Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

20-25 years ago a handful of companies had a weird hold on me. I’d jump on anything Google made back then. Blizzard could sell me any game they came up with. If it was from Blizzard, it was gonna be great.

Lost all of it obviously. Not a single company has my loyalty anymore.

Except if valve were to release a mystery black box with faint lambda symbol on it. I’d pay whatever they asked for it.

My theory is that there's a period when a studio has huge early success (plus in the case of Valve, they started with huge amounts of money from being former MS employees) that lets them devote themselves to their mission of making games, before either mission creep or dilution with new hires occurs over time either from staff naturally changing over time or expanding. Another factor is that when aiming to 'go big' and realize what they can do with lots of resources, they need to partner/join with others that don't work the same way and will influence them.

Valve is still a top tier org, but they simply make too much money in the publishing business to bother with game development anymore. Any sales would be peanuts to what they are making through developer fees and the marketplace. This is why all of their releases in the last decade have been F2P.

Sounds like a perfect environment to make games. No budget or schedule pressure, virtually limitless resources so the staff can strive to make art with love and without the corruption of chasing a bottom line.

The entire media industry on almost every format is chasing nostalgia because they refuse to recreate the environment that made endearing stories and experiences in the first place.

That's only the case if you are so blinded by advertising that you don't see the innovations happening in the low(er) budget media.

Not at all. Where are the low and mid budget movies? Where are the games publishers on low budget games? Art as a business has transitioned to investor gambling rather than having any thought for the quality of the product. That's what I take issue with.

Sure single person self-funded passion projects exist. They always have and they always will. And sure what one person can do is more than they ever could in the past. It's still not the same as something that's forged by a team of visionaries each with unique backgrounds and skillsets.

Frost makes the point more well spoken and stylish than me often.

https://youtu.be/gZffFoQekcc

> Where are the low and mid budget movies?

At Cannes and your local 'art' cinema ? To be fair, I don't watch movies much, but I do still go to these sometimes.

> Where are the games publishers on low budget games?

Who said anything about publishers ? (And Valve dumped theirs as soon as they could.)

> Sure single person self-funded passion projects exist. They always have and they always will. And sure what one person can do is more than they ever could in the past. It's still not the same as something that's forged by a team of visionaries each with unique backgrounds and skillsets.

Ok, I have no idea what you're talking about, are you "no-true-scotsmanning" here ?

We have a great recent example : "Factorio (: Space Age)", which started as a one-person idea, took form as a 3-person company, got after release a 20k€ Indiegogo funding, then blazed a trail of success over the next 12 years, now with something like 5 million sales for the base game and a 30 person company.

How is that not "a team of visionaries each with unique backgrounds and skillset" ?!

Or the amateurs at Spring-Recoil / Zero-K / BAR, which show how you can do that even better than the professional, commercial RTS.

Or indeed one person projects like Shadow Empire (with some publisher support), which show how you can make a brilliant 4X/Wargame on what I assume is a tiny budget...

And there are probably many other examples here...

Your examples account for less than 1% of the industry. Why are you cherry picking examples when discussing media industry trends? Are you saying "it isn't happening because of these few examples"?

I get that you're trying to discredit the argument by claiming fallacies, but these aren't just my views. Industry insiders (Frost in games and RedLetterMedia in movies) have been talking about this for nearly a decade.