2024 Was the Year the Bottom Fell Out of the Games Industry
2024 Was the Year the Bottom Fell Out of the Games Industry
From layoffs to the return of Gamergate, video games—and the people who make and play them—had a rough year.
The elephant in the room here is that hardly anyone has a disposable income to spend $90 on an AAA game title and potentially thousands in hardware on which to play it.
Shelter, food, healthcare and power costs have increased too much. When the basics can't be met, people stop spending money on these additional things because it makes the difference between eating or not for a week.
I'm pretty stoked I was able to get Witcher 3 this year for under $8
I’ve been saying for a while that the best thing that can happen to standard, microtransaction-free, singleplayer video games is: An increase in the US Minimum Wage.
Sadly, that doesn’t help international markets as much. I really wish we could get rid of key resellers so that games sold somewhere like Africa can be fairly measured out in terms of loaves of bread, not US dollars.
To put it bluntly, if they make something I want to buy, I'll participate, but this live service shit isn't anything I want to buy, so.
They'll learn eventually, I don't care what they make. It's all mostly cookie cutter garbage. Support devs going against the grain like GSC and indie devs. Let AAA die. What's it alive for, constant disappointment?
Let AAA die.
I don't give a shit generally about AAA games but the value of having large stable game development studios goes beyond the direct games they create, this is a crucial stepping stone for would be indie game development studio founders detonated and destroyed and mark my words the collapse of stable, consistent employment in the game development industry will play right into a brutal deleveraging of worker's negotiating power and lead to further consolidation in the industry around AAA studios that have to try less and less hard (and pay their developers less and less) because very few indie studios will be able to weather these manufactured and designed shocks to the system.
This is the same old strategy cut throat robber barons/capitalist oligarchs always use to steal from workers.
This. There are very few major games that remotely get my attention nowadays. I've spend most of my gaming time and money on indies
This is what I hate with the state of the gaming industry now. They've instilled the mindset in me, where there are games I would've ideally love to get and play. But, the skepticism of my mind is ever-churning, so I'm working around to find out what about the game that I will not like about it than there is to like about it. Like whether the game was made by a studio who'll be shut down later because of unrealistic expectancies. Whether the game is going to one day be free-to-play.
Just so many guesses and it's robbed me of the simple concept of just getting a game, playing it and enjoying it. That's what the gaming industry has done, is bastardize what I should be looking for out of games. Because the industry just fucks one thing up after another every damn year from shutting down studios, passing up on better projects in favor of this shitty ass live-service, MTX ridden one and flaunting how well they've taken advantage of every gullible "GAMURRR" that wastes their money on feeding into the shit that is served to them.
I think that's where Indie games have really stepped in. There's been a lot of good indie games that are just a nice complete experience on their own. And with them being so much cheaper it's harder for AAA games to compete.
Instead of go woke go broke, I'd argue it's be greedy, become needy.
the return of Gamergate
Really?
I feel like a perpetually online person, but maybe not as much as I think? I missed this one, but I also don't spend a lot of time on 4chan these days either.
I envy you. If you search for "DEI", "Sweet Baby"/"SBI", or "modern audiences" in Steam forums or on Google, you'll find it.
Dud you'll have people posting shit in steam forums who haven't even bought the game bitching and moaning.
I saw a post on the forum for a game I've been playing recently and it was "One Year Anniversary: never forget the dev added a pronoun selector at character creation. Never buying this garbage."
Game in question is Lunacid, and apparently the dev added the pronoun selector specifically to bait the trolls. And the pronouns are literally never used in any capacity. It's just flavor text.
ETA: I believe steam forums should be locked unless you've bought the game in question and played for at least like an hour or so. The damn points shop makes you play your games for at least 2 hours before you can get any of that useless shit, so why not the forums?
Traditional media likes to call "gamergate" to being called out for "access journalism". That's also why they took the uncivility of a vocal few to represent a larger movement that demanded more transparency in games journalism. Turns out, if you have a megaphone, you seldom want to share the power to use it.
Disclaimer: this is my opinion as an IT worker and dev, not fact. Please be constructive.
I feel with the folks losing their jobs or seeing their indie studio crash and burn.
That said, I feel like they’re starting to pay the price for letting a monopoly dictate game sales (as benevolent and popular this monopolist is, I know I will again be brigaded for this).
As another commenter said, the industry still tries to go ahead with triple or even quadruple A games, push hype and sell to underage gamers practically gambling games with hero faces.
Then there arent enough unions to hold companies to a standard because in the IT world as a whole, people are used to their privilege. „Trust me bro“ is still seen as a valid strategy in this business.
All while customers get put on pink glasses to make them oblivious to the fact that IT work is just a craft, like carpentry, but less known. The amount of buzz words and bullshit in the industry is appalling and needs to go, double time.
A dev should be judged by their ability to develop, not play corporate mindgames or „speak the lingo“.
While I agree with just about all of your points, there's one thing I'm not clear on. Who's the monopolist in your scenario? The console space has 3 competitors and on the PC side, you've got several more. I don't see any of the big PC or console companies dictating game development trends. That seems to me to come from the publishers chasing the next big thing, or trying to make their own version of the last big thing. The rest of what you said is spot on, though. We need stronger unions and we need to demystify what developers do. And we absolutely need to tell the tech bro types to fuck off and stop stinking up the place.