this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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Alright, new theory:
You guys don't play too many games, right?
For the record, the best selling games of this year had fewer live service games than last year and the year before. The top of the charts was consistently single player games without microtransactions and this is one of the main GOTY candidates of 2023 following trends from "business schools" straight into... eh... a climactic absurdist musical number.
I'd tag that as spoilers if I could because, as I said, it's increasingly clear you guys haven't been playing this stuff.
You're right, the best selling games have been single-player focused. So why has Ubisoft, EA, Square Enix, ActivisionBlizzard, Warner Bros, and Sony Interactive been pushing to jump on the recent extraction shooter trend? Hell, find me a triple A publisher that does not have a live-service game being maintained, I'll wait.
If you're argument is that AAA is not wasting millions of dollars on chasing trends, you'll have to find more evidence than all their projects being failures.
Larian
That just proves other strategies have success. AAA bullshit and good games can both be successful.
Uhhh… k? BG3 is not a AAA game?
It's AAA in a sense, but it isn't bullshit. In fact, indie games can be bullshit in the form of asset flips, knock offs, and uninspired crap. Budget doesn't directly determine bullshit, it's just that AAA bullshit is a more noticeable issue.
Regardless, great media makes money alongside trash media. That's how it's always been, we just don't remember the trash as much.
Because they're not all failures, they're also making single player games and you're assuming that the one example of publishers wanting to tick a box in their lineup is somehow all they (let alone the entire industry) are producing.
The fact that people are making extraction shooters doesn't mean they're not making anything else. Warner's biggest game this year is a narrative RPG. EA's biggest game is (as always) a sports game, and their highest reviewed games are a Star Wars single player action game and a single player horror game. Sony's biggest game is an open world superhero action game. I don't know about Ubi's sales off the top of my head, but what they've shipped recently is a 2D metroidvania and a throwback to classic Assassin's Creed.
I don't understand why you want publishers to be judged by what they don't make, as opposed to what they make. Major publishers are billion dollar companies that put out many games. I have zero problems with EA running Apex Legends if I get to play Dead Space. I have zero problems with Sony trying to get a live service game going if they keep making insanely refined narrative action games. I don't enjoy every game people make, but I don't hate that people make games that are not for me if there are also games for me happening at the same time.
Baldur's gate 3 wasn't the top earning video game this year, just the top selling one. The business school cronies only care about the profit, not the quality.
Different metrics, though.
I do have to disagree that this chart proves what you say it proves, though. Arguing that Rockstar in particular does not care about quality is... a sizzling hot take.
Look, there are plenty of grifters in gaming, particularly those coming from the tech side of things (not "business school" so much, honestly). And yeah, there's a lot of money to be made and the majors are going to want a piece of that pie. Which is fine, because I want them to have money to also go after the big flashy triple-A single player stuff.
But it's obviously not true that all you get from the games industry is cookie cutter GaaS stuff. It's less true by the minute. Which is not to say I want online games to go away, either. I will actively play some of the games on that list. On purpose. I don't want them to be the only thing there is to play... but fortunately they're not, so... cool?