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[CokeDiet]

So you want them to lose their jobs? Most there are just developers and don't make decisions.

If anyone normal was there they could have Alpha'd up. Created a sense of fear and dread in the break room. That would have got the Professor and his/her/it's/Tony Danza/whatever not so merry band of Misfits in line.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

2018 - 2021 saw a glut of AAA SP games release from Sony. The downside to releasing such games is their developers instantly begin hemorrhaging money as sales fall off a cliff and they begin their next 6 years working on a new game while generating very little income.

I'll say this till the cows come home. PlayStations leadership does not play or care about games. They're not "fanboys". So we have two groups casting their vote on what PlayStation should do...

Group A: Playstation SP fanboys who have very vague financial information saying "PlayStation should focus on SP games".

Group B: Highly competent executives, with tons of exact financial and player analytics, who also have no preference for which game type gets made saying "GAAS is vital to our future".

Trust Group B.

Fiscal 2022-2024 years have had GOW Ragnarok, Spiderman 2, H2, Astrobot and margins are still half what they were 2018-21.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

Fiscal 2022-2024 years have had GOW Ragnarok, Spiderman 2, H2, Astrobot and margins are still half what they were 2018-21.

Tough to really glean anything from that as expenditure seems to fluctuate pretty significantly according to PlayStations graphs.

 

[ArtHands]

Good. Studios that make bad games should not be awarded with a bigger budget they should get shutdown. MS take note.

Concord has got Sony Playstation's seal of approval there.

 

[MALpractice311]

2018 - 2021 saw a glut of AAA SP games release from Sony. The downside to releasing such games is their developers instantly begin hemorrhaging money as sales fall off a cliff and they begin their next 6 years working on a new game while generating very little income.

I'll say this till the cows come home. PlayStations leadership does not play or care about games. They're not "fanboys". So we have two groups casting their vote on what PlayStation should do...

Group A: Playstation SP fanboys who have very vague financial information saying "PlayStation should focus on SP games".

Group B: Highly competent executives, with tons of exact financial and player analytics, who also have no preference for which game type gets made saying "GAAS is vital to our future".

Trust Group B.

Except Group B's projects keep failing. And not just for Sony. This year has seen the still births of multiple live service games, which has resulted in massive financial failures and studio shut downs.

Group A's projects at least sell decently well. They just need to get their budgets under control.

 

[SenkiDala]

If anyone normal was there they could have Alpha'd up. Created a sense of fear and dread in the break room. That would have got the Professor and his/her/it's/Tony Danza/whatever not so merry band of Misfits in line.

Alpha'd up... Must be the gayest thing I've ever heard. And I'm French.

 

[Angry_Megalodon]

Imagine calling guys who burn 400M "competent executives"

 

[BattleScar]

Fiscal 2022-2024 years have had GOW Ragnarok, Spiderman 2, H2, Astrobot and margins are still half what they were 2018-21.

I wonder what recently released hardware they would have been spending money on bringing up?

 

[diffusionx]

Any word if some Sony managers got fired as well?

I mean, there has to be a number of people at Sony who've seen Concord during its development multiple times and just weren't able to recognize it being absolutely ASS.

These people are clearly at the wrong positions and at the wrong company. They should go back to selling vacuum cleaners or whatever they were doing before they got their gigs at Sony, because one thing is fore sure: they have never seen nor played a good video game in their lives.

Makes you really wonder how they got their jobs... Oh, and the people who hired them should be fired as well.

Disasters like Concord really exposes how clueless Sony as a video game company is right now.

Concord is such a monumental disaster at a huge scale it should have triggered widespread changes because as you point out all the hundreds of people involved clearly do not know what they are doing.

2018 - 2021 saw a glut of AAA SP games release from Sony. The downside to releasing such games is their developers instantly begin hemorrhaging money as sales fall off a cliff and they begin their next 6 years working on a new game while generating very little income.

I'll say this till the cows come home. PlayStations leadership does not play or care about games. They're not "fanboys". So we have two groups casting their vote on what PlayStation should do...

Group A: Playstation SP fanboys who have very vague financial information saying "PlayStation should focus on SP games".

Group B: Highly competent executives, with tons of exact financial and player analytics, who also have no preference for which game type gets made saying "GAAS is vital to our future".

Trust Group B.

>competent

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

Except Group B's projects keep failing. And not just for Sony. This year has seen the still births of multiple live service games, which has resulted in massive financial failures and studio shut downs.

PlayStation (along with EA, WB, Riot, Ubisoft, Microsoft etc...) has this data. They've reviewed this data. They would like nothing more than to make more Uncharted, God of War, Spiderman, and Horizon SP games because those are safer and easier to do.

They're still pushing towards Live Service because that's what gaming has become.

You have to go watch those Civilization intro videos about the progression of mankind. Live Service represents space travel. Group A represents wooden sailboats. You don't win Civilization by building wooden sailboats even though they're safer to make.

Group A's projects at least sell decently well. They just need to get their budgets under control.

Group A is a shrinking market. Why spend 5 or 6 years making a game for Group A when Group A will be 20% smaller in 2030?

 

[CokeDiet]

Alpha'd up... Must be the gayest thing I've ever heard. And I'm French.

Then my man you never played Concord!

Then again, none of us did!

 

[LimanimaPT]

I just figured out that all those junior game devs will have an incredibly hard time finding new jobs. Having this trashy game on your resume will not sell well.

I've read that the game is good from a technical point of view. Juniors are not responsible for character designs or gameplay.

 

[ArtHands]

PlayStation (along with EA, WB, Riot, Ubisoft, Microsoft etc...) has this data. They've reviewed this data. They would like nothing more than to make more Uncharted, God of War, Spiderman, and Horizon SP games because those are safer and easier to do.

They're still pushing towards Live Service because that's what gaming has become.

You have to go watch those Civilization intro videos about the progression of mankind. Live Service represents space travel. Group A represents wooden sailboats. You don't win Civilization by building wooden sailboats even though they're safer to make.

Group A is a shrinking market. Why spend 5 or 6 years making a game for Group A when Group A will be 20% smaller in 2030?

Yah. There are multiple studio closure which specializes in single player games too.

 

[diffusionx]

Group A is a shrinking market. Why spend 5 or 6 years making a game for Group A when Group A will be 20% smaller in 2030?

why bother making a game for Group B when they are all going to be playing the same games they are playing now in 2030, if they even are still playing games? This is like the people who all tried to make a MMO after WOW.

In fact I find it more likely that those people stop playing Fortnite and start dabbling in other genres (including singleplayer) than than it is they drop Fortnite and play another gaashit treadmill. And new players are going to go to where everyone else is.

 

[MALpractice311]

why bother making a game for Group B when they are all going to be playing the same games they are playing now in 2030, if they even are still playing games? This is like the people who all tried to make a MMO after WOW.

In fact I find it more likely that those people stop playing Fortnite and start dabbling in other genres (including singleplayer) than than it is they drop Fortnite and play another gaashit treadmill. And new players are going to go to where everyone else is.

Yes. This right here is what I've been predicting. If you want to predict where the live service market is going, just look at all the post-WOW MMOs.

 

[Frwrd]

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

This is like the people who all tried to make a MMO after WOW.

Or is it like the people who tried to make a Battle Royale after PUBG?

In fact I find it more likely that those people stop playing Fortnite and start dabbling in other genres (including singleplayer) than than it is they drop Fortnite and play another gaashit treadmill. And new players are going to go to where everyone else is.

Nah, the kids who grew up with Live Service will stay in Live Service due to conditioning. It's why so many who grew up without Live Service stay playing SP. As SP gamers age out of the medium, the entire industry will just become Live Service. Plus, Live Service is relatively new and will improve at a faster rate over the next 20 years. It's growth ceiling is significantly higher.

 

[MALpractice311]

Or is it like the people who tried to make a Battle Royale after PUBG?

Nah, the kids who grew up with Live Service will stay in Live Service due to conditioning. It's why so many who grew up without Live Service stay playing SP. As SP gamers age out of the medium, the entire industry will just become Live Service. Plus, Live Service is relatively new and will improve at a faster rate over the next 20 years. It's growth ceiling is significantly higher.

Well, clearly we can't convince you otherwise at this point. But how many more massive live service flops would it take to change your mind?

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

Well, clearly we can't convince you otherwise at this point. But how many more massive live service flops would it take to change your mind?

It's never about flops existing. Multiplayer has always been harder to hit with.

I'd need to see the GAAS market plateau for a number of years AND believe we're at some kind of creative end point for GAAS games.

I don't think our current crop of GAAS juggernauts are anywhere close to a creative endpoint. GAAS will improve immensely if you understand human psychology.

 

[diffusionx]

Or is it like the people who tried to make a Battle Royale after PUBG?

Nah, the kids who grew up with Live Service will stay in Live Service due to conditioning. It's why so many who grew up without Live Service stay playing SP. As SP gamers age out of the medium, the entire industry will just become Live Service. Plus, Live Service is relatively new and will improve at a faster rate over the next 20 years. It's growth ceiling is significantly higher.

"the kids who grew up with live service" didn't really grow up with "live service", this is a misnomer. They grew up with a live service game, because it's not feasible to play more than one of these over any amount of time. They aren't "fans of live service", they are fans of Valorant, or Fortnite, or PUBG, or GTAO, or what have you. Maybe they dabble in others, maybe they switch at some point, but they switch because their friends switch, there's social elements at play here. Even if they like Valorant more if their friends are playing CS they will play CS as long as they have those friends.

Also, and I have said this before, I am not sure you understand people that well. MP games existed before live service. A lot of us played a lot of it, going back to the late 1990s on PC. But MP starts to lose its appeal over the years. It also becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with the userbase as life takes over. I would be surprised if the same people grinding season passes in whatever game at 25 are still doing it at 45 when they have a full time career, house, family. Life just doesn't work that way. At some point spending the little time in a game you control entirely has more of an appeal to it. If anything, games that want to hold on to those people will have to casualize, which will change their appeal, which is exactly what happened to WOW over the decades. WOW is basically a game you can bop in and out of and do whatever you want without much resistance, nothing like it used to be, and nothing at all like a competitive live service sweatfest game.

 

[Cyberpunkd]

As someone said when describing the project nature of games industry - does it really matter? The devs worked for 5+ years on it, they got good resumes. The management pocketed the cash from Sony’s buyout, they will be fine as well. I don’t think someone considering hiring people from Firewalk will find them technically incompetent, they are most likely on the level of other AAA devs.

I don’t think people will take two important lessons from it:
1. One AAA failure can tank the studio, even the one backed by the largest platform holder
2. Vast majority of your employees don’t give a damn enough to even be critical of their work even when it concerns their livelihood (see point 1)

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

"the kids who grew up with live service" didn't really grow up with "live service", this is a misnomer. They grew up with a live service game, because it's not feasible to play more than one of these over any amount of time. They aren't "fans of live service", they are fans of Valorant, or Fortnite, or PUBG, or GTAO, or what have you. Maybe they dabble in others, maybe they switch at some point, but they switch because their friends switch, there's social elements at play here. Even if they like Valorant more if their friends are playing CS they will play CS as long as they have those friends.

This paragraph has multiple illogical statements in it.

First, I've never met a multiplayer gamer who has only played one multiplayer game in my life. We all float from GAAS title to GAAS title, just as SP gamers float from SP game to SP game. The only difference is that we stick with games longer than you. Everyone reading this right now knows they could walk into any high school and find a ton of kids who played Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, and Warzone etc...

Secondly, you suggest that maybe GAAS gamers switch because their friends switch. Why would this matter? Why does Epic Games care that more players are playing Fortnite today because gamers got their friends to play? All that matters is player preferences and what they're willing to spend their money on.

Also, and I have said this before, I am not sure you understand people that well. MP games existed before live service.

MP is not Live Service. The MP games of the past were mostly based on the old economic model. Pay once up front, and we don't care how much you play. The new model has a focus on keeping players engaged. That is a huge fundamental advantage of Live Service. An advantage that wasn't widespread before 2017.

A lot of us played a lot of it, going back to the late 1990s on PC.

PC was a relatively small market in the 1990s. The bulk of industry investment was spent on SP games using the old pay before you play model. Live Service is the next evolution of the medium.

But MP starts to lose its appeal over the years. It also becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with the userbase as life takes over. I would be surprised if the same people grinding season passes in whatever game at 25 are still doing it at 45 when they have a full time career, house, family. Life just doesn't work that way.

You've probably never considered Fortnites growth before. The game is significantly more popular today than when it was during 2018s zietgeist. The reason why it's more popular today is because the ratio of SP gamers to MP gamers has shifted drastically since then. Old gamers who prefer SP games are leaving the medium. New gamers who enter the medium are choosing Live Service over SP games.

At some point spending the little time in a game you control entirely has more of an appeal to it. If anything, games that want to hold on to those people will have to casualize, which will change their appeal, which is exactly what happened to WOW over the decades. WOW is basically a game you can bop in and out of and do whatever you want without much resistance, nothing like it used to be, and nothing at all like a competitive live service sweatfest game.

I don't think you realize the metamorphosis that's occurring in MP space. The old multiplayer games relied on the competitive "sports" model. Unreal Tournament, StarCraft, Overwatch etc... These games were highly competitive, relied in twitch reflexes, and often has very short gameplay loops akin to basketball or football. Multiplayer is beginning to boom because the technology has now gotten to the point where it can explore the "heroes journey" formula that the SP market once had a monopoly on. Multiplayer is now about larger worlds, a higher degree of interactivity, more social in nature, and giving players a variety of goals that appeal to their personality type. Fortnite, Valheim, Lethal Company, Among Us represent multiplayers new stage and the stage has only just begun.

It made sense that older gamers "aged out" of Unreal Tournament at a certain rate. The new model of multiplayer will continue improving at keeping the older gamer especially with how many kids prefer Live Service multiplayer over SP.

 

[diffusionx]

This paragraph has multiple illogical statements in it.

First, I've never met a multiplayer gamer who has only played one multiplayer game in my life. We all float from GAAS title to GAAS title, just as SP gamers float from SP game to SP game. The only difference is that we stick with games longer than you. Everyone reading this right now knows they could walk into any high school and find a ton of kids who played Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, and Warzone etc...

The only thing that really matters here is if those people play those games and are invested in it, literally, spending money on it. Especially true of F2P games like Fortnite. Yea it's super easy to download a live service game, play it for a bit, then move on, but if you spend no money, a company can't survive like that, and we've seen that for a lot. What matters is what companies are spending their money on. In the case of SP games, for the most part gamers spent money on all of them, with GAAS that's not the case.

Secondly, you suggest that maybe GAAS gamers switch because their friends switch. Why would this matter? Why does Epic Games care that more players are playing Fortnite today because gamers got their friends to play? All that matters is player preferences and what they're willing to spend their money on.

MP is not Live Service. The MP games of the past were mostly based on the old economic model. Pay once up front, and we don't care how much you play. The new model has a focus on keeping players engaged. That is a huge fundamental advantage of Live Service. An advantage that wasn't widespread before 2017.

PC was a relatively small market in the 1990s. The bulk of industry investment was spent on SP games using the old pay before you play model. Live Service is the next evolution of the medium.

You've probably never considered Fortnites growth before. The game is significantly more popular today than when it was during 2018s zietgeist. The reason why it's more popular today is because the ratio of SP gamers to MP gamers has shifted drastically since then. Old gamers who prefer SP games are leaving the medium. New gamers who enter the medium are choosing Live Service over SP games.

I don't think you realize the metamorphosis that's occurring in MP space. The old multiplayer games relied on the competitive "sports" model. Unreal Tournament, StarCraft, Overwatch etc... These games were highly competitive, relied in twitch reflexes, and often has very short gameplay loops akin to basketball or football. Multiplayer is beginning to boom because the technology has now gotten to the point where it can explore the "heroes journey" formula that the SP market once had a monopoly on. Multiplayer is now about larger worlds, a higher degree of interactivity, more social in nature, and giving players a variety of goals that appeal to their personality type. Fortnite, Valheim, Lethal Company, Among Us represent multiplayers new stage and the stage has only just begun.

It made sense that older gamers "aged out" of Unreal Tournament at a certain rate. The new model of multiplayer will continue improving at keeping the older gamer especially with how many kids prefer Live Service multiplayer over SP.

I know that Fortnite is becoming more of a platform, Epic surely hopes that people play the game for the game for decades, just like WOW, which means that other companies have no more hope of getting those people to switch to their game than EA had when they made Warhammer Online to compete directly with WOW. It's a waste of time to even try as Epic has the lock in and the ability to pivot with its users (as Blizzard did) so other companies need to do something differently. Releasing yet another live service game to try to convince peple to spend decades playing it isn't going to work. Releasing yet another F2P game you invest $100M+ into and then see it flop within a few months or dwindle down to nothingness isn't going to work either. yet at the same time, something like Hogwarts Legacy sold 25 million copies and was the biggest game of last year...

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

The only thing that really matters here is if those people play those games and are invested in it, literally, spending money on it. Especially true of F2P games like Fortnite. Yea it's super easy to download a live service game, play it for a bit, then move on, but if you spend no money, a company can't survive like that, and we've seen that for a lot. What matters is what companies are spending their money on. In the case of SP games, for the most part gamers spent money on all of them, with GAAS that's not the case.

The GAAS market is growing. The SP market is shrinking.

The reason why companies like PlayStation are shifting towards GAAS is because they see the conveyor belts for both markets and they don't want to be isolated in an ever evaporating SP pond.

I know that Fortnite is becoming more of a platform, Epic surely hopes that people play the game for the game for decades, just like WOW, which means that other companies have no more hope of getting those people to switch to their game than EA had when they made Warhammer Online to compete directly with WOW.

Tell that to Arrowhead Studios who got a lot of people to spend money on Helldivers 2 despite that game having loads of creative and technical issues.

Fortnite is not some creative end point where titles like Lethal Company have no chance to thrive. The GAAS market is young and rife with potential.

It's a waste of time to even try as Epic has the lock in and the ability to pivot with its users (as Blizzard did) so other companies need to do something differently. Releasing yet another live service game to try to convince peple to spend decades playing it isn't going to work. Releasing yet another F2P game you invest $100M+ into and then see it flop within a few months or dwindle down to nothingness isn't going to work either. yet at the same time, something like Hogwarts Legacy sold 25 million copies and was the biggest game of last year...

Gamers cherry pick to fabricate a false reality about the future of their preferred game types.

Companies look at comprehensive data to thrive.

Gamers have a bias towards personal preference. Companies have biases towards money.

Orienting towards money rather than personal preference is always the smarter bet.

 

[ArtHands]

Yah Sony definitely crunched the numbers there when they make financial decision. They sees gaas as a part of their future, not sure why people insist to go against them. SP games are still coming so it’s an extension to what they are doing