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EpicRandy said:

Machiavellian said:

The problem with Palworld is its like Minecraft.  It gains a lot of success but does that mean it will change the game industry.  The real problem is always with the consumer.  Think about it this way, how many games trailers get shone and the graphics isn't on par with most AAA games and it gets panned by the public.  Hell, before the game even make it to market, its already got a lot of negative feedback.  Is the case is that there are to many games, no enough innovation or disconnect with creators and customers.  Palworld is very successful but is it a blue print for any other game, probably not.

As for layoffs, there just was no way it was not coming.  I am surprised that devs got cut but then again there is a lot of scale back in the game market now probably because cost of producing a lot of these games just not brining in the money.  Without actually knowing the inner going on with the merger its hard to say that those teams that did get cut were not holding up to a certain standard within ABK.  While we are only hearing about this now, this all was negotiated months before closing the ABK.

Yes we're pretty much saying the same thing.

If I may explain things better for what I meant by using palworld as an example is simply that wowing consumer with graphics does not mean anything anymore. back in the 2000s a game could be marketed and talked about for it's graphics that pushed boundaries. in the 2010s that was also the case but to a lesser extent and that mentality lead to an explosion in development cost. Meanwhile nowadays (and this have been true for quite some time) a game that doesn't try to push graphics in any way doesn't feel like it lacks anything compare to one with heavy focus for it. Graphics have just grown to be absolute garbage of a focus for the success of a title, gameplay and/or stories as again become what matter most. This coupled with the fact pushing for graphics is primarily what lead development time and budget going out of control and you can see the why the bubble finally popped.

to better illustrate what I'm saying is, add 2-3 years of development and 50-100m budget to palword to produce the same game but with way better graphics/animation and... it would not have done anything more or less for the title success in any way. A push for better graphics have simply become synonymous with lesser ROI. 

The way I see the gaming industry going forward and even on the AAA side of things is to start heavily reusing assets from previous entry while focusing on innovative gameplay and stories (TotK say hi). I also believe we will observe a trend towards consolidating engines, particularly towards a select few like Unreal Engine, while in-house engines become increasingly rare.

To your point, PUBG when it hit that 3.2 million concurrent player mark, it both looked and played like ASS for the most part still does! Yet, to this day still holds the record on Steam for highest player count. You look at other massively popular games like Counter-Strike continues to immensely popular while not having changed much over the course of 24 years now.

Even other big Survival games like Rust and Ark started as indie titles as well that have continued to thrive.

But the other side of the coin is these are multiplayer games. The games that are meant to push the boundaries of graphics are always going to be the single player games to really wow at what technology can do. 

If budgets continue to remain unchecked, developers will get themselves to the point where a single flop could be the end of the studio. Which in some cases, we've already seen that happen. It'll be a painful pill to swallow for some, but a necessary one.