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Major Games Publishers Are Feeling the Impact of Peaking Attention

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Re: Major Games Publishers Are Feeling the Impact of Peaking Attention

#81

Post by freehunter »

llukas wrote: post #9

I'd love to spend money on games. Most games seem to be optimized for younger audience (==dumbed down) or monetized in really dumb ways. So no buy.

There are plenty of games I find that aren't dumbed down or geared for younger audiences but then I find the opposite problem: they're way too in-depth and require way too much time commitment. I picked up The Witcher 3, and that's certainly not a kids game or monetized in stupid ways, but it's also not a game I can play for 10 minutes and then set aside for a few weeks and come back and play again. RDR2 is like that as well. Most of the open world games are, in fact. And games for adults that aren't open world game, I'm finding them to be super difficult. I assume I'm just getting worse at gaming, but it really sucks to be locked down to only a handful of games that are single player, casual friendly, made for adults, not so difficult that I'm throwing my controller across the room, and not nickel-and-dime me to death.

We need a "dad's games" genre.

Re: Major Games Publishers Are Feeling the Impact of Peaking Attention

#82

Post by ihuman »

stunt wrote: post #44

Regarding the video attention, Fortnite is building most of its community around game streamers instead of players! Most of the Fortnite events are heavily focused on big streamers than pro gamers unlike other successful big gaming communities. That leaves a lot of power to streamers hand. But streamers will play any game that they’re get paid to play unlike players from community. Most of their community are followi…

> But streamers will play any game that they’re get paid to play unlike players from community

They're also paid by the community through subscriptions and direct payments (Twitch bits). They'll get more people watching (and more bits/subscriptions) if they play an already popular game that people are interested in watching.

Re: Major Games Publishers Are Feeling the Impact of Peaking Attention

#83

Post by p1necone »

the-pigeon wrote: post #68
makecheck wrote: post #61

The problem for me is that games are rarely designed to be “complete” anymore. I assume there’s some kind of catch with most of them, and it’s tiring. Why spend time on a game only to discover that it’s actually missing entire chapters, or has major bugs, or is curiously un-fun without an oddly expensive “optional” item? (Clearly many people must fall for these schemes, otherwise so many games would not be designed t…

There's a ton of modern games that don't do this. Most of the top games your find on metacritic for Switch, PS4, PC and Xbox One don't do that. For example games like Breath of the Wild, Witcher 3, and Read Dead Redemption 2 are complete games without the catch you are talking about.

Basically just stay away from EA, Activision and Ubisoft and you won't find that much of this stuff.

Did I miss any?

Re: Major Games Publishers Are Feeling the Impact of Peaking Attention

#84

Post by [deleted] »

escapecharacter wrote: post #60

Blatant self-promotion: For us who grew up playing lots of video games but are now adults, we now have: 1. Way less time 2. A higher expectation of quality 3. More money Creating "Quality Time" entertainment is why I founded Escape Character. We're a platform for online experiences with a live actor. Since a paid actor is involved, and we pay them a suitable rate, events are ticketed even though they're online, just…

[deleted]

Re: Major Games Publishers Are Feeling the Impact of Peaking Attention

#85

Post by Thaxll »

CydeWeys wrote: post #20
debacle wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EA is really struggling with their Star Wars license. If they put out just 1 good Star Wars game they'd see insane revenue. I haven't purchased an AAA title in years and I would buy an okayish Jedi Knight IV.

My dream is a modern Star Wars/TIE Fighter space shooter. Those were some of my very favorite games back in the late Win 3.1/early Win 95 era. I suspect it wouldn't have the same widespread appeal as an adventure/shooter/RPG like Jedi Knight, but it could be also be made at a pretty low cost, and it's not like the license restricts how many Star Wars games they can release. May as well go make a space shooter with a…

Because Disney will never give its licences to a company that ships less than 5m copies per SW game.

That's one of the reason EA is one of the only publisher big enough to have the rights.

Re: Major Games Publishers Are Feeling the Impact of Peaking Attention

#86

Post by zrobotics »

fredophile wrote: post #74
1123581321 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best reporting on Activision I’ve seen has been from outside the games industry and games journalism (I’ve preferred writing from this link, Variety, Bloomberg, etc.) Activision is not concerned about whether they are making money now. They are concerned about whether they can continue to make money. They have profitable, mature lines but nothing in the battle royale genre that is quickly growing and a threat to…

The latest Call of Duty game has a battle royale mode. I can't recall hearing anything about their BR mode after launch. Clearly, just making a BR game isn't a guaranteed path to success even when it's backed by a major brand name.

Have we forgotten all the bland brown cover shooters that weren't successful, or the pile of WWII shooters before that? Somehow the industry and many of the customers continually forget that chasing the latest trend typically doesn't pan out. If I want to play BR, then PUBG & Fortnite already exist.

The thing is, I know I'm not the only person who doesn't like BR, and there's certainly money to be made without a BR mode. Just look at Rockstar, they're doing absolutely fine financially.

Re: Major Games Publishers Are Feeling the Impact of Peaking Attention

#87

Post by jay_kyburz »

fredophile wrote: post #74
1123581321 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best reporting on Activision I’ve seen has been from outside the games industry and games journalism (I’ve preferred writing from this link, Variety, Bloomberg, etc.) Activision is not concerned about whether they are making money now. They are concerned about whether they can continue to make money. They have profitable, mature lines but nothing in the battle royale genre that is quickly growing and a threat to…

The latest Call of Duty game has a battle royale mode. I can't recall hearing anything about their BR mode after launch. Clearly, just making a BR game isn't a guaranteed path to success even when it's backed by a major brand name.

The Call of Duty BR mode is not free. It's very good, far more polished than Apex Legends.

Re: Major Games Publishers Are Feeling the Impact of Peaking Attention

#88

Post by dragontamer »

maxsilver wrote: post #78
1123581321 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best reporting on Activision I’ve seen has been from outside the games industry and games journalism (I’ve preferred writing from this link, Variety, Bloomberg, etc.) Activision is not concerned about whether they are making money now. They are concerned about whether they can continue to make money. They have profitable, mature lines but nothing in the battle royale genre that is quickly growing and a threat to…

> but nothing in the battle royale genre that is quickly growing and a threat to both Call of Duty and Overwatch That's not really how games work though. Games are mainly emotional purchases of mass-produced art, not commodities like Corn or Oil. Games are not fungible like this. Telling Activision "you must make a battle royale game because Fortnite" is a quick way to watch them burn a lot of money on something that…

> It's like saying, "Hey Warner Brothers. Disney just made a bunch of money making this 'Frozen' film, so you need to also make a movie about Magical Sisters in some sort of Medieval European Ice Palace". Technically, they can execute on this, but the result is unlikely to be successful.

Maybe a more apt example is "Hey WB, Marvel just made a huge amount of money making a 'Shared Superhero Movie Universe'. You should do that too".

Although I guess WB is finally starting to make good movies in Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and maybe Shazam?

----------------

In any case, I agree with you. Battle Royale games are clearly the hot new thing at the moment, but Hearthstone (Blizzard / Activision) basically created the online collectable card game (yeah: MtG is the original game, but it never had a good and/or profitable video-game version before Hearthstone).

The goal of these game companies should be to discover the NEXT big game genre. Battle Royale is big today, but it will be years before you can launch a new Battle Royale game on the same quality as Fortnite.

New Genres pop up all the time: MOBA (League, DOTA, HOTS), MMORPG (WoW, Guild Wars, Final Fantasy, Eve), and now Battle Royale. Who knows? Maybe the next major genre will be robot-cars with rockets on them that play soccer. (Rocket League, except no clones have been made yet!! Think about it...)

Re: Major Games Publishers Are Feeling the Impact of Peaking Attention

#89

Post by ilaksh »

To me there are a couple of things going on. Both were touched on by the article to different degrees.

One thing is that videos games interest is largely affected by trends. When PUBG blew up I had been out of the loop and I actually thought it was a novel concept. But it wasn't. It was just an improvement to game modes that had existed for years. Now we have seen Fortnite take over interest in PUBG and now with Apex not because it was a totally new thing but because it's a familiar thing with new wrinkles. It's a lot like clothing fashion. We don't really go for totally new ideas because we want to fit in. There is a network affect going on where the hot new thing dominates just because everyone is doing it now. So there is definitely a limited amount of attention.

The other thing is the fact that various video streaming services exist and people can get much of the same experience from video or streams as they get from actually playing games. But video or streams are free or inexpensive whereas each new game requires a heavy investment. It is enjoyable to watch someone else play a game. Not quite as fun as playing it yourself necessarily but it also takes much less effort. You can also get various degrees of social benefits from streams or videos depending on how much time or effort. Again, not as good as "real" socialization necessarily, but also usually with much less effort.

I would go so far as to say that a lot of the investment into assets, programming, story, content in general is being broadcast out for free or low cost or for the benefit of streaming platforms/streamers and it's possible that the producers of those video games are not able to make as many sales as they would have had their content not been available (albeit in a non-interactive way) on those broadcast platforms. Which is not to say that it's necessarily overall bad for sales or bad for consumers. I just think it has an effect of sales.

Re: Major Games Publishers Are Feeling the Impact of Peaking Attention

#90

Post by ilaksh »

crsv wrote: post #4

An interesting thing that's happening right now with the release and rise of Apex Legends is seeing how these now stale numbers are already starting to move around in regards to the level of engagement that Fortnite now commands versus what it commanded only weeks ago. The pace that the market is moving is pretty incredible in direct contrast to the landscape even just 5 years ago when MOBA's owned the world. This in…

Wow I guess I am officially old now because I finally installed TikTok, and I would describe it as trivial and obnoxious rather than "nimble".
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