Adamant80, on 26 January 2019 - 02:17 PM, said:
We must organize a special research team to study past games. Was it the simplicity of the code? Was it the fact that products were seldom shipped with the intention of adding fixes post launch? Was it the invasion of the Microtransaction? Or was it something else?
i blame it mostly on the move from games-as-a-product to games-as-a-service. when you make a product you want the best product possible so it stands superior to its competitors. when you do a service you want the highest return on the least amount of work. fewer employees at lower pay rates and that translates into lesser ability to deliver.
you can kind of also blame it on rent-an-engine, and to be fair that was always happening. of course that's not always a bad thing (see anything by raven). it makes game dev more accessible and frees you up from having to write reusable bits like renderers and physics engines freeing your programmers up to write game logic. of course thats a double edged sword, because it lets you cut your talent pool down to unacceptable levels, and you dont have any expensive high skilled employees available to solve the hard problems. pgi takes this to an extreme.
that said some of my favorite games had in house game engines developed by people who have a major stake in the dev studio. thus they aren't going to be so easily separated from the codebase on which it all depends. what did pgi do? contract a guy who really didn't care what became of his work when the contract was over. de-emphasizing the need for programmers leads to a whole buttload of problems, and noone with the skill set or experience to resolve them. thus glaring issues persist and promises are broken.
i honestly dont expect them to change. but i can also say i dont buy as many games as i used to. free to play saps your time unless you pay huge fees and then saps your time a wee bit less. its also not as fun. when you spend $60 on a typical game and complete it over the course of about a month, you tend to buy other games, and thats good for buisness. but if im grinding for small things and not seeing an end to the game in sight, i dont get the kind of sense of completion that i get from pay once and never again games, and this leads to me buying less games.
then you got the indie school of thought where 'screw profit lets make a game because thats what we like to do' is the usual mantra. its like comparing pop music to the underground stuff. the pop people only care about more money and will use every marketing gimmick in the book to make it happen, while underground bands just want to make music.
Edited by LordNothing, 26 January 2019 - 05:01 PM.
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