To everybody who said not to be worried about this and that if this was actually a bad idea capitalism would solve it magically from indie game studios appearing out of thin air to replace the roles played by AAA game development…
Take a long walk off a short pier you naive assholes
The golden age of video games is over, yes indie games will step up to the plate to fill some of the gap, but at a structural level they simply can’t replace AAA studios. By definition AAA game studios have a capacity to create video games that smaller studios don’t and even more importantly for the career of promising game developers AAA game studios can play a crucial role in providing early career experience. AAA game studios also provide the possibility for game developers to start families since at least in the past larger companies tended to be more stable and could guarantee more stable employment.
This was not inevitable, and as fans of this medium of art we collectively failed to stop this from happening or even really to put up much resistance to it at all. We failed the artists that make the art we love.
I think your smashing of AAA games / their studios and a Golden Age of video games is borderline ridiculous.
I think history has shown (Nintendo specifically) that game play is king, you do not need a billion dollar project with ultra realistic graphics to have fun… many people, like me, have a ton of fun and rarely play any AAA games
The second part is also ridiculous (specially the family part) considering AAA Studios were the worst at exploiting their staff and lay them off the second the beta game was sold in early admissions
I think history has shown (Nintendo specifically) that game play is king, you do not need a billion dollar project with ultra realistic graphics to have fun… many people, like me, have a ton of fun and rarely play any AAA games
Nintendo is a MASSIVE game company, indie game companies could never produce their games the way Nintendo does. What a confounding example you chose from a company that is notably hostile to hobbiests and indie developers.
You are really failing to understand the basic dynamics going on in the labor market of game development here. Larger entities can do things smaller entities can’t, if you want to dispute that argument you are going to have a hard time doing so as the logic is very basic.
Large game companies can create games that would be impossible for smaller indie studios to make, large game studios can offer employment of a nature that smaller indie game companies simply can’t.
Look at Ubisoft’s large open world games or the Red Dead Redemption series, an indie game studio could never bank on creating similar games as the raw time it takes to pay developers to make that big of a detailed landscape would be infeasible for a precarious indie game company to tackle. This is just basic business sense.
I love indie games, don’t try to take the high road of claiming you have made yourself more pure by only playing indie games as if that was a solution, they are different categories.
The second part is also ridiculous (specially the family part) considering AAA Studios were the worst at exploiting their staff and lay them off the second the beta game was sold in early admissions
Don’t conflate workplace culture with the basic reality of working at a riskier, smaller company vs. a larger established company with longer and more predictable product development cycles. You wanna start a family while working at a tiny company that could go POOF if
only one or two things go wrong?
It’s not so much that Nintendo is massive… it’s that they don’t FIRE their devs after every project. Miyamoto, Sakurai, Aonuma, etc. have all been working at that company for DECADES.
They are MASTER artisans, in the same way a carpenter becomes one over a lifetime.
The games industry outside of a very select few companies like Valve, Nintendo, Insomniac, etc. DEVOUR people and churn through them at a completely horrific pace.
Constant crunch, burnout, underpaid, firing as soon as a game’s profit chart shows even a slight slowdown… all that results in a broken pipeline where you always have 20-something-year-old interns being paid dogshit who are desperate to keep their job working 60 hour weeks and hoping they can jump ship to a better studio before they get shit-canned… and then bailing on the industry completely.
Even hit game making celebrities like Cliff Blezinski, John Carmack, and other relatively well-known game devs either no longer work at their hit studios, or have left the industry all-together.
The reason it’s shit now, is because those who own the studios think making games is more like the textile industry or people working as cogs in a burger factory than any sort of artisan work… so they have reshaped it to be one where people are expendable and replaced constantly by bright-eyed young folks excited to work on their dream IP for them.
It’s just finally catching up as the owners’ boundless greed has only continued and conditions have worsened for the actual game makers.
It’s not going to improve until the current way of making games is completely overturned and regulated in such a way where those who work on games can have their careers grow in the same way other artisan fields can - where they apprentice under masters who teach them the ropes, and who slowly gain knowledge and skill over many game projects they ship under the banner of one company - and they get royalties and other real tangible benefits for their hard work.
Nintendo is a MASSIVE game company, indie game companies could never produce their games the way Nintendo does. What a confounding example you chose from a company that is notably hostile to hobbiests and indie developers.
When Nintendo came out with the wii, they were laughed out of the room by Sony and MS because their games were too simple and graphics lacking… it was a huge success, that is what I meant… plenty of small, indie even, video game studios have and can produce huge hits… more importantly, they do not need to make a kajillion dollars to break even which means their games are not akin to armed robbery
Large game companies can create games that would be impossible for smaller indie studios to make, large game studios can offer employment of a nature that smaller indie game companies simply can’t.
I am not refuting that… I am refuting your claim that not having AAA games means the video game golden age is over… AAA video games have been mostly pain in the last 7 years… we can have tons of fun with no AAA titles
You are saying “If Mercedes Benz collapses, cars are over”… I am saying “there are plenty of other car makers to keep the industry as a whole”
I love indie games, don’t try to take the high road of claiming you have made yourself more pure by only playing indie games as if that was a solution, they are different categories.
Never claimed any of that… simply said I have fun with them and won’t miss AAA games
Don’t conflate workplace culture with the basic reality of working at a riskier, smaller company vs. a larger established company with longer and more predictable product development cycles. You wanna start a family while working at a tiny company that could go POOF if only one or two things go wrong.
What AAA Studio are you thinking of? which one has NOT laid off tons of people as soon as their very successful launches cash in?
Gamecube-PS2-Xbox 360 Era. It was a time when game developmental costs had come down a bit, the demand for games was pretty steady, and the market wasn’t oversaturated. It allowed AAA devs to make some big creative swings and return a steady profit.
There’s a lot of different genres that are popular today where you can point to a game from that era as the progenitor. Stuff like Resident Evil 4 for the third person action shooter, Devil May Cry for spectacle RPGs, Katamari Damacy and Pikmin for uh…whatever the hell they are.
I don’t think AAA has ever been as creative as they were during that period. For over a decade now, pretty much all creativity in games has come from indies, with AAA being comprised of copycats.
It has been plenty unreasonable to work for AAA game companies for a long time. Long crunch, layoffs between projects, abuse by managers has been widespread for like 15 years at least. And attempts to remedy these issues with collective bargaining has been met with obvious union busting for several years at least.
Perhaps your definition of a golden age existed and had ended, but if so the end was longer ago than you think and we’re watching the end of an inevitable decline. You also have to compare this to everyone else’s conditions. The fact “gig economy” is even in our lexicon should show how unstable tons of people’s employment and income are.
I don’t really disagree with this sentiment, my point is we risk losing the essential narrative of why what will occur or arguably already has occurred happened if we don’t continually reemphasize the actual issue.
What did you expect anyone to do about this? Every CEO has a responsibility to make number go up above all else and will literally be fired if they’re not willing to do what it takes to make that happen. There is literally nothing any gamer can do to stop that. And you call other people naive?
True but also my point is kinda that you might as well try because without workers having meaningful leverage in their workplace, management will undoubtedly drive large corporations that impact the entire industry into brickwalls for the dumbest, most shortsighted reasons.
Yeah, I don’t want to discourage anyone from trying, but tech jobs are a long ways away from having unions be the norm.
I’d love to have one in my job, since the only kind of job security you get in software is becoming a specialist in some niche area where you’re the only one who knows how anything works, which isn’t exactly a low-stress position either.
Not that I disagree a stable studio has it benefits for all the reasons you listed, but even in the best of times most AAA is still not a normal 9-5 environment. Your expected to crunch just for your team to be laid off immediately after releasing something. Those studios were shedding labor like snake skin even before these bigger cuts. AAA has also been creatively bankrupt for literal decades at this point, executive boards churning out the same game year after year, with lootboxes and micro transactions being their greatest innovations in recent memory.
I can agree we need stable studios, with leaders who prioritize their employees, creativity and passion - but come on, glazing these corpos as shepherds of some golden age of gaming is absurd. Innovation WILL continue without them.
To everybody who said not to be worried about this and that if this was actually a bad idea capitalism would solve it magically from indie game studios appearing out of thin air to replace the roles played by AAA game development…
Take a long walk off a short pier you naive assholes
The golden age of video games is over, yes indie games will step up to the plate to fill some of the gap, but at a structural level they simply can’t replace AAA studios. By definition AAA game studios have a capacity to create video games that smaller studios don’t and even more importantly for the career of promising game developers AAA game studios can play a crucial role in providing early career experience. AAA game studios also provide the possibility for game developers to start families since at least in the past larger companies tended to be more stable and could guarantee more stable employment.
This was not inevitable, and as fans of this medium of art we collectively failed to stop this from happening or even really to put up much resistance to it at all. We failed the artists that make the art we love.
I think your smashing of AAA games / their studios and a Golden Age of video games is borderline ridiculous.
I think history has shown (Nintendo specifically) that game play is king, you do not need a billion dollar project with ultra realistic graphics to have fun… many people, like me, have a ton of fun and rarely play any AAA games
The second part is also ridiculous (specially the family part) considering AAA Studios were the worst at exploiting their staff and lay them off the second the beta game was sold in early admissions
Nintendo is a MASSIVE game company, indie game companies could never produce their games the way Nintendo does. What a confounding example you chose from a company that is notably hostile to hobbiests and indie developers.
You are really failing to understand the basic dynamics going on in the labor market of game development here. Larger entities can do things smaller entities can’t, if you want to dispute that argument you are going to have a hard time doing so as the logic is very basic.
Large game companies can create games that would be impossible for smaller indie studios to make, large game studios can offer employment of a nature that smaller indie game companies simply can’t.
Look at Ubisoft’s large open world games or the Red Dead Redemption series, an indie game studio could never bank on creating similar games as the raw time it takes to pay developers to make that big of a detailed landscape would be infeasible for a precarious indie game company to tackle. This is just basic business sense.
I love indie games, don’t try to take the high road of claiming you have made yourself more pure by only playing indie games as if that was a solution, they are different categories.
Don’t conflate workplace culture with the basic reality of working at a riskier, smaller company vs. a larger established company with longer and more predictable product development cycles. You wanna start a family while working at a tiny company that could go POOF if only one or two things go wrong?
It’s not so much that Nintendo is massive… it’s that they don’t FIRE their devs after every project. Miyamoto, Sakurai, Aonuma, etc. have all been working at that company for DECADES.
They are MASTER artisans, in the same way a carpenter becomes one over a lifetime.
The games industry outside of a very select few companies like Valve, Nintendo, Insomniac, etc. DEVOUR people and churn through them at a completely horrific pace.
Constant crunch, burnout, underpaid, firing as soon as a game’s profit chart shows even a slight slowdown… all that results in a broken pipeline where you always have 20-something-year-old interns being paid dogshit who are desperate to keep their job working 60 hour weeks and hoping they can jump ship to a better studio before they get shit-canned… and then bailing on the industry completely.
Even hit game making celebrities like Cliff Blezinski, John Carmack, and other relatively well-known game devs either no longer work at their hit studios, or have left the industry all-together.
The reason it’s shit now, is because those who own the studios think making games is more like the textile industry or people working as cogs in a burger factory than any sort of artisan work… so they have reshaped it to be one where people are expendable and replaced constantly by bright-eyed young folks excited to work on their dream IP for them.
It’s just finally catching up as the owners’ boundless greed has only continued and conditions have worsened for the actual game makers.
It’s not going to improve until the current way of making games is completely overturned and regulated in such a way where those who work on games can have their careers grow in the same way other artisan fields can - where they apprentice under masters who teach them the ropes, and who slowly gain knowledge and skill over many game projects they ship under the banner of one company - and they get royalties and other real tangible benefits for their hard work.
When Nintendo came out with the wii, they were laughed out of the room by Sony and MS because their games were too simple and graphics lacking… it was a huge success, that is what I meant… plenty of small, indie even, video game studios have and can produce huge hits… more importantly, they do not need to make a kajillion dollars to break even which means their games are not akin to armed robbery
I am not refuting that… I am refuting your claim that not having AAA games means the video game golden age is over… AAA video games have been mostly pain in the last 7 years… we can have tons of fun with no AAA titles
You are saying “If Mercedes Benz collapses, cars are over”… I am saying “there are plenty of other car makers to keep the industry as a whole”
Never claimed any of that… simply said I have fun with them and won’t miss AAA games
What AAA Studio are you thinking of? which one has NOT laid off tons of people as soon as their very successful launches cash in?
Can you define “golden age of video games”?
When Factorio was injected into my dopamine receptors. Time has been a blur ever since.
Gamecube-PS2-Xbox 360 Era. It was a time when game developmental costs had come down a bit, the demand for games was pretty steady, and the market wasn’t oversaturated. It allowed AAA devs to make some big creative swings and return a steady profit.
There’s a lot of different genres that are popular today where you can point to a game from that era as the progenitor. Stuff like Resident Evil 4 for the third person action shooter, Devil May Cry for spectacle RPGs, Katamari Damacy and Pikmin for uh…whatever the hell they are.
I don’t think AAA has ever been as creative as they were during that period. For over a decade now, pretty much all creativity in games has come from indies, with AAA being comprised of copycats.
The original Xbox was the contemporary of Gamecube and PS2, not 360.
for some reason I always think the 360 came out much earlier than it really did.
god has it really been two decades?
Two decades and two months!
The period during which working in game development could be considered somewhat theoretically reasonable to pursue as a career.
It has been plenty unreasonable to work for AAA game companies for a long time. Long crunch, layoffs between projects, abuse by managers has been widespread for like 15 years at least. And attempts to remedy these issues with collective bargaining has been met with obvious union busting for several years at least.
Perhaps your definition of a golden age existed and had ended, but if so the end was longer ago than you think and we’re watching the end of an inevitable decline. You also have to compare this to everyone else’s conditions. The fact “gig economy” is even in our lexicon should show how unstable tons of people’s employment and income are.
I don’t really disagree with this sentiment, my point is we risk losing the essential narrative of why what will occur or arguably already has occurred happened if we don’t continually reemphasize the actual issue.
The time when OP was a kid/teenager and nostalgia hits the hardest.
What did you expect anyone to do about this? Every CEO has a responsibility to make number go up above all else and will literally be fired if they’re not willing to do what it takes to make that happen. There is literally nothing any gamer can do to stop that. And you call other people naive?
Organize, unionize and have a militant solidarity with people doing the labor to make art.
“Gamer Culture” in general has a longggggg way to go in this regard.
It’s a rough world out there for people trying to unionize…
https://kotaku.com/ubisoft-halifax-shutdown-unionized-rainbow-six-mobile-2000657752
True but also my point is kinda that you might as well try because without workers having meaningful leverage in their workplace, management will undoubtedly drive large corporations that impact the entire industry into brickwalls for the dumbest, most shortsighted reasons.
Yeah, I don’t want to discourage anyone from trying, but tech jobs are a long ways away from having unions be the norm.
I’d love to have one in my job, since the only kind of job security you get in software is becoming a specialist in some niche area where you’re the only one who knows how anything works, which isn’t exactly a low-stress position either.
Not that I disagree a stable studio has it benefits for all the reasons you listed, but even in the best of times most AAA is still not a normal 9-5 environment. Your expected to crunch just for your team to be laid off immediately after releasing something. Those studios were shedding labor like snake skin even before these bigger cuts. AAA has also been creatively bankrupt for literal decades at this point, executive boards churning out the same game year after year, with lootboxes and micro transactions being their greatest innovations in recent memory.
I can agree we need stable studios, with leaders who prioritize their employees, creativity and passion - but come on, glazing these corpos as shepherds of some golden age of gaming is absurd. Innovation WILL continue without them.