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The rule of a decade?

anvi

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The 27 club of gaming! I think some burn out, but it is such a brutal business and so predatory. They are all out to kill each other and gobble each other up.
 

JarlFrank

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Companies aren't sentient entities.

The people working at those companies are the ones responsible for good games. And oftentimes it happens that after 10 years, many of the people responsible for good mechanics, content, visuals etc will have left the company. Bioware today isn't the same Bioware that made BG2, KotoR, etc - I doubt there's even one original Bioware dev left at the company. It's only a brand name now. Of course Mass Effect Andromeda and Dragon Age 3 are nothing like their previous games, because they're made by different people.

Then there's the phenomenon of people getting promoted out of their specialty fields and holding a managing position for a project they don't feel passionate about, while the thing they're really good at - like quest design or something - is now being done by other people. Case in point: Sawyer getting to lead the development of PoE which he really didn't want to do, and Feargus even told him what kind of main quest he wanted in the game, restricting Sawyer's creative freedom despite being project lead. The end result is a messy mediocrity that doesn't even know what it wants to be. Avellone designed some really good stories and quests when he got to be lead on PST and KotoR2, but later on he also was promoted and did more management shit and only had time for writing one or two companions when it comes to actual content creation.

So you reach a point where the people responsible for high quality content no longer create any content, either because they left for greener pastures or because they were promoted into a position where creating content is no longer their responsibility. And then suddenly, the games that company makes become drastically different... because they're no longer made by the same people.
 

Arbiter

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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

Why are those replacements often less qualified? Successful companies should be able to hire good people.
 

Butter

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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

Why are those replacements often less qualified? Successful companies should be able to hire good people.
Because companies infrequently hire based on merit. They don't want the optics of being staffed entirely by White guys.
 

Norfleet

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Why are those replacements often less qualified? Successful companies should be able to hire good people.
That's easy: Because if those people were more qualified, they would have had the job in the first place. Thus, a replacement must necessarily be of inferior quality than the original, otherwise it would have been the original choice in the first place. It's just like why every new game you play will always be the worst game you've ever played: If this game were better than the previous games you played, why did you play those instead? Thus, the current game you're playing was chosen at lower priority than all of the previous options: It is a worse choice, that you are now pushed into after having exhausted your previous options.
 

J1M

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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?
Generational knowledge transfer failure.
 

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
It's just like why every new game you play will always be the worst game you've ever played: If this game were better than the previous games you played, why did you play those instead? Thus, the current game you're playing was chosen at lower priority than all of the previous options: It is a worse choice, that you are now pushed into after having exhausted your previous options.

It is also that most humans experience a linear progression of time and cannot play games before they exist.
 

J1M

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Companies aren't sentient entities.

The people working at those companies are the ones responsible for good games. And oftentimes it happens that after 10 years, many of the people responsible for good mechanics, content, visuals etc will have left the company. Bioware today isn't the same Bioware that made BG2, KotoR, etc - I doubt there's even one original Bioware dev left at the company. It's only a brand name now. Of course Mass Effect Andromeda and Dragon Age 3 are nothing like their previous games, because they're made by different people.

Then there's the phenomenon of people getting promoted out of their specialty fields and holding a managing position for a project they don't feel passionate about, while the thing they're really good at - like quest design or something - is now being done by other people. Case in point: Sawyer getting to lead the development of PoE which he really didn't want to do, and Feargus even told him what kind of main quest he wanted in the game, restricting Sawyer's creative freedom despite being project lead. The end result is a messy mediocrity that doesn't even know what it wants to be. Avellone designed some really good stories and quests when he got to be lead on PST and KotoR2, but later on he also was promoted and did more management shit and only had time for writing one or two companions when it comes to actual content creation.

So you reach a point where the people responsible for high quality content no longer create any content, either because they left for greener pastures or because they were promoted into a position where creating content is no longer their responsibility. And then suddenly, the games that company makes become drastically different... because they're no longer made by the same people.
In that case, the real problem is that you have to take the promotion to make more money. It makes no logical sense, it would be like a record label promoting Britney Spears to management because her first record sold well, instead of just asking her to record a second album.

Unlike other creative industries, most game dev compensation is paid before the work is complete instead of as royalties on successful results.
 

Cazzeris

Guest
Just look at the people: I changed a hell of a lot in 10 years. So it's either the consumers or the developers who fail to adapt, get tired, lose the allure...

If anything, the surprise is gone. After a decade, the devs know what their games look like, and so do the gamers. What is the point then?

People stop enjoying the discovery after a while. They stop thinking, and start remembering, and the conscience dies, and new things are not necessary anymore. Look at your parents

Plus, games have a child-like essence to them. An old toy maker does not assimilate new ways of interactin and explorin
 

gurugeorge

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Strap Yourselves In
Any good company is a bit like a band - it's a bunch of people who are simpatico and mesh well together, productively and creatively. So that has a certain lifespan, dictated in part just by their ages (folks are at their peak from about their mid 20s to their mid 30s) and in part by them starting to drift off and do their own thing (concentrate on family, become interested in other things, etc.). The "company" that's left - well, if all goes well, the people who founded the company pick people to carry it on who are also somewhat sympathetic to the vibe of it, and it carries on with a sort of homoepathic essence of what it was, but even that fades out eventually, till only the name and history and maybe some internal traditions of it are left.

For my money, Looking Glass and Troika were the best companies in the field. I suppose Blizzard too, but in a way I almost can't forgive them for what they did to the MMO with WoW (even though it was amazing at the time). I'm sure there are some companies rising now who'll do great things too (I can think of the Korean company, Dandylion, who made Troubleshooter - if they manage to survive financially and keep going. Or perhaps the Frenchies who made Solasta.)
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
I disagree that a company must change over time due to new people and people leaving. Company culture changes drastically from too many people leaving(obviously some people are much more important than others with regards to this) and too many new hires.
Has Bethesda changed much in 15-20 years? I don't really think so. They also have a surprisingly small core development team compared to "AAA" dev companies.
Has Obsidian changed dramatically in the 9 year span between New Vegas and Outer Worlds? Absolutely.
 

Roguey

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Has Bethesda changed much in 15-20 years? I don't really think so. They also have a surprisingly small core development team compared to "AAA" dev companies.

Bethesda's been around since the mid 80s but one can say their good decade was from TES: Arena through Morrowind at which point the company culture changed.
 

lycanwarrior

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

Might as well put Rockstar there too.

Most of the original people who made the GTA and RDR games are now gone, many of them having left after RDR2 was released.
 

lycanwarrior

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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.

Excellent analysis.

The old man yelling at the clouds Simpsons character pretty much applies here lol.

When you see so many posters on Reddit and Youtube mentioning great SP AAA games that have come out recently or their favorite AAA developers, it is almost always either Nintendo or a company connected to Sony (Sucker Punch, Naughty Dog, etc.). In other words, a 1st-party console manufacturer.
 

lycanwarrior

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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.

If MSFT allows Obsidian/InXile to make the HARDCORE/PARTY-BASED CRPGs, then I will believe it.
 

Rincewind

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Codex+ Now Streaming!
This is what happens to initially successful small game studios and companies in general once people whose only interest in life is to see numbers growing in their bank accounts start running the show:

The programmers and the developers there were extremely excited about [Elite]. The people we unkindly later referred to as the suits talked about it and said, ‘Oh yes, it’s a very interesting technical demo and it shows that you are very competent, but why would anyone want to play a game like that? How long is it going to take to play it?’ We said, ‘Oh, quite a long time.’ They said, ‘What? Half an hour?’ We said, ‘No, no, no, weeks, and you won’t really finish it,’ which they didn’t like either. We said, ‘You just get better. You will be able to do more things, you will be able to go further and explore and ultimately you will get bored with it.’ They said, ‘But that’s not very good. You can’t do that. What happens if you die?’ I said, ‘You die.’ They didn’t like that either! They said, ‘Why can’t you have three lives?’ I said, ‘Well it really doesn’t fit in with the logic of the game, but we are allowing you to save your place, so that’s essentially the equivalent of lives.’ ‘Oh, so how many times can you do that?’ I said, ‘Well, as many times as you like.’ ‘But you don’t get a free life when you get 10,000?’ I said, ‘Well, we haven’t got a score.’ They said, ‘You need a score.’ I said, ‘That’s what our money is. Whatever you do earns money. If you shoot a pirate, you get a bounty. If you trade goods …’ And they said, ‘That’s all very complicated. No one will want to do that.’ And, actually, to be fair, we were a bit worried, thinking we might be in this sort of ivory tower. Are people going to want to work out how much money they need to buy 16 tonnes of food or whatever?

(source)
 
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I disagree that a company must change over time due to new people and people leaving. Company culture changes drastically from too many people leaving(obviously some people are much more important than others with regards to this) and too many new hires.
Has Bethesda changed much in 15-20 years? I don't really think so. They also have a surprisingly small core development team compared to "AAA" dev companies.
Has Obsidian changed dramatically in the 9 year span between New Vegas and Outer Worlds? Absolutely.

Yes, they've changed a lot in the last 20 years. Morrowind to now is 19 years. 20 year from their last released game is stuff they were doing in '98. Daggerfall falls within 20 years of Fallout 4. I'd even say they've changed from Oblivion and Fallout 3 to Skyrim and Fallout 4 and three of those games released within the same generation.

I was thinking about this, companies that do and don't change over time. This seems to be more of a western thing. You look at companies like Nintendo and Capcom, or some of these little companies that spun out of those larger Japanese companies, and they don't really have these kind of big shifts outside of the company itself going through some kind of large shift like Sega dropping out of the console market and later the arcade market dying. Although even with a company like Sega who in the '90s was known for making Sonic and good action games, they're still know for making Sonic and good action games; you can even see a progression from Streets of Rage, to Die Hard Arcade, to SpikeOut, to Yakuza.

Meanwhile the big western companies (Activision, EA, Ubisoft [not so much Take-Two]) almost seem to change from console generation to console generation. You go back around 15 year with Activision and their big stuff is Marvel games, Tony Hawk, and id related first person shooters; you jump forward to now and it's like Call of Duty and remaking games of Sony mascots from the PSX era.
 

Higher Game

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Most MMA fighters have a good decade in them unless they started at 35. Creativity and avoiding being figured out starts to fade at around that point, and this can happen to guys still in their late 20's who are physically at their best and even most skilled, but their subtle telegraphs and patterns are exposed and they can't rewire themselves fast or consistently enough to keep up.

Video games, like combat sports, have an artistic element. The most noble artists know how to stretch out their allotted creativity decade over 30+ years instead of burning out. We haven't gotten them yet.
 

JDR13

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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.

You're wrong here. Unless you think id being a subsidiary now means we shouldn't count their newer games for some reason. Both Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal were hugely successful. In fact, Eternal is the biggest seller they've ever had.
 

Falksi

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I was thinking this after watching Vogal's gay promo for Queen's Wish 2. Gone is his desire to make great games, instead we have a sales pitch about a Fallout 4 wannabee clone which he's making to purely make bank.

Fuck the cunts. That's what abuse is for. Shower the with it in droves.
 

Arbiter

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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.

You're wrong here. Unless you think id being a subsidiary now means we shouldn't count their newer games for some reason. Both Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal were hugely successful. In fact, Eternal is the biggest seller they've ever had.

It does not change the fact Doom 2016 was restarted multiple times and released way over budget and way over schedule. In 12 years after Doom 3 id only managed to release 2 games: Rage and nuDoom. He knows how long it would take if they were not required by Bethesda.
 

JDR13

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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.

You're wrong here. Unless you think id being a subsidiary now means we shouldn't count their newer games for some reason. Both Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal were hugely successful. In fact, Eternal is the biggest seller they've ever had.

It does not change the fact Doom 2016 was restarted multiple times and released way over budget and way over schedule. In 12 years after Doom 3 id only managed to release 2 games: Rage and nuDoom. He knows how long it would take if they were not required by Bethesda.

The point is that you were blantantly wrong in claiming that Doom 3 was their last successful game.
 

JDR13

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I was thinking this after watching Vogal's gay promo for Queen's Wish 2. Gone is his desire to make great games, instead we have a sales pitch about a Fallout 4 wannabee clone which he's making to purely make bank.

How is Queen's Wish 2 like Fallout 4? Just curious. I haven't watched the promo myself.

Also, when did Vogel ever make great games?
 

Arbiter

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Why are those replacements often less qualified? Successful companies should be able to hire good people.
That's easy: Because if those people were more qualified, they would have had the job in the first place. Thus, a replacement must necessarily be of inferior quality than the original, otherwise it would have been the original choice in the first place. It's just like why every new game you play will always be the worst game you've ever played: If this game were better than the previous games you played, why did you play those instead? Thus, the current game you're playing was chosen at lower priority than all of the previous options: It is a worse choice, that you are now pushed into after having exhausted your previous options.

It does not work that way. When a company hires it cannot simply pick the best candidates from the entire workforce: it can only hire people who are currently looking for new opportunities, are interested in this particular employer and live in a suitable location. The workforce isn't static either, people enter the workforce as they graduate end leave when they retire. Employees might become much more qualified over the course of their careers: yesterday's bad candidates might become excellent candidates tomorrow (or the other way round).
 

Falksi

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I was thinking this after watching Vogal's gay promo for Queen's Wish 2. Gone is his desire to make great games, instead we have a sales pitch about a Fallout 4 wannabee clone which he's making to purely make bank.

How is Queen's Wish 2 like Fallout 4? Just curious. I haven't watched the promo myself.

Also, when did Vogel ever make great games?

It also focusses on construction.
 

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