| Ryuu96 said:She responds to 3 main points in this video:
1. "If a studio doesn't want layoffs or to shut down, they should just make good games." Her response: the quality of a game no longer matters. You can have a Hogwarts Legacy that sells gangbusters, but all Warner Bros. sees is a potential risk if it fails. Live service games can also fail, they often do, but the overall cost-benefit analysis actually makes them less risky.
2. As an addendum to 1, the biggest focus right now for most entertainment companies isn't even necessarily money, it's time. Because the more time you spend on a platform, the more you're likely to spend money, view ads, and have all your info mined and sold. A one-and-done experience is fundamentally not aligned with that goal.
3. "More studios should just go indie so they aren't beholden to these awful practices." Her response: the indie space is just as volatile and doing pretty bad right now, studios are closing all the time, they just aren't all big news like a AAA studio closing. Indies are having increasing trouble getting publishing support or just funding for projects in general, specifically because they're often more niche, less focused on monetization, and therefore more risky, even if they're generally smaller scale. But whereas a flop at a big studio might result in layoffs or maybe a closure at worst, an indie flop is probably just going to tank the whole company immediately and it might not even release if the stars don't align.
Now, there are still big games, Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, Cyberpunk. But she feels these will increasingly become the exception in the industry, not the rule. Companies like Fromsoft and Nintendo will become the go-to companies you go to for your single-player experiences, while 90% of the rest of the industry chases what they see as the bigger cheese, and even if 10+ more live services fail, a company is going to keep trying because the cost-benefit is still conceivably more attractive than any single player game could ever be. If that crashes a company, pull your losses and move on to the next company and hope they succeed.
Source Another perspective from the Xbox OT in ResetEra which got some praise. |
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