While Baldur’s Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.
BG 3 is so stupid, it’s not even optimizing micro transactions for maximum profits
How am I supposed to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment without paying for my dice rolls?
Wonder what a divine crit roll would cost, $5 in combat $3 outside? Heck that’s too complicated $10 for all, $7 for season pass holders.
For those wondering there is no season pass.
They would have to also start charging to save scum. Why would I pay $5 for a crit when I can just reload my save and try until I get one? Every new save is $0.50 and every reload is also $0.50.
Fuck it, exiting the game now costs $2. We need to recoup the opportunity cost of you not being somewhere you can be directly marketed to.
How can I save time and pay to skip playing the game?
Unity CEO has entered the chat
“Leaving money on the table” must be the exec’s perspective.
I’m a game developer. No game developers are panicking about this game. I’ve not played it but I’ll probably play it soon. It looks great but even if it blows my mind it doesn’t cause me to panic. It inspires me. I don’t know of a game developer that gets panicked at the sight of good games. I know monetary goblins that might realize they can’t push heartless games anymore but in the last decade we’ve started to see games really take shape as cinematic masterpieces. Experiences that truly top movies. This is the inevitable next step. Games with more interactions and more meaningful choice out of those interactions.
I think by “some developers”, they’re referring more toward the AAA studios who have spent the last couple decades baking MTX into every nook and cranny they can find in their games, and not indie devs.
Honestly, nowadays it feels more like an indie studio is more of an indicator of quality than AAA. Most of the games I buy and enjoy are indie/small studios.
Honestly, nowadays it feels more like an indie studio is more of an indicator of quality than AAA. Most of the games I buy and enjoy are indie/small studios.
Larian is about as indie/small as Bethesda was when Skyrim released.
AAA games are very rarely as innovative as indie games, it’s all just the same rehashed stuff I feel like. Just whatever is “safe”.
So, I very much agree, the typical AAA stuff from studios like EA, Ubisoft, etc. Don’t interest me.
Although maybe Starfield will be interesting, we’ll see. I didn’t really like Fallout 4 though, I wished the RPGs were a bit more like the more old school ones lol.
I’m willing to be surprised by it, but I’m not optimistic for Starfield. What I’ve seen of it so far looks mainly like they grafted chunks of No Man’s Sky onto a Bethesda Fallout game and are trying hard to pitch it as The Next Big Thing. Frankly, I’d much rather have the next mainline Elder Scrolls game instead, but at this rate I’m going to be 40 before I get to play a sequel to a game that came out in my 20s.
They also lifted chunks of Star Citizen.
I’m fairness, incomplete chunks is all that exists of Star Citizen.
Well, that and a whaling operation on the scale of Victorian England’s.
I am in the SC club and it’s a glitchy, broken, incomplete mess while also being one of the coolest gaming experiences I’ve ever had when it works.
I saw a tier list meme that some teenager made on Discord of every game they’d ever played. You know what didn’t appear once on the list? Not a single Grand Theft Auto game nor a single Elder Scrolls game. I asked them why and they said because GTA5 and Skyrim are “old”
They’re taking so long between releases now that they missed an entire generation of gamers
because it’s more profitable to re-release those games over and over again and sell shark cards
Even so they won’t be panicking. They can just pull a trusty piece of IP out and slap some microtransactions on it and the core target group will be all over it.
There are even great AAA studios out there that aren’t pushing mtx. I just played uncharted 4 and I can’t believe that is almost a decade old. It still holds up. Far better than Rockstar’s red dead redemption 2. That said there is room in the industry for everyone. The indie team that takes 6 years to make high quality games to the AAA studio pushing games out every 2 years. Including small indie studios of 5 people making huge hit survival games and indie games that were made in 9 months but have a lot of heart.
Quality is subjective and I think we’ll start to see our genres break down as people go towards more and more specific definitions. We’ve already seen this a bit with the fps reverting back to doomlike with games like prodeus.
in the last decade we’ve started to see games really take shape as cinematic masterpieces. Experiences that truly top movies.
Metal Gear Solid is from 1998
Sure but I am talking about games as a whole. You see more cinematography today in most games than you saw in MGS 1998. In fact, MGS 1998 has cutscenes and it has gameplay. Games today are removing that divide. Your gameplay is in your cutscene. In MGS1 you’d hit a video and walk away for 10 minutes while listening to it and it’d be fine. Today you hit a cut scene and you stay because you’ll have to shoot someone as the conversation breaks down or the building collapses and you have to jump out.
That’s what I am talking about when I say cinematic masterpieces. They don’t have jarring cuts between a cutscene and gameplay and they feel like cinematic moments while you are never taken out of the gameplay. Eventually, we’ll get to the point where you could show a game in a theater and people wouldn’t know the difference.
Real talk. I don’t game on console anymore, but Metal Gear Solid is the crowning jewel of console game plots.
Ever tried explaining the series to someone unfamiliar with it? You end up sounding like a fuckin meth head coming off a binge, and to me that makes it a narrative worth diving in to.
The video tries to imply it’s industry wide, but only show 3 tweets. I’ve also seen nothing but praise from other game developers I know.
Absolutely what I noticed too. The tweets didn’t seem like they were even “panicking” but just saying to players “Don’t expect this because most studios aren’t going to devote the same resources and ability to the party-based classic isometric-inspired RPG genre because the genre is fairly niche.”
It a headline says “some” in it, it’s clickbait.
I sware that’s happened with all big games of late, Elden Ring, TotK, etc. A few Devs decide to be contraian to the praise and then the media decides it a huge backlash.
That’s just modern media, they often write about the internet exploding about something and then it’s just a few tweets from random people.
A few Devs decide to be contraian to the praise and then the media decides it a huge backlash.
They are not even criticizing the game.
The opinions are basically either “Smaller studios won’t be able to replicate BG3” and “Not all games/RPGs need to be as deep and long as BG3”.
Yeah, it can and should be a warning to studio heads, but as game consumers we absolutely should raise our expectations (and stop buying micro transaction crap). There are plenty of big studios with money who could buy the licence and spend years making the game, but those studios belong to the big publishers who optimise for profit not for game quality.
Man, parts of Death Stranding were so interesting they should have won movie awards. Brilliant supporting character/mocapped actors. Couldn’t agree more on that front.
The bar has been reset and folks like you are eager to meet the challenge :)
I also question how much that bar has truly been raised. I’ve not played Baldur’s Gate but I have seen people treat games like generation-defining games for them to just kind of not exist outside of their bubble. Like Uncharted 4, Last of Us, Spiderman, and God Of War. I just finished Uncharted 4 and it was truly amazing but for a lot of people, it did not raise their standards for the entire industry. I feel like, if anything, Baldur’s Gate 3 will raise standards for AAA RPGs. Then again, it might have just preemptively killed Starfield.
Then again, it might have just preemptively killed Starfield.
They’re pretty different games. They’re both RPGs, and there’s some overlap, but turn based is ultimately very different gameplay than action, and one isn’t going to scratch the itch for the other to a lot of us.
Yeah, honestly, I doubt BG3 is going to cover the same ground for a lot of players. I don’t think people are going to play BG3 and expect more from Starfield. People will understand that they are far different games and BG3’s influence is probably going to stay in turn-based CRPGs rather than being an industry-wide influential game.
I’m fully expecting to go pretty hard at both, and BG3 might have me engaged enough to not jump straight into Starfield at launch, but I need immersive 3D games, too, and except Elden Ring which is it’s own thing (even if it does pretty comfortably check the boxes of ARPG), I’ve been waiting for something of comparable scope to Skyrim that doesn’t have a fatal flaw for a long time. Even as old and janky as it is now, it’s still a scale that’s only matched by a handful of games in the decade since.
The beauty of Bethesda’s flagship titles (namely Fallout and TES) is even if they end up as buggy messes upon release, or have empty maps, the modding community corrects those flaws relatively quickly.
It’s one of the reasons that I, a long-time veteran of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., am not worried if GSC Game World fucks up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. Today, the best part of the first titles is the mods that fix, improve, and add content to the games. It’ll be the same with this one, and I’m excited to see what people do with A-Life 2.0.
I’ve not played…
Then go play it and then judge it. This game is a seismic as Mass Effect 1 or even Doom.
See, that’s what I am talking about. Mass Effect 1 didn’t have a huge impact on the industry as a whole. Doom only had a huge impact on the industry because it was very small and they started licensing out their engine with groundbreaking tech. The industry is huge now.
I remember a lot of people were saying Half-Life: Alyx was a huge industry changer and that it would prove that games are far more enjoyable in VR. It is the best-reviewed VR game on Steam. Yet, now, VR is essentially dead.
I remember when people were saying PUBG just changed the entire industry and we’d never look at it the same again. Which honestly, PUBG did have a large but temporary impact on the games industry. A lot of battle royals came out after. Now though, you’d be lucky to find a successful battle royal release in the last 2 years.
I’ll certainly play it when I can but a 20+ hour game commitment is not what I am honestly looking for anymore. I like far shorter experiences. So overall, it feels like counting the chickens before they hatch. Is Baldur’s Gate 3 really going to stay in people’s minds? Is it going to influence the next games that come out? Are AAA studios building more classic isometric-inspired RPGs because of it?
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Doom did have a significant impact on the industry but only because the industry was small. Doom 2016 was released and people said it was “industry” changing but realistically counter-strike, valorant, and other FPSs are the same as before. I am just cautious between the whole industry changing and realistically only transforming a small subset.
True industry-changing games can be felt today. I will say that Doom is industry changing but again because it was so small. Half-Life 2, was that industry changing? Frankly, between Half-Life and Half-Life 2, the first feels far more influential to me. I’d say Doom’s offshoots are more influential than actual Doom at this point. Minecraft feels industry changing and was around that time indie game development got huge. In part, because of Minecraft’s success. Mass Effect though? I remember it being called a fine RPG with terrible combat mechanics. I think people far remember more about Mass Effect 2 and 3 rather than Mass Effect in 2007. Your article was written in 2021 and the only other one I found was written in 2012 and talked about Mass Effect 3’s ending and how it changed the industry because Bioware listened to fans and caved to change it.
Actually, let me put it this way. An industry-influential game is a game that any game developer should absolutely play even if they are making a console or PC game or mobile game. It doesn’t truly exist anymore but even if you cut off the mobile game developers and stick t just console or PC, BG3 is probably not industry-influential because someone making Slime Rancher or Survival Crafting games doesn’t really need to have knowledge from BG3. BG3 will probably influence RPG games and probably solely RPG games. That’s a subset of games that a lot of developers do not need to worry about. I do not need to go rush out and play BG3 in order to build any game.
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Not even close. I’m playing it right now, well into act 2, and while it is THE ultimate example of what a cRPG should be, that doesn’t necessarily mean the breadth and scope would work in other genres. You’re WAY overestimating the impact this is having on the gaming industry, and that’s evidenced by how other developers are responding to it.
Also. I’ve played through all the Mass Effects (even Andromeda, which I actually enjoyed more) and to say that it was industry-defining is a fanboy take. Full stop. From where I’m sitting ME1 did not introduce anything groundbreaking that hadn’t been done already by that point, and to be honest the early Fallout games had way more gravity when it came to choices and decision-making. I’d say of games in that era, the original Borderlands was more ground-breaking given it kind of kickstarted the looter-shooter genre, and that’s a stretch.You are free to disagree, but to hand wave me away as having “fan boy takes” is pretty rude and does not make me want to engage further. Thanks and have a great weekend. 
Click baiting video. Other devs don’t care. As long as they can make money pumping out mediocre games then they will continue to do so. Acting like this is the first good game to come out in a decade or something.
DEVs do care. As a developer working on something you want to be proud of it. Publishers do not care.
The individuals working on the game might care.
The managers who make the decisions don’t. Doesn’t matter if they are a publisher or the development company itself. It’s a bit blurry these days anyway, what with how easy it is to self publish and how many publishers have their own internal development studios.
The managers who make the decisions is also unclear as power differs on the company. They could care all the way up to the CEO but if the CEO puts an unrealistic deadline, the game has an unrealistic deadline
Looking at how many games have stood in Dragon Age: Origins’ shadow over the past decade, I get the sense that lots of studios wanted to create the true spiritual successor but couldn’t come up with the resources to do so.
Or if not lacking resources, definitely lacking the creative freedom.
I think this is also part of why there’s been such weirdly resilient misrepresentation of games like Star Citizen, from its very inception to this day – publishers know that if these kinds of projects succeed, it raises the bar.
Raising the bar is great to the devs themselves who love doing new stuff, implementing new ideas and changing formulas etc. when they are given the time and resources to do that. Publishers hate it because it means you can’t just pump out the same old tired, formulaic reskins of games and expect everyone to pay a premium.
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Well it’s main competitor also collapsed on it self, maybe it’s just hard to do?
main competitor also collapsed on it self
Elite Dangerous is alive and well, thank you. I still play it.
Developers? Panicking? Developers will rejoice that they don’t have to build these garbage mechanics. Publishers and game studio execs? Yeah they’ll panic
Oh no, if people remember that games are supposed to be good, no one will buy our lootbox-infested crap anymore.
Good.
Loot boxes are so 2017. It’s all about battle passes, engagement, and player retention now.
You know what creates engagement and retains players?
Making a good game that’s actually fun to play instead of focusing on how you’re gonna sell me hats and paint jobs and weaponizing FOMO.
But however will the poor shareholders get their value this quarter?
Someone think of the shareholders!
Oh I am thinking of them… how to murder shareholders in various unique ways… could be neat game idea too!
As much as I prefer this model that actually isn’t what creates engagement and retains players over several games and years. They don’t do it because it’s fun to make predatory things. They do it because it makes them heaps of money. If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it. That’s the sad truth here.
Re: hats and paint jobs…hats dominated TF2 for how long? There was a black market and widespread scamming for cosmetics, that’s how nuts it got.
I wonder if the TF2 “buds” item is still used as a game-trading currency.
Sorry, but the other methods are demonstrably better at it. We didn’t arrive at them by accident. There are outliers like Civilization keeping people hooked for years; the people still playing Skullgirls all these years later sure aren’t doing it for any type of reward system. But the fast track to keeping people playing your game is to use all the scummy bullshit.
I wonder why they haven’t tried the model airport books and comics use, though. We could do it with games at this point. Like, make a series of games that are low budget, relatively short, and easy to pump out very quickly, but with a distinct series identity and maybe a consistent writer/artist across games. Then make a lot of them and get people hooked on the series instead of on 1 mega game.
Even just text adventure style games, wireframe arcade style games, bullethells, shooters like Vampire Survivor & etc, visual novels, syuff like Undertale, whatever? I think it’s clear that a low budget or small team doesn’t equate to unpopularity these days, if the game is made with care and attention to detail.
We do have series now but they’re high budget and long and kind of also trying to be the 1 mega game at the same time.
There’s also a lot of options for reaching new/underserved audience. Like. Make a high quality horse game for once, please? And profit off a bazillion horse girls who’ve been waiting for just that for decades.
Or make games for other countries that don’t have a big video games market yet, maybe. Like sell a console real cheap, at a loss, and then sell games in an area where there’s less competition? Maybe.
One example might be Fnaf (before security breach or help wanted), since they are relatively simple, short games made by one guy, not on high budget. Most of them launched like 3-6 months after each other, keeping up interest in the series.
Something big aaa games also miss is the creativity, since a cool gimick can be implemented as a main mechanic in a 1-2 hour game, since it doesnt over stay its welcome.
So yeah, most games are getting too long for their own good (like ubi sandbox games), not to mention the ‘games as a service’ games.
a series of games that are low budget, relatively short, and easy to pump out very quickly, but with a distinct series identity and maybe a consistent writer/artist across games
Telltale has entered (and exited) the chat.
I wonder why they haven’t tried the model airport books and comics use, though. We could do it with games at this point. Like, make a series of games that are low budget, relatively short, and easy to pump out very quickly, but with a distinct series identity and maybe a consistent writer/artist across games. Then make a lot of them and get people hooked on the series instead of on 1 mega game.
I think that’s exactly what Fortnite and Destiny 2 do, even though I object to the way they do it for so many reasons.
people remember that games are supposed to be good
I’ve played a lot of great games in the past few years 🤷♂️
How many other studies are making games like BG3 or D:OS? Essentially zero.
Larian found a killer formula with D:OS and brought it into the limelight by getting the chance to develop BG3, probably one of the most anticipated games of all times… but also one that some younger generations were nearly blind to. I recall it being a Diablo vs. BG thing back in the day, and while both were awesome, kids weren’t picking BG.
And Larian is working on the backs of giants. They didn’t get egotistical and reinvent the wheel, they went with DnD 5e exactly as they should have. (I’m not sure how closely they’ve followed it, though, if anyone has more information on that. I’m not ready to start it quite yet.)
The stars aligned and Larian is receiving long-due acclaim as a result. I’m very excited for them.
It’s faithful enough to 5e that my partner and I broke out the players handbook to do some long term class planning together. A couple of things are different, like buffs to frenzy barbarian and changes to roleplay feats or spells to have a more mechanical benefit.
But yes, as a long term DM for 5e, it’s faithful to 5e.
Great to hear!
Larian has been absolutely phenomenal through their process on both of these. Kept with the ‘it’ll release when it’s ready’ model, the exception with the alpha/early release on BG3 which I would say helped improve the quality of the Release product that much more, through testing/reports and cash influx without the ‘pre-order today, get whatever you get tomorrow’ mantra.
I agree, they made the absolute most of the early access when it has become so common for that stage to just be a money-grab or an excuse for not finishing. There’s no way it would have been as stable as it is if they hadn’t done that.
The most significant change I noticed was you can cast any number of leveled spells per turn. That’s a pretty significant shift from 5e’s rule of only one leveled spell (excluding using action surge if you dip into fighter) per turn.
However it makes the player stronger so I doubt anyone is really complaining about it.
Oh, really? That seems imbalanced, but like I said I have yet to play so what do I know.
It gets a little silly if you exploit it. Sorcerer can get pretty ridiculous.
I’ve been playing BG3 and perhaps I’m misunderstanding but you only have one action and one bonus action per turn and you only have so many spell slots per caster. Unless you have a leveled spell as an action and a separate leveled spell as a bonus action and enough spell slots for both you’d be hard pressed to cast more than a single spell per turn per character
It’s been a while since I played 5e, but if I remember correctly you could do some fuckery with Haste and/or Sorcery Points if you don’t follow that rule.
Plenty of spells cast as a bonus action. With a cleric I can cast Spirt Guardians and Spiritual Weapon on the same turn. Or polymorph and mass cure wounds. It makes a significant difference for bonus action spells.
BG3 is what games used to be and what they should have been like. It bring me back to my KotOR1/2, and Witcher 1 days. It’s great.
No… no its not.
Other developers appreciate art.
Publishers are probably sweating a bit. But as a dev I love seeing any game succeed like this!
The expectations have been set for a long time. BG3 isn’t the first good game. It’s just the first in a while, after mountains of AAA garbage ultimately driven by shareholders and MBAs.
The sad thing is: those people are so clueless that they dont see they’d make more money by just not getting in the way of a good dev team.
The problem with your second statement is that it is patently untrue.
That is why rocketed has been milking GTA microtransactions. The GachaGaming reddit tracks a series of microtransaction-heavy mobile games. They make hundreds of millions (as much as an entire AAA very hyped game release) quarterly through microtransactions.
Companies have come out and said that microtransactions are more profitable than making new games which is why they are shoehorned into every damn piece of game possible by AAA studios.
I hate microtransactions and I wish it wasn’t the case, but stupid kids with daddy’s credit card and stupid gamers and whales make bad games with microtransactions very profitable.
What if games have to be good, not just eventually but on the day we sell it to someone.
Worse yet, what if we have to do some QA on PC and optimize our games instead of just hoping that they don’t continuously crash on launch?
“Oh no fans might demand good games at release! The horror!”
Won’t anybody think of the stockholders‽
Making bad developers panic maybe?
I can’t imagine something like this makes the Redfall devs feel good about themselves.
Actually Redfall likely doesn’t make the Redfall devs feel good about themselves.
Wasn’t the whole thing with Redfall that it was Bethesda mismanagement? I’m not going to put that on the Redfall team. Does make me completely disinterested in buying any Bethesda games that aren’t mainline TES though.
Looks like it went way deeper than that…
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/redfall-development-lost-70-percent-staff-arkane-austin-prey/
That’s just part of the mismanagement.
What worries me is that one of the leakers who was leaking shit about Redfall prior to release who was 100% correct about everything, also said he saw Starfield and it was in worse shape than Redfall was. It’s obviously coming out later, but not that much later.
Starfield is a Bethesda game proper and it’s wise to have appropriate expectations. :)
I forget, on launch wasn’t Fallout COMPLETELY broken for Nvidia cards? Or was it AMD? I can’t remember, it was one or the other…
While true, the state of Redfall was far worse than the expectation for a mainline Bethesda RPG (comparatively), even as bad as they have been in the past. So saying Starfield was in worse shape still has some hefty weight to it, if the leak is true. It will have at least had more time in the oven for things to be fixed up a bit more in line with normal expectations. And that’s my hope.
Plus, Microsoft needs a win, especially after Redfall. They need this one to be hit outside the park.
That’s upsetting. I was never going to play Starfield, but I want games coming out to be good. We don’t need another dumpster fire like the CP2077 launch was.
Such a shame, I was immensely sold on the initial trailer. I did not even end up playing it
For what it’s worth, I thought it’d be horrible from the reviews and ended up trying it anyway, and I actually really enjoyed it. shrug Rather feels like I played a different game than everyone else.
I’m sure it’s partly the difference between starting with rock bottom expectations vs starting with Prey/Dishonored expectations, but I think even without that I’d like it.
Also, it has no micro transactions! Zero. Not even for cosmetics - those are just unlockables. Credit where credit is due.
Anyway if you liked the look of the trailer and you have gamepass, it’s worth at least trying, imo.
Honestly I hope this does indeed set a new gold standard. Probably not with the whole early access thing, though. It’s a thing that needs to go away.
Early access worked well for them, part of the start of the game was able to be play tested, the community got to give feedback, and they actually listened, its how it should be done
Yeah but not how the remaining whole industry treats it.
I saw literally no outcry regarding BG3 and early game bugs. Comparing it to CP2077 it was a stellar release in terms of PR.CP2077 didn’t have early access tho? How is this an argument against early access
I don’t think Early Access should go away as it’s not inherently bad in and of itself.
What’s bad about it is when it’s used to sell a totally unfinished piece of shit that stays an unfinished piece of shit indefinitely.
EA is an immensely useful tool for game devs, the issue is EA as an excuse to ship unpolished games or to leave games unfinished forever. Neither of which are problems intrinsic to early access, they’re just bad business practice that should be shunned like any other
As a gamedev: Early Access was useful for devs, back when it was real Early Access. Think: Kerbal Space Program (the first, not the second).
Nowadays it’s mostly a marketing tool, that allows to generate the hype for launch twice… Publishers and players expect “Early Access” games to be feature complete and polished before the “Early Access” launch…
And again, Larian Studios used EA as intended, which allowed them to publish a good, polished game.
As did Supergiant, with Hades. When Early Access is used properly, it can help make a great game.
I liked what Daemon X Machina did, where they released a demo, sent out questionnaires to everyone who downloaded it, published a video about the results save how they were planning to act on it, and a few months later released a new demo with a new questionnaire.
Yep, that’s probably the most helpful thing for devs. This sadly often conflicts with publishers’ announcement schedules. There are, however, companies that do NDA-protected play-tests, where you get the same kind of information, without publicly announcing the game.
Ubisoft did (does?) it to a degree with their Rainbow 6 TTS (beta) servers to test the sandbox and did so for a few technical alpha/beta releases acting as selected pewviews to see how the game is received and where bugs are.
How does it cost millions of dollars to make a current AAA game, and they’re rarely worth it?
If you have 5,000 people on your payroll for a game what the hell are they doing? Every game should be fantastic.
I love indie and AA games. Smaller teams. More focus. More fun. Usually more quality content.
It’s an issue of time and scalability. Going from 100 employees to 200 employees wont make the game in half the time. And corporate accounting would rather have 2 mediocre games per year than 1 extremely good game every 2 years, even if it sold 4 times as well since revenue is analyzed within fiscal years and financing isn’t free. Capitalism sucks.
Capitalism sucks.
All the greatest games ever made were created in capitalistic economies so i cannot see how that is a determining factor. I don’t know what games your thinking of. Tetris?
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Counter point: Baldur’s Gate is selling well within capitalism because it satisfies what the customer wants, which capitalism rewards in an environment with lots of competition, and video games have lots of competition. As big publishers like Ubisoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard, and Take Two have scaled back their offerings of lots of different types of games, including the type of RPG that Larian makes, it’s no surprise that the likes of Larian are rewarded for making that type of game. It’s why companies like Embracer, Anna Purna, Devolver, and Paradox are going to be growing a ton over the next decade.
Trust me, I get it and I agree, #capitalism sucks. Mostly.
But that’s not how it works.
You can’t just take an arbitrary event and claim it came to be despite the circumstances, not because of them.
Like, that’s not how causality works.
Besides, It’s a way stronger argument to point at the overwhelming amount of bad games and bad features and say those got produced under capitalism and that’s why it’s bad full stop.
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I think you’re missing the point. They’re just saying the incentive structure of capitalism doesn’t necessarily encourage the best types of games. We see this with borked EA launches, predatory MTX, loot boxes, battle passes, etc
We don’t exactly have many non-capitalistic economies.
But we have games that people made outside of the incentives of capitalism. i.e., because they wanted to make the game they wanted to make. This is what has created the absolute best games in existence. Not the incentive of money.
Was terraria made for the purposes of money? Was outer wilds? No. They were passion projects. Of course they had to earn money, because you need to earn money to survive, but that wasn’t their primary goals. Contrary to games such as call of duty or whatever. Which are just incredibly bland in comparison.
I mean see how much microtransactions, loot boxes, etc. Is ruining the atmosphere of games and exploiting the hell out of people and kids. Don’t tell me devs are putting that in because that is what their dream game would contain. No, they put it in purely because of capitalistic incentives. Would you argue that that is good?
Making a good product is an incentive of capitalism too. Microtransactions, battle passes, loot boxes, and other “live service” trappings dilute once-good products because people are often too attached to brands. As people tire of bad products, good ones can come along and thrive, which is what Battlebit appears to be doing for Battlefield fans, what Baldur’s Gate 3 appears to be doing for RPGs, and what Elden Ring and the last two Zelda games are doing for open world games; what Cities: Skylines did for SimCity fans and maybe what Life By You could do for Sims fans. There’s money to be made for making a good version of something that the reigning champs screwed up, abandoned, couldn’t think of, or didn’t bother to bring to market; that’s capitalism.
Do you think those games wouldn’t have been made without capitalism?
All of those examples are driven by people wanting to make a good game because that is their passion.
If they were given infinite resources to make a game, and would gain nothing else beyond just a decent standard of living or whatever, do you think they wouldn’t made them? Because I think they would.
How hypothetical are we getting here? Somehow we live in a world where everyone has infinite resources? Capitalism just distributes the finite ones we have to things that people buy. A government can do that as well, but we don’t have a great track record of them being able to buck the realities of where those resources need to go. If there’s a UBI, you could end up with more games of the scope of Stardew Valley, or once tools and game engines get to be good enough, you could end up with more games that are feasible to be made by one or two people in a handful of years like that one was. But Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, Zelda…no, probably not. I can’t predict the future, but they seem to be impossible to be made by small teams even with magical game engines that automate a lot of work that went in to make them.
Once you get beyond the profit motive, you’re now at this point where you need to hire more people. Anything beyond really small teams are going to have a hard time sticking to someone else’s vision unless one person is the boss calling the shots; otherwise known as the one with capital, paying those other talented people to work toward that goal. Of the 600 people making Baldur’s Gate 3, I’ll bet 550 of them disagreed on lots of directions that it went in, and it just becomes an insurmountable problem to wrangle that many people otherwise and keep them on track. If you don’t need the money and you disagree with what the boss is doing, you’ll just do your own project instead.
Meanwhile, we just got a Titan Quest II announcement, which I’ll bet is a reaction to the general direction Blizzard has been going in since Diablo Immortal was announced, much like I was saying earlier. There’s also another perspective I’d like to add on here, which proves both of our points. Ryan Clark of Brace Yourself Games, makers of Crypt of the NecroDancer, used to do a YouTube show called Clark Tank, similar to Shark Tank, talking about how to make indie games that make money. Creatives have tons of passion projects they want to make, and you’ll never get through all of them in a lifetime. However, you know types of games that you would like to make, that you can observe are also making money, that you’re confident you can deliver while they’re still popular, so that you can profit, expand, and repeat the cycle. In a sense, passion projects and what the market is asking for via where they’re spending their money.
My point was that capitalism and its incentives do not create good games.
Capitalism rewards profit at any cost, and nothing more. In the end this allows for cash grabs and terrible working conditions, which the industry is riddled with. Good games would still have gotten made without these incentives.
There’s many assumptions in this text, and it ignores great games that were financial flops (or couldn’t get made in the first place), and terrible ones (like gacha games or basically the whole mobile games ecosystem) which are greatly rewarded and successful. There are so many resources wasted on objectively not good things for players such as how to exploit their psyche to spend money which compromises the game design, or resources spent on stuff like marketing just because that’s what pays back, instead of spending those on making a better game.
I would argue that capitalism’s incentives hampers the creation of good games if anything. Because now instead of thinking what makes a game good, devs are instead forced or incentivized to think what makes money. And they are very much not the same thing.
I think there is a difference between “capitalism” and “capitalism”.
I think a more nuanced argument is that better games come from companies that are not primarily driven by the quarterly revenue cycle of Wall Street, that is defined as “capitalism”.
I think it’s more of a hit-and-miss, and good corporate leadership is the kind that people forget it’s there when good games come out. I mean CDPR had a CEO both when Witcher 3 was the thing, and also when Cyberpunk 2077 was the thing that flopped. Obviously, people were more interested in the beancounters’ influence in the latter case.
Without capitalism Tetris would have remained an obscure piece of shareware probably vaguely known outside of ex-soviet nations. It’s only the desire to monitise the IP that saw it on every platform under the sun and packaged with every Gameboy.
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Yeah, the creator didn’t profit at the time because of communism and their belief that his creation belonged to the state. If he had been in a capitalist country at the time he could have copyrighted his game asap and exploited it for profit himself.
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At the very least a smart creator in the US can go to a solicitor and make sure he isn’t being mugged off before they sign a deal, you didn’t have that that with the Soviet Government.
Yes lots of creators have been screwed by the people that worked for, notably in the comics field. But a lot of the time it’s because they signed a contract having no inkling how big the work would be.
I know that’s probably rhetorical, but probably a similar problem to modern movies where (as described in the video
Why Modern Movies Suck - They're Too Expensive) they are going after spectacle (rather than story or other elements) and due to cost they must make a ‘safe’ product to stay profitable, where a bland but universally palatable product will sell more tickets/copies than a stellar niche thing.I’d also add that companies know they can usually ride the success of their own name/brand recognition. Even worse here with games because of pre-ordering, early-access as a product, and crowd-funding (which some wildly successful publishers still do–on top of unpaid self-promotion and all the other things–because people still think of them as indie).
The main problem is they drop $20mil on effects and star faces and fucking spend $20/hr for a fucking committee to write a story in a week that wouldn’t pass a screenwriting 101 course.
The problem with movies and games these days is where the money goes, not how much of it there is.
games are art projects at the end of the day and there are often many non-art people (or just people without the right skills or vision) making executive decisions on direction, deadlines etc.
Usually they don’t. Something like Horizon Forbidden West credits almost 3500 people even though Guerilla Game has less than 500 employees, most of the rest is absolutely massive bloat from different outsourced teams and Sony departments - like the “Head of Opportunity Markets Business Operations Tim Stokes from Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.: Global Business Operations” was undoubtedly very important for the development of the game.
As for Baldurs Gate 3, Larian Studios currently has 450 employees in 6 different locations, so they are actually around the same size as Guerilla. I wouldn’t be surprised if the credits end up being well above a thousand people (D:OS2 has around 500 credits even though Larian back then had only 130 people).
Battlebit has 4.
4 people. That’s it.
