They honestly need to look at Fortnite as the model. It wasn’t meant to be this massive AAA game. It was a modest game with a unique concept (building). Adding battle royal was done on a whim. It just happened to click with millions of people.
IIRC it was a joke mode to make fun of how popular BRs were.
I don’t think this is quite right as BRs were new at the time. When Fortnite released there was really only PUBG in the battle royale space.
I believe it was something closer to a prototype they made in a month or two simply because they liked Battle Royales and thought it would be a fun gamemode to add a side thing.
Excuse me, Minecraft Hunger Games maps were a thing as well! ☝️🤓
(But yes, I agree, BRs were new.)
ACKSHUALLY “last man standing” was a game mode in Unreal Tournament 1999, so the concept was there for a long time
It was a game mode in most shooters, it was just a tacked on onr as opposed to a focus
I remember there being PUBG and some other twitchslop where the gas was neon green and exiting a moving car at any speed would down you. I think there was a third BR that was raging before Fortnite
Yeah PUBG wasn’t the only one on the market, but everything else wasn’t anywhere near the punching weight, as PUBG was breaking steam records.
There was an indie battle royale that was struggling, a Minecraft BR mod, and I think the one you’re describing though I can’t even remember it’s name. None of then were really competitors for PUBG and more of trying to edge in a little bit of their spotlight.
Until Fortnite, of course.
there was really only PUBG in the battle royale space
H1Z1 really having an Ozymandias moment rn
I couldn’t remember the name of this one, but looking it up, it actually had really good numbers in the range of 80-150k concurrent players.
So I was wrong, I recalled PUBG being the dominant game at the time with very little of anything else near its numbers.
They work for the shareholders, not the customers. For most publicly traded companies, the stock is completely detached from fundamentals, so they just do whatever the large investors like (often just hype the new hottest thing; such as marketplaces or “increasing efficiency” with layoffs), regardless if its good for the “real” business or not.
How boeing lost 11.9 Billion in one year, and then 11.8 billion a few years later. Is there anything people that have a lot of money can’t do? Yeah, stay in their fucking lane.
Because they want to chase that annual recurring revenue stream. Make game once - make money forever. What these executives don’t realize is how hard it is to make such game. They seem to believe if they throw just enough money at it, a profitable game will come out.
I’ve noticed that an increasing amount of games that I enjoy over the past decade have been indie games (or games with lax publishers.)
Sadly not every deserving AA studio gets to survive in the long term nowadays. Minimi Studios is my go to example for this. They made amazing niche games with no exploitative DLC/monetization that were widely praised but rarely played. Sometimes good, honest studios can’t make enough money to get by in this day and age and that’s a real tragedy.
wtf does “AA” and “AAA” even mean, like, why do they need different batteries.?
besides, I thought, batteries were totally out…
AA is a game that is a normal full sized game, but was made on a budget that limited scope. Good examples are the Metro series or Balatro. AAA is your normal games with big budgets. AAAA is a special title for Skull and Bones, it means you spend a gigantic amount of money and make sure the whole thing sucks.
Balatro is indie, songs isn’t it? Developed by a single dude with probably zero budget
Balatro has a publisher, Playstack. While they put very little money into traditional advertising, Playstack absolutely had a calculated marketing campaign that nailed success by getting specific streamers on board.
This technically makes it not ‘indie’ as they have a publisher but the indie/AA/AAA labels are kind of ridiculous.
Yeah, maybe not a good AA example, just couldn’t think of a second one off the top of my head.
Larian and Hazelight are AA
Clair obscur expedition 33
Basically everything Nintendo makes is AA, they just charge AAA+ prices for them.
AAA is smaller, too, so I’m not sure why they think it’s better
I’d bet on JRPG rank rules; D, C, B, A, A+, A++, S, S+ and as many S’ they bloody want in order to make S tier worthless. Instead of doing the sane thing and adjusting the criteria for a rank.
But in this case there is no Ds Cs or Bs, only As.
I believe the AAA term actually originates from investing. In investing, a “AAA” investment is one where everyone is pretty confident that it’ll be a positive return. It got a bit of use in the games industry to mean games that were expected to sell well no matter the what. It eventually got warped into just meaning big games with big budgets, and people started using the “AA” term to mean “like AAA but not as much”
TIL, thanks!
it’s how much shouting they do when developing and advertising the game
Studio size/development costs
Goku explained it once in front of Buu.
Because we buy the games, the microtransactions, the cosmetics, etc. Even just one purchase multiplied by millions is a win for publishers. Whales and content creators fuel the cycle even more. Meanwhile, currencies get deliberately convoluted: you need stars for a pull, which require sparkle farts, which you can’t buy directly or in exact amounts. Out of sparkle farts? $14.99 gets you 6000—enough for three whole pills! Don’t worry, there’s a pity system, so the most you’ll spend is only $400. And then you’re left with 60 stars, and if you just had 40 more!
You’re not forced to buy, but they make the grind brutal and a slog. If you’re really unlucky, it can even make actually playing the came harder. And as long as this system makes money, it won’t stop. Games are turning into storefronts with a mini-game attached. Good games feel like rare blessings, and creativity is often found only indie studios. Big teams have talent—they’re just not allowed to use it, their companies don’t care about that. Gotta make money, more money, all the time, forever, or you’ve failed.
I say “they” like I don’t play a few gachas myself, but still.I do like the analogy of the ingame currency named “sparkle farts”
Infinite growth mentality vs remembering the customer as a human
“I don’t understand what you’re calling the wallet piggies” - executives and the whole marketing dept
And honestly, they’re right. Games are fundamentally optional and there are so many to choose from but these garbage studios make garbage games and openly degrade their customers but people keep paying them.
Because they’re run by executives that have no fucking idea what game development entails.
That and everything now needs to be “disruptive”. An idea doesn’t see the light of day in a tech board room without explaining how it’s going to disrupt the market and create space for itself. So unless the game is pitched as a killer of whatever the competition has it won’t move forward. It’s the whole silicon valley mindset of move fast and break things in action.
We’ve got the IP, why don’t we make the Smash Bros. killer? We can call it “MultiVersus”!
I mean it doesn’t look so good for the AAA studios tho
why are they like this?
Which would you rather have 1 million dollars or 100 million dollars?
That’s basically the thought process, if it bombs I can blame it on some other, if it doesn’t then I’m good
Which would you rather have 1 million dollars or 100 million dollars?
It’s not that straightforward, unfortunately. The real culprit is allowing all giant public companies to hoover up all the small companies. Now you’re not a 3 person team with a side job trying to pay the bills and getting lucky. Office rent, Unity/Unreal want their cut, app stores want their cut, Salary, IT, Healthcare. You end up needing to support quite a lot of infrastructure to make that 1 Mil game. That no longer ‘moves the needle’ on your company’s yearly income and the stock suffers.
Then, you can’t just make a game and release it anymore, you need live ops, sales, events, campaigns, otherwise you’re leaving money on the table.
otherwise you’re leaving money on the table.
This is the same argument as “would you rather have 1 or 100 mil”
But yes, you’re right to point out large companies who need to make big money to keep the lights on and, if public, stock profile. If the market perceives modest growth, it will not react kindly, leading to downstream financial losses. Some investors invest in ideas and products, most invest in perceived potential gains. No investment–>no funding–>no games.
Capitalism ruins everything. Usually by design.
This one, right here OP.
Capitalism is, at its core: Profits > all
Profit is more important to these chucklefucks than the customers happiness, their loyalty, the staff that make the product, hell, even the product they’re selling… This includes your life; profit is more important than your life. If they can bump their quarterly earnings with you doing something dangerous that turns you into a fucking grease stain, they’ll fucking do it. They’re psychopaths.
Only because of laws does any company do “the right thing”. Everything else they do is to reduce expenses, or increase profits.
They wouldn’t try to make the next fortnite, if fortnite didn’t make its creators disgusting amounts of money. Games wouldn’t become micro transaction hell if microtransactions didn’t rake in shitloads of cash steadily.
Video Games are simply their tool to extract the maximum possible value they can from you. First it was stupid one-off horse cosmetics, then it was paid DLC, then they started shipping half of a game before it was ready (cutting dev costs so they could get their payout faster), then releasing paid “DLC” which was the rest of the fucking game… To now, when we have little more than an idea, some mechanics, and somewhat unique art design before the streaming pile that they call a game gets to be “released”, and they’ll literally add everything later.
Look at halo. Let’s use it as a case study. The original game had its share of problems on release, but it was at least pretending to be a full game when it came out. Full single player and multi player, with a fully fleshed out campaign, complete with working cutscenes. Halo 2 followed a similar path, for the most part… Eventually, the Halo dev team became beholden to the almighty shareholder and now we have halo infinite with an infinite amount of bullshit and no single player campaign… Unless you want to pay extra for it, or for these skins, or for… You get the idea.
I played, and liked Halo. I fell away from it after Halo 2/3 due to life stuff, and at this point, I picked up the matter chief collection for the nostalgia, but that’s probably the last money I’m putting into the franchise. I just can’t be bothered. It was good while it lasted.
Halo is hardly unique in this. I only used them as an example because it was easy. I could have also used Diablo…
Part of the reason that happened with Halo is because Bungie lost the IP to Microsoft when they separated. Everything after Halo 3 was done by another studio that was part of M$. I believe it was called 343 Studios or something like that.
Yeah. The point doesn’t really change from this fact though.
My intention wasn’t so much to dispute your claim rather than to give context as to why it happened. Really the core of the issue is the fact that Microsoft was able to take the rights from Bungie at all.
Most of the shit in our lives comes from these massive corporations just hoovering up all the smaller entities so there’s less choice for the consumer.
Enshittification.
No. I want an incredibly small scale indie game made by a tiny team and fills my desires for power and war/crimes. Rimworld, Kenshi, Factorio.
Any recs ?
Stellaris for proper warcriming.
Those three fill the bill pretty easily. I’d add Satisfactory for the snarky AI and the general disregard to anything not made of concrete or steel.
Love me some Kenshi.
I cheated and used the recruitment mod and trained and equipped the hell out of a squad and went on a grand tour hitting every major settlement and freeing the slaves, because I wanted to better the world.
And then I put holy nation paladins in the peeler for my own amusement. That reminds me I think I still have Longen in a cage somewhere.
If you want snarky AI, can I recommend Portal.
Though that doesn’t really count as indie.
Portal started as a tech demo. 10 people worked full-time for 2 years and 4 month.
It’s pretty close to an indy game. But if HL2 development is included then it’s definitely not indy.
Dang, already played them all
Never enough, ik
