That was an amazing thread. I don't think a lot of people with short attention spans or low IQ's will get through it, but if you do it's pretty enlightening about how the business of making games is these days
It's good info, but Twitter is the absolute worst platform for this kind of info dump. I can't believe the degenerates that actually endorse these multi-tweet monstrosities. Just write a blog post and link to it, FFS.
The problem isn't that new gamers aren't being born, the problem is the new gamers only play Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, Genshin Impact, etc.
They aren't playing FF and Square Enix and also other traditional AAA console/PC game makers have a serious problem because of this
That's part of it, I'd argue the other piece is how long it takes for games to be made now. How are you going to generate buzz with the younger crowd when your studio has released 1, maybe 2 entries in a franchise during their entire lifetime? And in Square's case, they have made some really shitty FF games during that run. So it's an uphill battle for them.
And as we've seen every industry understands the race to the bottom that happens when you lower the price of a premium product.
Game theory coming into play yet again, when one moonshot F2P cash cow (Fortnite) strikes gold and everyone else wants a piece. This is high risk behavior that leads to an industry crash. Then again, suits don't give a shit. They're in it for the money and that's it. Look at the movie and music industry. There is still quality content being produced, but the vast majority is derivative bullshit and the value is certainly not there.
Some think raising the base price is the answer, but imo it would lead to significantly lower sales. The answer, to me, is clear: make more aa games with lower budgets, graphics and development times and stop catering to the higher end of things for consoles. Let the people who want that stuff just choose gaming PCs. Then they wouldn't have to sell 10 million copies or be forced to gut dev teams and studios.
Diminishing returns on power and everything that comes with it, even at $500, just doesn't seem all that attractive to a majority of gamers out there. To me the sweet spot of nice enough graphics and development times was around the PS4 generation, or perhaps somewhere between PS4 and PS5 tech with SSD drives would be a better choice for the masses of console users.
Or we can just stay on the current path and continue down the road of one or less major franchise per gen and GaaS titles and indies...
Preach on dude. Budgets are out of control, expectations for visuals are unrealistic, and game dev studios need to take a step back in production costs and refocus on the content itself, and more frequent releases of smaller games. We don't need open world FF games with the graphics of Hellblade 2, the cost is certainly not worth it.
Nintendo learned this a loooong time ago, and they haven't forgotten what it means to remain profitable and not to go chasing the latest fad. F2P GAAS is not a sustainable business model, except for when it is. All that means is a few companies will be able to do it successfully, while the rest fail and have a chance of taking down the studio.