Early access might legitimately be the way to save the failing AAA market. You get a real chance to learn what players actually want, and how to appeal to them, while slotting your game into its proper niche.

I mean sure, there's bound to be stinkers, there always is. But Early access would kinda rock for these games. "The game runs like shit, we don't want to play it." Then next month you get a dedicated patch for performance and begs get squashed faster and more efficiently. Imagine if they didn't fuck around with borderlands 4 and released as an ea title. Could have worked.

Shareholders like CEOs aren’t real people and their opinions should be tossed down the drain.

Oh I keep thinking in the shareholders (Pours querosene in the funnel). I always do...

It's interesting because the live-service formula is kind of antithetical to what they want. They essentially want a low-effort low-cost perpetual money-printing machine. They really should just invest in actual money printing machines and churn out fake money, because that'd be a more successful endeavour.

The live-service games that live on do so because of a constant investment and commitment to the game and the community it harbours. The moment people think the writing's on the walls, they jump ship.

It's just so bizarre to me that they want people to invest time and more importantly, money into the game, when they themselves aren't willing to do so.

Like a gambling addiction if you think about it. "No no no, THIS will be THE game that will make us Fortnite money!!!"

Yeah. I guess I'm too old to understand the drive for better and better graphics.

To me, you don't repaint a new version of the Mona Lisa just because we have better paints available today.

Graphics (for me) peaked in the 360/PS3 era when games started to nail smooth "movement". After that it was just about making things more and more photorealistic, which is so completely uninteresting to me because I'm playing a game.

The only ones I play these days are Warframe and occasionally PoE2…

I didn’t know they made Power over Ethernet into a game, let alone a sequel.

Why do they need to get filthy rich? Why not settle for rich and having a good game?

On a movie set, the director has a huge amount of authority. It's been baked into the culture for about a hundred years that the director is one step below God. A studio treats films as investments, but they also hire a director and (mostly) get out of the way. Sure, producers do meddle, but it's nowhere close to the same amount as with games -- and all the meddling is still pointed at the director, not the crew. I think this limits the damage that can be done.

Also, the film industry has strong unions. Most of the abuses in game dev simply aren't allowed. I suspect that the horrible culture of game dev can cause developers to stop caring, which bleeds through to the final product, and that won't happen to the same extent for movies.

"Popcorn movies" are a big thing, and most of those big investments are these. They're "turn off you brain for two hours and chill" events. A game, even the most chill ones, almost always last much longer and require more engagement. That is the defining trait of the medium. If you can totally turn your brain off then you didn't make a game, you made an expensive movie. Games, for players, are an investment. Movies often aren't.

It's not. Plenty of game franchises are similarly profitable.

I mostly agree with you, I feel like most games with staying power, are games that fundamentally will have you playing because you enjoy it.

I don't think I can write off seasons in multiplayer games though, some games do benefit from having larger changes that happen at the end of these seasons.

Battle passes can at best be fine(if they at least pay for the next one), I don't think any are particularly good as a metric for staying power, you still need/want to enjoy playing the game to progress the battle pass.

For me the best staying power is a game that has complexity and depth to mechanics. So I have something to improve on and chase(like lap times in sim racing)

Factorio, rimworld, stardew valley, and project zomboid are the games I'm likely to be playing at any given time of year since they came out and every time there's an expansion or update.

These weren't expensive games to develop, I even played them for years when they weren't yet finished.

I'm still of the opinion that the best games are the ones that are developed in a way is friendly to the mod community.

Mods literally made MechWarrior mercenaries, Minecraft and GTA5 into Great games rather than merely good ones.

And also spent by utterly incompetent management whose prime qualification is fluency in corpospeak and AAA tier ass-kissing...

... as opposed to, you know, any kind of actual project management skills.

They're all self important, self righteous idiots, in leadership roles in AAA.

... The goddamned AAAA pirate game that Ubisoft took 10 years to rework 3 or 4 times, and then shit out as basically a demo of a mobile style gacha game, that requires a fairly high end PC to run.

How is that not just like, money laundering / tax evasion / tax fraud, with extra steps?

There's plenty of constraints still, they aren't technical though. It's about making a game good despite the monetization requirements.

Lol

Yeah, that's totally the problems and not vertical integration being used to churn money as a gift...

PS2 games look and play great on the Steamdeck. Probably my favorite way to play them.

By the way, I have a couple of PS2's, and I use a harddrive so the hardware just keeps working. Usually it is the laser that fails. There are also options to network and play from NAS, or use a micro SD.

It honestly feels like original and creative works are exclusively the domain of indie developers nowadays.

Given how bloated AAA budgets have become, publishers seemingly don’t want to risk taking a chance on some more whacky ideas - at least until an indie dev proves it out first.

Buckle up, mate.

This is... but the prologue. Steel yourself. You'll need it.

Apparently we've gone all the way around, because there has been no numbered Baldur's Gate game that wasn't AAA as absolute fuck.

This sentence makes my brain hurt. They co-opted it how? You're just entirely unwilling to engage with any piece of media the far right actually likes just on principle? As in, regardless of how... not far right the piece of media itself happens to be?

I hate this century. This century sucks.

the game seems to have been co-opted by the Far Right

Oh no, I hadn't heard about this yet. What'd they do?