The games industry desperately needs another crash.
this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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I wish them the best flop
I still read "live service" the way it's pronounced on the jimqusition
LiVe SeRvIcE
Devil's advocate: they created a new studio with all the lessons and right core employees who understand the space the best.
Well atleast they are trying stuff unlike some other trillion dollar company that keeps on buying studios but still fails the make good new ip (hell! they are struggling to keep halo intact).
Word
As long as there continues to be succesful live service games, they will never stop attempting to make new ones, because the succesful ones are the most profitable forms of entertainment ever devised.
Of course there is only room for a limited amount of live service games on the market (since gamers only have one life to waste on them), so most of them will fail, and many of them even before leaving the drawing board it seems.
This is an excellent point. An organisation the size of Sony is simply incapable of not attempting a live service hit as long as they have the resources to do so.
A smaller player can pursue a strategy where they gain profits from their (somewhat specialized) segement of the market. Sony lacks that flexibility due to their size.
Yep, they can make a bunch of games that costs them hundreds of millions to make it they manage to make one that brings in billions in profit... That's what we call gambling.
That’s what we call gambling.
Most companies call it R&D.
But then, why do they keep canceling them before release? They don't know if they'd have been hits or failures.
Of course we can't really know what goes on behind the scenes. But obviously these kinds of games are designed by committee (namely board members). So every single detail is going to be dictated from above, and as new games are released by other publishers with new succesful features these dictates changes mid-production. I can't but imagine that the development of live service games are a complete shitshow from start to finish.
So perhaps at some point they decide to get rid of the entire mess and start afresh, only for the process to beging again of course.
I've seen project managment in industrial fields go in circles in similar ways, and now that you put it this way I can totally see it.
For the love of god can we get another syphon filter or ape escape??
*Monkey's paw curls*
Your wish has been granted. Look forward to our upcoming Syphon: Extraction, an exciting extraction shooter with none of the gameplay you remember!
Also on the docket is Ape Escape Infinity, a gacha featuring all your favorite apes and up to several minutes of gameplay. Now supports importing NFT apes, because our execs are still pushing crypto as the next big thing for some reason!
Wow.... Just... go fuck yourself man.
Tap for spoiler
I hate how goddamn accurate this is
I'm still salty they turned Marathon into an extraction shooter. Marathon, one of the all-time narrative greats!
Why make millions releasing games people want when you can potentially make billions by abusing addiction research to keep users playing long past the point they enjoy your game?
(I'm vaguely associated with the gaming industry. I knew things were about to go downhill when I started getting invites to lectures on retaining players and extracting money by using unethical psychological tricks - this was nearly fifteen years ago and targeted at mobile devs, but it's long since infected the entire industry)
It's only Marathon in name.
Wait did you get an invite to this,?? (PocketGamer Connects - Helinski)
This video really opened my eyes to F2P manipulation and because of this I mostly avoid it now.
Not that video specifically, but the others were along the same vein. They were all completely open about how they abused psychology to get people hooked, and spoke about players using dehumanizing terms like assets or cash cows. It was disgusting how shameless they were.
Wow and that was 15 years ago. Think of how much worse it has become now
I don't think it's actually gotten much worse (things even got slightly better after a few countries threatened legislation for going after children), it's just that those tactics have slowly made their way out of the mobile space (where post-installation monetization strategies are a result of users expecting mobile games to be free, or at most a couple of dollars) and into regular gaming.
A free-to-play gacha game on Android having a scummy monetization model is nothing new, but an $80 (soon to be $90) AAA game double- and triple-dipping into your wallet with paid season passes and FOMO banners and all that other junk, plus plastering ads on its menus? That's still relatively new to consoles/PC, and putting that crap in games you paid for represents a new level of greed.
Yeah the only reason I’ve have bought a PS 1 to 3 was to play Metal Gear Solid. I have bought neither the 4 nor 5, since no new MGS was released on it ( I played MGSV on ps3). A modernized Syphon Filter with improved stealth gameplay would definitely make me want to buy the PS5.
It's even funnier the n^th^ time!