2024 may not be kind for game developers.

[Cyan]

PS1 and PS2 eras were special times. Consoles back then offered a distinct experience from PCs. Consoles were becoming a gaming experience of their own taking away from the PC space, which is why MS wanted to bridge the gap.

Playstation consoles had games for pretty much every occasion and had the benefit that third parties were making gaming experiences unique to the platform.

The Playstation built an identity around franchises that these days are multi. Having the benefit of reaching critical mass in terms of userbase and having a ton of exclusives from third parties, gave them a lot of room to experiment.

I think 3 major events changed the course.

First major event is when Sony lost momentum with PS3 and with it the growing critical mass from the two previous generations. That changed a lot of things. From that point, all third party franchises and support that were initially guaranteed to be exclusive became multiplatform. A lot of titles that were initially announced as PS exclusives found way on 360 and PC to retain profits. Final Fantasy, Tekken and DMC for example.
Sonly back then publicly acknowledged that third party exclusives were becoming a thing of the past and had to find ways to differentiate themselves with their own efforts. And they did offer a lot of variety.
That meant putting out more of their own internal resources, which increased risk.

Second major event was PC and Console technology and game development becoming more unified. That was MS strategic aim with XBOX. This can be found in interviews about MS's concerns and why they wanted to enter the console business. PC and Console experience became more similar and the differentiating factor was further eliminated. Almost all major franchises were released on both simultaneously.

Third major event was the disproportionate increase of costs in relation to the required critical mass of userbase to support profitability. 100 million PS1 gamers were a much healthier number than 100 million PS4 gamers to ensure profitability for the swarms of games released that require more time and money to make. Also the manufacturing costs of the console is not allowing for healthy price drops.

A €90 PS1 or a €120 PS2 was a great price for someone who wanted to buy party games like Singstar or Eye Toy or Buzz!. The PS1 and PS2 seemed like high tech consoles you could buy for a steal and you had access to all kinds of games of which a great deal was only available there. It was the best product for very high adoption suited for everyone.

Now with PS5, they need to find ways to sell that €500 console they can't cost reduce, to more people. They need to invest more in high cost games to convince that €500 is worthwhile. They don't have the required critical mass that is proportionate to the costs of game production to ensure a healthy room for profits, and almost all third party games are released everywhere.

But the PS's selling point was it's ability to offer high tech gaming (at launch), the most popular franchises and games for everyone. All these were covered throughout it's lifecycle in stages of gradual adaptability and progression . The stage of high tech gaming (early adoption) reaching the ultra casual (late stages). A PS can't be PS if it misses any of these stages. It kind of got it with PS5 at launch, but it misses the progression of PS1 and PS2. If Sony released a weak console like the Series S to sell cheaply, it probably wouldn't have gone far either because it would have missed the initial expectations that made PS appear like an affordable high tech product that both PS1 and PS2 were at least in the eyes of the public

thanks for this post, very enlightening. Nothing to add tbh.

The pandemic and lack of hardware components might have played a factor too.

I didn't know that MS wanted to somewhat merge the console and PC experience. The idea sounds good, but they failed miserably. Except for the X360 most Xbox consoles are seen as if they lack soul, or maybe it's just that they don't offer Sony's experience and "charisma", nor Nintendo's. The best thing about the Xbox is imho the social experience --friends and so on. That didn't exist in Windows gaming and when I play the Windows store version of A Plague Tale Requiem, I still get to see the many friends I had made during the X360 era because they unified that with pc gamepass.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Imo its result of chasing gaas utopia + desire to please stock holders. Gross.

That's a red herring. GAAS aren't why so many developers and publishers are laying off people and re-evaluating how AAA games are developed and released. It's part of the the reason, but it's not by any means the only reason or even the major reason.

A $300 Million ‘Spider-Man 2’ Budget, Sony’s Future And AAA Unsustainability

The cost of Spider-Man 2's development raises larger questions not just about Sony, but the wider industry pumping out expensive AAA games.

www.forbes.com

The Insomniac hack gives us a window into one of the major reasons Sony are re-evaluating how their studios will do AAA game development.

Spider-Man 2 was the fastest selling Sony exclusive in the history of PlayStation. It cost 3x the cost of the first game. By the end of the Holiday season that it released the first game had already broken even and was making a profit. Spiderman 2 had not. Unless Spider-Man 2 has incredible PC sales once it hits PC, it's highly unlikely that Sony will make as much money on Spider-Man 2 as they did with the first one made by Insomniac.

And that's not even counting the impact of inflation on the revenue that it generates. For many years the console gaming industry could rely on expanded consumer spending to keep up with game development costs. That's assuming your game sells well.

And even if your game sold well, it may not sell well enough to actually generate a profit. Remember all those Eidos games that sold a lot of copies but still sold under expectations leading to loss generation for Square-Enix?

And if your game doesn't sell well? What then? There's a serious potential for bankruptcy and then having to have a fire sale of your IP to try to pay off any creditors your development house or publishing house might have.

IIRC - one slide from the Insomniac hack showed Spiderman 3 tentatively expected to be 450+ million USD to develop. Unless something changed that likely meant that would make even less money than Spiderman 2, not to mention the first one.

It's why the AAA industry is so incredibly reliant on proven IP in hopes that proven IP will generate enough interest that the game "might" sell enough copies to generate a profit.

GAAS was seen as a way to mitigate the incredibly high stakes risk (risk is now generally higher than reward for much of the AAA gaming industry) of AAA game development. Try to get a successful GAAS game out in hopes that it can then allow you to continue funding AAA single player games.

Sony is evaluating how they are going to proceed in the future. If they do not have a tentpole GAAS game generating revenue to help offset the high cost of the increasing costs of their studios AAA gaming development budgets, then they needed to re-evaluate how their internal studios were going to develop AAA single player games going forward.

In other words, they needed to figure out how to reduce development costs so they could continue to make AAA games. The first part of that is reducing as much staffing as possible, hopefully, without impacting too heavily the ability of internal studios to make and release games. After that, I'd expect there to be more budget reviews, stricter release deadlines, possibly even reduced scope of games.

I do wonder if Sony will push some of their internal studios to make something other than open world games. Open world games are very expensive to make. I would not at all be surprised if Sony started to reject open world game proposals from some of their studios and only greenlight cheaper to make streamlined gaming experiences.

Regards,
SB

 

[Cyan]

A Major 'Re-Evaluation' At PlayStation

The PS5 maker announced mass layoffs, project cancellations, and a studio closure as it copes with the $300 million reality of Spider-Man 2

deadgame.substack.com

It's kinda curious how they define Jim Ryan as the CEO who fans love to hate.

 

[Cyan]

Sony is evaluating how they are going to proceed in the future.

there is a new official statement from Sony, and it pretty much indicates that.

An Important Update from PlayStation Studios

Today, Sony Interactive Entertainment initiated a reduction in our workforce – including within PlayStation Studios – and I wanted to talk about the impact that will have. These decisions have been extremely difficult, but they are necessary, and I think it’s important to be transparent: The...

sonyinteractive.com

do wonder if Sony will push some of their internal studios to make something other than open world games. Open world games are very expensive to make. I would not at all be surprised if Sony started to reject open world game proposals from some of their studios and only greenlight cheaper to make streamlined gaming experiences.

this part of the statement might sound expected. No more narrative games?

PlayStation 5 is in its fourth year, and we are at a stage where we need to step back and look at what our business needs.

At the same time, our industry has experienced continuing and fundamental change which affects how we all create, and play, games.

Delivering the immersive, narrative-driven stories that PlayStation Studios is known for, at the quality bar that we aspire to, requires a re-evaluation of how we operate.

Delivering and sustaining social, online experiences – allowing PlayStation gamers to explore our worlds in different ways – as well as launching games on additional devices such as PC and Mobile, requires a different approach and different resources.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Is that because the have moved on and nothing Sony does would keep them, or because Sony did nothing to keep them so they moved on?

Mostly the former. To be fair, Sony couldn't have predicted Nintendo Switch and Phone dominance after PS4. Maybe their biggest mistake was not making a new Vita.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Imo its result of chasing gaas utopia + desire to please stock holders. Gross.

Not as many are chasing GaaS as people keep saying. A lot of GaaSlighting going on.

Spider-Man 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Hogwarts, Elden Ring, Starfield, God of War, Cyberpunk.... almost none of the biggest games of the last couple years are pushing GaaS.

Just because a bunch of 3rd party super hero games tried it unsuccessfully and ran out of GaaS, doesn't mean there's this big GaaS explosion.

 

[Cyan]

This pressure of rising costs is everywhere and it affects some industries, like gaming, even more. This pressure pushes economies into adopting the practices of "fast food" business. That means practices that produce profits faster, it generates "growth" but at a huge cost in quality of life, weather it is salaries, employment or the actual utility and quality of services and products produced. Expect the next transformation of the industry to be highly praised regardless of its product quality and effects in the employment market, because it will make more "business sense".

this had to explode at some point. In the PS2 era you launched a game and that was it. Nowadays Sony have to pay the servers, community managers and so on. That's added costs, and then some Palworld game appears and breaks sales records....

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Who knew people just wanted to have fun.

 

[eastmen]

Not as many are chasing GaaS as people keep saying. A lot of GaaSlighting going on.

Spider-Man 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Hogwarts, Elden Ring, Starfield, God of War, Cyberpunk.... almost none of the biggest games of the last couple years are pushing GaaS.

Just because a bunch of 3rd party super hero games tried it unsuccessfully and ran out of GaaS, doesn't mean there's this big GaaS explosion.

GAAS games don't need the same outright sales as something like a Spider-Man 2 because they are supplemented by continued purchases in game. There have been some big failures but also some successes. Look at hell divers 2 you buy it for $40 , maybe $60 if you want to be a super citizen and then there are a bunch of outfits you can buy and each time someone buys that its more money in the game devlopers pocket.

The gas games that are failing are games that are bad. Suicide squad is a game no one wanted, people wanted another arkham game and I am sure they would have even been happy with a gas game that played like those games and you can just buy your batman and robin and batgirl whatever skins from else worlds or batman beyond and crisis on infinite earths and so on.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Sony is evaluating how they are going to proceed in the future. If they do not have a tentpole GAAS game generating revenue to help offset the high cost of the increasing costs of their studios AAA gaming development budgets, then they needed to re-evaluate how their internal studios were going to develop AAA single player games going forward.

Don't be so reliant on AAA titles! EyeToy was cheap. SingStar was cheap and had great ongoing revenue. LBP was cheap and had great ongoing revenue. Games like Palworld won't cost $300M to make, and how much does Nintendo spend on its gangbuster-selling titles? Instead of chasing big dollars with big titles, diversify and get more people playing more content. Get a decent AA level operation with less reliance on blockbusters.

People are happy playing on mobile! Get them a console gaming experience that's fun, unique from mobile, sociable, and broaden the platform. What PS1 and PS2 did very successfully!

 

[snc]

Not as many are chasing GaaS as people keep saying. A lot of GaaSlighting going on.

Spider-Man 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Hogwarts, Elden Ring, Starfield, God of War, Cyberpunk.... almost none of the biggest games of the last couple years are pushing GaaS.

Just because a bunch of 3rd party super hero games tried it unsuccessfully and ran out of GaaS, doesn't mean there's this big GaaS explosion.

It was about playstation lay offs, half of their gaas game were now canceled.

 

[Nesh]

Ok this got my attention. 95% were working on a live service game.

Also the PS2 manifesto. How things have changed.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1753754954911604903

I miss the simplicity of those older times. And to be honest, today's games sometimes feel like their dragging their feed to increase content.

Not sure if you share this experience, but with most games the past 2 or 3 generations feel like this:
Start of the game is exciting.
2/4s are ok
3/4s I get tired and I m only playing it to finish it and often might get carried away on hours of side quests or extras to get trophies or make my character stronger, or to not miss something that may be important. This part feel like psychologically pressured to commit. Not really enjoying it.
Last part depending on design might either bring back my initial interest and excitement or it might still bore me to death.

This is very common with most games I play. This was less of a problem for me during the older generations.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yes. I feel in the past, devs made games just to be fun. That was it. Making a fun game resulted in it generally being successful. Nowadays it's all data driven but he psychology of engagement is not the same as the psychology of fun. Instead of people playing when they are having fun, they are playing to stay on top of the battle-pass etc. This helps drive 'popularity' and helps with megasales of those games that are megasuccesses, but the motives behind game design have warped to business and dollar led, not end user emotion led.

 

[Nesh]

Yes. I feel in the past, devs made games just to be fun. That was it. Making a fun game resulted in it generally being successful. Nowadays it's all data driven but he psychology of engagement is not the same as the psychology of fun. Instead of people playing when they are having fun, they are playing to stay on top of the battle-pass etc. This helps drive 'popularity' and helps with megasales of those games that are megasuccesses, but the motives behind game design have warped to business and dollar led, not end user emotion led.

I know some people will hate me but that's one of the reasons I enjoyed the first MGS games so much. They were short, but the content that usually spreads to 30 hour of todays games was creatively dense and varied into fun, packed into a short game duration. Every section of the game was treated with special care and designed as an event. That's why every section was memorable and intense and had huge replayability. It also added a lot of variety and experimentation with NPCs (friends or foes) that is usually found in open world sandbox games.

And I think it may have either borrowed, or coincidentally followed the formula of the first Resident Evil games. The game structure is somewhat similar. Few highly varied areas, culminating to the ending.

Resident Evil 1 and 2 were very short. But as we progressed, things were changing and happening making each section memorable.

This counts for the first Devil May Cry too. It was the most memorable with the highest replayability game of the series in my book.

The game would pitch you with the same tools you had or new ones, but will require you to approach the game differently or give you freedom to mix and match your gameplay to every new discovered area, pitching you to new enemies with different defenses and offenses. Every new enemy was an action puzzle.

Remember how many ways we could approach bosses in MGS games, or be required to be creative. Or remember how in DMC each boss was significantly different, required different playstyle against but gave you the freedom to mix your moves. Fucking spectacular.

These days I finish games and barely remember large sections of the game and often miss and/or forget huge chunks of the story since they get over complicated. In Forbidden West there were so many dialogues and explanations, I barely remember much.

I m pretty sure Death Stranding would have left a bigger impression and we would have remembered a lot more if it was shorter and packed all the content more densely and more substantially, just like MGS.

The Uncharted games and God of War 3 were also some of the last highly memorable games I played because they were shorter and sections were divided and designed with specific events.

Most games today are depleting our attention span and infesting us either with chores or with repetitive gameplay.

I don't remember ever actually enjoying any of the Assassin's Creed games for this reason.

I think developers would be better off making shorter games with more meaningful density of events and gameplay.

 

[Scott_Arm]

@Nesh A little tough to judge that 95%. Community notes are stating the report classifies a game with a DLC roadmap as "live service." I kind of hate that term. It's nebulous what it means. There's live service, games as a service, multiplayer, mmo. Is Counter-Strike a live service game? It has micro transactions (loot crates) and it's an online game. I feel like normally it means games like Destiny, where it's more about fully online games that continually expand the experience, but I'm not sure that's how it always gets used. Then you have "Early Access" games that pretty much always have a roadmap describing the content that will be added with a rough timeline, and I wonder if that falls in with the report. I'm not sure if I'd count those or not.

I think games with micro transactions and skins are inevitable, just because of the financial situation, but that's quite a bit different than promising roadmaps of big content dumps post release. I'm pretty sure Alan Wake 2 is getting DLC with modes and content expansion, but does that make it a live service game?

 

[Scott_Arm]

@Nesh Regarding engagement and fun, one of the games I enjoyed fairly recently was It Takes Two. It's relatively short, and each level has a different design with a different set of abilities to change up the gameplay. You can get through it very fast, and it's just an engaging experience because none of the mechanics overstay their welcome. I really wish more games would take that approach, instead of just designing games with a million map markers which only have five variations. I'd say a lot of games have a megaton of filler content that's just added to pad the experience so the publisher can claim value for dollar. People instantly recognize that stuff, but there is a subset of gamers who just demand more and more. The thing is I'm not sure if those people actually are worth the money. They might play a lot, but are they actually spending to match.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Don't be so reliant on AAA titles! EyeToy was cheap. SingStar was cheap and had great ongoing revenue. LBP was cheap and had great ongoing revenue. Games like Palworld won't cost $300M to make, and how much does Nintendo spend on its gangbuster-selling titles? Instead of chasing big dollars with big titles, diversify and get more people playing more content. Get a decent AA level operation with less reliance on blockbusters.

People are happy playing on mobile! Get them a console gaming experience that's fun, unique from mobile, sociable, and broaden the platform. What PS1 and PS2 did very successfully!

That's what MS is doing. Obsidian is working on Avowed AAA, but also put out Grounded AA and Pentiment AA. Ninja Theory is putting out Hellblade 2 AAA, but also doing Project Mara AA. Hi Fi Rush was AA. Psychonauts 2 was AA. Killer Instinct AA

 

[Johnny Awesome]

It was about playstation lay offs, half of their gaas game were now canceled.

Half? Sounds like they're not chasing GaaS anymore then.

Seriously, what Sony GaaS titles were in development? The only one I remember is TLOU one.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Not sure if you share this experience, but with most games the past 2 or 3 generations feel like this:
Start of the game is exciting.
2/4s are ok
3/4s I get tired and I m only playing it to finish it and often might get carried away on hours of side quests or extras to get trophies or make my character stronger, or to not miss something that may be important. This part feel like psychologically pressured to commit. Not really enjoying it.
Last part depending on design might either bring back my initial interest and excitement or it might still bore me to death.

This is very common with most games I play. This was less of a problem for me during the older generations.

It's you. Most games have always been tedious after a point.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

And I think it may have either borrowed, or coincidentally followed the formula of the first Resident Evil games. The game structure is somewhat similar. Few highly varied areas, culminating to the ending.

Resident Evil 1 and 2 were very short. But as we progressed, things were changing and happening making each section memorable.

With terrible controls. Modern games have much better controls.

This counts for the first Devil May Cry too. It was the most memorable with the highest replayability game of the series in my book.

The game would pitch you with the same tools you had or new ones, but will require you to approach the game differently or give you freedom to mix and match your gameplay to every new discovered area, pitching you to new enemies with different defenses and offenses. Every new enemy was an action puzzle.

Remember how many ways we could approach bosses in MGS games, or be required to be creative. Or remember how in DMC each boss was significantly different, required different playstyle against but gave you the freedom to mix your moves. Fucking spectacular.

Sounds like Elden Ring and Lies of P. Modern games you should check out.

Most games today are depleting our attention span and infesting us either with chores or with repetitive gameplay.

I agree there's too much of this.

I think developers would be better off making shorter games with more meaningful density of events and gameplay.

On this we can agree.

My take is simple. Games used to be good or shit. Games are now good or shit. Choose good games. Not shit games.