2024 may not be kind for game developers.
- Thread starter Silent_Buddha
- Start date
Both Outcast and Alone in the Dark have sold below the predictions, Embracer Group has admitted.
www.ign.com
Alone in the Dark Reboot Flopped, Embracer Says After Laying Off Staff - IGN
The Alone in the Dark reboot failed to meet sales expectations at the embattled Embracer Group, it has said.
I haven't listened to it yet but The Verge discusses the problems in the games industry in a podcast.
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www.theverge.com
Why the video game industry is such a mess
The layoffs will continue until everything is Fortnite.
www.theverge.com
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
Apparently there are 270k game devs in the US, which is apparently 39% of the total game developers. Thus there are 692k game devs world-wide. 10k laid off out of 692k doesn't really seem like a big number to me (roughly 1.5%) for a struggling industry. Did game devs expect to be immune to job loss for some reason?
Why isn't Nintendo first party viewed as a "black hole" on Switch? Haven't the biggest games always commanded a huge share of revenue?
Why isn't Nintendo first party viewed as a "black hole" on Switch? Haven't the biggest games always commanded a huge share of revenue?
Just mathing this more fully - 1.5% so far this year. "Tens of thousands since 2022" could be 5+%. So 6-7% reduction in jobs over a couple of years, and that's only counting the big ticket items.
They are sold and not on-goingly monetised. You don't have whales dropping $2000 over 5 years on a Nintendo game instead of buying multiple games from multiple devs and playing each for 20 hours.
I really didn't see the point of that reboot. I would have bought a faithful remake! They just had to remake the graphics and modernize the controls as the rest is still great today. It would also have being cheaper to make without the useless cutscenes budget. The original game didn't have that. Just great settings, lovecraft lore, puzzles and monsters. The game was already so modern you could already decide to play as a man or woman, they just had to use modern controls/graphics and that was it.Both Outcast and Alone in the Dark have sold below the predictions, Embracer Group has admitted.
Alone in the Dark Reboot Flopped, Embracer Says After Laying Off Staff - IGN
The Alone in the Dark reboot failed to meet sales expectations at the embattled Embracer Group, it has said.
Frenetic Pony
Veteran
There's this delusion among too many higher ups in the games industry that spending more money on games is required to keep up with the competition that has spent more money on games. Witness X-Com/Midnight Suns designer Jake Solomon implicitly blaming increasing budget competition and games like Forbidden West "outspending him" on the failure of Midnight Suns, rather than it being a weird X-Com super lite with Super Heroes/Partial life simulator where you hang out with said super heroes, a concept that doesn't sound like it'd sell to almost anyone.
That "more $ = more sales" entirely discounts just how much money Nintendo games can make, or that Stardew Valley was made by one person that's now worth half a billion from it or something. Most recently one can point to the most financially successful game of the first half of 2024, Helldiver's 2, as a game that's not pushing visuals or cutscenes or budget in any huge way but is hugely successful because, gasp! it's fun.
Yes, a giant number of "leaders" in the games industry literally don't understand that people buy games primarily because they're fun. It would be baffling, except for:
There's other problems the games industry has, which is that there's a lack of a widespread knowledge base for how to find people that are actually talented at the sort of game design that sells. Witness The Suicide Squad and the studio heads they made Arkham Knight, repeated that formula 2 more times, and then when it came to Suicide Squad demonstrated that they didn't actually know how to design games in any professional, systemic manner and just got lucky with Arkham Knight and repeated that formula twice more. According to another Schrier piece (hey the guy can investigative journalism sometimes) the two had no idea what they were doing, deciding themselves to make a live service game but refusing to play other live service games, refusing to communicate what type of game they were making to employees, wasting gobs of time and resources on a vehicle system despite the super powered traversal system already being in, etc. etc.
Publishers really need wider spread institutional knowledge for how to tell wheter a game designer is rational or not, but given some of the industry is run by the likes of Yves Guillemot and Phil Spencer I don't see that happening anytime soon. But at least if they spent less money, as seems to be happening with recent information from studios like Zenimax and Insomniac, any disasters would be smaller disasters.
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Johnny Awesome
Veteran
That seems exaggerated. How many were hired during that time? Big headlines, but no detailed analysis. Poor journalism.
Nintendo 1st party is the biggest black hole going. The fact that it's 10 games over 5 years instead of 1 game with MTX is irrelevant.
Why? If 10k is 1.5%, and we're told there have already been 10,000s of job losses since 2022, that's maybe 30,000 for 4.5%. Depend on what "tens of thousands" actually is. And that's also only looking at the reported large-ticket redundancies. Even if going with the smaller estimate of 5% over a couple of years, I think that's pretty significant.
Could be, but that's now changing the argument. I'm just focussing on whether the number of job losses is significant or not. You said 1.5% wasn't a lot. I'm saying it's notably more, 1.5% in 6 months, something like 5% (could be more, could be less if "tens of thousands" is over-stated) over two years. Is that or is that not a notable loss?
I like the way you ask why Nintendo isn't viewed as a black hole, and when presented with a reason why that doesn't count, just then state it is a black hole with no justification! I understand why people don't see Ninty as a problem but don't understand the opposite POV because it hasn't been explained.
What actually makes Nintendo black hole then?
Huge profits. They are a black hole for customers money.