You've probably heard of all the of layoffs in the video game industry. But is it game over or a new age?
It's never been easier to make a game with all the "free-to-dev" game engines out there. But "Game dev is hard" you keep hearing. Game dev studio releases an award winning game but gets shut down soon after. Live service games are winning the big bucks. But live service game hoppers are a thing. And many live service games fail. Live service games just eat up attention and gamer time that normally goes to single player games.
So many seemingly contradictory statements are out. What's going on?
Well maybe the "game" has... changed. (har har)
Let's break down some of these statements from my (biased) point of view.
Never Been Easier to Make Games but Game Dev is HARD
So how do we make sense of this? In a way these are both correct once you add in the implied words.
Why is game dev easier than ever before? The barrier for non-programmers have been vastly reduced for developing many game genres.
Making a game (of random of low quality) is far easier than ever before. We can paraphrase it further. Making a game that fills checkbox face value requirements of a game design is easier than ever.
There is a concept called "asset flip" games. You can buy entire game mechanics and game art assets in online digital game dev stores. Low effort games that pull together several premade assets to make a "game". These kinds of games tend to lack a soul to them and suffer from inconsistent quality and incohesive style. Progression exists but sometimes is odd.
Even for one-person dev teams, what usually happens is the devs playtest their own games and make adjustsments themselves. Quite often their own "game taste" is left behind when the devs make game design choices. Players can almost instinctively feel the style of game design. Almost like how cooks who cook the same receipe sometimes makes food that tastes different.
This is one of the actual hard parts of game dev. Making game design choices... that work somewhat decently.
Then the other part of why game dev is hard? Wide variety of skills that are needed to make the parts of the game. Interactive storytelling, testing, making the art assets (2d or 3d), level design, ui design, sound, composing music are all parts to making a decent game.
So programming is no longer a hard requirement to make a lot of games because of game engines. All the other parts of game dev is still hard. But now game devs can easily skip tuning or iterating on the game and sacrifice a game's quality, look, and feel.
Live Service Games Hidden Impact
Live service games are everywhere now. For major video game corporations, it seems like Live Service games are the only way forward. Players spend more time and money on live service games than ever before. And that's time and money that could have been spent on single player games for better or for worse. "Dead game" is now a commonly used term on the internet. Sometimes it's now accidentally used for single player games in terms of concurrent player count?
To make decent money as a AAA studio the way forward is Live Service... mostly. Many decent single player games have released by AAA studios that players liked but the companies tended to deem as financial failures anyways. Why is that? It's the kind of open question.
Yet some indie games of astonishingly small size made millions with their mostly single player games. What is going on?
It's good to keep in mind for big AAA studios their scale is massive. A few million dollars is a magnitude too small for them. Magnitude. Meaning a digit too small. Also have you taken a look at how long the credits are? Every one of them needs to get paid. Then what do you have afterwards in terms of net profits?
As for the actual answer of why large game dev corporations need that much live service money to make that profit? I only have theories. Maybe it's because they overextended? Maybe short term growth is always demanded from them? Maybe it's because they are trying to grow in a market that is already saturated? Or something else? Who knows?
Also live service games, by their very nature, take up more time from players. Then also many developers are trying rush into them. Which takes up even more time from them.
Not that live service games are bad. It's just good to understand what single player games are competing against.
Is There Hope?
I do see hope. A long time ago before the age of digital distribution and "royalty-fee-only-when-selling-games" game engines, there was an indie game market. Perhaps another time I will talk about my small glimpse into it.