Steve Troughton-SmithIt's wild to think that the titans of gaming — Activision, EA, Ubisoft — all collapsed at pretty much the same time. Bungie looks like it has no future. Even Bethesda has only been able to put out a string of duds, for years now. And yet a couple of the best games this year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and ARC Raiders, are from new studios made up of industry veterans, born from the ashes of the big companies that can no longer sustain themselves. We're watching a full-on reset taking place
And you certainly don't fix the situation by laying off everybody, telling studios they have to increase margins to 30%, and inserting AI everywhere, a la Microsoft. It's a death spiral for unsustainable studios, pushing developers to build worse and worse games, with less funding, to extract as much money from players as possible until inevitable studio closure
Nathan Snelgrove@stroughtonsmith I think we're seeing the limits of team size and project scope. Very few studios will be around doing what Rockstar does. Seems like the future is the E33 and KCD2-sized teams. Which is totally fine, because those are great games.
Emma Melinda@stroughtonsmith hey there