STUNLOCK THE PRESSES: combo breaking news (Part 1)

[shelter]

thinking about these bits together:

@thecatamites

i feel like the value of AAA games has actually been in decline since the late 90s! not necessarily their quality, or length, or etc - but i feel like part of how these things have always rhetorically justified their pricetag is with the idea that they’re selling a glimpse of the future, of the transfigured videogame landscape to come where these things have finally escaped their own built-in awkwardness and weirdness to attain the fluid dreamlike qualities of, like, the VR episode of murder she wrote. it’s not hard to suggest that this is coming when every few years sees dramatic changes in graphics capability etc, but how about now that the vision of the future they’re selling is essentially just the present with more polygons?

@geist

this just means the AAA gaming world is going to further niche itself, because they have to bank on the fact that the people who buy these games want exactly what they are currently getting. the gap between the cost of these games, and the cost of every other kind of game (from high end indie games, to free to play multiplayer games, to mobile games, to retro games, etc) is already so large that the people who play them have to increasingly love them (which is also one of the reasons why every review of every AAA game is positive.) if you’re paying $60 twice a month for access to the sony and ubisoft prestige open world extravaganza instead of just playing fortnite and minecraft and counterstrike and league like everyone else, these publishers have to assume that there is a very specific reason why.

@BustedAstromech

The big change in the past generation (Xbox One/Playstation 4) is that all the smaller titles got eaten. So the biggest games have managed to increase sales despite the userbase not increasing because they just don’t have high-budget competition anymore. My studio is composed of 3 studios that merged in 2011 and had previously been releasing 2 games every 3 years. Since then they’ve done 2 and a half games in 9 years. But each game is only competing with 1 or 2 games per year like it! So…

like, it feels like the aaa game industry has intentionally turned itself into an extremely profitable cadaver, where fewer devs make fewer large scale games with less competition, and the userbase stays static in a quasi-“niche” way as the profits increase, and like generational technical development also grows increasingly asymptotically niche in terms of who’s interested and popular/industrial investment in “the future,” and everything slows down and thins out on purpose while only growing internally, and that’s what makes money. but the majority of the non-aaa mainstream games geist cited that “everyone else” plays (fortnite and minecraft and counterstrike and league etc.) are also like really old by previous industry standards? obviously there are new entries into that group that blow up for some period of time every so often, and a constant stream of shit getting manufactured, but in practice it feels similarly corpselike - the difference is that they do have to expand their player bases, but because they’re detached from any of the traditional industry models around generational progress and external rather than internal novelty, they can stay dominant as platforms indefinitely as long as they continue to grow and offer enough entertaining variety for their users. i guess this is sustainable but it’s incredibly boring and insular. well that’s capitalism or whatever