Discussion 59% of devs say industry is in a bad state, primarly blame investor expectations and mismanagement

[BotenAnna]

Lol. "Concern trolling". Can you stop throwing words like that around please. You're on a mostly Nintendo fan forum, and you don't know the difference between good, quality developers and ones that aren't? Why are you a fan of Nintendo.

Even by Famiboards standards this is insanely shitty Ninfan posting.

 

[poochy]

Switch is at 140m and still growing, I'm 99.9% certain PS2 and DS were selling at a snail's pace by this point in their lifespans.

“99.9% certain” is crazyyyyyyyy. The entire reason the PS2 sold as much as it did was that it had absurdly long legs all throughout the PS3 generation. Sold over 6mil units in FY2011!

 

[Caviar]

Switch is at 140m and still growing, I'm 99.9% certain PS2 and DS were selling at a snail's pace by this point in their lifespans

PS2 very famously had one of the most back-heavy lifespans of any console in history. At this point in its life, the PS2 had shipped 117m. It ended with ~160m.

It shipped over 40m units after the PS3 launched and was still beating it some months in NPD sales charts like a year or two into the next gen.

 

[Mbolibombo]

Yeah it's not pretty in the industry currently and honestly not much is looking better either.
Hopefully I'm wrong.

In regards to PS2 legs. A lil story

I was piss poor and miserable 2008-09 - I had almost no money but I needed som distraction in life, I bought a new PS2 for 400 sek on campaign which is basically 40$ and got 3 guitarr hero games from a friend for free. Got my through som rough times.

There were so many deals to buy the PS2 console for almost Peanuts at the time, it never surprises me to see that the legs were as long as they were.

 

[ivetto]

It's also worth noting that Japan has much stricter laws surrounding hiring and firing people that intentionally disincentivizes over-expanding development resources.

At the time of the layoffs I was really jealous about Nintendos structure. Its stable and safe, meanwhile I got affected by Riots changes, which I didn't expect at all knowing the scale of the company.

 

[RennanNT]

Nintendo is certainly the dominant force on their own consoles, but even selling 74% of all games (I am just making this up) sold on switch, thats still more than 250 million games sold by third party devs.
Keep in mind the switch has sold more than 1000 million games. Devs missing on that pie is their fault more than Nintendo's own blue market strategy.

Just giving official numbers, the software total is 1235M and 595~610M first party games sold.

So, over 600M 3rd party games sold, and that doesn't include eShop-only games.

 

[rick_C]

Low/mid-budget games are good now. Only high budget games and their devs are having disaster, they are getting a disease called "bigger".

 

[Gotdatmoneyy]

A. Sample sizes from where?
B. It does matter who they are. And don't put words in my mouth. I literally said quality. What if that whole sample is literally low quality Devs, not Devs from Nintendo et al? You know what I'm talking about. Not all Devs are equal and you know this. Does it not matter when you know what devs are working on your favourite game, and you find out it's the ones you really like, you know, the good ones? Please don't twist and claim things to your liking.

The mistake you are making is thinking your ability to code is related to your ability to understand faults in the industry. If the quality of the devs actually mattered (and quality is an arbitrary metric because how would any of us reasonably judge) then how can anyone talk on this subject? Your opinion would be worth 10,000 times less than a low quality dev based on the logic you are providing.

Just because you are a dev for Nintendo or work on Mario, that wouldn't make your view of the industry landscape better. You're working on IPs that are globally recognizeable, you're already playing on easy mode.

 

[correojon]

This may be wishful thinking, but we're getting news of people that have been laid off getting together to start their own indie studios. In 4-5 years the landscape may shift tremendously, as the big studios will have to compete with these "indie+" studios which are now made of experienced devs who known what it takes to release big games. Of course the indie studios won't have the same resources as the big studios, but with tools becoming better everyday, their experience + the big studios relying on new hires the gap will close and we're already seeing how graphics and presentation from a couple of gens before are now accepted as not just good enough, but almost indistinguishable from the current threshold.

Big studio management is truly incompetent, without the talent the IPs are worth nothing. Say you buy a studio with all their IPs and then let the people go. The next games of those IPs will suffer for it, we've seen it happen time and time again. Even if you get good numbers for the next 2 or 3 games, the value of the IPs will eventually be run down to the ground. This is what management doesn't seem to understand, that when you buy a studio the most valuable item is not the bunch of IPs that come with it, but the talent. The IPs on their own may give you diminishing revenue for the next 10 years, but the talent can multiply that revenue for the next 20 years and more. Nintendo is the best example of this, as you can clearly see how blockbusters like BotW, Mario Odyssey or Mario Kart are built on past games, using the knowledge the dev team has amassed through decades. On the other hand, look at the state of the biggest original IPs from Microsoft: Halo and Gears are a shadow of what they once were and people look at new releases with curiosity and distrust more than excitement.

The problem is that management doesn't make plans for 20 years. The CEOs will probably fly away to another company with a compensation package in 5-10 years, so what's their motivation to think of longer-term plans? They can make plans to have exponential, insustainable growth for the next 5 years, like the shareholders request. Then 5 years later when it inevitably comes crashing down they just leave. The next CEO has to lay people off as the inflated company structure is no longer viable (it never was), mitigating the red numbers for the next 3 or 4 years while they hope for the best. Management is truly incompetent. Yes, it was impossible to see something like Covid coming, but it was very evident that it would someday go away. The failure to adapt to this on time is just incompetence. These are people who are being paid millions, for that price I would expect fucking geniuses at the helm, not someone who is surprised when a pandemic gradually disappears in a couple of years.

 

[Razgriz]

At the time of the layoffs I was really jealous about Nintendos structure. Its stable and safe, meanwhile I got affected by Riots changes, which I didn't expect at all knowing the scale of the company.

To be fair there's also an obvious downside to this stricter hiring process, which is that actually getting a job is quite a bit more difficult upfront.

Kind of a double edged sword, although I know which one I'd prefer.

 

[lexony]

Investor Expectations dosen‘t necessarily only mean Shareholder Speculation or Venture Capital in the broad sense. It‘s the companies themselves too.

For some time already publishers have very high and in some cases unreasonable expectations. Where in the past it was enough having a Concept and Gameplay Prototype, now a Publisher basically wants an already almost finished product or at least flawless prototype which in the best case isn‘t known to the public (No trailer, demo or early access, so they can have full control over marketing), but somehow still proven to be successful. Either that or they publish games only after an early access success.

Especially for indies but also mid sized devs those are targets getting increasingly difficult to meet. That’s the reason why more Devs try to publish games themselves. Then they can decrease their own risk and at least can get some money while development by having Early Access or releasing smaller scoped games with DLC later. This is nothing new, but we are starting to see this trend with even bigger publisher/devs now.

Publishers just want to have low risk, invest less in new untested ideas and still expect unique games.

I don‘t want to blame Publishers only, it‘s hard for them too with having their investors in the back. And it’s not only them, other possible Investors, like Game Funding in general is still difficult to get. But people should keep in mind there are no "good guys" in this. Even highly regarded publishers like Devolver have an increasingly more difficult standard to meet for even previously successful devs.

 

[Hero of Legend]

“99.9% certain” is crazyyyyyyyy. The entire reason the PS2 sold as much as it did was that it had absurdly long legs all throughout the PS3 generation. Sold over 6mil units in FY2011!

PS2 very famously had one of the most back-heavy lifespans of any console in history. At this point in its life, the PS2 had shipped 117m. It ended with ~160m.

It shipped over 40m units after the PS3 launched and was still beating it some months in NPD sales charts like a year or two into the next gen.

...Really? Could've swore I read that PS2 was running on fumes by this point. Guess I was wrong then?

To be fair, if that number above is right then Switch did indeed handedly beat PS2 by this point (140m vs 117m) and PS2 was selling for basically bottom of the barrel prices like around $99-ish IIRC. I know I grabbed one in 2009 for around that price. Switch famously is still at virtually full-price if it even got a drop at all (I think it did in Canada but only due to slight currency correction?).

 

[Metroid]

Plenty of other people replied before I got a chance to, but wow. I'm just glad Famiboards is the type of place where that type of belief is still the exception and not the rule.

 

[Brofield]

59% of devs currently employed, or is there a representative sample of ex-devs from the +10,800 that have been laid off across the industry since the start of the year alone who also checked off corporate greed and incompetent management?

Fine a time as any to once again loudly shout from the rooftops

Fuck Lars Wingefors
Fuck Johan Ekström
Fuck Ian Gulam
Fuck Careen Yapp
Fuck Matthew Karch
Fuck Phil Rogers

FUCK EMBRACER