Just fyi, Factorio only has one dlc. But a good example would be Rimworld, it is AT MOST at a 20% sale with its release beeing in 2018 and has four content DLC's between 18€ to 23,50€ which have the same sale policy.
Patenting a good game mechanic only to stick it to everyone else and not doing anything with it is peak stupidity already, nothing they do after will ever top that.
I feel like it would’ve kind of been fine if they made a dozen games since patenting it, using it. Or would license it out fairly cheaply. Maybe something like, “give us 1% of your game’s revenue.” Honestly, even that is a bit greedy, imo, since that’s revenue not profit… but also, it’s 1% so I think it’s kinda fair. 🤷♀️
Bamco did the same thing with the loading screen minigame patent. They used it for ps1 games and nothing else... and the patent expired after loading screens became too short and infrequent to justify adding a minigame.
@@Paradox-es3bl A little bit of greed is baked into patent law, because as you allude to, licensing's often more profitable than making and selling your own product, and it's WAY lower risk! It's free money if you price it reasonably for the licensee.
I wouldn't say that so soon, this _is_ corpo we're talking about. They've proven time and time again that the depths of human stupidity are always deeper than we think.
I don't feel any bit of empathy for them. Not just for patenting the Nemesis system but for betraying the fans of the Arkham series and tainting Rocksteady's reputation over seeking some stupid trend. 100% deserved, and I hope things get even worse for them as they should for any company stupid enough to make dogshit decisions expecting no consequences.
Due to the fact that WB locked out millions of potential player by their rather harsh region locks, they brought it on themselves. That's at top of insane monetization.
@@mizuchi6209 I was gonna say this, the regions locks, forcing linking, monopolizing and ruining things like crunchyroll and rightstuf... it never ends. Rightstuf used to ship things to me rather cheaply like 10~20 for shipping now they only force flat rate at $50. Was also wondering why rightstuf stopped sending me cool catalogs for free ... Sony rips the soul out of everything even from ps3 > ps5, ps3 had a lot of cool features they slowly trimmed out from 4 to 5 ( honestly surprised I haven't seen an extensive video about this stuff with sony
I think that WB in general is in a death spiral, not just the games division. They've mangled their animation division, turned their games division into the worst monetization traps ever, and screwed over their movie division as well.
@@shadiafifi54 It's honestly baffling how they still haven't managed to bankrupt themselves yet, despite every single decision they make being questionable at best. Just shows how out of touch these suits are, that they can fumble the bag with even the most iconic characters and universes out there
@@Mariorox1956 They haven't bankrupted themselves yet because they're literally worth ~US$23 billion. They still have a lot of money to burn through, not to mention royalties on what IPs they have. They own DC comics, Looney Tunes, etc... and even though they're not using these IPs properly the old stuff is still raking in money. They have a big cushion to protect them, but who knows how long that will last.
Meanwhile, Zaslav greenlit Velma season 2, and he renewed Aew despite Aew is bleeding out money and viewers with Rampage and Collision. Batwaman was canceled when it was under 300k viewers, yet Aew is still on.
Squares and rectangles. All impairments are losses (it's a specific accounting term for a specific kind of intangible asset), but not all losses are impairments (if you sell something for less than it cost you to make it, that's not an impairment, that's just someone in management having flunked Common Sense 101 in kindergarten.)
@@SimuLord uh. People sell stuff for less than its' made all the time. They're called loss leaders and are used to get people in the door so they spend money (net profit) elsewhere. Like consoles.
@@SenkaZver net loss prices as part of a strategy to generate net profit in the longer run are not the same thing as net loss prices because someone f'd up.
@@SenkaZver Very true, and valid. Heck, Amazon had a "lose a little on every sale and make it up in volume" business model at first because Jeff Bezos was selling a "loss leader" not to his own customers but to investors. Once critical mass was achieved, well, that's why Bezos is richer than Marcus Licinius Crassus and less likely to get shredded by Persian horse archers. But of course, that's not the same as paying $100 for 100 units of something you intend to sell for a profit and then pricing them at 50 cents each.
Impairment is a specific and defined term required to be used in accounting for losses of a certain criteria. Considering this reporting is based on the company's financial statements, the use of accounting terminology is to be expected. The term is neither new nor used as cosmetic makeup.
It feels so vindicating to watch this live service slop fail spectacularly, but man I feel bad for the devs losing their jobs over these terrible decisions made by the suits.
@@hive_indicator318especially with Zaslav, man's pretty much the worst type of suit to have as CEO with how the various media branches of WBD have been handled since the merger. Not that any of the AAA companies are great but his directives have done more to hurt their bottom line going forward than he'll ever admit to.
As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, "He who lies down with dogs wakes up with fleas." If your life's work is making live service games, you forfeit the right to complain when you get laid off.
Exactly Guenter. What the suits fail to realise is whilst the live service model has the potential to be the most lucrative with things like season pass, battle pass, subscription, dlc, expansions and gacha mechanics. The problem is, the live service pie is finite and games like Roblox, Fortnite, Genshin and CoD have multiple slices of the Live Service Pie. There's only crumbs left of the live service pie for more niche games that doesn't have a mass appeal.
@@aster4jaden I mean I given the burn out of the player base on the Game as a service model either Industry giants they learn the lesson or go out of business & the Indie developers & freaking Nintendo inherit the industry in their place.
Multiversus situation is so dumb. Not only did they lose players, they also managed to completely fuck up what they had by completely rehashing the core gameplay (that people liked) into a slow muddy mess that feels like cheap Brawlhalla reskin
@@Delmworks Back then, you're likely right. Right now, probably not. Understanding what the market wants when you're actually making the game is important.
I still fish in Ocarina of Time every once in a while. Does that mean I want a game that's purely a fishing game. No. I just enjoy taking a break and catching a couple fish in the game without anything overly complicated.
My eyes just glaze over at this point when I hear “rifts” “gems” and all the other bs buzzwords these companies are shoving into their games. Just sell a good game and make it fun.
Something this leaves out, is during the beta for Multiverse, there was no indication that it was a beta until they announced they were pulling it. That game had fully launched, and they shut it down entirely to put in the new, game ruining monetization
them being out of touch is about annoying as its ever been - they have zero idea why these games are falling and as a result will continue to do as they've been doing
It’s not a shame if multiverse dies. They chose where to spend their dev effort. Every time a gatcha, pay to win, transaction infested, half baked “game” (aka casino) dies, the industry improves a little.
@Satook I do not think rifts was is really the best way to view the errors of MVS. It definitely would be a shame, but it's almost certainly the fault of WB putting resources into the wrong places and targeted the wrong things. I wouldn't call MVS a casino game. You could argue that with Rifts, the single player PvE mode. But it's a weak argument considering it's probably the least played part of the game and is for a very niche casual audience. I would wager the vast majority of MVS players don't touch rifts very often. I play in MVS tourneys and have an ungodly amount of hours in that game, and I've touched rifts like twice.
@@Satook sadly the vast majority of the game industry is gatcha/P2W mobile trash, if you run the numbers, the average video-game is a mobile game made to milk money.
10:15 I don't think that's true. People absolutely want Quidditch - however they don't want a live service high cost standalone game, they want Quidditch within the single player games like Hogwarts Legacy.
This. The only reason I want Quidditch Champions and it's on my wishlist is, it's under $30 and has single player. The closest I'll get to a modern remake of Quidditch World Cup which was my favorite game to rent from blockbuster when spending the night at Grandma's and she'd take my sister and I there to pick a movie and game.
Yeah exactly. Almost no one is interested in a competitive pvp game. They just wanted a side quest that would satisfy their fantasy of being a quiditch champion.
I can definitely see that, why play quidditch with a random character with few cosmetics instead of as the character you crafted in the world you're already playing in? If they didn't want it to be free they could have made it DLC for Hogwarts Legacy. Just a one time payment and no F2P bs. I feel that makes a lot more sense
not all that true, a lot of people were waiting for Quidditch and an competitive online game (like Rocket League) fits it like a glove, and the weirdest part of the history is that THEY DID IT and had a very good game, until one month before the release when they announced they had added mandatory bots, skills, only 3 players could play together, no ranked, no custom games, and it all went worse from there
Suits just think live service is a infinite money glitch. Single player games sell millions but live service sells forever. Complete load of horseradish.
@@Ozzianman Brain rot has existed for ages. Used to be they only saw three games: Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, and Call of Duty. Now its the Live Services that haven't collapsed in on themselves.
@@krspaceT1And there was also the era of every company trying to make to make their own mmo after world of war craft was a hit and 99% of them failed. Times never change
No joke, I've got a genuine backlog developing and it's all indie or AA games. If WB (and EA, and Activision, and the rest of the slop merchants) got 1983'd out of existence tomorrow, I wouldn't even notice until I got to work on Wednesday and put all the Bellular/Mugthief/Legendary Drops reactions on in the background during the workday.
My backlog includes Core Keeper, Darkwood, RE4 (2005) and Disco Elysium. And while I play those I'm waiting for the following games to go on sale. System Shock Remake - Astrobot - BM Wukong Stellar Blade - Lies of P - Robocop Rogue City Visions of Mana - Star Ocean the Second Story - W40K Space Marine 2 People who keep saying gaming is dying should really consider playing other games.
Well, if they start making Batman Arkham games again, I'm more than OK with that (games in between Arkham Origins and Arkham Asylum, there's room for many games there).
The problem with the quidditch game is that Harry potter fans want the full Harry potter experience. Not a portion of it to be turned into a stand alone game. It be like trying to make a hogwarts game that only allowed you to go to classes and do mini games that deterimined if your house wins the cup. Ok its a Harry potter game, but I'm not experiencing the Wizarding world or doing everything I want to do in the Wizarding world . Quidditch is a cherry on top feature that should be in the same vein of hogwarts legacy. Not a standalone.
Just a friendly reminder that this is the same company who went after Meatcanyon for his bugs bunny parody wabbit season and got it for copyright. Making it officially cannon that Bugs Bunny is a struggling grapist. These people aren't very smart.
Also, the same company that allowed Velma season 2 to exist to "own the Chuds" and make another contract with Aew, ignoring the fact that Aew is dying and losing viewership and money.
Shipping 20 characters in the game but having 10 locked behind paywalls that when added together cost more than the rest of the game is just awful. I skipped SF 6 because of all the monetisation in it. Skipped this one too.
@@sinteleonSkylanders was full of fomo practices? You missed out on one character that never reached your area? Too bad. S2bu. Screw fomo. SF6's monetization is bad, but Tekken 8 makes SF6 look humble.
You thought Blackrock Fighter 6 was bad? Tekken 8's disc-locked content, season passes, battle passes, and the Cash Shop already cost more than the God damn game itself, and Heihachi came out as a P2W character like Leeroy the DEI character from Tekken 7.
Quidditch is really just a 1v1 between seekers because the snitch is a plot device to make Harry seem special and not something that makes any sort of sense in an actual game. Whoever finds it wins, and only one person per team can look for it. That means you have 10 ppl playing a pointless game and waiting their turn to play seeker. Why the actual fuck did they think it would be good as an online game. They should have just put it in Hogwarts legacy and been done with it.
"Let's sell off Batman projects to other streaming services, this will surely help Max.' ....More content is kind of useful for your streaming services, you know Zavlev?
@@JUANxxTNAFAN Animation isnt supposed to make money exactly, its suppose to market the brand and sell toys and merch. Why does Pokemon anime go on forever? Because its an advertisement for the brand.
Mortal Kombat 1 was the final straw for me. $120 for a glorified early access mobile game with garbage micro transactions. AAA gaming is on its deathbed. Support Indy devs who create games for enjoyment, not corporate “content” designed to maximize share holder profits.
they killed cartoon network which could have been a huge cross promotion, they also didn't take down multiversus when they should have, and they should not have had microtransactions on beta. these asshats are ruining themselves chasing short term gain at the cost of long term growth, it sucks that MK will go down with WB if it does go down but Zazlov should get some L's he is not good for WB as a whole.
CN was doomed the day it had nothing but CalArts cartoons full of questionable content and political/rainbow-commie agendas. Thank Stephen Universe and friends. Multiversus was doomed the minute LeBum "I love the CCP" James was added to Multiversus.
It was going to shit before with the rest of the industry. He obviously didn't fix any of the issues or the incentive structures are to produce this shit, which again he hasn't fixed.
@@IdgaradLyracant it’s even worse than that. He’s the guy that built TLC by developing their tried-and-true formula of finding the most fame hungry abusive dads in Bible country and tricking them into signing away their family’s privacy rights.
@@cartilageheadseriously, much as some people have a hate on for particular creatives because of their own attitudes it's hard to deny the creatives' ability to produce and sell product for WBD if you're willing to actually look at the numbers. I count some of said creatives as friends so I've seen what gets thrown at them by the supposed fans despite them doing more for WBD's bottom line than Zaslav is.
Something else that happened with Multiversus V2 was an age restriction. Originally they had none and you couldn't play V2 online if you were under 18. My son was 10 when the beta release and he fell in love with the game. When V2 dropped he downloaded it day one and when he realized all he could do was grind offline for effectively no reason, we uninstalled it that same day and never looked back. They had to have immediately alienated at least half of their player base with that alone.
Yeah. If they had an option to pay a flat fee for the base roster and had character packs comparable to modern fighting games I would have gotten it day one. I still haven't tried it because I don't want to engage with the free-to-play, 31 delicious flavors of xp/currency bs.
@@brentacomoosethat’s pretty much how it’s set up now, with the ability to earn xp towards character unlocks if you’d rather that over paying for the extra characters
Pretty much given up on AAA. As recently as 6 or 7 years ago I used to buy one every 6 weeks or so. Despite having more disposable income and playing games as much as ever, I've bought 1 AAA game since Cyberpunk 2077 which I bought pre-ordered (last time I do that), That was Diablo 4 and have no plans to buy any more AAA games soon. Enjoying indie and AA games a lot more. Not because they are cheaper. But because they are BETTER. More gameplay, better value, no imposition of gatcha mechanics. Just good games. 7DTD, Factorio, Grim Dawn, Age of Wonders 4, Balatro, Dying Light 2, Dwarf Fortress, OOTP25, X4 Foundations (best space sim EVER). NO shortage of games out there. Not sure I'll ever need AAA games again.
@@PaulRoneClarke Balatro definitely has to be my pick for indie game of the year. If someone told me a decade ago one of my favorite games would be a poker roguelike indie title, I'd have called them crazy. But damn that game is just fantastic, it deserves some awards and accolades.
@@Redsword603that's actually pretty common sadly, animation is not cheap nor fast so often after the pilot episode values shift towards getting it out the door on a deadline. It's unfortunate but a fact of how the industry has been since its inception it's why shows with fast to produce styles like the Powerpuff Girls, Southpark or even one of the oldest anime Astro Boy didn't tend to get compromised as much to keep their deadlines.
"Who would had guessed that doing stuff nobody ask, and on top of that doing a subpar work most of the time, would make them loose money, who would had guessed?!, welp time to firen hundreds of people because i want my yearly bonus" - the higher ups at WB
Lowkey I don’t think it makes sense for them to be directly in the games industry. Disney dropped buena vista games forever ago. License out your IP to other companies. Like disney does with ubisoft ea etc (but pick ya know good studios instead)
They won't learn anything, and will keep stepping on the same rake over and over and keep blaming the players for not buying their live service garbage.
Multi Versus and Quidditch just doesnt interest me. Legacy I totally vibe with but that's pretty much it. WB just has nothing else of interest and their response to SS is to abandon everything especially after legacy Its just as stupid as EA. "SP Games are dead!" Releases a SP game that outsells all their LS games "They are still dead an we are doubling down on LS!" Total idiots.
I think they can bleed money in search of that FIFA or GTA V hit that would give them 1 billion a year. They are sociopaths, they do not care about creating anything or their workers, it's all about the next quarter and line must go up.
It actually baffles me. They have a well marketed and known franchise, Mortal Kombat. Yet they see it struggle for players and decide "yeah, lets make another fighting game guys! But it'll be quirky cos its 2v2" (which many have already failed at) Then they burn extra money using flying brooms for more fuel Not even a slop shooter or pve game. They have to be trying to fail 😂😂
Should never have been allowed, game systems by and large aren't supposed to be copyrightable. Just like recipes. Specific technology to achieve a process that couldn't be achieved before is certainly copyrightable, but the process itself is like a recipe.
I think corporations have gotten the relationship between money and work backwards. The point isn't to do work to get money, it is to get money so you can keep doing the work. Specifically here you don't make games to make money, you make money so you can keep making games. If you get this wrong you end up doing work just to profit or make money, and that is in essence work disentangled from meaning and joy, it is bad work. Profit and money are necessary evils to stay in business, but they should never be the incentive to do a business. That way goes to hell in a handbasket.
You do realize your entire philosophy goes against capitalism, right? It makes perfect sense for a small business owner, doing what he loves, to enjoy doing what he loves first and only think of the income (beyond what's needed to ensure the business keeps enough success that one bad game dev cycle won't tank the entire company, of course) after the fact, sure. But Big Corporations have to show profit and growth, and once the process of creating good games is down to a science rather than being pure art (and let's face it, most triple AA games by big corporations are science driven, nothing-new in them, but sometimes well-executed combinations of other games previous systems in a new package), then scraping up more cash out of each dev cycle becomes the only way to ensure continual growth, because you literally cannot count on any particular project pulling in the player engagement numbers you need, that's a crap shoot. What we see happening in the larger games industry is the sadly natural result of big game makers trying to squeeze more and more profit from each new game release, and it's a never ending cycle of finding the next big marketing concept and pushing it onto the player bases, regardless if it serves the game best or not. When it happens to serve the game well, money is made, players are happy, etc. (WOW, Destiny, the Division, etc.) When it isn't doesn't serve the game well, players tend to throw a fit (Marvel's Avengers, Suicide Squad, etc.) First it was the MMO boom post WOW (But really that boom was already in motion before WOW released, WOW was just the biggest winner of that era), then moved into live service subscription-based multiplayer games like Marvel Heroes A-RPG/MMO, next came mobile games monetization schemes which obfuscate the real money needed from the player, and then Live Service Squad based games that could also draw in players on console, and after that came the worst of the bunch, Gatcha style monetization which is basically gambling and should be illegal. Now we're seeing all of these combined together in different ways all in an effort to squeeze as much money from the game purchasers as possible from each development cycle / game release. It's just capitalism at work. The large game companies have reasoned that they cannot literally force everyone to but every game, yet the rules of capitalism require not only success, but constant growth year after year, and there comes a tipping point where no further growth is possible because the monetization has been maximized.
That's capitalism! And it has a lot to do with how it's set up in the U.S. Companies have investors who only want to give you their money if your company continues to grow indefinitely. That's why they have to squeeze so hard. If they don't, they die.
Heres to praying that all the AAA studios go out of business and we can get good games being made again when companies figure out "oh we should make things that customers want, because thats profitable" instead of "we should make games to piss off the player base because we hate gamers"
@gamerscomplete thats a really terrible idea. The problem is not triple a studios its publishers, always has been. Killing triple a games will tank the industry. Talent will leave and never come back. Killing triple a studios because of poor publisher performence is like removing the heart to cure projectile vomiting. Effective but actually runs counter to your goal.
We don't need AAA to fail, it's an easy way for money to get into the sector. The rise of Indie is what we need. More and more indie companies are ex-AAA developers and will continue to trend like this which may develop new AAA companies and the cycle repeats
I think developers have just forgotten what 'passion' and 'risk' means, its why Indie teams are making so much more than AAA companies. Resident Evil 7, Half-Life 2, Titanfall and FNAF an amazing example of a team (or solo dev) who had a passion to make a masterpiece, took a huge risk that it would hold up and succeeded spectacularly. Now everything is just the same watered down garbage that is recycled because its a well known name. STOP using games as a way to make money and START using it as a tool to write something you care about!
I feel like one of the biggest issues is Publishers/Investors .. seem to struggle to understand how creative industries work .. like you can't treat them like a factory production line.
@@madeumad64 I understand what OP meant, its just worded poorly. While RE7, HL2 and Titanfall arent at all indie games, OP is trying to point out how all three were relatively ''risky'' projects (especially RE7) developed by passionate teams and managed to attract a huge cult following, and unfortunately that sentiment just isn't as common especially nowadays. This is what I managed to understand out of their comment tho.
Multiversus is honestly a really solid game at this point but the launch was an absolute disaster. The sad part is it doesn't seem like executive meddling that ruined things. PFG should not have made the decision to move to UE5, it added nothing but problems. The Smash community is very fickle, and building a live service to appeal to players who refuse to move on from Melee was just stupid. You'll never be Nintendo, you'll definitely never be 2000s Nintendo. The game really wasn't in as bad of a state as you claim originally, it needed that large initial count to burn through as it found its own audience and they completely wasted it.
The issue with live service games is your either the best in a certain genre or you fail, you can't just be a good hero shooter you have to be better then every other hero shooter or else why not just play those hero shooters. With a single player game you don't have to be better then elden ring because everyones already played it, you just have to be good enough for people to want to play your game.
It's not Superman, specifically. But there is a game coming out where you basically have Superman-esque powers. It's called Undefeated. Might be for you, might not. But it's certainly proof that an actual Superman game is doable.
I don't hate them for patenting the Nemesis system. I hate them for doing so and then do nothing with it for 7-8 years and counting. If they would have extended the system to other IPs, added new dimensions to it, etc. we could all enjoy it. On other words, the problem is that they patented it and then didn't do anything else good with it.
I’m not going to lie, Multiversus as a game is super cheap and free to play and they have/had a small dev team only existing for a couple years. There’s no way Multiversus lost them a huge % of those millions of dollars. Especially with how they don’t have to pay for character rights. This is just me speculating.
I actually played Quiddich Champions during the closed playtest. I enjoyed it, so much so that I purchased cosmetics with REAL MONEY because I wanted to support the developers. Fast forward to the game's release, and not only did I not get to keep those cosmetics, but I wasn't even compensated with in-game currency. Refunded. 👿
@@mjdevlog best I could figure was it was something they tried and scraped and missed removing UI elements. As no one could have made it to Looney difficulty yet and it was gone really quick. i was definitely disappointed with the rerelease switching to a whole new engine instead of just fixing the original game was an odd move from my perspective. But maybe UE5 offered better net code possibilities? IDK its a fun game i enjoy playing co-op with my buddy but i don't think I'd play much without a duo's partner. Platform fighting games are such a small niche genre but ive definitely been playing more frequently this go round. Now they are making a bunch of big changes this patch so we will see how it goes.
I am like 99% sure that WB is the reason why NetherRealm studios games have so many cameo characters and they are using it as an opportunity to advertise their other franchises. Especially because now cross-over dlc characters outnumber non cross-over dlc characters. I don't have a problem with 1 or 2 but, using the recent release/announcement of Ghostface in MK1 as an example, its just weird sometimes and not in a good way.
WB messed up a very long time ago. Every game they touched, they found a way to ruin the experience. Most disappointing for me is how much they destroyed Mortal Kombat instantly
That would be a very unusual decision in this industry. Big pubs routinely flip the kill switch when they determine a game can no longer be saved, and they do it as a middle finger to the ones who scorned them as well as the ones that supported them.
WB, you have easy money and refuse to pick it up - Mortal Kombat Kollections. We see how crazy good it's been for Capcom to release sets of their old games and MK has enough material for two such bundles. All the main games, the Ultimate/Gold versions and the side-games like Shaolin Monks and even Mythologies and Special Forces. That's not bringing up other Midway IPs they do nothing with, like Rampage.
@@sinteleon next patch they are adding the option to buy all but the new character for $50 i believe. You can play all characters while offline and training mode.The $50 is cheaper for each character you already own. they are also changing how you get characters to make it better but I didn't listen since i already have them all.
I played Multiversus when it first launched and enjoyed it a lot. However, the monetization was outrageous back then already. They also were intransparent about characters rotating, which meant every few weeks a huge percentage of players logged on to suddenly be unable to play their main, unless they grinded for hours, with characters they don't want to play as, or pay. And that was basically the core of every design decision - how to we create a problem that can be monetized. Even the overpriced battlepass, which is suppposed to be a carrot on a stick getting you to play just a little longer was outrageously grindy. While the core gameplay was great (aside from balancing issues), all of the monetization hurdles sucked every bit of fun out of the game bit by bit. The rugpull of "this was just a beta, though we never really said so" and taking the game offline for way too long was spelling its own death sentence. I checked back when they fully released it, but after reading about even more monetization and changes to game speed and more balancing issues, I never reinstalled. Quite sad.
It honestly baffles me how WB has such talented developers working for them, putting out games with such immense potential, only for that potential to be consistently wasted.
I think the problem is that investors see a new game concept take off and instead of thinking "we should do something that nobody else is doing and carve out our own market" they say "we should do the exact same thing for cheaper and try to steal some of that market." You're not going to beat developers at their own specialty. Just do something new. It doesn't have to be huge budget, just something that's fun and nobody else is doing.
Unfortunately, beating other companies in their new market is a sound, profitable strategy. World of Warcraft upended Everquest and various Asian PvP-MMOs in it's era to become Blizzards untouchable cash cow, and when Blizzard already hadthe ARPG market topped with Diablo, that's saying something.
In regards to MultiVersus there were a few pieces of information that were outdated or incorrect: 1. All fighters are available to play in local multiplayer for free and it’s been like that for a little while now, they’re currently trying to build up the tournament scene for this game too 2. The lives system for the single player rifts was never implemented. People dug it up in the code or in an earlier build of the game and passed it around like it was an official release of the feature but I’ve done every single rift in almost every available difficulty and I have never seen that feature, not even on the hardest difficulties Those are critical pieces of information that you left out, and even though it was not done intentionally or maliciously it’s still disappointing to see
They should double David Zaslav's salary, surely if they pay him even more he'll stop making the worst decisions imaginable at every given opportunity.
I don't actually think this would happen, and actually doing it well is easier said than done, but it would be pretty interesting if they gave a studio free rein to make a full on BG3-style Game of Thrones RPG, complete with decision-making that can effect who ends up on the throne or whatever.
Multiversus could (and should) have been amazing, but they messed it up by making it a live service! It should have been a $40-$60 game with extra fighters released later as paid DLC!
WB vastly underestimated how much of an undertaking a game like this, under a model like this is. Nintendo did not do it own their own. They had to tap into Bamco's generational knowledge and teams to make Smash work. A new studio without this foundation was always going to face major hurdles.
Technically they have made many smash games at home. Bandai happens to have support studios for colab work with Nintendo and does it with Smash. Nintendo could probably do an internal team again without much hassle. But they also started from 'hey, can we do this? and took at least until Melee to really hit it big. WB expected to skip a few steps.
@@krspaceT1 Yeah, agree. Nintendo even without Bamco is already in a WAY better place than WB was. I definitely think they could've put out Smash Ultimate, with less content, using internal teams alone. Especially given the foundation they had from Smash 4. I just think that it wouldn't have been as successful of a live service game as it was without the support of Bamco.
Best i can tell from looking at end of life numbers for Smash Brothers for the WiiU, it was down to between 10-30 thousand concurrent players. So for WB to look at those numbers and think "Yeah! Theres room for a live service there!" Is baffling.
@11:56 I believe the Factorio devs have explicitly stated that they don't ever intend to discount their game. Don't remember the exact reasons given; may have been to avoid older players (especially in its early access years) feeling cheated and undervalued, may also have been to avoid the "just wait for a sale" mentality on potential new players.
They shouldn't have given public access to multiversus until 1.0 or at least only offered an early access beta like a month or 2 before launch to drum up hype, and then have that momentum roll smoothly into the release of 1.0. If they launched it as a solid, polished, balanced and finely tuned game, they would have retained a lot more players and goodwill, and been able to translate that into more microtransaction sales.
Did not help that the switch from the beta to the release they did a massive change to the gameplay speed which killed my enjoyment of the game. Maybe I would have stuck with it had there was not so many different MTX systems that got added to it as well but the gameplay feeling worse AND tons of MTX systems thats going to be a nope from me and the last WB Game I will ever support.
@@WasabiCannonI will say, both aspects of it, the MTX and the game speed have vastly improved and S4 which comes out tomorrow is supposed to improve it even further
The quidditch game is fun af, especially now that the 6v6 mode got added. It's also has NO MICROTRANSACTIONS, and the progression is really nice. It's like wizard themed rocket league. My guess it probably struggled making a strong first impression because it made no sense canonically to not have 6v6 on launch, and instead had this confusing role-swapping system as the standard
If WB wanted this could have competed with smash but its just a shame they were looking to invest in a loss leader. True even more so weird cuz they did invest in ssquad for the same reason. Its like if you just made ssquad a single player 1 time playthrough game and then put all the live service money into multiverse they would have been way further ahead.
Quidditch Champions is a key demonstration of segmenting old game concepts off just to make more money is running into people not understanding how to cut the cake and still have a slice you can give to a customer. The prior Harry Potter games, the originals with the lumpy geometric character models, they kept that as an integral component because there isn't enough interest in it alone. It's not college football or basketball. It's a thing that's done as part of the wider inter-school competition. It's only one piece of the wider experience of being a student at Hogwarts.
God the nemesis mechanic being stuck in hell development with the WW game is just so unfortunate for everyone else. I can only imagine a Star Wars game set in the Old Republic era and running arround as a Jedi or Sith accolyte and fighting stronger and stronger enemies with the mechanic. Oh it would be so glorious.
The problem as always is greed. They want a continuous revenue flow from life service games, but insist on them also having an upfront buying price. In addition, the slop they release doesn't have nearly the needed quality a life service game needs to justify the high prices on top of the predatory monetization methods that honestly should be prohibited for all life service games, but sadly consumer protection laws are always years upon years behind where they are needed.
As a Multiversus Semi-Pro and someone who watches Belluar watching this is really sad. They changed the game too much from Beta on MVS and the movement isn't as crisp which is really important when the skill of the game was the movement.
Good video with lots of great information but I feel like you left an important piece out regarding multiverses. After the game went offline for all those months it came back with all the character models and stages rebuilt with a better unreal engine 5 graphics BUT lacking features that it had in the beta such as the stats after every game showing how much damage you did and how many of your opponents you knocked out among other things. As far as I know no one was really asking for the graphics improvement. I was $100 backer and active with the community and some of the social media spaces and I never heard people talk about how the game needed better graphics. The graphics looked great They were stylized and gameplay was obviously the most important part. The animations were good! When the development team was asked why so many missing features they responded that they had to rebuild every stage and character and resize art assets for the official release and that is what took up all the time and they barely got that done. So it's not just that the game went offline It's that it went offline and came back less of a full package than it did when it was in beta. As well as them changing significantly core aspects of the gameplay such as combo speed and base movement. But the sad part is that what you said is absolutely right, the game has the potential to be amazing and when it plays well it's super fun. I've continued to play it only because I'm stubborn and I'm trying to get my money's worth but honestly I wasn't enjoying myself till the last updates. They fixed ground movement and air movement and people seem to be liking the new character unlocks better so the game is slowly becoming better and better. I hope it's not too little too late and that they continue to make a more enjoyable product for everyone
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Just fyi, Factorio only has one dlc. But a good example would be Rimworld, it is AT MOST at a 20% sale with its release beeing in 2018 and has four content DLC's between 18€ to 23,50€ which have the same sale policy.
Patenting a good game mechanic only to stick it to everyone else and not doing anything with it is peak stupidity already, nothing they do after will ever top that.
I feel like it would’ve kind of been fine if they made a dozen games since patenting it, using it. Or would license it out fairly cheaply. Maybe something like, “give us 1% of your game’s revenue.” Honestly, even that is a bit greedy, imo, since that’s revenue not profit… but also, it’s 1% so I think it’s kinda fair. 🤷♀️
Bamco did the same thing with the loading screen minigame patent. They used it for ps1 games and nothing else... and the patent expired after loading screens became too short and infrequent to justify adding a minigame.
Didn't Nintendo do that to Palworld?
@@Paradox-es3bl A little bit of greed is baked into patent law, because as you allude to, licensing's often more profitable than making and selling your own product, and it's WAY lower risk! It's free money if you price it reasonably for the licensee.
I wouldn't say that so soon, this _is_ corpo we're talking about. They've proven time and time again that the depths of human stupidity are always deeper than we think.
I will never forgive them for patenting the Nemesis System.
one of the industry's biggest sins
@@digitaldragon101 yeah that shouldn't even be allowed
Changes need to be made to patents
Never forgive, never forget.
@@Edwin-iw8gbif we're gonna go thru the pain of changing patents, may we also take the opportunity to edit the DMCA?
Karmic justice
I don't feel any bit of empathy for them. Not just for patenting the Nemesis system but for betraying the fans of the Arkham series and tainting Rocksteady's reputation over seeking some stupid trend. 100% deserved, and I hope things get even worse for them as they should for any company stupid enough to make dogshit decisions expecting no consequences.
Fully agree.
Unrelated but you’re the first person I’ve seen with the same profile pic as me.
@@burg1704 UGH WHAT ARE THE ODDS?!?!
Trying to appeal to people besides straight white misogynistic men has nothing to do with why that game is bad.
@@baalfgames5318 What are the games that are misogynistic? Asking for a friend
Due to the fact that WB locked out millions of potential player by their rather harsh region locks, they brought it on themselves.
That's at top of insane monetization.
@@DarkDragonRus sony is walking that path as well, lets see how it will plays out
Games as a service is a dead model even EA is losing is Madden player base the burnouts is real the player base is just sick to death of that BS.
Multiversus was a guaranteed winner and they destroyed it in every way possible. It shouldn't even take that much money to produce such a simple game.
@@mizuchi6209 I was gonna say this, the regions locks, forcing linking, monopolizing and ruining things like crunchyroll and rightstuf... it never ends. Rightstuf used to ship things to me rather cheaply like 10~20 for shipping now they only force flat rate at $50. Was also wondering why rightstuf stopped sending me cool catalogs for free ... Sony rips the soul out of everything even from ps3 > ps5, ps3 had a lot of cool features they slowly trimmed out from 4 to 5 ( honestly surprised I haven't seen an extensive video about this stuff with sony
I think that WB in general is in a death spiral, not just the games division. They've mangled their animation division, turned their games division into the worst monetization traps ever, and screwed over their movie division as well.
@@shadiafifi54 It's honestly baffling how they still haven't managed to bankrupt themselves yet, despite every single decision they make being questionable at best. Just shows how out of touch these suits are, that they can fumble the bag with even the most iconic characters and universes out there
@@Mariorox1956 They haven't bankrupted themselves yet because they're literally worth ~US$23 billion. They still have a lot of money to burn through, not to mention royalties on what IPs they have. They own DC comics, Looney Tunes, etc... and even though they're not using these IPs properly the old stuff is still raking in money. They have a big cushion to protect them, but who knows how long that will last.
@shadiafifi54 it might be happening sooner then we think though, since they are selling spools of copper wire for $7
Meanwhile, Zaslav greenlit Velma season 2, and he renewed Aew despite Aew is bleeding out money and viewers with Rampage and Collision. Batwaman was canceled when it was under 300k viewers, yet Aew is still on.
@@Gachagarry He did but then it got cancelled later (Velma season 2).
Love how flailing CEOs try to cosmetic makeup their colossal failures with new terms like "impairments", instead of "losses".
Squares and rectangles. All impairments are losses (it's a specific accounting term for a specific kind of intangible asset), but not all losses are impairments (if you sell something for less than it cost you to make it, that's not an impairment, that's just someone in management having flunked Common Sense 101 in kindergarten.)
@@SimuLord uh. People sell stuff for less than its' made all the time. They're called loss leaders and are used to get people in the door so they spend money (net profit) elsewhere.
Like consoles.
@@SenkaZver net loss prices as part of a strategy to generate net profit in the longer run are not the same thing as net loss prices because someone f'd up.
@@SenkaZver Very true, and valid. Heck, Amazon had a "lose a little on every sale and make it up in volume" business model at first because Jeff Bezos was selling a "loss leader" not to his own customers but to investors. Once critical mass was achieved, well, that's why Bezos is richer than Marcus Licinius Crassus and less likely to get shredded by Persian horse archers.
But of course, that's not the same as paying $100 for 100 units of something you intend to sell for a profit and then pricing them at 50 cents each.
Impairment is a specific and defined term required to be used in accounting for losses of a certain criteria. Considering this reporting is based on the company's financial statements, the use of accounting terminology is to be expected. The term is neither new nor used as cosmetic makeup.
It feels so vindicating to watch this live service slop fail spectacularly, but man I feel bad for the devs losing their jobs over these terrible decisions made by the suits.
They probably would've gotten canned anyway at some random point just to make a line go up (or less down)
@@hive_indicator318especially with Zaslav, man's pretty much the worst type of suit to have as CEO with how the various media branches of WBD have been handled since the merger. Not that any of the AAA companies are great but his directives have done more to hurt their bottom line going forward than he'll ever admit to.
As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, "He who lies down with dogs wakes up with fleas." If your life's work is making live service games, you forfeit the right to complain when you get laid off.
Exactly Guenter. What the suits fail to realise is whilst the live service model has the potential to be the most lucrative with things like season pass, battle pass, subscription, dlc, expansions and gacha mechanics.
The problem is, the live service pie is finite and games like Roblox, Fortnite, Genshin and CoD have multiple slices of the Live Service Pie.
There's only crumbs left of the live service pie for more niche games that doesn't have a mass appeal.
@@SimuLordIs it their life's work? Or is it just what the industry pushed them into doing? Does critical thought just scare you?
"Like the rest of the Industry they have learned their lesson..."
That would be a first
I'll believe it when I see it.
"Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee hee hee."
@@aster4jaden I mean I given the burn out of the player base on the Game as a service model either Industry giants they learn the lesson or go out of business & the Indie developers & freaking Nintendo inherit the industry in their place.
@@Terminalsanity Wont be the first time Nintendo inherits the industry, they are the reason the video game crash didn't destroy the entire industry.
@Takkori in the west at least, but Sony did let them retake Japan so...all hail the gaming overlord Nintendo. Now bow to their game design or else
Multiversus situation is so dumb. Not only did they lose players, they also managed to completely fuck up what they had by completely rehashing the core gameplay (that people liked) into a slow muddy mess that feels like cheap Brawlhalla reskin
It’s genuinely crazy to get all this feedback about the game, being told the core parts of it are good
then CHANGING those core parts
And the few players that game has left are completely delusional and get offended by the most minor criticism of their game
nah Brawlhalla is trash in comparison.
Yep, i disliked how slow paced they made it after the temporary shut down
@@simpelgames645 STOP DOOMPOSTING COMPLAINER IS RUINING EVERYTHING they said
It's confusing how suits at WB don't understand this:
I, and presumably others, want Quidditch in a HP game, not purely a Quidditch game
Yeah, that sounds like something you'd put in Hogwarts Legacy 2 as a side minigame.
Agree to disagree-Frankly, if they’d done it about 9-ish years wailer when pottermainia was still peaking they could have had the next madden
@@Delmworks Back then, you're likely right. Right now, probably not. Understanding what the market wants when you're actually making the game is important.
I still fish in Ocarina of Time every once in a while.
Does that mean I want a game that's purely a fishing game. No. I just enjoy taking a break and catching a couple fish in the game without anything overly complicated.
@@DarkSupergirl that sounds like something to put into the first game ;)
My eyes just glaze over at this point when I hear “rifts” “gems” and all the other bs buzzwords these companies are shoving into their games. Just sell a good game and make it fun.
Gems and rifts are not buzzwords, they only count as such if it's being used by many other properties to describe the same thing.
I'm miffed that they've tarnished those words.
@@sinteleon great point, I appreciate your input!
@@senselessfool3441 Now, F2P (or Free to start if you're nintendo), lootboxes/gacha, season/battle pass, all those are indeed buzzwords.
@@sinteleon They are. Have you just not noticed?
Something this leaves out, is during the beta for Multiverse, there was no indication that it was a beta until they announced they were pulling it. That game had fully launched, and they shut it down entirely to put in the new, game ruining monetization
That's why I can't put any real world money in that game. There's no comfort in knowing they can pull that game at any moment.
them being out of touch is about annoying as its ever been - they have zero idea why these games are falling and as a result will continue to do as they've been doing
It’s not a shame if multiverse dies.
They chose where to spend their dev effort.
Every time a gatcha, pay to win, transaction infested, half baked “game” (aka casino) dies, the industry improves a little.
@Satook I do not think rifts was is really the best way to view the errors of MVS. It definitely would be a shame, but it's almost certainly the fault of WB putting resources into the wrong places and targeted the wrong things. I wouldn't call MVS a casino game. You could argue that with Rifts, the single player PvE mode. But it's a weak argument considering it's probably the least played part of the game and is for a very niche casual audience. I would wager the vast majority of MVS players don't touch rifts very often. I play in MVS tourneys and have an ungodly amount of hours in that game, and I've touched rifts like twice.
Good thing rivals of aether is picking up steam.
@@Satook sadly the vast majority of the game industry is gatcha/P2W mobile trash, if you run the numbers, the average video-game is a mobile game made to milk money.
@@dearcastiel4667 Mmm... no, but if u mean the most popular then kinda, yeah
I agree, but sadly I don't think games like The First Descendent are going anywhere anytime soon.
10:15 I don't think that's true. People absolutely want Quidditch - however they don't want a live service high cost standalone game, they want Quidditch within the single player games like Hogwarts Legacy.
This. The only reason I want Quidditch Champions and it's on my wishlist is, it's under $30 and has single player. The closest I'll get to a modern remake of Quidditch World Cup which was my favorite game to rent from blockbuster when spending the night at Grandma's and she'd take my sister and I there to pick a movie and game.
Yeah exactly. Almost no one is interested in a competitive pvp game. They just wanted a side quest that would satisfy their fantasy of being a quiditch champion.
I can definitely see that, why play quidditch with a random character with few cosmetics instead of as the character you crafted in the world you're already playing in?
If they didn't want it to be free they could have made it DLC for Hogwarts Legacy. Just a one time payment and no F2P bs. I feel that makes a lot more sense
not all that true, a lot of people were waiting for Quidditch and an competitive online game (like Rocket League) fits it like a glove, and the weirdest part of the history is that THEY DID IT and had a very good game, until one month before the release when they announced they had added mandatory bots, skills, only 3 players could play together, no ranked, no custom games, and it all went worse from there
WB lining themselves behind Ubisoft for “we had everything we need and we somehow astronomically fucked up, but it’s everyone but our fault.”
Doubling down on the games that just underperformed a bunch is a questionable call.
So risk averse they risk it all
Suits just think live service is a infinite money glitch. Single player games sell millions but live service sells forever. Complete load of horseradish.
@@Astar24653 The idea of inifinite growth truly has brainrotted business people.
@@Ozzianman Brain rot has existed for ages. Used to be they only saw three games: Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, and Call of Duty. Now its the Live Services that haven't collapsed in on themselves.
@@krspaceT1And there was also the era of every company trying to make to make their own mmo after world of war craft was a hit and 99% of them failed. Times never change
I have too many games to play right now so WB Games can just go away forever, nothing missed or noticed over here.
No joke, I've got a genuine backlog developing and it's all indie or AA games. If WB (and EA, and Activision, and the rest of the slop merchants) got 1983'd out of existence tomorrow, I wouldn't even notice until I got to work on Wednesday and put all the Bellular/Mugthief/Legendary Drops reactions on in the background during the workday.
My backlog includes Core Keeper, Darkwood, RE4 (2005) and Disco Elysium. And while I play those I'm waiting for the following games to go on sale.
System Shock Remake - Astrobot - BM Wukong
Stellar Blade - Lies of P - Robocop Rogue City
Visions of Mana - Star Ocean the Second Story - W40K Space Marine 2
People who keep saying gaming is dying should really consider playing other games.
@@matosz23 agree people that say that often get the newest cod and the hype game rn and then they complain....
@@matosz23western AAA industry is dying, thats a fact
Well, if they start making Batman Arkham games again, I'm more than OK with that (games in between Arkham Origins and Arkham Asylum, there's room for many games there).
The problem with the quidditch game is that Harry potter fans want the full Harry potter experience. Not a portion of it to be turned into a stand alone game.
It be like trying to make a hogwarts game that only allowed you to go to classes and do mini games that deterimined if your house wins the cup.
Ok its a Harry potter game, but I'm not experiencing the Wizarding world or doing everything I want to do in the Wizarding world .
Quidditch is a cherry on top feature that should be in the same vein of hogwarts legacy. Not a standalone.
Just a friendly reminder that this is the same company who went after Meatcanyon for his bugs bunny parody wabbit season and got it for copyright. Making it officially cannon that Bugs Bunny is a struggling grapist. These people aren't very smart.
Also, the same company that allowed Velma season 2 to exist to "own the Chuds" and make another contract with Aew, ignoring the fact that Aew is dying and losing viewership and money.
that's not how copyright strikes work lmao. they don't make the things that are struck down "canon"
@@stunlord Bro is missing the joke.
Shipping 20 characters in the game but having 10 locked behind paywalls that when added together cost more than the rest of the game is just awful.
I skipped SF 6 because of all the monetisation in it.
Skipped this one too.
This isn't necessarily bad IF the game is actually adequately fleshed out even with your original limited roster, see example: Skylanders.
@@sinteleonSkylanders was full of fomo practices? You missed out on one character that never reached your area? Too bad. S2bu. Screw fomo.
SF6's monetization is bad, but Tekken 8 makes SF6 look humble.
You thought Blackrock Fighter 6 was bad? Tekken 8's disc-locked content, season passes, battle passes, and the Cash Shop already cost more than the God damn game itself, and Heihachi came out as a P2W character like Leeroy the DEI character from Tekken 7.
Quidditch is really just a 1v1 between seekers because the snitch is a plot device to make Harry seem special and not something that makes any sort of sense in an actual game. Whoever finds it wins, and only one person per team can look for it. That means you have 10 ppl playing a pointless game and waiting their turn to play seeker.
Why the actual fuck did they think it would be good as an online game. They should have just put it in Hogwarts legacy and been done with it.
Im not forgiving WB for destroying animation, its actually so tragic how they just don't care about removing people's work.
"Let's sell off Batman projects to other streaming services, this will surely help Max.'
....More content is kind of useful for your streaming services, you know Zavlev?
Honestly don’t blame them. Animation doesn’t make money any more
@@JUANxxTNAFAN Animation isnt supposed to make money exactly, its suppose to market the brand and sell toys and merch. Why does Pokemon anime go on forever? Because its an advertisement for the brand.
Mortal Kombat 1 was the final straw for me. $120 for a glorified early access mobile game with garbage micro transactions. AAA gaming is on its deathbed. Support Indy devs who create games for enjoyment, not corporate “content” designed to maximize share holder profits.
This. Sooooo this
they killed cartoon network which could have been a huge cross promotion, they also didn't take down multiversus when they should have, and they should not have had microtransactions on beta. these asshats are ruining themselves chasing short term gain at the cost of long term growth, it sucks that MK will go down with WB if it does go down but Zazlov should get some L's he is not good for WB as a whole.
Microtransactions on beta is wild
CN was doomed the day it had nothing but CalArts cartoons full of questionable content and political/rainbow-commie agendas. Thank Stephen Universe and friends.
Multiversus was doomed the minute LeBum "I love the CCP" James was added to Multiversus.
Ever since Zaslav became the CEO, WB went to shit
It was going to shit before with the rest of the industry. He obviously didn't fix any of the issues or the incentive structures are to produce this shit, which again he hasn't fixed.
@@holographicfrog1503alienating both the creatives and the consumers in service of chasing short term financial wins is not how you dig out of a hole
What did anyone expect hiring a lawyer with zero experience in entertainment would have trouble building an entertainment empire.
@@IdgaradLyracant it’s even worse than that. He’s the guy that built TLC by developing their tried-and-true formula of finding the most fame hungry abusive dads in Bible country and tricking them into signing away their family’s privacy rights.
@@cartilageheadseriously, much as some people have a hate on for particular creatives because of their own attitudes it's hard to deny the creatives' ability to produce and sell product for WBD if you're willing to actually look at the numbers.
I count some of said creatives as friends so I've seen what gets thrown at them by the supposed fans despite them doing more for WBD's bottom line than Zaslav is.
Something else that happened with Multiversus V2 was an age restriction. Originally they had none and you couldn't play V2 online if you were under 18. My son was 10 when the beta release and he fell in love with the game. When V2 dropped he downloaded it day one and when he realized all he could do was grind offline for effectively no reason, we uninstalled it that same day and never looked back. They had to have immediately alienated at least half of their player base with that alone.
Would've made more sense for the beta to be age restricted instead of the public release...
Needing to be 22+ to play a cartoon game is wild. And you can't even reset or remove your account to input the age verification menu again.
Instead of live service bullshit they should have just released Multiversus for 20-40 dollars and sell DLC character packs like Nintendo does.
And done packs until they stop selling. Easy strategy, should have done so.
Yeah. If they had an option to pay a flat fee for the base roster and had character packs comparable to modern fighting games I would have gotten it day one. I still haven't tried it because I don't want to engage with the free-to-play, 31 delicious flavors of xp/currency bs.
@@pug987 I may like MultiVersus, but honestly, that should've been it.
@@brentacomoosethat’s pretty much how it’s set up now, with the ability to earn xp towards character unlocks if you’d rather that over paying for the extra characters
Pretty much given up on AAA. As recently as 6 or 7 years ago I used to buy one every 6 weeks or so.
Despite having more disposable income and playing games as much as ever, I've bought 1 AAA game since Cyberpunk 2077 which I bought pre-ordered (last time I do that), That was Diablo 4 and have no plans to buy any more AAA games soon.
Enjoying indie and AA games a lot more. Not because they are cheaper. But because they are BETTER. More gameplay, better value, no imposition of gatcha mechanics. Just good games.
7DTD, Factorio, Grim Dawn, Age of Wonders 4, Balatro, Dying Light 2, Dwarf Fortress, OOTP25, X4 Foundations (best space sim EVER). NO shortage of games out there. Not sure I'll ever need AAA games again.
@@PaulRoneClarke Balatro definitely has to be my pick for indie game of the year. If someone told me a decade ago one of my favorite games would be a poker roguelike indie title, I'd have called them crazy. But damn that game is just fantastic, it deserves some awards and accolades.
Zaslav also apparently ruined Juni Ito anime Uzumaki
STEVEM has a good video about this.
Everything he touches turns to dung, especially WB's reputation. Good PR isn't a resource to be burned away.
If true, then that explains everything now why the animation quality took a nosedive after the 1st episode.
@@Redsword603that's actually pretty common sadly, animation is not cheap nor fast so often after the pilot episode values shift towards getting it out the door on a deadline. It's unfortunate but a fact of how the industry has been since its inception it's why shows with fast to produce styles like the Powerpuff Girls, Southpark or even one of the oldest anime Astro Boy didn't tend to get compromised as much to keep their deadlines.
"Who would had guessed that doing stuff nobody ask, and on top of that doing a subpar work most of the time, would make them loose money, who would had guessed?!, welp time to firen hundreds of people because i want my yearly bonus" - the higher ups at WB
Idiots the lot of them. I feel bad for their employees.
Lowkey I don’t think it makes sense for them to be directly in the games industry.
Disney dropped buena vista games forever ago.
License out your IP to other companies. Like disney does with ubisoft ea etc (but pick ya know good studios instead)
Problem is whoever picks the “good” studios/publishers look at nothing beyond cfo buzzwords like marketshare, revenue, track record in sales, etc.
I hate EA, but Respawn would make a killer Batman game.
Elevator pitch: "Picture this: live service MINE SWEEPER! Can't lose, baby! Literally free money! Just look at the existing player base!"
They won't learn anything, and will keep stepping on the same rake over and over and keep blaming the players for not buying their live service garbage.
KOF XV called, they want their "Fighting Game of the Year" back
The only part of WB that hasn't burned their goodwill is the WB archive team. Their blu ray releases have really been a godsend.
Multi Versus and Quidditch just doesnt interest me.
Legacy I totally vibe with but that's pretty much it. WB just has nothing else of interest and their response to SS is to abandon everything especially after legacy
Its just as stupid as EA.
"SP Games are dead!"
Releases a SP game that outsells all their LS games
"They are still dead an we are doubling down on LS!"
Total idiots.
I think they can bleed money in search of that FIFA or GTA V hit that would give them 1 billion a year. They are sociopaths, they do not care about creating anything or their workers, it's all about the next quarter and line must go up.
It actually baffles me. They have a well marketed and known franchise, Mortal Kombat. Yet they see it struggle for players and decide "yeah, lets make another fighting game guys! But it'll be quirky cos its 2v2" (which many have already failed at)
Then they burn extra money using flying brooms for more fuel
Not even a slop shooter or pve game. They have to be trying to fail 😂😂
Serves em right for sitting on that Nemesis System patent. Sell it to me and I'll forgive them.
AYE!
Should never have been allowed, game systems by and large aren't supposed to be copyrightable. Just like recipes.
Specific technology to achieve a process that couldn't be achieved before is certainly copyrightable, but the process itself is like a recipe.
Factorio only has one DLC, for those of you wondering. "second DLC" was a goof-up
I think corporations have gotten the relationship between money and work backwards. The point isn't to do work to get money, it is to get money so you can keep doing the work. Specifically here you don't make games to make money, you make money so you can keep making games. If you get this wrong you end up doing work just to profit or make money, and that is in essence work disentangled from meaning and joy, it is bad work. Profit and money are necessary evils to stay in business, but they should never be the incentive to do a business. That way goes to hell in a handbasket.
You do realize your entire philosophy goes against capitalism, right?
It makes perfect sense for a small business owner, doing what he loves, to enjoy doing what he loves first and only think of the income (beyond what's needed to ensure the business keeps enough success that one bad game dev cycle won't tank the entire company, of course) after the fact, sure.
But Big Corporations have to show profit and growth, and once the process of creating good games is down to a science rather than being pure art (and let's face it, most triple AA games by big corporations are science driven, nothing-new in them, but sometimes well-executed combinations of other games previous systems in a new package), then scraping up more cash out of each dev cycle becomes the only way to ensure continual growth, because you literally cannot count on any particular project pulling in the player engagement numbers you need, that's a crap shoot.
What we see happening in the larger games industry is the sadly natural result of big game makers trying to squeeze more and more profit from each new game release, and it's a never ending cycle of finding the next big marketing concept and pushing it onto the player bases, regardless if it serves the game best or not. When it happens to serve the game well, money is made, players are happy, etc. (WOW, Destiny, the Division, etc.) When it isn't doesn't serve the game well, players tend to throw a fit (Marvel's Avengers, Suicide Squad, etc.)
First it was the MMO boom post WOW (But really that boom was already in motion before WOW released, WOW was just the biggest winner of that era), then moved into live service subscription-based multiplayer games like Marvel Heroes A-RPG/MMO, next came mobile games monetization schemes which obfuscate the real money needed from the player, and then Live Service Squad based games that could also draw in players on console, and after that came the worst of the bunch, Gatcha style monetization which is basically gambling and should be illegal.
Now we're seeing all of these combined together in different ways all in an effort to squeeze as much money from the game purchasers as possible from each development cycle / game release.
It's just capitalism at work. The large game companies have reasoned that they cannot literally force everyone to but every game, yet the rules of capitalism require not only success, but constant growth year after year, and there comes a tipping point where no further growth is possible because the monetization has been maximized.
That's capitalism! And it has a lot to do with how it's set up in the U.S. Companies have investors who only want to give you their money if your company continues to grow indefinitely. That's why they have to squeeze so hard. If they don't, they die.
It's called capitalism and it's cancer
@@aripocki That's economy by parasite.
I haven't played a WB game since they screwed over the Asheron's call gaming community...bunch of honorless greed goblins
This channel has became my main source of gaming news
Heres to praying that all the AAA studios go out of business and we can get good games being made again when companies figure out "oh we should make things that customers want, because thats profitable" instead of "we should make games to piss off the player base because we hate gamers"
That wish of yours will not grant what you desire
@@Random_dud31 It might.
@gamerscomplete thats a really terrible idea. The problem is not triple a studios its publishers, always has been. Killing triple a games will tank the industry. Talent will leave and never come back. Killing triple a studios because of poor publisher performence is like removing the heart to cure projectile vomiting. Effective but actually runs counter to your goal.
We don't need AAA to fail, it's an easy way for money to get into the sector. The rise of Indie is what we need. More and more indie companies are ex-AAA developers and will continue to trend like this which may develop new AAA companies and the cycle repeats
They don't hate gamers, they're just gamblers who think they're businessmen.
I think developers have just forgotten what 'passion' and 'risk' means, its why Indie teams are making so much more than AAA companies. Resident Evil 7, Half-Life 2, Titanfall and FNAF an amazing example of a team (or solo dev) who had a passion to make a masterpiece, took a huge risk that it would hold up and succeeded spectacularly. Now everything is just the same watered down garbage that is recycled because its a well known name. STOP using games as a way to make money and START using it as a tool to write something you care about!
I wouldn't consider thoee games with the exception of FNAF, indie games.
Bruh are you seriously calling Capcom and Valve an indie team? Good argument but awful examples.
I feel like one of the biggest issues is Publishers/Investors .. seem to struggle to understand how creative industries work .. like you can't treat them like a factory production line.
@@madeumad64 I understand what OP meant, its just worded poorly. While RE7, HL2 and Titanfall arent at all indie games, OP is trying to point out how all three were relatively ''risky'' projects (especially RE7) developed by passionate teams and managed to attract a huge cult following, and unfortunately that sentiment just isn't as common especially nowadays. This is what I managed to understand out of their comment tho.
Not the developers. Its higher up in the ladder.
Warner Brothers: "Our Game business is underperforming..."
Meanwhile, CAPCOM: "500,000 people played the open beta for Monster Hunter Wilds..."
Not sure if WB and Sony really learned what went wrong.
Multiversus is honestly a really solid game at this point but the launch was an absolute disaster. The sad part is it doesn't seem like executive meddling that ruined things. PFG should not have made the decision to move to UE5, it added nothing but problems. The Smash community is very fickle, and building a live service to appeal to players who refuse to move on from Melee was just stupid. You'll never be Nintendo, you'll definitely never be 2000s Nintendo. The game really wasn't in as bad of a state as you claim originally, it needed that large initial count to burn through as it found its own audience and they completely wasted it.
Live service games peaked a while back, that line ain't going up no more.
I feel like the games industry is seriously underestimating the appeal of mid-length games (10-20 hours).
The issue with live service games is your either the best in a certain genre or you fail, you can't just be a good hero shooter you have to be better then every other hero shooter or else why not just play those hero shooters. With a single player game you don't have to be better then elden ring because everyones already played it, you just have to be good enough for people to want to play your game.
I agree but almost all people do *is* play live service games, hell it helped made the industry more profitable than movies nowadays
Reminder that if anyone tells you the game industry is in the gutter, IT'S NOT, IT'S LITERALLY JUST BIG COMPANIES WHINING THAT NOBODY LIKES THEM.
I still want a good single player Superman game.
If they can do it with Goku, surely Clark can have one too
It's not Superman, specifically. But there is a game coming out where you basically have Superman-esque powers.
It's called Undefeated.
Might be for you, might not. But it's certainly proof that an actual Superman game is doable.
WB screwed me on pre order of mortal kombat, so I haven’t bought another game from them.
I don't hate them for patenting the Nemesis system. I hate them for doing so and then do nothing with it for 7-8 years and counting. If they would have extended the system to other IPs, added new dimensions to it, etc. we could all enjoy it. On other words, the problem is that they patented it and then didn't do anything else good with it.
I’m not going to lie, Multiversus as a game is super cheap and free to play and they have/had a small dev team only existing for a couple years. There’s no way Multiversus lost them a huge % of those millions of dollars. Especially with how they don’t have to pay for character rights. This is just me speculating.
I actually played Quiddich Champions during the closed playtest. I enjoyed it, so much so that I purchased cosmetics with REAL MONEY because I wanted to support the developers.
Fast forward to the game's release, and not only did I not get to keep those cosmetics, but I wasn't even compensated with in-game currency.
Refunded. 👿
6:47 They changed it to where all characters are available on offline play as of season 3
yup! quite a few bits of miss information in here. Rifts do not have lives.
@ShadowTaiga I didn't think they did either, but figured i was misinformed since I dont touch rifts very often
Too late though. They did it when all the grassroots hype is gone
@@ShadowTaiga they did at one point (i think on the looney difficulty) and they said "it was a bug"
@@mjdevlog best I could figure was it was something they tried and scraped and missed removing UI elements. As no one could have made it to Looney difficulty yet and it was gone really quick. i was definitely disappointed with the rerelease switching to a whole new engine instead of just fixing the original game was an odd move from my perspective. But maybe UE5 offered better net code possibilities? IDK its a fun game i enjoy playing co-op with my buddy but i don't think I'd play much without a duo's partner. Platform fighting games are such a small niche genre but ive definitely been playing more frequently this go round. Now they are making a bunch of big changes this patch so we will see how it goes.
I am like 99% sure that WB is the reason why NetherRealm studios games have so many cameo characters and they are using it as an opportunity to advertise their other franchises. Especially because now cross-over dlc characters outnumber non cross-over dlc characters.
I don't have a problem with 1 or 2 but, using the recent release/announcement of Ghostface in MK1 as an example, its just weird sometimes and not in a good way.
WB messed up a very long time ago. Every game they touched, they found a way to ruin the experience.
Most disappointing for me is how much they destroyed Mortal Kombat instantly
WB has a magical ability of only launching good games when they don’t care about it just look at Mad Max and Batman Arkham Shadows
Multivurses never should have been a free to play game
I feel like Disney is the only one who can save WB FROM THEMSELVES
WB needs to fail so their patents have a chance to be released or at least utilized. Peak corporate at the expense of their audience.
If they give up on multversis I hope they make it so you can start a game connecting to each other.
That would be a very unusual decision in this industry. Big pubs routinely flip the kill switch when they determine a game can no longer be saved, and they do it as a middle finger to the ones who scorned them as well as the ones that supported them.
@mc_zittrer8793 True. Good will for gamers is dead.
WB have been shooting themselves in the foot since "Man of Steel".
WB, you have easy money and refuse to pick it up - Mortal Kombat Kollections. We see how crazy good it's been for Capcom to release sets of their old games and MK has enough material for two such bundles. All the main games, the Ultimate/Gold versions and the side-games like Shaolin Monks and even Mythologies and Special Forces. That's not bringing up other Midway IPs they do nothing with, like Rampage.
Well, it's not like anyone could have predicted this coming.
Who is everyone? Hire him.
Multiversus was super fun but i kept running into bad connections with random players so i would only play with friends and that only lasts so long
Good rollback is the backbone of any competitive game that deserves to stick around.
if you liked it you should try again it is much much better now.
@@ShadowTaiga Maybe if they fixed the monetization to allow people to at least get the base roster at reasonable price.
@@sinteleon next patch they are adding the option to buy all but the new character for $50 i believe. You can play all characters while offline and training mode.The $50 is cheaper for each character you already own. they are also changing how you get characters to make it better but I didn't listen since i already have them all.
@@ShadowTaiga Took them long enough, should've been an option at launch outright.
If you see the financial reports comin'
Warn a Brother
I played Multiversus when it first launched and enjoyed it a lot. However, the monetization was outrageous back then already. They also were intransparent about characters rotating, which meant every few weeks a huge percentage of players logged on to suddenly be unable to play their main, unless they grinded for hours, with characters they don't want to play as, or pay. And that was basically the core of every design decision - how to we create a problem that can be monetized. Even the overpriced battlepass, which is suppposed to be a carrot on a stick getting you to play just a little longer was outrageously grindy. While the core gameplay was great (aside from balancing issues), all of the monetization hurdles sucked every bit of fun out of the game bit by bit. The rugpull of "this was just a beta, though we never really said so" and taking the game offline for way too long was spelling its own death sentence. I checked back when they fully released it, but after reading about even more monetization and changes to game speed and more balancing issues, I never reinstalled. Quite sad.
It honestly baffles me how WB has such talented developers working for them, putting out games with such immense potential, only for that potential to be consistently wasted.
I think the problem is that investors see a new game concept take off and instead of thinking "we should do something that nobody else is doing and carve out our own market" they say "we should do the exact same thing for cheaper and try to steal some of that market." You're not going to beat developers at their own specialty. Just do something new. It doesn't have to be huge budget, just something that's fun and nobody else is doing.
Unfortunately, beating other companies in their new market is a sound, profitable strategy.
World of Warcraft upended Everquest and various Asian PvP-MMOs in it's era to become Blizzards untouchable cash cow, and when Blizzard already hadthe ARPG market topped with Diablo, that's saying something.
Take me to a shard of the multiverse where no one has ever thought of the concept of multiverses
Player First Games was acquired likely so the monetization scheme would put players last.
@@garion333 I was looking for a comment like this.
the irony that WB games would aquire a studio called players first is really funny
Multiversus had so much potential, and they squandered it over pay for fun gimmicks…
They fucked up with the single player being rifts. That mode is horrible i wish they just made a story they could add to over the course of seasons
In regards to MultiVersus there were a few pieces of information that were outdated or incorrect:
1. All fighters are available to play in local multiplayer for free and it’s been like that for a little while now, they’re currently trying to build up the tournament scene for this game too
2. The lives system for the single player rifts was never implemented. People dug it up in the code or in an earlier build of the game and passed it around like it was an official release of the feature but I’ve done every single rift in almost every available difficulty and I have never seen that feature, not even on the hardest difficulties
Those are critical pieces of information that you left out, and even though it was not done intentionally or maliciously it’s still disappointing to see
They should double David Zaslav's salary, surely if they pay him even more he'll stop making the worst decisions imaginable at every given opportunity.
Even if they have smashing hit, it will be ruined by corporate greed. No point investing time and money into their "live services".
Imagine has they just released a 40 dollar game in 22 with 3-4 paid dlc packs like smash. Would have been so much better.
The only game I care about now is that Wonder Woman game. If they fuck that up, I am done with WB.
I don't actually think this would happen, and actually doing it well is easier said than done, but it would be pretty interesting if they gave a studio free rein to make a full on BG3-style Game of Thrones RPG, complete with decision-making that can effect who ends up on the throne or whatever.
Multiversus could (and should) have been amazing, but they messed it up by making it a live service! It should have been a $40-$60 game with extra fighters released later as paid DLC!
WB vastly underestimated how much of an undertaking a game like this, under a model like this is. Nintendo did not do it own their own. They had to tap into Bamco's generational knowledge and teams to make Smash work. A new studio without this foundation was always going to face major hurdles.
Technically they have made many smash games at home. Bandai happens to have support studios for colab work with Nintendo and does it with Smash. Nintendo could probably do an internal team again without much hassle.
But they also started from 'hey, can we do this? and took at least until Melee to really hit it big. WB expected to skip a few steps.
@@krspaceT1 Yeah, agree. Nintendo even without Bamco is already in a WAY better place than WB was. I definitely think they could've put out Smash Ultimate, with less content, using internal teams alone. Especially given the foundation they had from Smash 4. I just think that it wouldn't have been as successful of a live service game as it was without the support of Bamco.
@@-nomi.- less content or possibly a later launch. One of the two
Best i can tell from looking at end of life numbers for Smash Brothers for the WiiU, it was down to between 10-30 thousand concurrent players. So for WB to look at those numbers and think "Yeah! Theres room for a live service there!" Is baffling.
@11:56 I believe the Factorio devs have explicitly stated that they don't ever intend to discount their game. Don't remember the exact reasons given; may have been to avoid older players (especially in its early access years) feeling cheated and undervalued, may also have been to avoid the "just wait for a sale" mentality on potential new players.
They failed years ago... failed me with Asherson Calls series and there support. Nothing has changed...
They shouldn't have given public access to multiversus until 1.0 or at least only offered an early access beta like a month or 2 before launch to drum up hype, and then have that momentum roll smoothly into the release of 1.0. If they launched it as a solid, polished, balanced and finely tuned game, they would have retained a lot more players and goodwill, and been able to translate that into more microtransaction sales.
Did not help that the switch from the beta to the release they did a massive change to the gameplay speed which killed my enjoyment of the game. Maybe I would have stuck with it had there was not so many different MTX systems that got added to it as well but the gameplay feeling worse AND tons of MTX systems thats going to be a nope from me and the last WB Game I will ever support.
@@WasabiCannonI will say, both aspects of it, the MTX and the game speed have vastly improved and S4 which comes out tomorrow is supposed to improve it even further
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I really enjoy multiversus , I hope it survives
The quidditch game is fun af, especially now that the 6v6 mode got added. It's also has NO MICROTRANSACTIONS, and the progression is really nice. It's like wizard themed rocket league. My guess it probably struggled making a strong first impression because it made no sense canonically to not have 6v6 on launch, and instead had this confusing role-swapping system as the standard
I genuinely think the main problem is the price. Like it’s super super pricey compared to other games 😭
They make games 70$ and expect us still to have the money and TIME to play everything new that comes out😆😆
If WB wanted this could have competed with smash but its just a shame they were looking to invest in a loss leader.
True even more so weird cuz they did invest in ssquad for the same reason. Its like if you just made ssquad a single player 1 time playthrough game and then put all the live service money into multiverse they would have been way further ahead.
🎉🎉What a great topic, i've been wanting to hear more about this!
Quidditch Champions is a key demonstration of segmenting old game concepts off just to make more money is running into people not understanding how to cut the cake and still have a slice you can give to a customer.
The prior Harry Potter games, the originals with the lumpy geometric character models, they kept that as an integral component because there isn't enough interest in it alone. It's not college football or basketball. It's a thing that's done as part of the wider inter-school competition. It's only one piece of the wider experience of being a student at Hogwarts.
God the nemesis mechanic being stuck in hell development with the WW game is just so unfortunate for everyone else. I can only imagine a Star Wars game set in the Old Republic era and running arround as a Jedi or Sith accolyte and fighting stronger and stronger enemies with the mechanic. Oh it would be so glorious.
The problem as always is greed. They want a continuous revenue flow from life service games, but insist on them also having an upfront buying price. In addition, the slop they release doesn't have nearly the needed quality a life service game needs to justify the high prices on top of the predatory monetization methods that honestly should be prohibited for all life service games, but sadly consumer protection laws are always years upon years behind where they are needed.
As someone with almost 0 interest in rhe game of thrones IP I would actually be really interested in a single player RPG in that IP
the disconnect between "the money line" and "the player count line" is wild.
I was done with Multivers when they switched the cop car with the mystery mobile. I'm hoping with everything going on, things will get better
As a Multiversus Semi-Pro and someone who watches Belluar watching this is really sad. They changed the game too much from Beta on MVS and the movement isn't as crisp which is really important when the skill of the game was the movement.
Good video with lots of great information but I feel like you left an important piece out regarding multiverses. After the game went offline for all those months it came back with all the character models and stages rebuilt with a better unreal engine 5 graphics BUT lacking features that it had in the beta such as the stats after every game showing how much damage you did and how many of your opponents you knocked out among other things. As far as I know no one was really asking for the graphics improvement. I was $100 backer and active with the community and some of the social media spaces and I never heard people talk about how the game needed better graphics. The graphics looked great They were stylized and gameplay was obviously the most important part. The animations were good! When the development team was asked why so many missing features they responded that they had to rebuild every stage and character and resize art assets for the official release and that is what took up all the time and they barely got that done. So it's not just that the game went offline It's that it went offline and came back less of a full package than it did when it was in beta.
As well as them changing significantly core aspects of the gameplay such as combo speed and base movement.
But the sad part is that what you said is absolutely right, the game has the potential to be amazing and when it plays well it's super fun. I've continued to play it only because I'm stubborn and I'm trying to get my money's worth but honestly I wasn't enjoying myself till the last updates. They fixed ground movement and air movement and people seem to be liking the new character unlocks better so the game is slowly becoming better and better. I hope it's not too little too late and that they continue to make a more enjoyable product for everyone