Some AAA games have shortened life span, it seems. Does the Wales short-term take some live service games too? It´s a point to investigate. The industry go toward more short-term, annualized franchise and live service games.
The stagnation/decline in the AAA console marketplace, its implications on the health of the industry, and what can be done to reverse the trend
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I do think, however, it's pretty rich of Layden to say what he's saying, considering he oversaw PS Studios as they transitioned away from smaller projects bit by bit. He might have been directed towards that by the realities of what PS3 was and by the directives of his superiors like Andrew House, but that's up for debate. What is undeniable is that at least a part of this modern problem has his fingerprints on it and it's only after he's gone that he can say what he's saying.
In less than stellar news but not unexpected considering the layoffs from Sony.Deviation Games has seemingly closed down, according to employee posts on LinkedIn:https://linkedin.com/posts/alec2002_after-the-closure-of-deviation-games-last-activity-7172009261634375680-Vaqx?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
https://linkedin.com/posts/andrewcarrollgamedev_opentowork-activity-7172027468097286144-Cvri?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktopThe studio was formed by ex-Call of Duty and Treyarch developers and was working on an original AAA shooter in partnership with PlayStation.
Edit: officially confirmed
Kriste Stull on LinkedIn: It is with a heavy heart that we announce the closure of Deviation Games… | 44 comments
It is with a heavy heart that we announce the closure of Deviation Games. I want to express my deepest gratitude to our entire team. Thank you for all your… | 44 comments on LinkedIn
www.linkedin.com
Well there is this recently from Shawn Layden lol:
Can’t exactly say I agree & that Sony’s current COO doesn’t either given recent statements.
That didnt make any sense though. Unlike Church, people will not suddenly start buying AA or small AAA games. Its not like these games dont exist now.
Sony used to develop AA stuff in PS3 era that all pretty much flopped. Must of Sony UK studios closed down because they didnt transition to AAA. Japan studio closed down etc
If we agree with Layden then there will be mass layoff across the industry.
$200m budget ultimately mean majority of that money is going to average dev pockets. And we know from IG leaks these games are very profitable.
And what do you think we are seeking in the gaming job market now?
I don't like it but I have to agree with Layden on that point because to not do so is being blind to what is in front of the industry.
Belts are tightening, and companies are preparing for a hard year or three. Job are being cut... on mass. Studios are closing.
Yeah, that is pretty disingenuous given his involvement at Sony at the time this was happening. What is more annoying is that he is framing this as the direction that gaming is heading into, not only did he do the conducting, where the time comes due here he is well away from the impact.
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In his defence, though, there was a power struggle when Andrew House stepped away and he jockeyed for the top spot at PS and lost the power struggle to Kodera and Ryan, so while it's unconfirmable, I will lean on him taking direction from on high with how things played out and might have been able to course correct a different way than SIE actually tried to. But were that actually the case, he is still not fully absolved of his contribution to the problem.
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One thing I've always wondered about is the gender split in AAA games. As far as I know, "gaming" defined broadly has mostly equal gender split, but I don't know if that's necessarily true for AAA gaming. One recent title that seems to be one of the few to target an IP with a mostly equal gender split is Hogwarts Legacy. Anecdotally, I noticed many more women speaking about that game than I do the typical AAA game, probably the most since Animal Crossing's peak. I can't think of too many others.
Unfortunately I hate everything about that IP, but the point stands. If the current audience isn't growing, it would serve the market well to actively look beyond it.
Unfortunately I hate everything about that IP, but the point stands. If the current audience isn't growing, it would serve the market well to actively look beyond it.
I have also seen a lot females.talking about Zelda nowadays.
Those are some numbers that I honestly would like to see myself, because I suspect the same as you do.
That isn't much of a shock, Harry Potter as a franchise has a phenomenal reach with women/girls and so on. It's makes sense that women would pick up the game.
Again, agreed. This has been a thing that Nintendo has been pushing for a while, since the DS. It is the entire point of the Blue Ocean strategy, a tacit admission that the usual demographs aren't keeping things a float, so they went looking outside of gaming for a market. They found one.
A big one....
That said, it would be hard for me to think of any other company willing to deal with the fickle casual market and I not sure that Sony could.
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When you disect it, it definitely isn't and is mainly a marketing ploy by companies to ''look better'' for equality and diversity sake.
I would guesstimate around 25% of Playstation users are female and probably just over 15% for Xbox. These are small but much better than they were in 7th gen for PS/Xbox. For Nintendo I'd assume around 35/40% and for PC around 45-50%. Mobile is definitely 50/50.
Sony reported 41% being female gamers but it's hard for me to believe that it's Nintendo-level high for PS5, like it just seems very very unbelievable and uncharacteristic to have altered so much from PS4 and previous gens. I may be wrong and the more women that game, the better it is but I find that 41% hard to believe unless there's a lot of tomfoolery happening to get 41%. It's most likely just to look good to investors that they can target the female demographic more for growth.
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Maybe but that is a set of hypotheticals that I am not about the entertain given that he was pointed in the same direction. What I will attribute this too is that well... he lost, he fell, and looking at things at ground level has given him a new perspective. A little late to sound the alarm but at least he is.
Hmmm, how is those numbers world wide?
You know, I don't know how to parse that.... because I would have to consider that the number PS5 in the world is lower, but it's not. So how did they boost that number virtually over night.... Hmmm.
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One thing I really resent 80s Nintendo for is marketing the NES as a toy for boys. God, was that a bad long term decision. It took forever to get to this moment where we have AAA games with a 50/50 gender split.
Seems overly pessimistic. Youd be surprised at how wide the appeal for games is nowadays. Theres nothing specific about them that appeals more to boys. A woman will need her own PS5 to play HL, Baldurs Gate, TLoU, etc. The audience for the Harry Potter movies might give you an idea of who is buying the game.
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Didn’t help they had a console called GameBOY until 2005 either. Which arguably only got dropped because Nintendo had concerns about the DS being a true successor. However clearly the rebranding of their handheld line allowed them to broaden its market almost immediately.
Eh, chicken-egg situation imo. Computer stuff used to be for nerds, nerds used to be male. And video games were seen as a stupid waste of time by adults, so that also made the hobby lean towards boys. Different times now. However, it would be interesting to see an alternate universe where girls were targeted, too. Were there any NES-games that advertised towards girls specifically? I've honestly never thought about it. But imo it really shows what an underestimated industry gaming was back then, for nobody to even try.
Fwiw, though, it got even worse when Sony targeted not just boys, but "cool boys", lol. It wasn't until the NDS and Wii that gaming opened up significantly to boys and girls.
It was more that with the market crash in North America drove Nintendo to the toy aisle and that is gendered. Prior to that and gaming is more balanced with stuff like Pac-Man being more popular with women. The marketing for games was aligned with toys for years and that led to a boys-oriented domination. Game magazines and other promotions tended to lean harder on this with crass male humor or pin-ups in their advertisements with Nintendo easing on gendered advertisements by the 2000s. leading into the DS/Wii.
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There have always been women who are nerds and women who play video games. Women in those spaces have been consistently erased by both consumers and companies in part because the assumption was women didn't have the income to spend a lot of money on tech.
Not entirely surprising but even that can still tank as we have seen nor be as cheap as they think.
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that only works for so long.
there needs to be a real problem solver and not a bandaid issue,
we have hit a wall, graphics have essentially peaked. more improvements will come but its better to stay behind the curve and use cheaper and more outdated tech.
It feels like they've been saying that first quote for the last ten years. Or at least five.
They have not been wrong.
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this is anecdotal but like we really are.
even back then there we're some, however the whole environment even a decade and a half ago was, not very, it was pretty sexist.
in general i kinda grew to hate the idea of appealing to girls, appealing to girls is not having sexism.
you either appeal to everyone or you try really hard to get woman to actively not buy your games thats pretty much it.
thats also why girly games never really survived past the ds and wii days, its like having a game thats all blue about soccer, cars, and how cool muscles are.
it might work for a bit but after that people will wanna play real games, suffice to say.
gendering entertainment (outside of dating and romance stuff which kinda will be just based off your love interest, or its like a coming of age story or other examples which only one some people will be able to relate and other stuff kind of like that you get the deal) is never a good idea really.
it sucks that gamergate and whatever is going on now is happening. it will never work because woman will always want to do things, like men want to do things.
woman are human too, they also might rake an interest in games and might take an interest in devloping them.
50% makes sense as thats how much woman there are in the world compared to men, and theres nothing inherently gendered about liking games or movies or music or anything.
or at least those are my thoughts as a owman who ahs been gaming since like 5 years old.
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Which is funny. Because female audience usually... when they are into something. They are one of the biggest whales i ever seen lol. The popular chinese dressing game Nikki. has really strong spender there from China female audience.
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It's mostly an outdated idea that women had less financial independence and ability to spend money on luxury tech. The only reason the bias continues to exist is because of inertia and general sexism still persists.
That was a thing in like the 60s or 70s, at least in the west. It doesn't make any sense to assume anything like that nowadays. Just stupid.
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To be clear, I don’t think many people who make and play video games are consciously thinking “women have less money than men so don’t market to them.” It’s more that the stigma of video games being for men persists because of that original bias. Some people think “women don’t play video games in a significant number” and never bother to unpack that bias, and then it becomes self perpetuating, especially when the AAA game industry is so expensive that executives return to the same insular thinking over and over.
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Indeed. Its sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. There is a level of demographics and market research there, like many studios making military shooters would realize their primary market is men, but at the publisher level im surprised there arent more active efforts to court women. They spend a lot. The Genshin Impact female audience is pretty big and whale-y.
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Absolutely. The shorter way to put it is the original decisions made about who the target demo for video games was in the 80s and 90s had a persistent knock-on effect that still persists in the modern day. (not making that mistake was one of the few things Atari got right from moment one that saw regression in the 80s)
To a lesser but not less-persistent degree, this is also why gaming has been slow to adapt or incapable of adapting to ways of maintaining or growing queer and racialized audiences across the hobby more broadly (especially ways that aren't totally gauche).
Do you think a Persona-style RPG with a story that could have been written by a young adult novelist would be something that could be successful (i.e. million-seller), despite being sort of gendered? (Assuming the quality of the work is good / not standing in the way)
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yeah, specifically look at the difference between femc and mc in persona 3,
the life sim stuff definitely changes dependning on gender, so more life sim would be the way to go. (hence otome games)
though idk if a rpg where the focus is on the rpg could really be gendered at all, 90% of mc's are men and every persona canon mc except maya way back in 2 was a man and it still has a pretty good female playerbase.
regarding gender and sexuality i don't think I really know enough to go further into it though.
gendering just hinders more than helps in most cases, the only cases where it could really matter is in high school or romance where how you interact wiht your friends who your friends are what clubs you are a part of and who you meet or whatever is very mcuh defined by gender given how segragated things are, at least from personal expereince.
theres also how cultures interact with gender (korea especially) thats really to complciated to get into.
I think it could, with an anime aesthetic geared to teens. to answer your question.
Phil Spencer on the AAA industry.
www.polygon.com
Phil Spencer on what the hell is happening in the games industry
"The implications have human impact. And we should all reflect on that and think about it"
www.polygon.com
Phil Spencer re-iterates that Xbox is profitable. Could be that ABK is doing the heavy lifting here, though.
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That's what I completely believe and a long timeline I don't see PS or Xbox going above PS4/Xbox at all. That's why the case with the next Switch will be interesting - I think it will sell faster but it will reach the cap faster and it will be the same people who bought Switch.
I believe Xbox is and was profitable. Margins were not 40-50% like the mothership though. Maybe like around 5% like Sony or maybe slightly higher due to amount of GaaS games. But it was relatively low margins.
So we're back to the days Iwata was talking about audience a lot and released the Wii to back up his point. I think Nintendo still follows that spirit but Sony and MS never really embraced that kind of thing. I don't think Switch brought in many new gamers though but I think it did activate gamers who took a break.
Iwata's theory, (as I understand it) was that it was no longer sufficient to simply build product and have consumers come to it. That ultimately, they are fighting for attention and building the consumer base that they will need to rely on. They had to introduce the product to the public, beginning the relationship at that point otherwise potential consumers would have no idea that they exist. Building a sizeable consumer base is something that would take time but would be fruitful for Nintendo's continued survival.
Wii proved that, the Switch also proved that. They could not assume that the gamers within the tent was enough, they needed to look outside of that pool. They have been doing that since Iwata started talking and since his death is been something of a mantra at the company.
They'd better be, Phil's been in Mircosoft long enough to know how ruthless the company can be. If Xbox wasn't profitable then I doubt that Mircosoft would put up with it for long.
@duvjones MS did put up with consistent billions in losses for the better part of a decade and almost as soon as they gained momentum they had it snatched away by the PS4 and have gone downhill since.
It’s actually kind of remarkable what MS has allowed Xbox to do, even excluding the enormous acquisitions.
It’s actually kind of remarkable what MS has allowed Xbox to do, even excluding the enormous acquisitions.
Big Shakeup At Nintendo Testing Center Ahead Of Switch 2
Nintendo of America lays off some contractors while converting others to full-time employees
kotaku.com
NOA is joining with some contracts not being renewed. A mixed bag where some won’t get converted but others will.
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Yeah, it’s been my contention that Switch’s greatest value to Nintendo has been more about consumer retention in the console market by providing a device that better suits far more consumer lifestyles and reduces tension that causes some to drop the gaming hobby, which grows the audience by reducing churn in the market instead of the typical churn rate, where people who fall off the hobby are replaced in equal but never greater number by new buyers.
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Big Shakeup At Nintendo Testing Center Ahead Of Switch 2
Nintendo of America lays off some contractors while converting others to full-time employees
NOA is joining with some layoffs. A mixed bag where some won’t get converted but others will.
Something about Sega doing what Nintendon't, I dunno. I mainly bring this up because the news came out in a similar timeframe but also because Schrier mentions quality assurance workers in the article.
Though pulling back a bit, it's honestly an interesting point of discussion. It's something corporations brought upon themselves, but all of the wodely publicized layoffs throughout both games and games media is bringing about a somewhat accelerated effort to unionize. IGN's got a union, Sega's union recently got a deal through, Microsoft's getting a gaming union now. It'll be interesting to see how this impacts the industry going forward considering the fact that layoffs are generally the go-to method for cutting costs at many companies, but now the workers are (finally) doing all they can to protect themselves.
True but that was a state that wasn't going to last forever, much like the implied ultimatum that Sony Group itself has been signaling: that if PlayStation fucks up, it on it's own. Mircosoft was not going to prop up Xbox and Xbox Game Studios indefinitely and into perpetuity, they got to at the very least sustain itself which is it managing. That said, this success has almost completely been on the back of a single region. That is not stable, no matter how one looks at it.
Yeah, it's just a question of how much Microsoft itself is ok with it's position in the gaming market. It's not great, but it's not horrible either. How they approach this and what they do to improve will come down to how the company reacts and how it leads.
Sounds to me that some contracts are not getting renewed, which sucks for the folks involved. That said the promotion into the org is likely nice for those that want off the yoyo that is agency/contract work.Big Shakeup At Nintendo Testing Center Ahead Of Switch 2
Nintendo of America lays off some contractors while converting others to full-time employees
NOA is joining with some layoffs. A mixed bag where some won’t get converted but others will.
Honestly, so long as unions are kept out of the c-suite... I don't see a lot changing. It will make layoffs harder but again companies have dealt with that before with contract work, which isn't going to be great.
Still, what improvements are made will be interesting.
This isn’t a layoff, they just didn’t renew contracts since the projects were done. One of the ones who didn’t have their contract renewed said they hadn’t had a project since October. The actual news is they hired a good portion of them as actual employees. It really does no good for journalists to mix contractors (who yes do have issues with treatment) with full time employees.Big Shakeup At Nintendo Testing Center Ahead Of Switch 2
Nintendo of America lays off some contractors while converting others to full-time employees
NOA is joining with some layoffs. A mixed bag where some won’t get converted but others will.
These people wouldn’t have been able to even form a union at Nintendo in the usual sense, since they weren’t employed by them.
I know they aren’t layoffs but contracts not being renewed. I was being consistent with how I posted this type of news before but should have probably just went with that instead. I’ll edit it to clarify. The bigger news is indeed some of them being converted to full time employees .
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One thing I have yet to see anybody point out with regards to the precarious environment for consoles and triple A games today, is the dimished role the TV plays in our lives today. Back in 2012. Iwata remarked how the relationship between consoles and the TV had always been that of a parasite feeding of of its host. In other words, consoles could sell 200 million ww because there were over 200 million television owners ww that wanted a console next to their living room/bedroom tv.
Nowadays, lots people may own a tv but wind up dividing lots of time between the tv, the tablet, the pc/laptop or the smartphone. Yet we still have platform holders like Sony and MS making consoles exclusively monitor based like nothing has changed since 2013. The effect this has had is that consoles now have a much lower ceiling of potential customers to appeal too. Meanwhile, the most backwards/conservative company in the industry saw what was happening in 2011/2012 and tried to head off that potential threat. Failed on the first try but succeeded and then some on the second.
The problem I see for AAA games, is that they wound up sticking too close to Sony and Microsoft's strategy. There should have been a shift in strategy around 2018/2019, recognising that there was already plenty of stagnation on the PS4/Xbox One platforms. Instead, everybody stayed the course in the hopes that less competition in the Triple A space meant more sales in the long run.
The only option I see for AAA games to survive, is to scale back and focus on hybrid devices. Switch, Steam Deck and whatever comes next. Those are the options on the table.
Nowadays, lots people may own a tv but wind up dividing lots of time between the tv, the tablet, the pc/laptop or the smartphone. Yet we still have platform holders like Sony and MS making consoles exclusively monitor based like nothing has changed since 2013. The effect this has had is that consoles now have a much lower ceiling of potential customers to appeal too. Meanwhile, the most backwards/conservative company in the industry saw what was happening in 2011/2012 and tried to head off that potential threat. Failed on the first try but succeeded and then some on the second.
The problem I see for AAA games, is that they wound up sticking too close to Sony and Microsoft's strategy. There should have been a shift in strategy around 2018/2019, recognising that there was already plenty of stagnation on the PS4/Xbox One platforms. Instead, everybody stayed the course in the hopes that less competition in the Triple A space meant more sales in the long run.
The only option I see for AAA games to survive, is to scale back and focus on hybrid devices. Switch, Steam Deck and whatever comes next. Those are the options on the table.
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The long and the short of it is that Nintendo and Valve have correctly understood that videogames are a hit-driven industry, with no single winning formula besides giving the right people the resources they need to publish their concept, like literally all other mass entertainment. How they approach this slightly varies:
-Nintendo's approach is to 1) create games in a wide variety of genres based on interests in the wider mass-culture (e.g. Nintendogs, Wii/Ring Fit, Wii Sports, etc) and 2) reduce barriers to entry for newcomers where possible, in order to cast a wider net
-Valve's approach has been to try to smooth over as many points of friction as possible between creators and customers - even to the point of actively encouraging the blurring between a creator and a customer (i.e. if you want to make and publish a mod they'll happily distribute petabytes of user-created mod content via Steam Workshop for free, and even give you money to integrate that content into the official game if users want it). Despite having serious disadvantages in some areas (for example, most of their users are interfacing with Steam via an OS Valve have no control over), Valve handily outperforms its competitors when it comes to features and discoverability, even trouncing a competitor who literally owns and operates the OS that most of Valve's customers use. It is a miracle of engineering that Valve have made the Steam Deck experience as seamless as it is, given the complexity of the task.
It's no coincidence that for both companies, public shareholders either don't exist or have relatively little power over decision making, which means they have the opportunity to make investments that might not bear fruit for years.
Let's contrast this with Xbox and Sony:
-Outside of their initial xbox live arcade offering and their active courting of Japanese developers in the early/mid 360 days (coincidentally their most successful period), Xbox have largely been reactive rather than proactive - i.e. they see something valuable, and step in and buy it, and then throw money at producing the thing with the expectation of continued success. This has failed for 2 consecutive generations now and has badly diminished their signature franchises like Halo. I have yet to see evidence that this works in a sustainable way - at the end of the day, it's the developers who make a franchise what it is, and if you're primarily buying the IP but are losing (or worse, actively laying off) the developers, then it's quite easy for developers to replicate what they were doing elsewhere. It's not like the raw elements of intellectual property, like the characters and setting of something like Diablo, is that valuable to customers - it's mostly the game design which is the primary appeal, which is not intellectual property and which can easily travel with developers from one company to another. Their other major issue is that their parent company not only doesn't understand the business, but it is also most responsible for sabotaging xbox after its most successful period.
-I think Sony once correctly understood Nintendo's strategy, which is why they commissioned a wide variety of pitched game ideas, including the signature breakout hit of their first 2 console generations, Gran Turismo, which was based on the simple proposal of "driving my car on my TV". Numerous failures during the PS3 years have left large, spectacle-heavy games as their main attraction (Uncharted, God of War, Last of Us), and they have at this point tripled down on the business model of spending constantly expanding budgets on low risk winners. However, as can be seen by the collapse of high budget Disney/Marvel/DC movies, there is no such thing as low risk if customers simply get bored, and locking yourself into the arms race of delivering a constantly escalating spectacle is going to drastically reduce your profit margin. I would also say that unlike Nintendo, they are flippant about both acquiring and shuttering studios without any real forethought besides seeing dollar signs in their eyes. This has resulted in them making absolutely insane purchases (buying Bungie based on the performance of Destiny 1 and 2 was simply insane, the issues at Bungie have been thoroughly documented), while simultaneously penny-pinching numerous studios out of existence, despite their 1st-party software lineup having serious gaps outside of 3rd person action games.
Xbox' only hope is either to bow out and become the largest 3rd party publisher going forward, or if they insist that they can stay in the console market, they need to:
1) completely halt the business practice of enforcing <2 year temp contracts and actually build a permanent employee base - they have massively devalued Halo and Forza as a result of this business practice alone
2) expand their UK operation at Rare and Playground Games and, aside from tentpoles like Sea of Thieves/Forza Horizon, explicitly put them to the task of replicating Nintendo's production model - i.e. spreading resources around a number of smaller budget games in underserved genres that can be delivered in 2-3 years, and see what succeeds
3) Produce at least one hit free to play GAAS game (ideally the next Halo or a Sea of Thieves sequel) where the monetisation is based around gamepass (i.e. if you own gamepass, you always get access to season passes, no matter what platform you're on. If you don't, you pay for each one). I don't think the current gamepass model of rotating singleplayer 3rd party titles actually works - we already know completion rates for these games are low and most users already have some combination of a massive backlog or a couple of gigantic service games they spend most of their time on. I think the only way of growing and sustaining gamepass is to get a couple of big 1st party GAAS games on there, make gamepass a no-brainer option if you plan to play even one of them, and then slowly reduce the 3rd party offering on gamepass over time. Post ABK acquisition Microsoft's 1st-party offering should easily be enough to mostly carry gamepass, provided they learn their lessons.
4) Invest in building a marketing presence and supply chains outside of the US and UK. Whoever has been responsible for Xbox' marketing to date should simply never be used again. The lack of any established presence in international markets has meant that any gains from the 360 era basically evaporated instantly.
Sony are probably locked into their current trajectory until a high profile flop shakes them out of it - but regardless they will continue to reduce the gap between PS and PC releases. Just look at Sony's marketing budgets for the reason why - no sane company will look at those numbers and say "yes, lets continue to spend tens of millions of marketing budget advertising a game to one set of customers only, before arbitrarily relenting later and quietly dumping the game onto a market of about equal size". Sony's advantage is that they have basically won by default due to xbox' mistakes, so will reap the benefit of being the de facto home console in most markets, and thus get support from 99.9% of third parties. In a sane world this would appease shareholders, but it won't, so they will probably react in some way to the fact that almost the entire streaming industry is oriented around Steam/PC primarily, and any current barriers to entry on PC would be destroyed overnight if Valve started selling a TV device.
Sony's other potential issue is that high profile Japanese publishers simply cannot ignore that Nintendo basically owns the Japanese market now, so Japanese 3rd party games may become primarily developed for Switch 2. If that's the case, then any power advantage of PS5 is rendered meaningless, because vast swathes of the market (99% of indies and 99% of Japanese developers) will be delivering the same games to a cheaper device.
-Nintendo's approach is to 1) create games in a wide variety of genres based on interests in the wider mass-culture (e.g. Nintendogs, Wii/Ring Fit, Wii Sports, etc) and 2) reduce barriers to entry for newcomers where possible, in order to cast a wider net
-Valve's approach has been to try to smooth over as many points of friction as possible between creators and customers - even to the point of actively encouraging the blurring between a creator and a customer (i.e. if you want to make and publish a mod they'll happily distribute petabytes of user-created mod content via Steam Workshop for free, and even give you money to integrate that content into the official game if users want it). Despite having serious disadvantages in some areas (for example, most of their users are interfacing with Steam via an OS Valve have no control over), Valve handily outperforms its competitors when it comes to features and discoverability, even trouncing a competitor who literally owns and operates the OS that most of Valve's customers use. It is a miracle of engineering that Valve have made the Steam Deck experience as seamless as it is, given the complexity of the task.
It's no coincidence that for both companies, public shareholders either don't exist or have relatively little power over decision making, which means they have the opportunity to make investments that might not bear fruit for years.
Let's contrast this with Xbox and Sony:
-Outside of their initial xbox live arcade offering and their active courting of Japanese developers in the early/mid 360 days (coincidentally their most successful period), Xbox have largely been reactive rather than proactive - i.e. they see something valuable, and step in and buy it, and then throw money at producing the thing with the expectation of continued success. This has failed for 2 consecutive generations now and has badly diminished their signature franchises like Halo. I have yet to see evidence that this works in a sustainable way - at the end of the day, it's the developers who make a franchise what it is, and if you're primarily buying the IP but are losing (or worse, actively laying off) the developers, then it's quite easy for developers to replicate what they were doing elsewhere. It's not like the raw elements of intellectual property, like the characters and setting of something like Diablo, is that valuable to customers - it's mostly the game design which is the primary appeal, which is not intellectual property and which can easily travel with developers from one company to another. Their other major issue is that their parent company not only doesn't understand the business, but it is also most responsible for sabotaging xbox after its most successful period.
-I think Sony once correctly understood Nintendo's strategy, which is why they commissioned a wide variety of pitched game ideas, including the signature breakout hit of their first 2 console generations, Gran Turismo, which was based on the simple proposal of "driving my car on my TV". Numerous failures during the PS3 years have left large, spectacle-heavy games as their main attraction (Uncharted, God of War, Last of Us), and they have at this point tripled down on the business model of spending constantly expanding budgets on low risk winners. However, as can be seen by the collapse of high budget Disney/Marvel/DC movies, there is no such thing as low risk if customers simply get bored, and locking yourself into the arms race of delivering a constantly escalating spectacle is going to drastically reduce your profit margin. I would also say that unlike Nintendo, they are flippant about both acquiring and shuttering studios without any real forethought besides seeing dollar signs in their eyes. This has resulted in them making absolutely insane purchases (buying Bungie based on the performance of Destiny 1 and 2 was simply insane, the issues at Bungie have been thoroughly documented), while simultaneously penny-pinching numerous studios out of existence, despite their 1st-party software lineup having serious gaps outside of 3rd person action games.
Xbox' only hope is either to bow out and become the largest 3rd party publisher going forward, or if they insist that they can stay in the console market, they need to:
1) completely halt the business practice of enforcing <2 year temp contracts and actually build a permanent employee base - they have massively devalued Halo and Forza as a result of this business practice alone
2) expand their UK operation at Rare and Playground Games and, aside from tentpoles like Sea of Thieves/Forza Horizon, explicitly put them to the task of replicating Nintendo's production model - i.e. spreading resources around a number of smaller budget games in underserved genres that can be delivered in 2-3 years, and see what succeeds
3) Produce at least one hit free to play GAAS game (ideally the next Halo or a Sea of Thieves sequel) where the monetisation is based around gamepass (i.e. if you own gamepass, you always get access to season passes, no matter what platform you're on. If you don't, you pay for each one). I don't think the current gamepass model of rotating singleplayer 3rd party titles actually works - we already know completion rates for these games are low and most users already have some combination of a massive backlog or a couple of gigantic service games they spend most of their time on. I think the only way of growing and sustaining gamepass is to get a couple of big 1st party GAAS games on there, make gamepass a no-brainer option if you plan to play even one of them, and then slowly reduce the 3rd party offering on gamepass over time. Post ABK acquisition Microsoft's 1st-party offering should easily be enough to mostly carry gamepass, provided they learn their lessons.
4) Invest in building a marketing presence and supply chains outside of the US and UK. Whoever has been responsible for Xbox' marketing to date should simply never be used again. The lack of any established presence in international markets has meant that any gains from the 360 era basically evaporated instantly.
Sony are probably locked into their current trajectory until a high profile flop shakes them out of it - but regardless they will continue to reduce the gap between PS and PC releases. Just look at Sony's marketing budgets for the reason why - no sane company will look at those numbers and say "yes, lets continue to spend tens of millions of marketing budget advertising a game to one set of customers only, before arbitrarily relenting later and quietly dumping the game onto a market of about equal size". Sony's advantage is that they have basically won by default due to xbox' mistakes, so will reap the benefit of being the de facto home console in most markets, and thus get support from 99.9% of third parties. In a sane world this would appease shareholders, but it won't, so they will probably react in some way to the fact that almost the entire streaming industry is oriented around Steam/PC primarily, and any current barriers to entry on PC would be destroyed overnight if Valve started selling a TV device.
Sony's other potential issue is that high profile Japanese publishers simply cannot ignore that Nintendo basically owns the Japanese market now, so Japanese 3rd party games may become primarily developed for Switch 2. If that's the case, then any power advantage of PS5 is rendered meaningless, because vast swathes of the market (99% of indies and 99% of Japanese developers) will be delivering the same games to a cheaper device.
~600 employees (580 using their 2023 headcount)
I am beginning to get the feeling that Take-Two has bet the farm on GTA VI being as much of a cultural hit as in the series past.... and if it doesn't reach those heights, this will likely get worse.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Well if it launches without serious bugs it will be reach extremely high. After all it is the first GTA since online generation. If it had PC Day 1 launch it would reached enormous enormous heights, but even with just two consoles it will sell a lot.
I doubt that is happening, given how large the game seems to be. It's likely a debugging nightmare.
The second actually.... so GTA V exists and with it, GTA Online, the only component that stretched the life of the product by two generations.
I am not so sure about that anyways, we have yet to get a release schedule.... outside of "2025", so early 2025? Late 2025? fiscal end of 2025 (which is easily 2026)? I couldn't tell you, can you?