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spronk

spronk

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a huge chunk of that money is going into fortnite/GAAS and gacha mobile games, thats my point. mobile gacha games like genshin impact and stuff alone made over $5b last year, previously all that money was spent on AAA games. Fortnite alone made $6 billion in 2025 - Nintendos entire global revenue in 2025 was $8 billion. Roblux made $5 billion.

yeah for sure nintendo is huge and doing extremely well, as you say a big chunk of people buying single player games are 20-50s not kids. But an entire generation of kids now has been trained to play GAAS and f2p games and watch games on streams instead of playing them, I think that makes the future very bleak for single player narrative focused expensive budget games as older people age out and there are fewer kids to replace them.

hopefully it changes (tastes change wildly as you age) but I'm not sure how it'll go.
 
mkopec

mkopec

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And if the AAA games were not shit, like pretty much all of them have been in the last few years, they would be selling too. Maybe people just dont want to spend money on shit?
 
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Dr.Retarded

Dr.Retarded

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Daezuel said:
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250 years of Starfield!

Live Action Smile GIF by Xbox
 
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Cybsled

Cybsled

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Which wasn't a bad idea at its core, the execution just sucked. It's just a really average feeling game. They spread themselves so thin that nothing really stands out.
 
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Kharzette

Kharzette

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This is long and rambling and the english is a bit rough:



Talks about boiling open world games down into measurable metrics and the tower-map-reveal mechanic. Funny thing is I haven't played a single game that has that so I was a bit confused.

There's a bit of recent zelda glazing as well which casts doubt on the whole thing to me. I didn't play it but ugh that terrain looked very 2005.

So to summarize: Managers make everything worse, which is why indies and valve and small teams make good games.
 
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TJT

TJT

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Urlithani said:
RUB IT IN WHY DONT YOU?!?

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I'll remain skeptical. Game design these days is just getting worse by these studios and I am not sure if this will be an exception. Skyrim was great in 2011 (god damn) but Skyrim was derivative compared to Oblivion and even moreso Morrowind.

I think it is very likely to expect the game being organized around a gimmick of some kind like Dragonshouts in Skyrim. The existence of this mechanic cheapens everything else. For example, you can't have a cool spell creation system if you have Dragonshouts, as then they wouldn't use them!
 
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TJT

TJT

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Kharzette said:
This is long and rambling and the english is a bit rough:



Talks about boiling open world games down into measurable metrics and the tower-map-reveal mechanic. Funny thing is I haven't played a single game that has that so I was a bit confused.

There's a bit of recent zelda glazing as well which casts doubt on the whole thing to me. I didn't play it but ugh that terrain looked very 2005.

So to summarize: Managers make everything worse, which is why indies and valve and small teams make good games.
Click to expand...

This is definitely a big rabbit hole on game design philosophy. But all AAA games have adopted it because they love "metrics." Most of this revolves around the following principle. If you spend $500k in dev time on your cool hidden dungeon, but only 1% of players ever touch it this was a wasted $500k. Therefore you need to do other things that make this hidden dungeon as obvious as possible. Making it no longer hidden and cool. Similarly, you want the player's time so you can't have a RPG that actually locks you into any path. Because that would hide content from the player. Therefore a player can be the Archmage of the Mage Guild, Gladiator of the Arena, Master of the Warrior's Guild, Thief Lord of the Thieve's guild all in the same playthrough.

How these fucking idiots embrace this while most players don't even finish the game is beyond me. If you develop a AAA $500 million dollar game and only 40% of players even get to the end and and see the credits roll, how was 60% of the game not dead development time?

Naxxramas being transplanted into Wrath of the Lich King is of course the greatest example of this philosophy in gaming history.
 
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Caeden

Caeden

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I was one of the fucktards that supported Naxx in Wrath for that reasoning. It’s not necessarily bad reasoning. But like you said, most people barely finish a game they play and it can have dumb effects on design. I’ve walked away from very few games in my life without finishing. Maybe it’s autism.

I wonder how much of this is people realizing also that we have so much distraction that not many replay the same games over and over. Hell, outside Elden Ring and BotW, the last time I replayed a game myself was OoT on N64 and pretty much every snes game I could afford. I replayed and replayed the fuck out Out of This World. It was short and the controls were jank but it was just an awesome experience.
 
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TJT

TJT

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Caeden said:
I was one of the fucktards that supported Naxx in Wrath for that reasoning.
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The long term effects of that were catastrophic. Maybe game metrics weren't as advanced then but they had to know how many people actually raided to begin with. I'd bet both my balls the majority of players in Vanilla and BC never raided anything. They probably didn't even do Heroics in BC.
 
Caeden

Caeden

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I dunno. I loved the wrath and TBC periods. Had a blast running heroics. Would rather grind dungeons with my guild than ever touch a daily. I only played wow to raid. It was the only thing that appealed to me enough to put up with the rest. I did love the social element too. Heroics solved the problem of dungeons only getting ran during level up particularly when it’s a 10 level max level increase. I think that’s fine design. Plus, shattered halls was awesome. Magister’s Terrace. Crowd control. That all fell apart during wrath but that had some redeeming qualities in seeing how ludicrous or fast you could go. I think it’s all better than what came later. Simpler.

What were people even doing? PVP? There’s way better games for that and even then - that had its limits too. Crafting? Kill me. Farming mats? Housewife work.

I didn’t raid vanilla though. TBC was a different animal than vanilla imo based on later experiences until maybe naxx? Mechanically TBC bosses in general seemed more involved. I could see vanilla raiding being a lot more boredom
 
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moonarchia

moonarchia

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TJT said:
Not that time gated dailies were better.
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In TBC you had to have a top notch group for heroics. It was absolute AIDS. I eventually went back and did all the reps a few xpacs later when they were soloable, but that was a shitty way to lock people out of raiding at the time.
 
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Vorph

Vorph

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moonarchia said:
In TBC you had to have a top notch group for heroics.
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All that meant was having a prot paladin. The only thing difficult about them was convincing PUG mages/huntards to keep their greasy sausage fingers away from the sheep/trap button.

Since I was a prot paladin in TBC and Wrath, I loved that era. Sucked trying to tank in TBC raids, but they fixed that problem by Wrath too.
 
Noodleface

Noodleface

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Caeden said:
I dunno. I loved the wrath and TBC periods. Had a blast running heroics. Would rather grind dungeons with my guild than ever touch a daily. I only played wow to raid. It was the only thing that appealed to me enough to put up with the rest. I did love the social element too. Heroics solved the problem of dungeons only getting ran during level up particularly when it’s a 10 level max level increase. I think that’s fine design. Plus, shattered halls was awesome. Magister’s Terrace. Crowd control. That all fell apart during wrath but that had some redeeming qualities in seeing how ludicrous or fast you could go. I think it’s all better than what came later. Simpler.

What were people even doing? PVP? There’s way better games for that and even then - that had its limits too. Crafting? Kill me. Farming mats? Housewife work.

I didn’t raid vanilla though. TBC was a different animal than vanilla imo based on later experiences until maybe naxx? Mechanically TBC bosses in general seemed more involved. I could see vanilla raiding being a lot more boredom
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Brother don't even let the classic retards get started. There are those that thought that was when wow was it's hardest.
 
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