What’s driving this trend? The enshitification of triple AAA titles fucking slapping surcharges on EVERYTHING; day one dlc, microtransactions, always online DRM, the ability to revoke access to the shit we pay for, it’s death by 1000 cuts. EVERY anti-consumer action, every attempt to squeeze more of us while delivering the same rehashed shit over and over just drives me further into the arms of indie developers. The intent of us withholding our money and refusing to purchase your shit is to provide publishers with a sense of pride and accomplishment for retaining their customer base.
For me it’s a lack of creativity and innovation when it comes to gameplay. Indies or just smaller studio productions take more risks and that’s a lot more exciting.
Must be multiplayer, ostensibly because people ‘demand’ it, but a narrative easy to believe when you know players are stuck with your servers and you can effectively shut down the game when it no longer makes money for you.
Relatively fewer games to be made, no chances may be taken. Conventional wisdom tells them that people got over turn-based in the 90s, so even the FFVII remake refused to do real turn-based, while Clair Obscur showed that it was still absolutely welcome gameplay.
I’m playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for the first time right now. I’m not particularly a fan of turn-based games, but I’m digging there interpretation of the genre. I like how each character has a limited amount of movement per turn and the ability to navigate through the entire environment. I’m surprised more developers don’t use a similar model.
I admit I was thinking about E33 as well, but my niche is narratively strong games or puzzle games. Too many AAA games are narratively disjointed open world messes and when it comes to puzzles indies are just king. Animal Well, Blue Prince, The Witness etc.
Zero creativity, zero innovation, zero passion. Too many AAA games feel like all of the design and decision making happened in a boardroom full of executives and market researchers, then the actual designers and developers just churn out whatever the higher-ups have decided the product will be.
You know what this is called? A healthy and competitive market.
Yeah, I get there’s layoffs, but that’s mainly at AAA studios and is a symptom of a previously unhealthy, highly consolidated market. The job losses suck, but now diversity and competition is coming back, and that’s generally a good thing for consumers.
Whenever investors get involved things go downhill. If the only two parties are a buyer and a seller, the only way the seller can make money is by making a product the buyer wants to buy. But investors don’t care about the product. They may not even understand the product. They only care that the product makes money.
AAA studios are failing because they want to please investors, not buyers.
and it’s always worth distinguishing between executives and investors.
Executives are going to push the problem, but the core issue is shareholders. In the US, where most of these companies are based, a publicly traded company is expected to make money for its shareholders. Shareholders have subplanted customers in the companies ethical obligagions. The law has been used to make this national policy. Controlling shareholders can (and do) vote to remove company leadership that won’t act how they want. It is not just that they have to generate revenue, they have to generate as much revenue as possible as determined by shareholders. It’s corporate cartel tatics. Fail us and die. Do well and you’ll get rewarded with some of the take.
If a company goes public, It’s only a matter of time until it’s product goes to shit.
It was my understanding that it was a misconception that companies are legally bound to have an ROI or whatever. Not an economist so IDK. I just remember hearing that from several places. Regardless, the buyer-seller relationship is “I give you money, and you give me a product or service”. The investor-seller relationship is “We give you money, and you give us more money, and we don’t care how you do it.”
It was my understanding that it was a misconception that companies are legally bound to have an ROI or whatever. Not an economist so IDK. I just remember hearing that from several places. Regardless, the buyer-seller relationship is “I give you money, and you give me a product or service”. The investor-seller relationship is “We give you money, and you give us more money, and we don’t care how you do it.”
Only very technically. Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. still made the shareholder a priority over the product or the customer (technically it only set the precedent). It’s a misconception that actual profit is the legal requirement. I suppose I’m guilty of furthering it, but it’s easier to keep the oversimplification than to explain the nuances when the outcome is the same. The controlling shareholders are the ones that create this issue because their votes affect company policy, and if they don’t like the way the company operates, they have more direct legal avenues to change and challenge it than you or I would.
Well then they are simply stupid. Because if they did care that the product makes money, they would care about what the buyer wants to buy, because thats how you make the money.
In their mind they can just take their money and invest in something else. They don’t care about long term value, just milking it for all its worth. Pump and dump, then move onto the next cow.
I’m too lazy to find my 3 year old comment but it went something like “AAA games are about as AAA as the mortgage bonds were in 2007”.
The era of the AAA gold standard is long gone. You no longer need a million dollar studio bankrolled by a big name publisher/console to make a groundbreaking AAA game.
Most if not all of those studios have been cost cutting for the past decade to maximize profit which is how we reached the current market of UE5 slop and DoA live service games.
There’s even an entire YouTube channel dedicated to showing how many current “AAA” titles have regressed in graphical optimization and quality from older game engines due to the lack of proper development, despite the advancement in consumer hardware.
I’d pay the $70 or even $100 for a AAA title…if it released complete, relatively bug-free, and didn’t try to soak me with microtransactions and subscriptions.
idiots being too eager to throw ever increasing amounts of money at companies, to get what they used to get for 50, with zero self awareness that they are the cancer thats killing everything.
Counterpoint: games were more expensive in the past, sometimes even before adjusting for inflation. Goldeneye was $70 new.
The problem is that back then you bought a complete game to play forever. Now you buy an unfinished mess that despite costing as much, makes it abundantly clear that the game isn’t yours through DRM and in your face micro transactions.
True, but it’s at least a rough indicator, and having intact concrete pricing from back then was a bit challenging, and sears catalog came to me as a very well preserved source of vaguely appropriate pricing.
Like when BG3 came out and other devs whined about being unable to deliver such a game? Maybe they shouldn’t be considered AAA studios if all they do is waste their budget.
It doesn’t mean AAA will go away, just like big stadium packing artists like Taylor Swift never went away. They just accounted for less of the industry’s total profits than they used to.
More of people’s disposable money is spent on a wider variety of music and games, often opting for more “indie” and cheaper versions of both. It’s a good thing, honestly, for people’s tastes to be more diversified and unique.
I mean, it’s ok I guess, but as a musician myself that’s not helping much either. Buy some stuff on bandcamp (85% goes to the artists, cheap and often pay what you want) or if you need streaming get Tidal, they give 3x than spotify and didn’t give 100 millions to joe rogan.
Also bandcamp gives you high quality DRM FLAC files (or really whatever audio filetype you want) and those files are yours to keep, forever. You can also stream stuff you’ve bought through the bandcamp website. They also still do bandcamp fridays where 100% of the sale goes to the artist. Next bandcamp friday is May 1st.
Another option is direct-from-artist sales if they have their own website and store. Do vinyls still come with codes for an mp3 copy? I remember my vinyl for The Mean Jeans - Are You Serious? had a code and a link to download an mp3 copy of the album.
I got into music piracy back in the day because it used to be that record companies paid artists badly so I spent money on concerts and merch, now Spotify pays artists badly for the record companies. Anyway, if used at all piracy is best used to find artists you really love and then spend your money on legitimately purchasing their music.
Huh. Just found out that Bandcamp isn’t owned by Epic Games anymore. It was sold off to someone else back in 2023. Guess I don’t have a reason to boycott it now
There wasn’t really a reason to boycott it anyway. Epic just wanted “free” access to a massive library for their games, like how EA Trax used to be a thing. Nothing changed about bandcamp in the meantime.
I’m not gonna get started on this, but Epic or not, this is and was one of the only way to give money directly to artists. If you boycott Epic I really hope you boycott steam also cause they’re no better.
EGS has used anticompetitive and anti consumer practices from day one, all because Tim Swiney is a petty asshole that wants to be at the top of the pile.
Meanwhile Valve has generally been pro-consumer and built a relatively good service
Lol, another steam sucker ready to die for billionaire Gabe. They basically invented gambling for chlidren, they actually are the one that have anticompetitive practice lmfao, they dont let you own your games, they take a huge cut of 30% (epic take 12%, but you dont care about game devs right), they make billions in profit but employ less than 300 people.
But I’ve met enough of your kind to know your cognitive dissonance to know that no amount of proofs that steam suck would make you stop kissing their ass. You guys are the maga of gaming lol.
So yeah, the hard truth is you don’t like games you like steam, and you dont like music, you like yourself. Now fuck off yourself, you are the problem.
Musicians aren’t making much on any streaming platform. I wish I could afford to purchase more music on bandcamp but it’s been years since I’ve been able to.
If you don’t care too much how the music is used, music licensing can bring in money, it doesn’t necessarily have to be used in Ads.
Can I suggest occasionally buying stuff through something like Bandcamp? You get digital music and support the artist. Or, just buy some merch I guess.
Yeah, except now we would have the capacity to give money directly to artists. Platforms like shittyfy have shown people are willing to pay a couple of bucks a months to get access to music, we need to redirect the money to the artists and not some greedy ceo. Bandcamp is a start, we can do better.
Sounds like you’re someone who thought a little about pricing.
Why should anyone get a royalty for a listen?
There’s a club in my town with a dj who plays each week. Club gets paid, dj gets paid. His sets are like ads for his work in the club. Why would I have to pay for each listen? Why would he has to earn for each listen?
Especially if that DJ is residing somewhere else and won’t ever come to my town because it’s too small for him.
Why do we create superstars? Why does “superstar S” have to be paid millions because millions come to their show. Even though I stand 500 m away, I can’t see them, I can’t hear them properly. Why can’t it be that there is a cover band covering those songs. Maybe even doing a better job. On a loval concert, with great sound, a good stage, less crowd, less people, more fun.
Why do we cheer a dj with electronic music, who just plays one song after the other, with a little bit of mixing now and then and choosing the next track based on the crowd? Why aren’t people in the center of the music (anymore)?
I find this a bit entertaining especially hearing advertisers and executives occasionally vent on stuff like this. A huge portion of modern people especially the younger they are:
Don’t go outside
Don’t read billboards, bus wrap advertisements, bus stop advertisements, ignore advertisements in sporting arenas and uniforms, etc
Use adblockers online/ignore online advertisements
Mute the television when ads are on
Don’t have television subscriptions
Pay for streaming services at a level that removes ads
Watch like no advertising shows like award shows or late night/daytime talking head interview shows
only watches TV for the finals of a sporting league championship and when advertisements comes on mutes the TV or focuses on their friends or phones
Don’t discuss advertisements with friends like people did in the past
Show up to the movies late to avoid advertisements
Generally have an anti-consumption/anti-advertisement attitude even if they are consumerist. Being advertised to is an annoyance enough to buy something else
Throw away mailers immediately without reading
Ignore people trying to advertise on the street/passing out flyers
Don’t answer the door
Don’t answer the phone
Generally has no idea when anything new is coming out and mostly exists in a social bubble
Practically no monoculture
Doesn’t read emails unless they specifically searched/expected it
Etc
Besides the not going outside and problems that can arise from being in a social bubble, it’s all good stuff to me. For decades advertisers and businesses have optimized everything for selling products and now people are so desensitized to it to not care. Like no one actually cares about times square takeover advertisements anymore. It’s not a big deal.
“OMG it was advertised all over time square.” Responded with: “I live in Wichita.” “I live in India.” “I’m from NYC and tourist just look at them, they don’t read them. Fuck no I don’t read them. I don’t fuck with times square.”
It’s actually incredibly hard to advertise media now. Advertisements have to manage to seem organic or come off as predatory. So in comes the influencers but no influencer is as influential and trusted as a prime time advertisement before social media/YouTube went mainstream with people children to elderly. The vein to sell souless AAA/blockbuster media is busted
Don’t discuss advertisements with friends like people did in the past
This one is big and I never noticed it until a few years ago. My wife and I never got cable when we moved into our own place. One time my mother in law was talking to my wife about some commercial and my wife just said she hadn’t seen it. My mother in law got really weirdly upset or something, like my wife was trying to be condescending or something. But she was talking about it the same way people might talk about a funny skit from a show. It wasn’t until being away from it for years that I realized how odd it is.
Still feels crazy though how aware you’re forced to be about ads lurking in every corner. I check many of these boxes plus some others, use independent OSs, 3rd party apps etc. And still, although I hardly see any ads, they are so present just lurking under the surface.
Good example are sponsor comments in yt videos/podcasts. Some I can filter out with Sponsorblock, but the little video glitch reminds you every time that you have to stay safe. Podcast ads can easily be slipped with the fast forward button, but if you’re washing the dishes etc., sometimes you can’t react directly.
It’s really insane how ads are just everywhere these days.
I’m happy with every AAA game striving for RDR2 level of quality if we also get AA games from the same studios. And of course indie games are always gonna indie.
If they try to make only super huge AAAs and nothing less, then games are infrequent and quality suffers when they have to be rushed out when money’s getting tight.
The only AAA game that I have legitimately enjoyed and played more than once is Red Dead Redemption II. Other AAA games are okay, but they feel a bit hollow and lack the immersion that RDR2 has. Then again, RDR2 was showing off a bit with what the industry can do.
EDIT3: Note that the release dates on some of these are a bit apples-to-oranges. For example, Escape From Tarkov only had its 1.0 release in 2025, but had been widely-played well before that, so maybe “availability” would be more interesting than “release”. World of Warcraft Classic only split from World of Warcraft in 2019, but both games have an origin in World of Warcraft, which was released in 2004.
Nearly every title on that list is also a live service game that has been released for years. It’s almost like supporting your product post-launch builds a dedicated userbase or something.
(And yeah, I know it’s actually because of the profitability of addictive design patterns combined with microtransactions. Let me dream, please.)
This is also survivorship bias. Plenty of companies would love to support their game post launch and make this much money, but they go under trying to follow the same playbook; even the ones that were successful doing so before.
True. I know Dean Hall (DayZ, Stationeers, Kitten Space Agency) destroyed any hope of his survival game Icarus becoming a major success by releasing hundreds of dollars of expensive DLCduring Early Access, then later admitted it was because the money from his previous projects had slowed to a trickle and splitting his current project into a bunch of paid packs was the only way he could stay solvent. Even the megahits of the past all die out at some point.
Doesn’t help that Icarus is such a technical mess. Certainly limits the player base when you shoot for a graphically demanding game and then don’t bother with working on performance.
Maybe I’m just grumpy that I can’t play it anymore since switching to Linux despite upgrading my gpu.
Wow, most of them were even older than I’d thought. And even some of the new ones like Tarkov were in Early Access for years before their official release date.
(You flipped the date and country for 16 and 17, btw) Already fixed, never mind!
Yeah, I thought about changing it, but…the problem is that while the base game is playable now for $0, the overwhelming bulk of the game’s content is in expansion packs. Like, I don’t think that people really buy and play just the base game; it’d be more like a demo.
EDIT: A similar game might be DCS. I mean, yes, technically the base game is free, and you get (checks) a WW2 fighter and a Soviet ground-attack jet. But…basically that acts as a demo, and everyone is going to go out and get at least their favorite aircraft, and most of those aircraft cost about as much as a full-priced video game does. Hell, a couple of them are $80 each.
That’s fair. Though, by that logic would you consider something like that one Final Fantasy MMO F2P or not? I believe it lets you play all the old content for free and only charges for the last (few?) expansions.
Free to play, and “ever games” or whatever you want to call them. Solid classics that are easy to return to for years. Left 4 Dead 2 is a great example.
F2P games are subsidized by a small minority who will throw a hundred dollars a month into the game to obtain and max out whatever FOMO event or item/character is on rotation, and by an even smaller group of obscenely wealthy (or mentally ill) players who will spend tens of thousands of dollars just to say they own everything.
I’d honestly be fine with this model if the ones funding it were treated like patrons of the arts or something, but instead the industry hired a bunch of psychologists to run incredibly unethical experiments to create literally addictive design patterns encouraging the weak-willed or mentally ill to spend more.
Modern F2P game design is predatory and downright evil in the way it’s carefully cultivated to be just fun enough to continue playing, while constantly dangling the promise of more enjoyment if you’d only spend a tiny bit more (with that ‘bit more’ often only granting a small chance at getting what you want, with ‘pity’ systems only guaranteeing the desired drop if you spend the equivalent of around a hundred bucks in premium currency). But since it’s obscenely profitable, I don’t foresee it going away without legislation banning those practices.
Yeah, that’s what I hate about Genshin Impact most - the predatory gacha and FOMO-exploiting business model ruining what would otherwise be a peak game I could recommend to basically anyone.
Roblox screws over both the players and the creators who attract and keep them there, both of which as you said are mostly children. It’s actually kind of impressive how scummy the devs are. They’re the poster child for rent-seeking parasites.
It depends, it’s certainly inaccurate to describe all F2P games as doing this. Runescape, at least back in the 2000s, was F2P or a monthly sub. That was it.
Miniclip, Newgrounds, and similar felt more like mini games.
For free and in browser with some actual progression, I can think of RuneScape and those Artix Adventure Quest series games. I played both, but Runescape definitely felt like more of a complete game with 3D models and all.
God, I had forgotten how bad those Artix games were til I remembered them just now.
I played the bejeezus out of Runescape until I picked up Minecraft as a teenager. The free to play section certainly had its limits (only like 30 quests, about a dozen skills and only like 1/4 of the map) but you could absolutely access many, many hours of content purely in free to play. Compare that to another title from around the same era, Disney’s Pirates Online, which gave you an initial 3 days of free premium membership on account creation, you’d largely run out of free content and find everything gated to membership within a couple of days so it was hard to enjoy past those first 3 days unless you could convince your parents to buy you membership.
There’s also other projects like 2004scape, 2007scape, Darkan, Open RSC etc. depending on your preferred era of Runescape to relive, but ORSC and 2009scape seem to both have the most active development and most active communities by far (and ORSC is early enough to be hard to enjoy if you aren’t deep into vintage gaming)
I’d love to play AAA games- Crimson Desert and Spider-Man 2 are on my wishlist. But now that they’ve been optimized for frame generation, my 3070 can’t play them to my standard.
If I’m going to stare at a pixelated mess, I’d rather it be curated by an indie artist than technical difficulties from DLSS compression
What expectations do you have for resolution and frame rate? My 3070 plays Spider-Man 2 just fine. I think I’m running 1440 at 60. It’s as good or better than the original console release.
You’ve poisoned yourself. Chasing fidelity and refresh rates has done for graphics what short-form media did to attention spans. I’m emulating PS1 games and playing Fallout 4 on a 970 while my computer fans blow like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier and I am free.
Those still doing 1080p/1440p gaming get the best of both worlds: high framerates with all the fancy graphics turned on, without needing to rely on frame gen or spend a thousand bucks on a graphics card.
IMO 4k isn’t enough of a qualitative leap to justify all the hacks needed to make it run acceptably on current hardware, let alone the sky-high VRAM costs for that resolution. I’d rather run a game in ultra quality at 1080p than medium quality in 4k.
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If it doesn’t run well on mobile gaming consoles, then it’s losing a huge market. It makes sense now that handhelds are popular af.
What’s driving this trend? The enshitification of triple AAA titles fucking slapping surcharges on EVERYTHING; day one dlc, microtransactions, always online DRM, the ability to revoke access to the shit we pay for, it’s death by 1000 cuts. EVERY anti-consumer action, every attempt to squeeze more of us while delivering the same rehashed shit over and over just drives me further into the arms of indie developers. The intent of us withholding our money and refusing to purchase your shit is to provide publishers with a sense of pride and accomplishment for retaining their customer base.
I havent taken a stance but games requiring subscriotion have moved me away. Seasons pass, dlc etc.
to me, aaa = mark of inferior quality, barring some exceptions
For me it’s a lack of creativity and innovation when it comes to gameplay. Indies or just smaller studio productions take more risks and that’s a lot more exciting.
Yeah, AAA productions:
I’m playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for the first time right now. I’m not particularly a fan of turn-based games, but I’m digging there interpretation of the genre. I like how each character has a limited amount of movement per turn and the ability to navigate through the entire environment. I’m surprised more developers don’t use a similar model.
I admit I was thinking about E33 as well, but my niche is narratively strong games or puzzle games. Too many AAA games are narratively disjointed open world messes and when it comes to puzzles indies are just king. Animal Well, Blue Prince, The Witness etc.
Zero creativity, zero innovation, zero passion. Too many AAA games feel like all of the design and decision making happened in a boardroom full of executives and market researchers, then the actual designers and developers just churn out whatever the higher-ups have decided the product will be.
that is my point exactly. doesnt matter how nice the game looks, if its uncreative crap nothing will save that.
To me, AAA means but it in 6-12 months for $10-20
You know what this is called? A healthy and competitive market.
Yeah, I get there’s layoffs, but that’s mainly at AAA studios and is a symptom of a previously unhealthy, highly consolidated market. The job losses suck, but now diversity and competition is coming back, and that’s generally a good thing for consumers.
Whenever investors get involved things go downhill. If the only two parties are a buyer and a seller, the only way the seller can make money is by making a product the buyer wants to buy. But investors don’t care about the product. They may not even understand the product. They only care that the product makes money.
AAA studios are failing because they want to please investors, not buyers.
It’s this.
and it’s always worth distinguishing between executives and investors.
Executives are going to push the problem, but the core issue is shareholders. In the US, where most of these companies are based, a publicly traded company is expected to make money for its shareholders. Shareholders have subplanted customers in the companies ethical obligagions. The law has been used to make this national policy. Controlling shareholders can (and do) vote to remove company leadership that won’t act how they want. It is not just that they have to generate revenue, they have to generate as much revenue as possible as determined by shareholders. It’s corporate cartel tatics. Fail us and die. Do well and you’ll get rewarded with some of the take.
If a company goes public, It’s only a matter of time until it’s product goes to shit.
I want to upvote this one million times
It was my understanding that it was a misconception that companies are legally bound to have an ROI or whatever. Not an economist so IDK. I just remember hearing that from several places. Regardless, the buyer-seller relationship is “I give you money, and you give me a product or service”. The investor-seller relationship is “We give you money, and you give us more money, and we don’t care how you do it.”
Only very technically. Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. still made the shareholder a priority over the product or the customer (technically it only set the precedent). It’s a misconception that actual profit is the legal requirement. I suppose I’m guilty of furthering it, but it’s easier to keep the oversimplification than to explain the nuances when the outcome is the same. The controlling shareholders are the ones that create this issue because their votes affect company policy, and if they don’t like the way the company operates, they have more direct legal avenues to change and challenge it than you or I would.
Well then they are simply stupid. Because if they did care that the product makes money, they would care about what the buyer wants to buy, because thats how you make the money.
In their mind they can just take their money and invest in something else. They don’t care about long term value, just milking it for all its worth. Pump and dump, then move onto the next cow.
I’m too lazy to find my 3 year old comment but it went something like “AAA games are about as AAA as the mortgage bonds were in 2007”.
The era of the AAA gold standard is long gone. You no longer need a million dollar studio bankrolled by a big name publisher/console to make a groundbreaking AAA game.
Most if not all of those studios have been cost cutting for the past decade to maximize profit which is how we reached the current market of UE5 slop and DoA live service games.
There’s even an entire YouTube channel dedicated to showing how many current “AAA” titles have regressed in graphical optimization and quality from older game engines due to the lack of proper development, despite the advancement in consumer hardware.
Care to link the channel for the curious friend?
https://youtu.be/ljWylilACdI
It all costs too much now, and my backlog will hold me over until I die of old age. I’m at the age now where I don’t care about the new stuff.
I’d pay the $70 or even $100 for a AAA title…if it released complete, relatively bug-free, and didn’t try to soak me with microtransactions and subscriptions.
But that’s not what’s they’re selling.
Exactly. AAA is supposed to be pushing the standard forward and compete for my attention by making a better product.
If i can get an equally good or better game for less money i will obviously go for that.
All those stakeholders be like
This is whats wrong with gaming.
idiots being too eager to throw ever increasing amounts of money at companies, to get what they used to get for 50, with zero self awareness that they are the cancer thats killing everything.
Counterpoint: games were more expensive in the past, sometimes even before adjusting for inflation. Goldeneye was $70 new.
The problem is that back then you bought a complete game to play forever. Now you buy an unfinished mess that despite costing as much, makes it abundantly clear that the game isn’t yours through DRM and in your face micro transactions.
To provide a relatively decent source: https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1997-Sears-Christmas-Book
Around page 286. So 1997 christmas season, Starfox and Goldeneye going for $80… FFVII for $60…
N64 had the challenge that every single game was a circuitboard, so that inflated costs. Nowadays the price is for just the right to download a copy.
i mean, its also sears, premium store premium pricing.
I bought FFVII on launch day from Best Buy for 49.99.
True, but it’s at least a rough indicator, and having intact concrete pricing from back then was a bit challenging, and sears catalog came to me as a very well preserved source of vaguely appropriate pricing.
Like when BG3 came out and other devs whined about being unable to deliver such a game? Maybe they shouldn’t be considered AAA studios if all they do is waste their budget.
Same thing happened with music.
It doesn’t mean AAA will go away, just like big stadium packing artists like Taylor Swift never went away. They just accounted for less of the industry’s total profits than they used to.
More of people’s disposable money is spent on a wider variety of music and games, often opting for more “indie” and cheaper versions of both. It’s a good thing, honestly, for people’s tastes to be more diversified and unique.
Except almost no one can live with music now, with the spotify model.
I pirate my music and keep it in my local storage.
I mean, it’s ok I guess, but as a musician myself that’s not helping much either. Buy some stuff on bandcamp (85% goes to the artists, cheap and often pay what you want) or if you need streaming get Tidal, they give 3x than spotify and didn’t give 100 millions to joe rogan.
Also bandcamp gives you high quality DRM FLAC files (or really whatever audio filetype you want) and those files are yours to keep, forever. You can also stream stuff you’ve bought through the bandcamp website. They also still do bandcamp fridays where 100% of the sale goes to the artist. Next bandcamp friday is May 1st.
Another option is direct-from-artist sales if they have their own website and store. Do vinyls still come with codes for an mp3 copy? I remember my vinyl for The Mean Jeans - Are You Serious? had a code and a link to download an mp3 copy of the album.
I got into music piracy back in the day because it used to be that record companies paid artists badly so I spent money on concerts and merch, now Spotify pays artists badly for the record companies. Anyway, if used at all piracy is best used to find artists you really love and then spend your money on legitimately purchasing their music.
Hell you can still buy CDs direct (rarely) do that too. Great for display if nothing else.
I love Bandcamp. It does not have much of a filter so I get to find small and under the radar artists.
Personally I buy 90% of my music either on Bandcamp or as a CD in my local store… rip it… throw it on Jellyfin for easy streamikg
Huh. Just found out that Bandcamp isn’t owned by Epic Games anymore. It was sold off to someone else back in 2023. Guess I don’t have a reason to boycott it now
There wasn’t really a reason to boycott it anyway. Epic just wanted “free” access to a massive library for their games, like how EA Trax used to be a thing. Nothing changed about bandcamp in the meantime.
The reason would be fuck Epic.
Yes there was. It’s called “fuck those monopolistic cunts at EGS, they don’t get my money”
I’m not gonna get started on this, but Epic or not, this is and was one of the only way to give money directly to artists. If you boycott Epic I really hope you boycott steam also cause they’re no better.
Fuck off with your false equivalence bullshit.
EGS has used anticompetitive and anti consumer practices from day one, all because Tim Swiney is a petty asshole that wants to be at the top of the pile.
Meanwhile Valve has generally been pro-consumer and built a relatively good service
Lol, another steam sucker ready to die for billionaire Gabe. They basically invented gambling for chlidren, they actually are the one that have anticompetitive practice lmfao, they dont let you own your games, they take a huge cut of 30% (epic take 12%, but you dont care about game devs right), they make billions in profit but employ less than 300 people.
But I’ve met enough of your kind to know your cognitive dissonance to know that no amount of proofs that steam suck would make you stop kissing their ass. You guys are the maga of gaming lol. So yeah, the hard truth is you don’t like games you like steam, and you dont like music, you like yourself. Now fuck off yourself, you are the problem.
Musicians aren’t making much on any streaming platform. I wish I could afford to purchase more music on bandcamp but it’s been years since I’ve been able to.
If you don’t care too much how the music is used, music licensing can bring in money, it doesn’t necessarily have to be used in Ads.
Can I suggest occasionally buying stuff through something like Bandcamp? You get digital music and support the artist. Or, just buy some merch I guess.
It’s funny, I recall Benn Jordan saying in multiple videos of his that his profits went up when he removed all his music from spotify.
Live shows and merch have been the way artists make money since before streaming was a thing
Yeah, except now we would have the capacity to give money directly to artists. Platforms like shittyfy have shown people are willing to pay a couple of bucks a months to get access to music, we need to redirect the money to the artists and not some greedy ceo. Bandcamp is a start, we can do better.
What I’m saying is that record sales have been unprofitable for artists for a long time, so Spotify hasn’t really moved the needle on that point
Sounds like you’re someone who thought a little about pricing.
Why should anyone get a royalty for a listen?
There’s a club in my town with a dj who plays each week. Club gets paid, dj gets paid. His sets are like ads for his work in the club. Why would I have to pay for each listen? Why would he has to earn for each listen?
Especially if that DJ is residing somewhere else and won’t ever come to my town because it’s too small for him.
Why do we create superstars? Why does “superstar S” have to be paid millions because millions come to their show. Even though I stand 500 m away, I can’t see them, I can’t hear them properly. Why can’t it be that there is a cover band covering those songs. Maybe even doing a better job. On a loval concert, with great sound, a good stage, less crowd, less people, more fun.
Why do we cheer a dj with electronic music, who just plays one song after the other, with a little bit of mixing now and then and choosing the next track based on the crowd? Why aren’t people in the center of the music (anymore)?
Why is our system so fucked up?
I fear for the new Mass Effect game.
I find this a bit entertaining especially hearing advertisers and executives occasionally vent on stuff like this. A huge portion of modern people especially the younger they are:
Besides the not going outside and problems that can arise from being in a social bubble, it’s all good stuff to me. For decades advertisers and businesses have optimized everything for selling products and now people are so desensitized to it to not care. Like no one actually cares about times square takeover advertisements anymore. It’s not a big deal.
“OMG it was advertised all over time square.” Responded with: “I live in Wichita.” “I live in India.” “I’m from NYC and tourist just look at them, they don’t read them. Fuck no I don’t read them. I don’t fuck with times square.”
It’s actually incredibly hard to advertise media now. Advertisements have to manage to seem organic or come off as predatory. So in comes the influencers but no influencer is as influential and trusted as a prime time advertisement before social media/YouTube went mainstream with people children to elderly. The vein to sell souless AAA/blockbuster media is busted
This one is big and I never noticed it until a few years ago. My wife and I never got cable when we moved into our own place. One time my mother in law was talking to my wife about some commercial and my wife just said she hadn’t seen it. My mother in law got really weirdly upset or something, like my wife was trying to be condescending or something. But she was talking about it the same way people might talk about a funny skit from a show. It wasn’t until being away from it for years that I realized how odd it is.
Yould think the ad companies would get the message…
I think it’s more companies should question whether the advertisement they pay for is actually effective or if they’re just told it’s more effective
Some of the most wildly out of touch professors and students I’ve shared space with were business peeps.
Google bad record profits last quarter, so it can’t be that bad.
They do, just interpretation is different with their smooth brains.
Still feels crazy though how aware you’re forced to be about ads lurking in every corner. I check many of these boxes plus some others, use independent OSs, 3rd party apps etc. And still, although I hardly see any ads, they are so present just lurking under the surface.
Good example are sponsor comments in yt videos/podcasts. Some I can filter out with Sponsorblock, but the little video glitch reminds you every time that you have to stay safe. Podcast ads can easily be slipped with the fast forward button, but if you’re washing the dishes etc., sometimes you can’t react directly.
It’s really insane how ads are just everywhere these days.
You forgot
When you’re not allowed to own anything, piracy isn’t theft.
Piracy in general shouldn’t be equated to theft.
I already have, and printed several for my nephews.
This is the way.
They don’t seem to understand not every game needs to be a red dead.
I’m happy with every AAA game striving for RDR2 level of quality if we also get AA games from the same studios. And of course indie games are always gonna indie.
If they try to make only super huge AAAs and nothing less, then games are infrequent and quality suffers when they have to be rushed out when money’s getting tight.
The only AAA game that I have legitimately enjoyed and played more than once is Red Dead Redemption II. Other AAA games are okay, but they feel a bit hollow and lack the immersion that RDR2 has. Then again, RDR2 was showing off a bit with what the industry can do.
RDR2 is a fucking masterpiece.
I think that a bigger story there is the dominance of F2P games.
EDIT: Added release year after @[email protected] mentioned age.
EDIT2: And country of origin, while I’m at it.
EDIT3: Note that the release dates on some of these are a bit apples-to-oranges. For example, Escape From Tarkov only had its 1.0 release in 2025, but had been widely-played well before that, so maybe “availability” would be more interesting than “release”. World of Warcraft Classic only split from World of Warcraft in 2019, but both games have an origin in World of Warcraft, which was released in 2004.
Nearly every title on that list is also a live service game that has been released for years. It’s almost like supporting your product post-launch builds a dedicated userbase or something.
(And yeah, I know it’s actually because of the profitability of addictive design patterns combined with microtransactions. Let me dream, please.)
This is also survivorship bias. Plenty of companies would love to support their game post launch and make this much money, but they go under trying to follow the same playbook; even the ones that were successful doing so before.
True. I know Dean Hall (DayZ, Stationeers, Kitten Space Agency) destroyed any hope of his survival game Icarus becoming a major success by releasing hundreds of dollars of expensive DLC during Early Access, then later admitted it was because the money from his previous projects had slowed to a trickle and splitting his current project into a bunch of paid packs was the only way he could stay solvent. Even the megahits of the past all die out at some point.
Doesn’t help that Icarus is such a technical mess. Certainly limits the player base when you shoot for a graphically demanding game and then don’t bother with working on performance.
Maybe I’m just grumpy that I can’t play it anymore since switching to Linux despite upgrading my gpu.
I should totally put release date on there too. Just a sec, will add on a column with that.
Wow, most of them were even older than I’d thought. And even some of the new ones like Tarkov were in Early Access for years before their official release date.
(You flipped the date and country for 16 and 17, btw)Already fixed, never mind!Yeah, but thanks for the heads-up!
One minor correction, I believe The Sims 4 went F2P at some point. They’re funded entirely by expansion packs now.
Yeah, I thought about changing it, but…the problem is that while the base game is playable now for $0, the overwhelming bulk of the game’s content is in expansion packs. Like, I don’t think that people really buy and play just the base game; it’d be more like a demo.
EDIT: A similar game might be DCS. I mean, yes, technically the base game is free, and you get (checks) a WW2 fighter and a Soviet ground-attack jet. But…basically that acts as a demo, and everyone is going to go out and get at least their favorite aircraft, and most of those aircraft cost about as much as a full-priced video game does. Hell, a couple of them are $80 each.
That’s fair. Though, by that logic would you consider something like that one Final Fantasy MMO F2P or not? I believe it lets you play all the old content for free and only charges for the last (few?) expansions.
Yeah, expensive but high-quality add-ons are the norm for flight sims.
Free to play, and “ever games” or whatever you want to call them. Solid classics that are easy to return to for years. Left 4 Dead 2 is a great example.
I appreciate the nicely formatted table. :)
Shouldn’t the sims 4 be considered free to play? The base game is free, only the dlc is paid.
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Way too many American games in there :(
Or effectively F2P/MTX based ones, even if they have an upfront cost.
And it’s not even counting mobile.
I hear a lot about the resurgance of honest, pay-upfront games, but revenue sure isn’t supporting that.
F2P games are subsidized by a small minority who will throw a hundred dollars a month into the game to obtain and max out whatever FOMO event or item/character is on rotation, and by an even smaller group of obscenely wealthy (or mentally ill) players who will spend tens of thousands of dollars just to say they own everything.
I’d honestly be fine with this model if the ones funding it were treated like patrons of the arts or something, but instead the industry hired a bunch of psychologists to run incredibly unethical experiments to create literally addictive design patterns encouraging the weak-willed or mentally ill to spend more.
Modern F2P game design is predatory and downright evil in the way it’s carefully cultivated to be just fun enough to continue playing, while constantly dangling the promise of more enjoyment if you’d only spend a tiny bit more (with that ‘bit more’ often only granting a small chance at getting what you want, with ‘pity’ systems only guaranteeing the desired drop if you spend the equivalent of around a hundred bucks in premium currency). But since it’s obscenely profitable, I don’t foresee it going away without legislation banning those practices.
Yeah, that’s what I hate about Genshin Impact most - the predatory gacha and FOMO-exploiting business model ruining what would otherwise be a peak game I could recommend to basically anyone.
And Roblox does it by exploiting kids.
Roblox screws over both the players and the creators who attract and keep them there, both of which as you said are mostly children. It’s actually kind of impressive how scummy the devs are. They’re the poster child for rent-seeking parasites.
Not to mention that in one country the game is being allegedly used as a platform for spreading edgelordism.
https://www.onenews.ph/articles/pnp-terrorists-grooming-kids-through-roblox
It depends, it’s certainly inaccurate to describe all F2P games as doing this. Runescape, at least back in the 2000s, was F2P or a monthly sub. That was it.
Runescape also was a free game at a time when those weren’t really common. I honestly can’t think of any others with the scope of RS.
Not only was it free, it ran entirely in a browser window.
That’s how it managed to build its player base, and it coasts on that nostalgia to this day.
There were loads of free browser games back then
Miniclip, Newgrounds, and similar felt more like mini games.
For free and in browser with some actual progression, I can think of RuneScape and those Artix Adventure Quest series games. I played both, but Runescape definitely felt like more of a complete game with 3D models and all.
God, I had forgotten how bad those Artix games were til I remembered them just now.
I played the bejeezus out of Runescape until I picked up Minecraft as a teenager. The free to play section certainly had its limits (only like 30 quests, about a dozen skills and only like 1/4 of the map) but you could absolutely access many, many hours of content purely in free to play. Compare that to another title from around the same era, Disney’s Pirates Online, which gave you an initial 3 days of free premium membership on account creation, you’d largely run out of free content and find everything gated to membership within a couple of days so it was hard to enjoy past those first 3 days unless you could convince your parents to buy you membership.
Of course, both have extremely healthy community-run revival projects in 2009Scape and The Legend of Pirates Online respectively.
There’s also other projects like 2004scape, 2007scape, Darkan, Open RSC etc. depending on your preferred era of Runescape to relive, but ORSC and 2009scape seem to both have the most active development and most active communities by far (and ORSC is early enough to be hard to enjoy if you aren’t deep into vintage gaming)
Regardless of whatever fraction most of the revenue comes from, they still draw absolutely massive amounts of players.
I’d love to play AAA games- Crimson Desert and Spider-Man 2 are on my wishlist. But now that they’ve been optimized for frame generation, my 3070 can’t play them to my standard.
If I’m going to stare at a pixelated mess, I’d rather it be curated by an indie artist than technical difficulties from DLSS compression
What expectations do you have for resolution and frame rate? My 3070 plays Spider-Man 2 just fine. I think I’m running 1440 at 60. It’s as good or better than the original console release.
I have a 3440x1440 resolution. I aim for a smooth 60. Maybe they made performance better. But, it didn’t work for me well at launch
You’ve poisoned yourself. Chasing fidelity and refresh rates has done for graphics what short-form media did to attention spans. I’m emulating PS1 games and playing Fallout 4 on a 970 while my computer fans blow like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier and I am free.
Those still doing 1080p/1440p gaming get the best of both worlds: high framerates with all the fancy graphics turned on, without needing to rely on frame gen or spend a thousand bucks on a graphics card.
IMO 4k isn’t enough of a qualitative leap to justify all the hacks needed to make it run acceptably on current hardware, let alone the sky-high VRAM costs for that resolution. I’d rather run a game in ultra quality at 1080p than medium quality in 4k.
That and they are also $70 new. Like yeah no thanks