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Nacon exec says industry's problem is "too many games"
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
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this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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This is another important piece. Games that used to be linear and 8-15 hours are now open world and 60-80 hours long (often to their detriment). Most of the biggest games are designed to be played forever, which means it's coming at the expense of buying or playing new games. And development cycles are exceeding 5 years when they probably ought to be aiming for under 3 years.
The industry is making games with riskier development cycles, adding features that arguably don't make them any better or more marketable, and they're designed to make it actively hostile to the next person trying to sell a game to the same customer. It's no wonder it can't sustain the current trajectory.
There is always a market for smaller more focussed experiences. They are cheaper to make, so easy to make profit on. But, they want to turn every game into open world, microtransaction laden shit fest. A good example is Diablo 4, which literally removed genre standard features to make the game more tedious. Throwing hundreds of millions on a single massive game shouldn’t be a standard.
I love open world games, but I wouldn’t mind playing smaller games like older CoD campaigns too.
Which are those? I've heard that they nerfed fun builds to make the grind as long as they intended, but not whatever you're talking about.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d4/t/inventory-space-fix-it/83940
This one. D4 shitty inventory system which was a big step backwards.
I'm not fluent in Diablo parlance, but essentially it makes it harder to work toward the gear you want because they don't give you as much storage for the items you can't fit on your person?
Also curious.
If games are shorter people buy more of them.
Back in the day, so many studios tried to unseat wow with a fantasy mmo of their own. Seems an unwise strategy when playing an mmo is nearly a full time occupation. Very few players will have the time for more than one. Bad strategy. Which is why nearly every wow killer died.
Its clear the industry learned nothing when they started pushing perpetual live service games. Why would anyone play EA's destiny clone when they could instead play destiny, especially when the time investment makes it infeasible to play both?
Now the big thing is the battle pass, that demand tens of hours to complete. Same issue there. Can most players justify more than one battle pass subscription? Probably not.
There's a big reward for being second or third to market, but not too much beyond that. A few MMOs saw plenty of success despite WoW. League of Legends and Dota are massively successful, but Smite did well too. Minecraft is huge, but so is Terraria and Starbound. PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Warzone are huge, but Hyperscape couldn't cut it.