Frostpunk developers 11 bit studios have cancelled a new, console-oriented game in response to both "shifting market tr…
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Sony has been screaming the exact opposite of this and it continues to garner them a fuck ton of cash. You don’t even need Sony money to do it, as per Baldurs gate that many are also referencing here in the comments.

There’s no way they actually believe that, the C-suite simply can’t stop salivating over the potential money a live service game can potentially provide

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This is exactly it. They don’t like their profit margin.

Random_Character_A
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Not agreeing, but if I look at my own purchases for the last few years, there aren’t many story driven games there. God of War and Starfield. Didn’t play much either one.

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Yeah, if you ignore like ALL of the nominations and winners at The Game Awards for the last 10 years and take a look at checks notes Fortnite

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I thought the game awards were like the Oscars in that they are supposed to ignore the commercial success of the nominations? (Never follow that stuff so I could be completely wrong.)

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If they actually believe something so patently ridiculous, then it’s probably best that they cancelled it. So I guess this is good news. Those are the only kinds of games I want to play. FFS.

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It’s not ridiculous, it’s true, but it is sad. As always the public chooses the worst things.

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That’s not the sad part. It is companies going for maximising profit as aggressively as possible, meaning they don’t care if they could earn 20 mil on this game, if they can get 50 on another.

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Meh, if people didn’t pay or play those it wouldn’t make business sense to make em. Gaming is weird these days.

Everybody seems to have “the game” they play like OW or Valorant(?) or Fortnite, certain genres like racing and fighting games seem to have split up from mainstream gaming altogether where if you just check out what’s the new Tekken like people assume you’re like a “fighting game person” that goes to tournaments and builds your whole life around it and have since forever, back in my day it was just a game you played cuz the dudes on the cover looked cool and the game was fun.

‘Core’ games are all rip offs of souls or some other crap that I personally hate deeply, or straight up remakes of games where the original is just kinda better, consoles and GPUs cost way too much this gen and there are no real exclusives.

The trends in graphics are concerning too, everything is a TAA or AI upscale smearfest, PS5 can’t run that new Star wars game at more than DVD resolution without the same bullshit 8th gen checkerboarding or some other dynamic resolution technique alongside god damned AI trash. MSAA and SSAA seem dead and with them clarity and good visuals, all that artwork gone to waste, the only pretty games are MSFS and CP2077 with Path Tracing on max, UE5 is built from the ground up around smear and unity is enshittified, devs are cutting costs and custom engines are out, so future looks bleak

The only thing that I love about gaming nowadays is indie and AA games, from Stray (barring the awful graphics) to Sea Power, Descenders to Teardown to Airport Sim, these are games I had the most fun with this year that aren’t 5th-7th gen classics. That football game at TGA from Sifu devs seems fun tho. Tower networking looks cool too, reminds me of cozy weed shop 2 vibes with a WTTG2 style tech element and a game dev tycoon art style

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Too much “back in my day” vibe in your comment.

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Guilty as charged!

Fwiw I love gaming nowadays, things like itch and steam self-publishing just didn’t exist nearly to the same extent back in the day, and this has allowed for niche titles I could only dream of back in the day and weird artsy games like Buckshot Roulette, Disco Elysium and Warframe finding success is awesome and was definitely not a thing in the past where gatekeeping was inherent to gaming.

Even hardware stuff like FBT trackers and steam deck and the crazy modding scene of today are things I love about modern gaming.

That doesn’t mean it’s not without things to critique, as every generation of games has, nor that nothing of value has been lost.

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That doesn’t mean it’s not without things to critique, as every generation of games has, nor that nothing of value has been lost.

Agree

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Please explain how this is false

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What doesn’t sell are the games that don’t have a well written story or well-written characters. Or the games that their developers themselves don’t have any passion or interest in, games just made to please shareholders… Or games that get preachy on issues without proper care…

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Not everything is Elden Ring

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Baldur’s Gate 3 was only last year. Metaphor just set records for Atlas’ fastest selling game this year. Even amidst the tremendously troubled launch, Cyberpunk 2077 went on to be one of the best-selling video games of all time, and its DLC did very well too. God of War: Ragnarok sold at least 15 million copies. And these are just a few examples off of the top of my head that don’t fall into gray areas like GTA where they’re also a live service.

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Those are are the exceptions not the normal case. Look at almost anything remedy has done. Great stories but bad sales. Alan Wake 2 was still not profitable in November.

Meanwhile candy crush has generated more than 20 billion in revenue

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Alan Wake 2 took an upfront buyout in exchange for appearing on a less popular platform. That would be an exception to the normal use case. A thousand companies will go bankrupt trying to make Candy Crush even though someone already made Candy Crush. And you can replace Candy Crush with Call of Duty, World of WarCraft, Destiny, or whatever you like. Those games take up all of your time by design rather than allowing and encouraging you to move on to another game.

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AW2 is epic exclusive…

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Just look at most of the winners of Game of the Year. I’d argue most of them fit in the category of narrative driven story-rich games.

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I’m taking as their way of saying we can’t make a decent story. Like a kid taking his ball and going home with “nobody likes this game anyway”

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Really? It feels like every other AAA game is an interactive movie these days.

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deleted by creator

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This was barely true like 10 years ago. Now everything is mobile games and live services.

Narrative-driven, story-rich MTX and Battlepasses.

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Every yakuza game, baldurs gate, every fromsoft game, the insomniac games like spiderman, Sony stuff in general like horizon, god of war, last of us, etc, black myth wukong, the endless remake games (some of which are very solid) like ff7, silent hill 2, persona 3 reload, etc, rockstar games even (rdr2 was 2018 and gta6 is supposed to come out this year, maybe). The sea of jrpgs like shin megami tensei v vengeance, trails through daybreak, granblue fantasy, unicorn overlord, etc. And that’s literally off the top of my head

Mobile games and live services dominate for sure bc they shit money and are easy to develop but decent games still exist (though tbf a lot of them are starting to pull serious bullshit too. Love yakuza but sega locking new game+ behind a $15 dlc. First yakuza game I didnt do a new game+ run on and the lamest one to platinum because you don’t have to beat the hardest boss or run it on legendary)

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Every yakuza game, baldurs gate, every fromsoft game, the insomniac games like spiderman, Sony stuff in general like horizon, god of war, last of us, etc, black myth wukong, the endless remake games (some of which are very solid) like ff7, silent hill 2, persona 3 reload, etc, rockstar games even (rdr2 was 2018 and gta6 is supposed to come out this year, maybe). The sea of jrpgs like shin megami tensei v vengeance, trails through daybreak, granblue fantasy, unicorn overlord, etc. And that’s literally off the top of my head

Question 1: And those are all “interactive movies” in your view?

If the answer is yes:

Question 2: have you played literally any of them? I don’t think all of these barring the JRPGs could be more different from each other if they tried. RDR2, Insomniac and the Yakuza games for instance are pretty good, fromsoft not so much, and none of them are alike whatsoever, one is a GTA clone with a shockingly good story that’s as always, too long, fromsoft games are definitely not GTA clones sadly nor are they linear bamham combat superhero action games like the insomniac ones or story focused ones like GoW or Horizon or the insomniac Spideys (latter are particularly awesome).

I would be extremely interested what you’d consider not interactive movies? Factorio? Dwarf Fortress? Ghosts’n’Goblins? Super R-Type for the SNES? Umihara Kawase? Ultrakill?

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Only some of those are movie games, sure. I was more responding to your “everything is mobile games and live services”, which is just untrue

The only one I haven’t played yet is wukong. Also I agree the spiderman games are totally awesome. I strongly disagree about fromsoft games though, sekiro alone is amazing

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But the original reply stated:

It feels like every other AAA game is an interactive movie these days.

I stated that it’s not really true

And you went off to list games that supposedly support the original point.

And I said that’s not true.

And now you agree. So why even include those games or respond at all? This comes across like when you correct chatgippity or smth 🤔

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You keep going on about the original post. I was replying to you dude, who said everything is mobile games and live services. I never said all games are movie games? I just said you are wrong and not all games, AAA or otherwise, are mobile games and live services. And you are still wrong, and that’s still true

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Wuuuut?

The original post had nothing to do with mobile games and service at all.

My comment said that it was not true that all games are interactive movies, and you said it was - because of the games you listed, which you then said are not interactive movies.

Are you like, lost? Downvoting me with your alts ain’t gonna reverse that brain damage my guy, blocked.

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Just put some digital boobs in the game. It WILL sell

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Did we already forget that BG3 existed like once year later…?

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Cyberpunk 2077, RDR2 still wasn’t that long ago, Dragon Age Veilguard was actually a success convincing even EA, Star Wars Jedi series, the list goes on. It just has to be a good story, you can’t just slap some boring ass story in there.

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Veilguard is far from success, and it’s because it’s the worst-written DA game to date. And that is on EA. They had every chance to make it a good game (as the art book they published shows just what a good story it was shaping up to be before EA forced them to start over for a live service version) but they chose to waste everyone’s time for 10 years by changing their mind mid development multiple times, firing the veteran team members right in the middle of development…

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Odd to say Veilguard was a success when from what I can tell, one of the few things uniting the very fractured and divided gaming community this year was that the writing in Veilguard was horrible. And you know that’s true when the various members of that community can give their own varied reasons why the writing was horrible and they would all be valid.

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I only see that in some communities. Most of the people that hate on veilguard, from what I’ve seen, either haven’t played the game or are clipping parts out of context.

The complaints I’ve seen that aren’t “dur hur, binary qunari” talk about the shaky dialogue in the beginning, where things felt awkward and clunky, like a new team forming. I’ll give credence to the complaints about some depth being lost in the characters versus other games in the series, but I think those people feel that way because Inquisituon was a bloated mess (that I love) and they’ve played 1 and 2 so many times in different ways they’re meshing all the dialogue into one. Playing through veilguard a second time, and watching my partner take different choices than me, made the characters on par with Mass Effect 2 allies. Which, I’d say isn’t an accomplishment so much as a mild chastisement that it hasn’t improved since then.

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But, to drive home in case it isn’t clear, I love Dragon Age and I think this one ranks higher than Inquisition (but not trespasser DLC), on par with 2, and above 1 for me. I do not think it’s a Pinnacle of modern writing, it definitely suffered from some development struggles and that comes through in the final act as things get a little rushed and content feels more like a drip than a faucet. But then it wraps up well, or I thought it did.

It can use improvements, but I feel about it as i felt about 2 when it came out. “This is a change, and I’m not sure it’s what i wanted, but I do like the universe and the combat is a lot of fun and the characters as a whole are interesting”.

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I enjoyed every Dragon-age game so far and Veilguard is no exception. I think the writing is fine. Not great, but good enough. I can see why some people would complain, because it’s definitely watered down compared to DA:O. But I am still having fun almost 60 hours into the game.

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Someone still took the time to downvote your opinion that it ‘was fine’. The vitriol towards any positive or neutral comment is why I think it’s a specific group of people actually complaining, a fair share with “it could have been better, and it’s not my style of rpg anymore”, and the remainder just being relatively neutral to happy that they got more dragon age.

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Haven’t played, but I found this (negative) review compelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF-Kd2BBpx8

He did play through the whole game.

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Dragon Age Veilguard was actually a success

They finally confirmed or denied this claim?

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If the leaks to be trusted, they expected to sell 10 million copies but now they’re talking about they maybe can sell 3 million copies for the lifetime of the game.

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Back of the napkin math says they’ve already sold about 1.5M on Steam so far. A handful of sales like they one they’ve got right now should help them easily blow past 3.

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Aren’t those awful numbers? Like, a big successful AAA grant does way more than 1.5mil in it’s first week. If interest was there they’d be over 3mil by now.

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It’s all going to be relative to what they spent, which I don’t know. If they only spent $70M, they already made their money back. It’s looking like they’ll probably make their money back regardless, unless they spent an entire GTA6 on this thing, which I doubt. These are also only the Steam numbers that I’m calculating based on how many reviews it has; the PS5 version likely did quite well too.

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I’m willing to guess up to 3m has been sold across all platforms so far, but this is a major AAA game that was being developed for a full decade, there is no way in hell they didn’t spend multiple hundreds of millions on it in total. And those are very low numbers besides. Most big titles sell more than that faster than davg has.

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In others words, not a success, pretty bad for a IP so famous like Dragon Age

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It was very telling EA announced almost right after the launch that they won’t release any DLC’s and they’re moving the team to ME5 already. If that was not the sign EA left DA:V for dead, I don’t know what was.

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Why does capitalist reasoning always sound like a prayer to an angry god?

We consulted the oracle and it seems that the dragon is tired of corn. So we’ve hedged our portfolio with wheat and virgins.

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because it’s made up. The stock has value because we think it does. Clap your hands if you believe!

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Because that’s literally what it is. Business courses are much closer to church sermons than actual classes. They don’t apply logic to things, they simply consult their already established beliefs for the path forward.

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The Last of Us is still selling.

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Which one? The original? The Remaster or the Remake? Or the 2nd or the Remaster of the 2nd?

Net_Runner :~$
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Did these developers completely miss Baldurs Gate 3

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I think highlighting the success story is kind of missing both the great circumstances Larian built that game under, and the giant mountain of singleplayer games that are pretty good, but hit no success at all.

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We could spend all day and night listing successful SP games, I bet they canceled it because the game was just bad.

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Larian rn:

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To be fair, BG3 is like bottled lightning, and I think it’s unreasonable to expect many (if any) other studios to produce something like that.

Even the Divinity games were way above par, with a much more lukewarm (but not unsuccessful, I guess?) reception.

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Shit I loved Divinity Original Sin and the sequel, but even I don’t think Larian could match or exceed BG3

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jizzpunk

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thats a shitty excuse if i ever heard one

_cryptagion [he/him]
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More like it’s a shitty headline. The article shows there’s a little more to it, specifically that it was going to go over budget and they hadn’t figured out what they were gonna do.

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Typical infantile C-suite logic “I didn’t do X well, therefore X is impossible and no one can do X! It’s not my fault, I swear!”

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Maybe the people are just out of touch? I’m sure that’s it.

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No it’s the gamers who are wrong

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The title is a bit missleading considering that the actual article mentions a lot other problems that plagued the development.

Project 8 faced both progress and challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic made team stability difficult, but some quality improvements were achieved. However, critical issues persisted, causing delays and budget increases. The latest review revealed unresolved problems needing more time and money, along with revised sales forecasts, raising doubts about the project’s profitability.
– TLDR by Microsoft copilot

While there’s still demand for “narrative-driven story-rich games” one should keep realistic expectations. For this genre I feel smaller scope and indie developers work much better.

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Oof.

“The COVID-19 pandemic made team stability difficult,”

Makes me suspect they were woefully behind the rest of the field in development practices. My team, and many others, gained productivity when all the wasteful manager ego stroking in-person meetings stopped.

Alternately, it tells us they rely on a weird dev kit with a lot of esoteric hardware. Though I would still call that out as being super out of date. Nothing is particularly hard to emulate today, for teams that prioritize having rebuildable test environmenta.

Just wild.

Bummer about the layoffs. Probably won’t fix their agility problem, though.

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I think it’s probably true though. I pitched my game to them and they graciously responded and said they are looking into publishing narrative driven games but rather mechanically complex games.

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