In a bad-vibes moment, they’re denying a huge outlet like IGN a review code. No matter what I think of IGN in particular (nothing good tbh), that’s not something I can find a real explanation for other than “We made DC’s Gollum and want to avoid bad press as long as we can”.
Imagine you just finished playing Arkham Knight, and you get an interview with Rocksteady as a game developer. They love you, your passion, your creative skills, and they onboard you. This “game” is what Warner Bros hands down to you to work on. The well-known head of the studio leaves within a few years of you joining. You hold out hope that everything will come together so people can enjoy the art that you’ve worked so hard on. Warner Bros adds a battle pass. Warner Bros makes it a “game”-as-a-service. Warner Bros announces nonsensical lore additions for the sake of post-launch content. Warner Bros denies review copies. The “studio” you thought you were signing up for has become nothing but a slot machine for the higher-ups.
What a shitty thing to do to a whole group of wonderfully creative and skilled people.
See, this is the thing people don’t realize when they think generative AI is going to reduce headcounts overall.
Corporations suck. The entire reason they exist is because of the high transactional costs surrounding labor (there’s a Nobel winning economics essay on this from the turn of the 20th century called “the nature of the firm”).
They will reduce value and increase price as much as possible because they only exist to be a middleman between the consumer and the producer.
But right now there’s no alternative. It’s crazy expensive to make AA and up games so you need to target mass market appeal to get the money for it and usually need to crawl up finance bros’ asses who don’t even play games and look down on those who do.
That’s all about to change dramatically.
Co-op studio structures where employees are owners, smaller teams with large aspirations, franchises with small but dedicated fan bases - these largely died out in the 90s besides remnant very indie groups as transactional costs to produce a game went through the roof and those costs are about to turn around.
Yes, gen AI means less people are needed to make a game. But it doesn’t mean less people will be making games. It means there will be more games, and games coming from people with vision rather than coming from people with a quarterly statement they are trying to maximize.
Hello Games was a team of around a dozen people, and while it was a bumpy road, using procgen allowed them to build an entire universe. Well procgen and a whole host of other tools are about to suck a lot less and be much more accessible to even small studios to make ambitious games.
My hope is that we see things happen rapidly enough that many of the thousands of devs who have lost their jobs at mega-corps will be able to reorganize to take on the Goliaths and win rather than be forced to move on to other industries.
A shakeup is about to happen that’s going to destroy the season pass, micro transaction, soulless meat grinder that’s most large studio/publishers today - it’s just maybe ~3 years out from the inflection point of no return.
But one thing is for certain - most of the largest games companies are woefully unprepared for what’s coming and are about to be stepped all over like Blockbuster or Circuit City.
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You’re kidding? UE5 with Nanite is a whole-ass studio and you can use it for free and pay a percentage once you’re making money. It’s never been cheaper and the games have never been more plentiful. AAA has this problem exactly because games like Palworld are hits eating huge amounts of gamers’ time.