Post-mortems of this year's game developer conference suggest that publishers intend to avoid risk and further strengthen established IPs.
It was the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco last week. While this isn't typically a big event in terms of public announcements, it's a useful opportunity for developers to meet and for developers to meet each other, especially given the cancellation of E3. For publishers to conduct business transactions.
As you might imagine, the problem with this year's event is the precarious state of the games industry at the moment, with publishers making the now-familiar complaints about the lack of growth and high production costs of the latest triple-A games. Continuing.
The lack of constructive solutions to these problems has also become commonplace, with the predictable answer at GDC relying more on established franchises and seeming even remotely risky. It was something to avoid.
What's worse is that while most people are fully aware that this is self-defeating, they still seem to be doing it despite ignoring the underlying problem. is.
“The video game industry hasn't grown enough to keep up with the budget,” Epic Games Vice President Sax Persson told Bloomberg. “You're going to get something that people perceive as safe. No one wants to play safe. No one is going to say, 'This is a good, predictable game.'
“It's become harder to take risks,” admitted Tencent Vice President Martin Civil, who also spent 15 years at EA.
Everything is depressingly predictable, including the fact that indie companies are the only ones offering respite from endless sequels and spinoffs.
“Our strategy is to survive what's going on,” said Nigel Rowley of Devolver Digital. “The risk is still there, but not so high as to be catastrophic.”
Worryingly, not only are publishers not addressing the core issue of the increasing costs of making big-budget games, but both Sony and Microsoft are planning to launch next-generation consoles in the coming years. There are rumors that it will.
At that point, the time and cost required to produce high-end games will increase even further, as they do with every generation, and the situation will only get worse.
That is, assuming the company is looking to make something other than a live service game by that point…
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