Square Enix gonna Square Enix (but it's not just them) (Gaming)

by someotherguy, Hertfordshire, England, Wednesday, April 06, 2016, 15:48 (2940 days ago) @ Cody Miller

They had the same problem with Tomb Raider and one of the Hitman games. Reviewed well, sold well (in the millions, at least), but weren't making GOTY gamgbusters, so they were considered failures.

It's an almost industry-wide problem at this point, at least in the "AAA" space, and I'd say it's terrible for the industry. Big budget games need to sell an extraordinary number of copies just to cover their costs, let alone be seen as a success, which typically leads to one of two things -

• The game is homogenised, designed by committee and built to apeal to the most focus groups at once leading to a jack of all trades game that does everything but doesn't do any one thing well enough to really resonate with anyone
  
• Or the game is riddled with microtransactions to try and make up for "poor" sales.

if you're really lucky you get both.

Then you get smaller or indie teams who know their audience, know what they can expect to sell and make a game that caters to that audience and does it well. They won't ship 10 million units, sure, but they don't need to. A great "double-A" example is Demon's Souls. They knew their audience wouldn't be huge and released a smaller run of a game built by a smaller team to appeal to a niche audience. 3 games (and a remake) later, the franchise is doing extremely well.

Meanwhile triple-A development is bloated by extraneous multiplayer modes (because you need multiplayer to appeal to the CoD fans), needlessly powerful graphics engines that take 6 years to develop (and will be replaced in 2), celebrity cameos and licensed music, while enormous dev teams stuff in so much nebulous "content" in the form of collectibles and shallow sidequests just to pad out wishy-washy games to create the illusion of "value for money".

I love videogames as a hobby. I hate videogames as an industry.