That is why there is a break between the game industry and the players

With a break from work and continuing the poor sales of AAA games, it is worth seeing how this happens and why the games feel disconnected from its players.

I have written about work and the dangers of AAA games with big budget for a decade from this point. It was and is very clear that these big games simply do not work on the scale, but things have really changed after the Xbox 360 era.

Games are not really paid by players

The frequent argument I see online is that game budgets don’t matter. If the game is good, people will buy it. That’s how business works.

It is a fierce argument, but only if the game industry worked. The reality is that a gamer who spends the money earned with difficulty in a game is just the return of the investment, not really related to the initial investment itself.

To explain, game budgets are important for two reasons: the first is how much it is spent, and the second, and the often bypassed reason is where that investment comes.

Most players assume that their money goes to the safes of a money -filled game publisher, where they are executed dipped in the mountains with gold coins and then use the money to develop new games.

The reality is that by a decade or earlier, publishers have increasingly sought for foreign investment. This means that investors for new games are not players but external and often invisible organizations, and sometimes wealthy individuals who are paying the bill.

These external investors act as the money layer for publishers and often have zero the visibility or accountability of the public. A good example of this is what happened to the group of hugs when a big investor withdrew, causing mass breaks.

This kind of thing has happened globally, with Japan and Asia being evenly touched. The main difference is that in Asia, these dismissals are mainly kept secret, except some, as the Analyst of the Serkan Toto Games Industry explains.

“Despite the popular belief, the wave is also poured into Asia. The holiday data regularly mentioned in the media in the West reflects only a small proportion of people affected in places like Japan, Korea and China. In Japan, where labor laws strongly protect employees, some studios try to push staff by running people to retire or harass them, taking less graduates of the college or quietly taking freezing. “

This is also where the budget size becomes a matter. During the PlayStation 2 era, most game publishers tend to be more self-financed, with a more direct relationship with their clients about the money as the budgets were lower. After AAA’s madness in the following Xbox 360 era began, the budgets withdrew and the secession began with customers.

Much of the capital preserved from the previous era of Playstation 2 paid for this AAA nonsense, but it still resulted in the closure of hundreds of game studios.

When I started writing about this problem a decade ago, I hoped for the publishers to return to be more financially sensitive and realize that AAA was not long -term applicable. Instead, they doubled in the AAA games, but had spent most of their capital stored to that point, resulting in the need to seek more external investment.

Dismissal, dismissal from work, and even more jobs from work

Now that these big bets, decades of game development have not settled, these external investors understandably want their money to return. As a result, publishers have used money that would normally go to pay developers by making their games to pay these investors.

The result is that development studios either go bankrupt or cease many people to survive, while publishers keep the remaining money and try to reduce, though to a much more limited degree.

That is why, so far, we have seen about 25,000 dismissals between 2023 and 2024, and the situation is likely to worsen. Moreover, these are the only breaks we know, and the number is much higher. In Japan, this type of thing is treated much quieter, but it is also happening to a similar degree.

To give it 25,000 digit some contexts, the studio closures of the Xbox 360 age studio measured in hundreds. Most good-size studies, then were about 100-150 strong people. This means that these new holidays are equivalent to thousands of studios passing. What we are seeing now is an order of size greater than what happened the last time the AAA games failed, and this is where the real danger lies in the long run.

The other main thing is that many of these dismissals are not carefully planned. On the contrary, those with the highest wages tended to be trimmed first. These salaries are high because those people are more capable and experienced. As Swen Vincke, the leader of Larian Studio, pointed out, this loss of institutional knowledge is not an insignificant matter, especially as it is now throughout the industry.

Indie games are neither indie

Some have argued that Indie games are a self-sustainable return from the consequences of AAA, but unfortunately, it is not really the case.

Many modern Indie games are not independently funded, which means they still need external investment. While external investors are being widely withdrawn from games around the world, it still falls to publishers to fund these games.

These being the same publishers who put us in this AAA mess in the first place and are now trying to survive by gathering that cash they have left.

Yes, there are games made by one or two people and then be published on their own. These exist, but there are not enough of them to keep the games themselves.

Our current situation has also been improperly equated with the overthrow of the 80s mass game industry, and the games again withdrew well. The difference at that time was that most games cost very little to do, so a comeback was possible.

Games are a much more complex landscape now, and a “small” game still often costs much more to do, so the return is not so straightforward this time.

Games need more diversity, just not in the way you think

With all these holidays from work and empty from the game development teams around the world, the future of the games looks gloomy.

To understand why in more detail I found a very good analogy in spacewhich I have recently reviewed. In an episode, after the partial destruction of an agricultural station in Ganymede, a specialized character in Botany tries to explain the situation.

Nature has a large part of the biodiversity and a number of paths to flower a complex system. If some of those trails fail, the other takes over. This works because nature is an open, wide, complex system with a large surplus of the road.

However, this partially destroyed agricultural station is a much simpler complex system with a reduced number of excess trails. When these roads fail, there is not enough to take over, and then those roads fail as well, resulting in a complete ecological collapse.

The game industry is in a similar state. In the wider economic point of view, it is a relatively small system, and its structure lacks many integrated surpluses.

Massive developers’ surrenders are the first way to fail, and now publishers are feeling the resources of strain and gathering to survive everything that comes next. However, without developers who make games to generate revenue for mentioned publishers, this road will also fail in a timely manner.

Simply put, instead of spending $ 100 million in a game, we have to go back to spend $ 10 million in 10 games. That way, you have a better chance to make your money again. You also learn 10 times the amount about the market in that way, so it is not about direct profit.

Revenue demand and generation are still high in games, but publishers need to be more diverse in the size and number of bets they decide.

Games will always be a hit business, so instead of relying on an excess road, diversifying and building more. In that way, when one or more paths fail, others can take over.

This configuration has worked during the Playstation 2 era and can work again, especially as the switch is driving most of the middle game development now.

This is also related to my theory that games are a kind of cognitive firmware. There is nothing like that as a game for everyone, for everyone alone. This was illustrated by the variety of Playstation 2 software library, and that your game collection is likely to be completely different from mine.

In short, spending less individually on games and making different functional games different is the way to get out of this mess.

A guard change

One of the other reasons for secession with the audience of the games at the publisher level, except where the investment comes, is that many executions in large publishers simply do not play or like games.

This means that they do not understand what they are selling, which is equal to someone they cannot read working on a literary publisher.

Publishers really need to be reorganized and restructured. What is required are the smallest, weaker and most versatile publishers who focus on the middle-level budgets that were the main layer of the Playstation 2 Era, before the nightmare AAA to disrupt everything.

Not to mention that one of the main reasons for overcoming cost in the current model of publication is that executives to publishers require top-down changes in games that have not played, which increases the production process and creates costly delays and balloon budgets.

The smallest publishers employed by people who actually play games and who are more focused on distributing and supporting the submission of Backend, such as testing of certification and localization, would deny many of these costly decisions from top-down.

The good news is that we have begun to see more of these types of publishers displayed. However, what happens next depends on the current publishers that cause all these holidays from developing work.

If they finally abandon this clear volatile AAA madness and turn into something that has already been proven to work, we can have a chance to save the games. Otherwise, the future of the medium is certainly an unsafe.

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