Raph KosterThis is a great video that echoes things I have been saying for years now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2QgQtoGHRY&ab_channel=NeverKnowsBest
YouTube
MrTroy@raphkoster Thank you for this.
Tom Forsyth@raphkoster Yup. We've been way over-hiring for about a decade. Because it's tax-efficient when you're raking in the cash from mobile gaming. And training all those people is a huge drag and dilutes the culture of making games.
And then the chickens come home to roost. All those mobile gamers aren't putting cash back into the system. And the silly crypto money evaporates.
And now you have to fire all those people that shouldn't have been hired in the first place. And it sucks. It really sucks.
@raphkoster The tragedy is EVERYBODY KNEW THIS. We all knew we were hiring too many people. We all knew we'd probably have to fire them again.
But the people with the money didn't want to hear it. Hiring people is tax-efficient and makes the share price go up.
If we have to fire them all again next year - well, make sure you sell your shares before then, duh.
Charming folks.
James Widman
Josh Simmons@JamesWidman @raphkoster it's choosing to use "time spent" as a metric, which is hugely biased towards live service games which a large highly engaged segment of people play for tens of thousands of hours. I don't really think it matters as much as people seem to think with regards to the rest of the industry, except insofar as everyone wants to be a cod of duty.
@dotstdy @raphkoster i guess it's called "collar doody" because they like having players on a leash
Party Sam@JamesWidman @raphkoster Do these charts mean that actually gamers (and their tastes) are to blame for sticking to few products and refusing to move on?
Eniko (moved ➡ gamedev.place)@raphkoster @TomF the one unfortunate part of this video is "maybe there is a saturation of woke stuff in games now and maybe that isn't a selling point anymore"
As someone who makes "woke" indie games I can assure people that there isn't (over) saturation of progressive themes in games now. It's just not true
@eniko @raphkoster I suspect he means "relative to the market size that cares" in the same way that you can argue there's too many looter-shooters, not because every game is a looter-shooter, but because they have saturated the market that wants those games.
Whether he's right or not - how would I know? How would he know?
@TomF @raphkoster he doesn't know, because his evidence seems to be
1. Outcry over there being too much of it, which we know is actively astroturfed by the far right
And
2. "I am a politics-less YT channel and I want to be an equitable centrist and not upset anyone so I'm just going to both sides the issue just to be sure"
I dunno, i did not find that to be very compelling reasoning
@eniko @raphkoster Well, that's nice. I don't know why you're trying to pick this fight with either him or me.
@TomF I'm not trying to pick a fight, least of all with you
@eniko You're allowed to just disagree without trying to stick some sort of label on him.
@TomF "This is a sensitive subject and I understand that most people don't really like it when *non-political* YouTubers talk about overtly political topics"
"I do think it's reasonable for people to question what role it's (wokeness) played in Western gaming's downfall"
"And there you go, we discussed wokeness without me saying anything controversial, so no-one should be angry"
i was paraphrasing what he said, himself, about himself/his channel, in his own video. he called himself/his channel "non-political" and the entire segment was very "i'm not picking a side so let's look at both" so i short-handed that to "centrist", since that's what centrism is
he even says more than once that (paraphrased) anyone is free to do what they want, it's all supply and demand and the market will sort it out, which is an extremely centrist perspective
it's not hostility or labeling to call something by its name
@TomF i suppose i could've been kinder and called it "apoliticism" but i personally reject the premise that there is such a thing as an apolitical stance when discussing politics to an audience of literally hundreds of thousands of people
@TomF also i subscribe to the guy and even though this video left a bad taste in my mouth i'm *still* subscribed to the guy so clearly i dont think he's a bigot or a demon or a crypto fascist
Jack Mendo@eniko @TomF i mean, he ends up with another centrist opinion about not being sure if the problem is capitalism or the consumers (which i think thats a situation that originates in capitalism), he is ignoring decades of media representing other people the way we know and ignores one example on the video that nobody mourned when overwatch came out but ir remember the whole gamer® cries because Tracer was a lesbian +
@eniko @TomF and without entering with all economic mentallity, for him the inflation only exist for the corporation (that we already know that they have existed, but now they have more so they want more) to invest the profits on investment but there is no inflation when the "consumer's wallet" cant buy the games
Luna R@TomF @eniko I caught the discussion from this post, and read back, expecting drama. To my surprise I found none. In fact, to me, the fist sign of personal antagonism was this post.
Tom, I invite you to reevaluate how you approached this conversation. The world is full of "These minorities are being too angry! Why can't they just be civil?", which is bad enough, but that's not even the case here.
P.s. I say this with no antagonism. I wouldn't comment if I didn't think it could be constructive.
Katamari@eniko @TomF @raphkoster
He seems to gloss over a lot of crucial evidence in his analysis, even though he did a video covering Sweet Baby Inc aka Gamergate 2.
The loud "woke" game protest existed 10y ago when Overwatch was successful — it was Gamergate 1 era — yet "woke" is standard now.
The author takes a nuanced perspective, but he moved back just a little bit not enough so he is missing a lot of evidence. If you take GG1 into account, it's hard to make a neutral video.
@katamari @eniko @raphkoster I mean it's a video about money, and he said it was, and he said up front he was only going to talk about the politics inasmuch as it pertained to the money, and then he did that, and he's got other videos that do talk about the politics, and it's already an hour long so... eh.
airakose@eniko Yeah that part left a bad taste in my mouth.
The "i 'unno, maybe gamers are right to protest diversity in games. There's too many diversity" just doesn't sit right
There's an argument to be made about ham-fisted corporate trend chasing and checkbox ticking around representation - which would have fit his point better. Rainbow capitalism and all that. But he didn't make that point
This was the first of his vids I've seen, and it's put me off his whole channel tbh
@eniko @raphkoster @TomF Good point! Stating that there's an over-supply of woke games, because some "woke" games get a lot of complaints and negative attention, is just wrong...
Statistics show that female gamers are no longer an insignificant minority, yet we keep seeing these "oh no there's a girl in my game!"-rants all the time. We rarely hear of people complaining about male protagonists in games though.. Why? Probabily because the most childish and spoiled crybaby-gamers out there are male. They are more vocal about it, so they unfortunately get more attention. That doesn't mean that there's a massive demand for male protagonists in games.
Also, taking those complaints serious would be ridiculous, when just about 10% of video game protagonists are female (despite that number being approximately 50% is the general population).
Either way, game development is an art. Game developers are free to make whatever they believe in and express their own political views, and then we can like it or not. It's not supposed to be just about supply-demand. Maybe it is for some devs, but in that case they are not really creating "art".
I rarely see art critics and music critics talk about supply-demand, so I don't see why that should even be a topic here 🤷
Statistics show that female gamers are no longer an insignificant minority, yet we keep seeing these "oh no there's a girl in my game!"-rants all the time. We rarely hear of people complaining about male protagonists in games though.. Why? Probabily because the most childish and spoiled crybaby-gamers out there are male. They are more vocal about it, so they unfortunately get more attention. That doesn't mean that there's a massive demand for male protagonists in games.
Also, taking those complaints serious would be ridiculous, when just about 10% of video game protagonists are female (despite that number being approximately 50% is the general population).
Either way, game development is an art. Game developers are free to make whatever they believe in and express their own political views, and then we can like it or not. It's not supposed to be just about supply-demand. Maybe it is for some devs, but in that case they are not really creating "art".
I rarely see art critics and music critics talk about supply-demand, so I don't see why that should even be a topic here 🤷