the bottom fell out of mid-budget games as the industry consolidated around the major players in the mid-10s and was mostly filled by a total deluge of indie projects, many of which are now reasonably mid-budget or nostalgic for the mid-budget games of yesteryear.
this is like the 4th or 5th time this cycle has happened in the history of games. i don’t really pay attention to it anymore. just buy some weirdo indie game for ten bucks and have a good time. let the industry people like ubi, actiblizz, etc. play their little “oh i want to fund the next big thing but incur no risk for it!” in a bubble away from the rest of us.
will that funding ever come back? annapurna, devolver, new blood, and a few other publishers are stepping into the void of Indie-A, so probably. and while there’s obviously the monopolies of the various platforms like Steam and Xbox and PS and whatever, the indie hobbyist scene is thriving more now than at any point before, and there are easy and valid distribution channels for them that circumvent the platform holders. so even if the funding falls out, these kind of games will remain.
honestly i think people looking to the next big-name release are doing themselves a disservice at this point
I have a slightly different view of this, mostly owing to
my already being hyper-selective enough about big-budget stuff, and never once in my life having my income tied to the games industry, that I’m not like, reflexively offended by it, though I think looking at it as inherently awful is perfectly legitimate
my working in the regular tech industry and watching everyone hoard cash through Series B rounds right now because there’s plenty of money to spare, it’s just that no one wants to loose it upon the regular public economy while “confidence” is “low”
my really really liking the kind of indie-A we got during the PS4 generation before devolver and annapurna (neither of whom I particularly like as publishers) had established that niche quite so strongly
like overall I’m more interested in approaching this question from the point of view of “what does it mean for the journeymen, where are the people who actually expect fat salaries for good work going right now, because money and quality are still aligning for some folks out there” and how much of a disconnect does it have from the audience at any given time
The back half of the Humanity trailer made me sit up and pay a little more attention. Interested in the parts where you can play it as a RTS/Pikmin battle mob or tower defense. I kinda want to play a legitimate version of those phone games where you shoot stick doods through number filters to overwhelm an opposing stick dude generator. I just need a mammal brain off lizard brain on game where I might tap a little into the mammal brain.
Unfortunately in the games industry the people getting fat salaries generally do not seek out what you might describe as “good work.” If you asked this to a group of people who are actually at the top of their career they would probably say “I’m gonna go work for a AAA startup that is cloning some Blizzard thing” or they might actually just say “Bungie!” or whatever.
I don’t think it’s entirely that they have no taste. The work people do on these monstrously huge AAA releases is often genuinely difficult and interesting in a way that is perhaps not reflected in the thematic elements or the experience that a discerning player might have. There are so many noodley little jobs in games where you can dig deep into an absolutely unhinged craft problem, learn a ton, grow as a person, whatever, but a ton of them are deep in the guts of huge games that I don’t personally value very much.
My best example of this for my own discipline is the character-swapping stuff in Watch Dogs Legion. That problem was an immensely interesting and complex narrative design problem to solve, and I admire that team with all my heart. They’re incredibly smart and cool people! I wish I could have worked on that problem!! But to get that kind of work, which is genuinely interesting for craft reasons, you do sometimes have to go to a studio which is otherwise making a kind of slop that you would feel very at ease calling “legitimately awful.” Other times, it’s happening at studios which are just trying to make an infinite-money-funnel out of a live game concept.
The problem is that really interesting complex problem solving for later-career folks is very expensive and smaller companies are not often giving everyone the time to do it. The people doing really interesting expensive difficult work on smaller games are paying themselves less so that they can afford to do more of this work.
I fully recognize the core stages will probably be more controlled puzzle experiences and the back half is where they will start breaking the mold to create impact but the fact they’re advertising a stage editor at least inspires the idea of a loose frame work to experiment with.
Game funding has always been different enough from tech funding that it doesn’t work this way. Very few games pitch to investor funds because very few games can plausibly promise returns. It’s closer to movies where boutique labels owned by publishers or midsize independent labels pick up projects hoping to strengthen or diversify their portfolio and get a modest return.
I don’t think there’s ever been a mindset that allows tech startups to attract talent on the promise of moonshot rewards; instead, big-industry game workers who already know they could exit for higher and more stable work jump to a new small studio and take a pay cut to improve creative satisfaction and because they can afford it. Typically they move back into big studio work after the project finishes and the new studio closes.
Similar to film & TV, too, is the burgeoning world of highly-skilled independent workers that haven’t broken into big studio work and probably never will, and the comparative freedom those who have a big studio credit get, along with some forced specialization.
Yeah this was what happened 2-3 years ago when every week there was a new press release about how ex-Riot and ex-Bungie and ex-Blizzard people were all founding new 20-person studios of all their ancient friends to go remake the game that made them famous, or to make a new kind of Live Social Life Sim game to satisfy their ambition for the kind of work they wish they were doing.
They all took pay cuts to do that. But the pay cuts were not super huge and they’re hoping for a payout at the end of this part of their career, haha.
Yeah, I saw a few cycles of that myself. I have to check my own pragmatic expectations on small studio expectations (listen pal I don’t care how great your idea is you need the money upfront), but I do think there’s less hope that a small game will make everyone rich in a veteran-led game studio.
I think there’s a difference in the studios founded by big directors that start with 20 people and grow to 50 – those are people founding real businesses and probably have more serious plans. But they’re also the ones happy to retain most of the chains of expectation that held them down.
i make more money at the smaller studio than i did at the big one and also work on much more interesting work. i have no more desire to work on the big shit anymore!!
Let me tell you, it was a radicalizing event to see how the payscale works at a big company as people start climbing to senior, lead, director level. I certainly knew it but once I knew it,
at some point in my life I will be far enough away from stuff to start talking about the wildest pay shit I have seen, but it is truly heinous what you discover once employees start talking to one another. Anonymous salary spreadsheets are the best way to get everyone talking about unionization lmao
the main shortcoming I have generally observed around labor organizing in this context is that what it can get you (other than job security which you may not actually want as much as you think you do) once you’re already hovering around the six figure threshold is pretty limited, due to psychological barriers as much as anything else, and yet usually the comparisons you wind up having to draw are to people who can job hop for around double that (which is why I really wish the Bernie campaign provision for more cross-sector bargaining in the US has gotten more attention) – speaking as someone who left a unionized role for that reason.
That’s why it’s such a real problem that roles and social groups get divided at bigger studios. QA suffers the worst from this but it’s a problem with junior artists and producers, as well. The rise of temp contracts makes this dramatically worse. Social isolation keeps them segregated and keeps the permanent studio workers from feeling like it’s their problem.
by the way, the prevailing sentiment remains that this is true for big games that can flood marketing, very much Microsoft first-party titles, but not smaller projects (say, <$30m) where raised awareness is still the hardest challenge so more players means more awareness and buyers on traditional storefronts.
Of course, that was true of being in bundles for several years, but it eventually created a strong enough customer mindset that it effected starting sales. It’s unclear if that will trickle out of GamePass while using modern pricing strategies (stable high price with periodic deep discounts).
