What’s Happening in the Game Industry?

[rss334]

Here's my take broken down to simple form.  Bigger game studios are under pressure whether from shareholder or capital investors to turn a quick profit.  What starts out as a great studio ends up switching focus on great games to complete focus of turning a profit.  The managers are forced to meet unreasonable deadlines and deliver X product(s) per quarter to get the cash register ringing. 

As a result the quality of these games from the studios continues to decline.  Gamers are waking up to this, how many sequels now like Kerbal Space 2 and Skylines 2 have all negative ratings, these are not the only ones.  These studio begin to lose money and the first thing they do is cut more staff only adding to their problems. I'll take Paradox as an example, look at the content they are now pumping out almost monthly for EU4, CK3, Stellaris - I'm guessing they are losing money on everything else they are releasing.   I fully expect to them fold in the next year.

All because they lost focus on creating great games with good content and instead are chasing the dollar.

So the root of the problem is simply GREED.  Its no different than other industry, the companies get bigger and stop caring about their employees and customers, quality suffers, layoffs ensue .... all to make that might DOLLAR any way they can!

[ArizonaTank]

While all of this seems gloomy, I think there is a counter-trend, also driven by technology. Game engines and development aids are getting easier and easier for the average person to use with only basic levels of training. AI is only making this more true. Add in the relatively open nature of distribution platforms like Steam, and the game market is being somewhat democratized.

For strategy and wargames, the sector we care about the most, the past couple of years has seen a small handful of great games, produced by single, or small team indie devs.

Sure this means you get the occasional junk game, or abandon-ware. But in strategy and wargames, the big studios have definitely been given a run for their money.

Still, it is a hard business for these indie devs, and based on extrapolated Steam sales figures, it does not seem that many of them make a living wage.

https://www.grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=27380.0

The main, pop-culture games (where the real money is) are a different story of course.

[Gusington]

More bad news:

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/microsoft-announces-4-studio-closuresincluding-arkane-austin-and-tango-gameworks-creators-of-prey-and-hi-fi-rush-respectively/?utm_source=pushly&utm_campaign=MANUAL

Arkane: Austin developed Dishonoured :/

[rss334]

More bad news:

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/microsoft-announces-4-studio-closuresincluding-arkane-austin-and-tango-gameworks-creators-of-prey-and-hi-fi-rush-respectively/?utm_source=pushly&utm_campaign=MANUAL

Arkane: Austin developed Dishonoured :/

GREED and Profit look no further