I had heard elsewhere that the decision to give live service a go came from Bioware’s own leadership and was not thrust upon them by EA.

I can imagine a universe where Bioware stuck with scripted single player RPGs and faded along with the genre. In which case we might have been at the same point by now, just with a different list of games to use as conversation fodder.

I heard elsewhere - I forget the name of the journalist - that the real root cause was that EA pushed for a yearly release cadence like they’re used to with their sports and sim titles. That version of the story has Bioware juat generally struggling to adapt, and the specific questionable decisions are just symptoms of the underlying problem.

I like it because it fits nicely with the immediate situation: 50 people working on a game that will need a huge headcount ramp-up and multiple years to ship, and EA just deciding they would rather put their money into a more immediate payoff.

The decision for Veilguard to have abysmal writing was Biowares.

Veilguard had literally zero multiplayer content

err, at least for Veilguard you're missing the point that the dialogue was preachy and stupid. It was a doomed concept when they started forcing bullshit into the game.

Agreed. I really liked how the new progression system didn't force you into choosing a particular path.

Sadly, though, the story left a lot wanting. It felt like multiple writers had inserted their own incomplete story lines, so by the end of the game, you're left with unresolved plot threads regarding the Remnant, the Scourge, and the Kett, among other things. The only somewhat resolved plot thread is colonization via ending up inside the Remnant dyson sphere, but that basically renders all the effort you just spent terraforming planets throughout the game moot.

At least with the original trilogy, you're defeating Sovereign in the first game and the collectors in the second game, giving you some form of resolution, even if it was always clear the trilogy was going to lead to a full reaper invasion in the third game. And across all of them, your singular focus was on the reapers and not spread across multiple threats.

In terms of pure gameplay and mechanics, the first Mass Effect is incredibly rough, it's really hard to go back to.

That it was such a success and led to an incredibly successful franchise despite that, shows the power of its writing and strong characters and world-building.

A similar thing goes for another legendary series: Assassin's Creed. The first game is borderline unplayable, but it was still enough of a success to spawn AC2 which was a masterpiece of storytelling, although the fundamental mechanics weren't really smooth yet even at that point, and improvements were made all the way through brotherhood to AC3 and then black flag.

Over time, the story-telling and characters weakened, although there were some gems along the way such as odyssey.

Unfortunately "gameplay" wasn't why the franchise was popular or bought by their fans.

And I really enjoyed Veilguard, I think the combat systems were just great and I loved taking on all the optional challenges towards the end. Some of the side character interactions were very good too - Lace and Emrich especially. But it doesn't change the fact that overal the game wasn't that good.

I really think Elder Scrolls 6 will be a huge disappointment. It’s been so long (in corporate development hell?) and their passion project showed terrible taste and execution.

We still do: e.g. Larian (Baldur’s Gate) and Sandfall (Expedition 33). And smaller examples like Nadeo (Trackmania).

If it wasn't for Microsoft money, he would not have a studio any longer, after Sony was done sponsoring him.

Not really. Top ten spots for highest grossing games sold are half comprised predominantly of low-budget, gameplay innovative titles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

Tetris + Minecraft tied for first, Wii Sports at fourth, then Terraria at 7th, and Super Mario Bros. and Human: Fall Flat at 10th.

The other half are evidence to your point with possibly the exception of Mario Kart 8. But if we look even further down the list, we see a lot of once-small, indie titles with brand-new for the time gameplay or heavily perfected mechanics like Stardew Valley, The Sims, the original Pokemons, Wii Fit, Sonic, etc.

If anything, you're speaking to a very specific subcultural market of what I'd probably call gamer bros who are obsessed with getting good K/D ratios, streaks, and other Skinner-box adjacent rewards systems. The other large consumer markets include children who prefer simplicity with depth and the huge market of non-gamer-bros who are the ones buying Terraria and Stardew.

You're going to need a mountain of research to prove you can separate fun from creativity/novelty.

The hardware needed to render those AAA cinematic experiences is more expensive than ever though.

I have a very nice PC for gaming and even still most games I play looks like it could run on a potato XD

Perfect, I skip cut-scenes usually anyway. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Indie games often cater to whatever the devs found fun as kids, that kind of creates it's own kind of stagnation.

The indie boom of the late 00s and early 10s was to a certain degree the result of odd creatives working the Flashgame community (cut-throat in itself) being forced out onto other platforms as it died combined with other platforms providing monetization possibilities.

As with everything, once there was money to be found the vultures moved in.

I guess the question is what is "truly creative" for you? Does Half-Life Alyx count? How about the original Half-Life? Pong? Outer Wilds?

To me the likelyhood of a creative game coming from AAA studio is less likely than indie. Basically the same as movies. It can happen, but a truly creative game/movie/story is hard to come by in any sense. Was it the Ilyiad?

I think there is still roughly the same number of worthwhile games that get released each year, they are just buried by a ever increasing pile of shit.

There is shovelware at any level, but at the same time I think indie games have been a more consistent stream of good memorable entries than big budget studios the last 10 years.

I really have to rack my mind to find think of anything that I feel has been memorable the last decade, and even then half of them are AA titles (and many Japanese, dunno if it's the gambare ethos or what's up with that, maybe I'm a closet weeb). Nioh 2. KCD2. Expedition 33. Yakuza: Like A Dragon but not the sequel. The Elden Ring DLC. Prey 2017. Doom 2016 and Eternal. I guess Stalker 2 has been getting pretty good too.

For good indie games I can drop dozens of names without stopping to think. There's Hollow Knight and Silksong, Hedon, The Drifter, Lunacid, Cruelty Squad, Voin, Paradise Killer, Blue Prince, Fallen Aces, Not For Broadcast, Heaven's Vault, Chants of Sennaar, Dead Cells, Blasphemous, Immortality, Axiom Verge, The Blind Prophet, Cross Code, Cultist Simulator, Astalon, Dread Delusion, The Witness, The Signifier, ... I can keep going.

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> It’s a fantastic hobby though

And this is where things get... a bit weird - game developers that want to make a living out of what they do are competing with people who'd do it for free and who have no risk if their thing fails. It's the same in most creative fields - why would my employer pay for a band or dj at corporate events if we have some hobbyists working for us that will play for free / for fun?

> It’s a fantastic hobby though

For sure, but to make anything bigger than a toy game, you'd need a set of skills that is not easy to come by in a single person. Say, coding, graphics, and sound are completely different area, and within each, you typically have sub-specializations...

That said, if anyone's up for founding a purely virtual game dev studio, hit me up!

Especially with the recent slew of layoffs in the gaming industry. One anecdotal report from a local small time game dev said they'd get hundreds, if not thousands of responses to an open position, both domestic and international from recently fired game developers.

It's a really weird market, it's both one of the biggest industries in the world (bigger than music and movies combined), yet also high unemployment and poor working conditions / work/life balance, with AI throwing another spanner in the works. Meanwhile a lot of people that want to work in it aren't just in it for the money, they have genuine passion for the craft / industry - which is actually rare in most IT jobs, most enterprise jobs aren't exactly exciting material.

He's really old (>50) and there's no gaming industry near where he lives.

Like I said, there is no industry near I live, but I'm committed to my area because of the family.

Also, without having tried at all, I'm doubtful whether I could land a gig. Even though I've worked in and around IT most of my professional live, I don't have any relevant experience. And I doubt that I could work in an entry-level position: I'm old on the one hand (not attractive for employers) and have more bills to pay now than I did in my 20s (not attractive for me).

  > praised by consumers to hear their feedback and steer the company in new directions

> guaranteeing physical disks

I wouldn't be so sure about that

I think I only heard good about her for a very brief period after she took the helm. After that it's been mostly "Xbox is a disaster" with studios being closed, hardware getting more expensive and whatnot. I don't actually believe that Xbox is going to do much with physical media going forwards and they're probably not backing down from AI much either (at least in private). I imagine what happens with Project Helix is going to dictate her legacy (unless Microsoft shuffles her out before that).

I imagine it is bean counters but like VC bean counters... You dump a butt load of cash into games hoping they'll be the next GTA V or Skyrim

> if you can't deliver a project, you have to deliver less, not add employees

In most games you can't just fully drop a feature because other systems are designed with it in mind. It will end up broken like Veilguard or Andromeda. You can eat the cost and finish it or spend even more time cutting it out properly. The only cheap solution is release the unfinished game in early access, add the delayed features after and then do 1.0 with the original scope.

AAA publishers can't do that because they love their movie style reveals at industry shows and building up insane hype before launch. They also don't want to sell the game at a discount during EA which is standard practice for indies.

And selling an unfinished game with the promise that it will get fixed later is a bad look when you have thousands of employees, no matter what actually happened behind the scenes.

  > there's no numbers to steer you. you need an opinionated director, auteur, not an excel monkey.

> They see themselves as a media company with IP to be mined.

stares in Minecraft

That business model is at odds with any creative enterprise. It's one thing to scale a business that has a successful product that needs very little improvement over time other than efficiency gains which can be handled by a management class whose only involvement needs to be ensuring the core model is maintained and not degraded while improving operational efficiency. It's a very different thing to having to constantly innovate and create new and better products especially when those products need their own artistic merit to stand on. If you're just making the next FIFA game you'll be fine but anything that requires a plot will go over like a lead balloon.

There is very few companies where the executives don't engage with their own product. Imaging a film studio where the CEO has never watched a movie, or a publishing house where the CEO doesn't read books. I don't think you need to enjoy the product personally but you do need to engage with the medium at the very least to be able to understand what you are selling and to whom you should listen for feedback.

That kind of stuff is why the film industry has cycles of actors starting production companies, overturning the hierarchy with their money and successes, followed by them getting bored, selling out, the business becoming more businesslike until they start forking enough money to actors again that they again can produce their own stuff.

Netflix and co, might upend or stall that cycle, same as Steam/MS/etc can stagnate the games business.

I think games still has a cycle or two before being totally stagnant though, but regulators are working hard to fix that.

On the other hand, FromSoftware, creators of games such as dark souls, bloodborne, and elden ring, placed their main director as CEO. He still directs their main games, and admits to focus more on games than on business.

The trend has been they focus on quality, rarely compromising their vision, which started as niche gameplay ideas that are now a new genre, adopted in many new games. And the effect has been that they got a reputation for quality, and sell more and more games with each new release, with elden ring selling like 36M copies.

I think Innovation in big companies does happen, but often it get's stiffled by the bean counters before something comes by it, but that is also a good thing. Small businesses should always have the potential to bring the goliath to its knees if the big business has outlived is usefulness to society as a whole.

As an MBA, I can confirm. We might not necessarily do it well, but we can do it:D

But that brings up important point, is this complaint about execs in any way specific to games industry? It is very common across businesses that execs haven't actually done grassroots work in their companies field?

The best boss I ever had was a MBA who know nothing about engineering - he didn't try to micromanage us. However there are a lot of MBAs who are bad bosses.

MBAs are the best, Plato knew this

  > They assume their own experience is more or less what everyone else has, including their players. A sort of dabbling, disinterested experience, flowing from one piece of content to another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...

You can extend this to the amount of interest in games, casual vs competitive gamers.

^ Exactly; every game, and especially every new IP, is a risk. There's some checklists they will pass over but those are no guarantee.

Mass Effect or Dragon Age could've flopped like Anthem did and we would never hear from them again. In fact the first Mass Effect was pretty rough in terms of gameplay, as was the first Witcher game (and arguably the later ones and Cyberpunk because they all needed serious rework and bugfixing after release). Yet they're still popular because something else compensated for their technical issues.

  > I can't imagine anyone qualified to run billion dollar projects has much time for any interests other than running billion dollar projects.

counter example: Concord

We are seeing that there are a lot of players that did stop rewarding the companies as described. The problem is that the signals are not being picked up in these studio's. Partially due to the big divide between critical acclaim vs player reception that we have been seeing in games in the past decade.

Nope, Let it Be. They later stripped it and released Let it Be: Naked. George Martin was still on the White Album.

That's Phil Spencer. Phil Spector was a record producer (and convicted murderer).

Early Halo had nothing to do with Microsoft at all. In fact, it was first introduced as a Mac-exclusive title in development as a part of Steve Jobs' 1999 Macworld keynote.

> I'm not sure how AI could destroy the demand here.

By overwhelming the supply. How can a consumer keep track of what to play anymore?

As an example, I didn't even hear about PBZ until you mentioned it just now. The fact that Valve might occasionally select lottery winners is separate from other forces involved. I would hesitate to highlight the occasional breakout (artificially-promoted) success as some kind of evidence that there is nothing to see here.

> They just need to make good games.

If only we could just do that.

There's some kind of business concept (that I'm sure many around here know more about) around making decisions cheap to reverse. AAA studios are the antithesis of that.

It's a creative process. It looks great all the way through until it comes together and... it just feels wrong. The scene doesn't work for some reason.

So now we re-write. Translate into the five languages we support. Hope the voice actors for those languages are all available. Maybe even re-record existing lines to fit the new tempo. Maybe mo-cap, maybe new 4K textures, maybe more.

At this point I'm sure people in the room are definitely trying to convince themselves that, actually, it really wasn't that bad. Let's keep it. No one will care it's just one scene.

Rinse and repeat. It costs a lot more to fix mistakes on high fidelity games so I wonder how many just get left alone on purpose.