The games industry is just one giant fumble. You've got one of the the most successful companies in the world, topping the charts year after year with revenue, yet they are seemingly unable to work on multiple projects.
Activision figured this out with Call of Duty. Halo had a new game coming out every year between Halo 3 until Halo 5. That's 9 games over that time.
In just under that same timespan we've had ... .Two. Halo Infinite and Halo Wars 2. And as far as I'm aware there's nothing else coming that'll close the gap.
And I'm not calling for games to become Call of Duty here.
I'm asking, pleading for developers to hire more than one team. For some reason Bethesda has a jampacked roster of IP, and yet has barely one studio maintaining all of them individually.
Why is Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Starfield managed by one studio. Yes others work on it, but largely they don't push forward without BSG (Todd Howard) We might not see another Starfield game for 12+ years going the way Elder Scrolls has. And btw, Elder Scrolls was and is massively successful. We know with New Vegas you do not need Todd Howard for a game to be good.
Activision figured this out with Call of Duty. Halo had a new game coming out every year between Halo 3 until Halo 5. That's 9 games over that time.
3 big/even bigger studios that BGS are working on 3 separate games games within same IP. Each studio also have tons of smaller studios helping them. This is why Activison can pump COD games out yearly but when it comes to quality of those games, is whole another story...
And doing that it's not as easy as it sounds. If this would work, every big studio would do the same. R* has probably 10x or even bigger team than BGS, has tons of support studios, are outsourcing stuff and so on but they can make 1 game every 7-8 years.
This is why Activison can pump COD games out yearly but when it comes to quality of those games, is whole another story...
All of those quality concerns are more business decisions though rather than developers.
IF microsoft cleans house and removes the business nerds we might actually see a return to quality. As everyone stated, MW3 was meant to be a DLC, but the business heads changed it to be a standalone game. Fucking stupid.
And doing that it's not as easy as it sounds. If this would work, every big studio would do the same. R* has probably 10x or even bigger team than BGS, has tons of support studios, are outsourcing stuff and so on but they can make 1 game every 7-8 years.
But it doesn't, if you look at the Glassdoor reviews it is filled with people frankly pissed off that their working on bullshit for the GTA 5 Store than working on new games. We're wasting creative talent entirely.
We're outsourcing all the good jobs, GTA 6 work etc, rather than keeping that in house and outsourcing all the shitty store stuff.
And yes the store stuff makes a ton of revenue because people can't help themselves, but still.
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u/CruffTheMagicDragon Apr 21 '24
Feels like a fumble to not have a Fallout game coming out rn