alt Hacker NewsBioWare co-founder: game execs "have never made a game" and don't get it
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I'd take this person's opinion with a heavy grain of salt. They didn't sell to EA to grow, but because BioWare was failing. AI recreating games has nothing to do with BioWare being shut down and is therefore a red herring. The execs might not know how to make games, but BioWare has both been extremely slow at developing games and put out multiple failures in a row.
If you want truly creative games, it won't be AAA game studios but indie game devs. AAA game studios play a different game (pun intended) and it will serve its audience and more especially, their shareholders. There is enough space in the world for them and truly creative indie game studios.
I would really like to get into the gaming industry, despite the horror stories you regularly hear about working conditions. The main problem for me is that I'm really old (>50), and there's no industry near where I live.
I think the best answer is AAAA+ scale projects. AI has destroyed the demand for something that can be produced in a few months. The "meso" scale of game development is extremely difficult to work in. Constantly walking a tightrope between too easy and too hard. Rockstar games does seem to have the right idea. They can remain viable by simply never reducing their feature scope and spending unlimited amounts of money.
Perhaps enough indie game studios could align their thinking at the same time to accomplish a similar outcome. In any case, pooling of talent and resources is probably the only way to compete now. The individual developer simply cannot keep up despite being able to do more than they ever were before.
If you seek evidence of Jevon's paradox I think you may find it here. Albeit in a very undesirable form. Even if I can now do 100% more work per unit time, my prospective customer is demanding 300-400% on top of that in terms of the final delivered experience. The water level has gone up everywhere and continues to rise rapidly. Even outside of game development. Deliverables that would have elicited reverence from the business twelve months ago are completely unrecognized now.
blaming everyone but themselves for years and years while coasting off the legacy of others
Have any of the Bioware execs even played a game?
This is likely an unpopular opinion, but I think the devs and the people actually involved in the game development are at fault.
It's not like the execs are coming up to the meeting room and saying "Hey, let's make a shitty game because I am an idiot who wants to lose money...".
Their games are just bad, man. They don't know how to write a good story like in the first mass effect, they don't know what makes a game fun, and this is the natural result.
Games in general, but specifically AAA+ games, have an insanely risky business model. From early concept to release is often 4+ years of heads down development with zero revenue. Tastes and trends change within that time and what may have been a compelling concept 4 years ago might seem stale by release. Then there is balancing the game which is a monumental challenge in itself; when you've been playing the same game for several years you lose perspective on what's fun or not, what is easy/difficult, etc.
This coming from a BioWare exec is rich:
"BioWare is not, like, a guy. BioWare closing is not like Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino getting fired or cancelled.
BioWare is a business entity that existed for 30 years. During that time people — including lead creatives who were responsible for the great games — came and went.
Some video game studios manage to maintain a culture and a sensibility around excellence and the key creatives either stick around for a long time or pass the reins to handpicked successors who share their values and preserve the culture and standards of the studios.
What has happened in the game industry over the last 15 years is that there came to be a widespread belief that the cultures that incubated excellent games were exclusionary racist, sexist, homophobic boys clubs that needed to change in order to welcome in different kinds of people.
Instead of hiring people who shared their values and sensibilities, the people at these game studios were pressured to push their workforces toward being 50% female while achieving racial equity. The staff of the studios changed dramatically, the cultures of the workplaces changed dramatically and the games changed dramatically.
The pandemic sent a lot of people into their homes to play video games, which seemed like it was going to drive an era of growth for the industry. At the same time, the new generation of gaming hardware required more detailed assets, more animation, and therefore more people to make these massive games.
So there was a huge hiring boom at the precise moment that there was an overarching focus of the demographics of the industry, which means that nearly every Western game studio’s workforce was completely transformed. Over 40% of games industry workers under the age of 25 identified as LGBT or nonbinary on recent surveys.
Additionally, some studios have had unique pressures that have driven a lot of turnover. At Rocksteady Games, for example, a lot of the people who made the Batman: Arkham trilogy were not interested in building the live service game Warner wanted, so most of the principals on those games left the studio during the production of “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.”
The studio cannot pivot back to what used to be its strength at making single player titles after that failure because all the people who are responsible for the classic games are gone. They no longer have that strength. They no longer have the institutional capacity to make great games because great games are made by great people and the great people are gone. A similar thing happened to BioWare during “Anthem.”
They couldn’t just pivot back to making great “Dragon Age” or “Mass Effect” games after the failure of “Anthem” because too many people were gone and the culture had changed. They weren’t the same studio and they weren’t a great studio anymore.
The BioWare that was shuttered today is not the studio that made “Mass Effect 2” or “Knights of the Old Republic.” That studio hasn’t existed for many years. It was just the “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” studio."
XBOX will be the big validation of the model. They purposefully chose an executive who doesn't know a thing about videogames. The business side is obviously important, but can a videogame company be successful if it's run by bean counting business optimizers? I doubt it, but time will tell.
I believe on of the responsibilities of C suite of executives was to put clarity on how the chicken is cook.
Wasn’t Phil Specter former head of Xbox a big part of the original Halo franchise?
It's even worse than that. The execs at these companies don't just not make games, they don't play games, either. They fundamentally cannot understand what makes a good game because they don't engage with the medium, and do not care to.
Well sure, and I suppose the bosses at McDonald’s never bother to taste all the regional variations of their burgers, right? Personally, I suspect that in the future, the biggest indie game developers might band together into a single publishing collective. In such an organization, everyone right down to the janitowould understand how games are actually made. Most importantly, they would grasp at every level of the hierarchy that independence and creativity in the decision making process are the essential ingredients that make a game something we, the players, truly desire.
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BioWare is an example of what poor senior leadership can do even to a legendary studio. If you look at their output for the last decade it’s really hard to point to any of the games and hand on heart say the idea sounds fun.
- “Anthem” was literally built to be full of grindy bullshit right from day 1.
- “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” was a total travesty. SkillUp called it a “collosal disappointment” and said the writing made “every interaction (between characters) sounds like HR is in the room”
- “Mass Effect: Andromeda” I remember reading a review which says “the game has already become its own meme at this point”. Even people who were charitable to it admitted it was worse in just about every respect than the trilogy that it followed.
…And things are going to get worse before they get better. If you turn your gaze onto another legendary studio with train-wreck management, I can’t conceive of Elder Scrolls 6 being any good given that I found Fallout 4 disappointing and since then everything Bethesda has put out since then (just their own in-house stuff, not things they publish so I’m thinking of Id and Arkane as separate here) has been a catastrophe. In a sign of how bad the mismanagement is there, Id software which has put out banger after banger which have been commercially and critically successful has seen significant layoffs in spite of that. “Starfield” was terrible, “Fallout 76” was unquestionably one of the worst games of all time at launch (although they have somewhat improved it since then). Elder Scrolls 6 will have the same dead-eyed, dumb NPCs, the same disastrously poor writing, the same jank as “Starfield”.
The desire by execs to grow studios into these behemoths has led to them losing track of what makes games fun.