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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.