"Let's just all make Clair Obscur/Minecraft/Blue Prince" is not a repeatable strategy (every indie dev is trying to make good games). How much did it cost to make the Beatles' albums? A piano, drums, a couple of guitars and salaries for 4 guys? Why don't the big studios today with all their money just hire another Beatles?
Same reason why Ubisoft isn't just making another Balatro. Industrializing culture isn't (yet?) a solved problem.
> How much did it cost to make the Beatles' albums? A piano, drums, a couple of guitars and salaries for 4 guys?
The Beatles did only take a few days to knock out each of their earliest LPs. However, per Wikipedia, "the group spent 700 hours on [Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]. The final cost [...] was approximately £25,000 (equivalent to £573,000 in 2023)."
So, actually, envelope-pushing cultural landmarks typically do require a lot of effort and money to complete.
On the other hand I'm kind of shocked that the big gaming studios never seem to be fast followers. It feels like we've been through multiple waves of Balatro-likes from indie developers already. Where is the Ubisoft Lethal Company or something? You'd think having a studio full of experienced developers with tons of tech they could hop on trends quickly. It seems like they think it's beneath them or something though. Or maybe they're just structurally incapable of moving quickly. It did take 11 years and like 4 redesigns to make Skull & Bones after all.
This is a conjencture, even if I do work in the industry but not AAA, but: Following the trends simply isn't part of their business model. Following current trends is a very unpredictable business. Many try, and many fail. AAA had the luxury of somewhat predictable sales. They can make big bets like working years on a game, since they know they will have millions of players. And they know smaller studios can't compete with them in that business.
But, of course, making games is hard, and sometimes they fail. And now the free tools are getting really good, and smaller studios are becoming increasingly competent. Will we soon see the big ones fall? Their only way to survive is to keep going bigger, escaping the smaller studios to a place they can't reach. Now we have AAAA games. But is there a limit where players stop caring how many As a game has?
The more people you add the slower you get, not faster. Large companies are nutorously slow moving (and particularly slow to change directions) vs small upstarts.
yeah, but at this point it's weird they just don't grab a studio, give them a funding for 2 years and say them 'copy the latest indie trends with a tad more polish' and let them cook to see what comes out.
They tried that, e.g. "EA Originals"[0] is basically that (there are similar programs at other major publishers). I suspect it proved to not be a big money maker at the scale required to move the needle at publishers of that size., and that they are keeping these on as a sort of prestige programs.
CEO’s also never face consequences for destroying companies. Zaslav has run WBD into the ground and it’s currently being surrounded by vultures, and he’s still making like half a billion a year.
I wish I could find the article about it that I read a few years back. But CEOS needs skin in the game again. the incentives are all broken. running a good business doesn't matter anymore (at least in the US).
There is nothing forcing developers to release on steam, they can sell directly through a website. It’s not Valve’s fault no other competitor has gotten close to the quality of Steam. Epic Games could have made a dent, but they decided to try to bribe customers instead of making a functioning store.
This made me laugh. I tried Epic because I got a free game that I was interested in, but could only play it on the Epic Game store. After a week, I was no longer able to login no matter what I tried. So anecdotally, your statement tracks with my experience.
For all intents and purposes it's "functioning" for me. You can search for a game, hit buy, put in your credit card number, then download/play it. I've seen some spurious arguments about how it lacks a cart or reviews, but it's a stretch to claim the lack of them makes them non "functioning". I never bulk buy games, and for reviews I can go to steam or metacritic.
In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags) and some user feedback (like Steam reviews or Steam community discussions). Yes, most of Steam's features are half-baked, and Valve doesn't really want to improve them (curators, user tags, guides etc.), but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.
>In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags)
To be fair most online storefronts don't have that. Amazon/walmart at best have "categories", which epic also has. Even online content portals like spotify don't have tags, preferring something like "more like this".
> but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.
The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price. We see with airlines that consumers are willing to put up with hellish conditions to save a few percent on airfare. Those features are definitely nice, it's just unclear how they can avoid the free-rider problem if there are competing storefronts.
I think directly reducing the games' prices will not have the same effect as with traveling, since games are digital and non-mandatory goods, so less people will be swayed by reduced price; unless we are talking about 50% less, of course, which is why people use key reselling sites, because there it is noticeable (and people don't care about legality in that case).
That said, Epic is indirectly competing "on price" by paying publishers and developers for their store exclusivity, for free giveaways and even for just using Unreal Engine. But it's the price for developers, not customers. Tim Sweeney said multiple times that he thought supporting developers was more important than customers, and that customers would follow developers. I don't know how whether it worked though.
> The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price.
The way I see it, it depends how you see who is who's customer. Is the gamer the customer of the store, or are they the customer of the developer/publisher who put out the game, and in turn is the developer/publisher the customer of the store. The store cut is the price to buy their services, and they can shop around to find different offerings at different prices, just as gamers might be able to shop around and decide what (platform features) matters to them with the options available.
I wonder how good this will be. My employer gave us Perplexity Pro for free, and I removed Safari from my home screen and pinned Perplexity to force myself to use it… I found it really really slow and didn’t really add to my search experience
IMO, Perplexity does absolutely shine in a kind of search for what other engines don't compete at all. But it's way worse than normal engines for most of the things I search.
Anyway, comparing it by speed isn't useful at all.
