Decline Retold, Remade, Reforged, Resurrected, Remastered - Where are new IPs?

[thesecret1]

Compare the size of a dev team in the 90's to today. Then realize that today's game design department alone is likely bigger than the entire studio back then. Said design department is responsible for designing virtually every mechanic in the game, along with the story and themes, and since it's so many people, the result is inevitably a compromise between them. Then ask yourself, can anything ballsy and creative really ever come out of a design by committee?

Indies have an advantage in that they're usually so small that the design department is 1 or 2 guys, or they're run in an autocratic fashion by a person who actually cares about the game (rather than the money) enough to just overrule the committee and get his way. In corporate environments, this is an impossibility, hence why you constantly see neutered designs where even good ideas get turned to absolute shit.

 

[MaxPaint]

You underestimate how many people want the remasters, how many people like the xbrz filtering and how many people won't bother with mods. One of my close friends who plays vidya has a steamdeck so you may think he's already used to trying to make something work, looking for fixes etc. And yet when I tell him about some older games he can run on this thing, the first thing he asks is if there is a remaster. Like nigga just download a file or two from a github and put into a game folder. Also consoles. Remasters are the only way to make money run these games there.

 

[Hellraiser]

The industry went out of the pioneering/start-up phase sometime in the late 90s at the latest, shit also works different if the top are also those who built the company and were specialists in the field that wanted to do things their way. Just look who ran EA, Blizzard, Interplay etc. when they chucked out those groundbreaking classics and who ran them when they turned to shit. You can easily notice when the dullards in suits armed with the oh-so-useful knowledge of business school memes and nothing else came in. Being financed/subject to the whims of the stock market rather than having to worry just about the FFF/venture capitalist is another major reason for the change in risk-aversion.

Speaking of business school memes, try to place where AAA gaming was in the late 90s on the below (I'm not asking about where it is now because that's too easy):

Of course, being a business school meme, the "price competition" and "price wars" parts in the maturity and decline stages are utterly detached from reality. High barrier of entry industries trend towards oligopolies and monopolies and big gaming keeps getting away with competing with based on production values and marketing budgets rather than anything else, this is the "emphasis on efficiency" in the industry. As are remasters, obviously.

tl;dr:

 

[luj1]

Compare the size of a dev team in the 90's to today. Then realize that today's game design department alone is likely bigger than the entire studio back then.

I agree, I think team size and big budgets are actually counter productive

 

[luj1]

Indies have an advantage in that [snip] they're run in an autocratic fashion by a person who actually cares about the game

Everything should be like this

 

[Silvanus]

Compare the size of a dev team in the 90's to today. Then realize that today's game design department alone is likely bigger than the entire studio back then.

I agree, I think team size and big budgets are actually counter productive

There is an entire book about this that nobody in important positions within AAA game development seems to have read: "He had added more programmers to a project falling behind schedule, a decision that he would later conclude had, counter-intuitively, delayed the project even further."

 

[luj1]

There is an entire book about this that nobody in important positions within AAA game development seems to have read...

His explanations are great:

1. It takes time for the new people to become productive
2. The number of communication channels increases with the number of people
3. While adding more people decreases the duration of tasks that can be divided, tasks that cannot be divided take longer

 

[Necrensha]

Why? Why why why why, I hear this question every other week. There are so many things factors working against a return to the 90s levels of creativity, I'll probably miss like half of them:
Add several hundred/thousands of people to the team--> Impossible to have a unified vision.
''We made record profits!''--> Fire everybody to increase the number even more, the scattered group of devs have to basically learn everything from scratch in other places.
Increasingly high number of managerial layers--> Higher chances of something going wrong, ideas being blocked, dissidents being silenced/fired, and of course money being so important that the idea of having anything even mildly out of the norm in the game is looked at with the same trust as leaving Mr Pibbles around your 3 year old daughter.
Diversity---> Yes, being forced to have a bunch of third world dipshits in the team will absolutely reduce the quality of everything and divide the trust and morale of anyone actually qualified.
Apathy--> Who cares about doing something new? *Reaches into the IP vault* Here, grab this thing called ''Alone in the Dark'' and reboot it or something, I don't care.
Diminishing returns--> Code is not one of those things that you can add 6000 additional people to go faster, all the opposite, but just TRY to explain that to the suits.
Hopelessness---> Technological progress doesn't fill your mind with the ideas of what we shall accomplish in the future like it used to in the past century. Now, the only thing you're looking forward to is a 500000% increase in surveillance thanks to AI, and people will stare at you and not understand where's the problem with having a camera up their butt 24/7
Impossible lines to reach---> What's that? You ONLY reached 438% profits with your game? To the Call of Duty mines with ye!

Humanity willingly decided to put on a leather suit + spiked collar combo, and until lady Economy decides to drop the whip there shall be no hope of change.

 

[Elttharion]

An industry crash is pretty much inevitable. Just looking at the latest Sony slop, Spiderman 1 had a budget of around 100 million dollars. 5 years later and Spiderman 2 has a budget of more than 300 million dollars. And that was a sequel that rehashed a lot of things from the previous games for a by the numbers ultra generic open world game. 300 million to create something that is the very definition of mediocre.

The audience is also not growing fast enough to accommodate the ballooning budgets. In fact it is actually shrinking due to demographic collapse. There are not enough kids to replace older gamers and the few kids that are born are spending their time on tiktok or other crap like that. Thats the reason so many devs are banking on nostalgia 'here look at thing you liked when you were young, isnt it cool? Just ignore the fact we cut anything that could be offensive and your old favorite character is now a fag or a trannie'.

Pair this with the insane activism and general incompetence from game devs and the huge brain drain in the industry and studios need remasters to pad out their finances.

 

[Hellraiser]

until lady Economy decides to drop the whip there shall be no hope of change.

I disagree with this with ever fibre of my being. There is no hope for change whatsoever from the current status quo, at best you can hope for a generational shift in 20-ish years maybe getting rid of some stupid trends, but at the end of the day you are still dealing with a largely consolidated industry with a high barrier of entry. Even if you had true AI middleware allowing a small team churn out current year AAA quality production values, the big publishers would win from market entrenchment and marketing budgets/channels available to them alone.

Oh sure, things like the MS/xbawks blob absorbing every fucking thing around with no rhyme or reason are likely to collapse eventually. But that just means the survivors of an AAA crash are going to be even more risk averse, possibly only in the financial area (acquisition sprees like Embracer and MS, starting a ton of project with cheap debt just because interest rates were low and then shitcanning them and panic cost cutting to pay debt etc.). Whoever is left is going to play safe, and it's just going to be the same stale shit for 10-20 years until the next generation comes in, thinks old timers were too cautious and full of "youthful" hubris just repeats the same stupid patterns.

This is not all doom and gloom however, the indie scene has shown that a million monkey with computers can occasionally by pure chance strike gold or a diamond that's a bit rough around the edges, like they did with Subnautica, Factorio, KSP, Workers and Resources etc.

 

[luj1]

Even if you had true AI middleware allowing a small team churn out current year AAA quality production values...

You don't need AAA production values for incline, that's your first mistake

 

[Damned Registrations]

Even if you had true AI middleware allowing a small team churn out current year AAA quality production values...

You don't need AAA production values for incline, that's your first mistake

Yeah, people act like production values of 20 years ago are unacceptable, when they're totally fine for anything short of a glorified movie- and glorified movies are shit anyways. Art direction trumps production values for visual appeal every time.

 

[luj1]

Art direction trumps production values

Pretty much

Back in the day the content was centrally authored. You used to have one or two crazy people (random example, Michael Kirkbride) doing art direction + okay budget (which is the best combination)

Now you have 1000 normies + millions in a budget

 

[Dark Souls II]

Contemporary gamedevs are thoroughly unable of creating Settings. Just look at Pillars of Eternity, maybe the most ambitious attempt of creating a new Setting:

There is a world called Eueuearere, and in this world there is this thing called Euaeahu'glywhtyth (a macguffin), and there are races called Auahuruaauah (they come in green and blue and they are not anything like orcs whatsoever), and there are many gods, such as the gods named Euerueua, Auahuahua, Uehueahuaa'gthly and Auauaheuehlywth (gods of Earth, Water, Fire and Air respectively). Playing a game in this setting has a side effect of making you want to kill yourself.

And yet still, western gamedevs have the compulsive need to either make shit OC donutsteel settings, or regurgitating old shit and making it subpar. Meanwhile, there is a better way:

1) Just make a vague setting like in Dark Souls, add some lore in item descriptions, you are not Tolkien, you don't have to make everything from scratch, if the gameplay and atmosphere is superior that's enough.
2) Just don't care about worldbuilding whatsoever - western fantasy is dead as fuck but Japanese fantasy is thriving, look at the popularity of animes like Frieren or Dungeon Meshi, all you need is elves, dwarves, magic and swords to know that the setting is fantasy, no fancy worldbuilding is needed, your story and characters should be what gets the narrative going.

 

[Silvanus]

There is a world called Eueuearere, and in this world there is this thing called Euaeahu'glywhtyth (a macguffin), and there are races called Auahuruaauah (they come in green and blue and they are not anything like orcs whatsoever), and there are many gods, such as the gods named Euerueua, Auahuahua, Uehueahuaa'gthly and Auauaheuehlywth (gods of Earth, Water, Fire and Air respectively). Playing a game in this setting has a side effect of making you want to kill yourself.

Pillars lore makes me zone out so hard that I got to the part about the gods before realising that this was a joke.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

This is what Mark Fischer - postmodern scholar - predicted in his writings.

- Neoliberal economy creates an atmosphere in which the society is driven by competition more than any other force
- relentless competition makes people short-sighted and forces them to live in the moment
- This not only stifles creativity, but it makes them nostalgic for a past in which they felt more at ease
- Hence all the ramkes, remasters, etc. Because your average game developer's financial state is so volatile they don't have time to sit around and think of original ideas. In the rare cases that they do, their output is not received as well as an update for an older game, because people's mind are so clogged by daily struggles they don't have time and patience for new things.

Watch this video for a deeper analysis:

he is Fisher

haha lol

I've waited for 5 years for someone to mention him on this cursed forum

 

[Odoryuk]

If you look at the gaming industry closely, the remakes, remasters and rereleases were in it almost since year 1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_remakes_and_remastered_ports

Today the accumulated amount of good stuff has led to even more remasters and remakes, proportionally, but new things still happen from time to time

 

[Maxie]

If you look at the gaming industry closely, the remakes, remasters and rereleases were in it almost since year 1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_remakes_and_remastered_ports

Today the accumulated amount of good stuff has led to even more remasters and remakes, proportionally, but new things still happen from time to time

yeah just count how many times has nintendo remastered super mario bros lmao

 

[Gahbreeil]

By the example of Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater being rebooted with modern day graphics...

It's for the kids, OP dude. It's for the kids to play what their parents did. And that's it.

 

[Odoryuk]

If you look at the gaming industry closely, the remakes, remasters and rereleases were in it almost since year 1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_remakes_and_remastered_ports

Today the accumulated amount of good stuff has led to even more remasters and remakes, proportionally, but new things still happen from time to time

yeah just count how many times has nintendo remastered super mario bros lmao

A good game will always be adopted to newer platforms. Case in point: Resident Evil 4 or Skyrim

 

[Maxie]

If you look at the gaming industry closely, the remakes, remasters and rereleases were in it almost since year 1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_remakes_and_remastered_ports

Today the accumulated amount of good stuff has led to even more remasters and remakes, proportionally, but new things still happen from time to time

yeah just count how many times has nintendo remastered super mario bros lmao

A good game will always be adopted to newer platforms. Case in point: Resident Evil 4 or Skyrim

i think it's rather fair to make a distinction here perhaps i was too reductive lmao. nintendo was indeed one of the first really big gamedev corporations and spearheaded remastering shit for new systems (also to drive demand for them, which makes sense in the context of the pc market because corps partner with nvidia/amd)
a more common 90s gamedev studios was just a bunch of sweaty guys in a rented closet, with maybe a bunch of freelancers doing art assets. wasn't feasible for most of them to remaster their games, very few turned any reasonable profit anyway

 

[Konjad]

I don't know what you're talking about, there's plenty of new IPs. Kingdom Come, Divinity: OS, Brigand: Oaxaca, Cyberprank, Elex... I don't feel like there's a lack of new stuff.

 

[Lord_Potato]

I don't know what you're talking about, there's plenty of new IPs. Kingdom Come, Divinity: OS, Brigand: Oaxaca, Cyberprank, Elex... I don't feel like there's a lack of new stuff.

It is true there's recently much more rebooting, restarting, repurposing (and often despoiling) of old IPs then 20 or 30 years ago.

However, they're still good things being made. You just have to look for them harder.

 

[Hellraiser]

Even if you had true AI middleware allowing a small team churn out current year AAA quality production values...

You don't need AAA production values for incline, that's your first mistake

And where was I implying it was? I even mentioned indies that I consider good at the last part of the post. That whole post was mostly about why AAA/big publishers won't change much no matter how many of them kick the bucket. The "true AI middleware closing the dev resources gap" hyperbole was there to underline the competetive advantages the established big players have compared to any new entrants into the AAA segment (I probably should have been more clear I meant that segment specifically, indies work/compete differently), and why I believe stagnancy is the only course forward that segment will ever have.

 

[sser]

By the example of Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater being rebooted with modern day graphics...

It's for the kids, OP dude. It's for the kids to play what their parents did. And that's it.

It's actually for the kids to show their parents how the years are slipping by.