Embracer's Lars Wingefors on the "brutal truth" of the AAA market. CEO also discusses the possibility of raising the price of games to combat increasing development costs

Lol. "No one is playing our games, better raise prices". Genius.

“Why do people pirate?”

Ya fuckin morons.

Or maybe, you could be more intentional about where you put your effort during the development process. But hey if you want AA and indies to eat your lunch go right ahead and raise prices while releasing the same shovelware.

Are they going to start making AAA games worth more than 60? You make something like RDR2 I'll gladly pay over 100. You make another boring assassins creed I'll wait until it's 15.

I'm just waiting for the video game market to crash so they stop making games altogether. Then indie developers and open source games can rise in the aftermath.

It's getting to the point where more and more games are overpriced privacy invasive trash and frankly I'm tired of buying new hardware all the time just to get to play this regurgitated dogshit. I only play old stuff now. I'm playing descent for msdos right now and having a blast, later I'll play some 2005 battlefront 2. Fuck enshitification.

It did crash. Haven't you seen all the layoffs?
- That's routine stock price manipulation. They're not doing that because they need to, they're doing it because it makes shareholders think their costs are cut and makes their stock price jump.
  That said its less and less effective.

He talks about playtime and that gamers are mostly playing games 6yrs and older but doesn't even speculate on why that is. Could be technology, better gameplay, or some other factor. He's just, "we have a small window we're competing for" but doesn't seem to want to understand why some new games get more playtime than others.

Stop spending so much money, you dumb bastards.

It has never been easier to make a game. You just cannot imagine anything besides the biggest, most bestest game evarrr. You keep hiring more people - that makes it take longer.

Small teams have the requirement and the ability to look at a proposed feature and go "nope, can't." And then the game ships without that and nobody fucking cares. It's not half-implemented and unpolished, and it didn't take seven months of tweaking, and the audience does not notice its absence because the game was built around not having it.

Big teams suffer scope creep, plan ages to do everything, then need even more time to gouge out whichever big ideas completely flopped. Meanwhile the market has moved on. Even the parts that work reflect trends from when developed began. Congratulations! You've spent one hundred million dollars and seven entire years to make a bloated product that is deeply okay and now needs to sell eight zillion copies to break even. Just in time for a ravenous money-robot like Embracer to fire you all. They made a bad call in a completely unrelated industry, but sacrificing your perfectly successful company will make them money somehow. Maybe they'll pump that into one of the hot new independent studios that ships more than once per decade.

The days of me paying full price for AAA titles is over. Even some of the series I used to love were disappointments when new titles came out. Indie games have been giving me far more enjoyment and repeatability so until the big AAA studios figure shit out they can take their overpriced shovelware and cram it where the sun don't shine.

Pretty much the only time I am throwing down full price for a game is when the dev team is a handful of people, if not a single person.

These days my purchases are a support of the demonstrated development effort, not a valuation of a franchise or series.

YO HO HO

The truth of the matter is that AAA games have become so risk adverse and so determined to get all the money that they've become a risky purchase for players. Though recent publisher action has proved that's true of some indies too. Getting players to pay full price in this market is going to be increasingly hard.