The rule of a decade?

[Arbiter]

If you look at the history of game developers, it is easy to notice that many tier 1 companies experienced what you could describe as a golden decade and after that turned into mediocre companies milking their past successes. Examples:

Blizzard - the first largely successful game was WarCraft 2 (1995). After that everything that Blizzard built turned into gold, until the success of WoW (2004) and its early expansions. Blizzard started to decline rapidly with the releases of WotLK and Catalysm. I do not think I need to comment on the current state of affairs.

id Software - Wolfesntein 3D (1992) put them on the radar and Doom (1993) elevated them to the status of masters of the FPS genre (no pun intended). Quake series was also great. The last successful release from id was Doom 3 (2004), which sold well, though it was not universally praised at that time (I personally enjoyed that game). Rage was a disappointment and next Doom was in development hell for almost a decade, resulting in the company being sold.

Raven Software - once subcontractors of id Software, releasing clones of their games, they gained recognition with Heretic released in 1995. This was followed by a series of successful games, with RtCW being a highlight. Quake 4 in 2005 was a disapoointment, which, combined with failure of Wolfenstein 2009 resulted in Activision relegating Raven to the status of a DLC shop.

BioWare - BG was a smash hit in 1998, followed by great-to-decent releases. The last good old-school BioWare game is arguably DAO released in 2009.

Why do you think it happens? Do devs burn out after a decade or do owners of successful companies want to cash out as soon as possible?

 

[Arbiter]

A newer example to demonstrate that this not a mid 90s to mid 2000s trend:

The first major success of CDP was Witcher 2 released in 2011. Witcher 3 and expansions that followed were major hits. In late 2010s we got Gwent and Thronebreaker which did not meet the expectations of gamers, followed by the disaster of CP2077 in 2020.

 

[Silva]

From Software:

Demons Souls blows peoples minds in 2008. Sekiro ends the trend in 2018.

Elden Ring will be a piece of shit in 2022.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Raven Software - once subcontractors of id Software, releasing clones of their games, they gained recognition with Heretic released in 1995. This was followed by a series of successful games, with RtCW being a highlight. Quake 4 in 2005 was a disapoointment, which, combined with failure of Wolfenstein 2009 resulted in Activision relegating Raven to the status of a DLC shop.

They didn't work on RtCW. Gray Matter Interactive (formerly Xatrix Entertainment) handled the singleplayer, while Nerve Software (former id Software/Rogue Entertainment guys) handled multiplayer. IIRC Splash Damage had their hand in the MP component as well, but I'm not sure to which extent.

They did have good games around that time, e.g. Heretic II and Soldier of Fortune.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

While your math is a little wrong on Raven (plus I'd say the Marvel licenses they did were good) and iD's golden period arguably started with Commander Keen, I think your point mostly stands. I think one possible reason why is the people who are on a project, but not actually responsible for the main portion of it seem to get long and fruitful careers in high places. You can be looking at a guy who did audio for some random game and twenty years later he's the COO of some company. Another thing is, generally speaking, its hard to keep the amount of employees needed to maintain quality. Sometimes they get poached, but a bigger concern is that technology was swiftly advancing until the PS3 generation and you absolutely had to meet with that advance or get grinded into dust. That always carries with it a risk that the new blood doesn't really know what they're doing on the same level as the old blood.

 

[Nutria]

Microprose is another example. They were putting out one classic after another in the mid-80s to mid-90s but finally failed due to bad business decisions even though their games were still good.

I'd second the post above. I'm guessing a lot of these companies were forced to expand too fast around the 1990s-2000s and after about a decade they were too big to be an effective team like they were in the beginning.

 

[Alienman]

Starts with passion and ends in corporate hell after getting popular. CDProject is a recent good example I think.

 

[DemonKing]

Makes sense to me - after 10 years most of the people/culture that made a studio great in the first place will probably have moved on and if they've been successful they've likely been sold to one of the bigger companies and in the process of being sucked dry of IP and consumer goodwill.

Saying that Microsoft seems to have the right idea with their acquisitions at the moment in that they're apparently open to experimentation and trying out new ideas given they want Gamepass to have something for everyone.

 

[Curratum]

Guys, once you come to understand that all great games you love are flukes, accepting the torrents of shit that pour out every year, including from devs you used to love, will be much easier.

Games like this only come out when a multitude of factors align in the proper semi-random configuration, not because Person X is the greatest designer alive.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Guys, once you come to understand that all great games you love are flukes, accepting the torrents of shit that pour out every year, including from devs you used to love, will be much easier.

Games like this only come out when a multitude of factors align in the proper semi-random configuration, not because Person X is the greatest designer alive.

weird how certain devs were able to create "flukes" repeatedly in the span of a few years

 

[Morenatsu.]

Guys, once you come to understand that all great games you love are flukes, accepting the torrents of shit that pour out every year, including from devs you used to love, will be much easier.

Games like this only come out when a multitude of factors align in the proper semi-random configuration, not because Person X is the greatest designer alive.

nice to see you still posting the same shit as always, ignorant

 

[mondblut]

Success breeds desire for moar success, resulting in selling out and chasing the lowest common denominator.

 

[KateMicucci]

Everything reverts to the mean.

 

[DeepOcean]

Why do you think it happens? Do devs burn out after a decade or do owners of successful companies want to cash out as soon as possible?

That is simple to answer, before the first Xbox, most of the people who played games were hobbyists, they were nerds which primary entertainment was gaming as a whole and were willing to play all kinds of shit. After the first Xbox, a ton of people entered on the market but most of those were teenagers after a certain kind of popular experience like the Counter Strike crazyness and Halo crazyness, those people in their majority only play Halo, only play Call of Duty, only play Fifa, only play insert popular here.

So, the money that gone into experimental projects just dried up as the big publishers saw that servicing the audience of those huge titles made much more money that financing experimental titles. Live service was just an extension of this logic that made exploiting this casual audience even more lucrative. The AAA space is completely dominated by mass market hits and that wont change. The only reason why AAA companies are still releasing single player games is because Sony and Microsoft need exclusives and notice how those single player games all target the same tried and tested popamole mechanics of other hit games? Yes, because even they are trying to appeal to the audience of those hit games.

Good games require a certain creative enviroment, just go watch the No Clip documentary on Looking Glass, that sort of thing require a minimum of financial stability to be sustained, that is why Raven, Troika and Looking Glass died because the people in charge realized that they would be exposed to financial instability for decades with really high risks or have to sell out to keep going.

On the other spectrum, companies like Blizzard, despite having big hits before WoW, they wouldnt escape the change, it is more or less by the time of WoW that things were changing and the big money on gaming were starting to push for farming the hits instead of experimenting and WoW was a massive hit, the Blizzard that existed afterwards was no longer the one that existed before as it became a hit farming shop.

That seems clear to me, what I wonder is what will happen on the indie space? Will the hobbyists that play indie games grow enough in numbers so making more expensive games targeting them become viable? I see some genres like City Building, management, platformers exploding but all those genres have low barriers of entry and what about the genres with high bar of entry like cRPGs and FPS? While there are positive developments on the cRPG and FPS genre, I still dont see the financial support to pull off a non popamole Thief, System Shock, Deus Ex and etc. The market is big enough to sustain a Paradox or Devolver Digital but those publishers still struggle alot when they try to move to more expensive projects, Paradox had been avoiding making cRPGs for quite a while for example.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I've yet to see concrete evidence that having a team larger than 20 people actually produces a better game.
This is especially true in the age of asset markets & outsourcing art assets, which are arguably some of the most laborious part of modern games.

 

[DeepOcean]

Then we have only two explanations why someone didnt produced an indie System Shock 3 or a new indie Deus Ex: a)indie developers are a bunch of lazy retards and if that is the case, we are doomed because that wont change or b)producing content, especially consumable content, isnt as cheap as people think it is.

I think is in part a bit of both, after messing around with the Unreal and Unity asset stores and Mixamo, I can get a character and animate it to be game ready in 30mins, there is no excuse to release completely unpolished garbage that many of those bone headed developers do, however, that doesnt exactly make level design, especially expansive level design that is also good much easier to do. When you add the time required to produce those levels, iterate over them and play test them... boy the more complex the game is, the longer this process becomes and time is money.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Then we have only two explanations why someone didnt produced an indie System Shock 3 or a new indie Deus Ex: a)indie developers are a bunch of lazy retards and if that is the case, we are doomed because that wont change or b)producing content, especially consumable content, isnt as cheap as people think it is.

I think is in part a bit of both, after messing around with the Unreal and Unity asset stores and Mixamo, I can get a character and animate it to be game ready in 30mins, there is no excuse to release completely unpolished garbage that many of those bone headed developers do, however, that doesnt exactly make level design, especially expansive level design that is also good much easier to do. When you add the time required to produce those levels, iterate over them and play test them... boy the more complex the game is, the longer this process becomes and time is money.

System Shock remake is being made by <25(seems closer to 10) people.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Raven Software doesn't even kind of follow the perimeters you layed out. They never had a point in which they ever really fell back on past successes. Their peak also wasn't the fuckin' '90s; their biggest, and best games all came in the 2000s. The only thing that happened to Raven is they're owned by Activision, and Activision has this weird habit of throwing needlessly large numbers of their teams at Call of Duty.

Blizzard is a fucking weirdo company that went way too far up their own ass. They were celebrated for their "when it's done it's done" attitude, they bought into their own hype, and WoW created a situation where they really could just not release anything if they didn't want to. So you end up getting this situations where they can absorb multiple companies to work on something like StarCraft Ghost for half a decade and then not release it, and they can kill Blizzard North's Diablo 3 and take over the series. But, outside of StarCraft, Blizzard (and I'm talking Blizzard proper) was never some innovative developer. Their Warcraft games were always simple RTS games, they just had a nice level of polish and were humorous. Blizzard has always been a company that went after mass appeal, so I guess I don't really see any kind of shift from where they were to now beyond some recent goofy woke shit. The first two Warcraft games are simple, their big hit (World of Warcraft) was making the MMORPG a more simple genre for a general audience to jump into in comparison to stuff like early Ultima Online, the original idea for Warcraft 3 was dropped (and the graphics downgraded) so the wides possible audience could buy it. Warcraft 3 was probably when they gave up on big ideas. If you remember the original version of the game, or go back and look at what they originally wanted to do, it was much more grand than basically just doing StarCraft in 3D but with Warcraft.

BioWare has always kind of sucked. I know some people love their Baldur's Gate games, and I had a friend that really liked them for a bit so I played them some, but I never gave a shit. What happened to BioWare, from the sound of it, is they got to make exactly what they wanted. I guess they fancied themselves some kind of action developer too, but they've also been shit at it. Sadly they also found their biggest success with action so they keep making shitty third person shooters that got excused for being shitty third person shooters because they were also "RPGs." But, if you're talking about the, having hits, their biggest hits are all more recent stuff from the sound of it. The somewhat recent news about some of their cancelled titles also paints a picture of leads with no fucking clue as to what they're doing. Like these motherfuckers wanted to make what sounded like open world sandbox GTA game with a Jade Empire flavor to it (they'd later drop the Jade Empire aspect) and they were too fucking stupid to figure out how to make that work. Like from the sound of it Bioware basically wanted to make Prototype with dialogue options, but they couldn't figure out how to do Prototype despite things like Prototype progenitor The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction being a thing since before they even started development. The sword and gun combat system they wanted to do also basically sounds like they wanted to do Devil May Cry, but they also weren't aware of Devil May Cry. Anyways, my point is it sounds like BioWare was really dumb, overthought simple things, maybe weren't aware of what others were doing, and kind of pissed away EA's money for years.

id Software was always more of a tech company. They gave way to some cool games in the '90s. But Doom 3 is a game built around showing off what their new engine could do, and it ended up being a style of game most people didn't really want from a new Doom game. In this later stage of id John Carmack's interest seemed to started wondering to other places outside of gaming as well. Although I did like what I played of Rage, and it was a very good looking game with some pretty fantastic looking character models.

 

[Norfleet]

You're overthinking it. The average lifetime, period, of a successful company is around 15-24 years. So, it is no surprise that the company will go into decline around the midpoint of that cycle. It's not just a gaming thing, it's the behavior of companies in general. I suspect this is just how long it takes the Peter Principle to kick in where everyone gets promoted to a position in which they are no longer competent and the entire thing stalls out. And as the world moves faster, it seems the average lifespan of companies is falling.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

I think is in part a bit of both, after messing around with the Unreal and Unity asset stores and Mixamo, I can get a character and animate it to be game ready in 30mins, there is no excuse to release completely unpolished garbage that many of those bone headed developers do, however, that doesnt exactly make level design, especially expansive level design that is also good much easier to do. When you add the time required to produce those levels, iterate over them and play test them... boy the more complex the game is, the longer this process becomes and time is money.

It's more complex than that.

Asset stores and libraries can help in some cases, but most of the time you'll still need to adjust / rework things to make them fit the rest of the game, since these assets are created by different people with different styles / approaches to their work. That, and most of the time you'll only find the most generic-looking stuff in these stores since the creators behind these assets want to suit as many projects as possible.

The only thing that happened to Raven is they're owned by Activision, and Activision has this weird habit of throwing needlessly large numbers of their teams at Call of Duty.

AFAIK they got turned into a support studio since Wolfenstein 2009 and Singularity went over budget and sold like shit.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Yeah, those games didn't do well. But that's also a really fast turnaround to basically killing what was one of your hit studios and putting what's left of them on shit like UI design on Call of Duty. That didn't even cover some big period of time either. They release that Wolverine game and Wolfenstein in 2009, Singularity the next year, then they're just over. Activision doesn't even send them back to doing something like Marvel Ultimate Alliance, (either with or without the Marvel property [Activision will still be putting out Marvel games for a few more years]) their Jedi Knight games, or their Soldier of Fortune games...they're just done.

Activison basically does this to a number of their previous big developers at this time too. Raven and Neversoft get shuffled off to doing minor work on CoD, and Bizarre Creations is just shut down. I just kind of found the whole who was doing what of it all pretty weird at the time. Like I could get shifting Raven to a Call of Duty title, it was one of the biggest series they had, so why not put one of your FPS studios on your mega popular FPS series? But this shit of having them (and Neversoft) do nothing work on CoD didn't make any fucking sense. I could of went for Raven Software CoD that was basically just their Soldier of Fortune 3, and it's actually kind of weird they weren't given CoD after Infinity Ward basically left in 2010 and became Respawn Entertaimment at EA, but them doing nothing work on CoD games until somewhat recently just seemed like a completely moronic move from Activision. Never having Neversoft follow up Gun seems like one of Activison's ultimate bonehead moves too; they had Red Dead Redemption five years before Rockstar, and did nothing with it past the first game.

Activison 2010s shortsightedness is a really odd thing. I mean, by the time they basically eliminate all their old major studios, they've also:

- Driven old top money making series Tony Hawk into the ground...so they know there's a time limit on these.
- Lost Harmonix to MTV Games, and in the process basically lost out on their surprise hit franchise Guitar Hero
- While they still had a studio called Infinity Ward, they lost many of the heads of the studio that created Call of Duty, and the big hit of the series Modern Warfare.

Now in 2010 they've got Call of Duty, and they've got Skylanders printing money, but I'm not exactly sure what they thought the future would be when they didn't have anyone doing anything new that might become a hit like Guitar Hero, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (which is a four year old franchise before it has its first huge hit) and Skylanders had become. For the last few years internally the only thing they seem to make anymore is CoD and some remakes. Funnily when it seemed like they brought back Tony Hawk they ended up losing Vicarious Visions to the Blizzard side of the company.

 

[Hace El Oso]

You're overthinking it. The average lifetime, period, of a successful company is around 15-24 years. So, it is no surprise that the company will go into decline around the midpoint of that cycle. It's not just a gaming thing, it's the behavior of companies in general. I suspect this is just how long it takes the Peter Principle to kick in where everyone gets promoted to a position in which they are no longer competent and the entire thing stalls out. And as the world moves faster, it seems the average lifespan of companies is falling.

Yes, and the ‘solution’ to this is to abandon the corporate system and instead operate as an artisan workshop where promotion into useless(perhaps comfortably undemanding) positions is impossible because they do not exist.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Someone post the picture. You know the one I'm referring to.

 

[Roguey]

The market is big enough to sustain a Paradox or Devolver Digital but those publishers still struggle alot when they try to move to more expensive projects, Paradox had been avoiding making cRPGs for quite a while for example.

Funding Bloodlines 2 blew up in their face.

Then we have only two explanations why someone didnt produced an indie System Shock 3 or a new indie Deus Ex: a)indie developers are a bunch of lazy retards and if that is the case, we are doomed because that wont change or b)producing content, especially consumable content, isnt as cheap as people think it is.

I think is in part a bit of both, after messing around with the Unreal and Unity asset stores and Mixamo, I can get a character and animate it to be game ready in 30mins, there is no excuse to release completely unpolished garbage that many of those bone headed developers do, however, that doesnt exactly make level design, especially expansive level design that is also good much easier to do. When you add the time required to produce those levels, iterate over them and play test them... boy the more complex the game is, the longer this process becomes and time is money.

Core Decay and Peripeteia are in development. The former has the support of 3D Realms and the latter has a solid string of demos and crowdfunding, so I believe it's realistic both will eventually be released.

(there's also a 2D System Shock from 2008 called Iji that's great)

 

[Ol' Willy]

If you look at the history of game developers, it is easy to notice that many tier 1 companies experienced what you could describe as a golden decade and after that turned into mediocre companies milking their past successes. Examples:

May check out how many people from original line-up left in the company after ten-fifteen years. May explain some things