The bubble is bursting. Dark times are ahead for any game that takes more than 5 kids with gumption to make.
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aside from the Vinyl-verse*, which domain isnāt currently facing a giant car-crash coming their way, be it due to the ādisruptiveā innovations that predatory VC tech-bro-companies have brought upon themselves, or just plain old boring gatekeeping because it always worked that way?
*donāt get me started on how pre-order-and-then-receive-months-later-when-you-have-forgotten-the-order is a business model that seems to work well ā¦ for now.
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I would not be surprised to see this market flame out in ~2 years, seeing as how typical preorder lengths for prestige adult toys have crept up to over 18 months recently.
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fully agree, have experienced exactly that, a vinyl LP (iirc suikoden 2) arriving and being surprised by what this parcel could be.
Also: couldnāt think of an industry thatās really on an upward trajectory atm, aside from guns, military or AI-stuff, and even there it feels like a degradation rather than a boom.
Electric bikes maybe?
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I donāt know if this is itself is a sign of the bubble bursting, or at least any moreso than anything else. This feel more like Sony trying to go out into an area it had no real understanding of to predictable results, and any other company would have had the sense to not spend as much money as Sony did. But I also imagine failures like this are baked into the companyās high-level strategy of getting that One Big Hit because the income it will get from microtransactions will make up for all the failed games along the way, no matter how many people the company churned through to get there.
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It isnāt though.
TF2 still makes money.
Old games didnāt die, and to be a new one takes a lot.
I really think itās the CEO and corporate mindset thatās the problem. But more games are more successful than before. Yet how would one even make a Minecraft 2?
Games are wildly successful. Itās just the games you know.
āGamesā arenāt wildly successful. Like six games are wildly successful. Thatās precisely the problem.
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That just isnāt true.
Also we saw an upset with Rivals over Overwatch this year.
Balatro blew the doors down.
Iām drowning in good games to play.
Whatās the problem?
No problem, Dr. Pangloss.
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Right. Tons of games, and more availability than ever.
Your dower tone surely isnāt a YOU problem. Bah humbug.
i dunno it seems pretty weird to be like MORE GAMES THAN EVER when so many of those more games than ever charge you constantly after you buy them, thousands of layoffs are happening, games are constantly getting deleted from peoples inventories because nothing belongs to you anymore, and weāre having the discussion in a thread about a game that got deleted less than a month after it came out
like yes theres more than six games. but like some card game selling well (wow! a solitaire card game was successful? thats never happened) and a bunch of live service games screaming at you for battle passes and gacha isnt like, the heaven you describe it as
there will always be good games to play. there always have been. but its sad to see what is accepted as normal these days
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that did age well:
KTM has declared bankrupcy a few weeks ago and is undergoing restructuring, one reason being cited is the lack of bikes being sold, huh
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I do wonder if Balatro would have been successful if MS still included solitare on default windows installs.
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Those games exsist. Plenty of other games full in package exist and come out every year as well. You can choose to look at the slop. Or you can choose to look at the plethora of great games. Both piles exist in what was released in 2024. 2025 will be the same.
Soā¦ ya. There are things I donāt like. I donāt play those. Meanwhile thanks to a a lot of great friends I was inundated with games over the holidays. So Iām gonna clear my massive and wonderful JPRG that came out this year (one of many) so I can make time to play Carvan Sandwhich. But yes, Suicide Squad also came out, oh well.
Let me check out this Playstation 2024 wrap-up thing to see what itās like. Lol, I canāt believe my fifth most played game is like a whole 1 hour of playtime.
Lol, the site messed up and is showing stats for July but didnāt populate whatever that game was, and I didnāt play anything in August I guess.
Lol, the site messed up again and is showing me I got 50 trophies in August but didnāt populate whatever that game was.
Wait, whatās that trophy example say? Heal 5000 damage? What the heck did that come from?
Oh. Oh.
I played the Concord beta in July and then a ton of Concord in August. But Concord has been erased from Playstation history.
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That is wild! Thanks for sharing that
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I think the original point was thereās plenty of small games but itās rarely a sustainable pursuit professionally because whether or not these things āhitā is pretty unreliable. By necessity the scale of indie work for most is a hobby project distinct from material necessity. If youāre interested in making games as a career or like, need a steady income to stay alive, thatās where things like suicide squad and studios like rocksteady should exist. An āindustryā.
But like Concord, the āstableā end , which in concept should at the least be an avenue to pursue making games without going broke is increasingly precarious, exclusive, and reliant on a lucky match. Most companies financial goal is absorbing the entirety of game space within themselves, not pointing outwards towards sustainability for others. The trends are towards a decline in possibilities , space and opportunities (except for finance & dopamine experts). Which will have effects on the entire space because these are the games that define the space for most people.
Like yea the multiplayer Arkham knights or whatever game is āslopā and Iām not gettin it but itās also just symptomatic of a larger shift in what games āareā and can be. I find it surprising every time I see ppl complain that the street fighter battlepass is only appealing if u want avatar dress up stuff.
Like, isnāt it good that this is relegated to a specific, ignorable, aspect of a game that doesnāt need a ābattlepassā at all , which requires a full price buy in anyways? These are noticeable shifts in games that seem primarily, bad. Even as there definitely continues to be interesting work done by many ppl at many scale.
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I see your point now at least. I just fundamentally disagree with the outlook.
Of course, games are going to flop. Of course, it sucks that in the last few years weāve seen this financial bubble around gaming pop. Too many lost their jobs, and honestly, thatās horrible. The only material part of this that I think is a true loss.
But there are just SO MANY GAMES. Even if you only keep your eye to AA or AAA (which is all grey definitions) with people who make their livings making games, thereās just so much.
But the mentality has just changed. Games last longer, the financial tale on most games is longer. Yes there are games that create a drip of ways to pay in. I think a lot of that is perceived as newer but itās always been there. How they monetize is more apparent. But thatās always been in gaming, and always something Iād conveniently forget about, usually because it was beyond my financial means to play.
The other part that makes this idea so odd to me is that āgamingā as weāre talking about it here to the larger world is a fraction of the actual industry. Mobile gaming makesā¦ real money. The games are basically alien to me but the figures donāt lie. If you put forward stuff to people as a rule if you get enough eyes on it people will. What PC/Console games make in a year is just dwarfed by whatās made in mobile. Roughly if youāre playing with a controller vs a screen you are there because you are choosing to play those games for depth. Youāre in a niche hobby already.
Even then to point to the money as any standard is just, odd. Money has no relation to quality. Just looking at BLizzard, there was a single mount in WOW that amassed more money for the company than all the sales of Starcraft 2 did.
So sure you can look at buzz trends. Does it suck that Concord was bliped so hard? Yes. But having played the beta I wasnāt shocked by the middling reaction. Itās worth noting that months later Rivals came in and was a massive success and there are a lot of weird comparisons and contrasts you can draw. But Destiny 2 has been going for years now, itās not quite a hero shooter, but similar in a lot of ways and had a major content drop in 2024, but isnāt āofā this year.
I guess thatās a big part too. This lens of what happened this year is far less relevant than it used to be. Steam analytics show of people that use the platform, increasingly more are playing older games. Thatās a lot of what I meant with we have more accessibility than ever. Be it short narrative games people are playing from 2012 for the first time this year, or people still locked on TF2, thatās happening more and more.
Then with people on older games, yes the industry would get a bit smaller, you canāt have as many new games because little kids are still going to play Minecraft. Which is set to get even bigger in 2025.
SO yes Concord was a blip. But even in the hero shooter (what a dumb name for a genre) area, we donāt ever seem to lose competition. Concord did not strike a large enough mass-appeal cord for the type of game it was trying to be.
BUT I get why a lot of people here on SB were more enamored with it. I think there was a lot of that game that could be put into a more traditional FPS game with a deathmatch mode, and it probably would have been more successful. As a work, there was some interesting things that would have been fun to have seen through. We donāt get that chance now. But also what happened to Concord was unlike anything Iāve seen happen to a game before.
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To be fair, I think this is just me.
When I think back on the game, my feelings are mostly swirling around how, despite it technically being a hero shooter, it had the aura of an '00s era multiplayer shooter instead. Iām not 100% sure why, but it felt like the good old days more than the bad current days. Maybe thatās partly because of the qualities that made it not last. It had lots of rough edges that didnāt get completely sanded down into the smooth ācontentā grind that makes more successful games easier to consume. But despite writing all that, the disparate components of the game design didnāt come together well, so itās not like Concord was a hidden gem or anything. It just had lots of ideas with potential that were maybe on the right path to something interesting.
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