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.
Funny I was having a discussion like this with my dad today. That our entire economy is built on consumption. Nothing is built to last anymore they want you replacing everything as soon as possible and it all comes down to GREED.
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 profitÂ
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 playersÂ
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.
Rain the down votes, but listening to players is not really helpful. Players say everything and anything all the time from every direction.Â
That would be like asking a class of preschoolers how to make lasagna from scratch. Yeah maybe they get a couple things right (tomatoes! Yayy) but it's mostly gibberish. Testing is genuinely one of the most important things in game dev, but that is not remotely the same thing.
I think the true issue with a studio like Bioware is a lack of a singular vision. You can see it in Anthem and Andromeda really bad. A cool idea marred by design -by-committee execution.
These big studios lose their way when they start listening to focus groups and voting on gameplay in the studio. Games need a small core vision held by a few people unwilling to compromise. When studios get too big and the core of them is exhausted, they turn to stuff like focus groups and outsourcing designs and the soul of the companies dies.
Its why Rockstar is evergreen. The core team is the same and they still want to make what they make and they refuse to compromise.
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.Â
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.Â
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.
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u/ShreekertheJamisWack 8h ago
Weird times we live in where player counts are at an all time high yet everything is closing and shutting down ðŸ˜