Young millennial/zillennial AAA game dev speaking.
It is 100% a top-down issue. Most devs are talented people. When you’re incentivized by quarterly returns as management, over a long enough timeline you begin to care less about game quality and more about stock prices and net revenue in addition to whatever else you need to satisfy your bloated ego, even if you started out as a passionate dev initially. The Indie and AA space is currently thriving because these incentives don’t factor in as much for them.
Just like game design, it’s an issue with a series of carrots and sticks, not necessarily the people involved (although psychopaths do exist and tend to be overrepresented in c-suites worldwide).
tldr; Capitalism ruins everything.
Not that I disagree with you but it’s more like greed ruins everything
The worse thing that can happen to your niche hobby is for it to go mainstream. US anime has been consolidated into the Sony/Crunchyroll/Funimation/Rightstuf monster.
Capitalism doesn’t ruin everything. Corporatization ruins everything.
Who runs capitalism bozo
the local coffee shop isn’t a corporation
Unlike most "everything"s out there, games are doing great. Ignore shovelware and corpo schlock, some of the best games ever made have come out in the past few years. Genres get pushed, art gets made, phenomenal brain-off gameplay loops are polished, stories get told. Which world is better:
4 good games come out every year but it’s Nintendo and co making them. Also 100k bad games come out every year.
10 good games come out every year. Nintendo and Ubisoft and Sony churn out 29 shareholder revenue generators. There are nine million AI asset flip cash grabs and porn VNs released that year. People are paying 20,000 dollars a month for catgirl jpgs on their gambling phone games.
Who cares about “ratio” of good to schlock? You were never gonna play it all anyway. The last couple years alone saw everything from Balatro to Caves of Qud to Blue Prince.
^ ^ ^ This is true, but I also think it’s important to note the role repeated financial and cultural success has on one’s mind and ego when elevated repeatedly by both the market and culture. You are not only just financially incentivized not to innovate, but your ego continues telling you “my ideas are always good no matter what others think” after these successes, even when that’s not necessarily true and you need to be reined in by others so your good ideas can still shine and the bad ones can be challenged. This is how top-down cultural problems in studio disciplines calcify in addition to financial incentives. It’s important as a person(s) running a successful studio to not surround yourself with yes-men, which is not an easy task due to the previously-mentioned perverse financial and egoist incentives.
The funny thing is, I’ve heard about quite a few Indie studios that are just as bad. They do the very same thing we condemn AAA for - crunch, micromanaging, and even harrasment.
I was very surprised to hear that the person who lead the development on monument valley was a massive dick to his employees.(Repeatedly would use management tricks and neg people to the point of depression and feeling worthless).
So, I can totally understand the cultural success thing. Though I’d like to believe that we are better than the corporate management suite, I have to remind myself that anyone can be a dick. You can be a progressive left leaning animal lover and still be a horrible parent.
I have worked only in the indie/AA sphere, and my experience here hasn’t been all that great either. But, I had always believed the problem was in the work culture of my country itself, and that I would probably find it better to work with those outside my country. No, people are the same everywhere, just of different flavours.
Though I’d still prefer to work with like minded people vs those place capital over everything else.
This is also true. I’ve worked at a number of startup indies/AA splinter-studios (studios comprised of former devs of hugely successful AAA franchises), and most of them were horribly mismanaged. The sheer existence of good videogames is a testament to the blood, sweat and tears poured into them by groups of insanely talented people finding ways to work together efficiently.
Gamers gamify a system that can be gamed. More at 11.
I’m just so sad that it seems most execs in the field go play tennis or golf after work and think videogames are for losers. there is a lot of contempt and expectation that losers will just forever dish out money. if it wasn’t for this strange phenomenon that game engines are so available nowadays, we would be screwed. thank god for the indie space
Tbf most gamers are, indeed, losers.
true but not quite relevant, most people who read books are also losers. free-time activities are really everyone’s own prerogative
I mean, the other guy brought it up.
Who is the main target audience downloading and paying for these games?
Boomers, unironically. Well then x too, but 45+ are the biggest share of gamers by far in the west.
Boomers would be 60+ though. Anyone 45-59ish would be Gen X.
The executives, investors and accountants making the decisions that are ruining games are not millenials.
I am sure many are. Millenials are in their forties these days
The old ones, yes
They’re Elder Millennials at best (born in the 80’s, maybe late 70’s). Or do they qualify as another generation ?
Late 70s and the first few 80s years is a stretch, that’s Xennials. Elder Millenials and Xennials have an uneasy truce but we know the difference
Late 70s would fall in Gen X.
Millennials start at around '85 depending on who you ask.
Generations seem to be more vibes-based than anything.
Edit:typo
The average age of a manager in gaming is 45 and the oldest millennial is 44 lol get mathed idiot
To be fair, “generations” are bullshit anyway
How quickly the goalposts move, very convenient
But yeah, I generally agree, I’m not the one that framed the discussion that way.
The only meaningful lines of division are along class groups, as the upper class continually consolidates wealth and decision-making power. It’s just that most rich people are also old.
So almost half are millennials then?
Mean and median can be calculated for uneven distributions.
There’s actually a single gaming CEO that hasn’t been born yet, bringing the average down.
Dude chill the fuck out.
I’m not the guy you’re responding to, but seriously you’re the idiot here.
The average age of a manager is 45 that means there are several that are younger and several that are older. Some may indeed be millennials. Maybe not.
Get “logiced” idiot! But foreal just chill out. What did that other guy ever do you other than suggest some managers might be millennials?
You’re tone policing a shitposting sub but I’m the one who needs to chill okay sure
If the average age is above any millennial, they couldn’t be the majority group. It makes no sense to pin blame on a younger generation when the reins of power are being clung to by the elder generation across all imaginable contexts, not just game development.
That guy said “many are”. Not most or majority or anything like that. I suppose it’s possible they edited their comment.
Sure man I’ll give up on the tone policing. You’re still an idiot going around calling other people idiots for no reason. Check your ego bro. That’s all I was saying
I was about to say the same, most management is still gen x, even boomers (fucking retire please). Some low level managers are millennials, but these are not the people calling the shots. As usual, money hoarders make decisions, and you can accuse us millennials of a lot of things but having any money on us.
You might want to look, as usual, to indie millennial game devs. There you will see how we call the shots. We are nowhere that good as gen x indies, but we have our thing.
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Ironically they blame their own children too
the entire us went to shit, what’s your point
It is the money people’s fault. Once there was money to be had in the industry, all the idiots moved in, and no power can resist them. The game devs hate making awful cash-grab games that aren’t fun to play, too.
Then they have the marketing team, that tell you it is fun to play and they make sure you will see the game everywhere, you dont want to miss out on this hype right?!
What, don’t you want to play “Kane and Lynch: Dog Days 2” just because we turned the entire fucking subway car into an advertisement for it?
It feels like the Mariachi band that only goes away when you pay them. If you don’t buy it, we’re going to have to buy space on your living room wall and put a speaker in there to play ads for it, so fucking buy it you dummy, you don’t have a choice.
And you will enjoy it. It will be game of the year, don’t think about it, just accept this game is brilliant, you just spent $90 on it after all!
Excuse me, but a lot of passion han be found on the indie market.
I mean, kind of, but not really.
It all started with Halo. Back in the late 90s and early 00s the movie industry was the big money maker of entertainment and there was actually a lot of anti-gaming rhetoric in news and politics. The weekend Halo 3 released it was so popular that it disrupted the box office numbers for a couple of movies. The movie executives decided to stop trying to kill the gaming industry and take it over instead.
So I guess you can blame millennials for playing Halo instead of going to the movies that weekend.
It’s the same in every industry. Rich shit bags move in and buy successful entities but have no idea how to run them. They slowly get shittier, so good employees move on and do their own thing.
There’s still amazing games being made, there’s just a lot more shit games you have to sift though. Follow great game devs, not who they work for.
Yeah, the industry seems to be changing again. There’s a push towards passion projects and those projects are seeing more success than the big budget games. I think we will either see a new cycle of conglomeration or, hopefully, we will see the executives take a more hands-off approach and let the games make money for them.
Just because you own a sports team doesn’t mean you should be head coach.
With the tools available now, a smaller team can make projects that compete with much larger studios, mostly because they don’t have a hand tied behind their backs from having to paywall or monetize things. Currently playing Motortown: Behind the wheel, it’s literally a single dev making it and it’s just an all around great experience. He implements what he and the players want without extra fluff or cash grabs and players are spreading the word around about our love for this game so he doesn’t need marketing.
I don’t think big budget AAA games will change much going forward, the businessmen always think they know best and they’ll continue to make games worse if they believe it’ll increase profit. An indie game will just never produce fortnight or GTA money, so they’ll continue to want games that can replicate that model.
Unfortunately, it still influences everything that goes into it, if not for anything but the expectation to turn a profit.
A movie when I was a teenager was $3.25 for a matinee. Also, there were like barely any mass shootings. America is imploding. All these issues people bring up the outliers and they never want to talk about the root causes because it’s a contentious arena. Capitalism consumes itself until there’s nothing left and the wealth is all consolidated at the top horded and then World War. The cycle continues. Everything’s connected. Nothing in a capitalist society happens without money. If we want to understand the differences of then and now we would focus on the economy. I hate gaming of today. There are advances, but all I see is cigar chopping game execs as they pray on nostalgic millennials and children. I can’t even watch movies anymore because all I see is propaganda, mischaracterization, and the profit motive. All I see is rich people trying to mold your minds and destroy education and keep you hyper-distracted with short-term goals. It’s not that technology is evil, but anytime the Imperialist come up with some kind of new gizmo, it’s always a double-edged sword. I know people will think I’m overreacting, but I’m not. Once you realize how real life is, and all the mechanisms that go on around you, you start thinking about things differently. You change your behavior. Pearls before swine.
You’re not wrong
I’ve always found it deeply insulting.
The baby boom in the USA was a real demographic phenomenon but every “generation” after that gets fuzzier to the point where its now just rage bait nonsense or just a proxy term for complaining about changing fashions. Even within the Boomer cohort people had wildly different experiences growing up across such a large span. That said, every game studio I ever worked for was run by Gen X and Boomer aged people.
When they started in the industry it was small teams, tight budgets, a new frontier with a low bar to entry. Now it is highly corporate, capitalized, shareholder driven behemoth (like everything else). This transform happened when the millennial cohort was in our 20s, we had no influence on this, and it mirrored similar larger-scale transformations in the rest of society.
I’m fortunate in that I basically retired early, although I wouldn’t mind going back to work with a good group of people, even for cheap. Like the old days again. I still like the work I just hate the business. But it doesn’t matter, the whole industry is in ruins now.
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I think people don’t realize that current CEO’s are still old. Many of them in their 50s. I don’t think those are millennials.
Mostly or straight became indie devs or got they asses fired on AAA studios, let’s be honest indie and double A studios are what still keep this hobbie alive today
I certainly wanted to be a gameDev, and had shit ideas. It is my fault.
If you still have a hint of that spark in you, download a game engine and give it a go. Make something short and quick just to learn. It’s a fun hobby when you don’t let it consume your life.
Godot is a free and open source game engine, so lemmy would eat me alive if I didn’t mention it, but any of them, including Unity, would work for this purpose.
I simply don’t have time or energy, because I’m fighting for survival in an extremely toxic work and home environment.
Man I get you. I have barely touched this hobby in years. Best of luck to you, I hope things improve on those fronts.
Shit is subjective. As long as you love your own shit or the process of it, you are good.
You probably don’t have shit ideas, you just need help making you ideas work. Even Tolkien had a group of people help I’m improve the Hobbit.
One of the things I wanted to make, is a pixel style build a vehicle game, where you earn parts for vehicles that you build.
Ok, I like this idea. What kind of vehicles are players making and what do they do with the vehicles once they make them?
Generally, you just fight with them. I had plans for upgrades and even parts that are “organic”. That is, level up with use. I had plenty of crazy ideas. It was going to be open world, but 2D. You could build your own city. It would be more simple than it sounds.
Ok, cool. Now download Krita to make the assets and Godot for the engine. Start with a small and some version of your idea. And remember, this the most important part, it is OK to fail, failing is part of the process. Be kind to yourself when thing don’t work or come out the way you expected them to. It is OK to take breaks bit don’t give up.
I’ve been curious lately if the original Ape Escape is as good as I remember. I heard the sequels weren’t as good, but I have fond memories of the first game on PS1.
I prefer the sequels to AE1, with 3 being the best of the bunch (no pun intended).
The golden age of games, also happened to have publishers who were just that, publishers, not slave drivers commanding the market and shutting down studios every time they sneezed.
More of a late stage capitalism issue than a millennial issue
