BG 3 is so stupid, it's not even optimizing micro transactions for maximum profits
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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How am I supposed to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment without paying for my dice rolls?
Wonder what a divine crit roll would cost, $5 in combat $3 outside? Heck that's too complicated $10 for all, $7 for season pass holders.
For those wondering there is no season pass.
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"Leaving money on the table" must be the exec's perspective.
Unity CEO has entered the chat
Click baiting video. Other devs don't care. As long as they can make money pumping out mediocre games then they will continue to do so. Acting like this is the first good game to come out in a decade or something.
DEVs do care. As a developer working on something you want to be proud of it. Publishers do not care.
The individuals working on the game might care.
The managers who make the decisions don't. Doesn't matter if they are a publisher or the development company itself. It's a bit blurry these days anyway, what with how easy it is to self publish and how many publishers have their own internal development studios.
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“Oh no fans might demand good games at release! The horror!”
Won't anybody think of the stockholders‽
Oh no, if people remember that games are supposed to be good, no one will buy our lootbox-infested crap anymore.
Good.
Loot boxes are so 2017. It's all about battle passes, engagement, and player retention now.
You know what creates engagement and retains players?
Making a good game that's actually fun to play instead of focusing on how you're gonna sell me hats and paint jobs and weaponizing FOMO.
As much as I prefer this model that actually isn’t what creates engagement and retains players over several games and years. They don’t do it because it’s fun to make predatory things. They do it because it makes them heaps of money. If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it. That’s the sad truth here.
Re: hats and paint jobs…hats dominated TF2 for how long? There was a black market and widespread scamming for cosmetics, that’s how nuts it got.
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Honestly I hope this does indeed set a new gold standard. Probably not with the whole early access thing, though. It’s a thing that needs to go away.
EA is an immensely useful tool for game devs, the issue is EA as an excuse to ship unpolished games or to leave games unfinished forever. Neither of which are problems intrinsic to early access, they're just bad business practice that should be shunned like any other
As a gamedev: Early Access was useful for devs, back when it was real Early Access. Think: Kerbal Space Program (the first, not the second).
Nowadays it's mostly a marketing tool, that allows to generate the hype for launch twice... Publishers and players expect "Early Access" games to be feature complete and polished before the "Early Access" launch...
And again, Larian Studios used EA as intended, which allowed them to publish a good, polished game.
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Early access worked well for them, part of the start of the game was able to be play tested, the community got to give feedback, and they actually listened, its how it should be done
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I don't think Early Access should go away as it's not inherently bad in and of itself.
What's bad about it is when it's used to sell an totally unfinished piece of shit that stays an unfinished piece of shit indefinitely.
Developers? Panicking? Developers will rejoice that they don't have to build these garbage mechanics. Publishers and game studio execs? Yeah they'll panic
Making bad developers panic maybe?
I can't imagine something like this makes the Redfall devs feel good about themselves.
Actually Redfall likely doesn't make the Redfall devs feel good about themselves.
Wasn't the whole thing with Redfall that it was Bethesda mismanagement? I'm not going to put that on the Redfall team. Does make me completely disinterested in buying any Bethesda games that aren't mainline TES though.
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BG3 is what games used to be and what they should have been like. It bring me back to my KotOR1/2, and Witcher 1 days. It's great.
This reminds me of the time Ubisoft developers decided to have a bitchfit about Elden Ring because it didn't have any of the same shitty monetization or trash formulaic design choices as their games.
It's like these developers think that because they're painfully mediocre, every other studio is required to be as well.
In similar fashion, EA/Dice woukd have desperately tried to ignore battlebit.
4 devs made a game that is better in nearly every way than any of the last few battlefield games in their spare time.
I hope AAA studios clear house and find a new formula that doesn't ruin good IP.
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How does it cost millions of dollars to make a current AAA game, and they're rarely worth it?
If you have 5,000 people on your payroll for a game what the hell are they doing? Every game should be fantastic.
I love indie and AA games. Smaller teams. More focus. More fun. Usually more quality content.
It's an issue of time and scalability. Going from 100 employees to 200 employees wont make the game in half the time. And corporate accounting would rather have 2 mediocre games per year than 1 extremely good game every 2 years, even if it sold 4 times as well since revenue is analyzed within fiscal years and financing isn't free. Capitalism sucks.
Capitalism sucks.
All the greatest games ever made were created in capitalistic economies so i cannot see how that is a determining factor. I don't know what games your thinking of. Tetris?
I think you're missing the point. They're just saying the incentive structure of capitalism doesn't necessarily encourage the best types of games. We see this with borked EA launches, predatory MTX, loot boxes, battle passes, etc
I think there is a difference between "capitalism" and "capitalism".
I think a more nuanced argument is that better games come from companies that are not primarily driven by the quarterly revenue cycle of Wall Street, that is defined as "capitalism".
I think it's more of a hit-and-miss, and good corporate leadership is the kind that people forget it's there when good games come out. I mean CDPR had a CEO both when Witcher 3 was the thing, and also when Cyberpunk 2077 was the thing that flopped. Obviously, people were more interested in the beancounters' influence in the latter case.
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I know that's probably rhetorical, but probably a similar problem to modern movies where (as described in the video Why Modern Movies Suck - They're Too Expensive) they are going after spectacle (rather than story or other elements) and due to cost they must make a 'safe' product to stay profitable, where a bland but universally palatable product will sell more tickets/copies than a stellar niche thing.
I'd also add that companies know they can usually ride the success of their own name/brand recognition. Even worse here with games because of pre-ordering, early-access as a product, and crowd-funding (which some wildly successful publishers still do--on top of unpaid self-promotion and all the other things--because people still think of them as indie).
The main problem is they drop $20mil on effects and star faces and fucking spend $20/hr for a fucking committee to write a story in a week that wouldn't pass a screenwriting 101 course.
The problem with movies and games these days is where the money goes, not how much of it there is.
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I get everyone's sentiment here, boiling it down to "better games are better" but also keep in mind the development costs and times for making new games are constantly going up. Yeah of course there are fantastic indie games out there (and I love them myself) that have a fraction of AAA game budgets and dev time but those are the gems in the rough, not the norm.
I'm all for better gaming experiences but they do come with tradeoffs. Also, flops are now death sentences for studios so the pressure to perform is even higher
you sound like EA public relations
He's not wrong, though. Game development is a business, like any other, and larger-scale games require exponentially more resources to produce than smaller indie titles.
Obviously one could make the argument "Well they shouldn't be making every single game into a huge, multi-billion dollar blockbuster title that costs the player an arm and a leg to gain access to, then they wouldn't need that amount of resources to begin with", and that would be a fair argument. But ultimately, people keep buying those games, anyway. And not by force, they buy them of their own volition. So those games continue to be profitable. There's no incentive for big studios to change their ways when consumers keep giving them money, so they're going to keep making huge games that require huge resources and huge payments from the players.
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The expectations have been set for a long time. BG3 isn't the first good game. It's just the first in a while, after mountains of AAA garbage ultimately driven by shareholders and MBAs.
The sad thing is: those people are so clueless that they dont see they'd make more money by just not getting in the way of a good dev team.
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What if games have to be good, not just eventually but on the day we sell it to someone.
Nothing better then moving the benchmark forward.
Fans expectations for games are already insanely high. Baldur's Gate 3 isn't going to change much.
Also the video implies that this complaint is industry wide but only has 3 tweets (or X's?).
This just feels like an excuse of this IGN content creator to rant against developers.
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