Personally I would not call Immortals of Aveum an AAA game. 😅
And I mean, that’s maybe where the problems lie. This game is all jank and all generics, with no specific thing to present except “OMG LOOK AT OUR GRAPHICS!!!”. Which are also pretty unoptimized, so you end up with:
- Only a tiny tiny fraction of players can even play it.
- Then, the game is utterly generic. Despite how it might look to someone not knowing about it, DOOM 2016 and Eternal are quite unique games and have a very well-designed gameplay flow that even differs divisively between the two.
- The writing is horrible and would make even an MCU movie/series writer question their decisions in life.
- The magic is still just guns with replaced graphics. They didn’t lean into the very premise of the game at all. And all they had to do is play Lichdom Battlemage from 2014 to get some ideas and that game already struggled with the concept. But at least it pulled it off.
Can’t really say I’m surprised the game flopped hard. But unlike the dev I would call the underlying idea solid, just not anything about the execution.
Look, you are describing a perfectly rational theory for how events could play out in a theoretical universe, but you are just stependously, horrifically wrong if you think this story corresponds to reality in a meaningful way.
The truth is these companies have so much power (money) behind them that they don’t just keel over and die when they fail, they annihilate entire industries, catastrophically derail promising career trajectories for countless workers, structurally give themselves an impenetrable advantage with regulatory capture and most importantly utterly dominate the material reality of being a worker in that industry, even if the worker doesn’t work at the company.
Look at Uber, remember years ago when Uber keeled over and died once it became apparent that Uber wasn’t profitable unless drivers are exploited to an extreme degree? Then all those workers went and worked for other ride sharing companies that ran more effective businesses and treated their employees more humanely (in retrospect the by now well documented extremely sexist and toxic culture of upper management at Uber alone doomed it from the start)… The market solved the problem by rewarding rideshare companies with better technology and business models than Uber. I remember in California, Uber could have blocked legislation that was going to improve the lives of rideshare/gig workers immensely but they realized that the consequences of drivers and riders seeing Uber openly shit on their face and spend massive amounts of money to keep drivers from getting a tiny, measly amount more money and control over their work environment would spell utter disaster so they refrained. The wisdom of the market!
Wait… the exact, precise opposite of all that happened while Uber ran for years at a massive loss as a venture capital superweapon ripping millions upon millions of dollars into a gaping black hole and completely devastating the taxi industry without providing a truly humane or long term viable alternative for most workers or cities?
sigh do you really not understand what is happening right in front of you?
No, this is the reality. The likes of Activision, EA, Ubisoft, and Take Two rule the industry by market cap, but that’s because their games notably sell to the type of person who only buys a few video games per year at most. If they utterly dominated the material reality of the industry, how on earth could Baldur’s Gate 3 or Palworld even happen? How could Hades or No Man’s Sky, made by former EA devs, happen? Your view of reality is quite overly pessimistic. How can you even measure some of the claims you’re making?
I don’t know, my ideas are so wild and I am pulling them totally out of thin air. It isn’t like there is a massive amount of scholarly work on this topic, a pre-existing history of legal cases pertaining to these issues that have caused society defining laws to be passed in most major countries and many political movements that explicitly attempt to define and critique these processes at our fingertips on the internet waiting to educate and inform us.
And you know, the funny thing is I really for once was feeling a little optimistic about this kind of material existing for me to read and educate myself with but I guess in this case my pessimism was well founded.
You slipped in an edit while I was responding, and I think the gist of it is that you and I fundamentally don’t agree, especially not the hyperbolic flourish you used. I think you’ll continue to see plenty of great games come out in the next decades, because people still want to buy games and other people still want to make them.
If you are only concerned about this from the perspective of having enough good games to keep you personally occupied and not a step further to the experience of human beings working in the industry (beyond the narrow range of game companies you directly buy from) that makes the art you love, then yes you and I fundamentally disagree and I would never want to be misconstrued as making the kind of argument you are making.
Also thank you for complimenting my flourish :)
There will continue to be games to play because people will continue to make them. A bad experience in one place leads to a new studio designed not to repeat it.