Leaked email reveals Phil Spencer's damning verdict on AAA games: 'Most publishers are riding the success of franchises created 10+ years ago'
Leaked email reveals Phil Spencer's damning verdict on AAA games: 'Most publishers are riding the success of franchises created 10+ years ago'
Spencer's comment was part of a 2020 email that was included in the recent Microsoft document leak.
He's right
And they're hoping that you and I aren't paying attention
True, but also funny coming from the publisher that has run multiple huge franchises into the ground
"These AAA publishers have, mostly, used this production scale to keep their top franchises in the top selling games each year."
I never quite understood, why it's not more popular among big publishers to create smaller games throughout the year. You can have risky AAA titles in development and compete in the AA market at the same time.
It's just easier to advertise a single big game rather than several smaller ones. Even if you are interested in games it's impossible to keep track of everything that's being released. More casual players are aware of even fewer games. That's why AAA games still sell so well because they are the only games a lot of people are even aware of.
If the companies have to split their marketing budget between multiple titles, they would reach a much smaller audience. And even if one of the smaller titles would be a hit, it probably sells fewer copies for a lower price.
Ding ding ding.
Half the cost of the game is marketing. And marketing is an effort that builds upon itself
The more smaller games you have, the more you have to market to niches from scratch. And niches are generally more inclined to be informed users. And it takes a developer with vision to make a satisfying niche hit. Well it always takes vision but...
Meanwhile one big bombastic game will get a bunch of mainstream folks hyped over qualifiers of scope instead of quality. Yes, I am saying hype culture is primarily an idiot's hobby, but idiots still got cash.
Plus, plus, most studios don't really see their junior devs as something worth fostering. Better off burning them out and replacing them.
It's basically money well spent for them.
Eggs, meet basket.
Because the first job of anybody who is responsible for green lighting game development at these huge publishers is to not get fired. Making a game that only just breaks even or even worse makes a loss puts you at risk of getting fired. Even a relatively small game from a large publisher costs a ton to develop and market and has increased risk that nobody will actually buy and play it, at least in the most profitable first few months.
Franchises are so popular with this crowd is because they do not have to worry about name recognition. Hardest thing about getting a brand new title out is just getting people to know it exists and then to be excited about it. Franchises you hardly have to to do any work for that, you know you are going to get press and gamer interest, they sell themselves right up until they release and people get the chance to see if its a house of cards or not.
Its that front loading of sales that they are after, the shops having to buy in stock, idiots who pre order or buy before its clear if the game is broken in someway. Its the most profitable time as the game is at its most expensive, and it enables rapid repayment of the development costs. Games that start slow and have a very long tail of sales do not interest them anywhere near as much as they have already moved onto the next project and already been judged on the initial (under) performance of the game.
So make something new. Microsoft is in desperate need of defining series rather than Halo and Gears of War, both of which are the types of games he's criticizing here.
Why take risks when I can dig up an old IP and jingle it’s corpse around for a quick buck?
I like both, especially halo, it's very nostalgic for me, but the excitement for new games in the series' are gone and they need new exciting IPs
343 has also made some pretty terrible decisions with the franchise.
Both have places existing sure. There's nothing wrong with old series existing, just that new ideas should be tested and used.
Starfield advertised something like "Bethesdas first new universe in 25+ years" (paraphrasing)
That is not a good thing.
Hypothetically I don't see a problem with things like a new entry in Elder Scrolls. The problem (to me) seems more like constantly remaking Skyrim into new editions and for each new console.
constantly remaking Skyrim into new editions
That's pretty much Starfield in a nutshell, Skyrim in space. Don't get me wrong it's a fun game but it's basically reskinned Skyrim with a few new systems bolted on. I'm also noticing some reused assets from Fallout, pretty sure the noise the scanner makes when opening is the same as opening the PipBoy.
And then most of the universe was loading screens
Not to mention a lot of them are still crappy at best: Fallout 4 is ridiculous, Fallout 76 is even more ridiculous, Assassin's Creed turned into a conveyor joke, Cyberpunk 2077 was just insultingly bad at launch and remained that for a long time (haven't played 2.0 yet, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt), Starfield is another sandwich full of lies, Redfall is not even worth talking about akin to Deathloop, Diablo 4 is a machine to vacuum money on a schedule, online FPS has been nothing but battle royale for what feels like almost a dozen years and now they're testing the waters with "extraction shooters" looking at Escape From Tarkov (the extraction aspect alone won't bring them the same fame), and all of that is coupled with ever-increasing system requirements and prices, making gaming the most expensive it's ever been for really no good benefit.
The only AAA game that left me satisfied on launch in the recent years, like in the days of buying boxes, was DOOM: Eternal; to a lesser extent, Hogwarts Legacy was good, but the story felt lacking and really took away from the fun.
I personally blame the managers in the AAA gaming for not managing the scope creeps that obviously happen in many of these games, stretching the development resources, yet resulting in another "mile wide, inch deep" discourse time after time. Again, DOOM: Eternal is a great example: no crafting, no open world shenanigans, no multiple choices all leading to the same outcome (while not being a conceptual story-telling instrument) - just a focused game with multiple elements that make up the linear progression and gradually increase the possible complexity of one's experience, finally culminating in a complete FPS sitting atop impressive optimization and great visuals.
AAA is just not worth it these days and hasn't been for several years, neither in terms of hardware, nor software.
You make some true points, but it's hard to take them seriously when you blanket dismiss entire games that are enjoyed by many as crappy or entire franchises as a joke.
You can enjoy stuff that’s objectively bad. Like fast food. The problem is less the individual games and more the state of gaming as a whole.
It’s not that one game launches as an unfinished buggy mess, despite having a paid for early access period. It’s not that one game increases the cost of entry, and further augments that with season passes, microtransactions, preorder bonuses, always-online requirements and all other bullshit that is modern AAA gaming.
The problem is that it’s the norm. If someone who doesn’t play a lot of games picks up a copy of the Ubisoft game they will probably have a blast. The systems in the game were fun when they were novel fifteen years ago. It’s when you see the same games released year after year, with the same issues, and the same predatory monetisation schemes that it gets trite.
It’s perfectly fine to enjoy Starfield. I hope those who waited so long for it do. For me personally there’s just nothing to get excited about because it’s just another version of the Bethesda game. I have already played it a dozen times before, and while twelve year old me enjoyed it immensely, thirty year old me can find better things to do with his time.
In short, it’s not that fast food is hard to enjoy, it’s just that every restaurant serves the same boring old burger.
That can't be the sole metric. The POSTAL series is widely regarded as one of the worst franchises to ever happen in video games, and yet, I and many others are big fans of the entire series in general and are especially fond of some entries in particular; but it certainly doesn't make these games less janky and subpar in many regards - at the very least, none of them was advertised as something "for the next gen" or "groundbreaking" or any of the big words the AAA industry likes to throw around when advertising.
entire franchises as a joke
Thanks for that, though, I didn't meant to call the entire AC series a joke, only multiple of its entries after the first games.
20 years ago.
Call if Duty is 20 years old. FIFA is 30 years old.
Diablo is 26
Tbf there are only 4 (plus expansion) of those, there has been a cod per year for like 15 years now and a fifa every year for 20+. Those are the egregious offenders, I’m fine with a game franchise getting a new game every 7 years or so as long as it’s clear the studio has actually put work into that game.
Permanently Deleted
So many games to prove your point and the one you choose is FIFA?
“He’s right y’know”
Here's me wishing that Splinter Cell & Deus Ex was part of this ride.. It's been so long!
Don't worry. They'll turn them into live-service games with repetitive content and immersion-breaking cosmetic micro-transactions. You'll grind through the same few stealth levels with some barely random enemy permutations marketed as "infinite open world content". Your coop partner will be someone dressed in red cargo shorts, a purple mohawk wig, and a weapon that has so many random attachments on it you can't figure out whether it's a microscope, a dildo, or a sniper rifle.
This comment is true for so many games nowadays it's getting annoying.
I got WWZ recently for some reason and holy shit.
It had been a while since I had regret buying a game.
Same. At least with Deus Ex I have some hope left. Iirc the studio (Eidos?) was sold by Square Enix and the new owner may have them work on a new Deus Ex.
If you like those kind of games it may also interest you that Dishonored 3 being planned was part of the leaks last week.
"leaked" email
Is it weird I read the title 4 times and every time I read Phil Spector and I kept wondering why we carried what a murderer thought about video games.
I think they're equally as bullshit but they're right lol
That's not damning. That's how franchises work. Sequels come with an audience built-in, so they can pull a bigger budget on expected sales and spend less of it on marketing.
How recently was this not true?
Seriously. Ten-ish years ago, the big releases were Halo, Elder Scrolls, GTA, Bioshock, Deus Ex, Xcom, Zelda. If not all ten years old at that point - spiritual successors to much older games. Twenty years ago, the big releases were Tony Hawk, Mario Kart, Prince of Persia, Ninja Gaiden, Sonic... Elder Scrolls, GTA, Zelda. Thirty years ago, when home video games were just barely fifteen years old, half the big names were either direct sequels or media adaptations, and most would become long-running franchises. Shockingly, one title was already a decade-old franchise: Super Bomberman.
Now consider the games he's talking about, today. Halo's not on that list anymore. It's there. But it's not big. Deus Ex is dead again. The specific aforementioned Tony Hawk game killed Tony Hawk games. Prince of Persia and Ninja Gaiden came and went. GTA and the Elder Scrolls haven't released a game since, technically speaking.
Meanwhile the last two Zelda games are a more radical departure than anything since that awkward NES sidescroller. FromSoft keeps doing FromSoft stuff, but that's more of a genre than a franchise. Baldur's Gate III is a sequel twenty-three years later, in a genre that was niche then and niche-er since. There's big-budget remakes of stuff from the PS1 / PS2 era, but they're practically brand-new games. Tony Hawk, ironically, less so.
Some of the big-ass games ten years from now will be surprise hits and slow-burn successes from the last few years. Some games will get a quality-bump sequel that takes off, and then if we're being brutally honest, a publisher like Microsoft will squeeze the life out of the studio by forcing them to crank out more of that until they hate everything. And people in 2033 will complain on probably-not-Lemmy that Sea Of Stars V is such a tired rehash after the highs of IV, and why does nothing new ever come along?
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A thought I had yesterday playing Starfield, sighing with frustration as janky, broken system after janky, broken system sucked the fun out of my session...
All these different game devs, pouring all these funds & resources / hours into each creating their own special little bespoke game systems, mostly I assume to avoid paying licensing fees to Unity / Unreal. Imagine if they all pooled their resources and knowhow into making one stable, insanely-powerful, insanely-well-funded engine with limitless creative possibilities.
Starfield looks like a game from 10 years ago. Shitty character animations and weird-looking 'people'. CDPR are, imo, making the smart decision moving over to Unreal for future games. It works, it looks fantastic, it's very stable. More money and resources to put into the actual process of game dev rather than reinventing the wheel each time.
I don't think you'd ever want an engine level monopoly to that degree, even Unreal isn't by itself capable of the systems that allow Starfield to work the way it does, and would require serious modifications to do so, and not every studio would perform those modifications necessary to complete their game's vision, and then just give all of that to everyone else to piggyback off of for free, there are a lot of reasons to not do that, specifically, what Unity is doing now.
It only seems cool to do that with Unreal because they haven't pulled anything like Unity... yet. Not having done that yet doesn't preclude them from doing it, that's the scary thing about the Unity debacle, anyone engine could turn around and make a horrible change, we just have to trust that they won't, and being given monopoly power makes it too tempting to trust forever.
Unreal isn’t by itself capable of the systems that allow Starfield to work the way it does, and would require serious modifications to do so
Can you back that up? Nothing I've seen of Starfield indicates it couldn't be done in UE.
Please check out Angels Fall First and Renegade X, they're made with Unreal Engine 3 and are not AAA titles, so they can give you a glimpse of what even older versions of UE can do.
It only seems cool to do that with Unreal because they haven’t pulled anything like Unity… yet
Good point. Though, you'd hope they would've looked at the current Unity debacle and thought "fuck that for a game of soldiers", the backlash was resounding and rightly so.
Not sure if I offended some Bethesda fanboys or my idea sound too much like communism but people don't seem to like it haha.
What?
Nothing about Starfield is that amazing that you couldn’t replicate it in something like Unreal or even Unity.
Graphics are dead easy on either. Exploration is faked, it’s fast travel to a procedural terrain/level, with a few hand made destinations in between, nothing hard. Modular ship design? Simple. FPS RPG system, simple. Physics engines already exist, storing the location of player placed objects is trivial.
What exactly about Starfield makes you think an engine would need serious modifications for a SF-like game?
I'm happy they didn't go for unity or unreal. Recent events showed just how unsafe it can be, and how having self reliance is a valuable asset.