Random Gaming Talk

[Nintex]

Anywho, someone on Reseti pointed this out



Either video games are cancelled or this VGA and next spring is gonna be spectacular in terms of announcements.

The dev industry feels like it's in a panic: After Embracer's US$2,000,000,000 deal fell through, Epic laid off 800 ppl/15% of workforce, Bungie took it in the shorts right after, many places are in a hiring freeze. I was in a 2nd interview with a Sony first-party studio where the team "loved" me, but they paused hiring for the role. It is a shit-tastic time to be looking for work. 

A friend in the finance business says 2023 profits are record-high even though people are not sheltering-in-place like 2020-2022. Those profits aren't evenly distributed, for sure, but there is a bunch of money roiling around out there.

Another friend who I've known since my first job in dev nearly 30 years ago thinks it is at least partially due to a speculative stance on the disruptive influence AI will have in the next 2-3 years.

Yep, also Tech companies and game studios could in recent years count on tax breaks and overall unrealistic favorable conditions. Amazon, Google and Microsoft were mostly focused on growth and marketshare so their cloud services were cheap and there weren't big differences in regulations and currency valuations between the EU, US and to a lesser extend Asia. Interest rates were low and there were lots of opportunities for marketing and partnerships with hardware manufacturers, publishers or software developers. This has all changed in recent years. 

We're now seeing the same thing happening across the tech sector, especially with rising labour costs in the mix. They need to improve margins, and they have three ways to do it:
1. Scale up with mergers to spread costs and reduce overhead
2. Cut staff
3. Increase revenues

The first is a long term solution but with Embracer we've seen that without cheap credit this can quickly go south. Suddenly costs balloon and it takes a long time for a new product to launch to offset those higher costs.

Cutting staff is the second obvious solution but this usually leads to a company producing worse products or losing their ability to make games on their own all together.

Finally, jacking up prices is difficult as consumers are used to flat prices and cheap subscriptions by now. You can't suddenly ask $30 more because your game is delayed for 3 years. And you certainly can't keep those prices up at that level for long.

It's a big headache and the obvious next step is more outsourcing to cheaper countries, which is already happening. Keeping a skeleton crew at the 'brand name' studio in the west who delegate the actual work to Eastern Europe and Asia. This is likely the route Embracer will pick for Insurgency and New World Interactive. 

The companies that will win, will be those that keep their focus mostly on steadily making games like Capcom, Rockstar, Remedy, CDPR and Nintendo until all this blows over. 
And chances are that the big 'WOW AI CAN DO THIS?" for AI will end up in one of their games too. You just know that Microsoft will have this presentation for FORZAI or whatever and half the features except the AI Livery maker never make it into the game and Nintendo will ship Yoshi's Ailand which will blow away everything with fully sentient Baby Mario and Luigi 

Especially Remedy is an interesting case, for a long time they were chasing trends which delayed Alan Wake to whenever and turned Quantum Break into the aborted child of a Microsoft corporate strategy squashed in between both the failing UWP and Xbox TV Content and then at some point they said, fuck all that, we'll just make games again and we got CONTROL and Alan Wake 2 in quick succession.

Naughty Dog is on the opposite end of this. They're stuck doing remakes as they suddenly switched to GAAS and multiplayer. Leaving behind what they do best.