As an indie gamedev, my problem with most AAA titles is that they're essentially "interactive movies". If i want to watch a movie, i watch a movie. When i play i want a truly immersive and open-ended experience, with actual and organic choice-consequences.
And from your perspective as an Indie dev, what do you think is the main factor / are the main factors that prevent many AAA studios and their publishers from delivering those experiences today? It's obviously a mix of many things, but I am curious to hear your opinion from a developer perspective. And if you don't mind me asking, what kind of indie games are you working on? Would I have heard of any of them?
@@TiGGowich Developers have to proritize what create the most impact to the most players. Naturally, this means that the visual department, along with everything that gives the illusion that the world is "alive", gets the most resources. The result is static, or artificially dynamic worlds, with branching story at best. Creating a truly simulated world is extremely resource/time intensive, and that grows exponentially if the game has AAA standard of visual fidelty and stream-lined gameplay. So most AAA companies just create the "minimum viable product", which can capture most players with its visual and narrative impact, but is actually a glorified movie with dynamic elements. My gamedev approach is the opposite: in my game, DinoSystem, the ecosystem you live in is fully simulated and dynamic, as well as your character's attributes. Things happen whether you're there or not to experience or alter them. Graphics is basic and top-down (like the first GTAs) which allowed me to focus on the game mechanics.
I have not finished watching but i feel like they are forgetting that gaming is an entertainment industry. It all feels like, "make money maker" instead of "make fun game that makes money". Helldivers is successful because it is a fun game. I have a genius business strategy for a game. Alrigjt listen closely. Closer! I said close- never mind too close. Ahem. (Step one: make a fun game) What! Impossible! Are you saying that if the game is fun people will buy it? NO! NO IT CANT BE!
Also remember skylanders? That game is not even predatory compared to modern games. 8$ you get a whole in-game character. And a figurine. Which you should theoretically have all the characters when you buy the game. But modern games have 20$ skins that don't do crap. Modern games are so predatory that an old game that was the king of stealing your money is now seen as fair.
@@regularphill I do address the very point you are making later in the video haha... it's exactly the point I am trying to make. Games are ENTERTAINMENT. They are FUN FIRST. But today for big publishers, MONEY is on top of their mind and fun is a secondary thought. Which is ironic, because by focusing so much on the monetary aspect, the fun element gets lost and people don't want to buy it... it's really paradoxical
Great video. games got WAY more expensive to make, requiring more investors, which requires bigger returns, which requires more revenue streams. It all comes down to higher fidelity and more complexity requires a lot more people, and a lot more time, and the people footing the bill want assurances they will be compensated. Personally, I don't think it's inconceivable that the AAA industry could eventually collapse, as smaller and smaller teams begin putting out more and more profitable products.
I do explain this in the video, and you are of course completely right. My problem is that there the entertainment industry does not seem to follow the normal concept of economies of scale. Normally, as a company grows (let's assume it's a company that builds furniture), over time as they grow, they become naturally better at building furniture, they automate parts of the process, they reduce their per unit cost due to economies of scale, they become more efficient and profitable. This does not seem to be happening in the movies and video games space. And even though I do not have hard evidence for it, I suspect a lot of it has to do with massive amounts of internal bureaucracy, a management water head, too many management layers and administrators and not enough "doers" who just get sh*t done. This is not to say that larger productions shouldn't be more expensive - of course they are, but rather the input to output ratio should be tip in favor of the outputs. But I feel like they are putting in more and more resources without getting the additional returns. It doesn't help that the things they spend the money on also isn't ideal often times. Instead of building bigger and bigger worlds and creating 10000000000000000 loot items and quests, it strikes me that more focused games that don't try to encompass everything fare much better. I use Assassin's Creed in my video as an example. AC2 didn't make more money than Valhalla, but AC2 made way more money when compared to its development costs - the ROI was much higher. And the quality was better and it was better liked by players overall. These studios are "wasting" too much money on stuff that doesn't "matter." There is the pareto principle whereby you should focus your effort on the most critical 20% to achieve 80% of the outcome. Nowadays, it seems they are spending 80% of their time and resources on the 20% and it doesn't pay off. I don't think this is rocket science, but these organizations have grown so big, and they have created so many useless positions and so much bureaucracy... they are starting to fall apart. And we haven't even touched on things like outdated code, game engines, underpaid staff etc....
As a person who works in the gaming industry, developers waste a lot of money during development. Which is a lot of reasoning for rising cost. They also do a lot of reboot instead of sticking to the original GDD. The industry has no structure at the moment.
@@blackrottweiler8885 I've only worked with a big publisher for a few months as a consultant. but I was shocked to see how unorganized they were and their approach to game development. so many obvious and shocking inefficiencies...
Great breakdown of the Gaming Industries current dilema in terms of it providing less creative engagment, coupled with repetativeness and, being overly monatised. I was wondering if you could shed some light on the statistical sources that support your findings...By the way I agree 'Gaming Does Suck', as per many of the reasons you have covered in your video. I also noticed a change in the Assasins Creed francise after the 2nd installment which, had a separate area where you could practice your fighting skills outside of the main campaign indefinately. Provided you could keep up with killing off, the ever increasing hoard of enemies...that was absolute genius...
Hey :) thanks for your comment and feedback. I actually deliberately stayed away from digging out stats, because I wanted to focus on my own perspective. If you were to go by things like revenue alone, arguably Gaming as an industry has never been in a better place - more publishers, more development studios, more games etc. I think the point I was trying to get across is that it looks like this industry is doing better than ever before - which again if you were to just look at the numbers suggests yes we are. But if you look at video games as an ART FORM rather than just a consumable, I think it becomes pretty evident that we have very few games that actually captivate large audiences and remain in peoples' memories for a long time. This is hard to back up with any statistical data as it is always very difficult to capture one's emotions towards a product. The only real indicator we have that modern gaming has severe problems is the fact that we know more and more players stick with games that came out long ago. We can see a trend whereby the newer the game, the quicker the playerbase drops the sooner the game gets forgotten about until people move on to the next game. I guess this is just a long way of saying I don't have any statistical evidence for my statements, it's more about what I have noticed over the past two decades how the attitude towards games has changed. We don't really have these "all time favorites" anymore, like every kid who grew up in the 90s like me still thinks about something like Super Mario 64 or Super Mario World. But if you ask someone from the Fortnite generation, they don't seem to have the same emotional attachment to games in large. Games have become more of a product to be consumed and less about an art form, a creative endeavor. That's not to say these games don't exist anymore (as I point out towards the beginning of my video), but in large the "function" of video games seems to have drastically changed. Not sure if I'm making sense lol
If it wasn't for AAA gaming industry's endless greed and plummeting on its misconducts over the past few years, I wouldn't have realized how good the indie games are these days. I rarely buy AAA games anymore these days, and even more rarely I purchase them at full price. Out of 10 games that play these days, only 1 of them is big AAA game. I think the last AAA game that I bought at full price was Tears of the Kingdom from last year, and the only reason I bought that at full price was because I know that Nintendo won't try to screw me over with Zelda franchise.
Crazy isn't it. I don't personally like Tears of the Kingdom but I agree it's one of those AAA titles that suffers much less from some of the big issues that other major titles do. The last AAA title I purchased was Jedi Survivor, and I was shocked how poorly it ran on my PC despite me having a monster of a machine... and I was like "Screw that honestly" But you are right, at least we are lucky that indie games are getting better by the day. They are now a serious threat and a real competitor to large publishers - I think that's exactly what these companies needed. Who knows, maybe we'll see a bit of a change in their mindsets if they just get enough pressure? Although I suspect they will just pull a Microsoft and buy off all the smaller studios :/
You know I’m glad indie games and double AA games are doing better than triple AAA games, indie games like vermintide 2, risk of rain 2, ultrakill, hyper light drifter, disco elysium, deep galactic rock and stone, lethal company, helldivers 2, sentry, velum and hollow knight are doing better than triple AAA titles.
awww that‘s very kind of you to say haha. But I just started this whole thing, so I am more than happy with the views and positive comments I have received 😅😅 I genuinely thought this video wouldn‘t get more than 50 views haha
The best levels that ever existed and were the foundation of gaming, were made in the garages or basements of friends, not in multimillion dollar buildings filled with thousands of artists. The problem now, is that of a rich and poor divide. Big companies with everything available and indiendevs with limited tools. Already, the big corps are the bad guys.
Another reason why modern gaming sucks is the decades-long consumerism that is ingrained with western culture that affects all industries, not just video games. Modern gaming is a consequence of rapid technological advancements that inadvertently allowed shovelware to flourish combined with a consumer society that spends so much money than they earn just for the pursuit of eternal pleasure. Back then when video games are relegated to arcades, constraints are in place to ensure that video games are profitable while fun and challenging to play from start to finish without any downtime (eg. cutscenes, pointless sidequests, etc.) whatsoever, otherwise, if a video game is not fun to play, it'll most surely fail and be removed from the market sooner. Nowadays, with the advent of home consoles and eventually the internet, said constraints are removed, allowing game publishers and developers to be reckless with their decisions and make bad games that aren't fun, buggy and infested with monetization. They even cater to people that aren't real gamers, "gamers" that don't like a real challenge, and who don't understand what makes video games fun in the first place, a consequence of trying to please everyone. The consumer culture had been ingrained in people's minds even before video games were invented. It is when video games became more profitable later on that everything got turned to crap, thanks to opportunistic corporate vultures. I was wondering why video games became so bad nowadays until I realized above problems I've elaborated too late.
It is a curse I agree. Mass appeal over quantity waters content and complexity down. Which is probably 100% fine for the random casual player, but for more „hardcore“ gamers these trends are awful.
Pretty much they just followed the Hollywood model. Make it bigger and more generic, because large audience and consistency, and make it fancy, for marketing and so you can price out your less successful competitors. One up product every time, to keep up hype. Avoid risks, like new titles or fresh ideas, because risk is lost money. Eventually, expectation creep becomes so expensive that your business model is unsustainable. Instead of scaling back to keep things reasonable, Invent new profit streams to prop up your failing business, because god forbid affordable competition undercut your profit margins. Cut things that are not _strictly necessary_ until you have one streamlined product that has absolutely no substance. When your customers complain, tell them they have no alternative(because you specifically drove your competitors out of existence on purpose and hired all the best production professionals so you could make this argument of course) and ignore any further criticism. Jack up prices, because your customers will buy it anyway. Tl;dr, capitalism isn't kind to anything, but it is _especially bad_ the more complicated a thing is to put together as scale becomes necessary for production.
@@connerblank5069 I don‘t think the problem is capitalism but rather companies becoming too greedy and delivering sub par quality but I do agree to your point 100% otherwise
@@TiGGowich No, that's basically how everything works under Capitalism. Microsoft did it with computers, McDonalds did it with fast food, there are only like four car companies, America has precisely one phone company co-owned by two corporations(which is pretty much standard, as I understand it), Walmart is the only supermarket, Amazon owns all shopping forever, and so on. Granted, some industries have enough leftover regulation or low enough scaling factors for economy of scale that it's not so transparently monopolized, but competition is bad for business so most businesses that see any success iron it out wherever possible.
@@connerblank5069 I get your point, but I would argue again that this has less to do with "capitalism" as such and more with the way our economies are run and regulated. We could have stopped these monopolies, just nobody had the balls to do it. Economists are well aware of the danger of monopolies, our governments just completely failed to address this problem and now they are totally powerless.
@TiGGowich because people hate the consequences of their own actions and admitting fault. The game industry got this way for a reason, and gamers are that reason. Look at Oblivion, I love that game, but most of the DLC for that game sucked, it was also one of the first games with DLC (our current DLC meaning), gamers got rightfully pissed, but forgave Bethesda because Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isle was amazing. Forgetting that sub par player housing, horse armor, and a lot of other shit dlc came with it. Dead Space 3 is where Microtransactions and P2W stuff started to appear, with the ability to buy resources, the stuff needed to upgrade weapons. Gamers got made at that but brushed it off as not needing to buy it, just like the excuse we here for other bs in the game industry. Hell, take a look at VAs, the VA for Niko from gta4, hey got mad that he only got paid (I thank) around 100k total, when the game made over 600 million, and he felt cheated. Gamers attacked him and said he was ungrateful. Why we have the same 4 fuckimg VAs in every game. The only time gamers did something good for gaming was with lootboxes, but that could also be said that was EA getting to greedy and putting it in a Star Wars game. Gamers, myself included, made the industry we have today, but unlike most other gamers, I can admit that. You can pinpoint exact games and times where the shit practices we deal today appear, and gamers doing shit about it, being for a myriad of dumb reasons.
@@aaronlaughter6471 I would argue that Share Holders are a bigger part of that reason. Look at any company that goes public, at that point they perpetually have to please the Share Holders with more revenue or, the comapany folds...
@@barryhoyte8553 That's a small part, but not the whole picture, do you thank we would have loot boxes, DLC, Battle passes, seasons, and so much more shit gamers hate if they would actually stop supporting this shit. As much as it pains people to realize, gamers are the reason why the game industry is the way it is.
@@aaronlaughter6471 I agree. What I find sad though is that we do not seem to be able to get rid of this stuff again. I just don't buy any live service games, I have never purchased a loot box or microtransaction in my life... but the sad thing is that all these practices are working
im bad cause although its all about problems - the scope of problem is used by those interested in different outcomes - all human besides those that make decisions for shareholders pending a bonus
Also true, as soon as a studio grows big enough and becomes public, their focus naturally changes to meeting investor and shareholder goals... which again, I totally understand the economics behind these decisions, but it's sad when this stuff takes over in a creative industry like this
I think a reason for this is the size of the gaming community, the bigger you are the more likely you have something inside you that you can't control, Thus why we have companies "trying" to reach out to as many genres as possible for added profit, Id let you know that most people who don't engage with this type of topics only care about if the game works even when the game in question is a generic cash grab, mostly kids but also parents and people with Difficult jobs. Why is this? Well it's a simple term that have grown on me 'the less I know the better' I am more happy in life when the negative responses becomes too much and let them go and honestly i've felt alot better ever since thus why I have gone away from the internets opinions on Woke and Anti SJW I felt so depressive when I used to engage with it online
@@orge9711 I 100% agree and I do touch on this in the video of course. The bigger a publisher grows, the more people they try to appeal to… which is fine and makes sense. Unfortunately, this waters down the quality of the content. It has affected all the studios I used to cherish: Ubisoft, EA, Bethesda, Activision/Blizzard… SEGA even. I know to the average casual player this stuff doesn‘t matter, they just want to shut off their brain for a bit and play. But to those who are a bit more into it, it is really frustrating to see.
Its the hardware today it uses cheaper binned leftovers more on a die roo many lanes they have to use memoey to install and run in windows laggy due to cant do native instant run a game we went from 16 million colours 100khz sound qualuty 4k 70fps never changed if had a good cpu 3dgfx on board sound that wasbable to run iso into the gpu n run it native fps is at the out put monitor its now slow hhardware so they use ai to trick you to try make loads of binned silicone lower quality do what a monolithic fast prosseor did in realtime, we could bios flash and play any game unemulated from any console it ran now they cant do real tracing its ray traced then inserted into the game as 2d 4096 colours less than cd quality sound uses compression crc codecs because it cant do real time live hq video or sound because windows is holding it back usibg memiry to load in data yhe compare it then send n recieve this is not good so games have to he made downgraded to run because new hardware cant play old games they ran at 4k 60fps today the cards cant do this its not got the lanes power are latency bad we never tested ir reviewed hRdware on fps dlss resolution. Hardware decided what the output was you didnt have v sync it wasnt needed it was what it came out at on any game old or new the res fps was improved by upgrading today they have gone back n cant even do 3dgfx yhey render hence poppins lag n blame devs why games run crap, the games ran good but had to he changed to run on slower cheap hardware using memory to do a job cpu should fo. Rar c## were causing this move ftom iso native run all programs to go emulated slow n back 20 years in spec. A cpu doesnt decide your res or fps why does nobody call this scam out to sell shares up by selling off 20 year old binned chips the fabs closed its just china shaving n making the btoken work by connecting loafs of cpus together WE NEVER WANT MULTITASKING IF DONE ON OTHER CHIPS IR DIES we wsnt how we did it a powerfull processor onbgfx card n sound n controllers running on board cpu so lanes can send full hq image n sound native instantly. Creator pc aint gaming or 3dgfx machines they worse hardware than a phone. Reason 2nd hand is so sort after n going up in price , wifi is bad for a mboard it strips speed throughput , try play a game like crysis at 4k 60fps using original version you cant they had to make a cut down version to run on new hardware because it cant run games that need demanding hardware
So true that's what i always said. I miss the 90s and first 2000s and some gamesfrim 2011 to 2015. Games that were good were the Mario games & yoshi and Luigi snd Mario related games. Cintra double Dragon snd Bomberman snd Sonic and Mega man and. Hudsens Adv island and Spiderman and marvel games. Even the warriors and And Bonks and Metriod and pokemon stadium and Fighting games and Ninja turtles and other best em ups. Call of duty black ops was decent too.
there are still very good games, but the sad irony lies in the fact that the big publishers produce crap for mass appeal that is completely void of any sort of creativity and challenge.
*2011 was the last great defining year for gaming. Skyrim, Saints Row 3 and Deus Ex HR were the pinnacle of single player enjoyment for me. after that, everything just copy pasted 👎 COD, Madden, 2K, all the fighting and racing games....nothing was new or unique. even GTA5 disappointed for alot of people. Life Is Strange was unique. Fallout 4 was Outstanding. MGS5 redefined the stealth genre. Far Cry 5 redefined open world action. CONTROL changed my perspective on horror. INSIDE changed how I view puzzle games 👌 but i believe Fortnite laid the blueprint for a brighter future 🕵 instead of selling mediocre unfinished games for 75$ and pissing everyone off, put your game out for free 👍 if its good, players will support it through micro transactions.....if its mediocre, you'll make 17 dollars in a fiscal year and bathe in the flames of bankruptcy and foreclosure 🔥💀 it's not only Fair on all sides but it's the only way to save AAA console gaming at this point. people are NOT paying 100$ for half assed Bethesda and Ubisoft games come 2027, you can bet on that.*
Yet, these companies are somehow still around and kicking, and it doesn't look like they will be going bust or getting replaced anytime soon... that is my main frustration. Despite so many people being fed up with these things, in the end too many people still keep buying this stuff...
@@TiGGowich *I think by 2027, we'll see a collapse of most AAA developers. its been a 10 year crash burn but were finally getting there. Rockstar will survive. SEGA will survive. 2K and EA might survive but I wouldn't be surprised to see them get baught out and absorbed. if Ubisoft continues down its road of stupid, they'll be absorbed. you're really only looking at like 3 or 4 major developers going into 2030.....and honestly, its for the best* 👍
Tbh i think it's broader than that. The Idea that a game with millions (potential) is guilty of capitalistic gouging is ALWAYS true. I applaud your flag waving but the only way to remain true imo is that people dont sell over. Infra isnt that bad that that cannot imo. outside of that is the thing..
Oh I totally agree with you, I am very pro market economics. But there seems to be this trend that the bigger a studio grows, and the more they try and appeal to everyone, the more the quality of their games suffers. Which is fine if you are a very casual player, I'm sure most people don't care about any of those things, they just want a bit of light entertainment and happy days. I think this is mainly a problem for those slightly less "casual" players who crave high quality experiences rather than watered down mainstream
Hi, I quite literally say in my video that there are a lot of great games. I mention around 10 from 2023 alone. The point was not to say there aren't good games, I am referring to industry practices that ruin gaming.
well, there are those games for sure, but I don#t think they represent the vast majority of the market. Which specific titles are you thinking of when you use the term "woke" out of curiosity? Yeah I find myself going back to older games as well more and more... which retro games are you currently into? I need inspiration haha
@@TiGGowich You can try GBA games for example there are a lot of unlokcables in those games, if you a PS1 fan you can try PS1 games, but if you were lucky to get a PS2 and play PS2 you can play these games in general PS1 and PS2 were the best times for japanese anime rpg's and other games, like wild arms for example a great anime jrpg about western cowboy life with a great story. My experience was with PS1 because my family at that time could not afford PS2 and PS1 wasn't even bought from shop it was bought from a familiar person and there were tons of games too, my first game on PS1 was Army men World War Final Front. As for why games are like this, well it is because human greed cannot be stopped and also American culture plays big role in all this their censorship and sensitive nature ruined most games, good thing there are indie devs. But I'am leaving steam so not a single platform will receive my money, I"am done with "modern audiences games".
As an indie gamedev, my problem with most AAA titles is that they're essentially "interactive movies". If i want to watch a movie, i watch a movie. When i play i want a truly immersive and open-ended experience, with actual and organic choice-consequences.
And from your perspective as an Indie dev, what do you think is the main factor / are the main factors that prevent many AAA studios and their publishers from delivering those experiences today? It's obviously a mix of many things, but I am curious to hear your opinion from a developer perspective.
And if you don't mind me asking, what kind of indie games are you working on? Would I have heard of any of them?
@@TiGGowich Developers have to proritize what create the most impact to the most players. Naturally, this means that the visual department, along with everything that gives the illusion that the world is "alive", gets the most resources. The result is static, or artificially dynamic worlds, with branching story at best.
Creating a truly simulated world is extremely resource/time intensive, and that grows exponentially if the game has AAA standard of visual fidelty and stream-lined gameplay.
So most AAA companies just create the "minimum viable product", which can capture most players with its visual and narrative impact, but is actually a glorified movie with dynamic elements.
My gamedev approach is the opposite: in my game, DinoSystem, the ecosystem you live in is fully simulated and dynamic, as well as your character's attributes. Things happen whether you're there or not to experience or alter them. Graphics is basic and top-down (like the first GTAs) which allowed me to focus on the game mechanics.
@@TiGGowich Ok i think YT has some issues because i commented 2 times and it didn't show up, so maybe 2 similiar replies may appear 😅
@@nerdmassa9086 lol all good friend
I have not finished watching but i feel like they are forgetting that gaming is an entertainment industry. It all feels like, "make money maker" instead of "make fun game that makes money". Helldivers is successful because it is a fun game. I have a genius business strategy for a game. Alrigjt listen closely. Closer! I said close- never mind too close. Ahem. (Step one: make a fun game)
What! Impossible!
Are you saying that if the game is fun people will buy it?
NO!
NO IT CANT BE!
Also remember skylanders? That game is not even predatory compared to modern games. 8$ you get a whole in-game character. And a figurine. Which you should theoretically have all the characters when you buy the game. But modern games have 20$ skins that don't do crap. Modern games are so predatory that an old game that was the king of stealing your money is now seen as fair.
@@regularphill I do address the very point you are making later in the video haha... it's exactly the point I am trying to make. Games are ENTERTAINMENT. They are FUN FIRST. But today for big publishers, MONEY is on top of their mind and fun is a secondary thought. Which is ironic, because by focusing so much on the monetary aspect, the fun element gets lost and people don't want to buy it... it's really paradoxical
@@TiGGowich Yeah I got there! Good video.
@@regularphill thank you
Thank you either way for watching and your valuable insights :)
Great video.
games got WAY more expensive to make, requiring more investors, which requires bigger returns, which requires more revenue streams. It all comes down to higher fidelity and more complexity requires a lot more people, and a lot more time, and the people footing the bill want assurances they will be compensated.
Personally, I don't think it's inconceivable that the AAA industry could eventually collapse, as smaller and smaller teams begin putting out more and more profitable products.
I do explain this in the video, and you are of course completely right. My problem is that there the entertainment industry does not seem to follow the normal concept of economies of scale. Normally, as a company grows (let's assume it's a company that builds furniture), over time as they grow, they become naturally better at building furniture, they automate parts of the process, they reduce their per unit cost due to economies of scale, they become more efficient and profitable.
This does not seem to be happening in the movies and video games space. And even though I do not have hard evidence for it, I suspect a lot of it has to do with massive amounts of internal bureaucracy, a management water head, too many management layers and administrators and not enough "doers" who just get sh*t done.
This is not to say that larger productions shouldn't be more expensive - of course they are, but rather the input to output ratio should be tip in favor of the outputs. But I feel like they are putting in more and more resources without getting the additional returns. It doesn't help that the things they spend the money on also isn't ideal often times. Instead of building bigger and bigger worlds and creating 10000000000000000 loot items and quests, it strikes me that more focused games that don't try to encompass everything fare much better.
I use Assassin's Creed in my video as an example. AC2 didn't make more money than Valhalla, but AC2 made way more money when compared to its development costs - the ROI was much higher. And the quality was better and it was better liked by players overall.
These studios are "wasting" too much money on stuff that doesn't "matter." There is the pareto principle whereby you should focus your effort on the most critical 20% to achieve 80% of the outcome.
Nowadays, it seems they are spending 80% of their time and resources on the 20% and it doesn't pay off.
I don't think this is rocket science, but these organizations have grown so big, and they have created so many useless positions and so much bureaucracy... they are starting to fall apart.
And we haven't even touched on things like outdated code, game engines, underpaid staff etc....
Thank you either way for watching and your valuable insights!
@@TiGGowich great video, thanks for replying!
As a person who works in the gaming industry, developers waste a lot of money during development. Which is a lot of reasoning for rising cost. They also do a lot of reboot instead of sticking to the original GDD. The industry has no structure at the moment.
@@blackrottweiler8885 I've only worked with a big publisher for a few months as a consultant. but I was shocked to see how unorganized they were and their approach to game development. so many obvious and shocking inefficiencies...
Great breakdown of the Gaming Industries current dilema in terms of it providing less creative engagment, coupled with repetativeness and, being overly monatised. I was wondering if you could shed some light on the statistical sources that support your findings...By the way I agree 'Gaming Does Suck', as per many of the reasons you have covered in your video. I also noticed a change in the Assasins Creed francise after the 2nd installment which, had a separate area where you could practice your fighting skills outside of the main campaign indefinately. Provided you could keep up with killing off, the ever increasing hoard of enemies...that was absolute genius...
Hey :) thanks for your comment and feedback. I actually deliberately stayed away from digging out stats, because I wanted to focus on my own perspective. If you were to go by things like revenue alone, arguably Gaming as an industry has never been in a better place - more publishers, more development studios, more games etc.
I think the point I was trying to get across is that it looks like this industry is doing better than ever before - which again if you were to just look at the numbers suggests yes we are.
But if you look at video games as an ART FORM rather than just a consumable, I think it becomes pretty evident that we have very few games that actually captivate large audiences and remain in peoples' memories for a long time.
This is hard to back up with any statistical data as it is always very difficult to capture one's emotions towards a product. The only real indicator we have that modern gaming has severe problems is the fact that we know more and more players stick with games that came out long ago. We can see a trend whereby the newer the game, the quicker the playerbase drops the sooner the game gets forgotten about until people move on to the next game.
I guess this is just a long way of saying I don't have any statistical evidence for my statements, it's more about what I have noticed over the past two decades how the attitude towards games has changed.
We don't really have these "all time favorites" anymore, like every kid who grew up in the 90s like me still thinks about something like Super Mario 64 or Super Mario World. But if you ask someone from the Fortnite generation, they don't seem to have the same emotional attachment to games in large.
Games have become more of a product to be consumed and less about an art form, a creative endeavor. That's not to say these games don't exist anymore (as I point out towards the beginning of my video), but in large the "function" of video games seems to have drastically changed.
Not sure if I'm making sense lol
If it wasn't for AAA gaming industry's endless greed and plummeting on its misconducts over the past few years, I wouldn't have realized how good the indie games are these days.
I rarely buy AAA games anymore these days, and even more rarely I purchase them at full price.
Out of 10 games that play these days, only 1 of them is big AAA game. I think the last AAA game that I bought at full price was Tears of the Kingdom from last year, and the only reason I bought that at full price was because I know that Nintendo won't try to screw me over with Zelda franchise.
Crazy isn't it. I don't personally like Tears of the Kingdom but I agree it's one of those AAA titles that suffers much less from some of the big issues that other major titles do.
The last AAA title I purchased was Jedi Survivor, and I was shocked how poorly it ran on my PC despite me having a monster of a machine... and I was like "Screw that honestly"
But you are right, at least we are lucky that indie games are getting better by the day. They are now a serious threat and a real competitor to large publishers - I think that's exactly what these companies needed.
Who knows, maybe we'll see a bit of a change in their mindsets if they just get enough pressure?
Although I suspect they will just pull a Microsoft and buy off all the smaller studios :/
Blood Wake on the original Xbox was a more complet game then skull and bone. This game was made in 2001.
Hahahahaha yeah it's insane isn't it?
You know I’m glad indie games and double AA games are doing better than triple AAA games, indie games like vermintide 2, risk of rain 2, ultrakill, hyper light drifter, disco elysium, deep galactic rock and stone, lethal company, helldivers 2, sentry, velum and hollow knight are doing better than triple AAA titles.
@@jamespaguip5913 I couldn‘t agree more! I just wish AAA studios would use their money and influence to create great games
You deserve more than 30 subs ❤️
awww that‘s very kind of you to say haha. But I just started this whole thing, so I am more than happy with the views and positive comments I have received 😅😅 I genuinely thought this video wouldn‘t get more than 50 views haha
The best levels that ever existed and were the foundation of gaming, were made in the garages or basements of friends, not in multimillion dollar buildings filled with thousands of artists.
The problem now, is that of a rich and poor divide. Big companies with everything available and indiendevs with limited tools. Already, the big corps are the bad guys.
It‘s ironic isn‘t it that the companies best positioned to create good stuff are so bad
Another reason why modern gaming sucks is the decades-long consumerism that is ingrained with western culture that affects all industries, not just video games. Modern gaming is a consequence of rapid technological advancements that inadvertently allowed shovelware to flourish combined with a consumer society that spends so much money than they earn just for the pursuit of eternal pleasure. Back then when video games are relegated to arcades, constraints are in place to ensure that video games are profitable while fun and challenging to play from start to finish without any downtime (eg. cutscenes, pointless sidequests, etc.) whatsoever, otherwise, if a video game is not fun to play, it'll most surely fail and be removed from the market sooner. Nowadays, with the advent of home consoles and eventually the internet, said constraints are removed, allowing game publishers and developers to be reckless with their decisions and make bad games that aren't fun, buggy and infested with monetization. They even cater to people that aren't real gamers, "gamers" that don't like a real challenge, and who don't understand what makes video games fun in the first place, a consequence of trying to please everyone.
The consumer culture had been ingrained in people's minds even before video games were invented. It is when video games became more profitable later on that everything got turned to crap, thanks to opportunistic corporate vultures.
I was wondering why video games became so bad nowadays until I realized above problems I've elaborated too late.
It is a curse I agree. Mass appeal over quantity waters content and complexity down. Which is probably 100% fine for the random casual player, but for more „hardcore“ gamers these trends are awful.
Pretty much they just followed the Hollywood model. Make it bigger and more generic, because large audience and consistency, and make it fancy, for marketing and so you can price out your less successful competitors. One up product every time, to keep up hype. Avoid risks, like new titles or fresh ideas, because risk is lost money.
Eventually, expectation creep becomes so expensive that your business model is unsustainable. Instead of scaling back to keep things reasonable, Invent new profit streams to prop up your failing business, because god forbid affordable competition undercut your profit margins. Cut things that are not _strictly necessary_ until you have one streamlined product that has absolutely no substance. When your customers complain, tell them they have no alternative(because you specifically drove your competitors out of existence on purpose and hired all the best production professionals so you could make this argument of course) and ignore any further criticism. Jack up prices, because your customers will buy it anyway.
Tl;dr, capitalism isn't kind to anything, but it is _especially bad_ the more complicated a thing is to put together as scale becomes necessary for production.
@@connerblank5069 I don‘t think the problem is capitalism but rather companies becoming too greedy and delivering sub par quality but I do agree to your point 100% otherwise
@@TiGGowich No, that's basically how everything works under Capitalism. Microsoft did it with computers, McDonalds did it with fast food, there are only like four car companies, America has precisely one phone company co-owned by two corporations(which is pretty much standard, as I understand it), Walmart is the only supermarket, Amazon owns all shopping forever, and so on.
Granted, some industries have enough leftover regulation or low enough scaling factors for economy of scale that it's not so transparently monopolized, but competition is bad for business so most businesses that see any success iron it out wherever possible.
@@connerblank5069 I get your point, but I would argue again that this has less to do with "capitalism" as such and more with the way our economies are run and regulated. We could have stopped these monopolies, just nobody had the balls to do it. Economists are well aware of the danger of monopolies, our governments just completely failed to address this problem and now they are totally powerless.
Because gamers made their beds, and now are pissed they are told to lay in it.
@@aaronlaughter6471 Sort of. My question is: Why do you think many people are like that?
@TiGGowich because people hate the consequences of their own actions and admitting fault. The game industry got this way for a reason, and gamers are that reason.
Look at Oblivion, I love that game, but most of the DLC for that game sucked, it was also one of the first games with DLC (our current DLC meaning), gamers got rightfully pissed, but forgave Bethesda because Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isle was amazing. Forgetting that sub par player housing, horse armor, and a lot of other shit dlc came with it.
Dead Space 3 is where Microtransactions and P2W stuff started to appear, with the ability to buy resources, the stuff needed to upgrade weapons. Gamers got made at that but brushed it off as not needing to buy it, just like the excuse we here for other bs in the game industry.
Hell, take a look at VAs, the VA for Niko from gta4, hey got mad that he only got paid (I thank) around 100k total, when the game made over 600 million, and he felt cheated. Gamers attacked him and said he was ungrateful. Why we have the same 4 fuckimg VAs in every game.
The only time gamers did something good for gaming was with lootboxes, but that could also be said that was EA getting to greedy and putting it in a Star Wars game.
Gamers, myself included, made the industry we have today, but unlike most other gamers, I can admit that. You can pinpoint exact games and times where the shit practices we deal today appear, and gamers doing shit about it, being for a myriad of dumb reasons.
@@aaronlaughter6471 I would argue that Share Holders are a bigger part of that reason. Look at any company that goes public, at that point they perpetually have to please the Share Holders with more revenue or, the comapany folds...
@@barryhoyte8553 That's a small part, but not the whole picture, do you thank we would have loot boxes, DLC, Battle passes, seasons, and so much more shit gamers hate if they would actually stop supporting this shit. As much as it pains people to realize, gamers are the reason why the game industry is the way it is.
@@aaronlaughter6471 I agree. What I find sad though is that we do not seem to be able to get rid of this stuff again. I just don't buy any live service games, I have never purchased a loot box or microtransaction in my life... but the sad thing is that all these practices are working
im bad cause although its all about problems - the scope of problem is used by those interested in different outcomes - all human besides those that make decisions for shareholders pending a bonus
Also true, as soon as a studio grows big enough and becomes public, their focus naturally changes to meeting investor and shareholder goals... which again, I totally understand the economics behind these decisions, but it's sad when this stuff takes over in a creative industry like this
I think a reason for this is the size of the gaming community, the bigger you are the more likely you have something inside you that you can't control, Thus why we have companies "trying" to reach out to as many genres as possible for added profit, Id let you know that most people who don't engage with this type of topics only care about if the game works even when the game in question is a generic cash grab, mostly kids but also parents and people with Difficult jobs. Why is this? Well it's a simple term that have grown on me 'the less I know the better' I am more happy in life when the negative responses becomes too much and let them go and honestly i've felt alot better ever since thus why I have gone away from the internets opinions on Woke and Anti SJW I felt so depressive when I used to engage with it online
@@orge9711 I 100% agree and I do touch on this in the video of course. The bigger a publisher grows, the more people they try to appeal to… which is fine and makes sense. Unfortunately, this waters down the quality of the content. It has affected all the studios I used to cherish: Ubisoft, EA, Bethesda, Activision/Blizzard… SEGA even. I know to the average casual player this stuff doesn‘t matter, they just want to shut off their brain for a bit and play. But to those who are a bit more into it, it is really frustrating to see.
27:11 good one😅
Its the hardware today it uses cheaper binned leftovers more on a die roo many lanes they have to use memoey to install and run in windows laggy due to cant do native instant run a game we went from 16 million colours 100khz sound qualuty 4k 70fps never changed if had a good cpu 3dgfx on board sound that wasbable to run iso into the gpu n run it native fps is at the out put monitor its now slow hhardware so they use ai to trick you to try make loads of binned silicone lower quality do what a monolithic fast prosseor did in realtime, we could bios flash and play any game unemulated from any console it ran now they cant do real tracing its ray traced then inserted into the game as 2d 4096 colours less than cd quality sound uses compression crc codecs because it cant do real time live hq video or sound because windows is holding it back usibg memiry to load in data yhe compare it then send n recieve this is not good so games have to he made downgraded to run because new hardware cant play old games they ran at 4k 60fps today the cards cant do this its not got the lanes power are latency bad we never tested ir reviewed hRdware on fps dlss resolution. Hardware decided what the output was you didnt have v sync it wasnt needed it was what it came out at on any game old or new the res fps was improved by upgrading today they have gone back n cant even do 3dgfx yhey render hence poppins lag n blame devs why games run crap, the games ran good but had to he changed to run on slower cheap hardware using memory to do a job cpu should fo. Rar c## were causing this move ftom iso native run all programs to go emulated slow n back 20 years in spec. A cpu doesnt decide your res or fps why does nobody call this scam out to sell shares up by selling off 20 year old binned chips the fabs closed its just china shaving n making the btoken work by connecting loafs of cpus together WE NEVER WANT MULTITASKING IF DONE ON OTHER CHIPS IR DIES we wsnt how we did it a powerfull processor onbgfx card n sound n controllers running on board cpu so lanes can send full hq image n sound native instantly. Creator pc aint gaming or 3dgfx machines they worse hardware than a phone. Reason 2nd hand is so sort after n going up in price , wifi is bad for a mboard it strips speed throughput , try play a game like crysis at 4k 60fps using original version you cant they had to make a cut down version to run on new hardware because it cant run games that need demanding hardware
thanks for that answer, I was not aware of this - I must admit though, my understanding of all the hardware aspects are somewhat limited.
@ScoopDogg, could you please learn how to spell and punctuate sentences in your life?
So true that's what i always said. I miss the 90s and first 2000s and some gamesfrim 2011 to 2015. Games that were good were the Mario games & yoshi and Luigi snd Mario related games. Cintra double Dragon snd Bomberman snd Sonic and Mega man and. Hudsens Adv island and Spiderman and marvel games. Even the warriors and And Bonks and Metriod and pokemon stadium and Fighting games and Ninja turtles and other best em ups. Call of duty black ops was decent too.
there are still very good games, but the sad irony lies in the fact that the big publishers produce crap for mass appeal that is completely void of any sort of creativity and challenge.
*2011 was the last great defining year for gaming. Skyrim, Saints Row 3 and Deus Ex HR were the pinnacle of single player enjoyment for me. after that, everything just copy pasted 👎 COD, Madden, 2K, all the fighting and racing games....nothing was new or unique. even GTA5 disappointed for alot of people. Life Is Strange was unique. Fallout 4 was Outstanding. MGS5 redefined the stealth genre. Far Cry 5 redefined open world action. CONTROL changed my perspective on horror. INSIDE changed how I view puzzle games 👌 but i believe Fortnite laid the blueprint for a brighter future 🕵 instead of selling mediocre unfinished games for 75$ and pissing everyone off, put your game out for free 👍 if its good, players will support it through micro transactions.....if its mediocre, you'll make 17 dollars in a fiscal year and bathe in the flames of bankruptcy and foreclosure 🔥💀 it's not only Fair on all sides but it's the only way to save AAA console gaming at this point. people are NOT paying 100$ for half assed Bethesda and Ubisoft games come 2027, you can bet on that.*
Yet, these companies are somehow still around and kicking, and it doesn't look like they will be going bust or getting replaced anytime soon... that is my main frustration. Despite so many people being fed up with these things, in the end too many people still keep buying this stuff...
@@TiGGowich *I think by 2027, we'll see a collapse of most AAA developers. its been a 10 year crash burn but were finally getting there. Rockstar will survive. SEGA will survive. 2K and EA might survive but I wouldn't be surprised to see them get baught out and absorbed. if Ubisoft continues down its road of stupid, they'll be absorbed. you're really only looking at like 3 or 4 major developers going into 2030.....and honestly, its for the best* 👍
Tbh i think it's broader than that. The Idea that a game with millions (potential) is guilty of capitalistic gouging is ALWAYS true. I applaud your flag waving but the only way to remain true imo is that people dont sell over. Infra isnt that bad that that cannot imo. outside of that is the thing..
Oh I totally agree with you, I am very pro market economics. But there seems to be this trend that the bigger a studio grows, and the more they try and appeal to everyone, the more the quality of their games suffers. Which is fine if you are a very casual player, I'm sure most people don't care about any of those things, they just want a bit of light entertainment and happy days.
I think this is mainly a problem for those slightly less "casual" players who crave high quality experiences rather than watered down mainstream
Hey! Not all modern games are bad. There are plenty and I mean PLENTY of great games out there. Want me to list you a few?
Hi, I quite literally say in my video that there are a lot of great games. I mention around 10 from 2023 alone. The point was not to say there aren't good games, I am referring to industry practices that ruin gaming.
Modern games are too woke and crap that's why I've gone back to Retro gaming 👍🏽
well, there are those games for sure, but I don#t think they represent the vast majority of the market. Which specific titles are you thinking of when you use the term "woke" out of curiosity?
Yeah I find myself going back to older games as well more and more... which retro games are you currently into? I need inspiration haha
@@TiGGowich I've gone back playing PS1 PS2 and PS3 games.
The old gtas, Spyro the Dragon, Medal of honor etc..
@@TiGGowichI sometimes dig out the Sega megadrive.
@@TiGGowich You can try GBA games for example there are a lot of unlokcables in those games, if you a PS1 fan you can try PS1 games, but if you were lucky to get a PS2 and play PS2 you can play these games in general PS1 and PS2 were the best times for japanese anime rpg's and other games, like wild arms for example a great anime jrpg about western cowboy life with a great story. My experience was with PS1 because my family at that time could not afford PS2 and PS1 wasn't even bought from shop it was bought from a familiar person and there were tons of games too, my first game on PS1 was Army men World War Final Front. As for why games are like this, well it is because human greed cannot be stopped and also American culture plays big role in all this their censorship and sensitive nature ruined most games, good thing there are indie devs. But I'am leaving steam so not a single platform will receive my money, I"am done with "modern audiences games".
@@whiskeygamer9402 That's cool, they are really good games. I've recently been grinding Grandia 1 and 2 haha