Is the commodification of video games ruining RPG quality?

[luj1]

wow

 

[Kruyurk]

[/QUOTE]
[/QUOTE]

"See, those are DLC shitlets to sprinkle on the main AAA turd."

 

[Frozen]

Technology is lagging and people making games are more incompetent then ever. They need almost a decade to spew out some generic shit that doesn't even look good and is completely broken even after all that time.

I don't care if its "a true" rpg or not, If it would be at least fun to play as an action game and looked great I'm in. But most of games are just boring shit and don't look anything better then in "normal" times when 5y for a game development meant it would never come out. Now its like impossible short cycle. WTF are these people doing for so long?

 

[FriendlyMerchant]

Said degree is gotten in the infested woke indoctrination system that has brainwashed these people into producing mediocrity and the destruction of the things made by their betters.

Yep. This is why Central and Eastern Europe, where the Frankfurt school has less influence, are producing better RPG's. No way that a game like Kingdom come could have been made in Commiefornia. Even in AAA sphere, Cyberbug 2077 is not great, but compared to western AAA games like Faggout 76, Anthem, ME:Andromeda, DA:I(...), Cyberbug 2077 seems amazing(not because is great, but because the others AAA are bad). Other huge problem of the development industry is the "diversity hiring" and pressure from activist investors.

I'd hardly call Cheese Pizza 2077 an rpg. It pretty much is just a GTA game with a custom character.

 

[Pink Eye]

Mega gross.

 

[Azdul]

There was a time when video games were made by self-proclaimed toymakers (basically a bunch of Jeff Vogels). People who gravitated to the medium for its potential in creating something fun, or beautiful, or insightful.
(...)
Commodification of media across the board appears to be lowering our standards for art as a society.
(...)
The best example would probably be Raid: Shadow Legends, a turn-based gacha "RPG" that made more than $569 million in its lifetime. And they did this by spending millions in saturating the internet with their horrible, cringy ads.

There was a time when society was willing to accept only the best of Jeff Vogel's MS Paint creations - but then society art standards had lowered to the point where people enjoy unremarkable art of Raid : Shadow Legends

The truth is that market simply had grown and diversified.

The main difference are sales expectations. In 1991 bestselling CRPG (Eye of the Beholder 1) sold 150 000 copies. Nowadays it would be seen as a failure - so the CRPG market was left by big publishers - and the niche was filled by indies and Eastern European companies.

Raid : Shadow Legends is a successor of games packed on 90's shareware CDs to fill up '650 MB of quality games' quota. Kids were / are playing them because with 0$ budget they had no other choice.

And finally - if there is unfulfilled market demand for hardcore RPGs - it also means that there is market opportunity to make some serious $$$ by making one. Distribution barriers that were there in 90's - basically disappeared.

Or - maybe the number of people complaining is much larger than number of people actually willing to buy RPGs made according to 90's standards on typical 90's RPG budget.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

 

[PorkaMorka]

And finally - if there is unfulfilled market demand for hardcore RPGs - it also means that there is market opportunity to make some serious $$$ by making one. Distribution barriers that were there in 90's - basically disappeared.

Or - maybe the number of people complaining is much larger than number of people actually willing to buy RPGs made according to 90's standards on typical 90's RPG budget.

I wouldn't assume that the market is able to perfectly satisfy all demands.

It seems like games that are both great and hardcore are not necessarily that profitable to make, because they involve doing a lot of work to please a relatively small and demanding audience.

Battle Brothers seems like it should be an indie success story, it has tons of fans making content about it, got more attention than a normal game in that genre, good reviews, only took 3 guys to make it, looks kind of inexpensive to make in terms of graphics.

But there were some indications that it might have only been moderately financially successful, (at least before the DLCs) because it took those guys 5 years to make it and they had to invest tons of hours into it, giving up other opportunities and in the end they may have only made enough to keep things going for one more game. If that next game fails, they might still be out of business.

It's entirely possible that a worse game could have sold better and cost less to make, just by marketing to a broader audience and copying what is popular at the moment.

 

[Tyranicon]

Battle Brothers seems like it should be an indie success story, it has tons of fans making content about it, got more attention than a normal game in that genre, good reviews, only took 3 guys to make it, looks kind of inexpensive to make in terms of graphics.

But there were some indications that it might have only been moderately financially successful, (at least before the DLCs) because it took those guys 5 years to make it and they had to invest tons of hours into it, giving up other opportunities and in the end they may have only made enough to keep things going for one more game. If that next game fails, they might still be out of business.

It's entirely possible that a worse game could have sold better and cost less to make, just by marketing to a broader audience and copying what is popular at the moment.

I dunno, Battle Brothers is one of the best-selling small team RPGs. It's hard to estimate profit without a direct quote from the developers, but they have ~15k steam reviews. Which means they have around .5 to 1 million buyers on Steam. The game's lowest recorded price in USD is $10. Non-USD probably goes lower.

Doing a (very, very rough) calculation of half a million copies sold at $10, we get $5 million. With Steam's cut, refunds and fees, devs usually take home about 60% before taxes. So on the extreme minimum end, Battle Brothers made $3 million on just the base game, on Steam. This is entirely guesswork.

Is it a decent income for 3 fulltime devs with unknown business costs, over x amount of years? I dunno, depends on their individual circumstances. But I would say it's a pretty rare success in this field. We have yet to see a small-team cRPG reach the financial heights of Stardew Valley, Undertale, etc (unless you consider Rimworld a cRPG).

Even right now, BB has 1,661 players in-game. Astounding.

But yeah, they could've spent one year making some isekai hentai visual novel and made the same in sales....

Goddamn why didn't I do that?

 

[0wca]

It is rejection of mediocrity but there is a little elitism hiding in there too. Or maybe elitism is the wrong word for it, maybe just the fact that when you grow older you see a lot of things and are harder and harder to impress. It's like if you concluded an epic, several year long tabletop campaign ages ago and then a kid walks up to you and says: "I just killed a goblin with a magic missile!" and expects you to be excited.

And that's only the first factor. The other is that video games (and entertainment in general really) have become the propaganda arm / pacifier of the government to keep their people in line. It's like colosseum in the Roman Empire; the biggest games were always held when times were tough so as to distract from reality. Now that might just be another word for escapism, but when used in this way by the elite, the quality of said entertainment quickly drops, because it isn't about how good it is as long as it's provided.

And that is how standards start to continually decline. Then, eventually, you get a slight upward trajectory on the graph of quality and people lose their shit and start overpraising it and this lowers the standard even further because it slowly starts erasing past achievements with the new, watered-down version that's only perceived as better in relativity to the current standard.

We basically have to hit absolute rock bottom of entertainment before stuff gets better again, because that's when even the most moronic of patrons are going to realize the shit they're consuming. We can also help this along by pointing out the quality in the days of old and getting the newer generations past the stigma of "bad graphics", but that's easier said than done.

 

[Fedora Master]

Technology is lagging and people making games are more incompetent then ever. They need almost a decade to spew out some generic shit that doesn't even look good and is completely broken even after all that time.

I don't care if its "a true" rpg or not, If it would be at least fun to play as an action game and looked great I'm in. But most of games are just boring shit and don't look anything better then in "normal" times when 5y for a game development meant it would never come out. Now its like impossible short cycle. WTF are these people doing for so long?

Like any failing culture, we're losing the ability to do things we were able to in the past. Go to the moon, secure our borders, make decent games...

 

[gurugeorge]

Maybe it's because I'm getting old, but looking out at the sea of new shows, movies, and yes even my beloved RPG genre, I can't but feel that our standards are slipping.

They've been slipping for a long time - basically the early 2000s were the last time big money put quality, integrity, or even making huge amounts of money, anywhere near the top of the list. The interests of big money moved on to social engineering and pushing a particular Narrative, particularly when they had the wake-up call of Trump/Brexit (which showed that they hadn't lulled people into a false sense of security as much as they thought they'd done). Social engineering and pushing a particular narrative are now prioritized, even ahead of making a profit sometimes.

However, in some cases they only have a certain amount of financial headroom, so they can't afford to lose too much money (even the mighty Disney can't afford to do that year after year), and they do have to think about quality and pleasing the customer to some extent too. The success of the recent well-made Spider-Man movie (in the teeth of a supposed depression of movie-going due to COVID) is probably ringing a few bells, and we may see a retreat from full-on Narrative pushing, to the more tolerable mix of message-pushing and customer-first entertainment we had before the mid to late 2000s.

But that would still leave in place the other factor responsible for the drop in quality in the videogame field in particular: the changeover from small, dedicated nerdy audiences to mass-market audiences. So you might see a return to stuff that slightly weights entertainment over narrative-pushing, but it'll still be lowest-common-denominator stuff.

 

[Sacibengala]

Mega gross.

Yeah. The worst part is that you couldn't even fuck her.

 

[Divine Blessing]

so Richard Garriot, Brian Fargo etc. coded for nothing but love, right? even Chris Roberts donates all his CIG fortunes to charity...

video games r commodities, a commercial product, for the purpose of profit?
so the opposite (of the questions implied answer) is true: its the commodification, the intent of profit, which generates video games and therefore quality at all.

the discourse may debate on the Bioware-Syndrome, when corporate control negatively influence, if not stagnate the products quality. because every mainstream trend the last two decades has been at least initiated from indie devs and community. see MoBas, Survival, Battle Royal, all redefined gaming and turned into megacons or got at least bought into, hired or copied.

AAA budget doesnt guarantee quality, not even (indie) talent, this definition is for the customers to individually vote via their wallets. so, if there is any, what r the objective criteria for quality in video games (and RPGs)? does a technically up-to-date product guarantee quality? do the 500 millions of Star Citizen make it a success? does the name (and brand) Jeff Vogelmann?

before we dive into marketing analysis specifics, y not understand the very base of all marketing (and video games)?
(hint: profit)

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

Mega gross.

She's hot

+18

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

WTF are these people doing for so long?

Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Also office politicking.

 

[Azdul]

But there were some indications that it might have only been moderately financially successful, (at least before the DLCs) because it took those guys 5 years to make it and they had to invest tons of hours into it, giving up other opportunities and in the end they may have only made enough to keep things going for one more game. If that next game fails, they might still be out of business.

It's entirely possible that a worse game could have sold better and cost less to make, just by marketing to a broader audience and copying what is popular at the moment.

If it took them 5 years to make 2D game like Battle Brothers - chasing latest trends and broader audience is out of the question.

It was the same in 90's: 5 years would mean that you start development before release of first Voodoo - and finish it when Geforce 3 was becoming popular. Game would have been cancelled at least three times in the meantime for looking dated and missing technology window.

It took less than 6 months to develop EoB 1. When EoB 1 got good reviews, SSI approved development of the sequel and Westwood released EoB 2 The Legend of Darkmoon (once again - on multiple platforms) in the same year. Next year Ultima Underworld was released - and technology window for EoB sequels was slowly closing.

So Battle Brothers developers should not complain - in 'good old days' they would have not released their game at all.

 

[Not.AI]

I don't think commodification is the primary issue here, it the monetarisation models that fucks up corporate incentives.

(a) Nah, I say. It's not even a problem of incentives. It's even worse.

I've come to realize, through over the years in business, from finance to manufacturing to startups, that the whole story is almost never about incentives.

Incentives have always, everywhere been insufficient. Even a word for it: slack.

What I've seen is this.

In large companies, most people don't really _work_.

They _go_ to _work_ and _come_ to _work_.

Old essay on this topic (circa 1994?) by the founder of Autodesk.

In that company, apparently, out of over 200 people doing something, around like 15 actually contributed at all to anything that shipped. To the product.

This is the prime reason why startups can compete with large companies at all. If most people in a large company actually worked, no small firm could ever compete.

In a startup, if there are 20 people there, 19 at least are doing work.

A larger firm will try to produce more features - this and that and this and that - but with 15 out of every 200 doing real work - as opposed to so-called "bullshit" jobs... - they will fail. They have a product marketed to need 2000 people working on it to meet expectations - working on it at the _same_ level of craftsmanship that will be found in mostly in small groups where a lot of attention goes to everyone - but they have 150 doing the work. They tend to fail to meet expectations. In every criterion, they tend to fail.

Everything of good quality has always been and will be subsidized.

Bruce Sterling once wrote that science as an activity would have failed long ago if overly motivated people who work mostly for free for most of the day every day didn't go into it. It's not that scientists are idealistic and eccentric - but that nobody who isn't eccentric would work for almost any amount of money how many hours and with the intensity needed to get anything done given the self-selected goals of science. (Distraction)

With larger firms, the probability that most or even any of the hires are going to work as hard as actually needed to meet the expectations of the consumer is nearly nil.

Many really great games are really great solely because internal motivation of the tight team selection basically subsidized the product.

Relax the amount of attention that goes into team selection and into quality control and you get - almost every time - the generic, not very fun stuff we tend to get.

Individuals who get hired to work in such firms may remain highly talented and motivated, but since they know that they alone are not enough to produce the results actually needed, and they see that there are not enough of a proportion of people like them on the team, who will aim to produce the very best product regardless of anything else, they don't bother to do the best because they recognize there would be not point, only stress.

It's a vicious cycle.

Because quality comes from attention and attention doesn't scale. Anybody like the "customer service" bots in aliexpress, for example? Did they actually get great "customer service"?

And incentives don't matter much - because incentives to solve a problem don't matter when everyone realized the problem is either very hard or unsolvable.

Finally, most large corporations are filled by people who took the job as a lifestyle choice, not actually for maximizing profit (Ackoff wrote about this years ago...), and then of course incentives don't matter. Whereas firms trying to break into the market are often filled by people actually following incentives. Their only problem is lack of resources, however. Two ways to lose, no way to win, eh?

Majority of those millions who say they enjoy RPGs actually enjoy open-world cinematic action-adventures, which they think are called RPGs. RDR, Assassin's Creed, for example.

(b) Nah, I say. Or rather it is not the main story. But the side story.

There is a limited sense in which this is the case - many people who say they like fantasy actually enjoy specifically David Gemmell and only David Gemmell, or people who say they like horror only really like Stephen King, not horror the genre - that sort of consumer base - hence fantasy and horror have actually collapsed a few times as markets.

Many people who say they like RPGs don't like RPGs, they like one particular series of games that might actually be an RPG.

Ass. Creed is an RPG, I think. Maybe half of the games these days are RPGs in a broad sense. Merely the RPG part is poorly done. See above.

But that is a side issue. Most games are tending to become some "lite" version of Deus Ex mixed with the 1980s and 1990s 2D RPGs which were light on stats and light on action and weird mixes. Merely now with great graphics.

These games can be good. But they require an enormous amount of hours of work to get any good result. Far more hours than almost any firm will _really, actually_ put in. Whatever they say they put in or seem to put in. So see above again.

(c) Most stocks are going up apparently during a recession - what incentives do large firms have to develop great products? If they can increase in value when most of their products are unavailable or in severe shortage?

Summary. Incentives have no effect where incentives can have little effect. Incentives are there. You can make huge profit on a great game. But most firms are already wealthy, very wealthy. They grow anyway so long as they produce any product. And they can get 300M on a 100M, for example, on a low effort product, or 3B on a 150M with a high effort product, but it will take them 100 times and not 10 times the effort. It ruins any lifestyle choices. And besides, they are incapable of overall getting the same quality team but with that many people, unless the management works as hard as the owners of some startups or newcomer firms.

But large newcomer firms are hard to start: no connections means few resources. 150M is something only a large firm can gather. It's not that newcomers lack wealth per se, they mostly lack the business and social network to get the resources onto a project.

The result: a bad time for a consumer overall, with only a few exceptions.

In other words, my previous example wasn't an accident. It's the same problem that science funding has. Same problem book publishing has.

The good stuff will probably be in the exceptions.

Until technology is good enough to allow a team of 20 to do the work of 2000.

 

[gurugeorge]

With larger firms, the probability that most or even any of the hires are going to work as hard as actually needed to meet the expectations of the consumer is nearly nil.

Many really great games are really great solely because internal motivation of the tight team selection basically subsidized the product.

Yeah I agree with a lot of this post. My work experience is mostly in the music industry, but I've temped for law firms, banks, engineering companies, all sorts, and this is basically correct. People grossly underestimate the amount of time and energy you have to put into anything professional to get it "out the door," and how the final quality of something skeeters on the knife edge of small decisions made quickly, by a (usually male) team that's very tight and simpatico and doesn't need much in the way of overt communication, and is mostly driven by enthusiasm, to the point of (as you say) being self-sacrificing, effectively subsidizing the final product. Also, with commercial product, the manager of the team, or producer, has to be talented at managing people (oh wonder of wonders! ) - to command or cajole, as needed - and has to schizophrenically be able to keep one foot in the heat of the engine room and one foot in the wider world, with a constant eye on how the final product will hit its intended consumer or audience.

It's only that amount of enthusiasm that can really carry a thing, and where you have even pockets of that in a bigger company, that's why and how it works. The idea of disparate individuals meshing by means of objective co-ordination signals (like incentives) is largely mythological (I mean, it's not totally wrong, it does happen, but as you say, at best it produces stuff that's workmanlike and functional, not the really inspired things that push boundaries and have something like the feel of a work of art).

Even at a less intense level, the multicultural and diversity hiring requirements mean things have to be run more by blatant rules, which in turn have to be managed (more waste), and everything has to be dumbed down more and more, with proportionately more deadweight.

In fact even the idea of a "job" as a defined role is off the mark. In the best teams, even if there's some specialization, everyone can do several things well enough to take up some slack if necessary, and there are layers of overlapping magisteria.

 

[lycanwarrior]

In regards to viewing video games as "art"...

Historically, "art" has been funded by rulers, religious institutions and other wealthy individuals/entities. Aka the "patronage" system.

Nowadays, art is also funded by the government.

Asking big corporations to fund "art" and not "products" that make a profit is not realistic IMHO.

 

[Azdul]

Old essay on this topic (circa 1994?) by the founder of Autodesk.

In that company, apparently, out of over 200 people doing something, around like 15 actually contributed at all to anything that shipped. To the product.

This is the prime reason why startups can compete with large companies at all. If most people in a large company actually worked, no small firm could ever compete.

In a startup, if there are 20 people there, 19 at least are doing work.

I agree that out of 1000 people credited on Assassins Creed less than half were doing something useful.

However, founders have skewed view of the company - especially when they're not good at managing large enterprise.

If startup of 20 people has 500 customers - you can be sure that there will be no customer support whatsoever. If the product works - great. If not - though luck.

Most startups depend on Google / Microsoft / Amazon for infrastructure and distribution. Hardware startups depend on TSMC / Samsung / Global Foundry. All depend on VC leeches for financing. At some point big boys will try to screw them up and get larger part of the pie for themselves.

As the result - 90% of all startups go bankrupt in first few years.

IMO any startup that tries to do either MMO or AAA graphics or brand new game engine or single-player and multi-player at the same time - is punching above its weight. Single player RPG taking risks in gameplay department - is just about what startup can achieve.

 

[Faarbaute]

Once game development became prestigious, it was over for nerds.

Now you got normal, uninspired, wagies, working a job. These people are basicly peasants suited for rote work but find themselves in a creative field because there are no factory jobs left. While at the top you got typical manager types you could slot in and out of any buissness.

These people don't give a shit about quality. They don't even know what quality is.

They are like a colony of sea creatures crowding a hydrothermal vent or a pack of hyenas fighting for control of a water hole. The onley reason it took them this long to sink their claws into game development was because up until this point, it had no value to them.

 

[Not.AI]

(a) Actually multiplayer is easier than singleplayer in most ways today. A company can buy its own at scale infrastructure relatively inexpensively these days without depending on any giant to provide the service. The service is easier to use but actually more expensive than owning your own hardware. Powerful servers can be had so inexpensively because the giants upgrade their gear often and flood the market at the same time with the not-quite-best gear that is, for a smaller firm, much more than good enough while they are growing but not yet as big.

However, the smaller firm also must innovate in the tech themselves if they want to do multiplayer, that is the tradeoff. Not everybody wants to do that. Or can do that.

And this is where notion of a so-called "unfair advantage" is important for startups that want to do something interesting.

Like was saying above about subsidies. Quality is not necessarily something that must be paid for by patronage, for profit companies can and often do create art, nor by size, but specifically by some kind of subsidy. Some unfair advantage they simply already have at the start. Then it's not cost prohibitive and also requires no convincing of anybody to get onboard and simply happens naturally.

Consider the music to the Dragon Quests, for example. It's only because Sugiyama decided to do it. One individual who happened to be overqualified to begin with. And worked on that product. Very well, suppose he worked on another product. Then that other product would have had that kind of score.

Singleplayer is more dependent on the firm creating one-time-seen content and - to be done well - tends to be more expensive and - what is important - yet with fewer ways to pay for itself. A double disadvantage, hence much more difficult.

(b) The point however is quite simple about large versus small companies doing work.

Consider a large firm with 1000 staff on research. Each year each researcher gets 200K. And each one gets each year 100K in expenses for their research to spend as needed.

100K doesn't sound like much but that is a R&D budget each year of ... 300M. Must be a rather large company.

Now look at some startup whose total budget might be 20M. 10X less than that.

But notice that 19M >> 100K.

Founders might take from 0K to 100K. So there might easily be 19M for a single project.

In a startup, unlike the larger firm, attention is plentiful, they select one great project. Or maybe two, maybe three.

Startup projects tend to be far more likely to succeed precisely because they have far more resources on the project that is competing in the market. The only thing they do lack is equivalent scale hiring ability.

(c) Exactly - quality production must be subsidized by overcompetent, overqualified people going into the field. If treated as just an ordinary job - no more motivation than for any other job except that it pays the bills - quality products being made is extremely unlikely.

But in large, mainstream products, mature markets, with large firms, can't and won't, with few exceptions, give enough attention to the very best, overqualified team to make the very best product for consumers. Even if, had they bothered to make the very best product, not a merely adequate or substandard product, they would have gotten far more profit by the way.

 

[Maxie]

Take the rod to whoever has successfully promoted RPGs being twenty-odd minutes long bits of 'quests' consisting mostly of talking to some stupid NPCs written as ideology dispensers (ie. Avellone and similar talentless hacks)
Having taken the rod, play Etrian and cackle at plebs from atop your well deserved ivory tower

 

[Not.AI]

Uematsu on your team is another example of a company producing quality due to "unfair advantage" - exactly.