PC Gaming

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.

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.

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.

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.

BG4: Modern Warfare will be a fantastic take on the D&D ruleset.

I wish I could buy the exact same Balders Gate next year, but with just different bald people based on the data of which bald people was shown most in the media this past year.

Congrats, now you’re going to have a roguelike zombies mode where you progress off levelling instead of wall buys.

Yeah. You use data to target the most common factors to make your audience as broad as possible, and you end up making the most bland slop that nobody actually cares about.

Stardew Valley's success had more to do with smart marketing than anything. The game has the exact same formula as Story of Seasons and Rune Factory, which are very corporate-run series, just not at AAA scale. The difference was Eric Barone cultivating word-of-mouth marketing via influencers and online communities to reintroduce the genre to the Western market (along with lucking into capitalizing on what was then a more nascent pixel art indie gaming trend).

Undertale's a good example, though (I'll still note this particular example is a huge spoiler). I did the thing and it was a very fresh idea, and one of the best hooks I've seen in a video game. Thing is though, I doubt even 10% took that route to see it. That's something the game has in common with Baldur's Gate 3, which is full of those low-percentage moments. AAA devs don't like investing a lot of resources into things most people aren't going to see.

Stardew Valley? At a certain point of the game, you start to genuinely care about the characters. Not just as in-game characters, but as virtual people with their own backstories, goals, dreams. You relate to them.

I just like to make the cute farm go brrrrrrrr. Honestly, I'm annoyed that marriage (or "roomieship" with the monster) is required to 100% the game.

Nintendo, the company that released dozens of sequels and remakes of Donkey Kong, Mario, Zelda and Pokemon, right? I guess my wildest dreams are a bit more wild.

Idk why people are giving you shit on that, you're right. Not necessarily indie-level right, but people hired to do the next Mario or Zelda are given remarkable freedom. I read up on the BotW development and they pitched their crazy idea, got green lit, and when leading their team they took suggestions from every part of the team (quite literally, artists, marketers, localization specialists, etc.). If I could remember the link I'd share it, but it's straight up good AAA management.

Though, to be fair it's really team by team and it's quite possible they got lucky with some of these. There are plenty of misses, after all. I'm kinda glad I'm off the Nintendo bandwagon after the whole Yuzu/Ryujinx legal crap.

So then sit back and let the makers make their shi--oh we don't need so many MBAs anymore? Oops!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.