Yossarian wrote:

If you want publishers to take a punt on new IPs, they need to know that they can weather the loss should they flop.

I can guarantee-damn-tee you that if EA publishes a game and it flops, then it'll end up just being a massive tax write-off for them. The Devs might lose their jobs over it, but it's not really going to affect a major publisher financially.

g.man wrote:

Yossarian wrote:

If you want publishers to take a punt on new IPs, they need to know that they can weather the loss should they flop.

I can guarantee-damn-tee you that if EA publishes a game and it flops, then it'll end up just being a massive tax write-off for them. The Devs might lose their jobs over it, but it's not really going to affect a major publisher financially.

It won’t because they can cover the losses from elsewhere, things like FUT are part of that.

Yossarian wrote:

monkey wrote:

If high production costs drive revuenue by making the game more marketable, why do the costs need to be covered by in-game slot machines?

Because the revenue isn’t necessarily enough to cover losses from other parts of the business. It’s a high risk industry, videogames, with most new franchises failing to gain a following and sinking without trace, potentially taking tens of millions of dollars with it. If you want publishers to take a punt on new IPs, they need to know that they can weather the loss should they flop.

  
How to Fix the Gaming Industry
- New IP should be spooned out piece by piece, gaining word of mouth if its good, limiting dev costs if it isn't. This will reward innovation and discourage copycatting. This is how companies are handling VR. An immature market they're experimenting with which they don't expect to make a lot of money from at this stage. But dipping their toes in to be able to profit later down the line.
-  Games should be developed only to the point where they need to be. If you make a single player game, don't shoe horn in multiplayer. If you can't make money from the single player game as it stands, look at ways to cut the budget from anything that isn't part of the game. Do you really need all those voice actors in your shooting game? Shiny bullshit? 800 different cars whose differences are so slight as to be irrelevant? 
- Don't over-saturate your own market - How can we compete in this crowded landscape of annual sequels cries the company when its fourth iteration of a stale franchise fails to live up to its financial projections. 
- See that game you're making? Don't bother - Most games are shit. Is yours shit? Thought so. Don't bother. Leave the way clear for games that people really really want or feel they need to make, to hell with the cost. 


How not to fix the gaming industry
- lootboxes.

The thing that rankles with games isn't that they're often bad or aimed at kids. If you're an adult playing with a child's toy, you'll have to accept that maybe that product wasn't designed with your preferences in mind. The worst thing is when stuff is in there that really should just be for responsible adults (like choosing when and how to spend money or gambling).

Yossarian wrote:

There’s a thriving indie games industry which offers everything you’re asking for. If you don’t want the shiny triple As with microtransactions, don’t buy them, simple. Some people do want them, some people are happy to buy lootboxes for them, some companies are happy to create them for that market, you can be as sniffy and dismissive of them as you like, none of this will change.

I don't buy them really. I'd like to but they've been mostly rotten for some time now. And yes I play mostly smaller indie stuff that is more creative, less time-consuming and less oriented towards bullshit. I still get to object to gambling being in kids toys.

afgavinstan wrote:

Re: tax-avoidance

There's your smoking gun right there.

Yossarian wrote:

I could maybe get behind that if it weren’t for the fact that parental controls can be put on consoles which will prevent kids from ever actually gambling in their toys.

It places gambling in front of kids, the same way as BET365, SkyBet, and Mansion sponsoring football teams, as well as every advert between the football on the tellybox

Businesses can close for a number of reasons, most often due to the poor decisions taken by their management teams.

Also, how many devs have folded after just one or two underperforming titles?

You should watch gav's vid before you go further down this road Yoss.

@Yoss, fair enough. Personally I'd much rather pay 80E for a game than have the games I like to play plagued with Cash Shops, Loot Boxes and Season Passes.

Yossarian wrote:

Absolutely they can, but you’d expect them to be replaced by new businesses when they fold, something which doesn’t particularly seem to be happening in this case.

Would you? Would you not expect existing businesses to fill that space?

Speedhaak wrote:

@Yoss, fair enough. Personally I'd much rather pay 80E for a game than have the games I like to play plagued with Cash Shops, Loot Boxes and Season Passes.

Well yeah, this is my point really, games should cost far more but consumers would be up in arms if they did, so this is what happens instead.

monkey wrote:

Yossarian wrote:

I could maybe get behind that if it weren’t for the fact that parental controls can be put on consoles which will prevent kids from ever actually gambling in their toys.

So if you're unlucky enough to have a neglectful, irresponsible or tech-illiterate parent then multinational companies are allowed to try and get you addicted to gambling?

This comes back to Coch’s argument before. If you have neglectful or irresponsible parents then there’s tonnes of stuff that kids can do which we don’t ban. This is probably fairly low on the risk scale as the parents will put a stop to it as soon as they get the credit card bill.

You should watch gav's vid before you go further down this road Yoss.

I probably won’t, TBH. As I say, I’d happily read a transcript.

Not the sterling one. The activision one. Activision's production costs have been going down for years.

Hey, maybe some devs/publishers have gone out of business because a handful of mega frnachises now dominates the industry, and have even increased their share since filling their games with microtransactions and additional paid-for content.

Probably not. That's a crazy idea.

As I say, I’ve actually seen very little that has made me feel like I’m missing out on anything in games, the pushes that I’ve seen have been pretty mild (Rocket League is the worst example I’ve seen). If it gets worse than that, I’m willing to reconsider, but at the moment the feeling of missing out seems fairly mild, certainly far less than that which can be engendered by walking down any high street in the UK packed with adverts and offers aimed directly at kids.