I'm just pissed off about Mass Effect. Andromeda had really good moment to moment gameplay with totally forgettable characters and setting, and I was cautiously optimistic for ME4 and now we'll never get it. Feels like the games industry is collapsing before our very eyes with closure after closure and mass layoffs across the board.
ME4 development was just going to be a repeat of Anthem. To languish for years with an occasional vague marketing attempt. Before EA puts their foot down and BioWare rushes a “game” out after a decade of development.
Then we would find out that development restarted twice. The game we ended up getting was rushed in 3 years after sitting around for a decade. Story, gameplay and everything else being all over the place.
Yeah definitely, they announced it YEARS ago and only now is it in early development? There's no excuse to drag your feet, don't aspire to be Bethesda.
Rockstar is like the one company where you actually can see where all the years of work went. Look at the advancements from San Andreas to IV. IV to V. And V to RDR2. They are all insane generational jumps full of quality in all fronts.
Maybe I am not creative enough but I feel like Andromeda showed the ME universe was pretty much tapped out. The trilogy is a masterpiece of a series, but I have a hard time imagining an interesting idea for what comes after the Reapers. I feel like it would have gone the way of Halo where the existing factions and characters get shuffled around with ultimately unsatisfying new ones for stories that are less than the sum of their parts.
Well yeah, they were a skeleton crew of their previous peaks. Being tasked with developing the same triple a quality rpg experience. I’d be surprised if they even got past the ideas phase because any idea too ambitious would need to be shot down.
They had one or two trailers out and its been 5 years, thats insane to not have anything to show for it. But given their mismanagement of DragonAge and Anthem it wouldn't surprise me. I was really hoping they could pull it off but once EA was sold I figured this would happen.
Meant it more in the sense that it was meant to drive up stocks or restore faith in the company while the project itself was nothing more than an idea with a trailer. Six years later and it still being in early development shows the game was never far along and they might’ve never planned on actually releasing it.
Yeah I mean at this point what aren't investors and hedge funds ruining? Shutting down your favorite restaurant, killing all the stores in your local mall, even getting their grubby fingers into kids sports and pricing out the kids who need it most. Its reached the point where either something is done about it or our entire way of life gets snuffed out for greed.
It's the endgame of capital accumulation, essentially. Scarce few major players in any sector are actually directed by people who worked their way up in their given industry specifically, and that means the major decision making is based purely on short-term profit motive because the CEOs and board members are all just finance people. Everything feels "soulless", cynical, and like a cash grab because it all is at this point. And most companies who don't follow that path just fall behind when competing for the massive pool of investment money, with few exceptions.
There was a time when, more or less, the people at the top had been in their industry for years or decades and brought their experience and hopefully their passion with them, but we're well beyond that now. Like you've listed, all of those industries are being run by finance people with no interest in the long-term good of the actual industries listed. Even restaurants have their own venture capital funds.
Yes... and no. There has and always will be a market for high quality games made with "love". Hollow Knight, Hades, Lies of P, Satisfactory, Abiotic Factor, BG3, Expedition 33, etc. These types of games draw in the players that were never enticed (or as easily influenced) by the monetary "strategies" of seemingly soulless games. i.e. Microtransactions, preorders, repeatedly buying into a brand/series despite trashing on it (*cough* CoD players).
It broke somewhere at the end of the 2000s and got really perverted after 2018. I wonder how a 2026ies Witcher 3 would look when it was released today.
It broke after 2 Republican Presidents and congresses royally fucked people by enabling decades of corrupt investment and offshoring.
Though Clinton too was part of that process, unfortunately. And even Obama was too weak to meaningfully counter it.
Ironically, Biden was actually starting to fix it if you paid close enough attention, but no one did and he had to clean up after Trump and was old, so here we are. With everything getting much worse, much faster.
It's because people who most need to vote to change it listen to social media vibes more than they pay attention to any actual data. They care more about the middle east than their back yard. Or conversely, they care more about the skin color of their neighbor than they even do their own family. Or they care about skin color in mods more than they care about protecting the rights of real people. I don't blame people for being upset about post COVID inflation, but the guy they voted for was the worst possible person to fix it.
I think you need to go familiarize yourself with the early gaming industry, basically every game studio that made something notable that wasn't Nintendo shit down like a year or two after whatever groundbreaking release.
Private equity ruins everything. Its kinda like when my 8 year old tells me how to hook up and use our travel trailer/camper. Its cute, but if I listened to her, it'd be catastrophic. This is pretty much how PE works in businesses. Everything is a data point to them and they have no clue how these companies actually function, nor what made them successful. They suck the soul out of everything for massive profits.
It's not that they don't know, it's that they don't care. Their sole goal is to extract more than they paid for it, and they want to do it as fast as possible.
Nothing is set up for longevity, as it doesn't need to be for them to profit
Private equity firms like blackrock took people's retirement funds and dumped them into entertainment companies for the sole purpose of pushing social narratives. The end result was every company went bankrupt and Trump got elected.
They would rather repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot than listen to the fucking customer base they serve. Then they’re also surprised when prioritizing advertiser money further alienates players
Not only do they not listen to the customer base, they actively insult the customer base when the customers try to tell them not to do something stupid. Then they act surprised when their product fails.
They only care about profits and the customer base is completely out of touch with that. The companies do not give a fuck about making good games because good games are not as profitable as the games that milk you for every dime.
They aren't shooting themselves in the foot, you just think they are because you want them to make good games, but that is not their prerogative.
For every consumer like you, there are 10 that happily buy FIFA ‘26 or Madden or NHL ‘26 at full retail despite those games essentially being reskins/minor updates of the previous years game for this entire decade.
FIFA changing would be a terrible idea because it already has a huge fanbase who want it to stay the same otherwise they would stop buying it. FIFA is an example of how listening to the fans makes more money, their fans just like it how it is,
Ok in Biowares case they havent made a commercially successful game in a long long time so this makes sense, but you all are talking about gaming companies in general and thats where this doesn't make any sense.
For the last two years there have been so. Many. Great. Fucking. Games. It seems like every week theres a banger 9/10 dropping from somewhere, both indie and AAA. So in actuality, companies are listening to gamers and largely making games customers want, and the industry is still as volatile as it is. So what then?
This is the harsh truth. We build up the very industry that turned around and spat in our faces because we weren't dumb enough to be blindly exploited.
So they then turned and found those who are instead.
Lol "good games are not as profitable" fucking nonsense. They just cant make a good enough game to be profitable hense why they result to shit scum tactics to extract as much money from their dedicated whales and why they no longer exist as a company.
What's surprising to me is they basically didn't make a profitable game for a decade yet were allowed to exist for that long and be responsible for 3 of some of the largest RPG video game franchises to ever exist. Utterly astounding.
Well when you're a AAA studio you obviously have to massively surpass your last sales figure with every new game! So screw your loyal customer base, you better add MORE content, and change MORE things to make everyone want to watch!
Yet videogames are more profitable than ever? Wake up. This isnt from not listening to gamers. This is the industry and its being steered the same way movies were into a corporate suit. It will make money or its worthless.
It takes time money and energy to make stories for a market where we all have our own bubbles. sure massive hits come along that sensationalize the industry like battle royales and extraction shooters but they're so few and far between that the gambles are less worth it each year. Its incredibly difficult to make games that are the relatable fantastic story we want with the graphics as high as a AAA studios bleeding your pockets can and everyone has to compare EVERYTHING all the time.
We have expectations for AAAS that we dont for indies, as if money decides creativity while indies get game of the year because they can afford those risks the AAAs are going to keep shutting down. Were seeing the same clones of eachother as its harder and harder to put all that money into developing something that isn't a planned money maker. This is why everyhing you see approved these days comes with a shop or micro transactions. They have to subsidize the production because the AAA industry has become gambling for most developers.
What the consumer base wants isnt as easy as back then though.
If you ask many people in this thread theyll point to the newest dragon age and insist its because of "woke" writing. Ive seen a few "Baarve" comments here. I admit, I wasnt a big fan of the very sanitized writing itself (conflict, horror, missing in-universe racism as an allegory to real racism)
But plenty of "woke" games succeed (BG3) and plenty of non-woke games flounder.
Thank MBAs for that. Greed is ruling gaming for a long while and the quality of games has fallen significantly. That's why AA titles and indies are the best new releases because every AAA is just released to make the numbers go up on a PowerPoint presentation.
Jim Sterling, love or hate them, said something that resonated with me 10ish years ago.
Roughly
"Companies would choose no money rather than some money if they can't have all of the money."
They are not content with just having a successful game that turns a profit, it needs to also continue producing piles of money for minimal development cost. They want a live service game people will shovel money into but refuse to invest the money and talent it takes to maintain those games.
Two big things that are affecting developers is surely Free to play and the cost & time of development. Specially for more niche developers for rpg games and the like.
If you make games that costs a 3 digit mil amount it is hard to survive. Although it is funny that some of the most liked games are indie titles which cost only a fraction.
That's what happens to every industry that gets bought up by large corps, for the most part. Even Youtube's quality is declining because of financial groups buying channels.
I don't watch a ton of YouTube channels in particular, what examples are there of channels declining after equity buyouts? I can only think of Veritasium but I haven't felt they have suffered a decline in quality
Veritasium used to have some of the best content on the 'tubes. Well researched and amazingly well written so even a dunce like me could understand complex topics.
Then along came PE and there was a marked decline in quality. They even made a video calling it out (no more than addressing the elephant in the room, however).
u/Lunix420 Ryzen 3700X | RTX 4090 | 32 GB RAM | I use Arch btw6h ago
Wrong. You are confusing the year they became profitable with the first time they officially disclosed their revenue.
Between 2014 and 2019 Google didn't even publish any data so literally we don't know what happened there. The only publicly know data from before 2019 is because of WSJ corporate leaks that proved they broke even in 2014.
For your claim that they lost money till 2019 to be true, they would have had to go from breaking even to loosing money again. But the assumption that YouTube went from breaking even at $4 billion in revenue in 2014 to somehow loosing money over the next five years, while scaling into a multi billion dollar company is absolute nonsense.
WSJ corporate leaks that proved they broke even in 2014.
But the assumption that YouTube went from breaking even at $4 billion in revenue in 2014 to somehow loosing money over the next five years, while scaling into a multi billion dollar company is absolute nonsense.
What are you talking about? Google bought YT in 2006. Financial groups bought channels even before that. You're saying it's been declined for 95% of its existence? At that point it isn't a decline it's just what it has always been.
A 4-person team financial group back in 2005 that wanted to get into the creator space early is definitely the same as a global group worth tens of billions of dollars that is doing it today.
Did you read my comment? It has nothing to do with whether or not they were buying channels. Its the RATE in which they are buying channels. Claiming financial groups have always bought channels at the rate they do now is absolutely false.
Your point of view reads like mental gymnastics to win an argument.
Edit.
For example, the article I linked estimates that mergers & acquisitions in the creator economy increasd almost 20 percent from 2024-2025 alone. Its impossible to deny the severity of the problem is worse.
There was a 20 year gap between Baldur’s Gate 2 and 3. If corporate dollars were hiring randos to pump out games every few years that whole time, you better believe there would be plenty of stinkers.
Instead they let it rest, until Larian had the right team at the right time to make another masterpiece.
Andromeda removed the tactical aspect of the gameplay and turned it into a generic tps. Same thing EA did with dead space. They try to turn everything into COD.
I legitimately cannot comprehend the sheer stupidity that led to them thinking removing the ability to give your squad specific commands and limiting you to three fucking abilities at any given time was a good idea. Its just mind numbing. Commanding your squad is like the best part of the original trilogy imo, especially on insanity where it's basically a requirement.
And they kept the simplified nature of the abilities. Overload was a point and click spell, but the limitations of the engine made that necessary. They took a dungeons and dragons engine and hacked it into a shell that played a bit like it was a 3d real time game (kotor). Then they took that engine and hacked it until it looked like a shooter.
So the spells had to be very simple. But they never evolved! Not meaningfully. Overload is still basically 'zap someone in your line of sight'.
Andromeda as Melee Vanguard + Jet Pack was legit peak combat system. The general flow to the biotic & tech explosions was super fun and felt like the final evolution of the series. It's too bad it was stuck in an awful game (menu overload, reheated plot lines and arcs, cringe writing, etc)
I liked MEA (with mods to fix the bugs after EA abandoned it) I would have liked to see at least a sequel to close it out and make it feel like your choices from the first game mattered. Overall once you got to exploring it was a pretty fun shooter platform jumper game.
you're suffering from ME3 abuse. ME4 never had any hope. Andromeda was this morbid tour of a franchise that was already dead. I'll never stop being mad about losing the ME series. But its gone, and has been for a long time.
Nah not collapsing, just consolidating into several large corporations controlled by the world's most wealthy individuals. Were just seeing the plans in motion for EA now with Trump's son-in-law and the Saudi's controlling it.
Andromeda came out in 2017... why was the next Mass Effect still in early development? Hell, that wasn't even made by the main studio.
Looking at the Bioware releases post ME3 is just sad. Their last half-decent game was DA:I back in 2014 and they've got three cancelled games in there... clearly there was a lot of dysfunction.
I love Mass Effect but the Bioware that made Veilguard aren't people I want to try and right the Mass Effect ship. It's sad to see them go but they've been a shambling corpse animated by the necromantic energies of EA for a long time now.
Feels like the games industry is collapsing before our very eyes with closure after closure and mass layoffs across the board.
Because it is. The AAA mega game industry is at least. They've been spending like crazy, chasing ever larger paydays, inflating projects that take years and years to make, trying to maintain an audience that isn't quarantined at home anymore. Everything is designed by committee, with consultants walking in and out of projects soaking up even more money, and nobody has any real ownership of any part of the process.
Well, studios that make good games are usually having success. It's just the modern audience slop that is infecting most studios is causing so many to fall apart. Can't expect the studios to stay afloat when their biggest game in 10 years, riding off the coattails of a highly successful IP, doesn't even make half the cost of development and marketing in sales.
It sucks to see once great studios like this go down, and I'm betting a lot of it is due to pushes from investors who saw the "massive multi-hundred billion dollar market" in gaming and wanted to get a piece of the pie, then influenced game studios with zero knowledge of what gamers want.
In fairness I do feel like some franchises should end at the trilogy stage. ME one of them, Gears another. It’s always felt like they’re just been milking the brand with the subsequent releases.
True. Maybe rather than going for ME4, they should have put out a content update that fixed the ME3 ending somehow. I know we already got the "fix it" patch that added the third neutral option, but come on... That didn't really fix an unsatisfying ending.
They stopped listening to players and started listening to dumbass CEOs in suits who know nothing about gaming and everything about spreadsheets and profit margins. They took all the soul out of gaming and most players are simply not putting up with it anymore. We were over promised and under delivered too many times.
20 years ago your CEOs were mostly just sweaty nerds that were somewhat business savvy that they slapped into a suit and put up on stage at E3 to announce their new Halo or whatever. Guys who were gamers or at least knew what gamers cared about and put their heart and soul into making sure that was reflected in the product. Back then most of these big corps thought gaming was a joke and there was no money to be made until one day they realized it’s one of the most profitable businesses in the entertainment industry. As soon as that happened it was over for big name studios. They got away from quality and just started producing a bunch of soulless slop as fast as they could to try and maximize profits.
While the major AAA studios (the ones that have been over optimized for profits by these suits) are failing I really think it’s allowing the spotlight to shift more to Indie Game Development. A lot of that soul and fun that I grew up on in games is so present in the indie industry that it’s astonishing to me that this big corps haven’t figured it out. Nobody wants another battle pass or half baked DLC (besides maybe the gamers who just buy CoD and Madden every year) we just want a fun, well put together game, that respects players time and money. It’s really not rocket science but you see this in every industry that big corps suits take over.
They have been hiring untalented people for too long. It’s just the reality of the situation. Videogames were better in every way aside from graphic fidelity 20 years ago. It’s overdue that a correction gets made to be honest.
the games industry is collapsing before our very eyes with closure after closure and mass layoffs across the board.
That's what happens when you allow cost to grow beyond all proportion to revenue and make creative decisions that are directly contrary to what your customers want (and have been vocally and consistently telling you they want) while also adopting a communcations approach that is actively derisive and contemptuous of your core customers and treating all criticisms and complaints as coming from 'toxic bigots' regardless of whether they are genuinely substantive or actually hatefully reactionary.
Many AAAs are collapsing because they are wasting money on frivolous bs like overpaid CEOs, managers, HRs and sensitivity/inclusivity consultants, making obnoxious characters and stories and willingly choosing to ignore the core audience in favor of a non-existing one, restarting projects with no direction mulitple times and ballooning the budgets of what should be 30-100 il games to 300-400 mil+.
EA thing is just a massive scam with the Saudis and Jared Kushner buying the company for its sports IP and gamba potential, and riddling it with debt so that everything else will get axed just to claw out of the hole, while the execs peace out with golden parachutes.
I think there was a nugget of good gameplay in there, combat felt solid and had some cool stuff going on. The problem is it was a Mass Effect game, and Mass Effect players expect excellent writing and storytelling, and Andromeda had neither.
It is collapsing. Since 2020 game quality has dropped and the cost of development is so high it is nearly impossible to make a profit. I wouldnt doubt that the future games will be a lot smaller and more open ended vs the narritive driven games we have now
No. Corporate gaming is collapsing. As well it should, they caused their own collapse with infinite greed. Gaming itself is thriving but you'll find the good games are being made by independent studios driven by passion instead of endless greed.
Cause like the film industry its streamlining to like 3 or 4 things
you have your generic Disney movie,Generic superhero movie, generic horror movie, and an adaption of something viral online (FNAF,Backrooms,Minecraft etc etc)
for games you have
generic open world game, generic sportsball game, generic FPS, and generic looter game
theres no room for comedy movies, RPGs, racing games, historical epic movies, hand drawn animation movies, etc etc. Cause they all draw in small numbers. That "huge number of gamers" you boast are just sportsball,CoD,Roblox and hero shooter/MOBA players
I really liked andromada, especially the vaults. It feels like a similar vibe as horizon, especially forbidden west, just less good. But good enough for me
Andromeda was so broken for the first 6 months to a year it was unplayable.. it was so terrible by comparison to the last 2 games that it should have been a spin off
Don’t worry, while private equity is gutting EA down to FIFA/Field they will absolutely squeeze every last drop of blood out of them like Grendel out of a viking villager. So the IP will find a new home.
Unfortunately veilguard was such a disaster that it is responsible for broware dying a decade wasted on bomb only existing on the slim chance mass effect could be a hit somehow.
Well that's what happens when the industry goes all in on live service games and microtransactions and neither ever take off on consoles or pc outside of a few games like warframe. I do not pity them. Give the players what they want or get lost. Love service and microtransactions is not what the players want. It's what private equity funds want.
I played ME:A randomly when it was already patched, and honestly i was baffled watching the reviews shitting on it after finishing it, cause i really did enjoy it overall. Then I saw the videos with the initial state the game was released... LMAO
I think the issue was that it was a decent game that had to compete with its name sake. So 8n comparisons it wasnt as good. It did also have its issues at launch.
The ME trilogy is a work of art and ended with such resounding finality that I didn't think BW could ever crack it open again. Hell their next ME game had to literally be in a completely different galaxy to not try and retcon ME Trilogy.
Then what does Bioware do after releasing stinkers like Anthem and DA Veilguard? They say "hey you know how we haven't made a great game in 10+ years? How about we crack open that Mass Effect trilogy for ya and tinker around under the hood eh?".
No. Thanks.
I'd rather Bioware shutdown instead of getting whatever Nuware garbage wearing Mass Effect's skin we would have inevitably gotten that would have retroactively damaged the series.
I would have been tentatively OK with an Andromeda 2, but that's not what Bioware teased all those years ago, looked like we were back in the MW.
triple A gaming at least, is collapsing entirely. I think for a while now Indie games have been pound for pound a lot more successful in terms of resources put in and revenue generated
With all the AI slopware being pushed out by random people who have a chatGPT account, its hard to compete when said person could pump a decent game out within a couple of weeks and focus on making updates for it as time rolls on.
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u/SolaireFlair117 7h ago
I'm just pissed off about Mass Effect. Andromeda had really good moment to moment gameplay with totally forgettable characters and setting, and I was cautiously optimistic for ME4 and now we'll never get it. Feels like the games industry is collapsing before our very eyes with closure after closure and mass layoffs across the board.