So far the most popular new games thus year are a relatively small extraction shooter and a survival sandbox thing cobbled together with the powers of cardboard, string and copyright infringement. We can do without giant games that appeal to everyone and are loved by no one.

I haven't played Baldur’s Gate 3, but the game seems to have done quite well by being a well thought out and executed game.

I tend to avoid advertising as much as possible, so I mostly hear about stuff through Lemmy/reddit and have no idea if there was a massive budget for commercials, events, billboards etc etc.

BG3 was everywhere, not because of advertising, but because people genuinely loved the game and wanted to talk about the game - which makes people interested in looking into the game. Spending tens of millions of dollars trying to make something look enticing is the fastest way to make me think your game wasn't properly cooked.

It's pretty rare that a really good game/movie slips through the cracks, not saying that these companies shouldn't advertise - but a quality product will end up advertising itself through word of mouth.

Would be pretty interesting to see what kind of games companies would produce if most of the marketing budgets were largely spent on improving game quality, playability, and experiences instead.

How about, instead of spending millions on marketing and exercises or graphical virtuosity that do nothing in terms of playability, innovation and fun, focusing on what matters and do games where $70 still turns a huge profit?

So the price will go down, right? Right?!

I'm mostly into indie games nowadays and I never pay 70$ for a single game, and if it's a mainstream game I really want I wait for a sale.

I think this is the same thing streaming media companies are realizing. When it was just pretty much Netflix, media companies would license them their content and Netflix would get their subscription fees. Then the media companies decided that they could earn more by cutting out the middleman and producing their own content.

This created a headwind where companies established departments for producing content for streaming and funded them generously. However, the fragmentation on the consumer end ended up splitting the market such that it became unprofitable to run at those levels - everyone wanted $10 per month to subscribe to their dedicated service,, and looked to in house productions to drive consumer loyalty. That, predictably, fell apart and now they’re increasing fees, cutting down on family accounts, and cutting productions.

I think that the massive layoffs we are seeing in the gaming industry is a similar reaction. Game budgets have become bloated to the point of being unsustainable. I feel badly for the devs and staff affected by the contraction, and I remain impressed by the size of the game market overall, but at some point, like streaming media companies, you have to realize there’s only so much pie to go around. The size of the pie does grow, but the expectation of demand has significantly outpaced demand.

Just stop spending millions in making games photorealistic where it doesn't need to.

Everybody who plays videogames has had this experience

Pay 70$ for a game:

• it's digital only
• comes loaded with Micro transactions
• grinding mechanics that have a pay to skip function
• single player campaign: 13 hours
• buggy and unfinished glitches and freezes
• PC port locked at 30fps, runs Denuvo.
• gets removed from my library in a few years because "It's too expensive to maintain and licensing reasons"

"I'm never getting ripped off like this again"

STUDIO executive "I wonder why no one wants to buy these games... Must be the price."