It’s a tough time to be making AAA games (or consoles) | Friends Per Second

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Counter to Andy's point about not talking about indies enough, I reckon skillup is doing a great job of highlighting up and coming games. My steam wishlist is full of indies that I only heard about thanks to the weekly vids.

More than a decade ago Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails commented on the games industry and how "modern games" were made back then, and he said that they were following the Hollywood studio model of big budget projects that will become unsustainable in the long run with fewer games to show overall. Is safe to say we've reached that point 💀💀.

I'm impressed you guys managed to get Ricky Gervais on the show! Lucy must be connected deep in British affairs

It feels similar to the film industry right now. It's the post-Covid streaming bubble bursting, everyone spent way too much accumulating and pumping money into creating content. Everyone is now consolidating and re-evaluating after realizing it's not making enough money.

PS4 also had its heavy hitters in the latter half of the generation to be fair. GoW & Spider-Man came out in PS4's 5th year. Horizon Zero Dawn & Gran Turismo Sport in 4th. Death Stranding in 6th, Ghost of Tsushima and TLOU 2 in 7th. Main difference I guess is the lack of a new Naughty Dog game like Uncharted 4 in 2016 that showcased PS4's true capabilities. Although you can argue Insomniac filled that spot with games like Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart and Spider-Man 2.

2:22:50 Lucy's Goofy/Kingdom Hearts joke went unnoticed and that is a crime.

He guys on the podcast app there’s like two different conversations playing on top of one another around 26 min mark

I’m glad these smaller games are beating out the AAA industry. It’s a crazy idea that fun is beating out greedy bull

Glad Andy pointed out that while MSFT is growing and valued at $3T, that doesn’t reflect growth in the gaming business. MSFT growth is driven by AI and Office mostly

Pacific Drive is not for everyone, it's only for a very specific type of person as Jake said It is a struggle game, everything is a struggle and you overcome it by upgrading, gathering tools and learning but the gameplay loop and 'enemies' didn't evolve enough to make the struggle interesting after a few hours.

Ralph’s silksong comment killed me

Jake is a man of culture. Mount and Blade, hell yeah.

How cool is it (to you) that you guys can just casually say, "we should get someone else in on that episode," who is another massive creator, or that you're getting consistent pretty high profile guests on. It's just cool to see. Good for you :)

I think the way games companies get past the current financial slump is to stop making these massive games with massive budgets, cut these massive teams down into many smaller teams and make a higher volume of smaller with a more specific vision. So many big budget AAA games feel so homogeneous because they're design by committee, they have to appeal to everyone, and anything unique about the game can be either the USP or the thing that turns people off it. Sony and Microsoft can use first party studios backed by hardware money to create the big exclusive games that sell hardware and push what graphics can be achieved on the hardware. Meanwhile, smaller groups can be pushing innovation on what mechanics, narrative, art style, look like in a video game. And you can take those risks because smaller budgets. The problem is that you need to stop the snake eating its tail, as it has done over the last 10-20 years, where small teams get given the big budget and big expectation and just get added into the soup. It's not enough for Dead Space to be a great game by a small team, it has to be bigger and more realistic graphics and then it "fails to meet expectations" and you're then into filling the game with monetisation.

Jake is great he is so open minded and is the only one of the bunch with the mentality of a normal dude that just likes videogames.

...I just want this guy to hush and let Ralph say what he wants to say. Every time he tried to speak, the guy just talked over him.

I'm so glad some major voices mentioned Phil being a hypocrite with his Helldivers 2 comment. Everyone seems to completely gloss over XBox buying to major publishers to make XBox exclusives every time he drops a "[people should be able to play wherever they]", and it's maddening.

1:18:26 Because of the nature of Hi Fi Rush, it have to run flawlessly. There should not be any input delay or frame dip.

This was a pleasant conversation to listen to. Not necessarily the most optimistic regarding my favorite hobby, but well articulated from multiple angles discussing why this generation of gaming feels so lackluster despite Big Gaming's that we've reached a peak. You four discussed the length of Triple A games becoming conflating quality with length, and my immediate thought was that I'm on another playthrough of Carrion (2-4 hour 8-bit game), and all I keep thinking since I played it was I hope another game like it comes along.