„Die Spielebranche befindet sich in einer wirklich schrecklichen Lage“, sagt Brenda Romero: „Wir waren in den 80er-Jahren dort, als der Absturz stattfand, und das ist definitiv noch schlimmer.“
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/the-industrys-in-a-really-horrible-place-brenda-romero-says-we-were-there-in-the-80s-for-the-crash-and-this-is-definitely-crashier/
43 Kommentare
Ehhhhhh……the industry is in a bad place because you have a lot of consolidation under companies who don’t know what to do with their properties, or you have a lot of companies putting out games that either don’t give gamers what they want and/or are buggy messes. A lot of small or midsize game companies are doing fine, especially if they’re self-owned.
No offense to the Romeros but John hasn’t put out a good game since Quake 1 and the Mafia game they just put out a decade ago was a financial flop. It’s not surprising their funding got pulled by Microsoft if they were tightening their belts.
What reality is she living in. We keep getting literal generational games near every year. Elden ring, baldurs gate, expedition 33, silksong, etc.
The industry is shifting, but we have multiple generations who’s primary form of entertainment is video games. It’s gotten to the point that watching people play games has become a legitimate business.
There will be changes coming, and many for the worse I am sure, but nothing compared to the scorched earth of the atarti crash.
The indie gaming industry is BOOMING. People just need to put their dollars there. Not in all the triple A slop.
Yeah its a pretty horrible time to be a game dev. Sure, you can be lucky and be the 1 out of thousands to make a hit indie game, but even then, the landscape for gamers is srarting to revolve around flavor of the week type of attention. You’re not making consistent income and it’s pretty rough. People have no idea how much money goes into marketing even for indie games. Its over 70% of your budget if you want to actually get anywhere. Finding publishers is crazy difficult, too. There are thousands and thousands of devs who put years and their heart into their game, only to get less than minimum wage, if they’re lucky.
Romero and his wife are just mad no one is buying their mediocre games. LoL.
Keep in mind games will never end, the only thing that can end will be some of the major players in consoles and the desire that everything has to be Triple AAA.
It might be good in some ways to have a reset? Gaming IP shouldn’t be always expected to be a cash cow.
I’d take 1 game created by a person or group of people that has heart and passion than a team of 500 making the next Hollywood style shoot em up.
Just bring back making interactive games with light guns and instead of full vr maybe utilize ar so people can run around.
Too many games
I bet it’s hard to be a game dev, but as a consumer I’m loving what’s coming out, in the past few years I’ve spent loads of time on Cyperpunk, BG3, E33, now enjoying Crimson Desert. The cream of the crop is fantastic rn.
They just need to stop making unjoyable slop that cost near 100$ on release
People who say this are the one’s who completely ignore the indie scene. Get out of your freaking AAA and infinite sequel bubble
I dunno, I imagine there’s a cycle. Some of the rogue developers I grew up ended up becoming power houses that eventually got absorbed by even bigger companies and thus enshitifaction begins.
The industry is just a pinata for investors at this point. Stop making games just for profit and you’ll see it do a lot better.
Lots of great AA games coming out all the time, as well as the indie scene. Kinda just seems like the AAA studios, especially in the US, are crumbling under their own weight.
LOL I completely disagree. Gaming has almost never been better. If you play on PC, you actually can’t keep up with how many fantastic games are coming out. The „gaming industry“ of mega corporations, overbloated, 10 year development cycle, 500 bajillion dollar development cost, $70-$90, open world third person games are in a horrible place maybe but there are some fantastic games out and coming out.
Total bullshit. The 80’s crash was a result of a complete glut of very poor quality games that flooded the market for a few different reasons.
When Nintendo came in with their closed platform that they had to approve games for, ensuring a minimum of quality, the video games market started exploding again, significantly surpassing the heights of Pong and Atari.
Today the video games market is highly mature, on multiple platforms and with multiple levels of developers and publishers, from the giants of the industry to one and two man passion projects which, with some luck, can even become big hits.
There is no crash coming, not in the way that the 80’s crash happened. There has been a pull back on spending post COVID for multiple reasons, but that’s not the same thing.
I would be sad if no new videogames ever got made. However, there are enough made that could keep me busy until the end of my days. Hell, that’s just my Steam library.
Give Jane Jensen the licensed rights for Gabriel Knight 4 as she’s been attempting for years, Activision needs to stop sitting on this thing for decades waiting for her pass away.
Anyone who loves point and click adventure games with great stories from the ’90s knows what I’m talking about.
Private equity and venture capitalists have ruined pretty much everything from the housing market to video games. These people understand nothing about the industries they buy out. They only care about profits and don’t seem to understand that passion projects that are the products of love and sacrifice are what make money because their passion and love shine through. Everything from film and tv to video games feel like hollow shell cash grabs that are designed from the very first page to make money and follow formulas of what made money before. They’ve co-opted studio heads and devs who understood how to make appealing games that make money in favor of patterns and precedents to extract as much money as possible from beloved franchises that ultimately end up just destroying said franchises. This is why indie studios and AA games were so big last year, in my opinion. The passion of their work really shine through and audiences could feel it. Expedition 33 has a soul. Call of duty 9000 does not. One is a joy to play. The other people play out of habit or to grind battle passes because they have fomo.
The industry is shifting because the tools are so much more powerful that a single finger of guys can make better game than a multinational corporation.
I think, similary to movies, music, and fine arts, indie and niche stuff will become more relevant and find its way. If mainstream AAA stuff only serves a particular target group, we will start to look somewhere else. And I personally feel a lot better playing games by some passionate devs and artists and supporting those than giving another Ubisoft my money.
I think the game industry is in an incredible place where more indie developers have a chance and the AAA gaming industry is struggling. It’s the same thing with Hollywood. You have to make movies people wanna see, you have to make games people actually wanna play. Hollow Knight, silk song expedition 33, Hades. All incredible games maybe we don’t want Black ops 15, the same fucking game over and over again I’m sick of that shit. I already played the first couple when I was young. I don’t need to keep playing the same game. Do something original.
Turns out you can’t milk the cow forever.
And here we are with Nintendo just chillin through it all again
Spire 2 and Mewgenics just came out. Seems pretty good to me.
The death of AAA studios is welcomed. Indy devs have been carrying the industry for the last 10 years
This article is, whether these two realize it or not, more so referring to the stage of capitalism we are in then because video games as an industry is about to pop. It’s fascinating how mainstream media utterly lacks the language or willingness to diagnose this, and just sees people getting fired as signs of a recession in an industry. Because that would have been somewhat true 20-30 years ago.
The reason today that big publishers jettison half their staff the instant a game comes out, success or failure, is because it makes that quarter look better. And “make the quarter look better” is the ideology that runs all our major industry’s now. It funnels more money to investors. And we have designed a system where increasingly across more industries, creators have no rights to their creations. You can pour your heat into a game for 3 years and your reward is a pink slip because the instant the game is done, the corporation that owns the game dousnt need you anymore.
This specific problem is wholly un-unique to the game industry. Thought video games are new enough that they have zero history of serious unionization. So things are really bad out there for developers
The industry itself, measured in terms of how many games in can produce and the variety, is in a golden age. And this is owed to how accessible game development is now compared to decades ago. Big publishers are increasingly irrelevant to the consumer. I mean I guess it sucks if your a sheep who buys FIFA and cod every year. But these people arnt really discerning quality anyway. For people who enjoy video games as a hobby, we have never been more spoiled for choice. That aspect of the industry won’t change. As long as we don’t let companies like Nintendo patent game mechanics…….
I’ve been in this industry the vast majority of my life. Yes, this is likely the most „house of cards“ the industry has ever been…but I’m not worried about the long term success of video games. This isn’t the first crash it’s survived, and it won’t be the last. Everyone treated the crash of 83 as the death knell of the game industry, but that wasn’t even the worst crash the industry has suffered. During 83 the industry lost roughly 75% of its value. During the 70’s though, there was a crash that led to the industry losing over 95% of its value. Even if we see an INSANE crash in the coming years, gaming will survive. I’m not worried about gaming as an artform. It has proven it’s here to stay. What form that takes might change, but people will always want to play games.
AAA studios need to go back to basic… Stop spending 200m-400m on making a game. look how timeless masterpieces like batman city were made (cost only 10m to made) or half life 2 (cost around 40m). Smaller tighter games are much better than big overbloated games imo.
And to think that one of my dreams was to work in the video game industry……
These niche artforms and hobbies become billion dollar cash cows. This is the expected outcome when the suits get involved.
I’ve been in the industry since the late 90s and this is absolutely the worst I’ve ever seen it.
i’m 10 years in the industry. it’s dead
One thing I hate about gaming nowadays is when people expect multiplayer games to continuously add new stuff every week. Like I know some games are live service and that’s what you pay for but I feel others really didn’t need to go so hard with the updates and the moment the Dev take a little while cooking something new up. People are already saying dead game etc.
It’s kinda happening to Arc Raiders I wouldn’t necessarily call it live service as there isn’t a battlepass and there’s not really much FOMO in it at all.
It’s all the people who hate PvP. Like come on you can expect devs to release numerous high quality PvE encounters every other week. Of course your gonna get bored you only really need to kill certain Arc (the Robot enemy) a few times to max out your character (obviously more if you choose to go on an expedition it’s kinda like prestige in CoD)
PvE is literally just killing the same enemies over and over who have the same attacks in order to get stuff that lets you do it slightly faster.
I’m not bashing PvE as a whole it is fun especially when you team up with randoms but there is only so much h you can do before it become boring.
The PvP in this game lets the game essentially become timeless. Each encounter is slightly diffrent due to skill levels and gear. The player interaction is fun (yes it gets toxic, but honestly I ignore it and if they are extremely racist it’s all the more satisfying killing them).
Arc raiders can afford to Slow Down. I just feel it needs a little better endgame that incorporates PvP and PvE maybe like an item hunting thing where you can exchange lots of certain items for semi permanent perk maybe like 40 hours of better stamina (I’m not to sure on the balancing as I’m sure it could be abused). But I’ll love an endgame thing that still has the thrill of searching and acquiring a certain items
It’s the public companies that are really going to crash. Being a public game company basically means you are anti-consumer and pro-board of directors. If your entertainment company is no longer pro-consumer you are going to crash it’s only a matter of time.
There’s such an oversaturation of the video game market, which is good and bad. Good because there’s a lot of quality Indy games, but they’re buried in terrible games. Not to mention competing with AAA studios that churn the same crap out every year because people keep buying it.
I used to teach high school in the US. For a long time, the absolute #1 answer that kids gave when asked what they wanted to do after high school, the most popular response was always game designer/tester/professional gamer.
FWIW I did notice at some point in the last ten years or so that „influencer/streamer“ became the newer version of that.
hardware going through the roof 80 dollar games, yeah id say its in a bad place. especially for aaa studios hell bent on draining every cent from gamers.
Good riddance. They hired a bunch of bad writers who injected bad characters and forced politics while college gaming courses churned out probably the worst generation of game developers ever.
China came in and cleaned house on the epic story game and waifu department, while indie devs just created… games. Wow. Imagine that. Fun engaging content. Turns out gamers just want attractive people and fun gameplay without a dumb political lesson written by a moron that grew up in the suburbs of california and never experienced anything harder than a bird shitting on their windshield.
Potentially, but this is vastly different from the 80’s crash. I mean back then video games were basically recognized as a novelty rather than a hobby that people might invest a lot of time into. The mindset over gaming has been permanently altered
To be fair everything is about to crash because of this economy bordering on a recession.
Romero is a dipshit