And I mean, that's maybe where the problems lie. This game is all jank and all generics, with no specific thing to present except "OMG LOOK AT OUR GRAPHICS!!!!". Which are also pretty unoptimized, so you end up with:

Only a tiny tiny fraction of players can even play it.
Then, the game is utterly generic. Despite how it might look to someone not knowing about it, DOOM 2016 and Eternal are quite unique games and have a very well-designed gameplay flow that even differs divisively between the two.
The writing is horrible and would make even an MCU movie/series writer question their decisions in life.
The magic is still just guns with replaced graphics. They didn't lean into the very premise of the game at all. And all they had to do is play Lichdom Battlemage from 2014 to get some ideas and that game already struggled with the concept. But at least it pulled it off.

Can't really say I'm surprised the game flopped hard. But unlike the dev I would call the underlying idea solid, just not anything about the execution.

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[–] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

The thing that we all keep missing about this is even though EA sucks because it is an example of late stage capitalism hollowing out everything for profit, doesn’t actually mean the idiots with MBAs from Harvard or whatever running the company are actually making intelligent choices about profit.

The system of capitalism actually perpetuates itself better when things periodically catastrophically fail from wildly incompetent leadership since it keeps worker power from organizing, wipes out competitors that aren’t also massive corporations that can be easily colluded with, and provides a perfect backdrop for the rich to say “sorrrrrry it all broke again, guess we are the only ones that can fix it, so we will maybe take this chance to buy up more of the economy :) “.

So yes in a very real way I think EA functions to devalue the labor of game developers, keep competition of smaller game development studios categorically unable to create products like EA, and serve as a vessel to ritualistically dissect smaller game companies so that companies like EA have an infinite, desperate workforce and consumers have no better choice for video games. Just because these processes are twisted and rationalized under a story about the ruthless, noble pursuit of profit doesn’t make them have any real connection with efficiency or profit. One could perhaps say this all has much more to do with violence than it does profit.

That is the thing about ideologies, whether they have any connection to reality or not is actually not very important at all to the truly successful ones that permeate the way societies think about themselves.

Additionally, anything that can help massive corporations that are strip mining the gaming industry claim the gaming industry is sliding into a tough period where it’s hard to make games that turn enough of a profit to steadily employ game developers, is EXTREMELY useful to companies like EA because they see this whole AI thing as an opportunity to deal a permanent blow to the quality of life and general leverage workers have in the game development industry. Thank god the movie industry saw it coming a mile off, but video game culture is too full of toxic conservative little boys screaming at each other to understand what is about to happen (and is already happening).

It breaks my heart, but what is happening right now will likely deal a blow to the vibrancy of video games as an art form that will reverberate for decades. After all, once a worker exits the game development industry because they can't find a job it doesn't matter how passionate they were about video games, how special their talent is, how creative or unique their ideas are.... they sure as hell aren't coming back once they get that a job in an industry that doesn't hate its workers so much and besides a deep sense of burnout about something you love is truly one of the most awful experiences in the world... not many people are willing to revisit a place they experienced that.

[–] space@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That's why AAA+ is failing and indie games are getting better than ever. It's insane how good the tools and engines have gotten. Making games had become much more accessible than ever.

[–] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Making games had become much more accessible than ever.

Making music has become MASSIVELY more accessible than ever, but you know what? It’s just a hobby now, capitalism has destroyed making and recording music as a livelihood unless you manage to get a handful unicorn jobs.

Just because it is easy for a company to enter a market doesn’t mean that structural, toxic issues with that market magically are nullified as problems. Gamers as a category seem to have a REALLY hard time wrapping their head around this.