PC Gaming

CandyCrush would like a word

A reminder that AA-AAA is basically just specifying how much money has been poured into its development. Not how much love, passion and hard work went into creating it.

Baldurs gate 3 is made by an indie game studio.

As in they’re independent and are not beholden to a publisher or external revenue sources that own their idea and forces them to take business decisions they don’t want to due to monetary reasons and outside pressure.

And yes, absolutely S+ tier games.

The sad thing is none of them want to make a bad game. They just cit so many rough edges off so nobody cuts themselves that they all end up making the same ball.

Much rather have a game like Death Stranding that half the players are going to bounce off and the rest are going to love all the more for it.

perfectly attuned to terrabytes of marketing data

My friend works as software dev and he can attest the exact same thing. He has better ideas as a software dev, but marketing and sales people disagree and the management listens to them because all they see are numbers and money. MacNamara fallacy is epidemic in private industry.

Corporate art will always be underwhelming.

The smaller the dev team, the more pure the vision. Doesn't always mean it will be good, but the good ones are great. The best AAA game still looks and feels like all the rest.

Art and profit are very compatible. But nepotism and profit even more.

BG3 if that counts as AAA

Outside Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom I don't think I've enjoyed a triple A release since 2017.

Yeah. AAA higher-ups are very rarely gamers or actually interested in playing video games. They're just business people who I think mostly want to chase the profitable trends and recreate whatever successes they had in the past under projects with actually decent leadership.

Indie devs also generally aren't concerned with stretching the runtime out over return limits or in a way that will prevent people from reselling the game.

Megacorp business model is incompatible with every industry, it’s entirely based on what is the absolute bare minimum that will still make money. Absolutely no passion in the work, no interest in quality, and no care for the people getting trampled to make it.

Not only good videogames. Good art in general. Music, text, movies, tv series and videogames all go for the "mid" nowadays. Offend noone, include everything and everyone and above all: make no hard choices which others haven't done already.

Which results in data driven hollow 1000 in a dozen AI "caught in the algorithm" trash. Just look at most what comes out of Netflix "studios" these days. It will be the end of them.

And you hear it in music too: everything sounds the same these days. Everything.

And you see the same in writing: more and more generic stuff. The big names pump out more and more of same-ish stories. Say what you like about Prime Stephen King for example, but what he wrote during his crazed coke/whiskey fueled years... It was original. And weird.

The cycle of megacorps- this works in most industries with a lower barrier of entry.

First the industry begins as a bunch of small competing startups that build a shit ton of absolute trash. Eventually a few companies find the right formula and start to find some medicum of success. Innovation is rapid but quality is low.

Next the industry consolidates in a feeding frenzy of mergers and aqisitions. During this time innovation is high but demands for quality is also high. New startups are constant as the forming megacorps pay high prices to control innovation or suppress competition.

Then the consolidation reaches a peak. At this point innovation almost completely ceases as megacorps refuse to pay out any more. Quality rapidly decreases as the few remaining megacorps try to maximize profits. The entire industry turns to shit products and high prices.

The only thing that can save the industry from stagnation is government anti-trust action breaking up the megacorps into smaller competing companies like in the second stage.

It's not just risk, you also can't really target a narrow audience. Indies can afford to make a game that only 1/100th of people will be interested in. Even if the AAA studio was 100% sure they would succeed and gain a loyal fanbase, they won't do that if the potential fanbase is pulled from too small of a group.

Probably because the suits don’t play games, so they have no clue what makes a game good or not. All they have is data, but data without context is just numbers.

there are plenty of crappy indie games, too

This is a massive understatement.

There's this fantasy that indie = high quality, but just look through Steam chronologically. 95%-99% of indie games seem to be good ideas that faded into obscurity, buried under the tidal wave of other games, that their creators probably burned out making for little in return. Many are just... not great. But others look like bad rolls of the dice.

Basically zero indies are Stardew Valleys or Rimworlds.

This is the nuance the Baldurs Gate dev is getting it. It's not 'games should develop like indies'; they literally can't afford a 95% flop rate.

But that doesn't mean the metrics they use for decision making aren't massively flawed.

Reminds of how Delta Heavy - Ghost got recommended to many people on YouTube recently, because the ever-present soulless algorithm detected people mentioning Clippy, engaging with videos mentioning Clippy, putting Clippies as their profile pictures, etc. - despite the fact that the entire Clippy surge is entirely against the endless data vacuuming and the algorithmisation of everything.

I really hate what data has become for the modern consumer at large - something's everybody after to try and capitalize for, at an active disadvantage for you.

Cue the still growing thirst for more control, more data, more censorship.