The wild monetary successes of Call of Duty and Fortnite send a clear message: treat unsupervised children as prey and you will earn billions of dollars
There’s also titles where the Devs cooked and ended up spending too much time and resources and underdelivered on huge flops. See Daikatana or whatever kickstarter game is disappointing people at the moment. Making games is just difficult, let alone making something that everyone loves.
It’s almost like sometimes an idea doesn’t work out and you either have to abandon it or restart from the beginning but most companies won’t let that happen cause they don’t want to spend the time/money to do it.
The real message being sent is that you can release a $40 always-online PVE game with MTXs and rootkit anti cheat and gamers will tolerate all of it if they think it’s fun…
Appreciate you not jumping down my throat. You’re right, it is a low bar, and HD2 does clear it pretty easily. But you and I both know that publishers won’t hear the part about the game being fun (or they won’t care). My point isn’t that HD2 is bad, just that publishers will see its success and completely misinterpret why it’s successful. They’ll see a live service game doing well and think that people want more live service games, not fun games.
I wouldn’t mind live service games as much if these companies were forced to give up tools to allow the community to continue hosting.
Corporations have made it loud and clear over and over: they will torch every scrap of gaming culture if it meant an extra 20 bucks. They are NOT to be trusted with the preservation of this history.
I suspect the difficulty the publishers face is that fun is difficult to quantify. The read on this might end up being “All things being equal, DRM/MTX/etc aren’t statistically impediments to financial success if the game is going to sell well anyway. If we percieve them to improve our bottom line, let’s include them”.
I haven’t really got into HD2, too online for my tastes, but I can see its appeal. I think there is a broader phenomenon of a divorce between where big studios are heading and where “traditional” players want to be.
They’ll see a live service game doing well and think that people want more live service games, not fun games.
I can say, when you’re out there with your squad and it feels like space Vietnam, that’s why its selling. That portion of the atmosphere, gameplay, and intensity is on point
While Helldivers 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 might look like sudden jackpot successes
This article is funny. It’s like the feel-good inverse of a rage-bait article. It’s stating what we all want to be true and cherry-picking two games that only sort of provide evidence towards it, and only if you squint really hard.
Both games are sequels backed by huge publishers with tons of cash.
BG3 is a Dungeons and Dragons franchise title; a franchise which recently received a massively successful film, a huge boost in popularity during a pandemic, and a boost in cultural relevance in Strange Things.
Helldivers 2 fits the claim a bit better, but it is still a sequel to a well received, well selling title. The extraction shooter genre is also exceedingly popular right now, and the fact that it has Games as a Service bullshit built in says that publishers weren’t as hands-off as the article implies.
So the more realistic take-away from this is that good games with huge budgets for development AND marketing in reasonably popular genres can make a ton of money.
Which isn’t saying much. And it certainly doesn’t look like a sudden jackpot.
Very true. Though I would click that bait so hard!
I still prefer this type of article to lots of others in the bait family. Obviously they want people sharing this article and saying “See! That thing I believe is proven!”
Worth mentioning that Helldivers is hugely and openly influenced by Starship troopers, which although not as big as something like D&D, is still pretty well known in pop-culture to this day, at least in the sci-fi circles.
I can’t speak to Helldivers, but pinning Baldur’s Gate 3’s success on the recent growing popularity of the D&D franchise is beyond reductive. There’s no huge publisher for Baldur’s Gate 3; Larian’s a licensee and an independent studio to boot, and Hasbro’s not running massive marketing campaigns for them any more than Disney is for the typical licensed Star Wars game. There’s also the game’s pay-once sales model, which is something else you get when you’re not beholden to publishers or public shareholders.
BG3 was the culmination of decades of iteration by Larian and was the studio’s first attempt with a AAA budget. The game has more in common with Divinity: Original Sin 2 than it does Baldur’s Gate 2, as the Baldur’s Gate die-hards would be happy to tell you.
Calling CRPGs a popular genre is also going to get some laughs. Sure, we might be able to look on this point now in a few years as when CRPGs went mainstream (or maybe not, as the insane amount of choice built into the game set the bar so high that it’s possible no one’s going to bother with that kind of risky content-making). But by the time Larian started development on BG3, the genre had just risen from the dead after some successful Kickstarter campaigns and was still very niche.
I get that they’re successful, and it’d be fantastic if this became the trend. But Battlefield and Call of Duty sell consistently with much less development effort and a lot lower risk of flopping.
It looks like Call of Duty is typically 3 year development cycles, and one took only 1.5 years. Baldur’s Gate took 6 years.
Well yeah it is. It’s also heavy on the mtx, non-pushy as they stay (for now). Compared to something like DRG I really don’t feel the appeal, apart from maybe having overplayed DRG at this point.
It's not bad. You only have to use the "premium" currency to unlock the extra unlock tracks, but you also get that currency in-game and farming it isnt too crazy.
Currently as soon as you pick it up your account gets it, so you can drop into trivial missions, find some, collect it, alt F4, do the same mission repeatedly dropping at the super credits every time since the spawns are static on the same map (hence the alt F4) and then once you have 1,000 you can buy one of the unlock tracks. All of the gear and everything in the unlock track is in-game currency from there, so I don't consider it bad at all since you can easily cheese it for free
For one of my friends even though he was on my steam friend's list, and I could see him as a friend on the HD friend list, I had to accept a friend request from him in HD's pending invites section for the game to consider him a friend, and that allowed him to join our friends only games.
It's likely you have the same issue, whatever the reason
The friends thing is weird. I have a pending invite to a friend and I’m already appearing in his list as a friend ans he can’t accept the invite. So we have to set it to public, join, set it to friends only to avoid randos.
Weird, I was able to accept mine, even though he was already my friend, it just made us friends on his side as well. It must be broken in more than one way
Although I agree that BG3 was not exactly well polished, it was far from being “blatantly unfinished”. I’d even say it was far more finished than what can be considered finished by contemporary standards
Businesses think in quarters, seeing a cost centre through man hours is a huge no-no for boasting a healthy valuation. They use a model far more suited towards selling tangible products than something long term.
Assume I’m a psychopath C-level executive. Why would I spend huge resources on a success that earns money when I can earn money on fifty screwups instead?
Just because a signal is sent, it doesn’t mean it’ll be received. We all know that practically any other major brand will still pump and dump e-waste, filled to the brim with mtx
They should manage the organization and stay the fuck away from the product.
Only really mature product owners that understand what they are doing and LOVE the product they are making should be allowed near your product… and they will work with devs to make something wonderful.
Satisfactory, Valheim, manor lords, enshrouded… just a few examples of product that is loved. And it shows.
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