Old-School RuneScape is a case study in what happens with that attitude today. RuneScape degenerated into a corporate run for profit wasteland. Several years after that, they launched an old version of the game and have been working on it to this day strictly constrained by polling players whether or not they want updates. It's now 3-4 times as popular as the "mainline" RuneScape, the one that corporate ruined. However they apparently make a lot more money per player on "mainline" RuneScape even though both have the same subscription cost.

MMOs as a form encourage the formation of companies operating as businesses to facilitate their production, and MMO players often talk online like they simply dont understand this but also that they have authority over this because it happened to their genre first. I find it very bizarre.

You need the team of 500 to do the "telemetry" and microtransactions parts.

The game industry has merged with the gaming industry.

If you look at a game like elden ring I’m not surprised that hundreds of people were involved. It would be sad if we wouldn’t have games like that.

Isn't this true for any type of (software) development though? Once the size of an organization grows, everything slows down because processes are formalized, hierarchy is created, etc. This all becomes worse once a company goes public.

When WhatsApp was acquired, they had around 50 employees. By now, it's around 1500. It's still just a messaging app.

Quern was 4 people and Forgotten City was just a handful as well.

Having more experience as a businessman with very little gaming depth, I find it even more absurd.

> The indie industry will continue telling new stories without it

The problem with this version of events, is that ever since the floodgates opened on steam, individual indies aren't really making enough money to fund themselves. It's not really sustainable to have an industry where only folks who are already independently wealthy can afford to be game developers-

Most of the indies who do make money these days are in a much more AA-like model where they work with a traditional publisher, who funds development of the next game up-front.

This. We are currently in the new golden era of Indie games or even gaming in general. You can’t plan success anymore with marketing and market research.

But you can succeed spectacularly with genuinely good games like Balatro or Slay the Spire.

OSRS is also a great case study, and I think it was the first MMO to do this? At first it was pretty lackluster, but got enough popularity from the nostalgia wave to survive for a bit, but they dedicated a team to it and they ended up doing some pretty great things given time. It gets around 3-4 times more paid players than "mainline" RS does.

I believe there was significant controversy about whether it was safe to update or whether it should be a permanent time capsule. The developers ended up earning everyone's trust by experimenting with new major content on a new continent of the game world that was basically their sandbox, until it was felt they were making the game better and not worse. Even the original version of this new continent was criticised for being a massive empty plain, although now it's more filled in. They also developed a system to poll paying players on whether new updates were desirable or not, and most of the time they wouldn't add something that didn't get 3/4 approval.

Okay to expand.

WoW classic was certainly a business move, but afaik from watching a couple of wowc videos, a part of the appeal was the rerelease of the following expansions, which they cant just do forever since it would just lead to the same end, so they have to pivot to WoW forever.

LoL classic has not been as successful as wow, and even they have talked about patching the game literally less than a month after its release.

Both of these classic releases don't seem to be permanent games, and their rerelase seems aimed to capture the nostalgia while still providing live service updates in order to prevent people from getting bored because their endgames can't continuously monetize players.

OW 2 was supposed to be a release with a pve mode as it's focus, which it failed, so there was no real reason to have a distinction between ow1 and 2. Both the removal and return of 6v6 and role queue have been nothing more than attempts to balance the game, and I don't really see the need to point it out as "MBA damage" any more than any other patch for any other game.

I have no comments about HOTS because I played at most 5 matches in the game 10 years ago.

>For better or worse, some degree of gate keeping is healthy in this industry. I think if you want to be the CEO of Xbox that you must demonstrate some kind of ranked ladder experience in halo or COD. A 1v1 StarCraft match with the interim CEO. Just a stupid idea idk what to say. Being a gamer has nothing to do with managing a gaming company well

> The revitalization of old games via the "classic" release model has demonstrated that simply undoing the MBA damage is an extremely viable option

The rerelease of classic is the MBA damage lol.

How is the economic system broken?

Which is why for the most part I play old games. Retroach is your friend.

When I play something new, it is typically either indies or games from smaller studios that still can put out something fun.

I don't touch AAA. Fuck that noise.

because they're all becoming the same. Just like cars pretty much have the same shape nowadays

I don't believe dropping to 100‑man teams will be enough.

A big problem is that we now have such big budgets that they need approval higher up, and worse, you end up looking like a fool when your project fails. That is still the case with 100-man teams.

This is not necessarily a terrible situation to be in if it were a startup situation where you could count on having 90% failures and the winner making the whole bucket worth it and people knew and accepted that.

But outside Sand Hill Road nobody gets that, so the strategy is to play it safe, safe, and safe, and then you end up with boring games.

It also doesn't help that it used to be that gamers would reliably update every couple of years, so graphics cards and processes would get faster, and you could make a generic shoot‑'em‑up game that was significantly better than the previous shoot‑'em‑up just because you now had more to work with.

Computers have actually increased in price, so much so that no one buys to update their computers. And at the same time, you need permission from an extremely high level to make games, so you can only make games that are very safe.

Meanwhile, the golden age of indie games is out there. It's never been easier to make your creative game and it's never been easier to find an audience for it.

As a result, there are more games than ever on Steam, and those fun games can last a lot longer because they don't have the marketing budget, so there's no big, immediate launch-month splat window. People will find them on social media, watch their favourite streamers play them etc.

Until we get to a point where games are created by studios who accept that 90% of them will fail, we are going to have interesting games from non‑studios.

That leaves a hole in the options for game development, though. Where are we with games that can be developed by 50 people but not by four? Those games do not have a home right no; They are too risky and uninteresting for the big guys, and they are out of scope for the independent.

The entire game-development business is being torn apart and remodeled by AI development right now. It is very likely that the big companies may never be able to make a game with 500 people.

Many games that were previously too large and required too many people to be feasible for indie developers are now very feasible for them. It's also quite possible that exclusives, such as for PlayStation, will very quickly disappear due to widespread piracy aided by AI powered decompiling. The future is extremely hard to predict at present, even more so than for non-gaming segments of the industry.

software industry get "leaner" with AI, I don't see game industry is any different

The dog is key. The dog is the mastermind, the 32 people are just symbionts.

That is every business, that is just how you make the most money.

> Development cost for that game was around US $1.5 billion.

but is it making the game any better? Or is it just gold plating?

Can you provide some examples?

The only major game in recent history I'm aware was labeled as particularly woke is Dragon Age: Veilguard, mostly due to a particularly cringy (and presumably self-insert) scene where Taash lectures their parent. The character was made even more irritating by regularly refusing to address Emmerich by his name in dialogue.

However, what turned me off from the game and roused most of the discontent I saw had to do with the removal of one of the bigger RP elements the prior games had: the ability to get into significant arguments with companions and even dismiss them entirely or cause them to leave on their own.

The solution for companies looking to invest these higher budgets is in fact to make an ecosystem game, because ecosystem games capture continuous revenue from players rather than one time purchases. I'm surprised the article doesn't mention the gacha game boom as it is the prime example of companies trying to adjust to the market.

> Turns out that even people who are down for that sort of game don't need more than one (and they already have that one)

Not sure about this. There are lots of people who have a main game but still pick up every 3rd or 4th fotm aaa/indie darling, and I think most gacha game players play more than 1 from what I've seen.

> whereas all kinds of people would be happy to buy something unique and fun.

I don't really believe this from my experience with interacting with people.

I'm not convinced that Sweeney is being altruistic, but there are some upsides to attempting an ecosystem. It pushes standards (hopefully open) forward and allows smaller teams to develop games without having to reinvent all of the non-game infrastructure that many people expect from games these days.

You cannot take Sweeney at face value. Like any good salesman, his job is to manufacture demand for his own product, and like any good salesman, he doesn't actually believe what he's saying, because, like any good salesman, he doesn't let truth get in the way of profit.

Yeah, I agree with that take. It’s the fashion industry of computers. People will bend over backwards just to be a part of it.

This worked because it was new and the big industry hadn't made it into an assembly line yet. The first person to make a car surely got rich, you can't get rich making a new car today because you compete with the professional car makers. What's the next new thing that doesn't have an assembly line?

>And they had to code on the VERY FIRST home computers and consoles, in assembly language, before many people could master that hardware and explain all its tricks in a consolidated knowledge base like we have on the internet now.

I find it unlikely that we will have another once-in-a-century opportunity to be there at the opening of a new frontier like the home computer boom was or the internet revolution that closely followed it.

Maybe it's my pessimism speaking, but the AI boom most definitely doesn't feel the same opportunity wise.

When is the last time you have opened itch.io and bought a couple of games?

The reason this isnt happening that much anymore is that the standards for games have increased for the average consumer, so development costs have increased to fit those standards. And even then, publishing your game in a monetizable way is hard and often requires starting capital now.

And when it is happening, it is happening on roblox. When is the last time you have opened roblox? It is more or less exactly what you want -- teenagers make either simple games or free copies of more popular games and then fill them with microtransactions to make money.

> Can we bring that back somehow?

All the tools are there, and lots of people are doing it already. Literally nothing is stopping anyone from "bringing that back".