https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/the-wild-successes-of-helldivers-2-and-baldurs-gate-3-send-a-clear-message-let-devs-cook/
The studios behind these mega hits spent more than a decade iterating on their favorite design ideas until they went supernova.
Very poignant point being made here about employee retention. Mass layoffs are a sledgehammer to institutional knowledge in companies, and retention and advancement of entire teams does the opposite.
A company literally cannot learn lessons from successes and failures. That's done by employees in the company. Lose the experience, and you have to start again.
Yeah. I also don’t see how one could stay motivated if one knows that they’re like to be let go once the current project is about wrapped up.
Interesting read. The airport argued against a short term development model and taxes back a years, maybe even decades long search for the right game formula and it's perfection. I found it especially interesting how he showed the path from Magica to Helldivers and the retention of core mechanics over the games.
The studios behind these mega hits spent more than a decade iterating on their favorite design ideas until they went supernova.
With what money? If I had 10 years to iterate on code without releasing it, I too could come up with something nice. Could.
I’m happy for people who like these games, but I am so tired of seeing articles about them in my feeds. They are still companies, they still don’t care about you, just your money, but everyone acts like these two are their best friends and the saviors of gaming.
Sure, they like money. Who doesn't? But you have to admit there's a big difference between what Larian gave us for $60 with Baldur's Gate, and shit like $65 mounts in Diablo and $80 melee weapons in CoD and the various other chicanery ActiBlizz and other truly greedy companies have been pulling.
As such, in addition to liking money, I would argue the people at Larian genuinely care about making a good game that people enjoy. Cuz if it was ONLY about the money, they would've made a much different game. I imagine it helps not being a publicly traded company.
I think it’s actually simpler than that. It’s a thing that used to be a lot more common decades ago. They have talented people, those people made a good product, and as a result the product effectively sold itself.
Just goes to show that there’s a road to commercial success that doesn’t involve treating your users and customers as a resource to exploit, and it’s causing all the other gaming company CEOs to lose their fucking minds because this is starting to turn into an industry-wide grassroots rebellion.
My guy, literally everyone is after your money, including yourself. We all have mouths to feed and roofs to put over our heads. The difference is some businesses actually care about creating an amazing product or providing exceptional, valuable service in exchange for said compensation, and some businesses care about fuck-all else, to the extent of exploiting mass-genocide and slave/child labor.
I like how this article specifically mentions two popular games at the moment. That's SEO for ya. This article could easily be told without mentioning either of these games, but if they did that, then they wouldn't get traffic from people who like those games. They'd have to actually write something worth reading.
The article would be a lot less convincing if it didn't present the clear evidence provided by those games. They are important in this context because there aren't a lot of games like them coming out today.
Depends on how you define success.
If "success" means a product that gamers love then yes, Helldivers and BG3.
If "success"= money printing machine, then the answer is live-service, DLC, microtransaction hell.
Most publishers only care about 1 of these.