I think it’s pretty clear that the money people in entertainment – be it video games, movies, TV shows, or even printed paper books – really want properties that they can own (monopolize) and build low-risk, profitable releases on. It’s sort of the logical endpoint of applying capitalism to arts and entertainment.
We expect the game studio to be like a factory, a productive arrangement which the owners are incentivized to maintain and keep operating smoothly. Just as a factory builds a product, we say, a studio builds a game or a movie or whatever.
But the owners see the franchise itself – “Fallout” or “Halo” or “Avengers” or “Star Wars” – as the factory, the thing that’s worth owning, the thing to keep churning. Just as a factory builds a product, they figure, a franchise builds a reliable, low-risk profit.
Hasbro has entered the chat…
I think you’re spot on, and the results are demonstrating how that doesn’t work at all.
Corporate so desperately wants art to be a science, and it’s falling flat on its face over and over in doing so.
I’ve this idea before, but I feel like your point reiterates it really well.
This is partly what happens when you reward the silicon valley tech bros for being really good at one thing (coding) and letting everyone assume that it means they’re the best at everything (or that it’s even the goal for everything)
I used to work with doctors, and this is exactly how I felt about them. It’s as if they focus and study so hard in one specific category of knowledge and for whatever reason assume that all their hard work raised their knowledge of every subject ever. In my experience, it’s the complete opposite. They’ve neglected everything else to such a degree that they’re completely incompetent on everything outside if their area of expertise.
Really is a shame what has happened to one of the greatest game studios of all time.
Their legacy is very much in the past now, this is just a weekend at Bernie’s now
Unfortunately that goes for 99% of once successful studios now. Delightful turn of phrase though.
what has happened to one of the greatest game studios of all time.
Microslop hoovering up all the development studios. That’s what happened
I wish Carnack would emerge from the void and offer to buy back his first child. id Software and idTech could be so well repositioned to take a cut out of Epic’s pie. Unreal performance is utterly abysmal these days. If only idTech had similar licensing to Unreal…
id was fractious and wracked by strife even when it was tiny any young. It worked at a time when technical proficiency and innovation was enough to amaze, enough to make a game company viable. There’s no reason to suspect that Carmack is or was any kind of business visionary or talented manager.
I think that Unreal’s real advantage is its ubiquity - all the tools that you might want to use for game creation, from mocap to modelling, with with it; and there’s a near-endless supply of programmers and artists that know how to use it. The licensing is just a bonus. idTech is infamous for its bad tool support; Raven software basically needed a whole pile of direct contacts in id in order to develop games on that engine. But yes - Unreal 5 basically means that you’ll struggle to hold 30 fps even with framegen and upscaling, whereas idTech is silky smooth and efficient.
Carmack was at his best working near-solo, solving some tricky optimisation problem and getting Mike Abrash to tweak up the resulting assembly. Some of the comments that came out of Meta suggest to me that he finds large teams frustrating and stilting. Can’t blame him there, really. Am not sure he’s the man for modern AAAA+ gaming, with huge teams and massive pipelines. Besides, he’s more interested in messing about with AGI now; best leave him to that.
It’s not incompetence, this is calculated slop.
The end of an era. 😢
How about unionizing? There’s your plan right there.
There would have to be a blanket nationwide video game developer union, regardless of the employer.
Sounds awesome
It’s seriously needed. I have friends that work in the industry and I have to keep checks on them; I’ve never seen them so depressed. I get it, when four projects get cancelled in a row and everyday is a question if you’re on the chopping block next.
That sounds so rough. You get the job you always wanted, only to live in constant anxiety.
I really hope things change for the better.
Oh it’s been rough, and we’ve been friends since grade school. I went a different route but he went with the game developer route. It’s hard even for me to get him to chill out a bit these days. I know he’s not suicidal; but I do wonder if the stress will kick him in, he’s been getting sick a lot so I can tell he’s got a lot of strain on his immune system from the constant stress.
Stress like that is way worse than it looks. It wears you out from the inside. To your point- it weakens your immune system, which makes everything else worse.
It really is heartbreaking what this world can do to people. I hope they can find success is whatever direction they take.
