I think this Charlie Brown guy makes a lot of sense...

Big budget AAA games are mostly just sandbox worlds filled with chores.

Honestly the thing I hate the most about the industries proverbial gold rush for "THE NEXT HIT MULTIPLAYER GAME" is how many video game developers set out to make a hit eSport. Live service is one thing, but the thing you'll quickly notice if you look at the most popular eSports is that virtually none of them launched in an even remotely balanced or god forbid "professional" state. But guess what, they were fun to play! And even if some things were critically unbalanced or at times blatantly unfair, the games were so good and attracted such a large audience that even if the balance was a complete mess, there was inevitably going to be a sizable portion of the player base that wants to compete to be the very best like no one ever was. Like I know it's derivative to just say "Make fun games lol", but it feels like the industry forgets that in order to have a thriving player base that loves a game so dearly that they're willing to spend thousands of hours across several years playing it, you kinda have to make playing the game enjoyable first.

I just love the Warcraft 2 ost. There is definitely much wisdom in your words, but my mind just keep wibing with the music. 😇

My 2 cents. I went and studied 'game design', but it was a misnomer, it was game development. I learned, to some extent, animation, sound design, coding and time management. At no point did the teachers or tasks discuss 'Fun' as the ends of our means.

"If you don't know your destination port, no wind is favourable." Very true in any work / grind context. I'm currently realising that with life things the opposite might be true sometimes :) Loving the rants, always very worthwhile!

The "be interesting every 10 seconds, whether that's you or the gameplay or whatever" is, well...very interesting. There used a to be a channel called "Pre-Recorded" from some of the red letter media guys (Jack and Rich). They were extremely interesting to listen to, since they would cover all sorts of nerd media as they played, from comics to tv shows to industry news. Really good stuff that was were I got like, 90% of my media recommendations through. But they ended up stopping the channel because they were getting tired of playing games all the time and tired of trying to find new games to play - which caused some funny reactions from the community which was basically "We don't get a flip about the games you are playing - it's basically just background noise. YOU GUYS are the interesting part!". So yeah, I just thought it was funny that it's kind of the reverse of the situation Day9 outlines, where they themselves were super interesting, but thought the games were the ONLY thing that had to be interesting! I know there's a few other reasons they wanted to stop Pre-Recorded (busy schedules etc.), but I always thought that was interesting to reflect on.

Your brother had a video like this but from an esports perspective. All the outside money came in and ROI wasn't there yet. The money pulled out and a crater left in the wake and basically had to rebuild.

Yep; gold rush by an industry. They bought the best shovels and hored the best miners but there wasnt quite the gold in those hills that they thought

I am a consultant/application developer and like game dev, the direction and requirements for a project is so crucial. That includes management. In a world of AAA gaming, it is driven by smash hits and the corpo suits are seeing only that.. It is not sustainable at the moment. My main hobby is gaming and I can't imagine working in games. Even in the indie space. It is so scary to me. I highly recommend the Psych Odyssey docu series for Psychonauts 2 if you want some perspective. It is the most transparent view into development I have ever seen. It is crazy.

Another problem is that older games and indie games make the industry much more competitive. No one's that interested in the next 7/10 triple-A release when we have a decade old backlog of masterpieces we've been meaning to get to that are all 20 bucks or less. Any full price release pretty much has to be Elden-Ring level for me and my friends to consider buying it. In 2005, a new release basically only competed with other new releases. Now a new release is competing with all the top hits from 2010 onwards.

So true Sean. This is something I see a lot, people going into an industry with a skewed perception. I blame the social media and news for this. The one that get the most attention and view is the success stories, or the abysmal failures, the middle ground dont get as much traction. All the stories about studios and publisher making a hit games and net millions give the impression that making game is easy. I often get asked about breaking into the game industry, but the thing is, you don't need to ask anyone, just go to artstation and you see the quality and skills you should be aiming for, it is long, hard, and tedious hours of work and practice, and it still come down to luck if you get a job or not. Making games isn't easy or glamourous as people thought it is.

"How do I become a content creator???" Make content people wanna consume. Pretty good advice. Pretty good.

"What happens if they're building toward an unclear target" sounds like the Stormgate slogan.

Clicked for the rant Stayed for the Warcraft 2 OST. Great game.

Hearing the Warcraft 2 soundtrack again... man it's so good.

I think the bigger issue that people arguably miscategorize as "greed" is that the ownership and management structure of the vast majority of game studios strongly incentives short term profits and trend-chasing over reliable long term planning. In a universe where more game's companies were worker-owned, hiring 20-30% more staff than you need would be rightfully seen as a colossal failure on the part of upper management to correctly manage long-term risk, and c-suites responsible for those failures would be out of a job if they couldn't turn things around without layoffs. But as long as share prices are maximized in the short term, there's very little reason for stockholders at big companies to consider layoffs a real management failure. And the result isn't just layoffs, but more cancelled projects and worse games overall as developers are further overworked to cover for these failures. Just a deplorable state of affairs, and one I've heard is pretty common in the wider software industry as well, sadly.

Speaking as a game dev I can say that no one sets out to make a mediocre game, it’s usually just that you run out of money and time. I’ll also say that most games don’t find the best way to make everything work to be “fun” until the very last minute, so you have to strike a delicate balance between improving what makes the game great and actually finishing off the whole game. Planning is impossible simply because no one knows what will actually be fun until you make it, and estimating how long things will take is a notoriously impossible task for developers. The only way that teams of developers get better at making games is to make more games. So even making mediocre games is progress on the way to making truely great games. So this wave that has ultimately stopped many game developers from actually practicing making games, I doubt that will be a good thing for people expecting the quality of games to increase

Hi Sean, I'm curious, are there specific micro and macro strategies to dialogue content and delivery of speech that you take (or avoid) to maintain such high content quality?

You are very on the point here, many investors or managers do not seem to know what makes games appealing, they just know what might sell them. They might even calculate with that risk, but not the human cost or prestige cost if one fails, because they can only see investment vs payoff. Also, the industry is still a highly unregulated and union-soft, so exploitation and gambling is done before respecting the people that make the games. It's exists in many industries, that disconnect between the investor, or shot-caller and the actual craftspeople, but in games it certainly amplified with the technical challenge vs how dependent on steady employment it is.

Sean brings up a very good point about 7 out 10 games not being good enough. Right now on my PC I have ready to play: FFXIV, Trackmania, all of the Souls games, Risk of Rain 1 and 2, Terraria, BG 3, Talos Principle 1 and 2, Armored Core, etc etc. All of those are 9 and 10 out of 10 games. A bunch of them I haven't finished. Why in god's name I would play shit like Suicide Squad or Starfield.

Man, I no longer watch Day9 regularly, but every time one of his videos pop into my feed I don't hesitate to watch it. He is just so articulate and makes excellent points. I always learn something about the industry.

Something I see streamers do that I think helps them is being informative, opinionated, talking their thoughts out loud, and they usually play a game that doesn't require complete concentration on the game. The last point I made is especially crucial due to the interaction time needed for their audience's chat, whether answering questions or just reading chat out loud. It's nice to be seen and have one's voice heard online. As a perfect example to this, we have Day9 able to pause his game to interact with his stream and give all those points I listed, which I find awesome and crucial in streaming.

It's exactly how you described it. I was affected by a recent layoff in the gaming industry (not AAA, but mobile-gaming) and people just saw the gaming industry explode during the pandemic. Everyone wanted a piece of the pie and studios popped up left and right. I still remember when it came to making our games the actual effort that went into the fundamental gameplay was maybe 20%, while the monetization made up 80%. That's just not how you make good games.

I work in the industry. It's really not complicated. First, less money is being spent on movies and video games nowdays and companies are dumping more money for making them which leads to number two; games are becoming harder to make for multiple reasons. The pandemic has change the way we make game. Game company are trying to having employees back in their studios. This is why Indie developper are doing so well. They often have tighter control on the outcome, less employees to manage and communication is easier that way. Lastly, it leads to what is being discussed; quality. The quality of video game is going down on average because of number 2.

Making video games wasn't originally about trying to create the next big hit. For most people it was a passion project. To say yes I successfully made an interactive piece of entertainment for people to enjoy. The simplicity has become a distant memory.

I want to note that a 7/10 game from an individual or a super small team of people can actually be "good enough" in the sense that if a small audience thinks its a 9/10 it will pass with them and do well. Only once you have big teams does the game need to be killer to be worth it.

I've been watching your stuff for years Sean! It's great that you are introspective about your own performance and appreciate the brutality of numbers. There are always gold nuggets in your streams that seem to spontaneously come into existence. Much love and respect. And very nice quote!

This really helps me stay confident in talking about Infinity Wars feature of making a card game where you get all the cards and not being pay to win like basically every other card game out there, instead of hyping the stuff you mentioned. Thanks Day9!

What a great "mini talk" from Day[9]. Does anyone know whether we can find this in transcribed form, or at least w/o the loud background music?

I think the biggest problem is the mentality that is driving the direction of game design. One game does something fun and innovative and thus has success from it. Then the investors see that this thing did well, so they need to replicate it ad nauseum. Game design decisions are being driven by sales data and marketing surveys rather than actual game design principles. And this problem has been going on for *decades.*

This is completely unrelated but I didn't realise so much of the original HS soundtrack was just remixed WC2 music

The music is somehow timed perfectly with this rant

I don't disagree. Though when it comes to AAA studios I think there is a big problem of investors having a say in what the game should be. Investors invest for the sole purpose of return of investment, this often results in following fads and innovation stagnation since they want to make money as efficiently as possible, because they benefit from it. I believe the moment a studio listens to investors is when a great studio becomes mediocre and bland at best. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. This also relates to layoffs, lay off people before the yearly report to artificially inflate the margins (or whatever the exact statistic they use).

The reverse of this has also been common! Many live service games that are poorly handled and badly marketed have enormouse loyal fanbases despite it all. Guild Wars 2 feels like one marketing disaster after another but its core gameplay, especially its combat, are so fun that it's become completely unkillable

Hey, i discovered your chanel with asmon, i wish you the best and hope to get more insight on game dev from you! Thanks!

You have some good points in here, but I don't know if those points support your conclusion that well. While what you're saying makes sense regarding how to make a fun game, that only makes all these layoffs remotely justifiable if you assume the premise that either 1) a better game equals a more profitable game, or 2) the people in charge care about the quality of the product more than they care about the profit they make from it. I find it very hard to believe in either of those.

eyyyyy , never knew that the in-game pet battle music in WoW was from WC2 at 6:15 ish

I believe the solution starts with DIRECTORS. Movies are similar, where money can put the production together, but you gotta have a good vision and direction to execute. And this needs to come top-down, from a good creative leader that people can follow. None of that bikeshedding or design-by-committee junk. I think too many gaming companies have been putting Executives and VP's at the helm of their production rather than great creative people with good track records. This is something that some Japanese game companies are getting right.

Thank you !

You have no idea how apt that sailing metaphor is. While working on a project that went nowhere, we were asked every so often on what kind of seas we were sailing (yes literally that). Anytime someone would mention that they didn't understand the full vision yet, couldn't see the fun in there, etc. We got told "you don't have the full picture yet." There never was a full picture. Leadership was sailing without a course and without a map. Getting told by investors what the next feature for the milestone was going to be. We would make a half finished feature, show it to them and then move on the next thing they requested, while never finishing the previous thing. By the end it either gets canned or rushed out the door as a mediocre product that nobody wants. I have gotten more experience working a crap than working on actual games at this point.

Is day9 playing the old warcraft games? I have always wanted to play Warcraft 1 and 2, is therw a legal way to do so?

How many CEOs were laid off from the major studios? How many of them took pay cuts? The purpose of these layoffs is to reduce labor costs so the executives and shareholders can take that money

Can we get Day9's top 5 must read books on business, creativity, and gaming?

This is a nice rant.

the music lol

You're not going to make the next big thing if you're only ever chasing is the last big thing - and yet this is what game companies do, endlessly

We need more rants to the Warcraft 2 soundtrack.

Great analysis and /agree 100%

More compelling is seans take on broadcasting. He has a very unique viewpoint, as hes professionally trained for it. I think 'being entertaining every 10 seconds' is a very dangerous concept. Much like the games industry argument, there are a lot of very popular Streamers who provide little to no useful information or quality gameplay, but survive simply by acting for views.

game development has always been volatile; you're always gambling on your next project - it can utterly flop and you are either 1) screwed or 2) going to be screwed on the next flop. There's always an element of luck involved (regardless of your planning, etc) that eventually the house always wins. The bigger your budget the more flops hurt.

Bro, I see Warcraft 2, I give a like and subscribe. Now I’m gonna look through your list and see if you’re streaming Warcraft 2 campaigns.

it always hurts to see studios shut down that make *actually good games*. but they do either way.

1:10 - it's so much more than that though. It's not just the gaming industry. It's the entire tech industry. And funnily enough - it's largely nothing to do with the industry or the companies involved. It's a macro-economic issue stemmed from the fact that these companies or teams were created during times of cheap debt (pandemic) and (relatively) lower cost of living. Now, interest rates are up, debt is expensive, cost of living is through the roof (which applies pressure to companies to increase wages) and companies are stuck in the middle of two very severe pain points. The playbook exists for a reason. If you need to clear up $10 million in debt, the easiest way to do it is to remove 10 people from your company. People are your most expensive assets. Now imagine you have $500 million in debt...

Fantastic points

Why is it so hard to yeet incompetent management anyway? And what are the executives doing for their ridiculous salaries and bonuses?

Very good take

What other people think is always secondary. What matters most is the thing you're actually making. That is the fact of reality that everything you do should be grounded in. What other people think is important, but you cannot expect to make others think well of you time and time again, if you never actually deliver, because all you're selling is a big bag of air. That's called fraud.

AAA companies have become complacent in business and are no longer aiming to produce anything but a marketable product. From the top down they have baked in the culture of marketability, reach and growth instead of fun, community and future.

What happened to your hair?! The Legend still lives!

one really important thing to remember is that even the best authors / game developers / creatives have their flops / misses; with game development if your budget is always big you are guaranteed to fail eventually (at a smaller scale - like for an individual author; if you have a crappy 2-3 years you just don't release your crap work, for a multi-million dollar project that's impossible).

Shit this makes me want to watch your stream

Dude - as a game dev I have been saying for years that if a game isn’t massively successful, it’s not good enough. Anything worth while will find its audience and spread like wild fire.

there are things that fit into a management / investement level overview, and then there are things that actually determine whether the game is good, subtleties, synergies, polish, etc, and there is no overlap in the venn diagram. so the management / investment puts their energy into tuning and cranking all the levers that exist at their resolution, but none of them are actually meaningful levers, and by manipulating the project in this way they disempower the actual designers and engineers whose work will actually determine the outcomes, its almost as funny as it is sad

its not just layoffs in gaming. lots of businesses, especially the banking industry, are firing their work from home employees expecting 30% of them not to return to the office by force. if businesses can, they try to get people to quit so they dont have to deal with the political fallout of layoffs.

Also, the games that make the most money aren’t the 10/10 games

I strongly agree. There have been a lot of games in recent years where you hear about it and are like really? You had no idea what you were doing for that long? Like with mass effect Andromeda, there's this huge development cycle and people are like wow. Thats what you made? But really they kind of fucked around with procedural generation for a really long time, seemingly fruitlessly, and then they reached a point where higher ups finally were like ok we need an actual, real game. And then Andromeda was pieced together mostly in like 2 years give or take. This isn't an uncommon story in the industry even for large games. I'm not 100% sold that this is the only issue but it's certainly a very large issue. I'm also curious where some game ideas are really coming from. You see a title like suicide squad which was very negatively received when it was first shown off. A title that was in development for quite awhile. And you cant help but wondering how they were insulated from that response.

As someone w/o Sean's unique industry-specific perspective, I think I'm more inclined to see this as a broader phenomenon and disagree with his assessment...The problem with saying, "The industry just needs to do better; it's really competitive out there" is that other industries are showing this is an oversimplification and that socioeconomic conditions dwarf the influence of 'creatives who plan better'. Are Marvel movies getting worse because filmmakers are getting worse at writing? (Or for my IT pals, did VMware staff get laid off in droves because the software is suddenly unusable? cough cough corporate merger cough cough) I think not. As profits rose, we didn't see better movies coming from the big studios, did we? We saw corporate consolidation and a WRITER'S STRIKE! IMHO, this is about the failure to proportionally reward employees for the increases in revenue that they are ultimately responsible for. The mandate for C-suite execs in unfettered market capitalist environments is to ACQUIRE and GROW, not create. These incentives encourage the company to produce the 'expensive-looking, mostly broken, Kevin Hart-voiced title', buy smaller studios to cover the inevitable deficit when that game flounders, and the PLAN adjusts so they can do it again and again (and if I'm doing my job as the contract defines...am I really being "greedy"?). All that fresh blood in the games industry? Makes it really easy to PLAN to fire and re-hire >80% of the team for each project, REGARDLESS of result. Increased competition across the market SHOULD drive up the total volume of games that fail. But to act like that's the reason for a dramatic uptick in layoffs (the likes of which can be observed ACROSS industries) is to miss the forest for the trees... TLDR - Trust-busting is dead, this is all Nixon's fault, and 'blind optimism' from the market is nowhere near as damaging as anti-populist government policy.

Omg Warcraft 2

9:57 lmao based question

If they weren't making great games, then good shut em all down

WOW, that question, "Why don't they just make good games?" LOL How are people this ignorant?

Sean, working in tech generally, I've seen such incompetence at the level of leadership. It's just a real shame.

The whole discourse around the layoffs, and the fact that a lot of the media suddenly realized these stories are great for clicks, has just been weird. It's been a frenzy of feeding "emotional garbage" to an uninformed audience. Did some of it warrant the attention it got ? Probably. But never in my 20-ish years of following the industry has there been an inkling of similar attention to the business side of studios and publishers. I guess it got primed with the whole MS acquisition debacle last year, but no one used to care or pay attention to stuff like this unless it was some big shot leaving or getting fired or a darling studio getting shut down. EA had a run in the noughties and 2010s where they were buying and shutting down studios all over the place, and sure they got some flak but it was nowhere close what we've seen this year.

Wonderful to see these idea floated in a mainstream space. Hubris and ignorance are way more responsible for the deluge of awful coming from, as said, most/all creative fields these days. Diablo 4 anyone? Millions of people behind it, legendary studio and IP, current generation everything! And nobody bothered focusing on making the game any good, then they decided to delude themselves into thinking it couldn't be their fault, it must be their customers who just don't know what they like. Now they're apparently still trying to fix it but frankly anyone still giving them attention at this point is part of the problem.

I wonder how Riot Games layoffs fit in this narrative.

You're interesting every 5 seconds Day9 :)

what about hi-fi rushes studio, that game litterally got praised into heaven for being the work of love that it was. That studio being shut down just hurts to watch.

didn't expect you to be based, i guess the gamefest presenter script was just really bad lol

1) its sad and ironic that Sean is discussing this over Warcraft considering where Blizzard went (RIP). 2) Since when does Sean have a wife

Movie games, bad writing, terrible characters, absent gameplay or worse, boring rote 3rd-person "action" gameplay in the Ubisoft mold, boring worlds, boring worlds adapted from people's boring D&D campaigns, the list goes on and on. The project leads and people greenlighting projects are taking a fat dump on this industry while the technical and art folks take the hit. This liquidation phase is necessary but the wrong people are getting punished. We need fewer and better games.

Being a streamer is HARD. Bravo Sean. You make being entertaining look effortless.

Every tech company has laid off last year or two. Unless someone is in AI companies aren't interested.

The industry over-hired in the pandemic and expected infinite growth. The AAA industry is too big to succeed, they cannot adapt to the fast changing market

Yeah, I don´t beleive for even half a second that most of these layoffs aren´t just the usual slimming down of companies after they released something as to make it more profitable on paper and then sell it. Laws that make such layoffs possible should be changed, how can you live like this? How are games being made AT ALL?

the most popular games aren’t 10/10 games though

The poor planning / management of this video is having the background music blasting in the background.

The economy is in shambles, what do you expect?

too many games being released

Have they tried releasing good games that don't artificially cost 900 million to make? Don't remember asking for Hollywood celebrity voice actors. Do you?

So, less filler. Got it. :)

@13:35 I have very happily joined many day9tv streams and have to point out that: most of the time I did not stop watching because I was no longer entertained, but because other responsibilities required me to. I am sure day9 can draw conclusions from trends but don't overlook many of us would watch more if we could.

whats crazy is y ou look at the sea of thieves announcements and it very much is like what people compared it to at release. they would call it nomans sea because it was so much like nomans sky in promising a lot and delivering nothing. but bugs and programing incompetence aside sea of thieves has so much to offer now. though porting a 6 year old insanely buggy game to a new console without at least finally fixing 6 year old bugs is kinda... weird. but hey they werent planning to be nearly as successful as they are so

Deserved :)

He could go on forever :D

There's also this really odd cultural influence that creates an expectation in the employees mind. Generations ago, it was common to get a job, and keep that job for 30 years. There are still some industries like oil drilling, mining, manufacturing, where you really become a lifer because it's all you know how to do. These jobs required training, there were other social and cultural reasons where people defined who they were by what they do "I am a plumber" or "I am a mechanic" or "I am a teacher". Defining ourselves by what we do means we tend to put a lot of our self worth into our current job. Consequentially, society tells us that if you lose your job, it's traumatic, you did something wrong, you should have done better or you should have been more talented or been a better fit. What I've come to realize and has helped me through a half a dozen layoffs in my 15 year career in the games industry and what I tell people who struggle with the trauma, something they don't like to hear, but it's their sense of entitlement that is causing them pain and grief. You are not entitled to a job, you're not entitled to the one you had or the next one you'll have, you don't have a god given right to have a job, you have to contribute to society in a way that is productive, and by doing so, you overall will have a career. Stop playing a victim because the job was never yours in the first place. It was an opportunity for you to trade your time, skill, effort, ideas etc for money, period. You will have more if you like, but you have to work for it, and what you choose to provide as a contribution to a productive society, will determine the "security" of your job. If you picked "games industry" and not "medical doctor" guess what, you never should have expected to have job security in the first place. Adjust your expectations and move on.

7:15 The problem with this logic is it doesn't work at all. There's plenty of 9/10 studios who've reported record-breaking revenue and profits also doing layoffs. If it was at all about quality of game then Tango Gameworks would still exist. And if it's only in "some" of the cases, then it can't really speak to a phenomenon wave.

Tru

If you make a boring game, it won't sell well. I feel like this fundamental truth is lost in a sea of "Games are art!" and "Investors love DEI!". And while both of those statements are true, they don't lead to a good game inherently. Gamers have a built up resistance to DEI because it's in everything now and it mostly comes across as tokenism and patronization. And for the first statement, games are as much a science as they are an art. It doesn't matter how beautiful your game looks if it runs at 15 fps peak. And it doesn't matter how incredible your music design is if the gameplay is literally an empty open world with the most robotic NPC's imaginable. Every game should start with a "gameplay first!" mindset and plan, and then build everything else on top of that. Sadly that isn't the case these days. Also what's with the writing in like... everything? Movies, games, TV shows... I feel like writing quality in entertainment has fallen off a cliff in the last decade. Of course this only really correlates to AAA these days. Indie devs have been killing it for years now.

Layoffs happen for 2 reasons: 1. Non-essential trimming. This is "the shitty one." We saw that when Blizzard laid off half the QA and almost all community management. Basically when they're desperately looking to cut costs and replace positions that can be automated. If AI goes crazy, you'll see a lot more of this. 2. Project cancellation after bad performance or misguided expectations. Investors snap their fingers, and the next round will only be 2 games with a strict budget. That means, if this studio had 4 teams working on 4 projects, they now have to layoff 2 teams. 15 years of hubris and bad management leads to this. Remember when WoW came out and how, suddenly, the next console generation had a TON of BIG games coming out all the time. That's because WoW showed the money people that video games could mean BIG money. Then it grows and grows, until it doesn't anymore... It's like making it big, being stupid about your decisions, not buying but renting a bunch of expensive stuff, and then losing your source of revenue. What do you do now? Hubris and bad management. A dangerous concoction!