Yeah but the consumers don't even get good exclusives out of it anymore, or exclusives at all, and PCs are so much more common now. It'll be a long time until Nintendo falls, and Sony has their entire tech giant machine behind it so they won't be quick to exit either, but they're going to lose more and more of their market dominance. Nintendo will likely fare better than Sony, at least for a while.
Playstations are for dumb niggers and normies, PCs (and by extension Steam Deck) is for Gamers and modders, and Nintendo is for kids. There's a huge retro portable hardware modding market for the GBA after Nintendo's schematics for the GBA and SP lines leaked too, but that doesn't sell games so it's not growing.
no one knows how to run a small indy studio as an investment vehicle, and
no one knows how to get around the CRA bullshit that mandates hiring infinity niggers, fags, dykes, troons, libtards, single moms, etc or else big daddy govt will sue you into oblivion.
While I agree with your post in the broad strokes, I object to things like this.
These two things are joined at the hip. Running a game studio as an investment for private equity (or public trading) is the problem. As soon as you don't control the creative direction, the money men come in and start demanding changes based on what they think will sell. This is why they drop buzzwords like ESG and AI these days.
The reason for those 8k textures and uncompressed audio is because if a game lacked those things, it would get roasted on YouTube. I use this example a lot, but the degradation of Bethesda games is due in part to YouTubers pointing to the lack of farms in Fallout 3 and asking "how do they eat?". It's far easier to plop farms everywhere than fix deeply rooted issues with the writing, but either one gets YouTubers off their back, so farms it is. It's the same way that adding quad bikes won't magically fix Starfield because the problem is an engine limitation.
Just use fiverr, or hire a gooner artist like baalbuddy or mossacannibalis. They are used to delivering a certain quality of work quickly and in high volume. The tranny ones all shit out Cal Arts beanheads or furry abominations, filtering for skill filters out trannies.
I already have a couple artists in mind who are based/redpilled/etc so I'm set, seriously just look around on twitter or ask in the art board here.
For a 3d model it's still hours and few hundreds of dollars, especially if you are doing a back and forth. An AI model will be free and take minutes to make a model that you'll be entirely willing to throw in the trash if it doesn't fit. The only real negative is that you'll have the artists kvetching on how it's not fair.
Edit: Forgot to put in my first post but the idea is to make the tool freeware and only compatible with GODOT so to fuck over Unreal and Unity.
While I agree with your post in the broad strokes, I object to things like this.
These two things are joined at the hip. Running a game studio as an investment for private equity (or public trading) is the problem. As soon as you don't control the creative direction, the money men come in and start demanding changes based on what they think will sell. This is why they drop buzzwords like ESG and AI these days.
The point of an investment bank is to make money from projects people pitch to me. Investment banking isn't bad in itself, it's only bad when it grows too large for one person to handle.
My plan employs the people who pitch the projects directly, and facilitates the successful completion of their projects. It's still a bank, only the banking occurs inside my walled garden of less than 15 employees. Obviously I need some sort of profit sharing mechanism to give my employees an incentive to do their best work, and to make the "ownership" of the IPs they develop feel real to them.
I would never control the creative direction directly; instead I would only employ people whose creative direction I trust, and generally behave like Gabe Newell with a more direct autiste wrangler persona. Rather than micromanaging employees, I would give them general orders (in the 4GW light infantry sense of the phrase) to accomplish some goal by whatever means at their disposal, and occasionally check in to observe the results and clarify the order if needed.
If I give you a general order to take that Nip pillbox, then I only care about you taking that Nip pillbox. The details of how you do it don't matter to me, only that it's done on schedule. You can call in an air strike or naval bombardment, sneak up with a flamethrower and torch everyone inside, sneak up with grenades and toss half a dozen in there before rushing it and clearing it with a shotgun, squad rush it, climb a hill above it and roll boulders or logs on it, shout out in Japanese that you will accept their surrender and make sure they're sincere in case they suicide bomb you, blow up a dam upstream of the pillbox and drown them. The choice is yours... just get rid of that Nip pillbox.
If you want C-suite speak, my goal is to look for employees that are good enough in two+ areas (art, audio, coding, writing, lawyering), White shitlords, and extremely opinionated/focused/autistic/passionate about modding/romhacking, then sort of nurture them like plants in a garden into 10x experts in their 2+ fields. From there I act as a benevolent dictator and issue general orders to accomplish certain tasks necessary to ship games until I drop dead.
Also I think I should pay for them to attend a community college in their area to improve their skills and get more skills. I don't really care if they work 4 hours a week or 80, as long as the game ships complete and on time. They can do whatever they want while they're doing their job for me - they can babysit their kids or work another whole ass job - as long as the game ships complete and on time. My job is not to micromanage them because it gets me off, it's to get them what they need so they can make fucking games.
I don't want your time. You don't owe me 40 hours a week. I want your soul poured into a video game so I can make money selling it to people. I want to get into your mind and have sex with your mind and produce a big beautiful bouncing baby of a game, which we will raise up to be a big strapping lad or a busty young beauty, who we will lead out into the world to slay and break hearts. I want soul. I want life. I want everything but your time. You can keep your time, give me your soul.
Conventional managers drop buzzwords like ESG and AI these days because they are literally paid by US federal government agencies and their NGO proxies to say these things. These are normative statements. They are not measuring public sentiment, they are shaping it.
The reason for those 8k textures and uncompressed audio is because if a game lacked those things, it would get roasted on YouTube. I use this example a lot, but the degradation of Bethesda games is due in part to YouTubers pointing to the lack of farms in Fallout 3 and asking "how do they eat?". It's far easier to plop farms everywhere than fix deeply rooted issues with the writing, but either one gets YouTubers off their back, so farms it is. It's the same way that adding quad bikes won't magically fix Starfield because the problem is an engine limitation.
Bethesda's issues with Skyrim being the size of a small county are due to bugs in the engine used for the last 3 or so Elder Scrolls game. A single zone can't get much larger than vanilla Skyrim's main zone before it develops serious bugs.
The obvious solution is to make 6 or 7 main zones corresponding to each hold gatekept by impassable terrain, each about the size of vanilla Skyrim. From there you can populate it easily by designating certain areas within each zone as manually generated content areas, and the rest as randomly, semi-randomly, or procedurally (but tied to a seed for each game) generated.
By varying the types of content generation you get a good mix of randomness, challenge, and reliability that avoids the issues of using only one or two of these methods.
The textures issue is literally a skill issue, many of the skeletons for trees and suchlike are fucked up and perform poorly. If you fix this, the vanilla textures look fine. Besides that, the workflow for making textures should always be make the highest resolution you'll support, then scale down. There's not much further up we can go in resolution before humans can't see improvements. The issues Skyrim had with the improved releases are due to the technology improving over 15 years.
Other issues with Skyrim that you didn't mention include:
Plot/Gameplay Segregation: if you know magic then you can literally just kill all the guards in jails. Create some way to seal magic users, and make the ethnic slur shouts and explicit trump card the player can use if they've never used their shouts in that hold.
The economy doesn't exist beyond individual shopkeepers.
There's no way to invest in a dairy farm to get a reliable income you can use to fund adventuring.
There's no forced specialization by limiting perks outside of the original game.
There are no fixed character attributes.
Combat is jank.
Stealth archer is the optimal build because the spell selection sucks, followers are uncontrollable retards, and the armor mechanics are retarded.
Jersh summed it up perfectly when he said on MatI, years ago, "society is managed by fat, middle-aged, childless women", and the same is true right down to the bing bing wahoos.
Jersh summed it up perfectly when he said on MatI, years ago, "society is managed by fat, middle-aged, childless women", and the same is true right down to the bing bing wahoos.
I follow the BAP formulation that we live in a tribal society style matriarchy, complete with the castration of male offspring to take care of the hags in their old age, and inviting hostile foreign tribes in to fuck them hard and give them violent criminal offspring.
These two things are joined at the hip. Running a game studio as an investment for private equity (or public trading) is the problem. As soon as you don't control the creative direction, the money men come in and start demanding changes based on what they think will sell. This is why they drop buzzwords like ESG and AI these days.
No, the problem is not that game companies need investors, and investors want returns. The problem is that games can only be made by guys who live in front of their computers, and nerd culture has been completely pozzed and troonified. The poz is coming from inside the house. When the people paying for everything let the nerds do what they want, you don't get Doom any more. You get Concord. You get the new Dragon Age. The nerds who want to make badass games full of cool shit are outnumbered and gatekept by the bluehaired freaks who masturbate themselves into comas over tranny porn. It's like how if you let musicians play whatever they want, Beethoven's 9th and Handel's Messiah will never get played by a professional orchestra ever again, because all they want to do is play shitty "world music" any more.
No, the problem is not that game companies need investors, and investors want returns. The problem is that games can only be made by guys who live in front of their computers, and nerd culture has been completely pozzed and troonified. The poz is coming from inside the house. When the people paying for everything let the nerds do what they want, you don't get Doom any more. You get Concord. You get the new Dragon Age. The nerds who want to make badass games full of cool shit are outnumbered and gatekept by the bluehaired freaks who masturbate themselves into comas over tranny porn. It's like how if you let musicians play whatever they want, Beethoven's 9th and Handel's Messiah will never get played by a professional orchestra ever again, because all they want to do is play shitty "world music" any more.
Then why did this shit not start until after the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act - which allows the US government to display government propaganda to US citizens at home - went into effect on July 2, 2013?
No, the problem is not that game companies need investors, and investors want returns. The problem is that games can only be made by guys who live in front of their computers, and nerd culture has been completely pozzed and troonified. The poz is coming from inside the house. When the people paying for everything let the nerds do what they want, you don't get Doom any more. You get Concord. You get the new Dragon Age. The nerds who want to make badass games full of cool shit are outnumbered and gatekept by the bluehaired freaks who masturbate themselves into comas over tranny porn. It's like how if you let musicians play whatever they want, Beethoven's 9th and Handel's Messiah will never get played by a professional orchestra ever again, because all they want to do is play shitty "world music" any more.
I've touched on this on another thread, but DOOM wouldn't be made today because Carmack and Romero wouldn't get a real job and be able to build up their skills and connections. There's no one at these jobs like Al Vekovius to recognize raw talent anymore, and while Carmack and Romero needed tard wranglers (once they separated from Softdisk and later Apollo, that's when the wheels came off) there's no way they would've made it past the first interview—if they were even invited to an interview at all.
I was thinking about this topic again while at work and started breaking it down systematically. What's the main reason to increase the cost ceiling all the time? In the past the shiniest looking game guarantees big sales, there was a direct correlation between production value and sales.
What about now? Production value are no longer the predictors for success, so why are studios/publishers still focusing on them? What rational reason exists to keep increasing operational expenses in an industry with turnover cycles as long as gaming?
These two things are joined at the hip. Running a game studio as an investment for private equity (or public trading) is the problem. As soon as you don't control the creative direction, the money men come in and start demanding changes based on what they think will sell. This is why they drop buzzwords like ESG and AI these days.
That's ultimately what screwed over Atari, selling to Warner Communications for funding, then the original people like Bushnell got pushed out in favor of stooges like Kassar, instituted changes that were unpopular (thus causing exoduses like Activision), and ultimately setting the company alight the second it wasn't making money anymore. There was money and creativity flowing through Atari up until the big layoffs but I doubt that had things considered under Kassar and whoever followed him that would've lasted long. (Kassar's experience was running a clothing company and saw video games, at least initially, in much of the same way as shirts—a commodity with no talent behind it).
The current WB Games at least is run AS a video game company, even if it produces pozzed slop like most majors these days.
I was thinking about this topic again while at work and started breaking it down systematically. What's the main reason to increase the cost ceiling all the time? In the past the shiniest looking game guarantees big sales, there was a direct correlation between production value and sales.
What about now? Production value are no longer the predictors for success, so why are studios/publishers still focusing on them? What rational reason exists to keep increasing operational expenses in an industry with turnover cycles as long as gaming?
Same reason as before. Investors/stock holders want big returns. A few games like Call of Duty 4, GTA, WoW, Assassins Creed, and Halo didn't just make money, they made all the money. This started a race to the bottom as every company chasing that jackpot. Anything that wasn't a billion dollar hit was considered an obscure failure. An exception was, oddly enough, Bethesda. Which is why they were king of the AAs for a while. But even then, you have the specter of infinite quarterly growth that necessitates bigger and bigger games lest you risk getting fired or facing a lawsuit.
Anyway, these money men wanted more epic than CoD*, more graphics than CoD*, more content than CoD*, anything that is perceived as giving their game the edge. Bugs and glitches don't matter as much as they'll already have made the sale by then.
* can be any of the previously mentioned massive hits
This is part of why activists had an easy time infiltrating, because all they do was promise more sales. It didn't matter they were full of bullshit. Sweet Baby Inc, Anita Sarkeesian, and all the others walk in and demand exorbitant fees to give a talk, which studios pay because they think it will help them get money from desirable demographics.
Another aspect of this that I already mentioned, but will hammer the point home, is that these business men are boomers that know nothing about games, or are gen x and millennials that learned business theory from boomers. Increasing quarterly growth and more money spent = increased returns are boomerisms that were either never true, or are not true any more.
This isn't even a new thing either as Henry Ford ran into this problem with his shareholders. When in increased wages and lowered the cost of his cars, he was making a shrewd business decision considered genius even to this day, but the shareholders wanted him to raise prices and lower wages. They took it to court, and while Ford was allowed to proceed, the law in the US was changed so that shareholder value was the most important thing to a company, so another Ford couldn't happen again.
I don't think it's that bad. Eternights was made by one guy and it was a 3d game, not just a retro 2d game. A lot of those boomer shooters fall under A level as well. I don't think expectations get dragged up as much as you think and even then, tools improve. The latests Unreal I think took care of dynamic lighting for you. It may not be perfect, but it's something less a small team has to worry about.
Pretty much. Games are something that can only surge from passion and sadly a lot of that passion currently wears tranny socks. I have been mulling a project of my own but the dread of interacting with nutcases makes me consider it a solo project and at most I'll buy some specific assets once I have something to actually apply them to.
Indie tools are getting better and better all the time. There will always be a gap between indie and Max-A games, but I don’t think any style or level of quality is doomed to be stuck in that gap. It moves over time.
Agreed. We go back to the engine for games is passion, but passion without somebody wrangling and putting hard dates makes times bloat. Perfectionism is the death of any passion project or at least it's what I blame for turning Silksong into vaporware. Somebody has to be the bad guy and if you think your approach can achieve it, I look forward to your products.
no one knows how to get around the CRA bullshit that mandates hiring infinity niggers, fags, dykes, troons, libtards, single moms, etc or else big daddy govt will sue you into oblivion.
Agreed as well. You can work with this if you happen to look for a role where a competent women isn't a unicorn, but god forbid you are looking for a raw programmer. Keeping the team small enough to void the issue outright is the right play. The moment your criteria to hire somebody is not just "minimum skillset beyond threshold" and "has good dynamic with rest of team" you are already playing with fire.
What about now? Production value are no longer the predictors for success, so why are studios/publishers still focusing on them? What rational reason exists to keep increasing operational expenses in an industry with turnover cycles as long as gaming?
Aside from what Dredd said, big companies are like gigantic snails. They do a lot of things purely on inerthia and getting them to course correct in a period of time not tracked in years is a herculean effort. I mean, you are seeing right now the games that were being conceptualized in 2016, peak current year, come out. If DEI acrually dies, you won't see it in AAAAA games till 2029-2030 the earliest.
