That has to do with shareholders realizing they can make money out of the gaming industry. They basically ruined it like they ruined healthcare and housing.
Those shareholders? Dentists. No love lost between them and the gamers.
Mobile and fast broadband internet is what ruined gaming. Back in the day, it was impossible to download a game very reliably plus it was super slow if you tried. It was far easier to go to a store and buy the disks.
Mobile showed that there is an enormous crowd of extremely stupid people willing to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at adolescent half baked code and that the best retention and monetization is often with junk that is never fixed or is even broken worse over time. That standardized garbage and flooded the space with loads of slop. Just sorting through the slop is a chore now and fools have proven that it is profitable to take a giant shit of slop and dump it on everyone to let people pay their way through searching for undigested corn kernels in these places. The same is true of streaming. You pay for it to waste your time. You lower your expectations, and the cycle continues. It is profitable to target the stupidest people. Culturally, it will require the majority to stop being brain dead zombies, but good luck with that. We’re both zombies on an idiot brick right now.
I don’t know, games are getting really good these days. If you ignore the aaaaaaa slop you’re going to find some awesome stuff
Who is the main target audience downloading and paying for these games?
Boomers, unironically. Well then x too, but 45+ are the biggest share of gamers by far in the west.
Boomers would be 60+ though. Anyone 45-59ish would be Gen X.
The executives, investors and accountants making the decisions that are ruining games are not millenials.
I am sure many are. Millenials are in their forties these days
They’re Elder Millennials at best (born in the 80’s, maybe late 70’s). Or do they qualify as another generation ?
Late 70s would fall in Gen X.
Millennials start at around '85 depending on who you ask.
Generations seem to be more vibes-based than anything.
Edit:typo
The average age of a manager in gaming is 45 and the oldest millennial is 44 lol get mathed idiot
So almost half are millennials then?
There’s actually a single gaming CEO that hasn’t been born yet, bringing the average down.
Mean and median can be calculated for uneven distributions.
The old ones, yes
the entire us went to shit, what’s your point
Indie gaming is the best it’s ever been. AAA gaming was always going to devolve into cashgrabs.
Indie gaming now is great for players, but for gamedevs it is a saturated market and most of them don’t make a profit
AAA games are made by companies that have boomers and early gen x in charge
Indie games are more likely to be made by people actually doing the development, i.e. millennials & early gen Z currently
Indie games have been having a great decade, AAA keeps getting worse
Thanks for attending my TED talk
I seriously have nothing to say to anyone who doesn’t see it that way. If all you play is big budget corpo horseshit and your first instinct is to blame a generational cohort, that says more about you.
AAAlways has been .jpg. Just look at literally every sports game since the Street series.
Btw kudos on the memetic payload that is your username, you monster.
Hell yeah
Yeah, as far as I’m concerned most AAA games might as well be part of a totally separate hobby that I don’t pay much attention to.
Also the craft of game-making has improved, so that even an average modern game is in many ways better than the best games from 25 years ago. For example, consider Diablo II. I played the remake a lot and large parts were as good as I remembered but what really stuck out to me was how boring the boss battles are. The height of skill is running in a circle around Diablo when he does his lightning hose attack. It’s far worse than pretty much any modern ARPG, not because the technology has improved but because people have learned from Diablo II’s mistakes.
Diablo II blew my mind in 2000 in a way that a better ARPG wouldn’t today, but that doesn’t mean that games have gotten worse. It means that I have gotten used to playing great games.
It’s far worse than pretty much any modern ARPG, not because the technology has improved but because people have learned from Diablo II’s mistakes.
I was ready to argue you at the start of the sentence and then went completely agreeing with you. New games aren’t better because they are new, but they have a potential to become better by learning about what worked good or bad in previous games. And it doesn’t make classics look bad now, like, we don’t need to fix Chess for how wild the horsey is in it, but coming to any old game requires setting oneself into the context of when it was launched, and therefore we need to see any new game through the lense of past experinces and how they learnt on mistakes of the past instead of repeating them.
Some people got it right back in the day.
Super Metroid is a perfect game from start to finish. I still play it a few times a year I’d say.
And also, the rate of good AAA games coming out is still the same, it’s just they’re drowning by the see of identical boring cashgrabs.
It’s the same with all the other media, cool shit is still there, you just have to learn to filter the bullshit out.AAA gaming shows the effects of late term capitalism on gaming.
As a millienial software dev:
Imo: What happened is twofold:
- The business grads also played games, and saw the money to be made.
- The best devs are smart enough to *not work in AAA Gamedev.
Which is depressing as hell. I considered switching to game dev (since anyway want to change my stack and language), then realised that would be sacrificing too much for too little and abandoned the idea. I will have a better time making money doing something else and playing in free time than diving into this madness that does not even pay adequately in pursuit of the off-chance of getting to work on something great
I phone screened for a game dev position. The ad said about half my salary. It was going to be a big sacrifice. Then on the phone screen they said 10k less than that.
When I sounded concerned about money, I think that killed my chances. “Tell me more about this profit sharing” was almost certainly the end. It was for the best.
MBA = Megalomaniacsl Bastard Accountant
(with the fun bonus of almost no actual math required!)
The people who break there bakes making the games. Are the ones who enjoyed them as kids. It’s the executives and managers who run the decisions. Who have never played games before.
It is the money people’s fault. Once there was money to be had in the industry, all the idiots moved in, and no power can resist them. The game devs hate making awful cash-grab games that aren’t fun to play, too.
Then they have the marketing team, that tell you it is fun to play and they make sure you will see the game everywhere, you dont want to miss out on this hype right?!
What, don’t you want to play “Kane and Lynch: Dog Days 2” just because we turned the entire fucking subway car into an advertisement for it?
It feels like the Mariachi band that only goes away when you pay them. If you don’t buy it, we’re going to have to buy space on your living room wall and put a speaker in there to play ads for it, so fucking buy it you dummy, you don’t have a choice.
More of a late stage capitalism issue than a millennial issue
Serious, genuine question:
Has a team of, or single Zoomer game dev(s) … made… any… game?
I am not gonna pretend that I somehow know all games and all game dev teams by age, but uh…
Yeah, are there any notable games made by a team that is majority composed of people born after '96 ish?
Like… I am a millenial, and I am well aware of the ludicrous greed and mismanagement of AAA studios, how even most AA studios end up getting fucked by some kind of IP rights/funding issue, if they live long enough… I’m still pissed that EA killed Maxis… and I am also well aware of many games with primarily millenial dev teams… very often devolve into, or revolve around ‘millenial speak’ / ‘millenial writing’ …
Most of us millenials, outside of the tiny number of mod teams that actually stuck together long enough to form a game studio, or just outright form an indie dev studio… yeah most of us just jumped into the megacorp game dev meat grinder and then acted both entitled and surprised to find out that ‘corporation bad, actually.’…
But I seriously cannot think of a mainly zoomer game dev team that’s made anything other than pretty much shitty asset flips and/or outright scams, enternal alpha/early access type bullshit… or maybe mobile, gacha type games?
I would love to be informed that I am an idiot and there are some really good zoomer made games, but I am ignorant of their existence.
Hell, even a seriously good mod by zoomers would count, I know I was modding many games before I even got out of highschool.
But I seriously cannot think of a mainly zoomer game dev team that’s made anything other than pretty much shitty asset flips and/or outright scams, enternal alpha/early access type bullshit… or maybe mobile, gacha type games?
You didnt exclude game jam games and there are a lot of those. There are also quick games that are not meant to be expanded so they wouldnt count as eternal early access
A huge amount of games in the indie scene are made by zoomers. Lethal company was made by a 21 year old. The current game industry is composed of mostly millennials, but still a lot of zoomers.
Hey there ya go!
I didn’t know Lethal Company was made by a Zoomer.
Apparently he has been modding/making Roblox gamemodes/doing itch.io releases since he was 10!
LC isn’t exactly my cup of tea personally, but that is definitely a good example, LC has been quite popular.
Thank you for informing me =D
get absolutely abused by employers squeezing every penny they can while blocking union efforts
He forgot that part
‘Easy’ ‘solution’: Do game dev as a hobby, release as FOSS
Gen X is running those companies, they’re the ones to blame for this shit.
