Is there an indie games bubble?
Is there an indie games bubble?
by Gita Jackson on Sep 27, 2023 // And does it matter if it bursts?
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No. There will always be a demand for new videogames and indie studios make the best ones.
If anything the AAA bubble is bursting right now.
The AAA bubble burst a while ago. Complete AAA games rarely release anymore because studios keep trying to push the boundary on scope and size instead of focusing on quality.
The limited size of indie games means they'll always have the capability to ship complete. They don't always because the teams are much smaller and less experienced, but I've always found more enjoyment out of a passionate indie game than a corporatized AAA.
What's with this focus on the word "complete"? Usually I just see it from people salty about the idea that a game ever gets DLC, but we're rarely seeing the kinds of things we saw in the late 00s and early 2010s where games would have a "missing chapter" or whatever, so if something about modern games is being described by how "complete" they are, it seems like a bad descriptor to me.
More that now that patches are easy to implement across any platform you don’t have to ship something that works well day 1 anymore, nor does it need everything that should be out at release. Often that means people release a game well before it should have released and charge full price for a game that is literally incomplete. Great example would be No Man’s Sky which was “complete” (based on their advertisements) maybe 3 years ago(whenever they implemented actual multiplayer finally)? And came out 7 years ago.
There's a kind of qualitative difference between a game that was built to be played and later has DLC released for it and a game that is essentially built as a DLC platform. The latter has become extremely common in AAA games and it winds up feeling incomplete because the insertion points for planned DLC are usually quite noticable.
I think this definition gets diluted by those who would call something like a Paradox game incomplete just because there are only so many features you can build for a systems-driven game like that in a few years of development time, and they naturally expand on it over time. But out of dozens of expansions, there are people who say all of them are absolutely necessary to get the "complete" experience when realistically they'd never engage with even half of the expansion features anyway.
What evidence do you have that AAA’s are a bursting bubble?
I agree with that person as long as we're continuing to use the qualifier "if anything". AAA studios have thoroughly undiversified themselves and are looking for buyers from the few other companies wealthy enough to afford them, hence Activision's and Zenimax's sales to Microsoft. EA, Square Enix, and Ubisoft were all looking for buyers, and it wouldn't surprise me if Take Two was as well. EA's got sports and Battlefield and little else. Square Enix has Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest and little else. Ubisoft has Assassin's Creed and Far Cry and little else. On and on. They spent the last decade not making small bets on new IPs to replace these IPs once their time in the spotlight wanes. It's the very thing that Phil Spencer was talking about in that leaked e-mail about what he sees as a strength of Game Pass and a weakness of how AAAs chose to respond to the changing market.
You're forgetting The Sims, a veritable cash cow for EA, where every tiny add-on costs $15+.
But otherwise, I agree.
They're pivoting to free to play, so that series may have waned as well. I'm sure it's still profitable, but you don't switch to free to play, especially for what is ostensibly a single player game that doesn't rely on player counts, if everything is going well.
Free to play with microtransactions is just the way to go for games that can be monetized in that manner. The lower barrier to entry means far more downloads and the piecemeal monetization means that players will frequently end up paying more than $60 alongside the larger player base.
Compared to the business they used to with the Sims, free to play makes it much, much harder to break even. You're hoping to monetize more off of a smaller percentage of your players. 95% of people will never pay in a free to play game, and the Sims games would sell over 10 million units each, handily, plus expansions. But I know that plenty of people would pirate the expansions, so EA probably sees that as a threat that they need to lock behind an internet connection in a server-based game, and they'll likely destroy the series' profitability in the process.
Oof. If that's true, I feel bad for all the folks who have invested so much time into the series.
I don't think you need to. The series is turning to something else entirely, with a completely different focus. I already think any previous episode is more fun than 4.
The folks who loved the old games probably won't think 5 is a free replacement for these. They'll just think, it's okay, I'm going to spend a dozen hours trying to make the old one kinda run.
Square has final fantasy, dragon quest, kingdom hearts, octopath traveler, forspoken, and a myriad of smaller games you aren’t familiar with including lots of mobile game sales. They’ve got like 15 2023 releases on their Wikipedia. They’re doing fine and don’t belong on this list lol
They've got 10 games for 2023, and about half of them are either Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy (Kingdom Hearts, btw, is basically still Final Fantasy as it relates to IP). If you're making small bets to find the next big thing to replace your big franchises, you need to make a lot more of those small bets, like publishers used to do 20 years ago and like mid-sized publishers are doing now. Rumor has it they divested themselves of former Eidos studios to make themselves a more attractive purchase for Sony, which fell through but resulted in exclusivity deals like Zenimax did.
Didn't final fantasy perform poorly, and forspoken was so bad, they closed down the entire branch working on it?
FF16 sold over 3mill week 1 so I imagine it’s doing fine. We’ll see next sales update.
Forspoken hasn’t done very well but the point is they’re publishing a ton still.