everyone was addicted to Genshin impact… but they have MORE players now they did then. The reality is some trends end up being short lived fads others end up being a genre or similar and stick around for longer. It’s hard to know which each will be, and you have to take risks here, just as you take risks trying new ideas.
CD Project Red was not AAA when it created Witchers 1-3. AA is the way to go!
It very much was a AAA product. W2 was a cultural milestone in Poland, and financial boon. It brought in $13 billion gross.
By the time W3 rolled around, they were the second-largest dev in Europe. They had a staff of 1500 alone working on Witcher 3 - and almost another 1000 voice actors.
This was a vast project, funded in the hundreds of millions, by a AAA company.
LIES
The moment the CD Project created GOG, they were no longer indy studio. Red is AAA studio since Witcher 2, CD Project is parent company, GOG is publisher.