Former PlayStation exec says there's a "collapse of creativity" in the industry

Well I mean when games are designed by a committee of worthless executives, what the hell do you expect?

7

I feel like a big reason why AA disappeared is poor visibility in a saturated market.
Indies get visibility from just posting on social media and indie-specific events, because many people genuinely just love seeing labors of love.
AAA games get visibility from just pumping millions into marketing.

As a AA game, you're kind of caught in the middle. You're not enough labor of love to reach the indie enjoyers, and you're frequently just drowned out by AAA marketing. Not to mention that AAA releases are frequent enough that you'll pretty just reach gamers who enjoy a certain genre or franchise.

Having said that, we're on the tail end of the games wave that came from the pandemic. Maybe in a year from now, AA games are in a better place again.

5

In contrast to this exec and many of the responses, another Steam Next Fest is happening right now! Go play free demos of upcoming games, 99% of which are Indies you've probably not yet heard of.

16

In AAA studios this seems to be the case. Right now it seems like the mid size studio is putting out the most consistently good quality work.

10

Only amongst the people in charge of big companies that make the games.

The actual cogs probably have tons of ideas being ignored because management doesn't wanna take the risk on something new and original over doing the same tired-ass shit they've been doing for the past 2 decades.

You (other gamers) wanna see creativity? Look for independently made games, where passion still exists because they're not beholden to a council of greedy shareholders sucking the very soul out of them.

33

Exactly. When indies stop making innovative games, we know the industry has run its course.

6

Stop sending people to the fucking Call of Duty mines

I know that's Activision, but... every company has their version of the "COD Mines"

30

There's no collapse of creativity. There's just a collapse of the industry that now is in the hands of shareholders whose only goal is profit.

As soon as your company gets controlled by those, your creativity becomes a need to make another soulless "blockbuster".

Look at the indie world instead. There is creativity, it's just incompatible with the AAA business model.

125

And it’s not just happening in the gaming industry. Across the board the people who do the actual work are beholden to massive managerial structures that add huge costs and zero value, all to look like they’re doing something important.

52
The other day I started a she called Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. You lose a hand of cards to a Wolfman and he turns you into a hobo skeleton tasked with traveling the US to spread folktales. The wolf is voiced by Sting, the whole game pays homage to an idealized peak of Americana, and I've never had to decide what button to map "hitchhike" to before.

Creativity is alive and well, flourishing even. This guy is just blaming others for the problems he brings to the table.

27
- The amount of creativity in the indie world is insane. It's been a lot of years since I last played a AAA game because of this.
  
  Have you ever played as a crow? There's an indie game for that.
  
  Have you ever played a shooter in which you literally shoot people trendy clothes instead of bullets?
  
  The creativity is there, you just won't find it in your typical AAA, because that game's only goal is to milk your wallet.
  
  17
- Game makes me want to strike out and look for that place over the ridge where the water tastes like the sweetest wine.
  
  3
Yes. Most AAA stuff now is just copy and paste because games cost so much to make and so they want a guaranteed return on their investment.

But I think consumers are getting tired of that now, as Ubisoft's declining sales seem to be demonstrating.

21
- I swear it's only expensive because of the CEO taking most of it, and the rest being spent on ads and other trash like that. Basically propping up their friends
  
  I'd be shocked if they spend close to 50% on the actual game design/function
  
  8
- That definitely is the line we hear from CEOs when they raise prices, cut labor costs, and over monetize. Do you have any proof that production costs for games have gone up more than any other industry has? They pretty famously don’t pay game developers very well compared to other programming positions so I don’t know where this inordinate cost inflation would be coming from.
  
  2

What, you mean, after laying off all the creatives?

Who could have ever imagined such an unprecedented outcome except literally fucking everyone.

74

Quick hire more managers

26
- "We need as many golden parachutes prepared as possible, people! This shit is going DOWN!"
  
  9
"Who needs creatives when we have AI?!"

9
A lot of the industry’s progress comes from its mistakes. Every pioneer has had histories of dumb games they made that weren’t well received (and that they were not immediately fired for).

But now people aren’t even staying in the industry long thanks to burnout, turnover, and “firing sprees” now signature to the tech industry. Sooner or later people either just get other job types, or try starting their own small studio making 8-bit Roguelikes.

6

If one listens to the actual quote, it is hard to disagree with the general point he is trying to make. Still, coming from a Playstation exec, it very much feels like this...

36

Former PlayStation exec who left in 2019 before the PS5 launched.

While the writing was on the wall that creativity was leaving the AAA space, PlayStation was still the AAA darling which didn’t really mess up.

8

It's a POV issue. If I worked at Sony, I wouldn't think anyone was very creative, either.

13

Yup. But if I worked at Nintendo, I'd realize that even big studios can be creative.

Indies are where it's at though.

-1
- Unfortunately Nintendo's creativity also extends to their legal department
  
  5

Capitalism kills creativity. Thats why nearly every game is that exact same GTA, third person view game, just put in a new setting.

No one can take a risk and everything has to be as similar to the things that made money before, as possible. Everything has to be aimed at as wide an audience as possible, inevitably pleasing no one.

21

Cyberpunk is basically futuristic GTA in a first person view, saints row 4 was basically GTA with superpowers, spiderman is basically GTA as Spider-Man

Even in this one format, there's endless room for creativity and innovation. It's a formula for a fun game...

But where I loved cyberpunk, watchdogs was similar in many ways and I just couldn't get into it

The problem is that they want to shove slop in proven molds and get a winning game. It's still slop

2
- That's basically what I meant but you fleshed it out more.
  
  Yeah, there probably is more that can be tried and maybe I'm being unkind to the format. Its not the formats fault.
  
  2

I'm surprised and relieved to hear such a salient take.

It's not really surprising that if the big names in gaming spend an enormous amount of budget on a game that it's not automatically going to be a hit. After all, a large chunk of that time and money is spent on further monetizing the game. The more monetization features they work on, the less attractive a game becomes to the player. It feels like that should just be common sense, I'm surprised a bunch of business majors never learned that they need a good product.

Like, honestly, a game isn't going to automatically generate enormous profit just because a lot of money has been spent on it. It also has to be a decent game in its own right.

This is something that indie gamers have been saying probably as long as there's been indie gaming. Maybe it will carry more weight when a suit says it. But then, he's a former executive, so maybe it won't have as much impact as it should.

Time for an anecdote:
I can think of two Blizzard games that I really enjoyed until they had a 2.0 release. Both used the 2.0 as an opportunity to change their monetization model in favour of squeezing more cash from players. They're Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch.

Heroes of the Storm was free, but had a cash shop where you could buy cosmetics. Each cosmetic was listed for individual purchase. There were bundles, but if you really wanted just a single skin you could buy it for about $5-$15. That's not an unreasonable price and I was happy to support a free game by buying the occasional skin for my favourite heroes.

When Heroes of the Storm had their 2.0 rework, they changed the cosmetic shop to be based entirely on lootboxes. You could no longer get the things you specifically wanted and had to rely on random chance. You could of course get more lootboxes by throwing more money at the game, but you'd have to buy way more lootboxes for a chance to get the thing you wanted. That turned me and a lot of players off of the game, and it wasn't long after 2.0 that Blizzard stopped active development and put the game in maintenance mode.

Funny enough, Overwatch did the opposite, but it was still a step towards greed and super frustrating. In the original release, you had a lootbox based economy and a cosmetic shop where you could spend currency earned from the lootboxes to buy skins. Lootboxes were available for free as you played, but also available for purchase. You could ultimately get whatever you wanted just by playing the game enough.

When Overwatch 2 came out, the model switched to free-to-play and battlepasses. The free stuff you could get was limited to something like half the battlepass cosmetics (you can buy the pass to unlock more), and the cosmetic shop became a cash shop with insane valuation of skins. I think the average skin is like $30, and often they're only available in bundles where you have to spend even more to also get skins that you might not care about.

In an attempt to reach more market, Overwatch 2 was released on Steam. This was the first (and I think only?) platform that Overwatch got released to where users can leave reviews on the game. It has a 20% recommendation rate, which is categorized as "Mostly Negative" and makes it one of the worst releases of all time on Steam. And this is for a game that you can play for free - it costs you nothing and people are trying to warn you not to waste your time.

The reworks between Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch are both examples of studios taking a beloved game in its own right, and lobotomizing it to make it more profitable. Never forget what they've taken from us.

13

When you're spending $300M on a game budget you don't want to take a lot of risks. But I don't think there's any lack of creativity coming from the market as a whole. Most dire pronouncements on the state of games are only really true if you ignore indies.

Like honestly, I think GOW and Spider-Man and Horizon are fine, but I'd rather see Sony put out several AA games that take risks than crank out another sequel to those.

4

Former PlayStation exec still doesn’t get it.

7

The people who make it suck are the idiots who keep buying shit games pre-release and then let the company finish it over the next decade and think thats a good business model.

0