- Joined
- Jan 15, 2019
$300 million per game, all but one fail. The one that doesn't "fail" has to generate $3 billion in revenue just to break even, much less turn a profit. VCs are fucking morons.
Highguard - Concord 2.0?
- Thread starter The Lаughing Man
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- Sep 28, 2022
even at launch tor could only really be considered a failure in the context of having been hyped up as the wow killer, which it obviously fell way short of (this was at the height of wows success, when wow had over 10 mil monthly paying subscribers)
Mr Processor
kiwifarms.net
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- Jan 8, 2022
We really need a Teen Girl Squad 4 player coop game.
makingmaker
kiwifarms.net
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- Feb 19, 2026
300$? its always exaggerated, 50-100 dev studios in 5-6 years can burn around 50-150mil max to release game similar to highguard. 3 bil in revenue fo live service game thats really popular is easily achievable, do not underestimate morrons easily spwnding 2-10k usd on one game in 1-3 years.
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2019
I'm just going by industry-reported/claimed figures here. They claim they're burning hundreds of millions on each of these turds. I agree it's ridiculous, but they seem to be doing it.
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2019
Tencent apparently has presence on TGA board, the same Tencent that invested in studio behind Highguard. Some people suspect he was shilling on their behalf. Others think he's genuinely retarded and actually thought it was new Apex Legends in the making.
What makes it really weird is rumors that they didn't even pay for the spot, which is very suspicious. At the end of the day, it could all just be a funny coincidence.
- Joined
- Sep 23, 2019
There's a recurring problem a fair few industries have. I tend to associate it most with J. J. Abrams and his mystery boxes. but it applies to lots of modern strategies: they only work if the audience is not aware they're in play.
Take JJ Abrams and his mystery box obsession. Putting things really simply, he prefers to leave his mysteries open-ended because of an experience when he was a kid with a random grab bag of stage magic props. He speculated on it so much that eventually he decided there was no way whatever was actually in the bag compared to his imagination. So by leaving people speculating, they can essentially pick the story they want, rather than one strict interpretation he enforces.
Fair enough in theory... the problem is twofold. One, JJ doesn't actually put anything in the grab bags, because he never intends to reveal them... and two, he blabbed about this strategy including point one in a fucking TED Talk. With that one talk, he didn't realise that he had just explained to literally everyone what was in every grab bag he ever made: nothing. And as a result, people stopped getting emotionally invested in his stories at all. He didn't realise that the grab bag relies on the author actually putting things in it, and that telling everyone there was nothing would essentially break every story he ever told before or since.
Similarly, the scattershot live service strategy only works when people don't realise you're employing a scattershot live service strategy. If those snoy live service games came out without the knowledge there was ten of them planned at once, people wouldn't know that they're employing the scattershot strategy and would thus assume that each game had at least some dedicated thought going into making it live service. But when it's literally a draft quota, and people know that the scattershot strategy is a thing, even games they might be invested in get the stinkeye - is this really something the company has it's heart behind, or is this like a 80-90% chance I'm wasting my time getting emotionally invested?
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2019
Not really. Tencent's on the TGA board and owns a piece of the Highguard devs' studio. Ergo TGA gives Highguard a freebie. Left hand pays the right hand. No actual money (or value, lol) changed hands. Just two lepers scratching each others' backs.
Good observation. The other thing that killed JJ Abrams' mystery box obsession (besides just blatantly admitting what he was doing) was people who actually sat through all six fucking seasons of Lost. Good fucking Christ that was such a train wreck piece of shit. Same thing happened w/the Battlestar Galactica remake (though that was Ronald Moore and company and that show had the courtesy to at least end after four seasons instead of six, so it wasted less of its fans' time). All the buildup and mystery leading up to the finale ... and ...?
For Lost, "it was all a dream" and/or "oh lol errybody's dead and in purgatory or heaven or hell or some shit lol I don't fuckin' know who's even still watching this shit?" and for BSG it was "oh lol they were our ancestors all along, also Starbuck v2 along with 'Chip Six' and 'Chip Baltar' were all angels or some shit, fuck technology fly it all into the sun let's go be cavemen again, also Roslin and Adama died lol".
Over a hundred episodes in each series building up interesting mythos, world building, lore, etc., with lots of fun fan theories (Abrams wasn't wrong about that aspect of the approach), and then they just flip off the viewers and say "fuck you, you're all wrong, it's nothing cool, it's some dumb mundane reset or dream or death metaphor." I gave up on Lost after two seasons of that shit, but I was a sucker and held on for the full BSG ride. Can you tell I'm a little bitter about how that turned out?
So as you said, Abrams and his ilk set the expectations for their stories -- they start to suck about ⅔ of the way through, run out of steam, go off the rails, and melt into liquid shit at the end. But yeah, it's the same approach -- just fling shit at the wall until something sticks, but unfortunately there's only so much "glue" (i.e. viewers/players) to go around and stuff doesn't just stick by itself (or by accident).
I'd love to get my hands on the actual viewership and player counts. Hollywood has to know they're sinking. There just isn't any way of hiding the pattern anymore. And of course modern games and their endless telemetry give precise information to the devs about practically everything, from "number of times any asshole anywhere on earth clicked [make-the-game-go.exe]" to "number of times people in New Jersey named Bob fired the Turdflinger Mk. 3" and I bet the people staring at those spreadsheets are frowning too.
So much smoke and mirrors in the industry, so much fucking hot air, and nobody seems to be interested in just trying to make a decent fucking game. Glad to watch it keep collapsing the way it is. The gaming press being its usual duplicitous self, lying through its obviously-bribed teeth, will keep it great company as it sinks.
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Mystery Spy
kiwifarms.net
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- May 25, 2024
The idea that Geoff promoted this game out of the goodness of his heart is a fantasy I can’t believe people are falling for. We are talking about an ad spot worth millions.
I find more likely Tencent, the company that funded this game, and also has a sit in the board of the TGA (The Game Awards) pushed Geoff to promote this game, so they may recoup their investment.
The idea that he liked a random indie game so much he decided to promote it, is a fairy tale designed to hide an obvious marketing campaign.
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- Jul 20, 2019
For some reason I was convinced that doing so without disclosing the relationship is illegal. And while no one would go to prison over something like this, why risk it?
It's exhausting to be so right. I'm tired of digging these graves, man!
If gaming journalism had any real journalists in it, they'd be digging into this. Such a controversy could seriously damage TGA's reputation if true.
babadook
kiwifarms.net
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- Dec 25, 2019
How many people watched a jj abrams ted talk, be honest.
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- Apr 6, 2014
Even better: what if none of them succeed? Because there's absolutely no guarantee any of them will make a profit. It isn't like a slot machine where if you pull the lever enough times you have to win. You can't sell a bad product people don't want and assume eventually they'll start buying it just through sheer volume of your output.
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- Sep 23, 2019
This is the wrong site to ask a question like "how many people know *x* said *y* without actually watching the original video?"
Regardless, this was essentially the turning point where it became common knowledge that JJ Abram is a hack, rather than an auteur. Up till that point, it might have seemed like his words meant something.
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2019
That means they have money to burn, and these studios going down is inconsequential - there's always someone else.
These fucks won't be the ones going under at the end of the day. Even if Tencent itself somehow closed down, they'd just embed themselves in another corporation and keep doing the same thing. People like that operate on a different level.
Bobbobson
kiwifarms.net
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- Dec 25, 2020
My favourite part is how raging Raul went full hater on Geoff after that because he made him look like a moron. Like it's somehow Dorito pope's fault.
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- Jun 4, 2018
Shovelware is only sustainable because the costs of development are so low that it makes barraging the marketplace with slop a viable tactic.
Scaling up to multimillion dollar expenditures strikes me as very poor risk management.
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- Jan 15, 2019
If journalism in general had any scruples or real journalists in it at all, we wouldn't have "awards shows" in the first place. They're all rigged. Fucking all of them. Literally all of them. From the highest profile shit to the dumbest local/regional "amateur music awards" garbage (I have personal knowledge of one such "awards show" being ballot-stuffed in favor of a guy who happened to be friends with somebody who owned a popular music-related store on the east coast a couple decades back, just as one example; fun fact though, at least the emcee called it out at the show that night and said "I still have no idea who this guy actually is, and I've lived here 20 years, but apparently everybody else knows him so he's your winner this year in [x] category, congrats stranger" and just rolled with it).
Ain't no awards show that isn't bought & paid for long before they start building the sets.
Fun thought ... I wonder what the world would be like with actual journalism, comprising unbiased reporters asking uncomfortable questions and reporting unpopular/undesirable facts and embarrassing powerful people with regularity. Instead of the muckraking garbage we have now.
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- Feb 17, 2023
Dibs on So-and-So! #nottheuglyone
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- Jul 20, 2019
I'm aware, but I won't deny that TGA makes for a fun spectacle... when it features interesting games that is. Shilling is gonna happen regardless, at least they're making it fun.
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- Dec 13, 2022
Maybe not. The Disney Snow BROWN bitch and Marvel's Brie Larson seemed to both adopt that same strategy as well, and it of course led to spectacular failure.