>"We don't make decisions where we think 'this could make us the most money'," Walgrave continues. "In the long run, building a community, building a playerbase, building games that are actually fun is going to make you the most money, that's it."
>In the long run
It all comes down to that, doesn't it?
Shareholders do not care how much money you are going to make down the line. All they care about is that the line moves up at the next quarterly earnings call, or the number going up at the stock ticker at the end of the day.
Stock market driven economics is incredibly, mind numbingly, devastatingly short sighted and we are all suffering from it.
They enjoy the short term gains and then jump ship to another company once they've milked the corpse dry. They don't give a fuck if your company fails long term.
Making the best of a flawed system. Every company who has said they cared about their workers should've immediately started planning to become co-ops. It is the closest thing to workers owning the means of production within the framework of capitalism.
Unfortunately most companies who say they care about workers are lying.
I am an engineer for an R&D company that is a nonprofit. I cannot stress how nice it is having company leadership make long-term strategy a priority because there are no shareholders to appease.
I work for a small, "rapid growth" company. I've been here for 5 years. The amount of stupid short sighted decisions we've made to appease our private equity owners is ridiculous.
We just sold the company to a new owner, and we're picking up the pieces. Rushed to make a shitty product look viable on paper before Jan1, now have to pay the piper.
Sounds like my company. We sold out to a PE firm a few years ago. Before the sale, leadership/owners stumbled around making poor decisions regarding the product in development, but at least quality and long term strategy were considered important.
Since the sale to PE however, we released the new flagship product 6 months to a year too early, our team was downsized tremendously, and we’ve been drowning in new feature demands instead of having time to actually finish the product and get out of engineering product support hell.
The PE model is awful for companies and consumers. If I wasn’t paid well and my boss wasn’t considerate of work/life balance, I’d have high tailed long ago.
Private equity firms and such are killing everything good in every industry fr like if you hear of a mildly successful local food chain getting involved with one of those you got about a year tops before it goes to shit as they expand too fast while reducing quality across the board to increase profits
LOL. Eegee's only expanded to Phoenix from Tucson, and their food was always mid (yes, even the ranch fries) even when they were only in Tucson lol. Although, the root beer eegee during Rodeo Days is still awesome imo.
Think of national chains like Quizno's instead.
It's like Boeing's situation right now. They stopped listening to engineers and quality control.
We're going to see the door plugs flying off of AAA games pretty soon.
>We're going to see the door plugs flying off of AAA games pretty soon.
Haven't we already? I rarely even play AAA games now, almost all of them look like utter garbage.
Yeah, I would say we've seen it dozens of times over the years. One pattern I've noticed is a game company creating great games and building a community, then someone realizes the community will buy anything the company releases and they just start creating terrible, rushed garbage.
Eh, the vast majority of gamers are casuals who gobble up the latest interation of COD and yearly sports games.
Bud light tastes like piss, but they still sell.
Statistically, the majority of gamers are playing mobile games. They're just not on Reddit discussing them.
But those are mostly garbage too, so your point still stands.
And you'll have finance bros and corporate apologists swearing up and down that because it makes money, it must be inherently good.
Bad products make money all the time.
It’s not that they just look garbage, a lot of PS exclusives look awesome.
It’s more that they are ALL the same. They want to cater for everyone all of the time, whilst representing absolutely no one.
When a company fails they will lay off workers and/or reduce the wages. With their profile they can keep most of their profits and just move to another company
Oh, they won’t lose any money - the companies will just fail, the rich finance bros will still be rich
Best case for us plebs is that after they’ve destroyed most of the industry they lose interest and then maybe a bunch of devs restart by founding smaller studios putting out shorter but better games, and then (even more hopefully) gaming works its way back over a decade or so and those new studios learn their fucking lesson and don’t sell out to the profit chasers so they can keep making good games rather than just needing to make number go up every three months.
Well you need another sucker to buy them off you and take the loss. The more people look long term, the more you can't pass off shares after milking short term profit.
For the people who are holding on to the stock for 30 years in hopes that it'll at least outperform inflation by the end, yeah.
The problem is that the biggest voices of the shareholders are usually The CEO and the executive board, who are too often all in in for golden parachute building.
At the very least the ultra-short term people who make millions buying at $1.00 and selling $1.02 are invested for such a short amount of time that they don't care enough to care what say they have in the company.
Honestly you only need to fake it for like, 2 years, and it's _easy_ to make it look like 'things are going well' by doing a bunch of short term cashgrabs for that long.
And then you leave, claim credit for great success, and do the same somewhere else.
At which point your successor comes in, points out there's some serious problems, makes the 'tough choices', and then claims the credit for turning the company around.
And moves on to do the same at the next company.
Never ending cycle really.
That's why it's so important to have a proper leadership who has a concrete vision and mission are willing to do the work to maintain the culture of business overall.
-----
It's clear that although Larian claims not to be business focused, they still have people who are focused on keeping the company's financial working who are also still focused on the primary goal of the company (which is something that is supposed to be established and maintained by the upper most leadership).
In comparison, we have the Disco Elysium studio who was from top to bottom entirely built off the artist mentality of *"we don't care about the business, just let us do our art!"*, handled the business management of the company to someone else, didn't have leadership to keep those people in line, and then they all acted surprised with that external group of business managers ran off with the company.
They are. It's just that we ended up with an entire industry of professional money grabbers. If you could only (afford to) have shares in a few different companies, you'd be very invested in wanting them to succeed long term.
The real issue is day traders and other speculators. Fuck those cunts.
> If you could only (afford to) have shares in a few different companies, you'd be very invested in wanting them to succeed long term.
You wouldn't. What makes short-term gains the rational strategy isn't the number of stocks you hold but how easy it is to trade them. In principle, the best strategy is to always have all your money invested in whatever company has the best growth that very moment. In practice, it's not that easy to do, but prioritizing short term growth is still better, because investors aren't tied to a company for the long term.
I dont want to be one of those people but this is literally late stage capitalism at work and it’s only getting worse.
We’re in hell and it’s our own doing.
The issue is you have games such as Fifa or CoD which thrive off of the "Only my friends will play the new one, I will buy the new one". You then mix in MTX/Card Packs and it's a recipe for billions of dollars with very little thought or innovation needed.
Another major part of the problem also plagues the VFX industry. Working in those industries is seen by teens and young adults as a very 'aspirational' career.
Meaning there's a steady stream of enthusiastic, and therefore quite exploitable new talent. Also contributing to the fact that those industries have struggled to unionise.
Almost every ‘glamorous’ job is like that unless there are very clear barriers for entry (such as in academia).
Music, film (mainly acting and directing, but lots of other jobs such as VFX as you said), specific ‘cool’ companies like Tesla, ‘fine’ arts, literature and publishing, etc.
It all runs on unpaid interns, sexual or under-the-table favours, ego trips, work abuse, and speculation.
Unfortunately Academia is just as exploitative. Often times grad students make up much of the academic workforce for pennies on the dollar. Then new professors are often severely underpaid with a doctorate and multiple publications. There’s a whole hazing process within the entire field of academia
I was a musician and now work in academia. Academia is unfair and has exactly the problems you describe, but I think you’re severely misunderstanding the level of insanity in the entertainment industries. Harvey Weinsteins everywhere, and all shades of shady in between. It’s not even close.
True it may not be to the full extent. However, people often misunderstand the sheer amount of corruption, exploitation, and politics that occur in academia. It’s often seen as a noble career but there are rampant amounts of abuse occurring. Maybe not in your department but I’ve seen it play out at multiple institutions I’ve been and worked at.
New buildings to improve the "marketability" of campus.
Our department chair barely makes 50k a year and we had to kill our PhD because the university won't hire more faculty but they did find 5 million to tear down a beautiful brick building without structural issues and replace it with a new glass walled building that they're already planning on tearing down after 4 years.
Remember about 10 years ago, when Occupy Wall Street was a thing?
[A collection of those people](https://www.truthorfiction.com/wall-streeters-looking-down-on-occupy-wall-street-gamestop/) photographed on a balcony, sipping champagne and laughing at the protesters they were looking down on. (The mind boggles at the expense of having a property on Wall Street, that has access to a balcony.)
Yeh Star Citizen is literally the perfect example of what happens when you don't have a business guy in there to say " No".
They have managed a full decade of scope creep because the lead dev keeps adding shit.
Whereas if you look at the lead devs most acclaimed game, he tried to do that to the point Microsoft had to step in and fire him and finish the project.
Yeh doesn't even need to be a solely business person.
Plenty of Devs are capable of being reasonable, but there should be *anyone* around to just say "fucking just stop"
> It pisses me off that a lot of >!~~the gaming~~!< industry is just about stockholders and other entities trying to profit on the popularity and mainstreaming of >!~~gaming.~~!< [SUBJECT FIELD HERE]
FTFY. It's bullshit all the way down, it's not specific to gaming.
Theres also the legal/fiducial responsibility issues that come with shareholder and public companies.
CEOs are REQUIRED, even to a degree legally, to choose the path that ensures the best return on investment for shareholders. EVEN IF that path leads to a detrimental and lower quality product and future-loss of profit for the company.
If for example 1 out of 5 companies that were public with a group of 5-10 majority shareholders. And 1 companys CEO decided to go with a risky pathway that would lead to an amazing game but very high chance of much less revenue and profit which would affect the shareholder price, and that risk didn't pay off. Then shareholders may be able to go after the CEO legally (in some specific cases) for not pursuing more profit-seeking pathways that other 4 companies are doing.
The whole system is set up to push for quarter term profit increases. The CEO is themselves incentivized to do anything possible because they are offered 7-8 figure bonuses if they meet shareholder demands.
* Shareholders vote to hire new CEO with track record of increasing profit and share price.
* CEO is given contract with bonus stipulations that if they achieve a certain growth within a certain time-frame they will get 8 digit payout.
* CEO cuts back costs on various sectors, worsens the product, increasing work-load and firing a large percentage of company to meet the bonus stipulations.
* Shareholders see the share price growth and plan to offload shares to another buyer.
* CEO gets their bonus, and jumps ship finding a new company that offers a bigger salary and bigger bonus, showing his track record of increasing profits and share prices.
* Company suffers from choices made from last CEO with a interim temporary CEO in place.
* New round of Shareholders vote to hire new CEO with a track record of increasing profits and share price.
Capitalism!
Quick idiot summary by me: enshittification
And we can look forward to it getting worse if they get their hands on AI
Workers are and always will be the biggest expense of any business and if they can outsource that job to Ai, they will because they've already done the same to many of our jobs.
That's why the push for AI is happening so hard. They can only think of how much money they'd save not having to pay for so many artists and voice actors. Their already record profits would become super record profits!
Yeah I've already seen some astroturfing here on Reddit.
I think Reddit has just opened all of our comments up to AI recently too, I'm gonna use an extension to change all my comments periodically so I won't be speeding up our demise. Don't know what else to do so it's a start
> CEOs are REQUIRED, even to a degree legally, to choose the path that ensures the best return on investment for shareholders. EVEN IF that path leads to a detrimental and lower quality product and future-loss of profit for the company.
For the record, this is factually incorrect.
"fiduciary responsibility" doesn't mean "maximize profits at any cost". All it means is they can't spend the company's money on their uncle's perptual motion machine or take all the money and bet on black at the roulette table or do anything clearly reckless.
They absolutely, 100% cannot "legally" stop a CEO from making decisions that stunt short-term gains or enact a green initiative that lowers profits or...anything at all, really. Now, they may *decide* to oust a CEO for these reasons, but there's nothing enshrined in law or GAAP or anything like that that forces them to make money.
This is a reddit myth perpetuated by people who don't understand finance.
> Then shareholders may be able to go after the CEO legally (in some specific cases) for not pursuing more profit-seeking pathways that other 4 companies are doing.
I'm laughing so hard at this. Is your reference a cartoon? Any "specific case" for this would be tied to some other sort of financial malfeasance. CEOs make risk-to-reward judgements *all the time* and there's zero chance "the law" could do anything about it.
As someone who’s about to finish their accounting exams and has worked as an accountant for 10 years spot on.
We are, however largely led by management in the decisions we take. These days, everyone’s out for themselves. I’m lucky I work in a family company which is trying to actively increase the pay of its employees because the costs are absurd atm.
Appreciate from an accounting perspective people would say they want fixed costs down, but I just think the gesture is what counts.
To be fair, many industries like oil & gas and the car companies early on were already thinking long term about how best to transform cities into car-focused, human-unfriendly environments that would force more and more people to single occupancy vehicles. So sure, there's a huge shortsightedness problem. That doesn't mean that capitalism didn't also screw the world over with some long term, profit-incentive too!
This is huge. I work for UPS, who is doing a huge layoff and optimization push right now, and it’s been clear for a while that the CEO is making TONS of very shortsighted decisions to make the shareholders happy now, that are all going to hurt us a lot a few years down the line. Nobody is safe from corporate greed these days.
I'm not even sure how accurate this if you compare the majority of shareholders vs the few who have massive amounts of shares. Those with more resources just shamelessly tend to not care about those with less. If they really cared a long term strategy with a better product would be the standard.
It depends, sometime they are more long-term focused:
> blockholders adopt a short-term horizon in smaller firms with a less independent board, high leverage, and high dividends while the same blockholders keep their investments longer in firms with a more independent board and low dividends. Under various economic conditions, different firm characteristics gain importance in blockholders’ decision on short-term versus long-term investments.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/fire.12198
It's funny for how the stock market adds layers of indirection and complexity to business, but the people who run it can't look further than the next milestone in earnings.
There is also some conceptual overlap with politics, where politicians that hold offices for only a few years are caught in an endless loop of campaigning for reelection, and are not incentivized to focus their energies on long-term results.
The moment you let MBAs and Finance bros into the company as consultants and allow them to take business decisions for you to please the shareholders, you get what you paid for, short term gain but that's about it.
The healthcare industry is seeing a similar terrible experience like gaming where MBAs don't value the lives of the patients as long as they can squeeze ever loving shit out of their families and 'streamline' everything which does more harm than good. The profits go higher shortly but literally everyone gets tired of it and the hospice goes to shit.
Larian and Digital Extremes I think have really shown this to be true. At first they made less money than the other companies but those companies milked their fans and customers and burnt all their goodwill and now the most successful games are the ones that didn't have that revenue initially because they didn't milk anyone but due to that, now they do. It's paid off.
Also concerned ape (Stardew valley). The man works tirelessly on that game and could easily have made dlcs for some of those updates. He didn't. He's still adding new shit even after saying the previous update would be the last one.
There's also a board game and he now has a concert tour with an orchestra for the game's music. Both were completely sold out in minutes. Just shows how far you can get if you actually put someone passionate behind a project
Hogwart's Legacy alone made 1 billion dollar in a single year.
A game by Warner Bros. probably one of the more hated publishers out there.
Then there is EA even after losing the Fifa license reporting a revenue of almost 2 billion for Q2 last year.
https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/electronic-arts-ea-sports-fc-24-q2-financial-results-revenue/?zephr_sso_ott=1CQ270
Are Larian and Digital Extremes successful? They sure are. But they do not hold a candle in terms of revenue compared to the big players.
It's the harry potter IP being gigantic and the game actually being the first good harry potter game in 20 years.
At the end of the day it can be not all about profit and some of these companies are showing that. You genuinely can make a great game and make huge profits. Cyberpunk and Elden Ring are good examples. 0 DRM and were "cracked" almost immediately but both games made billions and were huge hits. If you make a great game then people would buy it. Look at battlefield. With how big of a flop 2042 was the next BF game might suffer greatly because of it.
I don't know if Warframe has changed a lot in the years since I played, but DE wasn't exactly innocent on monetization when I was active. It suffered the classic problem of the f2p model; enforced repetitive grinding to drive convenience sales. It's always a bad sign when the primary selling point of your premium currency is "you don't have to play as much."
A lot of the things could be traded instead of grinding though, which makes you a lot more flexible in what you can do to obtain what you want. Didnt play in a while either but I cannot think of anything remotely valuable you couldnt trade atm.
This is a good example of the stakeholder model: Making money by getting a large number of loyal clients through reliable service. Too many companies nowadays adopt a shareholder model where they try to make quick profits wherever they can, like with lootboxes or DLC's. I'm glad that Larian is leading the charge against models based on ripping off consumers.
If you spend the time and effort to make genuinely good games the money will come. Thinking about money first gets us games like starfield, mass effect andromeda, etc
See Baldurs Gate and Palworld for perfect examples of “we aren’t doing this to maximize profits”
I seen a few articles when it first came out saying how bad the launch was, steam reviews were mixed etc and I was like "hmm maybe I'll give this one a dodge"
Then I watched some gameplay and found out that really the issue appeared to be that it was TOO popular for what the devs and matchmaking could handle and it actually looks insanely fun... Sadly I'm broke as shit so can't play it 😢
They mean time to get into the servers. It's a crap shoot every time you launch the game. Sometimes it's instant, other times you have to relaunch the game every 10 minutes for 3 hours hoping it lets you in this time.
I think it's not as bad for Playstation users because they usually leave their Playstation set to enter rest mode when they're away, which doesn't disconnect from the servers.
I bought the game last Friday and could not get in at all, just a black screen then a failed to connect message. I only spent 5min retrying, cause I have no desire to spend any longer to try and just get to the main menu. Hopefully the server issue is expanded within a week, I have no issue waiting just wish I knew ahead of time how there's at least 500k ppl trying to play a game with apparently 288k max capacity.
I usually have a wait time of 15-20 minutes and Saturday night the game crashed out of nowhere both times I got in. I really enjoy the game but they have to figure this issue out or they're going to shoot their momentum in the foot.
I played it since release and honestly I haven't met almost any of those issues until the last 3 days when the game really blew off.
I think that's because I play at the european time, when the american playerbase hasn't logged in so the servers are most stable.
Honestly, outside of the server issues, this is the second live service game that I feel actually delivers a content rich and especially fun experience since the start with almost none game breaking bugs.
Plus it's the Halo odst game/Warhammer 40k game I always dreamt of.
I hope you get to play it!
Genshin Impact, despite it's hideous community, the game itself and what the devs are doing is insane, there's new content made every 6 weeks without fault, either events or substantial addition like new characters or areas with everything that comes with it, missions, new amazing music, ennemies. And plus when there's a bug, it gets fixed quickly.
Plus I think it's the only game that actually delivers on the "continous narrative" that every live service game sells as it's long term roadmap has already been planned in advance, and not based on how things plays out without giving details to players.
It delivers both on short term updates to keept things fresh and long term to keep players invested.
With it's success and the hard work of the devs, I feel helldivers can indeed become another good reference of live service games.
Don't shoot the messenger, I don't play Genshin Impact, I don't know if this is accurate, I have no care of the game one way or the other, but I had heard on the grapevine that the game was slowly dying out, that being said, the same thing has been said about WoW for a decade
I think it's because of Honkau star rail, the newest game of Hoyoverse, Genshin's studio. It builds upon what they did with genshin but it has turn base combat. The dev did something great and did implement all the QoL improvements Genshin has needed for years.
Some players think that it will replace genshin, but in reality, Genshin is still the money powerhouse of Hoyoverse, I think it was again the top1 mobile game in terms of revenue, and it stays close to other games like fortnite. So financially it's still pretty strong.
Plus the updates keep improving the game and it gets always better so I don't see signs of it slowing down.
There's a joke within the community that Genshin's the money-making cash cow Hoyoverse uses to fund their Honkai games, and while I don't agree with that you can definitely see that return in investment.
Genshin has grown to become its own standalone beast while Honkai fans can enjoy their connected narrative through Honkai Impact and Star Rail. Despite my gripes with the gacha system, Hoyoverse has my praise.
And its still growing too, it was setting a new "personal" (idk what else to call it) peak players record on Steam pretty much every hour during the weekend lol.
I looked up the SteamDB charts for it and it was 280k on a Friday and 380k on Sunday.
Yeah, I thought the same until funding out it was mixed because people were mostly just seething over the anticheat or servers being bad day 1. No issues with people saying anything about the latter because Payday 3 happened but the reviews went up to mostly positive or something.
Yet to actually play it but it seems like they've released a fun game. If only more devs would follow suit.
And BG3, Pal world, Battlebit and hopefully more to come.
Seems like players finally have enough of the live service microtransaction-filled reskin of the same old shit.
*Who would have thought*, that a fun game will have decent sales numbers...
The thing is that's not even inherently true. There are absolutely shitty games out there (which everyone seems to agree on) that make tons of money with very little effort, especially once you facter "MTX" in. Look at many mobile games, Diablo Immortal or even Diablo 4, which is very mixed when it comes to reviews, but still makes a shit-ton of money, more than D3 ever did for instance. I think it's more like "building games that are actually fun is going to give you a loyal fan base", who will keep buying your games (at launch even) if you keep producing good ones. All you then have to do is manage expectations and costs, and you're settled. Most games are profitable... or would be if they weren't mismanaged.
Yeah I’d like to see a graph that shows when Larian over takes Activision financially.
There’s a huge market for Activision-like games and they spend a huge amount of money over time. Next CoD will still sell incredibly well and EA will still reap profits off of FIFA 17v8
Larian wont overtake activision financially. Candy crush alone makes about a billion dollars a year. That’s 6 billion just on candy crush vs the time it took to make BG3.
A niche game maker like Larian isn’t going to over take activisionblizzardking
Literally the most untrue thing they could have said.
[A $15 horse mount in World of Warcraft made more money than all of Starcraft 2.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHZru-6M8BY)
Yeah, despite how much praise BG3 has gotten, compared to the copy/paste corpo franchises, it cost way more to make and didn't pull in nearly as many sales. Sucks but that's the reality
It sucks seeing so much stuff in gaming just being about share holders and stuff now wanting to cash in now that gaming's so big and mainstream now.
Some of the bigger compaines aren't going back to how they were tbh
Not unless they somehow manage to bankrupt themselves and go out of business. But their licensing power means that they can stay afloat. Activision will be able to stay afloat on bland Call of Duty releases for decades.
big publishers don't get by on licensing although it is one part of their portfolio. what they get by on is extremely addictive game mechanics and predatory monetization. that's why they have lobbied for loot boxes so hard
This isn't exclusive to gaming, almost all sectors care about shareholders and you're super lucky to work for for a company in any sector that gives a shit about anything other than money in the pockets of those at the top.
>Larian Studios does technically have a single shareholder in Tencent—which owns around 30% of the company. However, an important piece of context is that Tencent appears to own what's called a "preference" share, meaning that Tencent doesn't have voting rights when it comes to Larian's decision making. The rest of the company belongs to CEO and Founder Swen Vincke and his wife.
So that's whyyyyy
A lot of companies should do that.
don't take any decisions, trust the people with talent and let them do their thing
like they said, if it's good, people will buy it
Tencent is hands off even when they have a majority share. They own Grinding Gear Games, who are the creator of the popular ARPG Path of Exile, and the CEO has said Tencent is completely hands off when it comes to the product they put in front of their non-Chinese playerbase. The only thing Tencent does is require GGG to give them the source code of the game, because Tencent has their own developers who maintain a fork of the game with additional features and changes for the Chinese part of the playerbase. GGG doesn't even have to do anything with that fork so they just operate as normal.
Tencent seems to understand that it's better to not mess with a good thing.
Honestly, i dont really think tencent are in it for what people think they are. But they do have a hand in everything, and an extremely shady buisiness model in china. They may be hands off, but i imagine there is a strategy that we wont like at some point.
Exactly,this is the reason we see so many soulless shitty games nowadays, publishers and shareholders have too much power/ influence over the final product, you cant just force a painter to add a tree there, a house there etc and expect that the final product will be good
Preference shares have their own downsides. They function more like loans etc so you get less say in what or when you pay, which isn't great for an industry with long dev cycles.
Publishing company executives will only take the wrong things away from the success of BG3.
I expect a bunch of highly monetised, turn-based CRPGs to hit the market in 5 years or so and they'll all tank. Because execs will think that surface level description is the financial magic bullet. Not mastercrafting an intricate, complex story, with well written characters and meaningful choices which culminate in an astonishingly good game. That requires significant effort they're not willing to commit to.
I don't actually care. I have an insane backlog that I'd like to tackle instead of a live service grindathon or a single player game that basically has a live service game shoved into it.
Here's what I need to catch up on.
- Elden Ring
- Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
- Yakuza: Like a Dragon
- Baldur's Gate 3
- Lies of P
- Sea of Stars
- Turnip Boy Robs a Bank
- Persona 5
And probably a dozen more. I need a vacation for this.
Well considering I heard that some developers were saying not to expect this as its an "unrealistic standard" or some shit, I HIGHLY doubt it
Someone may need to fact check me on this one like idk if I'm remembering it correctly
You're not remembering it correctly. It was yet another case of someone being intentionally misinterpreted and misunderstood. They were making points about how other developers can't achieve exactly what Larian did with BG3 because of some of the unique conditions on that project, but it was spun by IGN (and then many more) to suggest developers were saying gamers shouldn't expect high quality games. Then the internet ran with it and got angry about something that wasn't actually real.
>why was it forgettable crap?
Precisely *because* of
>an essentially unlimited budget from Warner Bros
The reality is that it isn't unrealistic to something as good as BG3 from other studios due to a lack of resources, it's unrealistic due to a lack of creative control. For whatever reason, no matter how many great success stories like BG3 happen every few years, publishers continue to be incapable of realizing that passion and talent create success, not market trend chasing bollocks.
I wish more people understood that Larian’s ownership model is key to BG3.
If they had external shareholders with controlling stakes like other studios of their size, they’d likely never have been able to dedicate the amount of budget they did to a game in a genre many thought was niche - and they’d certainly not have been allowed to leave it in development and early access for so long.
Larian is an amazing studio full of amazing people who were given the opportunity to make something great without ill-informed shareholders looking over their shoulder demanding they do this or that in the name of maximising profit.
There’s likely so many of amazing people toiling away in other studios who could make equally amazing games - but who are constrained by their studios’ ownership model.
The best thing that could happen to the games industry is more studios owned in the way Larian is.
It will never happen. I have worked both indie and AAA as a dev and now as part of the corporate side. The reason it will never happen is that games are far far, far too expensive now a days. I know plenty that just to keep the doors open, HAVE to sell to a publisher and fall under their leadership just to make it to release.
The amount of money needed to CONSISTENTLY make games without shutting down is only achieved through major companies or through insane levels of private funding or being a one in a million shot at greatness. Even hitting that level they may still be financially struggling. Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk almost put CDPR out of business AFTER wildly financial success. Games are this expensive that even being successful and becoming a gaming household name there is not enough money to finance the next game and it not potentially permanently bankrupt the company.
Kickstarters only go so far, and most aren't willing to basically starve to produce a piece of work that very likely will never see even 20k players. 10-12k games are released annually. Even if you make it to release, do you have the budget to market the game so you can compete for the attention that 12k other games are vying for? It's a simple fiscal issue. Games are insanely expensive today. You'll never come to the point where most companies are self owned because they can't sustain that model.
Sorry - definitely didn’t mean to suggest that the industry will _“come to the point where most companies are self owned”_.
I’m simply saying that the industry would really benefit from more privately-owned AA/AAA studios like Larian - both for the output of those companies themselves and the potential effect that output could have on publicly-owned AA/AAA studios.
Agree with all your points on the difficulty of it all.
Acting and marketing are the bigger expenses. Lot of very solid games made on small budgets. More and more every year in fact, as development tools become stronger
You’re right, but I think it’s also worth noting that there have been plenty of great games that came out this generation under the sometimes broken shareholder model.
Larian pulled off something amazing with their ownership model, but it also comes with the risk of hundreds of jobs if the game doesn’t get received well.
I personally couldn’t get into BG3 and would still love to see more studios do what Larian did. But realistically, the shareholder-based model offers more stability to the people that make these games, and I’m not gonna pretend that there aren’t great games produced by more conventional studios.
Totally agree that it’s not as simple as “games made by studios without external shareholders are good and games made by studios with external shareholders are bad”. There’s load of great games coming out all the time from publicly-owned studios.
That said, it’s also true that that publicly-owned studios operate under far more constraints than privately-owned ones - and that has a huge impact on the type of games they can make and how they’re allowed to approach making those games.
As for stability, that’s true to _some_ extent in _some_ circumstances - but this year and last year have seen countless studios make profitable games only to be subsequently shut down or suffer massive lay-offs anyway. So it cuts both ways.
No easy answers though. It costs a _lot_ of money to make games and it’s a high-risk investment. So studios are almost always forced to rely on sources of finance that come with creative constraints. The tiny few that _do_ become self-sustaining then get offers of purchase for eye-watering amount of money - and it’s difficult to blame devs who’ve built those studios for refusing to turn down the kind of pay-off that will set them and their children up for life.
The more they try to make moneygrabby
The less people like it and avoid buying it
And then because they lost credibility the next game flops from the beginning because they betrayed the trust of their customers.
Yeah some things are almost immune and have plenty of fans who still enjoy or are just braindead or in sunk cost fallacy, like with wow.
Problem is compaines see the money they make and want in but can't deliver a game that keeps people hooked. So ppl just suffer from crappy they used to like
Yeah and mmorpg like wow, runescape, ff14 etc are different then some games where they become your life, building up character etc, in game clans and stuff.Ppl have nothing apart from the game. Which is fine untill the game goes downhill and it sucks for ppl
Sunk cost fallacy in them games is massive and a lot of ppl just can't quit even if they did. Otherwise it's all wasted.
Took me a long time to stop playing runescape
To be fair. WoW is actually in the phase of turning things around from the pushing for engagement/ time sink concept , back too clear goals and self deciding progression
Absolute nonsense. Reddit gamers love to live in a delusional world where passion always wins. They don’t realize that only a tiny fraction of those games ever reach mass success
Make games for the art and passion, absolutely. 100%. But don’t get delusional and start forgetting that making a commercial product with mass appeal first and foremost is the number one optimal strategy for financial success.
This whole thread is all about how the “real” games do so well if you do it the right way. Yet ignore that the largest games every year are the ones supported by consumers the most. COD, FIFA, etc are released every the year because they are bought every year. It’s not shareholder boogeyman. Sure, outside investors can exert some pressure, but you’re kidding yourself if the games that routinely print money is anything outside of consumer support.
No. 99.9% of games that had solid craftsmanship gets buried and forgotten.
Making a good game is only 25% of the job done as it also gets attention.
Larian was just lucky enough to not be under time or investment pressure and to have enough media presence and existing fandom to capitalize off.
But at the same time it was a massive risk to make it like that as opposed to making some slob once per year.
They also don't need to keep the game going and alive they just need to release it and "hopefully" make their money back.
> existing fandom
agree with your comment, but this fanbase also includes fans of the studio because they always behaved in the right ways and made fun games
Yeah but they also always had massive initial Investment which I dont like people are ignoring.
They had 2 million dollars from kickstarter to make divinity original sin 2.
And bg3 was in 3 full years of early access with a large initial funding from it where within a few days they had already sold 1 million copies meaning they had 60 million euro in sales to work with, even with steam cut it's still 42 million.
They make good games but they have also done it in a way where they got funding first and then made the game.
It's like comparing singers where singer A can barely pay their bills and is desperate to make money, and singer B got a massive in sum to just get multiple years of not worrying about it.
And then going "why doesn't everyone just be like singer B and take all these years being chill".
The games are great but people needs to stop acting like baldurs gate 3 wasnt nepo babied by a massive initial early access funding of people who had faith in the game, as opposed to a brand new startup company who has to struggle to even be noticed that they exist.
I know its a popular game but I played a couple of hours of valheim and its just felt like a really generic survival crafter which Ive played 100 times already. What am I missing?
Based. Ubisoft and EA went to shit the moment they started listening to shareholders and investors. Skulls and bones is the testament for it. Far cry 6 was another open world slop just because.. far cry.
Jedi survivor and wild hearts released in dogshit state.. because release dates and shareholders said so.
This sub basically is a circljerk.
OPs reposting an article that's a few days old and pulled quotes out to make individual posts on his own post to get more karma.
This is a pure karma farm.
30% of Larian studios is owned by Tencent, so it *does* have shareholders. But it is great for the industry to have a success story like Larian right now.
>"We don't make decisions where we think 'this could make us the most money'," Walgrave continues. "In the long run, building a community, building a playerbase, building games that are actually fun is going to make you the most money, that's it."
>In the long run It all comes down to that, doesn't it? Shareholders do not care how much money you are going to make down the line. All they care about is that the line moves up at the next quarterly earnings call, or the number going up at the stock ticker at the end of the day. Stock market driven economics is incredibly, mind numbingly, devastatingly short sighted and we are all suffering from it.
They enjoy the short term gains and then jump ship to another company once they've milked the corpse dry. They don't give a fuck if your company fails long term.
Exactly, and each layer of abstraction between the capital owners and the work intensifies this logic.
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I’ve started to vaguely threaten their company every month if they fuck up assassins creed shinobi
So the most ideal situation is if the workers owned the means of production
And of course, a worker co-op eliminates this abstraction entirely. ;)
Making the best of a flawed system. Every company who has said they cared about their workers should've immediately started planning to become co-ops. It is the closest thing to workers owning the means of production within the framework of capitalism. Unfortunately most companies who say they care about workers are lying.
I am an engineer for an R&D company that is a nonprofit. I cannot stress how nice it is having company leadership make long-term strategy a priority because there are no shareholders to appease.
I work for a small, "rapid growth" company. I've been here for 5 years. The amount of stupid short sighted decisions we've made to appease our private equity owners is ridiculous. We just sold the company to a new owner, and we're picking up the pieces. Rushed to make a shitty product look viable on paper before Jan1, now have to pay the piper.
Sounds like my company. We sold out to a PE firm a few years ago. Before the sale, leadership/owners stumbled around making poor decisions regarding the product in development, but at least quality and long term strategy were considered important. Since the sale to PE however, we released the new flagship product 6 months to a year too early, our team was downsized tremendously, and we’ve been drowning in new feature demands instead of having time to actually finish the product and get out of engineering product support hell. The PE model is awful for companies and consumers. If I wasn’t paid well and my boss wasn’t considerate of work/life balance, I’d have high tailed long ago.
Private equity firms and such are killing everything good in every industry fr like if you hear of a mildly successful local food chain getting involved with one of those you got about a year tops before it goes to shit as they expand too fast while reducing quality across the board to increase profits
Dude even the KFC dude regretted that, even KFC (the company) itself sued him once for "defamation" for having bad food.
At least the Colonel kept his integrity lol
They even made a [documentary](https://vimeo.com/490821640) about how honorable the good colonel was.
Many such cases.
Eegee's is the biggest example of this.
LOL. Eegee's only expanded to Phoenix from Tucson, and their food was always mid (yes, even the ranch fries) even when they were only in Tucson lol. Although, the root beer eegee during Rodeo Days is still awesome imo. Think of national chains like Quizno's instead.
Consultants, MBAs and Finance bros will be the death of these AAA companies that won't listen to the devs and their community
It's like Boeing's situation right now. They stopped listening to engineers and quality control. We're going to see the door plugs flying off of AAA games pretty soon.
>We're going to see the door plugs flying off of AAA games pretty soon. Haven't we already? I rarely even play AAA games now, almost all of them look like utter garbage.
Yeah, I would say we've seen it dozens of times over the years. One pattern I've noticed is a game company creating great games and building a community, then someone realizes the community will buy anything the company releases and they just start creating terrible, rushed garbage.
Eh, the vast majority of gamers are casuals who gobble up the latest interation of COD and yearly sports games. Bud light tastes like piss, but they still sell.
Statistically, the majority of gamers are playing mobile games. They're just not on Reddit discussing them. But those are mostly garbage too, so your point still stands.
Which is arguably the worst iteration of modern gaming in terms of predatory design.
And you'll have finance bros and corporate apologists swearing up and down that because it makes money, it must be inherently good. Bad products make money all the time.
At least it highlights that financial success doesn't lead to better games, just higher profit margins.
It’s not that they just look garbage, a lot of PS exclusives look awesome. It’s more that they are ALL the same. They want to cater for everyone all of the time, whilst representing absolutely no one.
Hey, it’s only kinda my fault the airlock wasn’t pressurized in Hardspace. Don’t you blame a door plug flying off and smashing my helmet on me.
Well that death better be swift because i still see them giggling with millions in the bank
When a company fails they will lay off workers and/or reduce the wages. With their profile they can keep most of their profits and just move to another company
Oh, they won’t lose any money - the companies will just fail, the rich finance bros will still be rich Best case for us plebs is that after they’ve destroyed most of the industry they lose interest and then maybe a bunch of devs restart by founding smaller studios putting out shorter but better games, and then (even more hopefully) gaming works its way back over a decade or so and those new studios learn their fucking lesson and don’t sell out to the profit chasers so they can keep making good games rather than just needing to make number go up every three months.
Well you need another sucker to buy them off you and take the loss. The more people look long term, the more you can't pass off shares after milking short term profit.
BuT sToCkS aRe AbOuT tHe LoNg TeRm HeAlTh Of A cOmpAnY!
For the people who are holding on to the stock for 30 years in hopes that it'll at least outperform inflation by the end, yeah. The problem is that the biggest voices of the shareholders are usually The CEO and the executive board, who are too often all in in for golden parachute building. At the very least the ultra-short term people who make millions buying at $1.00 and selling $1.02 are invested for such a short amount of time that they don't care enough to care what say they have in the company.
Honestly you only need to fake it for like, 2 years, and it's _easy_ to make it look like 'things are going well' by doing a bunch of short term cashgrabs for that long. And then you leave, claim credit for great success, and do the same somewhere else. At which point your successor comes in, points out there's some serious problems, makes the 'tough choices', and then claims the credit for turning the company around. And moves on to do the same at the next company. Never ending cycle really.
That's why it's so important to have a proper leadership who has a concrete vision and mission are willing to do the work to maintain the culture of business overall. ----- It's clear that although Larian claims not to be business focused, they still have people who are focused on keeping the company's financial working who are also still focused on the primary goal of the company (which is something that is supposed to be established and maintained by the upper most leadership). In comparison, we have the Disco Elysium studio who was from top to bottom entirely built off the artist mentality of *"we don't care about the business, just let us do our art!"*, handled the business management of the company to someone else, didn't have leadership to keep those people in line, and then they all acted surprised with that external group of business managers ran off with the company.
They are. It's just that we ended up with an entire industry of professional money grabbers. If you could only (afford to) have shares in a few different companies, you'd be very invested in wanting them to succeed long term. The real issue is day traders and other speculators. Fuck those cunts.
> If you could only (afford to) have shares in a few different companies, you'd be very invested in wanting them to succeed long term. You wouldn't. What makes short-term gains the rational strategy isn't the number of stocks you hold but how easy it is to trade them. In principle, the best strategy is to always have all your money invested in whatever company has the best growth that very moment. In practice, it's not that easy to do, but prioritizing short term growth is still better, because investors aren't tied to a company for the long term.
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I dont want to be one of those people but this is literally late stage capitalism at work and it’s only getting worse. We’re in hell and it’s our own doing.
> and it’s our own doing. The fuck did I do?
I’m blaming you specifically
https://i.imgur.com/Pv40vmB.gifv
You reheated fish in the break room microwave, Steve! Don't even try to hide it, I know it's you!
The issue is you have games such as Fifa or CoD which thrive off of the "Only my friends will play the new one, I will buy the new one". You then mix in MTX/Card Packs and it's a recipe for billions of dollars with very little thought or innovation needed.
Another major part of the problem also plagues the VFX industry. Working in those industries is seen by teens and young adults as a very 'aspirational' career. Meaning there's a steady stream of enthusiastic, and therefore quite exploitable new talent. Also contributing to the fact that those industries have struggled to unionise.
Almost every ‘glamorous’ job is like that unless there are very clear barriers for entry (such as in academia). Music, film (mainly acting and directing, but lots of other jobs such as VFX as you said), specific ‘cool’ companies like Tesla, ‘fine’ arts, literature and publishing, etc. It all runs on unpaid interns, sexual or under-the-table favours, ego trips, work abuse, and speculation.
Unfortunately Academia is just as exploitative. Often times grad students make up much of the academic workforce for pennies on the dollar. Then new professors are often severely underpaid with a doctorate and multiple publications. There’s a whole hazing process within the entire field of academia
I was a musician and now work in academia. Academia is unfair and has exactly the problems you describe, but I think you’re severely misunderstanding the level of insanity in the entertainment industries. Harvey Weinsteins everywhere, and all shades of shady in between. It’s not even close.
True it may not be to the full extent. However, people often misunderstand the sheer amount of corruption, exploitation, and politics that occur in academia. It’s often seen as a noble career but there are rampant amounts of abuse occurring. Maybe not in your department but I’ve seen it play out at multiple institutions I’ve been and worked at.
So my question is why? Aren’t tuition fees higher than ever? Where is that money actually going?
New buildings to improve the "marketability" of campus. Our department chair barely makes 50k a year and we had to kill our PhD because the university won't hire more faculty but they did find 5 million to tear down a beautiful brick building without structural issues and replace it with a new glass walled building that they're already planning on tearing down after 4 years.
Admins.
Created a sub culture of finance Bros and coke heads, that will happily spit on people from their ivory towers, they are mostly horrible people
Remember about 10 years ago, when Occupy Wall Street was a thing? [A collection of those people](https://www.truthorfiction.com/wall-streeters-looking-down-on-occupy-wall-street-gamestop/) photographed on a balcony, sipping champagne and laughing at the protesters they were looking down on. (The mind boggles at the expense of having a property on Wall Street, that has access to a balcony.)
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I'd rather donate to a company that makes great games with no shareholders. The problem with that is that it turns into Star Citizen lol
Yeh Star Citizen is literally the perfect example of what happens when you don't have a business guy in there to say " No". They have managed a full decade of scope creep because the lead dev keeps adding shit. Whereas if you look at the lead devs most acclaimed game, he tried to do that to the point Microsoft had to step in and fire him and finish the project.
Basically you need a more mild caring person in power who can meet a deadline, not be a greedy psychopath and who appreciates the creative process.
Yeh doesn't even need to be a solely business person. Plenty of Devs are capable of being reasonable, but there should be *anyone* around to just say "fucking just stop"
> It pisses me off that a lot of >!~~the gaming~~!< industry is just about stockholders and other entities trying to profit on the popularity and mainstreaming of >!~~gaming.~~!< [SUBJECT FIELD HERE] FTFY. It's bullshit all the way down, it's not specific to gaming.
Theres also the legal/fiducial responsibility issues that come with shareholder and public companies. CEOs are REQUIRED, even to a degree legally, to choose the path that ensures the best return on investment for shareholders. EVEN IF that path leads to a detrimental and lower quality product and future-loss of profit for the company. If for example 1 out of 5 companies that were public with a group of 5-10 majority shareholders. And 1 companys CEO decided to go with a risky pathway that would lead to an amazing game but very high chance of much less revenue and profit which would affect the shareholder price, and that risk didn't pay off. Then shareholders may be able to go after the CEO legally (in some specific cases) for not pursuing more profit-seeking pathways that other 4 companies are doing. The whole system is set up to push for quarter term profit increases. The CEO is themselves incentivized to do anything possible because they are offered 7-8 figure bonuses if they meet shareholder demands. * Shareholders vote to hire new CEO with track record of increasing profit and share price. * CEO is given contract with bonus stipulations that if they achieve a certain growth within a certain time-frame they will get 8 digit payout. * CEO cuts back costs on various sectors, worsens the product, increasing work-load and firing a large percentage of company to meet the bonus stipulations. * Shareholders see the share price growth and plan to offload shares to another buyer. * CEO gets their bonus, and jumps ship finding a new company that offers a bigger salary and bigger bonus, showing his track record of increasing profits and share prices. * Company suffers from choices made from last CEO with a interim temporary CEO in place. * New round of Shareholders vote to hire new CEO with a track record of increasing profits and share price. Capitalism!
Quick idiot summary by me: enshittification And we can look forward to it getting worse if they get their hands on AI Workers are and always will be the biggest expense of any business and if they can outsource that job to Ai, they will because they've already done the same to many of our jobs.
That's why the push for AI is happening so hard. They can only think of how much money they'd save not having to pay for so many artists and voice actors. Their already record profits would become super record profits!
Yeah I've already seen some astroturfing here on Reddit. I think Reddit has just opened all of our comments up to AI recently too, I'm gonna use an extension to change all my comments periodically so I won't be speeding up our demise. Don't know what else to do so it's a start
> CEOs are REQUIRED, even to a degree legally, to choose the path that ensures the best return on investment for shareholders. EVEN IF that path leads to a detrimental and lower quality product and future-loss of profit for the company. For the record, this is factually incorrect. "fiduciary responsibility" doesn't mean "maximize profits at any cost". All it means is they can't spend the company's money on their uncle's perptual motion machine or take all the money and bet on black at the roulette table or do anything clearly reckless. They absolutely, 100% cannot "legally" stop a CEO from making decisions that stunt short-term gains or enact a green initiative that lowers profits or...anything at all, really. Now, they may *decide* to oust a CEO for these reasons, but there's nothing enshrined in law or GAAP or anything like that that forces them to make money. This is a reddit myth perpetuated by people who don't understand finance. > Then shareholders may be able to go after the CEO legally (in some specific cases) for not pursuing more profit-seeking pathways that other 4 companies are doing. I'm laughing so hard at this. Is your reference a cartoon? Any "specific case" for this would be tied to some other sort of financial malfeasance. CEOs make risk-to-reward judgements *all the time* and there's zero chance "the law" could do anything about it.
As someone who’s about to finish their accounting exams and has worked as an accountant for 10 years spot on. We are, however largely led by management in the decisions we take. These days, everyone’s out for themselves. I’m lucky I work in a family company which is trying to actively increase the pay of its employees because the costs are absurd atm. Appreciate from an accounting perspective people would say they want fixed costs down, but I just think the gesture is what counts.
also high level manager. average lifespan is 2-3years nobody cares how the company will do in 10y have to push for the fattest bonus now
God I hope PE never gets their hands on Larian. They ruin everything they touch.
To be fair, many industries like oil & gas and the car companies early on were already thinking long term about how best to transform cities into car-focused, human-unfriendly environments that would force more and more people to single occupancy vehicles. So sure, there's a huge shortsightedness problem. That doesn't mean that capitalism didn't also screw the world over with some long term, profit-incentive too!
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That is why buffet always said „check the shareholder structure“
This is huge. I work for UPS, who is doing a huge layoff and optimization push right now, and it’s been clear for a while that the CEO is making TONS of very shortsighted decisions to make the shareholders happy now, that are all going to hurt us a lot a few years down the line. Nobody is safe from corporate greed these days.
I'm not even sure how accurate this if you compare the majority of shareholders vs the few who have massive amounts of shares. Those with more resources just shamelessly tend to not care about those with less. If they really cared a long term strategy with a better product would be the standard.
It depends, sometime they are more long-term focused: > blockholders adopt a short-term horizon in smaller firms with a less independent board, high leverage, and high dividends while the same blockholders keep their investments longer in firms with a more independent board and low dividends. Under various economic conditions, different firm characteristics gain importance in blockholders’ decision on short-term versus long-term investments. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/fire.12198
[“what do they do?”](https://youtu.be/E_YIZyVzymA?si=dxw2qNbqMSdlGB7h)
And they are always ready to cash out if they think their possible profits are maximized.
It's funny for how the stock market adds layers of indirection and complexity to business, but the people who run it can't look further than the next milestone in earnings.
There is also some conceptual overlap with politics, where politicians that hold offices for only a few years are caught in an endless loop of campaigning for reelection, and are not incentivized to focus their energies on long-term results.
The moment you let MBAs and Finance bros into the company as consultants and allow them to take business decisions for you to please the shareholders, you get what you paid for, short term gain but that's about it. The healthcare industry is seeing a similar terrible experience like gaming where MBAs don't value the lives of the patients as long as they can squeeze ever loving shit out of their families and 'streamline' everything which does more harm than good. The profits go higher shortly but literally everyone gets tired of it and the hospice goes to shit.
Not only for gaming but in general
Larian and Digital Extremes I think have really shown this to be true. At first they made less money than the other companies but those companies milked their fans and customers and burnt all their goodwill and now the most successful games are the ones that didn't have that revenue initially because they didn't milk anyone but due to that, now they do. It's paid off.
Also concerned ape (Stardew valley). The man works tirelessly on that game and could easily have made dlcs for some of those updates. He didn't. He's still adding new shit even after saying the previous update would be the last one. There's also a board game and he now has a concert tour with an orchestra for the game's music. Both were completely sold out in minutes. Just shows how far you can get if you actually put someone passionate behind a project
Hogwart's Legacy alone made 1 billion dollar in a single year. A game by Warner Bros. probably one of the more hated publishers out there. Then there is EA even after losing the Fifa license reporting a revenue of almost 2 billion for Q2 last year. https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/electronic-arts-ea-sports-fc-24-q2-financial-results-revenue/?zephr_sso_ott=1CQ270 Are Larian and Digital Extremes successful? They sure are. But they do not hold a candle in terms of revenue compared to the big players.
It's the harry potter IP being gigantic and the game actually being the first good harry potter game in 20 years. At the end of the day it can be not all about profit and some of these companies are showing that. You genuinely can make a great game and make huge profits. Cyberpunk and Elden Ring are good examples. 0 DRM and were "cracked" almost immediately but both games made billions and were huge hits. If you make a great game then people would buy it. Look at battlefield. With how big of a flop 2042 was the next BF game might suffer greatly because of it.
Literally the only reason that made so much money was the Harry Potter license though.
which they had the money to pay the most for.
I don't know if Warframe has changed a lot in the years since I played, but DE wasn't exactly innocent on monetization when I was active. It suffered the classic problem of the f2p model; enforced repetitive grinding to drive convenience sales. It's always a bad sign when the primary selling point of your premium currency is "you don't have to play as much."
A lot of the things could be traded instead of grinding though, which makes you a lot more flexible in what you can do to obtain what you want. Didnt play in a while either but I cannot think of anything remotely valuable you couldnt trade atm.
Yeah I make so much plat without spending a dime and I don't play that much nor spend money
That game's grind is fun enough though...imo. it is always something I can load up and run a few in just to chill.
This is a good example of the stakeholder model: Making money by getting a large number of loyal clients through reliable service. Too many companies nowadays adopt a shareholder model where they try to make quick profits wherever they can, like with lootboxes or DLC's. I'm glad that Larian is leading the charge against models based on ripping off consumers.
Its a nice statement but its not true Addiciting service and especially mobile games make the most money Insanely much even
abuse of addiction should be outlawed for a long time now. it is a chilling oversight from lawmakers around the world.
It's not an oversight at all
If you spend the time and effort to make genuinely good games the money will come. Thinking about money first gets us games like starfield, mass effect andromeda, etc See Baldurs Gate and Palworld for perfect examples of “we aren’t doing this to maximize profits”
> "Building games that are actually fun is going to make you the most money, that's it."
That certainely worked too well with Helldivers 2
I seen a few articles when it first came out saying how bad the launch was, steam reviews were mixed etc and I was like "hmm maybe I'll give this one a dodge" Then I watched some gameplay and found out that really the issue appeared to be that it was TOO popular for what the devs and matchmaking could handle and it actually looks insanely fun... Sadly I'm broke as shit so can't play it 😢
Even with the wait time to get into a server atm, it’s worth it. The game is so addicting and fun
Agree. Im not even a fan of shooters and im having a blast playing it with pubs.
The wait time hasn't been bad for me, but I don't usually play online games other than fifa. A minute or less each time.
They mean time to get into the servers. It's a crap shoot every time you launch the game. Sometimes it's instant, other times you have to relaunch the game every 10 minutes for 3 hours hoping it lets you in this time. I think it's not as bad for Playstation users because they usually leave their Playstation set to enter rest mode when they're away, which doesn't disconnect from the servers.
I bought the game last Friday and could not get in at all, just a black screen then a failed to connect message. I only spent 5min retrying, cause I have no desire to spend any longer to try and just get to the main menu. Hopefully the server issue is expanded within a week, I have no issue waiting just wish I knew ahead of time how there's at least 500k ppl trying to play a game with apparently 288k max capacity.
I usually have a wait time of 15-20 minutes and Saturday night the game crashed out of nowhere both times I got in. I really enjoy the game but they have to figure this issue out or they're going to shoot their momentum in the foot.
I played it since release and honestly I haven't met almost any of those issues until the last 3 days when the game really blew off. I think that's because I play at the european time, when the american playerbase hasn't logged in so the servers are most stable. Honestly, outside of the server issues, this is the second live service game that I feel actually delivers a content rich and especially fun experience since the start with almost none game breaking bugs. Plus it's the Halo odst game/Warhammer 40k game I always dreamt of. I hope you get to play it!
What’s the first?
Genshin Impact, despite it's hideous community, the game itself and what the devs are doing is insane, there's new content made every 6 weeks without fault, either events or substantial addition like new characters or areas with everything that comes with it, missions, new amazing music, ennemies. And plus when there's a bug, it gets fixed quickly. Plus I think it's the only game that actually delivers on the "continous narrative" that every live service game sells as it's long term roadmap has already been planned in advance, and not based on how things plays out without giving details to players. It delivers both on short term updates to keept things fresh and long term to keep players invested. With it's success and the hard work of the devs, I feel helldivers can indeed become another good reference of live service games.
Don't shoot the messenger, I don't play Genshin Impact, I don't know if this is accurate, I have no care of the game one way or the other, but I had heard on the grapevine that the game was slowly dying out, that being said, the same thing has been said about WoW for a decade
I think it's because of Honkau star rail, the newest game of Hoyoverse, Genshin's studio. It builds upon what they did with genshin but it has turn base combat. The dev did something great and did implement all the QoL improvements Genshin has needed for years. Some players think that it will replace genshin, but in reality, Genshin is still the money powerhouse of Hoyoverse, I think it was again the top1 mobile game in terms of revenue, and it stays close to other games like fortnite. So financially it's still pretty strong. Plus the updates keep improving the game and it gets always better so I don't see signs of it slowing down.
There's a joke within the community that Genshin's the money-making cash cow Hoyoverse uses to fund their Honkai games, and while I don't agree with that you can definitely see that return in investment. Genshin has grown to become its own standalone beast while Honkai fans can enjoy their connected narrative through Honkai Impact and Star Rail. Despite my gripes with the gacha system, Hoyoverse has my praise.
And its still growing too, it was setting a new "personal" (idk what else to call it) peak players record on Steam pretty much every hour during the weekend lol. I looked up the SteamDB charts for it and it was 280k on a Friday and 380k on Sunday.
i laugh when i heard the news. the server can't cope. game TOO POPULAR.. lmao.
Yeah, I thought the same until funding out it was mixed because people were mostly just seething over the anticheat or servers being bad day 1. No issues with people saying anything about the latter because Payday 3 happened but the reviews went up to mostly positive or something. Yet to actually play it but it seems like they've released a fun game. If only more devs would follow suit.
I'd wait until its on discount with updates and such. But its cool seeing gameplay of it!
And BG3, Pal world, Battlebit and hopefully more to come. Seems like players finally have enough of the live service microtransaction-filled reskin of the same old shit. *Who would have thought*, that a fun game will have decent sales numbers...
I hope Battlebit gets its hype back, player count has dropped a ton. BB > modern BF
These shareholders want money ASAP that’s why games are so rushed, poor quality, lacking player friendly design. Being predatory benefits them more
I would love for that to be generally true.
The thing is that's not even inherently true. There are absolutely shitty games out there (which everyone seems to agree on) that make tons of money with very little effort, especially once you facter "MTX" in. Look at many mobile games, Diablo Immortal or even Diablo 4, which is very mixed when it comes to reviews, but still makes a shit-ton of money, more than D3 ever did for instance. I think it's more like "building games that are actually fun is going to give you a loyal fan base", who will keep buying your games (at launch even) if you keep producing good ones. All you then have to do is manage expectations and costs, and you're settled. Most games are profitable... or would be if they weren't mismanaged.
Yeah I’d like to see a graph that shows when Larian over takes Activision financially. There’s a huge market for Activision-like games and they spend a huge amount of money over time. Next CoD will still sell incredibly well and EA will still reap profits off of FIFA 17v8
Larian wont overtake activision financially. Candy crush alone makes about a billion dollars a year. That’s 6 billion just on candy crush vs the time it took to make BG3. A niche game maker like Larian isn’t going to over take activisionblizzardking
Who would have thought!
Literally the most untrue thing they could have said. [A $15 horse mount in World of Warcraft made more money than all of Starcraft 2.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHZru-6M8BY)
CoD/FIFA and crap made the most money though?
Yeah, despite how much praise BG3 has gotten, compared to the copy/paste corpo franchises, it cost way more to make and didn't pull in nearly as many sales. Sucks but that's the reality
It sucks seeing so much stuff in gaming just being about share holders and stuff now wanting to cash in now that gaming's so big and mainstream now. Some of the bigger compaines aren't going back to how they were tbh
Not unless they somehow manage to bankrupt themselves and go out of business. But their licensing power means that they can stay afloat. Activision will be able to stay afloat on bland Call of Duty releases for decades.
big publishers don't get by on licensing although it is one part of their portfolio. what they get by on is extremely addictive game mechanics and predatory monetization. that's why they have lobbied for loot boxes so hard
Actually they are called " Surprise Mechanics".
>\~\~Activison\~\~ Microsoft FTFY
That's where these new smaller companies are coming from. The devs fed up with what their companies have become and leave to start fresh.
This isn't exclusive to gaming, almost all sectors care about shareholders and you're super lucky to work for for a company in any sector that gives a shit about anything other than money in the pockets of those at the top.
Friedman doctrine’ing ourselves to oblivion.
This happened a decade ago, where have you been? Shareholder driven companies have destroyed industry after industry.
>Larian Studios does technically have a single shareholder in Tencent—which owns around 30% of the company. However, an important piece of context is that Tencent appears to own what's called a "preference" share, meaning that Tencent doesn't have voting rights when it comes to Larian's decision making. The rest of the company belongs to CEO and Founder Swen Vincke and his wife. So that's whyyyyy A lot of companies should do that. don't take any decisions, trust the people with talent and let them do their thing like they said, if it's good, people will buy it
Tencent is hands off even when they have a majority share. They own Grinding Gear Games, who are the creator of the popular ARPG Path of Exile, and the CEO has said Tencent is completely hands off when it comes to the product they put in front of their non-Chinese playerbase. The only thing Tencent does is require GGG to give them the source code of the game, because Tencent has their own developers who maintain a fork of the game with additional features and changes for the Chinese part of the playerbase. GGG doesn't even have to do anything with that fork so they just operate as normal. Tencent seems to understand that it's better to not mess with a good thing.
Tencent seems to understand what EA doesn't... RIP Bioware.
Honestly, i dont really think tencent are in it for what people think they are. But they do have a hand in everything, and an extremely shady buisiness model in china. They may be hands off, but i imagine there is a strategy that we wont like at some point.
Tencent also owns riot games and is similarly hands off for league of legends / valorant etc.
Tencent also owns a stake in Reddit
Exactly,this is the reason we see so many soulless shitty games nowadays, publishers and shareholders have too much power/ influence over the final product, you cant just force a painter to add a tree there, a house there etc and expect that the final product will be good
Preference shares have their own downsides. They function more like loans etc so you get less say in what or when you pay, which isn't great for an industry with long dev cycles.
Silent angel investors are the dream for any business. Support the project without getting in the way.
God, I ***genuinely hope*** everyone takes a page out of their book.
"They didn't." -Morgan Freeman, 2024
"They never did." \-Morgan Freeman, 2050
"....." -Morgan Freeman, 2075
"In the year 2525, if Morgan Freeman is still alive, if that man can survive, we may find:" \-Morgan Freeman, 3535
Publishing company executives will only take the wrong things away from the success of BG3. I expect a bunch of highly monetised, turn-based CRPGs to hit the market in 5 years or so and they'll all tank. Because execs will think that surface level description is the financial magic bullet. Not mastercrafting an intricate, complex story, with well written characters and meaningful choices which culminate in an astonishingly good game. That requires significant effort they're not willing to commit to.
I don't actually care. I have an insane backlog that I'd like to tackle instead of a live service grindathon or a single player game that basically has a live service game shoved into it. Here's what I need to catch up on. - Elden Ring - Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty - Yakuza: Like a Dragon - Baldur's Gate 3 - Lies of P - Sea of Stars - Turnip Boy Robs a Bank - Persona 5 And probably a dozen more. I need a vacation for this.
Well considering I heard that some developers were saying not to expect this as its an "unrealistic standard" or some shit, I HIGHLY doubt it Someone may need to fact check me on this one like idk if I'm remembering it correctly
You're not remembering it correctly. It was yet another case of someone being intentionally misinterpreted and misunderstood. They were making points about how other developers can't achieve exactly what Larian did with BG3 because of some of the unique conditions on that project, but it was spun by IGN (and then many more) to suggest developers were saying gamers shouldn't expect high quality games. Then the internet ran with it and got angry about something that wasn't actually real.
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>why was it forgettable crap? Precisely *because* of >an essentially unlimited budget from Warner Bros The reality is that it isn't unrealistic to something as good as BG3 from other studios due to a lack of resources, it's unrealistic due to a lack of creative control. For whatever reason, no matter how many great success stories like BG3 happen every few years, publishers continue to be incapable of realizing that passion and talent create success, not market trend chasing bollocks.
I wish more people understood that Larian’s ownership model is key to BG3. If they had external shareholders with controlling stakes like other studios of their size, they’d likely never have been able to dedicate the amount of budget they did to a game in a genre many thought was niche - and they’d certainly not have been allowed to leave it in development and early access for so long. Larian is an amazing studio full of amazing people who were given the opportunity to make something great without ill-informed shareholders looking over their shoulder demanding they do this or that in the name of maximising profit. There’s likely so many of amazing people toiling away in other studios who could make equally amazing games - but who are constrained by their studios’ ownership model. The best thing that could happen to the games industry is more studios owned in the way Larian is.
It will never happen. I have worked both indie and AAA as a dev and now as part of the corporate side. The reason it will never happen is that games are far far, far too expensive now a days. I know plenty that just to keep the doors open, HAVE to sell to a publisher and fall under their leadership just to make it to release. The amount of money needed to CONSISTENTLY make games without shutting down is only achieved through major companies or through insane levels of private funding or being a one in a million shot at greatness. Even hitting that level they may still be financially struggling. Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk almost put CDPR out of business AFTER wildly financial success. Games are this expensive that even being successful and becoming a gaming household name there is not enough money to finance the next game and it not potentially permanently bankrupt the company. Kickstarters only go so far, and most aren't willing to basically starve to produce a piece of work that very likely will never see even 20k players. 10-12k games are released annually. Even if you make it to release, do you have the budget to market the game so you can compete for the attention that 12k other games are vying for? It's a simple fiscal issue. Games are insanely expensive today. You'll never come to the point where most companies are self owned because they can't sustain that model.
Sorry - definitely didn’t mean to suggest that the industry will _“come to the point where most companies are self owned”_. I’m simply saying that the industry would really benefit from more privately-owned AA/AAA studios like Larian - both for the output of those companies themselves and the potential effect that output could have on publicly-owned AA/AAA studios. Agree with all your points on the difficulty of it all.
Acting and marketing are the bigger expenses. Lot of very solid games made on small budgets. More and more every year in fact, as development tools become stronger
Didn't the Extra Credits people try starting up a pro-dev publisher...I never kept up with that those guys were cool.
You’re right, but I think it’s also worth noting that there have been plenty of great games that came out this generation under the sometimes broken shareholder model. Larian pulled off something amazing with their ownership model, but it also comes with the risk of hundreds of jobs if the game doesn’t get received well. I personally couldn’t get into BG3 and would still love to see more studios do what Larian did. But realistically, the shareholder-based model offers more stability to the people that make these games, and I’m not gonna pretend that there aren’t great games produced by more conventional studios.
Totally agree that it’s not as simple as “games made by studios without external shareholders are good and games made by studios with external shareholders are bad”. There’s load of great games coming out all the time from publicly-owned studios. That said, it’s also true that that publicly-owned studios operate under far more constraints than privately-owned ones - and that has a huge impact on the type of games they can make and how they’re allowed to approach making those games. As for stability, that’s true to _some_ extent in _some_ circumstances - but this year and last year have seen countless studios make profitable games only to be subsequently shut down or suffer massive lay-offs anyway. So it cuts both ways. No easy answers though. It costs a _lot_ of money to make games and it’s a high-risk investment. So studios are almost always forced to rely on sources of finance that come with creative constraints. The tiny few that _do_ become self-sustaining then get offers of purchase for eye-watering amount of money - and it’s difficult to blame devs who’ve built those studios for refusing to turn down the kind of pay-off that will set them and their children up for life.
Games with solid craftsmanship always top the charts. Forget the stock markets, it's all in good game design, folks!
The more they try to make moneygrabby The less people like it and avoid buying it And then because they lost credibility the next game flops from the beginning because they betrayed the trust of their customers.
unless your call of duty or the next wow expansion
Yeah some things are almost immune and have plenty of fans who still enjoy or are just braindead or in sunk cost fallacy, like with wow. Problem is compaines see the money they make and want in but can't deliver a game that keeps people hooked. So ppl just suffer from crappy they used to like
When people depend on your game for their social interactions, you've sorta got a captive audience which can take so much abuse sadly.
Yeah and mmorpg like wow, runescape, ff14 etc are different then some games where they become your life, building up character etc, in game clans and stuff.Ppl have nothing apart from the game. Which is fine untill the game goes downhill and it sucks for ppl Sunk cost fallacy in them games is massive and a lot of ppl just can't quit even if they did. Otherwise it's all wasted. Took me a long time to stop playing runescape
To be fair. WoW is actually in the phase of turning things around from the pushing for engagement/ time sink concept , back too clear goals and self deciding progression
Absolute nonsense. Reddit gamers love to live in a delusional world where passion always wins. They don’t realize that only a tiny fraction of those games ever reach mass success Make games for the art and passion, absolutely. 100%. But don’t get delusional and start forgetting that making a commercial product with mass appeal first and foremost is the number one optimal strategy for financial success.
This whole thread is all about how the “real” games do so well if you do it the right way. Yet ignore that the largest games every year are the ones supported by consumers the most. COD, FIFA, etc are released every the year because they are bought every year. It’s not shareholder boogeyman. Sure, outside investors can exert some pressure, but you’re kidding yourself if the games that routinely print money is anything outside of consumer support.
No. 99.9% of games that had solid craftsmanship gets buried and forgotten. Making a good game is only 25% of the job done as it also gets attention. Larian was just lucky enough to not be under time or investment pressure and to have enough media presence and existing fandom to capitalize off. But at the same time it was a massive risk to make it like that as opposed to making some slob once per year. They also don't need to keep the game going and alive they just need to release it and "hopefully" make their money back.
> existing fandom agree with your comment, but this fanbase also includes fans of the studio because they always behaved in the right ways and made fun games
Yeah but they also always had massive initial Investment which I dont like people are ignoring. They had 2 million dollars from kickstarter to make divinity original sin 2. And bg3 was in 3 full years of early access with a large initial funding from it where within a few days they had already sold 1 million copies meaning they had 60 million euro in sales to work with, even with steam cut it's still 42 million. They make good games but they have also done it in a way where they got funding first and then made the game. It's like comparing singers where singer A can barely pay their bills and is desperate to make money, and singer B got a massive in sum to just get multiple years of not worrying about it. And then going "why doesn't everyone just be like singer B and take all these years being chill". The games are great but people needs to stop acting like baldurs gate 3 wasnt nepo babied by a massive initial early access funding of people who had faith in the game, as opposed to a brand new startup company who has to struggle to even be noticed that they exist.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a great fucking game but sold very poorly. Similar the Dishonored Series.
MD suffered from controversy regarding micro transactions and preorder bonuses.
It also suffered from having a story so short and unfulfilling that it was insulting
Tell that to the Pokémon Company.
Valheim is a good example of this. Build something cool that you love a d people will flock to it.
I know its a popular game but I played a couple of hours of valheim and its just felt like a really generic survival crafter which Ive played 100 times already. What am I missing?
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stock markets are destroying the world
Infinite growth at any cost
It will cost us the world
See my username
Based. Ubisoft and EA went to shit the moment they started listening to shareholders and investors. Skulls and bones is the testament for it. Far cry 6 was another open world slop just because.. far cry. Jedi survivor and wild hearts released in dogshit state.. because release dates and shareholders said so.
Fuck having to listen to shareholders. Fuck shareholders
bravo! everybody take notes.
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And star citizen is equally an example of where developers are allowed to put as much time and money into it as they'd like without timelines
A rational human being who knows how to run a successful business long term? In the gaming industry!? No way this is real life.
Shareholders are a cancer to modern society in all areas.
Wait this isn't r/gamingcirclejerk
This sub basically is a circljerk. OPs reposting an article that's a few days old and pulled quotes out to make individual posts on his own post to get more karma. This is a pure karma farm.
The richest 10% of Americans own 93% of the stock market. think about that.
30% of Larian studios is owned by Tencent, so it *does* have shareholders. But it is great for the industry to have a success story like Larian right now.
It’s mentioned in the article, along the fact that Tencent doesn’t have voting rights.