Who is the main target audience downloading and paying for these games?
Boomers, unironically. Well then x too, but 45+ are the biggest share of gamers by far in the west.
Boomers would be 60+ though. Anyone 45-59ish would be Gen X.
Games are amazing right now, what is this talking about? EA/WB/Ubisoft dreck?
It started roughly around the ps3/360 era, when corporate devs began prioritizing turning their games into skinner boxes that were designed to motivate players to keep playing, so they would be more likely to engage in microtransactions, see more ads, or continue paying subscriptions. Of course gacha garbage is a fuller expression of this kind of manipulation now days.
Still plenty of great games out there, and in some cases we have a real renaissance.
Horse armor.
Holy shit, it was Microsoft. Microsoft ruined gaming.
Bethesda pioneered MTX with horse armor long before MS bought them.
EA and Valve pioneered in game ads and loot boxes.
Nailed it. When casino and packaged goods marketers and executives started malignantly metastasizing into the games industry.
As a millienial software dev:
Imo: What happened is twofold:
- The business grads also played games, and saw the money to be made.
- The best devs are smart enough to *not work in AAA Gamedev.
Which is depressing as hell. I considered switching to game dev (since anyway want to change my stack and language), then realised that would be sacrificing too much for too little and abandoned the idea. I will have a better time making money doing something else and playing in free time than diving into this madness that does not even pay adequately in pursuit of the off-chance of getting to work on something great
MBA = Megalomaniacsl Bastard Accountant
(with the fun bonus of almost no actual math required!)
MBAs, cause we gotta justify nepotism hires somehow.
I phone screened for a game dev position. The ad said about half my salary. It was going to be a big sacrifice. Then on the phone screen they said 10k less than that.
When I sounded concerned about money, I think that killed my chances. “Tell me more about this profit sharing” was almost certainly the end. It was for the best.
I think people don’t realize that current CEO’s are still old. Many of them in their 50s. I don’t think those are millennials.
get absolutely abused by employers squeezing every penny they can while blocking union efforts
He forgot that part
Yeah, oh no a bunch of people got into an industry that they loved so much they got underpaid and lowered the value of their labour to be treated worse.
But then a bunch of them realized they could just use their passion to make something themself and get paid for it and now we are having a hard time justifying why the big industry’s “shovels” are special.It is a shame this happening to lots of industries right now for lots of other reasons too. With the big industry now trying to justify it as being cheaper to make because they automated all the people that make the product especially better.
That has to do with shareholders realizing they can make money out of the gaming industry. They basically ruined it like they ruined healthcare and housing.
When it was released in 1993, Doom — which was developed for under $1M USD — was earning id software $100k/day immediately upon release, in shareware registrations alone.
It’s no wonder capitalist leeches saw those returns and wanted to insert themselves in the process. Of course the more who latch on, the more value they need to extract by screwing over both the devs and the players.
Obviously the devs and players are actually the only two groups who are necessary in this relationship, and they’re the ones getting soaked.
PS by “devs” I mean anyone who works on the game to make it better.
It’s mobile games. It has always been mobile games.
A large part of the population is simply unwilling to treat games as a medium that requires quick reactions, precision and thinking. To them, gaming more like spinning slots in a casino. Until about 2012, these people didn’t realize such games existed on consoles or the PC, so we were safe. Eventually mobile app stores tapped into this massive market, got enormous returns and made everyone else realize how many people were willing to engage with a glorified skinner box.
Every fiscally responsible company now has to assess the degree of implementing these dogshit gameplay loops, instead of just not doing that like they used to.
The only AAA games safe from this are the ones that are extremely hard (complex) as a baseline. Stuff like Path Of Exile and Elden Ring.
I don’t think that is true at all.
Strategy games existed, adventure and point and click existed, puzzles, turn based rpg, even forgiving platformers existed since before PC gaming, and flourished with PC gaming. Many of the hits needed nothing of that.
Many of the hits today still need all of that and are competitive.
The market grew, and with it came more audience and genres.
If we all liked yellow, what would happen to blue?
The company I work for recently tried to make a mobile game, being a fairly informal studio with many gamers on staff we made something more like a mini linear rpg than a typical mobile game. Testers loved it but the publisher said it was too complicated for mobile and cancelled on us.
Those shareholders? Dentists. No love lost between them and the gamers.
Serious, genuine question:
Has a team of, or single Zoomer game dev(s) … made… any… game?
I am not gonna pretend that I somehow know all games and all game dev teams by age, but uh…
Yeah, are there any notable games made by a team that is majority composed of people born after '96 ish?
Like… I am a millenial, and I am well aware of the ludicrous greed and mismanagement of AAA studios, how even most AA studios end up getting fucked by some kind of IP rights/funding issue, if they live long enough… I’m still pissed that EA killed Maxis… and I am also well aware of many games with primarily millenial dev teams… very often devolve into, or revolve around ‘millenial speak’ / ‘millenial writing’ …
Most of us millenials, outside of the tiny number of mod teams that actually stuck together long enough to form a game studio, or just outright form an indie dev studio… yeah most of us just jumped into the megacorp game dev meat grinder and then acted both entitled and surprised to find out that ‘corporation bad, actually.’…
But I seriously cannot think of a mainly zoomer game dev team that’s made anything other than pretty much shitty asset flips and/or outright scams, enternal alpha/early access type bullshit… or maybe mobile, gacha type games?
I would love to be informed that I am an idiot and there are some really good zoomer made games, but I am ignorant of their existence.
Hell, even a seriously good mod by zoomers would count, I know I was modding many games before I even got out of highschool.
But I seriously cannot think of a mainly zoomer game dev team that’s made anything other than pretty much shitty asset flips and/or outright scams, enternal alpha/early access type bullshit… or maybe mobile, gacha type games?
You didnt exclude game jam games and there are a lot of those. There are also quick games that are not meant to be expanded so they wouldnt count as eternal early access
Thats true, I did not explicitly exclude those, but I think you can tell that … I am trying to mean a game that… someone would actually pay for, a game that has at least some level of popularity, general cultural impact.
Some game jam games do kind of achieve this, some are later expanded into more fully fleshed out games that later release…
But generally speaking, a game jam is more or less a speedrun tech demo of you or your team’s ability to whip up something fairly basic… and most of these do not usually go on to have any real impact or popular awareness or even a niche following that expands outside of other game devs.
Its like a training routine / job interview process for a game dev.
I am not trying to insinuate no zoomers are technically capable of making a game, of course many obviously are.
I am trying to match the context and language of the OP, referring to a much more generalized: ‘what has been the effect of zoomer game devs on the kinds of games produced by game industry broadly?’
The interesting answer by the way is that there is a glut of them as Roblox, is actually a game mostly about making other games.
Its a more realized version of VR chat essentially for kids and alpha and Z is full of game devs who though are unfortunately in a single engine but with skill can actually transition to others and often do.
Some real talent is being cultivated but they are mostly unseen by looking at the places they aren’t.
See, I am aware of the … Im gonna call it ‘Roblox Capture’ phenomenon… and I am very, very concerned by this.
As you say… there legitimately are tons of neat gamemodes being made up by Zoomer (and presumably also Gen Alpha) budding game devs…
But as you say… its quite difficult to transition out of Roblox and learn all the other stuff you need to make your own game, especially if you are incentivized not to, by both the carrot of potential income, and the stick of everyone throwing a shit fit (cough, I mean uh, ‘difficulty in overcoming the momentum of the network effect’) if you try to move to your own platform.
Roblox… has a very, very predatory digital and real world currency scheme.
The Roblox owners are making way, way, waaaay more money off of their young gamemode devs than the tiny slice of the pie they actually get.
And… its also basically a lottery, like being a youtuber or an OF model or whatever: 99.9% of people make basically no money, 0.1% make a decent or sizeable amount… and you only ever hear about, or from, the tiny minoirty of successful people.
And thats to say nothing of how fucked up MTX and dark patterns are for the average user.
Basically, Roblox achieved a huge scale, fully realized version of what many pay to play GMod Roleplay Servers do/did as well as Roleplay Servers for like GTAV and RDR2 and other games…
You are right though that this is the interesting answer =D
A huge amount of games in the indie scene are made by zoomers. Lethal company was made by a 21 year old. The current game industry is composed of mostly millennials, but still a lot of zoomers.
Hey there ya go!
I didn’t know Lethal Company was made by a Zoomer.
Apparently he has been modding/making Roblox gamemodes/doing itch.io releases since he was 10!
LC isn’t exactly my cup of tea personally, but that is definitely a good example, LC has been quite popular.
Thank you for informing me =D
Yee game development is very accessible nowadays. Fortunately it still requires great effort to make a good game.
Gaming is insane right now. I can buy a game for $10 that would have won game of the year every year straight for an entire decade. Even saying this there’s probably like 15 games that fit this category.
Gamers today get what they deserve. If they want to consume triple A slop they’re going to get fucked. Its really simple.
I agree. There is a lot of great content for reasonable prices and a lot of terrible content for high prices. It’s a thriving industry. We just need to be intentional about our purchasing decisions.
I almost never pay more than 5$ for a game, get the free game from epic each week since last year, and I have hundreds of amazing games in my livrary. I litteraly could stop working and play super fun games 24/7 for the next 2-3 years without spending a dime. Up to a last year, I was litteraly playing on an overclocked i5 750 (16 y/o cpu) with a 1060i gpu, and can’t think of a game that wasn’t playable. I even worked on a small VR project on that computer lol.
Most definitely can be refuted. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of amazing games out there made by young and old people that appeal to both young and old people. The issue Anon is struggling with is non gamer capitalists running game companies and milking games for every last penny at the cost of quality.
I know it’s a tired example, but look at the company and team responsible for BG3. A game that is widely considered one of the greatest games to be realsed in at least the last 10 years, maybe even longer. This game was made by a company owned and operated by old people and young people. The teams directing, designing, creating, and writing this game were made up of multiple generations of people, and what was made, unimpacted by corporate greed, was a masterpiece.
Good games are products of passion and creative freedom, not money or age.
There’more great games now then ever there ever was. So many choices. Plus, the older games didn’t disapear and there is no such thing as “the Golden Age of gaming” lol. It’s just that a bunch of low- losers are spending their days on the internet crying about “woke runing my videagame” because they see a woman not having huge boobs and a bikini armor.
Im currently enjoying there Blue Prince.
There’s nothing else like it, it’s challenging, and cozy.
If you like playing detective, and bring patience and like exploring and taking notes instead of hyper-focusing on one goal, it’s tens of hours of fun.
I’ve been playing this, too! It’s a great game!
Only thing I don’t really like about it is the drafting mechanic. I hit a lot of “ooh! I think I know how to solve that puzzle!” or “Ooh, I think I vaguely remember something in that one room that I didn’t screenshot at the time but I’m pretty sure was a clue for the puzzle I just discovered!” only to never see the relevant room(s) in a bunch of runs. Hell, I’m pretty sure based on a clue that there’s some kind of clock room (if it’s just the den, I have no idea how to figure it out so I’m assuming there’s another clock room) I haven’t seen yet at all dozens of days in, another related puzzle that requires I draft a whole bunch of related rooms that I never get enough of (unless I’m on a wrong line of thought about that) and a third related to the other two where AFAIK I’m waiting on a random item drop and the room to use it in to appear in the same run.
Even something like being able to curate the deck more than the conservatory allows would be tremendous.
Yeah, that’s what I meant with having notes and pivoting: don’t focus on one puzzle like that. Follow all the threads and when you get the chance to make this one happen, do it.
For things related to items, you have an option to make things easier, e.g. I stored the power hammer in the coat check until I got both the coat check and a room I knew I could use the power hammer in. In the like 5 runs in between I just did other stuff, there’s always plenty to do.
Again, I think I understand what I need to do for one puzzle, but if I’m right I need to draft 8 specific rooms all in the same run (I’m hoping I’m wrong and can come up with some other answer). That’s…easier said than done barring a lot of luck. It’s very much that I’m pretty sure I know what the puzzle is and what the solution is but the game is unwilling to let me draft what I need to solve it.
I’m pretty sure one of my missing rooms from the directory is some kind of elevated clock room (“High up among all the clocks”, the only “high up” room I’ve really got is the Attic and the only room with a lot of clocks is the Den so it feels like I need a new room), but I’m a few dozen days in and haven’t seen one.
If you’re post room 46 you probably know what puzzle I’m talking about, and I’ve got 5/8 of the keys and the puzzle behind one door solved. The third one I’m missing is almost certainly in one of the lockboxes in the Vault, but that’s a matter of time and luck to get vault, the right deposit box key and enough steps to get from one to the other in the same day. It’s another case where it’s not an interesting puzzle or mystery, it’s waiting on RNG to allow me to do the thing. Getting those keys, figuring out the puzzles behind the doors, and finding the rest of the red envelopes are my current big goals.
And boy do I wish that I’d got the coat check the only run to date where I got all the parts for the power hammer. Currently got the emerald bracelet in mine, which is nice but…
I know of a trophy you only get if you draft 9 copies of a specific room in a single run, but I don’t think trophies are necessary to progress with other parts of the game.
About missing rooms: get the drafting studio, it allows you to add 8 additional rooms to your collection one by one. I don’t know anymore if the one you’re missing is among them, but I think so.
I may be wrong, but I was thinking the Machinarium with 8 gear rooms was the solution to something, and was being vague about it. So Workshop, Security, Utility Closet, Laboratory, Pump Room, Boiler Room, Hall of Mirrors to duplicate one of the above then Machinarium.
As for the drafting studio, that might be a solution. I’ve had bad luck getting it to pull too, only having seen it twice. Been holding off on picking an outer room in recent runs so that if I see the drafting studio again I can burn rerolls to force a shrine to get maximum use out of it.
As for a trophy for drafting 9 of one room, I hope that room is either aquarium or tunnel. I can’t think of another room it might be reasonable to draft that many of in one run.
You might be right about the machinarium, that seems to be unusually hard to get for a sanctum key. I haven’t thought about it yet.
9 of one room is easier than that, it’s a very specific room.
It went to shit because big corpos realized there was money in the games industry. It went to shit because capitalism took the reins.
No one I know can afford to buy a house because our generations been so royally fucked in every which way, yet somehow we are responsible for steering the entire game industry in our twenties. Right… lol.
Bu-but Asmongold and Kirsche Verstahl told me the problem was woke gamedevs! /s
I’m aware this was sarcasm, but want to point out Asmongold is a Nazi sympathizer. No idea who the other person is.
Asmongold is a priest of Nurgle.
The other is a Nazi VTuber, with her name allegedly being a dogwhistle (positive christianity if I recall correctly).
Like they didn’t realize in the 90s
Institutional money didn’t take it seriously until the mid to late 2000s.
Big video game companies were already doing the same as today though.
That’s why most of the money hungry games were in the arcades back then. PC gaming wasn’t nearly as big.
You have a very different memory of that time
Probably because we grew up in completely different countries. Australia was very behind back in the day. We had a 2 year lag.
I don’t know, games are getting really good these days. If you ignore the aaaaaaa slop you’re going to find some awesome stuff
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Ironically they blame their own children too
Wait, gaming is shit now and it was great in the past?
I agree about the speed of progress, but someone is forgetting all the movie games on the ps2 (looking at you cat woman).
Also, I’m old enough to remember the angry video game nerd reviewing bad NES games, holy shit, you have no idea how bad it can get.
There should be a list of actually good movie tie-in games. There’s probably like 20 of em and 2 of them are LOTR.
The LOTR games were so good!
Riddick has a good one, and I remember enjoying Shrek 2 on the 6th gen consoles.
Movie tin-in games that end up being utter pieces of shit date back to the Atari 2600. The USA videogame crash was caused by ET, of all things.
Yeah, this seems like a case of survivorship bias and the fact that there are way more games coming out in the modern age.
Rockstar made GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas, Bully, Max Payne and Max Payne 2 in the PS2 generation. We are 5 years into this current generation and Rockstar has made 0 total games for PS5.
Yeah there was a lot of shovelware back then. We get barely anything now.
Yeah if you only look at Triple A then it looks barren. But small and indie studios have filled that vacuum.
