Bill Roper, creator of Diablo & Warcraft, paints a very dark future for the videogame industry: "AAA games are dead"

[Cyan]

He sends a message through LinkedIn where he assures that the "consensus from DICE is that things are not going to get better in 2025".

The consensus coming out of DICE is that things aren’t going to be getting any better in 2025. In fact, there’s more investment pulling back and more layoffs and studio closures to come. AAA is dead and Indies and AA studios are on the rise.

There is a huge divide to make this a reality. There is now talk of more advertising, but it has been the reality that some of us have experienced in recent years.

He tells the story of how they started Lunacy Games in the summer of 2022 after losing the foundation of their studio, they wanted to create a game with a deep design that, precisely, was born from what was played in COVID.

It reminded me at the time of how we approached development in my Blizzard days, so we started working on something to attract publishers,

After bringing together a veteran team and talented newcomers who had already worked together in other years, they came up with a concept and project where by the end of 2022 they already had three interested editors.

Two of them were interested in financing the game [...] and the third proposed to us to be a fully financed first studio. We exchanged deals and figures when the terrain changed

All stakeholders backed down, explaining that they were 'reassessing their investment stance' or 'shifting focus to existing projects and studios.

By the end of 2022 we had no deal on the table and it seemed that we were back to square one. Little did we know that we were about to enter negative numbers in terms of opportunities for studios and developers.

Nobody signs for games that do not have fully playable demos [...] while, at the same time, no one finances demos.

A very dark future for the video game industry?​

And it doesn't end here, he was told that he would have funding opportunities, but...

I need a trailer, an active and engaged Discord community and a Steam page with at least 10,000 people that added the game to their Wishlist.

And that's before they spend a dollar. All risks fall on those who can least bear them. And a lot of what developers 'must do' now is not create their game.

The rise of indies is because their development cost is a race to the bottom. [...] 1-4 creators who live at home or share a flat and create a great game for less than a million dollars.

 

[Dominik D]

I'm no Bill Roper but I wrote exactly that before.

[So who suffers when games don’t hit sales projections?] Developers. Salaries are stagnant, and consequences of failures always result in workforce being fired to minimize cost. People investing in games (whether publishers or VCs) are also first to recuperate. So if game under-performs despite what otherwise would be considered decent sales, every last cent goes to whoever invested in the game, not to the studio or its employees.

Bizdev in the last two years was especially cut-throat. Small and medium size publishers scaled down investment in new titles. Their pipelines are typically 2 years deep so they can afford this conservative stance. The only games publishers were interested in were promising games near completion. So essentially the deal was "we'll help with your final 20% and marketing for ROI 150% or more". Very few studios can afford carrying game to alpha and then look for a publisher. But this is how market looks right now.

And elsewhere:

Money people are, very often, fucking clueless and benefit from the system that makes it incredibly hard for rich people to fail. Games and movies are investments in content to them. They won't wake up because they aren't dreaming. Gamers are, thinking that there are some secret cabals making games "worse". It's not a secret, it's unchecked capitalism.

And elsewhere still:

This ties into platform considerations: bleeding edge graphics limit your target audience. People advocating for mind blowing graphics are at odds with what sells. The only tiiiiny problem is that unless you can fund your development yourself (i.e. you are independently wealthy) there's pretty much no chance of getting funded right now. A lot of small and mid-size studios are betting on this dry spell ending in 2025 but it's a bet.

It is as bad as Bill claims.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

This is just "life".

I'm not sure there's anything fundamentally wrong. It was never really sustainable that there are 10000 new Steam games every year or something along those lines.

Game devs just aren't used to life in the big city. When gaming was growing at double digits for years on end, they were insulated from reality. Now reality has come

Every artistic endeavor suffers from the same problem. 1000 actors out of 1 million make 50% of the money. It's the standard Pareto problem.

It's the same for music artists or YouTube content creators.

Game devs were under the illusion that talent = success, but life doesn't work that way.