Obviously a response to Microsoft's acquisitions and kind of funny that this studio once by owned by MS and Acti-Blizz ends up with Sony. Sony says they'll remain a multiplatform studio, but we all know that won't last forever.

Reminder that industry consolidation is a direct and inevitable result of big tech encroachment into gaming. Capitalism bad for games.

  • CrimsonSage [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Honestly, all this consolidation and corporatization of games has done is made me check out of gaming. Of the little gaming I still do, I basically only play indie games and paradox titles at this point. As things keep getting worse and worse people are going to start checking out of society as both consumers and workers more and more. Like yes, it will be impossible to fully remove yourself, but as it becomes more obnoxious and expensive for a less and less appealing product people will just forgo involving themselves. I guess at that point they are just going to start enacting reverse consumption laws that mandate a certain volume of purchases by people and you will be expected to find a job to meet that expectation, a kind of perverted reverse MMT.

  • BeamBrain [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Half a century ago, when Marx was writing Capital, free competition appeared to the overwhelming majority of economists to be a 'natural law'. Official science tried, by a conspiracy of silence, to kill the works of Marx, who by a theoretical and historical analysis of capitalism had proved that free competition gives rise to the concentration of production, which, in turn, at a certain stage of development, leads to monopoly. Today, monopoly has become a fact. Economists are writing mountains of books in which they describe the diverse manifestations of monopoly, and continue to declare in chorus that 'Marxism is refuted'. But facts are stubborn things, as the English proverb says, and they have to be reckoned with, whether we like it or not. The facts show that differences between capitalist countries, e.g., in the matter of protection or free trade, only give rise to insignificant variations in the form of monopolies or in the moment of their appearance; and that the rise of monopolies, as the result of the concentration of production, is a general and fundamental law of the present stage of development of capitalism.

  • CommunistBear [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Eagerly awaiting to hear how this is somehow china's fault from :gamer-gulag:

  • Tervell [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    looking forward to Gamer 1984, where every single studio is owned by one of three mega-corporations, each with their own shitty digital distribution platform with awful DRM

    a boot stamping on a human wallet, forever (not mine though, :im-a-pirate:)

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      every single studio is owned by one of three mega-corporations, each with their own shitty digital distribution platform with awful DRM

      I mean, the thing about video games is that they really aren't that difficult to make. Like, yes. The AAA titles take tens of thousands of man-hours to build and huge server farms to support. But indie developers spring up with every incoming class of comp-sci freshmen. We've got a thousand tools and kits for game design. And so much of this shit gets distributed at the hobbyist level that you're never not going to have people doing knock-off Pokemon and Stardew Valley and Stickman Fighter games from now until forever.

      a boot stamping on a human wallet, forever

      Literally nobody is forcing you to be a whale. Nobody is making you spend $150k on a lootbox-issued cosmetic skin for a FPS game. Nothing is preventing you from pirating a copy of the original Starcraft, hooking up to a private server, and having the time of your life playing a classic RTS for the next 30 years.

      There are so many instances of real serious deliberate predatory consumerist exploitation. Microsoft monopolizing the branding on a Orc Axeman while Sony gets the license to reprint plushies of Axe Orcman and Nintendo rolling out a new version of Man: The Axe Orc just doesn't even register.

      Like, its barely IP anymore. You're just doing color-swaps on Space Marines and Barbarians. Nobody actually has a monopoly on Sci-Fi Space Fantasy shit. Its all thoroughly embedded in the public domain.

      • Tervell [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I meant the 1984 thing in jest, not as a serious dystopian scenario, I mean, we're on the site that has the :19: :84: and :gamer-gulag: emojis, it's typically not brought up in a serious manner.

        Literally nobody is forcing you to be a whale

        Of course, as I said, I'm a pirate. I've literally spent like 5 bucks on games in my entire life, and it was only because all the Valve games were like 90% off in a bundle, I've never bought anything else.

        the thing about video games is that they really aren’t that difficult to make

        Don't really agree with this one. Certain kinds of video games may be easy to make, but there's lots that aren't. I really dislike the general industry direction of prioritizing graphic fidelity, which definitely adds a ton of the monetary and manpower costs, but even if we move away from that, games are still going to be pretty difficult to make, because the actual game design part is a lot of work, and it's not something that you can solve by throwing resources at the problem - you can just hire more artists to pump out assets (admittedly, of dubious quality if there isn't a coherent artistic vision), but sometimes, an aspect of the game's balance is just going to stump you for weeks. It takes those indie devs years of their life to get their games out, it's not as if you can just download Unreal Engine and pump out a fully-formed FPS in a few months (or at least one with well thought out mechanics - you can do a shitty asset flip of course).

        • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          the actual game design part is a lot of work, and it’s not something that you can solve by throwing resources at the problem - you can just hire more artists to pump out assets (admittedly, of dubious quality if there isn’t a coherent artistic vision), but sometimes, an aspect of the game’s balance is just going to stump you for weeks

          I agree there. But I don't think we are lacking good baseline models for game design. And for spaces where you really are just out on the edge - your MMOs back in the 90s or your Minecraft circa 2010s or your Pong or PacMan - the novelty can excuse a substantive amount of poor design. Just look at EverQuest.

          it’s not as if you can just download Unreal Engine and pump out a fully-formed FPS in a few months (or at least one with well thought out mechanics - you can do a shitty asset flip of course).

          You can download Half-Life and churn out Counterstrike in a few months.

          You can download Warcraft 3 and churn out DOTA in a few weeks.

  • Kanna [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    All of this shit is bad and will only make the gaming industry worse :(

    • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The Blizzard buyout is worth half of Sony's market cap, and Sony interactive is only like 1/4 or 1/3 of Sony's overall revenues. There was no way Sony were matching that buy out in any meaningful sense, lol. The only viable thing would've been a merger, but the only studios Sony would've considered then are Japanese ones. I guess square Enix would make sense in a way, but not strategically since they're trying to compete in the American market.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        The thing Destiny proved is that you can just come up with another guy covered in metal plates, call him Le Epic Space Ninja, and make a giant pile of money recapping Star Wars just like every other Space Fantasy setting has been doing for forty years.

        Why the hell did Sony need to buy the rights to Derivative Work of Derivative Work, as though they didn't already have the rights to the original shit 20 years ago?

        It's all so fucking dumb. Just go crib generously from The Expanse and call your new game Into The Void: Beyond Space and Time. Then make another derivative of Lord of the Rings mashed up with Game of Thrones and call it MythLegend: The Sword Story, War Of The Dragon Lords. Make versions of that for thirty years. People will love it and give you infinity money. You don't need Bungie studios for any of this shit.

  • CanYouFeelItMrKrabs [any, he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Sony makes single player action games so it makes sense for them get developers who specialize in online games and FPS. They could keep Destiny multiplatform (or just PC + PS4) and have Bungie work on a new IP or Resistance/Killzone

    • FlakesBongler [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Destiny and any future projects Bungie makes

      Destiny pulls in good money, they'll make that money back in a year

          • FlakesBongler [they/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            That and Sony has Film and TV studios

            It's no secret that Bungie's been wanting to make Destiny into a multimedia franchise, which is probably why they agreed to the deal

            Get ready to see see a lot more of it in the next few years

        • viva_la_juche [they/them, any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          There’s a reason actually buying the game is only a small amount of the marketing effort and the rest is in loot boxes and other nonsense

    • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      A US-centric IP with enough of a player base that they can have a COD for Destiny deal with Microsoft. Given that Sony can't get away with a bigger merger than this at the moment, it's probably their best strategy.

    • jack [he/him, comrade/them]
      hexagon
      M
      ·
      2 years ago

      1.) Destiny income

      1. ) Stopping MS from buying Destiny and making them exclusive

      3.) Bungie experience with GAAS to help Sony studios new to it

      • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        3.) Bungie experience with GAAS to help Sony studios new to it

        Oh God, all those wonderful single player PS4 games really were an outlier weren't they. Wonder how much my credit card will get dinged every time Kratos says "boy".

        • jack [he/him, comrade/them]
          hexagon
          M
          ·
          2 years ago

          I'd be surprised if Sony moves their traditional studios away from that. Spider-Man, The Last of Us, and God of War make sickening amounts of money.

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Reminder that industry consolidation is a direct and inevitable result of big tech encroachment into gaming.

    Ok, I mean, I'm with you in theory. But what's this about Big Tech encroaching into gaming? Big Tech has always been in gaming. Who do you think made the original Playstation, back in 1994? Or the original Magnavox Odyssey in 1972?

  • Grownbravy [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The headache of Destiny 1 and 2 kinda doesnt make Bungie worth all that

  • Torenico [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Capitalism ruining games episode 20980418

    G*mers unironically defending capitalism episode 20980419

  • budoguytenkaichi [he/him,they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Not to dunk on Bungie too much, but I feel like their glory days are over, and have been over for quite some time. Too pricey if I were Sony.