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Do ultra-engagement games concern you in regards to the industry's future?

M

Mattenth

Member
I've started to become a little worried that the gaming industry is, in a way, shrinking and consolidating at a pace faster than expected.

These games are the culprits:
  • DotA 2
  • League of Legends
  • Grand Theft Auto Online
  • Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (and derivatives Sudden Attack/CrossFire)
  • PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds
  • Overwatch
  • Hearthstone
  • To a lesser extent, Warframe
  • To a lesser extent, Rocket League
In my view, these games are engaging tens-of-millions of players for hundreds of hours globally. In some sense, they're actually shrinking the market by removing consumers for months or even years. These are the same gamers that Bethesda, Warner Bros, and other publishers have been trying to attract, and yet they seem more distant than ever.

I'll leave it open-ended: does the meteoric rise of these games concern you in regards to the industry's future?
 
2

2blackcats

Member
No.

Those kind of games have been around for decades.

The market can only sustain a few. Once a few pubs get burnt the gold rush will slow down a bit.
 
T

tearsintherain

Member
It happened when World of Warcraft came out, a lot of people just stuck with it and completely ignored other games.

Its definitely a problem, especially for the mid tier single player games that used to be able to operate in the $20-50m budget space and make a decent return with average quality of product. That space seems just about gone now, either you have to spend a ton on marketing and awareness or you will likely just be ignored.

I don't think sadly there is really any fix, its much easier to just stick with 1-2 games that never end than spring $60 for a new game that takes 20-40 hours and ends. Its happened as well in the movie business with fewer people spending money at theaters, and seems to be happening in the TV ad-driven biz as well with fewer live watchers every year. Only so many hours of entertainment most people can support and the number of options grows rapidly every year.

I don't follow it closely but it would be interesting to see whats going on in the mobile space as well, and if its growing rapidly (still) or if its suffering similar problems.
 
P

pakkit

Banned
I don't know if it should concern the industry, but it should make developers think twice about what they're offering if they decide to go head to head with these games. There's a reason it took years before Team Fortress 2 was overtaken by Overwatch. Games like Lawbreakers see a gap in the market, but fail to show what puts them ahead of the titans in their immediate vicinity.
 
Y

yanipheonu

Member
Frankly it's always been the case that people only buy the handful of games they are interested in. Some people only buy one game a year, often just the copy of COD or FIFA or whatever franchise they're interested in that came out that year.

People like those on NeoGaf who buy a whole variety of games are in the minority.
 
C

Crossing Eden

Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
No. Because the industry is larger than ever and nearly every market is supported in some way shape or form.
 
Danny Dudekisser

Danny Dudekisser

I paid good money for this Dynex!
No, what concerns me is the way that the worst aspects of those games is finding their way into games that otherwise should've been fine (ie: single player stuff.)
 
G

ghibli99

Member
As someone who doesn't play any of those (just a little bit of OW earlier this year), that doesn't worry so much as do things like F2P becoming more prevalent on consoles and the rise of lootboxes in premium games. I think games that appeal to me will never go away completely, but I don't like that franchises I once loved are heading down those roads.
 
S

SparkStar

Neo Member
The remedy is to jump to $80 standard for a AAA, or return to the early cartridge era style pricing - larger games cost more, smaller games cost less.

The only reason we're seeing so much GaaS is because profit margins for games are unusually small and this is how they need to recoup their production budget &/- aftermarket sales.

I also think that we're just caught in an odd place in history and the economy. Production budgets are astronomical rn yet a regular consumer can't be expected to pay 80$ for a game. Wouldn't common sense indicate that, if the costs of things are going up the average household income should increase as well?
 
N

nynt9

Member
The people playing hearthstone religiously probably aren’t the same people who would be buying open world AAA console games to begin with. There are different audiences that play different games, and that’s ok. Gaming keeps growing because it appeals to a broader set of people.
 
J

JusDoIt

Member
Mild concern. EA's statement about the Visceral shutdown suggests they're going to take the Star Wars game into a games as service direction.

We've had some single player hits this year (Zelda, Horizon), but many single player games are struggling.

It seems like the industry is tilting toward the games as service model right now, but I'm not worried about single player games disappearing altogether. We will get less of them, though (it seems).
 
2

2blackcats

Member
SparkStar said:
The remedy is to jump to $80 standard for a AAA, or return to the early cartridge era style pricing - larger games cost more, smaller games cost less.

The only reason we're seeing so much GaaS is because profit margins for games are unusually small and this is how they need to recoup their production budget &/- aftermarket sales.

I also think that we're just caught in an odd place in history and the economy. Production budgets are astronomical rn yet a regular consumer can't be expected to pay 80$ for a game. Wouldn't common sense indicate that, if the costs of things are going up the average household income should increase as well?
Click to expand...

It hasn't been though. Adjusted gross income for Americans has been nearly flat since the 80s.
 
K

Kwixotik

Member
I mean a lot of those games just provide a better value for your money. Overwatch is a one time payment for a great game that is regularly updated with free new content. A lot of single player games with maybe a 10-15 hour plot and simple gameplay and without free updates charge the same entry fee. This is coming from a person who mainly plays single player games, but I'd hardly call those games a bad thing for this reason. If anything, it should motivate other developers to make better games.

Plus, its not like we have a shortage of incredible single player and multiplayer games this year.
 
N

Nephtes

Member
On the one hand, most of my gaming time is spent with games like these...
Overwatch, Destiny (and Destiny 2), as well as Hearthstone probably make up 90% of my game time spent this year...

On the other hand, I do miss the purely single player experience that tells a good story and doesn't overstay its welcome.

The problem is, the AAA single player experiences are a big gamble for companies to make. If the game doesn't sell gangbusters, there's no way to make the cost of investment back, much less a profit...

Not to mention the fact that game development costs have gone up and up and up for the AAA space while the cost for a new game hasn't increased since the beginning of last gen.

I hate that the game companies think every game needs to engage a player for 100+ hours. This practice has obviously become systemic at Microsoft with the cancellation of games like Scalebound and the focus on games as a service like Sea of Thieves.

I'm not hopeful for the future of the AAA single player experience.
 
A

Arulan

Member
No. PC multiplayer games have a long history of providing support and maintaining communities for years after release. Some of the titles you mentioned in the OP are very recent, and shows that well-designed titles can still find their audience. Yearly releases of franchises was always a terrible model for the consumer.

With the rise of indie development through ease of publication and crowd-funding there has never been more good games being release and of such a diverse number of genres.

It's the AAA market's insistence on increasing budgets and therefore the necessity for them to target an ever-larger audience that is shrinking a part of the industry. If their games continue to offer me nothing else but production values, I'll continue to ignore them. If they continue down this path its their own fault when it all blows up. It's unfortunate all the developers and studios that will be shut down for the lesson to be learned though.
 
A

Athleon

Member
It works the other way around too though. These super-popular games bring new people to gaming, a percentage of which will branch out to other stuff. I know a lot of people whose first PC game was League or CS:GO. Steamspy data shows that a significant amount of PUBG players are new to Steam.

Also I don't see the difference between your examples and people who just buy the yearly CoD/Sports Game, who make a huge part of console gaming. This isn't something new. The people who play a variety of games across different genres are a minority.
 
L

lazygecko

Member
I think these games have definitely begun to have a significant impact on consumer habits and taking comptetitors by surprise as they are completely unprepared for the new market dynamics, as shown this year by spectacular MP game failures like Battleborn and Lawbreakers.

I first started thinking about this kind of market dynamic during the wave of "WoW killer" MMORPGs in the latter half of the 00's and how so many of them failed to the degree that they could not even carve out a sustainable niche for themselves. With MMORPGs, there was both the investment of progression/play time and subscription fees that I think greatly affected consumers and made them very hesitant to invest in alternative titles the same way you would normally expect them to do for "regular" video games. I think we're definitely seeing the same kind of phenomenom in the current paradigm of huge mainstream multiplayer games.
 
AudioEppa

AudioEppa

Member
This is the same shit as last gen when call of duty blew up. Every brain dead publisher is thinking they can jump in the quick money honeymoon and have success.

Once they realize by the time they release their game, that nobody gives a shit. They will make up some exit strategy excuse and start looking for new a bandwagon they can jump on. Or return to the kind of games fans missed like activation with and boots on the ground cod.

I like online games. But #1 in my heart will always be cinematic story driven SP games. I really enjoy Fortnite, as someone who doesn’t play PC. I consider it my version of PUBG. But I’m not investing any more game time to copycats if this industry wants to start popping them out left and right. Fuck that. I’ll continue to keep my multiplayer circle super small. And wait for the publishers/developers that fucking get it like Sony WWS, Telltale and some others to support my preference.
 
2

2blackcats

Member
AudioEppa said:
This is the same shit as last gen when call of duty blew up. Every brain dead publisher is thinking they can jump in the quick money honeymoon and have success.

Once they realize by the time they release their game, that nobody gives a shit. They will make up some exit strategy excuse and start looking for new a bandwagon they can jump on. Or return to the kind of games fans missed like activation with and boots on the ground cod.

I like some of games in the OP. But #1 in my heart will always be cinematic story driven SP games. I really enjoy Fortnite, as someone who doesn’t play PC. I consider it my version of PUBG. But I’m not investing any more game time to copycats if this industry wants to start popping them out left and right. Fuck that. I’ll continue to keep my multiplayer circle small. And wait for the publishers/developers that fucking get it like Sony WWS, Telltale and some others to support my preference.
Click to expand...

And it's the devs (as well as the customers) that get burnt.
 
N

Nev

Banned
No.

And even if the market was to have only these games I'd be okay with it because nowadays AAA have considerably more scummy ways to extort the player than 90% of what the OP listed.

Not a fan of supporting 60€ + 40€ season pass + microtransactions + paywall for a shell of a videogame. For anything really.

People that pay for things like Destiny 2 are beyond my realm of comprehension.
 
1

120v

Member
it's not like those playing pubg, dota, ect would immediately run to, say, Horizon, Hollow Knight, or whatever, given the absence of those games
 
U

UnemployedVillain

Member
Don't all multiplayer games strive to be "ultra-engagement"? You haven't give a compelling argument about what those games share that make them so popular and why that warrants concern. You simply listed the most popular ones
 
S

sleepwalkcapsules

Member
I think it's probably got a limit in how it interferes with sales of traditional SP.

But now those ultra-engagement titles are also... ultra profitable...
What I think it will happen is that AAA publishers I'll want their piece of the pie, but there's not enough space for everyone.
 
Bolivar687

Bolivar687

Banned
Yes. Nearly the entirety of my playtime this year has been engulfed by Crusader Kings II and Dawn of War III, games which have modest graphics, reward investment, and are perpetuated by community content generation. I just don't see how the console space emulates this model without burning out developers on larger open worlds and diverting the team towards post-launch commitment instead of moving on to the next game. We've seen so many genres disappear from consoles, the remaining ones increasingly homogenize, renowned project leads abandon marquee studios, and "too big to fail" games losing their base or selling half of their predecessor. What little interest I have left in the space is obviated by my investment just those two PC games.
 
W

Wolf Akela

Member
There's this one big assumption that if a certain game didn't exist, they automatically go play other games. Lots of people out there really only play just for that one game.

Secondly, the market grows over time. It's not a constant number.
 
G

Guevara

Member
As someone who doesn't play multiplayer games (only occasionally couch co-op or versus)

There's always some online nonsense you all are into.
 
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