Nvidia won, we all lost

Seems a bit calculated and agreed across the industry. What can really make sense of Microsoft's acquisitions and ruining of billion dollar IPs? It's a manufactured collapse of the gaming industry. They want to centralize control of the market and make it a service based (rent seeking) sector.

I'm not saying they all got together and decided this together but their wonks are probably all saying the same thing. The market is shrinking and whether it's by design or incompetence, this creates a new opportunity to acquire it wholesale for pennies on the dollar and build a wall around it and charge for entry. It's a natural result of games requiring NVidia developers for driver tuning, bitcoin/ai and buying out capacity to prevent competitors.

The wildcard I can't fit into this puzzle is Valve. They have a huge opportunity here but they also might be convinced that they have already saturated the market and will read the writing on the wall.

Valve is a private company so doesn’t have the same growth at all costs incentives. To Microsoft, the share price is everything.

As much as they've got large resources, I'm not sure what projects they could reasonably throw a mountain of money at and expect to change things, and presumably benefit from in the future instead of doing it to be a a force of chaos in the industry. Valve's efforts all seem to orbit around the store, that's their main business and everything else seems like a loss-leader to get you buying through it even if it comes across as a pet project of a group of employees.

The striking one for me is their linux efforts, at least as far as I'm aware they don't do a lot that isn't tied to the steam deck (or similar devices) or running games available on steam through linux. Even the deck APU is derived from the semi-custom work AMD did for the consoles, they're benefiting from a second later harvest that MS/Sony have invested (hundreds of millions?) in many years earlier. I suppose a lot of it comes down to what Valve needs to support their customers (developers/publishers), they don't see the point in pioneering and establishing some new branch of tech with developers.

I think the reason you see things like Blizzard killing off Overwatch 1 is because the Lindy effect applies in gaming as well. Some things are so sticky and preferred that you have to commit atrocities to remove them from use.

From a supply/demand perspective, if all of your customers are still getting high on the 5 (or 20) year old supply, launching a new title in the same space isn't going to work. There are not an infinite # of gamers and the global dopamine budget is limited.

Launching a game like TF2 or Starcraft 2 in 2025 would be viewed as a business catastrophe by the metrics most AAA studios are currently operating under. Monthly ARPU for gamers years after purchasing the Orange Box was approximately $0.00. Giving gamers access to that strong of a drug would ruin the demand for other products.

The video game industry has been through cycles like this before. One of them (the 1983 crash) was so bad it killed most American companies and caused the momentum to shift to Japan for a generation. Another one I can recall is the "death" of the RTS (real-time strategy) genre around 2010. They have all followed a fairly similar pattern and in none of them that I know of have things played out as the companies involved thought or hoped they would.

I worked in the video game industry from the 90s through to today. I think you are over generalizing or missing the original point. It's true that there have been boom and busts. But there are also structural changes. Do you remember CD-ROMs? Steam and the iPhone were structural changes.

What Microsoft is trying to do with Gamepass is a structural change. It may not work out the way that they plan but the truth is that sometimes these things do change the nature of the games you play.

But the thing is that Steam didn't cause the death of physical media. I absolutely do remember PC gaming before Steam, and between the era when it was awesome (StarCraft, Age of Empires, Unreal Tournament, Tribes, etc.) and the modern Steam-powered renaissance, there was an absolutely dismal era of disappointment and decline. Store shelves were getting filled with trash like "40 games on one CD!" and each new console generation gave retailers an excuse to shrink shelf space for PC games. Yet during this time, all of Valve's games were still available on discs!

I think Microsoft's strategy is going to come to the same result as Embracer Group. They've bought up lots of studios and they control a whole platform (by which I mean Xbox, not PC) but this doesn't give them that much power. Gaming does evolve and it often evolves to work around attempts like this, rather than in favor of them.

Not in the game industry but as a consumer this is very true. One example: ubiquitous access to transactions and payment systems gave a huge rise to loot boxes.

Also mobile games that got priced at $0.99 meant that only the unicorn level games could actually make decent money so In-App Purchases were born.

But also I suspect it is just a problem where as consumers we spend a certain amount of money on certain kinds of entertainment and if as a content producer you can catch enough people’s attention you can get a slice of that pie. We saw this with streaming services where an average household spent about $100/month on cable so Netflix, Hulu, et al all decided to price themselves such that they could be a portion of that pie (and would have loved to be the whole pie but ironically studios not willing to license everything to everyone is what prevented that).

I purchased "approximately $0.00" in TF2 loot boxes. How much exactly? Left as an exercise to the reader.

> It's a manufactured collapse of the gaming industry. They want to centralize control of the market and make it a service based (rent seeking) sector.

It also won’t work, and Microsoft has developed no way to compete on actual value. As much as I hate the acquisitions they’ve made, even if Microsoft as a whole were to croak tomorrow I think the game industry would be fine.

This post is crazy nonsense: Bad games companies have always existed, and the solution is easy: dont buy their trash. I buy mostly smaller indie games these days just fine.

nvidia isn't purposely killing anything, they are just following the pivot into the AI nonsense. They have no choice, if they are in a unique position to make 10x by a pivot they will, even if it might be a dumpsterfire of a house of cards. Its immoral to just abandon the industry that created you, but companies have always been immoral.

Valve has an opportunity to what? Take over video card hardware market? No. AMD and Intel are already competitors in the market and cant get any foothold (until hopefully now consumers will have no choice but to shift to them)

This is too clever for me, I think - 0?

Thankfully, RTS is healthy again! (To your point about cycles)

I am not saying that about Steam. In fact Steam pretty much saved triple A PC gaming. Your timeline is quite accurate!

>> Microsoft's strategy is going to come to the same result as Embracer Group.

I hope you are right.

If I were trying to make a larger point, I guess it would be that big tech companies (Apple, MSFT, Amazon) don't want content creators to be too important in the ecosystem and tend to support initiatives that emphasize the platform.

What RTS games are you playing now, please?

People forget that TF2 was originally 20 dollars before hitting the F2P market.

AoE2, baby. Still going strong, decades after launch.

Petition related to companies like Blizzard killing games: https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home

I paid full price for the orange box

> big tech companies (Apple, MSFT, Amazon) don't want content creators to be too important in the ecosystem

100%. The platforms' ability to monetize in their factor is directly proportional to their relative power vs the most powerful creatives.

Thus, in order to keep more money, they make strategic moves that disempower creatives.

I've always played a few games for many hours as opposed to many games for one playthrough. Subscription just does not make sense for me, and I suspect that's a big part of the market. Add to this the fact that you have no control over it and then top it off with potential ads and I will quit gaming before switching to subs only. Luckily there is still GoG and Steam doesn't seem like it will change but who knows.

When were microtransactions added to TF2? Probably years after the initial launch, and they worked so well the game became f2p.

And AoE4, one of the few high profile RTS games of the past years, is dead.

Approximately. +/- 0

New stars would arise, others suggesting the games industry would collapse and go away is like saying the music industry collapsing would stop people from making music.

Yes games can be expensive to make, but they don't have to be, and millions will still want new games to play. It is actually a pretty low bar for entry to bring an indie game to market (relative to other ventures). A triple A studio collapse would probably be an amazing thing for gamers, lots of new and unique indie titles. Just not great for profit for big companies, a problem I am not concerned with.

If it’s manufactured it implies intent. Someone at Microsoft is doing it on purpose and, presumably, thinks it’ll benefit them. I’m not sure how this can be seen as a win for them. They invested a massive amount of money into buying all those game studios. They also admitted Xbox hardware is basically dead. So the only way they can any return on that investment is third party hardware: either PlayStation or PC. If I were to choose it would be pc for MS. They already have game pass and windows is the gaming OS. By giving business to Sony they would undermine those.

I don’t think nVidia wants gaming collapse either. They might not prioritize it now but they definitely know that it will persist in some form. They bet on AI (and crypto before it) because those are lucrative opportunities but there’s no guarantee they will last. So they squeeze as much as they can out of those while they can. They definitely want gaming as a backup. It might be not as profitable and more finicky as it’s a consumer market but it’s much more stable in the long run.

That was disappointing to see. I thought it was a great game, with some mechanics improved over 2, and missing some of the glitchy behavior that became cannon (e.g. foot archer kiting) The community (nor my friends) didn't seem to go for it, primarily for the reason that it's not AoE2. Exquisite sound design too.

Sins of a solar empire 2. AI War 2. There haven’t been any really “big” ones like StarCraft but some very good smaller ones like those two.

From a business perspective, launching a game like Starcraft 2 at any time is a business catastrophe. There are obscure microtransactions in other Blizzard titles that have generated more revenue than Starcraft 2.

BAR

https://www.beyondallreason.info/

But... While bar is good, very good. It is also very hard to compete with, so I see it sort of killing any funding for good commercial RTS's for the next few years.

If SC2 was such a failure at any time, why bother with 3 expansions?

I think the biggest factors involve willingness to operate with substantially smaller margins and org charts.

It genuinely seemed like "Is this fun?" was actually a bigger priority than profit prior to the Activision merger.

I like games companies that create games for fun and story, rather than just pure profit.

> Launching a game like [...] Starcraft 2

They can't even keep the lights on for SC2.

We [the community] have been designing our own balance patches for the past five years; and our own ladder maps since +/- day 1 - all Blizzard was to do since 2020 was to press the "deploy" button, and they f-ed it up several times anyway.

The news of the year so far is that someone has been exploiting a remote hole to upload some seriously disturbing stuff to the arcade (custom maps/mods) section. So of course rather than fixing the hole, Blizzard has cut off uploads.

So we can't test the balance changes.

Three weeks left until EWC, a __$700.000__ tournament, by the way.

Theoretically SC2 could become like Brood War, with balance changes happening purely through map design. Except we can't upload maps either.

There's plenty of business opportunity in any genre; you can make a shit-ton of money by simply making the game good and building community goodwill.

The strategy is simple: 1. there's always plenty of people who are ready to spend way more money in a game than you and I would consider sane - just let them spend it but 2. make it easy to gift in-game items to other players. You don't even need to keep adding that much content - the "whales" are always happy to keep giving away to new players all the time.

Assuming you've built up that goodwill, this is all you need to keep the cash flowing. But that's non-exploitative, so you'll be missing that extra 1%. /shrug

It's non-competitive (I'm burnt out with SC2 ladder a bit), but I've been enjoying Cataclismo, Settlers 3 (THAT is a throwback), and I'm eyeing They are Billions.

Some SC2 youtubers are now covering Mechabellum, Tempest Rising, BAR, AoE4, and some in-dev titles: Battle Aces, Immortal: Gates of Pyre, Zerospace, and of course Stormgate.

These are all on my list but I'm busy enough playing Warframe ^^'

Activision Blizzard was not a well run company. After running the company into the ground Kotick sold it off to Microsoft.

I own all AoE games, and despite having 3 and 4 installed, I don’t think I’ve so much as launched them. Every time I think “I should try this,” I remember I want to try a new strategy in 2 instead.

I found Iron Harvest, Last Train Home, Tempest Rising and Company of Heroes 3 to be pretty good.

You and many people.

Give 4 a try! Its multiplayer is excellent. Kind of a hybrid between Starcraft and AoE2 in terms of pacing and civ divergence. (Fewer, more diverse civs)

The archer kiting/dodging mechanic that dominates AoE2 is gone.

I play AoE2, not 4 because that's what my friends play, but 4 is the more interesting one from a strategy perspective. More opportunities to surprise the opponent, use novel strats, go off meta etc.