They'd rather oversaturate the fucking market place chasing an elusive Pot of Gold than go for the sure thing.
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
712 points (99.0% liked)
Greentext
6452 readers
2012 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Infinite growth mentality vs remembering the customer as a human
"I don't understand what you're calling the wallet piggies" - executives and the whole marketing dept
And honestly, they’re right. Games are fundamentally optional and there are so many to choose from but these garbage studios make garbage games and openly degrade their customers but people keep paying them.
I've noticed that an increasing amount of games that I enjoy over the past decade have been indie games (or games with lax publishers.)
We've got the IP, why don't we make the Smash Bros. killer? We can call it "MultiVersus"!
No. I want an incredibly small scale indie game made by a tiny team and fills my desires for power and war/crimes. Rimworld, Kenshi, Factorio.
Any recs ?
Stellaris for proper warcriming.
Those three fill the bill pretty easily. I'd add Satisfactory for the snarky AI and the general disregard to anything not made of concrete or steel.
If you want snarky AI, can I recommend Portal.
Though that doesn't really count as indie.
Love me some Kenshi.
I cheated and used the recruitment mod and trained and equipped the hell out of a squad and went on a grand tour hitting every major settlement and freeing the slaves, because I wanted to better the world.
And then I put holy nation paladins in the peeler for my own amusement. That reminds me I think I still have Longen in a cage somewhere.
Dang, already played them all
Never enough, ik
Capitalism ruins everything. Usually by design.
why are they like this?
Which would you rather have 1 million dollars or 100 million dollars?
That's basically the thought process, if it bombs I can blame it on some other, if it doesn't then I'm good
Which would you rather have 1 million dollars or 100 million dollars?
It's not that straightforward, unfortunately. The real culprit is allowing all giant public companies to hoover up all the small companies. Now you're not a 3 person team with a side job trying to pay the bills and getting lucky. Office rent, Unity/Unreal want their cut, app stores want their cut, Salary, IT, Healthcare. You end up needing to support quite a lot of infrastructure to make that 1 Mil game. That no longer 'moves the needle' on your company's yearly income and the stock suffers.
Then, you can't just make a game and release it anymore, you need live ops, sales, events, campaigns, otherwise you're leaving money on the table.
otherwise you're leaving money on the table.
This is the same argument as "would you rather have 1 or 100 mil"
But yes, you're right to point out large companies who need to make big money to keep the lights on and, if public, stock profile. If the market perceives modest growth, it will not react kindly, leading to downstream financial losses. Some investors invest in ideas and products, most invest in perceived potential gains. No investment-->no funding-->no games.
Niches exist because they’re already filled
You’re overestimating how easy it is to convince person with 10k hours in random game to move to yours
That's the thing... You don't need to convince them to put 10k hours into a different game. Only to buy it. Or to play it for at least 2 hours on Steam.
If I get like at least 20 hours of enjoyment out of a game I'm probably already as happy as can be with the purchase.
load more comments
(2 replies)
They honestly need to look at Fortnite as the model. It wasn’t meant to be this massive AAA game. It was a modest game with a unique concept (building). Adding battle royal was done on a whim. It just happened to click with millions of people.
IIRC it was a joke mode to make fun of how popular BRs were.
I don't think this is quite right as BRs were new at the time. When Fortnite released there was really only PUBG in the battle royale space.
I believe it was something closer to a prototype they made in a month or two simply because they liked Battle Royales and thought it would be a fun gamemode to add a side thing.
Excuse me, Minecraft Hunger Games maps were a thing as well! ☝️🤓
(But yes, I agree, BRs were new.)
ACKSHUALLY "last man standing" was a game mode in Unreal Tournament 1999, so the concept was there for a long time
I remember there being PUBG and some other twitchslop where the gas was neon green and exiting a moving car at any speed would down you. I think there was a third BR that was raging before Fortnite
Yeah PUBG wasn't the only one on the market, but everything else wasn't anywhere near the punching weight, as PUBG was breaking steam records.
There was an indie battle royale that was struggling, a Minecraft BR mod, and I think the one you're describing though I can't even remember it's name. None of then were really competitors for PUBG and more of trying to edge in a little bit of their spotlight.
Until Fortnite, of course.
People tend to chase trends because it is selling like hot cakes and therefore deemed safe. Everyone wants a piece. Executives feel the same. However, only very few realise that the market become over-saturated as it becomes more competitive because of tunnel vision towards digging any potential profits that may or may not be there.
Because they're run by executives that have no fucking idea what game development entails.
That and everything now needs to be "disruptive". An idea doesn't see the light of day in a tech board room without explaining how it's going to disrupt the market and create space for itself. So unless the game is pitched as a killer of whatever the competition has it won't move forward. It's the whole silicon valley mindset of move fast and break things in action.
Because they don't want some of the money, or even enough of the money. They want all of the money, and think all you have to do is copy a successful game to get it.
Moreover, like Hollywood, the gaming industry is largely run by people who truly do not understand the thing they're there to make. All of the C-levels still think it's the early 2000s where you could shit out anything that looked like a popular game and make 20 billion dollars from it. They think their entire market is dumb kids who will mindlessly play whatever is put in front of them without regard to polish, story, or even playability.
And chasing trends when it can take up 5 years or more to complete a project is utterly moronic.
And the market proves it's true.
How in the hell is EA still not dead?
Many studios produce barely acceptable shit, yet people buy it in droves.
How in the hell is EA still not dead?
Sports games
Seems to be the basis for 90% of the economy at this point.
EA is a publisher that goes against that, bad publisher to use as an example
load more comments
(2 replies)
My (completely uninformed) theory: It's competitive advantage. Indies succeed on their creativity, but that works because there are thousands of indie devs out there and we get to see the best (and luckiest) ones. It's not easy to replicate that creativity by just throwing more money at the problem. So what is a company with ooodles of money but no creativity to do? Make games that only a company with way too much money could make. No indie dev is going to make the next Far Cry or Assassin's Creed or Fortnite because they just don't have the budget to make that happen. So they know that even if they keep churning out generic crap, at least it's generic crap with very little real competition.
Of course then all of them got the bright idea to compete in a game business model that is inherently winner take all with already well established leaders. So yeah now it just seems like they're lighting money on fire for fun.
I'd hate to say it, but look at any big publishers quarterly reports. Compare how much base games sell compared to micro transactions.
^ EA's
They would all like to take the lead and have "the" live service game but unfortunately even their bland attempts still bring in a lot of cash. This is why the push to live service is so aggressive.
The only thing that's been slowing the push down is these big live service failures, which is making big publishers a little stingy on what games to push.
You are correct though, the big franchises have a lot of name recognition and its really hard for a competitor to muscle in on that established space (though they do try). Established IPs is a safe bet that often pays off, despite gamers lamenting it.
load more comments
(15 replies)
view more: next ›