Video Game Industry Deathwatch thread

[deuxhero]

Sony makes uneeded PS5 port of Until Dawn, a game you can already play on PS5, it bombs.
https://archive.ph/ipq8V
I'd normally ignore it since ports are cheap to make, but porting Spider-Man from PS4 to PS5+PC cost something like 10 million according to the Insomniac leak, which shows this company has no idea what the fuck it's doing.

 

[Tehdagah]

Sony makes uneeded PS5 port of Until Dawn, a game you can already play on PS5, it bombs.
https://archive.ph/ipq8V
I'd normally ignore it since ports are cheap to make, but porting Spider-Man from PS4 to PS5+PC cost something like 10 million according to the Insomniac leak, which shows this company has no idea what the fuck it's doing.

10 millions was the whole budget of God of War 2 for the PS2

 

[Big_poppa_pump]

Deathwatch? How much kill teams we sending in?

 

[mondblut]

only games made with good ideas, care and passion are actually successful.

Sweet summer child...

 

[mondblut]

I'm thinking AI bolsters Indy dev teams ability to push out more...

True.

...quality games

LOL. LMAO. Wait, you're serious, let me laugh even harder.

 

[Inec0rn]

Indy already make better quality games than AAA's. Unless your "quality" is graphics. AI will translate to faster better quality dev, and makes art / textures easier to come by than hiring people to do it.

1 good dev + AI is worth about 30-40 AAA slop devs.

 

[mondblut]

Indy already make better quality games than AAA's. Unless your "quality" is graphics. AI will translate to faster better quality dev, and makes art / textures easier to come by than hiring people to do it.

1 good dev + AI is worth about 30-40 AAA slop devs.

Your solution for an industry plagued by retards is... to open the gates to even more retards.

For every semi-decent indy game that somehow manages to swim up from the sewer there are literally HUNDREDS zero effort piles of shovelware shit getting uploaded on steam WEEKLY. And the only thing that still keeps in check most of the retards responsible for this plague is the need to somehow produce graphics for their plods of vomit.

Now give them a prompt to type "big titty girl cartoon anime japan", and within a month Steam will become an equivalent of a spam box in an email account you haven't checked for a decade. Have fun trying to find that promised 1 000 000 dollars check from a Nigerian royalty among the million of penis enlargement offers.

 

[Inec0rn]

Yes but you can use your eyes and brain to determine if something is a turd and choose to not consume it, all digital media is already swamped and filtered to a point where it self-moderates. I'm fairly sure Valve added a cost to listing something on steam as well (or if they haven't they can to filter low effort garbage).

Anyway what are you arguing about? a) That Ubisoft/Beth/EA/MS are going to make good SP games when their strong focus is on milking live service because it's unquestionably where the real profits are? or b) no good games will be made anymore?

 

[mondblut]

Yes but you can use your eyes and brain to determine if something is a turd and choose to not consume it,

Not when non-turd has no chance being noticed to begin with, thanks to the torrent of turd drowning everything. How many potential kenshies and grimoires the world has missed because another 20 rpgmaker weeb shits flushed them from the store landing pages within minutes of release?

Anyway what are you arguing about? a) That Ubisoft/Beth/EA/MS are going to make good SP games when their strong focus is on milking live service because it's unquestionably where the real profits are? or b) no good games will be made anymore?

What I am arguing is that giving random hacks better tools to further saturate the stores with zero-effort garbage will definitely NOT contribute to more quality games being made. Every quality game has been produced against adversity, with blood, sweat, and tears. This is the only way. If someone can't produce a game without AI doing everything in his stead, he's got nothing of value to contribute.

We need a gardener. A brutal gardener. A thorough, thoughtful gardener.

 

[JC'sBarber]

https://archive.ph/wip/fPG7o
Bungie is folding its staff into PlayStation, laying off at least 17% of its employees in the proccess.

• Spend billions on has been company to enhance your live service games knowledge
• Blow up your live service games
• Shut down the company you just spent millions on
• ???
• Profit

If it got this bad after Concord flopped, wait 'till you see what happens after FairGame$!

 

[deuxhero]

That we didn't hear of FairGame$ studio getting canned already or any proof of life from it is interesting in itself. My guess: They'll relaunch Concord as F2P to coincide with the Amazon show. After that bombs (but... but... our shill media said it was the "game" being a priced retail release instead of being an ugly game nobody wanted in a crowded market! Why isn't it successful now?!) then we'll see fire across Sony as a whole.

 

[ghardy]

The Amazon show is still alive?

 

[deuxhero]

It was an anthology with lots of stuff. Concord part is presumably still happening because a new preview from last week still has one of the characters present (above the first L).

 

[deuxhero]

Nevermind then.
https://sonyinteractive.com/en/news/blog/an-update-from-playstation-studios/
https://archive.ph/R4cGr

As part of our ongoing efforts to strengthen SIE’s Studio Business, we have had to make a difficult decision relating to two of our studios – Neon Koi and Firewalk Studios.
[...]
[Concord] did not land with enough players, and as a result we took the game offline. We have spent considerable time these past few months exploring all our options. After much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio.   I want to thank all of Firewalk for their craftsmanship, creative spirit and dedication. The PvP first person shooter genre is a competitive space that’s continuously evolving, and unfortunately, we did not hit our targets with this title. We will take the lessons learned from Concord and continue to advance our live service capabilities to deliver future growth in this area.

I'm surprised the studio got two months. So many good studios with established track record were dead within weeks of shoving a terrible last game out the door.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

market is so big quality is not a requirement anymore. on the contrary, the more shit they shit the more customers are going desperate for a shred of entertainment. quality is going to hurt them all, those producing it first and foremost since they're not going to deliver again.
i just watched on tv a movie trailer about the incredible adventures of a vegetable kid on a wheelchair in the wild west. holy. fucking. shit. there's no coming back from these depths, it's the end of civilization, we peaked in the '90s and didn't know it. only the matrix did.

 

[deuxhero]

On the contrary, the market is so big quality is required, but it's not the only requirement or even most important. Instead games need to be good enough, and pair it with something hypertargeted to a specific audience or a few with overlaps (edit: while being cheap enough for the demographic's size). Gamers won't forgive any jank in a generic, interchangable, AAAA slop but will gladly overlook jank if it's the only thing that will satisfy their hyper-specific interests. Look at the successful indies (meaning actual indies, not the ones that somehow afford these hundred thousand dollar trailer spots) of the last several years: They get talked about for their unique elements, rarely how good the gameplay is.

 

[cretin]

Indy already make better quality games than AAA's. Unless your "quality" is graphics. AI will translate to faster better quality dev, and makes art / textures easier to come by than hiring people to do it.

1 good dev + AI is worth about 30-40 AAA slop devs.

I'm not convinced this isn't just a masturbatory fantasy by engineer types wishing they could finally do away with creative types. Which doesn't seem like its the case, nor ever at this rate. God does have a sense of humor and he loves to rug pull the hubristic.

 

[Inec0rn]

It's the opposite logic. Creative types can do away with the engineer types because AI can write better code than them if you ask the right questions.

AAA is the opposite of creativity, we've had reboot,prequel,sequel,seboot for 20+ years now, how many AssCreed / CoD / FarCry reskinned games does it take.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

On the contrary, the market is so big quality is required

dood. latest dragon ball game. i rarely played shit so bad. it's selling like hotcakes. people convinced it's actually good because they have no idea what good is.

 

[deuxhero]

Remember how Sony announced they were going to "remaster" a PS4 game by chucking out the original and perfectly usable master files for voice acting and motion capture in favor of new acting for completely incomprehensible reasons? Well it came out, and it's both completely broken, and it has a peak player count of less than people currently playing the four year old PC release of the original.
https://steamcharts.com/app/1151640 (original)
https://steamcharts.com/app/2561580 (re"master")
Re-releases are done because they're easy money for how little effort and resources they take, but VA and Mocap are, by far, some of the most expensive parts of game development.

 

[lightbane]

Remember how Sony announced they were going to "remaster" a PS4 game by chucking out the original and perfectly usable master files for voice acting and motion capture in favor of new acting for completely incomprehensible reasons?

Reasons are actually simple: the protagonist was, while not completely cute, at least passable as a woman compared to the hambeast of the second game, and we can't have that because of male gaze. So the original game had to go. Also, greed.

 

[GrainWetski]

This belongs here. A "continued success" in this pathetic industry is apparently now making back more than 50% of costs.

 

[Hobknobling]

This belongs here. A "continued success" in this pathetic industry is apparently now making back more than 50% of costs.

Remedy is completely bloated by Tim Epic's open cheques he kept writing them in 2020-2021. They are going to crash and burn sooner or later.

 

[Devastator]

... But eventually, those bucks will run out, and there is nothing else the industry can do but go bankrupt. And why shouldn't it?, there are thousands of quality video games to play. Who even needs new ones at this point?. I personally would settle for native ports of older games to PC, like the stellar OpenGOAL fan project for the Jak games.

It's almost the same with cinema, why bother with the 50th clone of Die Hard on Netflix, when you can just watch Die Hard?. Why watch Amazon's Lord of the Rings abortion, when you can watch the actual Lord of the Rings?.

I agree but I'll tell you why: so a bunch of useless fucks can have a job, from devs and designers to managers. It's been a problem in many industries.

I've literally just spent all evening enjoying playing through Darius 2, Darius Twin, and Darius Force and...after a brief attempt at playing the dire FF7 Remake and GTA5 yesterday...it's really reminded me how losing 90% of modern games would make 0 difference to enjoying my life.

Let's see it burn.

Same, I spend more time playing indie games and old games and barely touch new-ish AA/AAA releases.

I was playing boomer shooters on my cheap laptop yesterday. Its AMD APU brute-force renders (i.e. no machine learning-based upscaling) those retro-looking games at the 120 FPS cap at native 1440p with ease, only drawing about 30W along the way. I was having a blast playing them.

So I was thinking to myself... Meanwhile I have a 13900K+RTX4080 "space heater" collecting dust because I can barely get myself to play Cyberpunk 2077 + DLC every now and then (I'm still trying to finish it). Yes, it's a gorgeous game that destroys my hardware... but when I play it, it seems sorta okay but mostly "meh". Like all other AAA releases seem "meh". Which led me to conclude that a lot of fat could be cut from the AA/AAA industry. Regardless of the outcome, I can't bring myself to give a shit about them. Live service pushing, ideology injecting, "don't you have phones" cockroaches.

 

[JC'sBarber]

I'm personally just tired of games being bloated, 50GB+ downloads that run on shitty engines like Unity and Unreal. Why bother when so many great old games take up a fraction of the space and perform beautifully on hardware as cheap as a Raspberry Pi?. I see so many games that 'look' interesting, and I just wish they were as well optimised as older titles. The recent Clock Tower re-release takes up a WHOPPING 8GB of space, despite being based on an SNES/PS1 game that takes up a few 'megabytes' at most. Incompetence abounds, and it's just not worth the hassle. I wouldn't even want to download such massive games even if I had a 10TB SSD on my PC, because I hate the thought of wasted space and inefficiency.