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Penny Arcade - Comic - Concordia
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Concordia
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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I would love for someone to take a long term view and tell management, hey, we have this new game we want to work on. Its likely only going to move about 600k copies. But, we are going to use a tight dev group, existing toolsets, and keep the budget under 20 million, so we will still make a profit on it. And, even though it doesn't do gangbusters, it establishes a new IP for you that can grow and grant larger returns down the road.
I think this here is key. I'm working at a small but historically successful and critically lauded game studio now. Even given all that, there is no silver bullet. It's an art, and like all art it's prone to failure and just wandering around trying to figure out what the hell you're doing. If you're doing it right, you're making a thing that is fresh and new, so you can't just copy someone else's success. You're building the tracks as you drive on them.
That's a whole lot easier with a ten car steam train than with a one hundred car maglev beast. One or two failed games won't find us all living on the street, unlike people at AAA companies. One big flop and heads roll. A couple of big flops and even the C-suite start having to deploy their golden parachutes.
The modern shareholder governed mega-corp structure doesn't allow for long term thinking. In any business sector. Nobody is interested in long term strategy anymore. It's all about quarterly earnings and being able to flip on a moment's notice. Stock in Sony dips in Q2? Time to dump all that stock and reinvest in something else.
They are laying people off even if games are successful, all the profit all the time.
It should be emphasized that the cascade of events that ended with Activision being sold to Microsoft started because they had their most profitable year ever, with the largest growth ever... But that growth has increased by less than it had the previous year and the board immediately agreed the company was collapsing and started looking for a buyer while the stock price imploded.
Hell, Ubisoft's current situation isn't even that bad - it's had an entire decade worse off than it has been in 2023-24 and was never in existential danger. The ownership wasn't talking about burning the company down or selling off assets to reimburse shareholder losses. Things are only dire because the board has decided they're dire.
The industry isn't really suffering, but the myth of infinite growth has taken over and no industry survives more than a few years of that before an unnecessary bloodbath.
They should try to make the next hit game. The point is you actually don't need to make all the dumb decisons Concord made to make the next hit game. Concord was never going to be the next hit game (and you could say that about many other high profile failures). If making the next hit game is a 1% chance of success with a 99% chance of dying in a pool of embarrassement, they're probably not on track to make the next hit game in the first place and should have been using a different strategy.
I just wonder about some of the really bad decisions made by publishers and studios these days. Take Ubisoft. They are on the verge of insolvency. But not because of Star Wars Outlaws underperforming, or the dumpster fire going on with Assassin's Creed: Shadows. No, the reason they are financally circling the drain is because of Skull and Bones. This was originally supposed to be a quick, cheap, and easy project capitalizing on the popularity of the Pirate aspects of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag that reused a lot of the same assets and got out the door quickly. Instead it ballooned into a decade long money pit that had to be restarted from scratch three separate times. As a project manager, how do you allow something like that to happen? How did Ubisoft allow themselves to arrive in a situation where they simply did not pull the plug on this project after it became evident that it was not going to be a quick asset flip. How do you keep pouring money into this project year after year? I makes absolutely no sense to me. And honestly, I think a company that makes these kind of decisions deserves to die.
I'm just saying it makes sense to be ambitious and spend the extra money if you think that investment can take your game from selling a hundred thousand on steam to being the next GTA V
It really depends on how you define the industry. Like so many others after consolidation, the people with their hands on the button define the industry as one that provides large executive salaries and big increases in stock value. When you look at it through that lens, it is suffering. It's just a regular goose, when they wanted one that shat out every larger golden eggs.
You don't get these same kind of pressures from indie games and smaller studios. They just need to make enough to pay off all the salaries and make a bit of reasonable profit for the owners/investors. They don't have levels of people scraping off that profit, and investors that are looking to get rich quick. Well, some do, but I speak in generalities.
A lot of those names in the credits were hired to do a job, they did the job, it paid for food and huggies and Christmases for those Production Babies listed toward the end of the credits. They learned a lot and did the best job they could, and they'll always take pride in that. If you watch the credits roll after a bad movie, how much of that is the fault of the Key Grip? How about the Gaffer? Did the Best Boy live up to that lofty title?
There are some creatives, and some managers, who were in high-level meetings where they could have sounded the alarm, sure. That is, when they get a moment to speak after the visionary creative director is done talking about how their dream is finally becoming a reality, and after the CEO finishes explaining how this is going to be the project that reverses the company's fortunes.
Bob's had his hand up for a while. Go ahead, Bob.
Unless you're talking about movies with a 100%/100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, I'm sure some percent of people say that on all creative projects. Kind of moot.
I'm talking about independent studios like FromSoftware, Larian, CDPR, Focus Entertainment, and other such studios. That's who is driving the industry forward right now.
It's "the bigs" who are making all the mistakes. The major publishing houses. EA. Activision. Ubisoft. Microsoft. Sony. Take Two. Warner Bros. All of those are the biggest players in the industry and every single one of them are run by suits who only care about money and don't care about concepts like "art" and "entertainment value" and "creative freedom." They want money. And they are making really stupid decisions that are ruining people's jobs and livelihoods in the pursuit of money.
The video game industry is actually an exact mirror of the streaming industry right now. There was a big streaming boom during covid, all the companies grew their business and then expected continued infinite growth after the covid bubble burst, and now they're all in a major consolidation and buy-off situation and they're all struggling because they made stupid decisions based on unsustainable data. Video games are doing the same thing.
https://www.polygon.com/news/481294/sony-fromsoftware-kadokawa-acquisition-talks
*sigh*
The one thing the bigs are very good at are buying the less-bigs.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/rockstar-typical-layoffs-hit-i-red-dead-redemption-i-studio
I remember how dirty they did the dev team that worked on L.A. Noire.