How about you get talented people to make the games they want to make, like they did before it became a big business, back when gaming was actually exciting?
The good old days were also exploitative and gross. You just didn’t know it yet.
There were scrope-creep / endless-crunch horror stories back in the ZX Spectrum era.
You assume too much. Those were problems brought on by the intrusion of big business after gaming became more profitable than movies, and precursors to the current blight. I’m talking about when gaming was almost entirely run by hobbyists doing it on their own time and dime.
The only time video games were dominated by motivated individuals was the initial explosion of D&D ripoffs on college mainframes.
Everything commercial has an undercurrent of taking those bright young minds and wringing them dry. Atari 2600 programmers were told they contributed as much as the guy who put the cartridge in the cardboard box. Atari’s best left to found Activision, which was all about excited artistic et cetera, until they did the same shit. Activision’s best left to found Accolade, which was all about et cetera, until Accolade’s best left to found Acclaim, which-- you get the idea.
Even the proto-indie boom on British microcomputers, famously starring a lot of teenage bedroom coders, was about tape duplicators making bank and paying those children a pittance. The kids who rose above that and started proper businesses had even odds for burning out, going bankrupt, or endlessly cranking out shoddy ports of licensed games.
Things are fucked right now. But they were kinda fucked back then, too.
Issue is that in the NES days, an entire game was just one to ten people and less than 1MB of data. Not much overhead risk at all. Now games are 100 people or more and 10,000MB. Not many want to invest millions on so much risk.
It’s also why there’s so many good “old looking” indie games. Only 1 in 50 ends up being really, really, good, but the overhead to making the game is a tiny drop in the bucket.
Not really true, Bethesda ballooned from ~70 around Skyrim’s launch to ~500 for Starfield.
The outer world’s dev team from obsidian was around 80.
Bungie has/had (bit unclear if this this before or after the ~200 layoffs) around 850 for Destiny
I think the AAA devs are proving that more devs don’t make things better. And Animal Well is 31MB, but I think that’s a bit of an exception really.
Not really to what? I can’t really tell what part of my Comment you disagree with.
Sorry, I’m probably nit-picking. My point was team size and game size gave ballooned, but it’s not broadly a AAA thing, it’s a very recent issue (last 10 years). They did just find when they hadn’t got so insane, but not much before the numbers you listed. Halo 3 and Skyrim’s are beloved games made by studios of around 100 devs.
Shows photo with deep cleavage.
The user feedback has spoken
Users: “Stop spending so much on development. Smaller teams, shorter cycles, more games. Stop making everything an all-or-nothing gamble.”
NEXON Games boardroom: “I think it’s trying to communicate!”
Pika pika
Indy games are art. Find an artist(s), pay them a living wage, and let them do their art largely undisturbed, guided by a vision of what the game should be, so they keep working towards the same goal. Let them learn from their mistakes and make their next game better. That leads to Baldur’s Gate 3.
CEO of an AAAAAAA+ game developer/publisher: “No games are a product. The most important thing is that the line goes up, so we check what the user feedback is and listen to the loudest crowd that wants the same old shit, only to complain that they always get the same old shit. Also, hire cheap, treat people terribly and get everyone out of the industry as quickly as possible, and none of that art nonsense - I mean, how am I going to sell that to the shareholders, they just want an estimate of how many skins we will sell in 2025 so they will agree to my pay rise?”
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”
And the world would have been better for it .
I’m starting to feel this way more every day
“we may not know how much money we can make by developing a certain game, but we can get a feeling as to what kind of game will make users happy. That’s why we test games even in the middle of development and collect feedback.”
That sounds a lot like using data collection to design games. And hey, it’s hard to create art. Art can fail even at its best.
