The success of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG has kicked off a fiery debate about game development, AAA costs, and players’ expectations
What do you mean “dont turn it into a weapon,” i have a dedicated spot on my action wheel specifically for turning things into weapons. My barbarian buddy can do it as a bonus action
Pro-tip: if a low-health enemy is close to escaping to call for help you can just throw Baldur’s Gate 3 at them for that last bit of damage!
deleted by creator
If fewer players would buy the shitty games, and stop buying the battle passes and mtx, they would stop selling them. It’s all about profit.
What do you think would have happened if Overwatch 2 launched and had a consistent player count of zero?
But it seems that a lot of people don’t care as much as I want them to, and a lot of people have less self control than a toddler. Little will change.
Enough people have left Overwatch 2 that they’ve resorted to putting it on Steam. Perhaps it’s not happening on the timeline we would like, but people do seem to be tiring of live service nonsense.
Exactly what you said. Most devs know they’re not putting out high quality games but the money flows in and that’s what they’re told to design.
Those games make money on whale players. People who spend thousands of dollars.
But if whales have no one to play with those whales end up leaving too.
I know I’m preaching to the choir, BlahajEnjoyer, but for anyone else reading this, this is why it’s important to also not play these sorts of games in addition to not spending money on them, if stopping any of this is important to you.
Sweet, sweet short term profits tho
I mean one studio makes a great game and a bunch of other studios make shitty games… then gamers like the game which is better and want more games to be like that. Traditionally that’s called market forces, not a weapon.
Kotaku out here dutifully defending the status quo. Maybe these complex, top-heavy, primarily commercially motivated hierarchies aren’t a good environment for the development of decent games. If those top people have a vision and a passion for their art, it’ll show. If they don’t and all they care about is money while throwing figurative scraps of creative freedom and control to their actual development and art teams, that’ll show too.
What Larian did right, more than anything else, is retain artistic integrity. They didn’t hold back to stuff anything behind a paywall or try to figure out how to design their game to appeal to whales. They had something they wanted to make, a franchise they wanted to do proper justice, and they knocked the ball out of the park.
Not because it’s perfect, because it isn’t, but because it is incredibly clear that they didn’t sell out their artistic integrity. It couldn’t have been made if they had.
That, I think, is what some development studios are worried about. Ultimately though, that’s a good thing. It offers the potential of changing the nature of the business to one that’s less about Skinner boxes and more about creating an enjoyable and maybe even profound experience.
Please do use Baldur’s Gate 3 as a weapon to cut money grubbing corporate filth out of the industry.
It’s the same bullshit as return2office, management has its interests which include armies of fungible resources they can track effectively via closure velocity.
It’s why big organizations are less efficient but they’re what we have because of marketing inertia (people assume big companies produce better product).
Oh nooo! Anyway, make the best game you can.
AAA studios, you can stop crying, you’re like a master car mechanic crying because you can’t bolt down a single goddamn nut with pre-existing tooling.
If it was a weapon, I’d probably accidently kill Gale with it. :(
The people in charge of these companies, meanwhile, get to quietly count their millions. After all, they aren’t the ones who have to go on a livestream and defend the latest patch notes.
There are, however, a lot of opportunities during development for everyone down the chain to voice concerns about making an online-only game that doesn’t need to be and requires them to go on a livestream to defend their patch notes.
And lots of opportunities for them to be ignored or fired. Devs can complain all they want but at the end of the day we have to do what our bosses order us to do.
If it wasn’t on their minds before Diablo IV, I’ll bet “defending our patch notes on a live stream” is going to be a difficult position to staff in the future for a company that’s already had issues retaining talent.
I’m not sure anyone is having an issue retaining employees. Top employees, perhaps, but for a lot of businesses you don’t need very many brilliant (and expensive) employees. Any competent soul will do. On that score, I can assure you that the game industry has no shortage of folks looking to get in to the industry.
I know a handful of developers (read: far too many) who have been fired for vocally disagreeing with management.
Sure, but if you want to see what happens when you have a lot of employee turnover from people not agreeing with the direction of a game, look no further than Redfall. Often times that top talent you’re talking about will form their own studios and bring colleagues with them.
Kotaku been smoking that pack since day one
Use it like a BFG, we need to focus on quality games… not hamster wheels with micro transactions and battle passes.
Triple A devs: Help, we don’t want to make good games, we want to make casinos!
My issue with all of this is thus, and the article touched on it a bit:
Gamers don’t give a shit if games are buggy. Actually, we only really want it to be a baseline level of playable. And even then, we’ll probably suffer through a lot. What we want is a fun game.
In fact, I don’t actually think most of us give a particular shit about micro transactions or battle passes other than that they tend to be accompanied by games that are abjectly less fun without them. I wouldn’t have batter an eye if baldurs gate has a cosmetic store because what I want has nothing to do with that.
I want to play games that are fun. That’s the bottom line. Baldurs gate is incredible because it’s good. I would have paid more for it than I did. I would have suffered through micro transactions and battle passes if I had to. Because I don’t give a shit about that.
I’m just tired of games releasing and not being fun.
I really love Baldur gate 3. It’s awesome
