
The video game industry can't go on like this - brycehalley
https://kotaku.com/the-video-game-industry-cant-go-on-like-this-1836606033
======
denkmoon
For those of us that don't care for the latest FPS or Battle Royale, the games
industry is going perfectly fine.

Never before has it been so easy for someone to get their game into the hands
of millions. Games like Factorio, made by people who are passionate about
games. With modern distribution platforms, companies like Paradox Interactive
find it viable to continue adding content to their games many years after they
were released.

Couldn't give two hoots about what EA and Activision are up to. They don't
make games for me.

~~~
Iv
The picture illustrating the article is of Mortal Kombat 11

11.

I had no idea they did more than 2.

When do you stop beating a dead horse?

~~~
nfoz
The horse perhaps has never been healthier.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Kombat_11](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Kombat_11)

"Mortal Kombat 11 proceeded to be the best selling video game software in
North America for the following month of May, for both Xbox One and
PlayStation 4. The sales of the game is nearly doubled comparably to previous
entries of the series."

~~~
agent008t
This baffles me. Who are these people that buy games like MK11, a new FIFA
game every year(?), go watch obviously purely commercial 'blockbusters' at the
cinema, etc.?

Do some people genuinely find these things really enjoyable?

~~~
w0utert
>> _This baffles me. Who are these people that buy games like MK11, a new FIFA
game every year(?)_

I see your point, but Mortal Kombat is not really the best example of a cash-
cow franchise that keeps selling the same game over and over. The successive
games in this series have huge differences, especially since the reboot a few
years back. If you like this style of fighting games, there are plenty of
reasons to buy the latest version every few years.

FIFA on the other hand is terrible in this regard. I can say with confidence
because I've been buying each entry since FIFA'09, and while there have been a
few major changes in 10 years that are worthwhile improvements, you _are_
indeed more or less buying the same game every year. I sometimes wonder why I
even keep doing it, I guess it's just because it's become a tradition I cannot
get away from, getting the game on release date and inviting my brother to
play it until deep in the night.

~~~
xamuel
>a tradition I cannot get away from, getting the game on release date and
inviting my brother to play it until deep in the night

Probably well worth the cost just to spend the time with your brother. I wish
I lived close enough to my brother to do a yearly video game night with him--
and wouldn't care what the video game was or how much it cost (within sane
reason of course).

~~~
magic_beans
If you can't do every year, what about every 2 or every 3 years?

------
JamesBarney
This article is all over the place.

It's about the reduction of single player games, nevermind it's about the the
move to cloud gaming, surprise it's about Google's data center energy
production, just kidding it about developer work environments, nope just the
environment.

~~~
Nasrudith
Yeah it reads like a clumsy hit piece - not that the industry doesn't have
problems but it falls so short of professional writing standards you have to
ask if they get paid for it.

~~~
jp555
The Journalism industry can't go on like this.

~~~
brighter2morrow
Journalism isn't really an industry so much as a lifestyle for well-to-do
people who don't need real jobs

------
theandrewbailey
> In 2008, those three publishers released 98 games; in 2018 they released
> just 28, not including expansions. In short, the single-player game was not
> sustainable. So why should we think the current model is?

The single player game was 'dead' because video game companies decided they
were dead, not because of any market forces. They realized that games with
multiplayer features sold a bit better, so they decided to focus on those, to
the point of (mostly) abandoning single player games.

Big publishers decided to make fewer, bigger games. But indies (and other mid-
tier devs) filled a huge market gap (Kickstarter, anyone?), so nothing really
changed much.

~~~
agent008t
I may be wrong on any of these points, but:

1\. Keeping up with latest technology (graphics) is important for games, as
those create the first impression. It is difficult to market a game built on
outdated technology.

2\. The above means that making games gets more and more expensive, probably
faster than the market expands (if it is still expanding).

3\. Multiplayer games are more profitable than single-player games.

This means that getting funding to make a single-player game gets more
difficult, as it may provide a very poor return on investment, if at all. Only
exceptions are low-risk existing franchises, which is why we mostly see those
in the single-player scene. The original Deus Ex, System Shock 2 or even Metal
Gear Solid would be nearly impossible today as those projects would be
considered to be too high risk / low reward.

~~~
dangerface
1\. Minecraft is the biggest selling game, or was at one point. Games should
be fun, pretty is an after thought.

3\. Its harder to pirate multiplayer games than single player only, thats why
they ditched them.

I don't think single player games are high risk / low reward but the games
industry is defiantly laser focused on high risk / unrealistic rewards.

~~~
friendlybus
>pretty is an after thought.

Pretty is a design choice (or should be). Minecraft's low resolution works
well with people who appreciate low resolution worlds, aka kids. Minecraft's
true genius, intended or not, is being a game that grows up with the kid as
they play.

You start off singleplayer by yourself just getting by in survival mode and
you end up building massive city sized projects in multiplayer learning to co-
operate on a grand scale. That learning process can cover 5yr old to 16yr
olds.

Photoreal is going to become cheaper and cheaper so making an artist aesthetic
is going to be more important for standing out than 'better' graphics.

------
onion2k
People have been saying this for about 35 years. Back in the 80s Imagine hyped
two games called Psyclapse and Bandersnatch saying they were groundbreaking,
huge, and _really_ expensive to make. They were never released and stories of
the devs working long hours and sleeping under desks came out. There have been
similar games and stories every year since then.

The story of the Bandersnatch game is the basis of the Black Mirror episode of
the same name. The writer, Charlie Brooker, is a big gaming fan.

~~~
mrguyorama
It's really convenient that you picked your start date to be right after the
Video Game Crash of 1983.

I'm not sure we would ever see anything like that again. The fact of the
matter is that the big names like EA and Ubisoft make boatloads of money and
aren't in danger of losing it. Mass appeal games and the audiences they cater
to are surprisingly un-finicky

~~~
whymauri
I think the next major crash in video games will be e-sports. And I love
e-sports (three time TI attendee). As Peter Dager (ppd), ex-CEO of Evil Genius
and industry professional says best:

>Esports is a phenomenon brought on by the introduction of the internet, it
does not have to be run the same way that professional sports operate. Many
professional sports do not expect to fill a stadium. 99% of our audience is
online and prefer to sit in their rooms on their PCs so lets please focus our
resources on improving the broadcast and player/talent treatment. Too many
irresponsible “businessmen” have latched on to esports over the past couple of
years and have convinced billionaires that they are sitting on top of a golden
egg. Yes esports is new, yes it is exciting to be at the front of an emerging
industry but you are setting everyone else who is to follow up for failure by
creating unrealistic standards and expectations.

>The [e-sports] audience is not going to grow immensely, let’s build
sustainable events so we can continue to enjoy the game we love so much.

I think if investor expectations are not well-managed, this is going to cause
an e-sports 'winter' if you will. If this happens, it's definitely going to
affect some major game-changing genres like MOBAs and some FPSs. I genuinely
feel like it could cause a huge stumble for AAA companies.

------
sien
This is not the graph of industry revenue for an industry that "can't go on
like this".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Video_ga...](https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Video_game_industry/0/f85d13c567f225f5e4fc8fd52f98c3f775e42591.png)

The game industry is probably in better health than book publishing, music,
film or TV. For consumer the plethora of things available has never been
greater.

~~~
AlexandrB
I think a sizable chunk[1] of that revenue may be coming from mechanics that
are more properly classified as gambling. If/when regulators catch on, things
might change very quickly.

[1] Mobile seems to be the fastest growing segment and it’s dominated by
gambling and psychologically manipulative micro transactions.

~~~
checktheorder
The only game I've bothered to put on my new phone since buying it 6 months
ago is an open source Scrabble clone I found on F-droid called "Crossword".
Every so often I'll look on the Play Store for a game, but I find nothing but
pay-to-win advertising-flooded lookalikes and abandon the search.

I'm perfectly happy to pay a one-time price for a fun game that includes all
content and is playable offline. Unfortunately they seem to be in rather short
supply.

------
tibbon
I am floored at how cheap games are these days.

Ultima IV had a street price of $50-55; in 1985. That's ~$130 in 2019. Teams
were far far smaller then. Of course a "successful" game was also a far
different standard; as within 4 years of release it had sold only 400,000
copies; despite being a pretty great game.

Whenever people talk about how expensive games are I feel very very old,
because games (and the systems) used to actually be expensive.

The C64 was an amazing budget system, and was originally $595. That's like
$1600 today. Yes it was a "computer" as well, but people balk at the price of
$300 systems today and call $1000 computers too expensive.

~~~
mr_crankypants
Teams were _so_ much smaller.

Ultima IV was about as big-budget as a video game got. Here are the credits
for the DOS version: [https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/ultima-iv-quest-of-
the-av...](https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/ultima-iv-quest-of-the-
avatar/credits)

19 people, total, for the original development and production on the Apple II
version, plus the PC, Atari and Amiga ports.

~~~
kbumsik
> 19 people, total

Still it was much smaller. Witcher 3 dev team is about 250.

~~~
mr_crankypants
According to [https://www.gamespot.com/articles/this-is-how-much-the-
witch...](https://www.gamespot.com/articles/this-is-how-much-the-
witcher-3-cost-to-make/1100-6430409/), 240 is just the number of in-house
staff. The full count of people who worked on the project came to more like
1,500.

------
inamberclad
Kotaku has been publishing this kind of article for years. Most video game
journalism is about creating enough content to keep an audience with a
microsecond attention span. Doing so requires creating hype, controversy, and
doubt.

------
bensonn
I am probably not the standard gamer so all this is personal opinion. I am
still playing Skyrim. I don't like FPS games, I don't like multi-player games
and I don't like sports games.

The $60 soft-cap makes sense. That is normally for the core game- Skyrim had
three official add-ons, I think $5 each. Game developers have created bad
reputations for themselves- you expect new games to be sold unfinished
requiring huge updates right after release and to still be buggy for months
afterwards. I tried Assassins Creed but within the first week I had multiple
~10GB updates, never made it further than the first 10 minutes of the game.
Micro-transactions and in-game advertising are probably subconsciously
factored into a games prices by customers now. I stopped buying EA games
because every loading screen or background object had "EA" written on it
(golf). $60 used to be the purchase price of a disc you bought and you owned
the game, pop it in and it works. $60 is now the price for a download link to
"rent" the game until the publisher or host decides to no longer keep it up
and running.

I hate "cloud" gaming. Friday night at 8pm and you decide to play some videos-
forced 12GB update means the game will be ready to play sometime Monday
morning, assuming the update didn't mess things up. If your Internet is down,
sorry, can't play the games you bought and downloaded.

Of course customers aren't going to spend more than $60 for a broken buggy
game filled with ads that they don't truly own. Bethesda had moved on from
Skyrim but fans have not. (Hopefully TES6 stays similar to the series) 8 years
after release people are still playing the game. New mods and full add-ons
created by fans are still coming out. The market is there for quality single-
player games.

I stopped reading when the article started talking about energy.

~~~
Havoc
Check out Witcher 3 if you haven't. Thought it would be hard to top
Skyrim...but actually...

------
Joe-Z
That‘s an environmentalism article luring you in with how single player games
have developed in the last 10 years. Nothing against environmentalism but I
was hoping to read more about how actual game development will change and not
the same topics that every other technology company faces equally due to
climate change and the resulting policies to mitigate it.

~~~
noobermin
To be honest, if one is concerned with environmentalism, addressing automobile
dependency will do a lot more for the environment than addressing data
center[1] electricity usage's contribution to GHG's which has, ironically,
lessened over the last decade[0].

[0] [https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-
emis...](https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions)

[1] EDIT: Total electricity usage(for both industry AND
commercial/residential) is actually a big contributor to GHG's still, but it's
declining and a lot of things, like the reply points out, contribute to it,
chiefly things like air conditioning and heating during the winter.

~~~
daxfohl
Not to mention it sounds like he's arguing against data center driven games.
Which seems like the wrong thing to argue against. Add up all the energy used
by the consoles and TVs and I'd imagine it dwarfs the data center energy.

~~~
Nasrudith
The transmission and encoding/decoding is probably significant however even if
the processing may be more efficient in bulk- look at streaming vs downloaded
energy useage for one.

But it is still probably a win over retail distribution.

~~~
daxfohl
And that said, talking energy to entertainment ratio, I'd think the
proliferation of giant screen televisions that are just on all the time would
be an even larger concern.

------
jhanschoo
The article makes two points, one centered around the profitability of making
games under current business models, the other one centered around the
environmental impact of the newer games-as-a-sevice models.

The point that the traditional games publishing model is bad for profits
holds, but the point about environmentalism is ridiculous.

First, high environmental impact would mean nothing for the ability for the
GaasS models to draw a profit.

Secondly, GaaS should actually be good for the environment. The alternative to
computing in data centers is computing in personal computers and consoles,
which leads to worse environmental outcomes both in the hardware itself and in
their lower efficiency. Besides, computing in data centers leads to more
opportunities for efficiency since redundant computations among different
devices and users can be parallelized.

The main environmental impact here is one the author completely misses: the
energy required for the bandwidth of streaming videos.

~~~
matteuan
I agree with you. I would add another huge efficiency advantage of a data-
center over a console, that is better heat dissipation.

~~~
moate
Also shipping. You only need to ship the platform in a GaaS model once, and
you build a data center once. From there you're just uploading/transferring
code. With physical games you need to produce the games and ship them each
time a new one comes out. Not to mention packaging etc.

~~~
wilg
Well, but most games are delivered digitally now
([https://www.statista.com/statistics/190225/digital-and-
physi...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/190225/digital-and-physical-
game-sales-in-the-us-since-2009/)). I wonder how the bandwidth to deliver the
full game compares to the bandwidth to stream video of the game if you're
playing it 100% over the internet.

~~~
matteuan
I think we can consider the devices where the content is accessed as thin
clients. There is some literature supporting the thin client architecture
(e.g.
[https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/55689271.pdf](https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/55689271.pdf))
and it seems that the power consumption can reduce significantly (3x). These
studies do not take in account this particular case but I think they can give
you an idea of the scale.

------
pdpi
I don't think the tangent off into the topic of cloud-based computing makes a
lot of sense.

PUE is a measure of efficiency for the data centre itself — how much power is
going into computing vs the data centre. It says nothing about the efficiency
of the hardware itself, which can easily beat the efficiency of consumer
hardware by enough of a margin that it burns overall _less_ energy.

One obvious place for such savings is storage — there's no reason you need a
separate copy of a game for each compute node that's running it!

Then they run into the problem of e-waste, which is precisely the sort of
thing that cloud-based/streaming consoles would actually make better!

------
personjerry
This is click bait. The author points out some trends in gaming and then
suddenly jumps to the conclusion that "this can't go on forever".

------
rndmize
This article is very questionable.

> When you adjust for inflation, the retail cost of video games has never been
> cheaper, and it’s been this way for some time. The $60 price point for a
> standard big-budget release has held steady for nearly 15 years...

I guess the constantly growing addressable market just doesn't matter? The
human cost has nothing to do with price points or gamer expectations and
everything to do with supply and demand. Lots of people want to make games.
Developers/publishers take advantage.

> you’ll get a stark—if unscientific—picture of how each big publisher’s
> release slate has thinned out in the last five years, relying on recurring
> cash cows like sports games and annualized franchises and little else. In
> 2008, those three publishers released 98 games; in 2018 they released just
> 28, not including expansions.

Yeah, because the big publishers _aren't needed_. The tooling a platform like
Steam provides has made it much easier to self-publish, or use a small-time
publisher instead - your game doesn't need to be on retail shelves to be
successful anymore, there's tons of free marking channels available today, all
of which combine to make publishers less necessary.

> The foremost takeaway is that while data centers are growing in number,
> their energy consumption is starting to plateau out of necessity, as the
> dramatic increase in cloud computing has actually forced tech companies to
> become more efficient.

This has literally nothing to do with gaming or its sustainability. As the
computing/electronics industry moves in more efficient or green directions,
gaming hardware (not even the game industry) will follow.

There's problems with the game industry - gambling mechanics, exploitation of
"whales", discovery/marketing/shovelwear, how to handle growing international
audiences, and so on, but I don't see any of these mentioned in the article.

------
izzydata
I'd honestly prefer the games industry collapsed and maybe started over. This
whole concept of massive thousand people teams working on huge scale games
that take many years to finish only manages to produce games devoid of
passion. Back when games were made by small teams where every individual was
able to contribute significantly to the game did it feel right.

Obviously that is just my personal opinion, but despite games getting more
graphically impressive they have been getting worse overall.

------
oneepic
>kotaku opinion article about the games industry at large

Like hearing a 4-year old talk about philosophy.

~~~
Sydney_
Your reply should be at the top. LOL

------
kraig911
I wonder what if video games can be contrasted against data we know for book
publishing. There was a time books were a huge novelty. Now we only talk about
the ones that a REALLY good. When I was younger almost ANY video game
impressed me. Nowadays not so much.

Funny thing is to the industry is doubling down on graphics graphics graphics.
But damn it if I'm the only one who thinks they're just not fun anymore. I
mean have you guys tried Anthem? It's awful.

Where is the goofiness that is battle toads. The narrative that is FFVI. The
precision that is a flight sim. There are obviously exceptions and some
amazing games. (Witcher III, BOTW, anything Mario, Stardew) But it feels like
the big publishers still think it's 2003.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
_" Where is the goofiness that is battle toads. The narrative that is FFVI.
The precision that is a flight sim. There are obviously exceptions and some
amazing games. (Witcher III, BOTW, anything Mario, Stardew) But it feels like
the big publishers still think it's 2003."_

The indie scene, man. I've been following Failbetter Games, and they've got so
much narrative over three games that are essentially about exploring a big
crazy world and all the people living in it, fully fleshing out the people you
meet, their pasts and presents, and what their lives say about the world they
live in.

I've never been so mildly horrified with my own unintended consequences and
revelations in that 'world' since I dropped the companion cube into the
incinerator in Portal.

~~~
baud147258
> I've never been so mildly horrified with my own unintended consequences and
> revelations in that 'world' since I dropped the companion cube into the
> incinerator in Portal.

For me, dropping the companion cube just meant that the door opened and I
could continue to move forward.

------
FrozenVoid
The future isn't about "buying games" or "cloud gaming subscriptions". It will
be a form of mobile/casual gaming overtaking interest of mainstream gaming
culture by providing similar quality of expirience in the browser, for free.

Its likely will look like self-contained web games, utilizing
WebGL+WebAssembly and procedurally generated assets on the client side. It
would be powered by ads, microtransactions and donations, without "sale" or
"subscription" paradigm - just load the webpage and play.

~~~
Freak_NL
> for free. […] powered by ads, microtransactions and donations

So, not actually for free.

~~~
FrozenVoid
In free-to-play model, you don't have to pay anything. You can block ads,
ignore microtranactions and don't donate anything, so its essentially free.

~~~
drucik
Well, when the game is designed around microtransactions free to play means
more free to pay, as playing without paying is not enjoyable at all. Look at
EAs mobile offerings.

------
tus88
I wonder what another Great Games Crash would even look like. Publishers go
out of business but platforms like Steam prosper as they already have more
superb games that anyone can play in a lifetime? And what would be the
resurrection of the industry? Who knows, but I sort of agree with the
sentiment that something is about to give.

~~~
badpun
In a hypothetical scenario where all publishers go out of business, it would
be hard to see how much the sales decline overall - i.e. how much sales was
driven purely by marketing and how much is people really wanting to buy and
play video games.

------
lowbloodsugar
I only play single player games, and I have more games than I have time. I've
completed Horizon Zero Dawn 5 times. Just finished Days Gone. My kid finished
indie classic Celeste earlier this year and is grinding through Dead Cells. I
didn't like Last of Us, personally (too depressing), but it did quite well,
I'm told. I've got Monster Hunter and Sekiro downloaded and waiting for me to
get bored of Days Gone.

I read that HZD has made a profit (after development and marketing costs) of
over $300m, having sold 10m copies.

Finally played an Assassins Creed game this year. Microtransactioned to death.
Never buying one of those again.

------
komali2
> Let’s run down the Big Three. We’re more than halfway through 2019, and
> Electronic Arts has only published one single-player game, the indie Sea of
> Solitude. Last year was much the same, with two indies as its only single-
> player releases: Fe and Unraveled 2. Activision’s portfolio of single-player
> games looks even thinner: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the only exclusively
> single-player, non-remake game that the publisher has released

Right, but, isn't that ok? I don't want to go FIFA on games like Sekiro. I
like it better when a team is given 3-5 years to churn out a dank single
player experience.

------
stcredzero
_studios shuttered, developers burned out, and toxic work culture fostered
environments hostile to marginalized people_

People have been banging on about this for quite some time. One would figure
that someone would put together a team that isn't toxic, then succeed. There
must be some kind of outside force which makes the whole industry toxic.
Probably the same market pressures which turn people into frenemies in other
media industries.

------
CoolGuySteve
The argument about the $60 price point seems specious to me. Video games have
massive economies of scale and the market has been growing steadily faster
than inflation, meaning that while the price point has been the same, the
volume of sales have increased with a low marginal cost for each unit sold.

Along with sheer sales volume, digital distribution has lowered publishing
costs, created after-markets for DLC, and reduced the secondary market.
Digital distribution also allows for much greater price elasticity.

If anything, you could argue that digital publishers like Steam, PlayStation
Store, etc, should lower their cut, but it seems like that's starting to
happen on the PC with increased competition in the space from Epic, Origin,
etc.

I think the real problem with the industry is that video games are a hit
business where a handful of games make almost all the profit. The best way to
profit in a space like this is to crank out content as cheaply as possible.

This is evidenced by the fact that game developers have been working crunch
since back in the 90s when a $50 game was worth $80 in 2018 dollars.

Edit: Why not comment instead of censoring with downvotes?

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _Video games have massive economies of scale_

In what way? The code and art/music/voice/story assets are custom for each
game; the only thing that might be shareable is the engine.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
Like I said, cost per unit sold is almost nothing.

------
metalrain
Amount of electronic waste and low percentage of recycling seems quite big
issue, much bigger than problems in gaming.

How many phones, laptops, tvs, desktop pcs, consoles, music devices, cameras
and other related devices have you stopped using lets say past 10 years? How
many have you recycled?

------
vectorEQ
once the race to the bottom ends someday we'll have companies making good
games again. there's 1 or 2 big studios who still take time for stuff, but
most large ones are pretty much hitting the bottom now and people are stopping
to buy their games and content. once people are fed up enough and sales take a
big enough dive they will wake up. - so in reality, gamers, it's in your hands
to change the industry. not in the developers hands. they just make what
sells. so buy what's good and they will focus on that.

------
zeofig
More incoherent gibbering from kotaku. There are plenty of good games.
Obviously the AAA titles are quite garbage these days, but who cares?

------
pablok2
Starts with the state of the game industry and goes on to climate change...
ok?

------
CivBase
> In short, the single-player game was not sustainable. So why should we think
> the current model is?

The single-player game is very sustainable. It's just not as lucrative unless
you double-down on in-game monetization like Ubisoft does. Devolver Digital is
plenty stable, even though it makes a tiny fraction of the revenue we see from
"AAA" publishers.

> In 2008, those three publishers released 98 games; in 2018 they released
> just 28, not including expansions.

Well there's the problem. If you focus all of your effort on a few large-scale
projects, you will have to milk those projects for all you can. There's still
a huge market for small and medium-scale projects, though. The indie market is
thriving.

> Independent developers, meanwhile, continue to fight for the smallest slice
> of an impossibly crowded market.

How is this an indication of a struggling industry? This just tells me that
the market is easy to break into, which should be hailed as a positive. Of
course "indie" studios aren't going to individually be responsible for a large
slice of the market. They don't have the budgets to fund massive projects with
a ton of marketing.

However, I'd be pretty interested in seeing just how much money "indie" titles
as a whole bring in and how that has compared to the rest of the market over
time. I'd guess it's grown significantly over time and that's the real reason
why "AAA" publishers struggle with smaller scale games. There's a reason "AAA"
publishers like EA want to be associated with some of these games.

> And Sony already offers a streaming service, PlayStation Now, which is
> likely to expand in the next generation.

If PlayStation Now is anything to go by, I wouldn't put a lot of stock in
xCloud or Stadia. There's a lot of buzz around it now, but I doubt game
streaming will get any mainstream traction for a long time.

> [a bunch of talk about data center power efficiency and climate change]

And how does this compare to the amount of energy spent running games
natively? I'm sure Microsoft's, Sony's, and Google's servers are configured to
utilize hardware much more efficiently than my gaming PC.

This seems like an out-of-nowhere tangent to me and the article doesn't
provide enough information about it to really go anywhere so it devolves into
lamenting the "current political climate".

I think this article makes the mistake of conflating the state of several
large "AAA" publishers with the state of the games industry as a whole. I've
long-since stopped caring about almost anything the "Big Three" (EA,
Activision, and Ubisoft) have a hand in, and most other "AAA" publishers have
damaged their reputation so much that I have practically zero anticipation for
new games.

There are many things companies in the gaming industry should do better, but I
don't think the industry as a whole is in near as dire a state as the author
describes. I wouldn't shed a tear if most of the "AAA" publishers disappeared
tomorrow. There's still plenty of great games coming out from developers and
publishers with much cleaner reputations.

------
golemotron
> Artists who work on gory cinematics integral to games like Mortal Kombat
> suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

This makes me wonder how surgeons and morticians manage. Surely something must
be done for them too.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
Pitch black humor and medical school training to dissociate appropriately from
the patient. But it's still very difficult, psychologically.

------
HEEEEEEEEEEEE
Kotaku's content is so heavily editorialized that it's hard to take seriously.
Every time I read an article it seems that I'm being told how to feel about
something rather than being informed about it.

~~~
gdulli
You know that this is explicitly and intentionally an editorial piece, right?
I'm not sure what you're criticizing other than something completely
fundamental about how all journalism works.

------
throwaway66666
I am going to be downvoted, but this needs to be said.

The problem with the indie developers is that many of them are driven by greed
and only greed. But that is hidden behind a veil of "we are the underdogs,
passionate people, like you!". In reality, it's just a job like any other, and
the "we are passionate", is the equivalent of "we are changing the world by...
uhh disrupting!" that startup kool-aid drinkers say.

Let me give you an example. I dated a twitter semi-famous indie dev a while
ago. She has a day job but makes games on the side. I have a day job and I
make music on the side. I remember I was in a room with her, and was looking
in ordering Aztec death whistles (it's a whistle that sounds like a human
scream), to use into my music. She asked me "oh and how many people will like
that?" To which I answered, "Right now I have 10 listeners. After the death
whistles maybe I will have 5" and grinned. I make music for me, not for anyone
else. If somebody happens to like it, that's fine. It's a hobby and a form of
self-expression, like people cook for themselves or practice archery for
themselves. I am not looking into becoming famous. In a sense, I am free to
create what i want, and I am limited only but my skills and what I can do, not
by what I must do.

She looked troubled... So I stopped and observed. She was looking at how many
copies a game sold, and was chatting on FB with another on-twitter-all-day
indie dev, about how many copies his game sold. Then she proclaimed that the
next title would be different, way more appealing to the masses. I put my
guitar down, stopped trying to sing "love will tear us apart" but in tuvan
throat singing! And proclaimed, wait you 're selling out? How can you be
selling out, the game doesn't even exist yet!!

She replied "So what? There is no same in wanting to make a good living from
your art. Not everybody is like you and is happy with just... playing. Never
advancing to the next stage. Never making something meaningful.".

I WAS SHOCKED. I still am. No wonder it didn't work out in the end. But... she
told me, she had started making games because the game industry was full of
stereotypes. Boys are the space marine, and girls play barbie's mini games,
barbie pets her horse, barbie goes on a date with Ken, bullshit. That she
wanted to make a difference, it was her passion, she wanted to prove that
there can be fun games that are not gender-biased and that everyone can enjoy.
I thought it was a noble, experimentation, passion project, like music is for
me.

No. No, making games is not the end itself. Making games is means to an end.
Indie devs are greed-driven. Not passion driven.

I hanged out with a few of them in GDC this year. They all care about money. I
felt like I was at a dinner with C* level people that just like gossiping
about IPOs and how much money some friends, or friends of friends of friends
raised. All about money. "This game sold 700k copies!!! It uses unity assets".
"That guy from romania made X million dollars!?!?".

There was a guy, who put a game on early access, then delayed the game's
release for 10 years, because he made enough money to buy a house in San
Francisco, and just did... nothing afterwards. Just talks to people with a
"holier than thou" attitude. Meanwhile the game aged so bad, it went from a
7/10 to a 3/10 when it finally got out 9 years late!!!! How dare you! All
these people who paid you because they believed in you, and you just shit on
them when you hit a certain $$$ in your savings account. But I guess... why
wouldn't he. He already accomplished his end goal of MONEY.

Early access, what a shitty thing. No self-respecting musician would say; Here
are the first 2 tracks of the album. And some drum tracks from the 3rd and 4th
piece. Maybe in 5 years you will get the bass track for the 3rd piece too! No
movie director would say; we released the green screen version, and when we
raise enough money you will get to see the dragons and the elves. Only game
devs do that.

The inherent problem I see with indie devs, is that they lie to their audience
as much as themselves as well. When I see the new GTA V game, I know what I am
getting into. I will pay $60 to run over some people. But with indie devs I am
being schooled about the exploration and experimentation. About feelings,
about difficult subjects that noone dared to mention in game medium before. I
am intrigued, I am captivated, I am in love! And then... you find out that
that indie-game, scooby-do-esque pulling the mask off it was Michael Bay, and
Michael Bay's 30th transfomers film all along! All about money, all about
making investors happy!

Music has forever changed. We musicians accepted that we won't be rich from
our music, so we are liberated to scavenge for a few bucks to rent a van and
go touring playing in 20-people shows. Usually when I hang out with musicians,
we end up smoking weed and committing to jam sessions that may never happen.
And then everyone gets really really excited when I pull the death whistle
out.

------
bag531
The game industry needs to unionize.

------
verisimilitudes
This is drivel that doesn't warrant a comprehensive critique, so I must be
really bored.

>At about this time next year, we’ll have a pretty good idea of what the next
generation of video games will look like.

The current Sony and Microsoft consoles seemed to have few games worth owning
and then released incompatible versions recently, yet a new version is
warranted?

>as studios shuttered, developers burned out, and toxic work culture fostered
environments hostile to marginalized people.

The only one of these that's valid is the developer overworking. A studio
closing and ''sexism'' don't even come close, but anything to conflate the
real issues, I suppose.

>When you adjust for inflation, the retail cost of video games has never been
cheaper, and it’s been this way for some time. The $60 price point for a
standard big-budget release has held steady for nearly 15 years, unadjusted
for inflation even as the cost to make big-budget video games has risen
astronomically with player expectations.

Sixty dollars is already high enough for a game and yet the next few
paragraphs discuss ways companies increase the price by selling an incomplete
product. Well, if the price ever rises, these companies would have no reason
to stop, so you'd have higher prices and the same garbage. Anyone who tells
you the price of a product such as this really isn't enough is likely a
mindless drone.

>In short, the single-player game was not sustainable. So why should we think
the current model is?

Why should I care if a type of video game is deemed ''sustainable''; what
makes this claim valid, anyway? If there are games that don't appeal to me, I
won't purchase them. Why would I ever think ''Gee, there aren't any new games
that appeal to me; I guess I'll buy one that doesn't.'' when there is such a
breadth of video games over several decades? That would be like buying a
fashion magazine because the book store didn't have any programming books you
wanted. If only ''Indie'' groups are releasing games I want, why would that be
an issue?

>In short, the single-player game was not sustainable. So why should we think
the current model is?

If you're a capitalist, you can only figure the market will eventually correct
itself, on its own, so why care? The article then spends several paragraphs
discussing climate issues, which are irrelevant.

>Video games cannot do this forever. If any of these things were to
collapse—the people who make them, the economy they’re sold in, the ecosystem
we’re all a part of—it would be catastrophic. All of them at once? That’s a
disaster we need to talk about, openly. Because there are solutions to these
problems.

Again, why should anyone care, considering the breadth of current games
available? Should I give a damn if a publisher is struggling, considering
there are more books, and about topics I like at that, than I could ever read
in my lifetime?

The article then suggests all of the children and men with nothing better to
do who regularly read Kotaku call their politicians about climate issues. The
last few paragraphs of this article are a mess.

>It’s unlikely that video games will ever truly go extinct. We’ll probably
always have something called “video games,” but what those games will look
like is still very much in flux. There’s no guarantee that the way games are
currently made will remain viable for another 10 years—games aren’t even made
today the same way they were 10 years ago.

This is such a stupid paragraph. This is clearly written for a lowbrow
audience they expect to easily manipulate.

>They will look different. They will change because they can, and because they
must. Hopefully, all the ways games change will be on our terms—otherwise
disaster will change them for us.

This is an entertainment medium, one that has a lot of garbage in it, at that.
This is about video games and some idiot was paid to write this.

In closing, this isn't a great critique, but the article was garbage. I
dislike there were enough cretins to put this on the front page, while
interesting material written by interesting people goes entirely ignored.
Those are my thoughts.

