Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2
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No. This shouldn't be the norm. How "successful" a game is on metacritic and sales has shockingly little to do with the actual dev team. At best it is marketing and PR. But even that pales in comparison to whether a disgusting hateful bigot says his audience should buy it or threaten to rape the families of every single person who worked on that game and a few others to boot.
It sure beats “Thanks for your hard work. Now that we’ve released, we don’t need you anymore, so good luck on the job hunt.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma for no apparent reason.
But yeah. That is the bullshit that gets pushed around. Oh, that is just how business works and we are business people and you should understand business. Wait... the CEO doesn't have significant portions of their salary and existence tied to a metacritic score? Well, that is because the CEO is good at business.
I'll also add on that this kind of model actively penalizes long tail games and post release support.
The poster child of this being Terraria. According to wikipedia, it was basically the indy dev darling of the year... 2011. Getting 70-80% from different outlets. And while we don't know those initial sales figures, we do know that.. 14 years later it continues to sell well enough that there will probably never be an actual final final patch. Like, the world will have cooled down from all the nuclear war and, somehow, there will be another re-release of Skyrim and another "final for reals this time" content drop for Terraria.
wrote last edited by [email protected]What should be the norm then?
If we’re going to criticize the way things are done, one has to offer an alternative that is better.
Btw I’m not saying that the current way is necessarily the best way.
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They actually did a lot of rebalancing of difficulty and P Organ (hee hee) progression alongside this. Mortismal touched on this in their video.
But Lies of P, at its core, is a game about parrying. You can get a long way with dodging and i-frames (I didn't do a deep dive on how good of a dodge P has but it is definitely on the lower end of the genre) but basically the last three or four bosses of the core game more or less require parries and guard breaks to have any chance of damaging them.
I loved Lies of P but the difficulty progression is REAL bad. Sekiro actually had similar issues but at least had Genichiro 2 to try and force you to learn (and then Ape to drill that in). Whereas Lies of P lets you play "wrong" for like 16 hours.
Yeah I'd be a bit shocked if you could dodge your way through the final boss of the DLC. There are some attacks I think need to be dodged, but they feel like the exception, not the rule.
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What should be the norm then?
If we’re going to criticize the way things are done, one has to offer an alternative that is better.
Btw I’m not saying that the current way is necessarily the best way.
Believe it or not, but you can actually criticize a business practice without solving all the problems in the world.
That said? Less of a focus on widespread acquisitions and immediate profits and more on realizing how many games have long tails and how the profits from a game that company (so not even studio) released five years ago can still fund development. Also, much more transparency in game development and regular credits updates so that people don't have a giant five year blank spot on their CV that will never get filled in unless they crunch for six months to make sure they were employed a day before release.
And actual salaries and not "incentives".
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Yeah I'd be a bit shocked if you could dodge your way through the final boss of the DLC. There are some attacks I think need to be dodged, but they feel like the exception, not the rule.
Like I said, the DLC is still on my todo list but assuming it follows the Bloodborne DLC difficulty (it sure as hell is following the Bloodborne DLC concept and narrative...)? Yeah, I would be amazed.
But I did watch a video of someone dodging to beat the real end boss of the core game which I similarly thought was nigh impossible. And it is incredibly brutal with basically a need for fairly perfect play just to do chip damage. So... sickos gonna sicko.
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Believe it or not, but you can actually criticize a business practice without solving all the problems in the world.
That said? Less of a focus on widespread acquisitions and immediate profits and more on realizing how many games have long tails and how the profits from a game that company (so not even studio) released five years ago can still fund development. Also, much more transparency in game development and regular credits updates so that people don't have a giant five year blank spot on their CV that will never get filled in unless they crunch for six months to make sure they were employed a day before release.
And actual salaries and not "incentives".
I mean if you think a system doesn’t work well it’s because you are able to identify why it isn’t working well and can visualize somewhat of an alternative. If that isn’t the case then you cannot be fully sure that there is a better way to do things, and maybe the system is working as well as it can be given the environment the system needs to operate in.
I’m not a dev myself so I can’t speak too much about the pov of being a worker in the industry and the issues you describe with credits. But from a management perspective the problem is that it is simply not possible to accurately predict which games will have a long tail. So if you plan for a long tail and the game isn’t received as well as you expected, what happens then? The game makes a loss. The studio might need to close because they overcommitted resources to the project etc. it’s much safer to assume that all the sales will happen in the first 6 months and forecast for that, and if the game turns out to be more successful than expected then that’s free money basically from a planning POV.
The intention of live service games is pretty much that, creating games that will purposefully and predictably have long tails, but the problem is that even if a game is designed to have a long tail it doesn’t mean that it will find an audience that will give it the momentum needed in the first place.
As for bonuses being tied to reviews or sales, they both have pros and cons. Maybe it should be a little bit of both, because well received game might make lackluster sales while a badly received game might make crazy sales numbers (most AAA games).
As for getting review bombed or getting panned by influencers. That is always a risk in every industry. I find that most games get the reception they deserve, For example a lot of people want to frame the latest Dragon Age for flopping because of chuds, but that is not in fact the case, because those same chuds probably sunk hundreds of of hours into BG3 which is by all chud metrics also a “woke” game. So the problem, very often is the quality of the game. Chuds are more than willing to put up with politics they don’t like in games when the game is objectively (subjective to the expectations of the intended audience) good.
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I mean if you think a system doesn’t work well it’s because you are able to identify why it isn’t working well and can visualize somewhat of an alternative. If that isn’t the case then you cannot be fully sure that there is a better way to do things, and maybe the system is working as well as it can be given the environment the system needs to operate in.
I’m not a dev myself so I can’t speak too much about the pov of being a worker in the industry and the issues you describe with credits. But from a management perspective the problem is that it is simply not possible to accurately predict which games will have a long tail. So if you plan for a long tail and the game isn’t received as well as you expected, what happens then? The game makes a loss. The studio might need to close because they overcommitted resources to the project etc. it’s much safer to assume that all the sales will happen in the first 6 months and forecast for that, and if the game turns out to be more successful than expected then that’s free money basically from a planning POV.
The intention of live service games is pretty much that, creating games that will purposefully and predictably have long tails, but the problem is that even if a game is designed to have a long tail it doesn’t mean that it will find an audience that will give it the momentum needed in the first place.
As for bonuses being tied to reviews or sales, they both have pros and cons. Maybe it should be a little bit of both, because well received game might make lackluster sales while a badly received game might make crazy sales numbers (most AAA games).
As for getting review bombed or getting panned by influencers. That is always a risk in every industry. I find that most games get the reception they deserve, For example a lot of people want to frame the latest Dragon Age for flopping because of chuds, but that is not in fact the case, because those same chuds probably sunk hundreds of of hours into BG3 which is by all chud metrics also a “woke” game. So the problem, very often is the quality of the game. Chuds are more than willing to put up with politics they don’t like in games when the game is objectively (subjective to the expectations of the intended audience) good.
But from a management perspective
Of course this model fucking benefits the managers. They aren't tied to those incentives. They get to keep their jobs when some assclown wears a "dark maga" hat to the keighelys and the game craters.
And.... fuck the managers. They are already doing great.
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But from a management perspective
Of course this model fucking benefits the managers. They aren't tied to those incentives. They get to keep their jobs when some assclown wears a "dark maga" hat to the keighelys and the game craters.
And.... fuck the managers. They are already doing great.
I mean you could make a studio where there is no manager (how does that work I’m not sure) and you’d still need to make financial forecasting if you want the studio to be an entity that continues to exist. Like I don’t understand your logic here, the only other alternative is to make everyone’s salary contingent to sales and then the pie is divided evenly like in a coop model but that means a lot more of the financial risk is shouldered by the devs and you probably don’t get paid until the game releases.
Like what is a proper alternative that:
a) pays you a salary while the game is being developed
b) accounts for the risk inherent with not knowing the future? -
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I'd like it better if they got a more permenant raise.
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Friendly reminder: This is NOT a "W"
Yes, it is better to have incentives tied to metacritic scores and units sold rather than... your actual existence.
But it is still the same bullshit. That is even worse in the era of chud influencers looking for the latest game to blame all the sins of the world on.
This article is basically the equivalent of "In rare economic W, man succeeds in using bootstraps to climb out of The Pit"
wrote last edited by [email protected]The entire point is this:
- the company is doing well
- the company is rewarding its employees because the company is doing well
In a world where companies boast record profits in the same breathe as they announce mass layoffs, this is good news.
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They actually did a lot of rebalancing of difficulty and P Organ (hee hee) progression alongside this. Mortismal touched on this in their video.
But Lies of P, at its core, is a game about parrying. You can get a long way with dodging and i-frames (I didn't do a deep dive on how good of a dodge P has but it is definitely on the lower end of the genre) but basically the last three or four bosses of the core game more or less require parries and guard breaks to have any chance of damaging them.
I loved Lies of P but the difficulty progression is REAL bad. Sekiro actually had similar issues but at least had Genichiro 2 to try and force you to learn (and then Ape to drill that in). Whereas Lies of P lets you play "wrong" for like 16 hours.
Agreed. Amazing game, but it's because most of it is excellent so the jank is easy to ignore, rather than the whole thing being polished.
I think they made the parry-heavy emphasis of the game even more difficult to 'read' by having all the early enemies be very twitchy robots with difficult-to-anticipate parry timings. It becomes much easier to get the timing right once the enemies become more 'organic' a bit later. That's also the point where you have some better gear and some level ups, so it's not quite so brutal.
Giving the early enemies slow, smooth attacks with big swings would make sense for robots, sort out the difficulty curve, and give you plenty of chance to get used to parries. They can reasonably require a lot of damage so ripostes would be the only way to effectively defeat them - health which you could reasonably remove from a lot of the late-game enemies who are stupidly robust.
Never felt like P actually has iframes on his dodge? It's serviceable enough when the important thing is to move away from where an attack is going to land, but it's certainly not a Dark Souls-style 'dodge through the attack'. It's not Sekiro's 'running away to tease out an attack you can punish' either, he's a very slow dude in comparison.
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All I get from my company is more work.
