One of those things that gradually, after every new leak or interview, you could just sense was coming. On top of the more recent smoking gun of the cross-platform job listing, it’s been said time and again: the younger generations don’t associate with hardware, they associate with the software.
On the one hand, it *sounds* healthier. On the other, it’s also clear this is the gross reality as to why we’ve seen so many games trying to come out in the live-service space: if you can’t be the next Fortnite, they at least need to have their own “game platform” outside their hardware platform to appeal to that growing younger demographic.
Ultimately I feel like, if big pubs can’t land on a hit in a reasonable amount of time, the upper-tier of publishers are going to kill themselves off, or shrink to a fraction of what they were.
Since many won’t find a quick success, my gut says the next several years (in the AAA space) are going to suck. Publishers will continue to de-prioritize “core” games, earmarking the lions share of dev funds towards the undisputed king of talent loss, studio closures, and money sinks: chasing live-service-game-platforms. They’ll keep taking talented studios, forcing them to work on anything OTHER than their strength, close them when that live service game fails, earmark another $200 million for the next failure, and repeat. So current day, but worse, and culminating in desperate last-grasp attempts as their time windows shrink & war chests get empty after years of tossing piles of cash into repeated failures.
Hopefully, the other side of all this will lead to a healthier, more sustainable market. I love a good spectacle game, but the lion’s share of my library is indies these days. So hopefully we’ll see those that don’t win the live-service-lotto go back to sensible development timeframes and budgets. A place less focused on boom and bust, and divests risk by making a greater amount of smaller budget projects. Less devs losing jobs, more talent being kept, more room for experimentation…more like the olden days of AAish titles.
And if they can’t do that, then I expect we’re going to see a ton of publishers closing in the next decade or so. And it’s honestly hard to think it’d be that great a loss. Remove the middle men, remove guys like Kotick (“take the fun out of making games” types), less corporate greed and BS. Maybe that’s far too optimistic an outlook in a “publisher crash”, but it feels like it’s hitting critical mass & can’t get much worse.
