RallyCarDelta Gaming

@HoegLaw I, for one, welcome our new cost of product overlords.

@GameOverThirty Biggest gaming story of the year, and may be the sign of things to come.

Everyone is going to complain about it, but this is the literal result of the economic differences between the supply chain of each format (digital vs. physical). In other words, this is actually how it works. Game companies resisted giving in for a variety of reasons, but here we are. nintendo.com/us/whatsnew/ab…

Have you ever tried to actually read anything on the well known games enthusiast press sites while on mobile, such as VGC, IGN, PC Gamers, etc? It's basically impossible with the amount of advertising and junk thrown about every page. The latest trend is blocking you from leaving when you try to exit. It's a terrible experience.

@PackyBrennan Yes. I didn't talk about UE above, but that switch is a component of the overall strategy. Now almost any external contactor that understands UE can work on the game.

@GameOverThirty I mean, they switched to Unreal. That opens the door to more contracting than the proprietary kind.

My comments on this largely have nothing to do with #Halo. Instead, what is probably happening at Halo Studios is emblematic of a broader games industry shift towards contracting. Large publishers and developers need to reduce their overall cost base. Despite revenue driven from MTX, game companies deal with a large cost base between releases (both live service and traditional). Add in new market dynamics (high risk / high saturation) and it makes more sense to ramp up with expert contractor rather than add general base cost. A core team at the company can handle certain functions, while expert contractors handle other functions. The game still comes out, but base cost is kept lower. Yes, there are other risks with this model. I'll cover that at another time.

@K__Med @MikeyJayRaymond The shotgun mod is the best way to play Elden Ring. It improves the experience across the board. How else does one deliver freedom to the denizens of The Lands Between?

SCOTUS completely invalidates Sony's lawsuit against Cox Communications. Even minor judgement left intact from the 4th circuit was thrown out. SCOTUS is completely correct here and this was a massive waste of time. This would be like suing the water company because someone built an unauthorized pool in the back yard. thehill.com/regulation/cou…

@MrWhimsical25 The jokes write themselves.

I FUCKING CALL IT @GameOverThirty

@nxd1979 Hey now. That's Gen-X and Xennials. We wear that shit like a badge of honor. We take care of ourselves because we didn't have a choice. Don't go giving millennials credit for that. They're all in therapy anyway.

no millennial trope has broken more brains than "you don't owe anybody anything". an ignoble, selfish narcissism dressed up in therapy-speak about boundaries and self-care in order to give yourself a pass from treating other people with a basic level of care and respect

@oliver_drk It was only a matter of time until a light hearted jab at gaming social media became the reality. 😄

Sony can call itself lucky that this mismanagement happens during a when PlayStation is undisputed in its market position, and outsells Switch 2 and Xbox Series. Things would look quite differently in 2007-2012. The nature of the business: Some frontrunners can afford to slip.

@GetFitWithJared Watch Nintendo's numbers. They did grow the company a bit, and you can see the response to that in some of their pricing. That said, it's nothing like the over-ramp we saw in many companies over here (or the aggregate flood of studios every 5 minutes).

Nintendo left the home console market in 2017 after the Wii U. The Switch is a mobile console, literally a tablet with special controllers that attach to it. They created a dock to allow it to be played at home, but it's built for mobility. I'm pretty sure that was a response to their low sales of the Wii U and the rise of mobile gaming in the 2010s, including the DS and 3DS That being said, the Switch changed the industry and gave us the handheld gaming PC market, along with the much smaller retro handheld market. But the fact they never came out with a dedicated TV Switch shows Nintendo left home consoles and it's worked for them so far. As for their games, they seem to keep their budgets under control.

Phil Spencer deserves a lot of credit for revamping #Xbox after MSFT took their eye off the ball during the Xbox One launch. He fought for Xbox to remain a consumer facing brand, especially with MSFT having failed in numerous other consumer product lines. He completed the acquisition of ABK despite numerous roadblocks (some of which were hilariously off base). However, given the updates over the past month, it's starting to make logical sense that he already had one foot out the door. Even from the outside you can tell that new leadership at Xbox is using a revamped consumer approach to the product. I'd also argue that what we saw at GDC was good for developers, though that was set in motion years ago, during Spencer's watch. You can tell there are two parallel, but complementary strategies at Xbox right now: Consumer AND Developer. How do we sell it? How do we make it easier to develop on the platform? Does this work over the next decade? I don't know, and neither do you. I like what I'm seeing, but my personal view doesn't mean market success. That's a much more complicated answer, especially when a company sees a mix of results.

I'm also of the opinion that the games industry can no longer be "business as usual." You'll still have your unicorns like Nintendo who can pretty much do their own thing (even they have been forced to change their business model), but most large game companies will need to adapt, and quickly.

He was also trying to navigate a changing market. From what we've heard recently, spending on PC Gaming will outpace consoles by 2028. Younger generations have grown up with phones and tablets for gaming and aren't as drawn to consoles as gamers in their 30s and older. The console market has stagnated and the next step is shrinkage. If Xbox continued business as usual they would be in trouble, more so than what randos on the internet like to say they're in. Asha clearly seems to be in her role because of her marketing background so I'm interested to see where she takes the company

Yep. And as I was saying to someone else, I definitely understand it given my time in corporate America. Games are especially vulnerable to this type of ramping given the industry dynamics. However... I can't avoid that we really should be beyond this by now. The games industry, IMO, isn't that young anymore. We know Western tech companies tend to be undisciplined when it comes to hiring, but the market is different now. It's grossly saturated and filled consumers aren't moving around like they did in other eras. My hope is that we start seeing more prudent hiring practices that drive smaller teams, lower underlying cost, and focus on realistic expectations.

@GameOverThirty Worked with Epic on Fortnite for 4 years. Was at Blizzard for 7. Live service games require a larger team but these teams could lean out considerably with little impact to the games they develop. Corporatocracy needs to be eradicated from larger studios.

When I say that staffing numbers in the games industry make absolutely no sense, Epic Games is a prime example. While perfect numbers are hard to find, staff count looks something like this: 2019 ~ 2000 employees 2021 ~ over 4000 2022 ~ over 5000 2023 (layoffs) 2023 ~ over 4000 2026 (layoffs) 2026 ~ Somewhere between 3000-4000 I don't care how successful #Fortnite is, this kind of hiring is just completely overboard. Very few companies in other sectors would EVER greenlight this type of hiring ramp. Who's looking at the numbers in 2021 and 2022 and saying "Yeah, this is fine." How do people miss the obvious end state? I've spent my entire career in fortune 500 companies, and I cannot answer this question: Why is the games industry, and technology in general, so utterly terrible at controlling their hiring?

We are approaching the end of the fiscal year for companies that use a March 31st calendar. Obviously, if they use a standard calendar, that would have been December 31st. Regardless, this means a new set of yearly reports. You'll typically see more details regarding strategy and overall company goals than you will on the quarterly summaries. All that said, I'm of the school of thought that quarterly reports are unnecessary. They tend to encourage short term decision making and often lack focus on longer term strategies. It's also a waste of time & energy preparing these presentations every three months. If I was king of the universe, I'd declare half year reports mandatory, with quarterly reports becoming optional (for publicly traded entities).

Oh I hear ya, and the games industry (especially Western development) is especially prone to "riding the wave." You're right. I'll be honest, I'm not even against "riding the wave" but I also know it can be done with careful planning and not just throwing more bodies at it. We've seen it. We're at the point where, IMO, the games industry leadership have been through these waves and you'd think they take a more measured approach to staffing, even when ramping up. In fact, if you listen to some of the "old heads" of the industry, they'll tell you there was a time when staffing really was scrutinized more heavily because it was known that at any time the consumer could move on to something else. Anyway. Thanks for the feedback. I agree.

Seeing things from the inside a bit as a dev, it’s because studios want to do everything to ride a wave of success that they constantly want to see grow bigger now matter how large it already is. Also the fight for attention in a live service environment to keep players engaged leads to the trap of constantly rising expectations. Not enough for a game to just be good as is, it now has to give out increasingly larger free updates that are overly ambitious. There is a decade of resources poured into limited time events for Fortnite that could have built multiple AAA games easily and that’s a tough pill to swallow but the answer as always is they were chasing the money but with reckless abandon.

I generally agree. The games industry is vulnerable to these types of boom busy cycles, but I also challenge the thinking that it can't be avoided. (Not saying you said that but just making the point.) I'm a devout capitalist to be honest, and even I know there are better ways to handle staff ramp.

@GameOverThirty The games industry isn't uniquely bad at this, but the boom-bust cycle of gaming revenue makes it more visible than most sectors.

@MR3Dev Some definitely will be, due to the fact that ramping on dev requires the admin / management staff to support it. It's one of the challenges of growing staff, it often requires both product support and staff roles.

@GameOverThirty I bet most of those staffs are not dev but some sort of HR and Admin.

With what we saw cancelled today, it does seem like they had fever dreams of all these "verticals" becoming successful. They likely required staffing and product development all of their own, despite being on UEFN. They were probably given their own budgets and allowances, and section leads were likely allowed to handle the process.

@GameOverThirty I'd guess having too many non-product platform technology verticals lets you expand w/o employee ROI concerns, exacerbated by Fortnite's runaway success.

Meanwhile... Valve only employs about 350 people despite printing money with Steam. 150 are dedicated to development. The remaining 200 live as staff on Gaben's yacht.