>the best games in the 80s and 90s were made by teams of a couple dozen at most who were all passionate and happy
>overly bloated teams were punished with mismanagement, delays and pour quality
>the best games of the 2000s were made by teams of hundreds of devs crunched and abused to hell and back
>those that tried to keep the small dev studio dream alive were punished by being bought out, going broke or being forced onto handhelds
Why did Vidya reward corporatism and Cruelty once 6th gen started? Was there anyway to stop it?

>>11879841 (OP)
>the 7th generation was so shitty supposedly due to rising development costs
>but the 6th generation was the greatest in gaming history despite game dev budgets already spiraling out of control at the time
curious...

>>11879940
>6th generation is the greatest in gaming history
Surely no one actually believes this

>>11879954
Do you enjoy acting like a pompous faggot online?

>>11879841 (OP)
I always hated live action segments appearing in my cartoons as a kid.

>>11879841 (OP)
>>the best games of the 2000s were made by teams of hundreds of devs crunched and abused to hell and back
And they weren't even as good as their late 90s counterparts.

>>11879940
>but the 6th generation was the greatest in gaming history
6th gen was when the tide was turning. It wasn't bad but something clearly changed.
7th gen was when the industry was in total downfall.

>>11879841 (OP)
They're trying to turn gaming into the big hollywood studio model, both for diversity jobs for their co-ethnics (and allied ethnic/identity groups) and to gatekeep wrong thinkers.

Studios are essentially investment banks, where they provide funding for projects in return for profits. This isn't itself bad. What's bad is their investment strategy: low risk, high investment, high reward projects which have hidden tail risks in that they can't afford to fail.

This works in hollywood due to their tax system subsidizing them every step of the way. It works in wall street because they can threaten to destroy main street's economy, plus they are enmeshed with the government & especially intelligence agencies. This is why you saw wall street, government, and Intel goons trying to muscle in on gaming.

The problem for them is it doesn't actually take a shitload of people to make games. It's talent intensive, not labor intensive. Throwing more middling people at it makes the product worse!

They can import or outsource to foreign scabs, but we can still code, draw, model, and write. The entrance barrier is cheap and low, but the excellence barrier is very high.

The ideal investment strategy for a small studio is high risk, low investment, high reward projects made with a very small team of multi-talented people who never expand beyond that. This strategy allows you to reuse assets, crank out lots of games of any quality (low to high), and sustain your studio for years off even modest successes. A major success can sustain a studio for decades.

MBAs are miseducated to treat businesses only as vehicles for financial speculation, which is why they destroy everything they touch. They are one trick ponies.

TL;DR: keep your studio under 15 people, do 100% work from home, and do indy dev

>>11879841 (OP)
>bought out
>punished
Being bought out is the goal in the tech industry. Any time EA bought out some beloved studio and raped it to death the original owners were fucking estatic that they got to cash out.

>>11879841 (OP)
People need to eat so they won't just work for free. What we need is education in the prison systems, teach them how to code then after they "graduate" make them spend the rest of their sentence making games for $0.63/hr.

>>11880332
You’re thinking with modern lenses for a retro related problem. Outsourcing wasn’t common in the 2000s but crunch was. Boys clubs became sweat shops overnight and everyone went along with it or didn’t speak out until much later

>>11879841 (OP)
In which Anon learns how Capitalism works.

Honestly, the issue very simply is supply and demand (i.e. what people can make money from). My issue with lots of people here is they don't seem to realise that by refusing to pay for the products they pirate, they basically signal to coorporations that no money can be made from games they like, and so those kinds of games no longer get made.

What changed is that video games became a lot more lucrative after the Playstation, and so more people invested, had an interest in controlling the output, and had ideas about what would sell rather than what was fun. No one gives a shit if the game is fun if it sells - and for that you need marketing, release timing assets that children/young adults latch onto and pay money for, and impressive graphics. All of that together leads to rushed games, brought out quickly, with style over substance and microtransactions. Those models are best facilitated by the sweatshop approach, rather than a game like Deus Ex, which took 28 months to develop after Warren Spector had been developing the ideas for five years beforehand.

Games like that still exist (Outer Wilds being one that comes to mind), but they're very much exceptions that prove the rule, and a lot of them end up looking the same because they use Unity or Unreal over original assets.

>>11880332
>They're trying to turn gaming into the big hollywood studio model, both for diversity jobs for their co-ethnics (and allied ethnic/identity groups) and to gatekeep wrong thinkers.

No, they're trying to make the most money possible. The distributors and publishers who control and direct studios output will drop diversity faster than it's hot if it doesn't sell across the world; the fact is it does - so they keep it. It might not sell to you, but you are not as big a target market as you think you are - or you don't pay for games so Sony, Microsoft, Ubisoft EA and Activision/Blizzard don't give a shit what you think.

>>11880132
6th gen was when experimentation stopped and existing formulas were being streamlined.

>>11879940
>>11880132
The 7th gen was when the industry and fans reaped what the 6th gen sowed. The industry still treated game development like the old days, making games in a variety of genres, making niche games, taking chances. Then all those companies went bankrupt or took huge hits when those games failed to recoup the giant investments. So in gen 7 there was an overnight shift to eliminate all those things from gaming.

>>11879841 (OP)
>only play games I like and ignore others
>no need for gay depression and doomerism about modern games
Yeah I'm a chad so what

>>11881490
This right here. The true point of no return were the success of Halo 2 and Fable. Two games notorious for crunch and simplicity that succeeded while other genres floundered and died

>>11881471
The CEO of Insomniac said something along the lines of all the publishers and platform developers were starting to force studios into a certain direction during the 6th gen. Specifically that they wanted to target teenagers, because they thought it would get their younger siblings too. That's why the 6th gen had a ton of edgy platformers. Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Vex, Blinkx, Shadow the Hedgehog's game, etc.

The important point is that this was when publishers were starting to exercise more control over the developers, and it got even worse as time went on. By the 7th gen publishers were forcing on disc DLC, preorder DLC, multiplayer modes that didn't need to exist, changing an existing franchises entire genre to try and capture a bigger audience, etc...

DQ1 1986 25 credited
DQ2 1987 30 credited
DQ3 1988 34 credited
DQ4 1990 57 credited
DQ5 1992 71 credited
DQ6 1995 65 credited
DQ7 2000 94 credited

FF1 1987 5 credited
FF2 1988 17 credited
FF3 1990 41 credited
FF4 1991 65 credited
FF5 1992 35 credited
FF6 1994 64 credited
FF7 1997 407 credited

>>11882248
>>11882265
Now post Dragon Quest 8 and Final Fantasy X for comparison.

>>11880809
>My issue with lots of people here is they don't seem to realise that by refusing to pay for the products they pirate, they basically signal to coorporations that no money can be made from games they like
I would have zero problem paying for retro games if my dollars went to people who actually made the game, but that's not the way it works.
>so those kinds of games no longer get made.
Not my problem.

>>11879841 (OP)
Video games becoming mainstream instead of just for kids and adult nerds ruined it.

>>11882298
Both of you are retards, but you're somehow more retarded than he is.

>>11882297
I had to stop somewhere but if you just know:
FF10 2001 562 credited
DQ8 2004 323 credited

>>11882317
Please say exactly what you found retarded so I can thoroughly shit on you.

>>11882329
There is nothing you could write that would be worth reading.

>>11882248
Anything up to dg 3 can be made by 2, 3 people these days. Modern games are simply bigger, though staff indeed coud be cut by half with better management.

>>11882369
Quitting while you're ahead, smart move champ. Wouldn't have ended well for you.

Those companies could survive today, judging the graphical quality of indie games to AAA games. NAZCA guys are trying to make a new run and gun, you have throw backs like Curse of the Moon, and people taking franchises back to basics like in Sonic Mania. Sadly 6th to early 8th gen was a blood bath. The other problem is that games we are use to that only required small teams in 5th gen and before will only be seen as budget games since people wouldn't want to spend 50~60 dollars on them.

Was there any way to stop it? No. People that play video games flip flop like crazy on what they deem acceptable graphics. I don't think most people will be shelling out money on a Simple Series looking game when they have a 6th gen MGS or see RE4. Graphics will always arrest attention.

>>11879841 (OP)
Captain Boring here:
It comes down to a few things: One) these companies are well funded and have a duty to return the highest value to their investors. Two) People pay for spectacle, and in a visual medium like video-games the better the spectacle the more players. Three) The hardware jumps were substantial, a single hardworking individual could get the most out of 8 or 16-bit hardware in assembly or later C, as the hardware grows in complexity, and the demands made to provide "The Spectacle" as I have put it, you need more people to work towards it.

>>11883379

What is this gif from?

>Hardware gets better
>Expectations go up
>To meet expectations, teams have to be bigger
>More employees and objectively higher quality assets cost more
>Those who don't meet expectations, don't do well

>>11885352
Screaming Mad George's Paranoiascape

>>11882298
>I would have zero problem paying for retro games if my dollars went to people who actually made the game, but that's not the way it works.

The point was that if enough people voted with their wallets, it would signal to those companies there was a viable demand for the product, and they'd make more of it. If you don't - they will make products for people who do pay. Currently those people are eight year olds on Roblox, Twitch streamers and people who want to be Twitch streamers.

Those people don't care about game quality - they care about ways they can participate in online communities, and in some cases generate advertising revenue, with gaming as a vehicle for doing that. It's performative, and ends up being quite generic.

It comes down to hard numbers - who is the most numerous cohort that will spend cash on games, and what causes them to part with their money? That's what the people who control funding of computer games care about, and it's how all markets work.

>>11879841 (OP)
Cha

>>11879954
PS2 remains the best console ever made in vidya history, yes

>>11887717
Where does the PSX rank?

>>11887717
Yet despite its quality it was the beginning of the end for the small team dream. The beginning of the crunch era were devs were abused and needed to be abused to create anything worth of quality

>>11879841 (OP)
>corporatism and Cruelty
Stop that. It's just normal fucking capitalism.
You wanna ask why it's rewarded? Because of the shit you're doing right fucking now apologetics for it because you're afraid to call out what it actually is.

>>11879940
>>the 7th generation was so shitty supposedly due to rising development costs
They could have just made games for the Wii instead of going full retard on HD platforms.

>>11888737
Which is what a lot of Jap devs did anyway, there's a reason why most Xbox 360 fans are mainly nostalgic about Western games.

>>11887717
then why doesn't it have a cultural following?

>>11888740
>western console with predominately western games has western fans nostalgic for the western console eoth western games
w-whoa...

>>11879841 (OP)
My only complaint about the seventh gen was that it lacked a lot of good console RPGs. However the handheld market more than made up for it, so it was whatever.

>>11879841 (OP)
the problem is that only big companies or one man indie devs make games
some of the indie devs should grow a pair and make games as a team in a small office

>>11879841 (OP)
the problem is that only big companies or one man indie devs make games
some of the indie devs should grow a pair and make games as a team in a small office

>>11881490
This is correct. 6th gen was amazing, 7th gen still kept going but collapsed halfway through due to the economic crisis or began consolidation and never truly recovered and have only been getting worse where the true Gaming fanatics are either playing PS3 or Switch and below or are on Steam.

>>11882248
>>11882265
>>11882318
What is interesting is nowadays AAA games are made by 700-1k teams with some outsourcing involved.

>>11883395
>Was there any way to stop it? No. People that play video games flip flop like crazy on what they deem acceptable graphics. I don't think most people will be shelling out money on a Simple Series looking game when they have a 6th gen MGS or see RE4. Graphics will always arrest attention.
You have it backwards. Graphics can only do so much. Nobody will play a game for graphics alone, but they will accept a game with average graphics so as long as the Gameplay is great. Besides JRPG's where always behind Western Games in regards to it's Graphics, but had the Gameplay to back it up including a unique visual style.

>>11889118
>You have it backwards. Graphics can only do so much. Nobody will play a game for graphics alone, but they will accept a game with average graphics so as long as the Gameplay is great.
The original Doom game never made more than $1 million.

>>11885525
>voting with wallets

The notion that individuals can make a substantial difference in the face of marketing campaigns is naive at best

The problem is that games are designed primarily to make money rather than be fun which is because of how our societies fucked incentive structure operates.

Games shouldn't be commodities

>>11889186
>Games shouldn't be commodities
So games shouldn't be traded and played?

>>11889236
>traded
No, digital games should be infinitely available. False scarcity is dumb.

>played
Yes. Like tag and football and all the shit you can play without having to have a license agreement

>>11889254
If you are too poor to buy something, just steal it and then cry like a baby when the police arrest you.

>>11879841 (OP)
I'm gonna be naive and blame 3D graphics as well as CD-ROM based systems for this.
Constraints of 4th gen were healthy

>>11889306
I also blame Duke Nukem 3D and CD-ROM systems for birthing Duke Nukem Forever, the worst boomer shooter in existance.

>>11889295
Do you really think the system where game development is dominated by the likes of EA and gacha stuff is good?

Having game development based on financial incentive rather than being fun is bad. Throwing more billions at the problem will only make it worse.

>>11889331
>Having game development based on financial incentive rather than being fun is bad. Throwing more billions at the problem will only make it worse.
I dunno. Doom 1993 and Doom 2016 were an unusually decent result of capitalism.

>>11879841 (OP)
Sales data from the 90s caused a paradigm shift towards primarily catering to normalfags during the 2000s. Normalfags demand gud grafix and don't care about gameplay so dev teams were adjusted accordingly to meet the new demand

>>11890080
dangerously accurate.

>>11880332
>The problem for them is it doesn't actually take a shitload of people to make games. It's talent intensive, not labor intensive.
My brother in Christ