That’s at least somewhat self-cleansing though. If everyone else loses hundreds of millions of dollars trying to become the next live service phenomenon, they’ll learn that it’s unlikely they will be and stop pursuing it. That losing strategy has caused major shakeups at EA and Ubisoft and immensely hurt Bandai-Namco and WB next to their more traditional offerings doing gangbusters. If I’m going to glance five minutes into the future with a dash of expecting current trends to extrapolate into the future, maybe the model that makes everyone happy is more of this “prologue” model that Metaphor and tons of smaller Steam releases have been employing, which is just a roundabout way to return to shareware from 30 years ago.
Well, when the reward being dangled is a Fortnite-sized chunk of the industry worth billions by itself it’s hard to suggest that the real answer is more, smaller, less profitable releases. Especially with public companies with a mandate to seek endless growth. It’s not like big traditional single player games are a surefire thing, either.
It’s a bit of a rough time for the industry right now, frankly. So… on that note, happy holidays everybody!
That’s at least somewhat self-cleansing though. If everyone else loses hundreds of millions of dollars trying to become the next live service phenomenon, they’ll learn that it’s unlikely they will be and stop pursuing it. That losing strategy has caused major shakeups at EA and Ubisoft and immensely hurt Bandai-Namco and WB next to their more traditional offerings doing gangbusters. If I’m going to glance five minutes into the future with a dash of expecting current trends to extrapolate into the future, maybe the model that makes everyone happy is more of this “prologue” model that Metaphor and tons of smaller Steam releases have been employing, which is just a roundabout way to return to shareware from 30 years ago.
Well, when the reward being dangled is a Fortnite-sized chunk of the industry worth billions by itself it’s hard to suggest that the real answer is more, smaller, less profitable releases. Especially with public companies with a mandate to seek endless growth. It’s not like big traditional single player games are a surefire thing, either.
It’s a bit of a rough time for the industry right now, frankly. So… on that note, happy holidays everybody!