would be incredibly funny if instead of dissolving Bungie’s board, Sony ends up selling the company off, and then Microsoft buys them a second time, and they make…another Halo
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per the ftc lawsuit microsoft looked at bungie’s burn rate and thought better of it
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I would not like bungie to touch halo ever again. The western civilization boys are pathetic.
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covid was a games industry boom but people didnt want to sit inside playing games forever i guess
bloated ass technical ‘marvels’ like cyberpunk and bauldurs gate 3 wont really have a chance to exist again for a few years i think
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they need to give halo to the Cursed Halo guy or Furries or both
honestly take halo away from the states we shouldnt be allowed to tell these stories anymore. we should be sanctioned on gun media
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yeah halo doesn’t need to be made by white people anymore, like somehow i doubt the videogame industry furries are going to bring a less sheltered perspective here
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i doubt the industry is going to crash in the way we think about that, bc games are too popular and entrenched overall. but there is a lot of shit being propped up that i don’t think is going to last. the production process for the biggest games becoming so insanely expensive has obviously led more to the model of subscription-based services and so many things using various gambling industry tactics to squeeze money out of people. a lot of indie games have started to adopt this too - if not directly in their money-making strategies, than at least in the design loops of games to keep people addicted.
to me i think this is pretty indicative of a space where a lot of people are out of ideas about how to sustain an income and an audience and resorting to any trick in the book they can to keep people coming back. this is the sort of thing i think eventually enough people become more savvy to and exhausted by. when you add this to the delusional overspending of a lot of tech/software companies in 2020/2021 and no longer having super low interest rates, i do think that means that part of the space is hollowing out. i don’t think that this is just a brief downturn and that things will quickly bounce back - i think there’s def more rot happening there.
but to me it feels less like games are entering a full industry crash than an “existential crisis” period. like, what exactly are games, and what do we want from them? what role are they playing in larger culture? we all know games are a massive industry, but this other stuff is still kind of up in the air for most things. so that’s why it’s a question that, to me, needs to be asked more. especially as generations that have more complex understanding of games as an artform grow older. and i do think this is a meaningful question to be asking in even the most, like, business-brained sense you could engage with that. could there be an emerging games culture that develops like the film culture that developed in the mid 20th century? like one that’s outside of market and brand-oriented thinking? i think it’s very possible. people might be getting more savvy about how to make interesting games that engage with current social and political issues within particular genres - without being too clumsy or heavy-handed or “games for change”-y about it. to me, i could fully imagine a post-MyHouse.wad universe being more like that lol.
i’ve said before specifically with indie games that i stopped really being able to recognize the space anymore around 2021. that’s when i started to feel a narrowing of possibility space and people just pumping out glorified clones of different popular genres. a bunch of genres at once seem like they’re getting oversatured. and it makes you wonder - what’s the point? what am i playing this for? a lot of people are going to take less of a risk on playing new things if they’ve felt consistently underwhelmed or disappointed by what they have played.
for indie games specifically i think the whole phenomenon of indie studious hoping for publisher or tech funds to keep them afloat which is a period i feel started around the mid-2010’s is going to mostly go away. that’s only something that can exist when publishers or companies like Microsoft have money to burn and will take a chance knowing that one thing could be a huge freak success. i imagine indie games becoming more of a space where people sink or swim based on the success of their visibility from self-marketing. which is sorta already where it’s headed.
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they exist primarily to prop up your stunted existence and help you to cum to girls if cyberpunk baldur’s gate 3 midnight suns halo infinite and like all the other recent AAA games i’ve played are anything to go by
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I mentioned this to you before, but an extremely coldly capitalist corollary to this point is that even though publisher and big game corp CEOs are heavily incentivized to burn everything to raise shareholder value next quarter at the cost of next year, the business fundamentals of video games are sound. Nobody spends their paycheck on facebook, instagram or tiktok. Millions of people really, REALLY want to spend their paychecks on video games. There’s no wizard of oz trickery here to prop up a technology that nobody wants and doesn’t make anyone happy. There are a lot of shades of that inside the overall medium, but overall people want to pay people to make video games, and that isn’t changing anytime soon.
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covid relief meant there was a lot of money available and getting all those loans forgiven was contingent on not cutting staff. Now the loans are forgiven and there’s not incentives to be staffed up anymore
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There’s a lot more to the story. the games industry grew much faster than GDP during the pandemic when everyone was trapped at home with a lot of free time, and has now slowed down a lot. It’s not really shrinking, but ‘less growth’ is apocalyptic for publicly traded companies. Additionally, games take 5+ years to make at the AAA level, which is an investment that requires borrowing a LOT of money, and after the federal interest rate went up it is way WAY more expensive to invest in a 7 year game production cycle. Even further, 2023 was the ‘best year ever for games’, which all that means is a bunch of these extremely long development cycles all coincidentally ended at once, meaning that these companies would be staffing down somewhat anyway even without all this other stuff going on.
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i can’t support another mmo, so hopefully no one makes another one i am attracted to
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For a while I thought maybe Nintendo didn’t really care about emulators anymore, but if they’re going after Yuzu I wonder if this means that they really are gonna add Denuvo to their Switch 2 games.
this section is gonna make for some painful testimony. ok, did they sign up for zelda? did you ban discussion of it because you knew it was illegal? can you read your pc gamer interview into evidence for us?
the very next count is screenshots of tweets complaining about spoilers lol
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Yuzu must pay for harm sustained by millions of Zelda fans when they found out about the video game story without consent. They must!
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can hardly think of a more noble pursuit than harming law-abiding nintendo customers
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I want to see written testimony of Nintendo attorneys that somehow Fair Use law does not apply to their software
I want to finally see them go mask off
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Enter this tweet into the court record
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