I’ll explain this as quick as I can. Basically the bourgeoisie that own the major studios are so obsessed with profit that they make blatantly unsustainable decisions like overmonetization and shipping unfinished games every few years. Now look what’s happening, the studios have no choice but to lay off employees to recoup the costs they inflicted upon themselves and the worst affected are the fired employees naturally.

This is honestly infuriating and insulting as someone who’s been a massive video game fan since 2019 because the franchises I took a liking to (especially Halo) had countless labor and talent (stretching decades in some cases) have been completely gone to waste publishing cookie cutter generic dogshit games for the c suite’s next payday.

Indies are no better. They also suffer from the problem of shipping unfinished games but unlike their AAA counterparts, they suffer from genuine lack of time and resources to deliver games in a timely manner. So the whole “go indie” is basically lesser evil.

Come to think of it Capitalism actually enables and rewards such incompetence as long as profits are high.

  • Addfwyn@lemmygrad.ml
    2·
    4 months ago

    I don’t think I would have played some games I liked as much if they were shipped finished, as waiting for a new version which improved and expanded the game was always a part I liked about some indie games I played.

    I think I agree with this, most of my favourite games right now (Dyson Sphere Program, Hades) are indie early-access games that would not have been possible in the “old style”. Those both come from studios that aren’t under real time-crunch and actually have relatively good working environment by all accounts. DSP is a small passion project from a Chinese studio that only works on that for example.

    Your example, Rimworld, is probably my favourite game of all time. Part of that is the development process, but also the tremendous support from the community. Rimworld without mods would not be the same game.

    Big studio AAA games could do those things too, but it is a relative rarity due to how much more profitable making a big GaS and/or DLC platform can be.