The publicly traded, investor enslaved industry has completely failed to innovate for so long, due to players not being their customers. Their customers are shareholders and their product is the promise of exponential growth. Advances in tech have reduced non-AAA development and publishing costs to the point that an indie or indie-esque studio can legitimately compete. This isn't a collapse, this is a new Golden Age. Also, cost is being inflated by being cheap. Rushing AAA games out to save money on QA and impress shareholders means paying tons of OT for crunch then lowers quality to the point that it doesnt sale. Investor pleasing CEOs are letting down everyone, including the investors.

Im calling BS on the statement that people will see a lower pricetag as lower quality. Show us some gameplay, let people a demo or something. If the game is good it will hold its own, even at the 70$price. But lets be hones, if a game is really really good. It will sell more at a lower pricetag. People want games that are games, an addicting gameplay loop. Do that and your game will do well. The suits are just looking for reasons to make it more profitable for them.

The AAA industry has abandoned the gamers. They even despise gamers. They think we just have to consume their games even though their games are simply not fun and a cashgrab. Luckily there are still people with real talent that is not part of that industry, and those people really make video games with passion and dedication. Those are the developers we have to support.

These $40 games and under have got us eating good. The sudden rise of indie games being mainstream over their AAA counterparts is something truly beautiful to see. I have had more fun in helldivers and palworld then I have in any other game in recent memory for at least the last 5 if not 10 years aside from elden Ring.

AAAslop: "Cheaper games are worse" Indies: "Are you sure about that?"

I'm not gonna lie boss man, if 343 made a ODST game that was like Helldivers 2 I'm fairly certain it would have been shit regardless, full of ridiculous micro transaction prices and probably not working for the first year of release.

6:27 this part. I’m coming to realize I can’t/shouldn’t be spending money on games like I used too. Inflation is so bad right now that I genuinely can only buy one full priced title once a year.

Wait for sale has been my motto for a long time now. Most big devs overinflated budgets and it doesn't reflect in quality. Devs making games like helldivers 2, Balatro and other smaller titles need to be prioritized. They won't learn unless we make them with our wallets

You mentioned Balatro in a video I watched last week. I checked it out and now I’m 50+ hours in and two copies purchased. Even used it to teach my fifth grade son some math concepts and now he gets up early before school to get a few antes in.

I personally LOVE that the mainstream game industry is getting a monthly wake up call at this point 😄

The videogame industry is healthy. What is sick, is those "publicly traded" companies. The drive for infinite growth is what is killing STUDIOS and not gaming.

S tier video. Thanks for talking about the real issues in the industry.

the second coming of Tetris

Absolutely spitting facts about how the marketing is the headline that's being missed. Well put, LD!

Hey AAA game companies, games don't have to all be open world, 3rd person shooters with survival and stealth elements. Heck, you can still call it a game even if it doesn't have guns in it.

I've had a renaissance game year as well. It started with getting a Steam Deck for Christmas, playing Valheim with my friends, then going crazy when Palworld and Last Epoch dropped. Now I'm looking at the new V Rising and Grim Dawn expansions, No Rest for the Wicked, Torchlight, Enshrouded, and many more coming this year. Previously I only had a Switch, and Tears of the Kingdom was a great game, but I'm glad to be out under the gigantic paw of "BIG N", and into the cozy lap of Indies.

17:40 related to your WF video u made the other day , there are some great interviews with Steve Sinclair and others from the DEvteam&staff about how they tried to pitch the idea for Warframe [then going by the title of Dark Sectors] and they were resoundingly told NO by every publisher and platform [which is insane considering the popularity of Halo at the time] , they eventually folded and converted some of their ideas into the Dark Sector game , which obvs WF has a lot in common with , afterwards they just wanted to actually bring their baby to life , so they made the call and the sacrifice and pooled all of the studios resources to alpha/beta this hail-mary/haymaker , asking for early supporters to be the og WF founders and such , the rest is WF history , currently one of if not the most successful title in its genre , having outlasted all the other 'killers'/competitors

There's a reason why indie and AA games are thriving right now; lower purchase entry, less publisher pressure, less complications with development (graphics and mechanics mostly), and little to no MTX / Season Pass BS (plus more freedom with actual passion behind the game). Baldur's Gate 3 is a rare example of Triple-A development also falling into this category despite the $70 tag, because it actually meets the standard quality to match (for the most part, no game releases in a finished state anymore). It's not a live-service either.

Excellent video man and I can see the effort.

Just listening to you video with on line repeating in the back of my head… “Wake up tenno”

At this point every game that seems to come out that isn't a AAA is "a wake up call" as of late.

Funny thing is I play a ton of roguelikes and quite a few RLDBs but Balatro just never grabbed me. It’s great so many people are loving it though.

Love these discussion video man keep it up

Right at the end of the Video, i had the steam pop up that tell me, a friend is playing Balatro. Thats a sign.

7:20 The game really makes you _feel_ like a white cube

Thank you!!

This coincides with what I watched with FF7 Rebirth... Had a streamer beat that in 107 hours and once he got to the ending, he deleted the game and Remake off his hard drive. The game (and I watched) had great highs and disappointing lows and a lot of bloat. Great music and combat but frustrating quests. Overall, the question I asked was why did Square make this over a smaller game that could do everything better? The response that we came to is that they banked on the Square name over making something new that involved risk or remaking games that were less known. It's a shame.

To me it's not necessarily the price per say as I can afford a full-priced game purchase every month or so. It's that: 1. My games backlog is massive. 2. There are many games that are cheaper and give me a great experience (Helldivers 2 is a prime exemple). 3. Plenty of great older games that I haven't played yet that are now cheap to buy. (In short the new games are being outcompeted) And last, but not least: 4. The state in which new games are released, especially on PC which is my main platform. Games are worse on release than if I would wait for even a few months. Add to that DLCs and whatnot. Perfect example: last year's Jedi Survivor. The PC version was reportedly really bad at lunch. I waited until Christmas, got the Epic GS coupon and bought the game on sale for like 30$. The game ran alright on my PC given the numerous patches and it was a lot of fun.

Hello, recently discovered your channel and your videos are great! I see you stream on Twitch, but it's mostly discussions. Do you plan on streaming your "subjects" like Balatro or Warframe? Would be really cool.

A new through on the success of Indie/AA games is their system, not the price tag (yes, it makes it more accessible, but the system) What makes Indie/AA games, especially like Balatro, Vampire Surivor, or Stacklands (i bet not many people heard of it) stand out is their system. Have you ever play a mini game, which is so well made, in GTA or RDR2 or any other AAA titles and think: man, I wish it would be a stand alone game, it must be fun. (Not you, Skull and Bones)? Indie developers have added depth to the experience and perfected the game loop. You simply cannot stop playing it without being " distracted" from the main game. With the current Indie price tag ($5-15), it seems like a steal. It is a wake up call to the new generation of developers: "Make a good game, make it fun and perfect it. You will success regardless of the scope of the game."

Everything vital is more expensive. Sad to say, games are luxuries and when essentials take a bigger cut; that entertainment budget has to tighten the belt. Which means whatever they select has to be more narrow than whim when the budget was looser. You can’t raise the price when people are struggling and think milking them dry will work. Then they will find cheaper and more entertaining modes of excitement.

IIRC publishers used to have a "shotgun" approach to products both in video and tabletop gaming industries. Over time they started to reduce the number of active developments in favour of more predictable outcomes. Eventually they started to engineer their profit with marketing and press instead of hoping that 1 in 12 products will recoup financial loss on the rest of attempts. Nobody like risks. While we see success of some AA and indie games, nobody covers the failure rate across the entire indie industry. So, it's not a wake up call unless every well-made indie game reaches a half of Balatro profits.

great video great take

Absolutely perfect video

To help put thing in perspective, for 130$ you could get an AAA game or then on Steam for the same price you could get Hollow Knight, Vampire Survivors, HoloCure - Save the Fans!, Hades, Undertale, Terraria, Lethal Company, Stardew Valley, Pizza Tower and Valheim and that's before accounting for any discount meaning you could easily halve the prices. There's an absurd amount of low price quality games available, you only need to know about their existence and if needed wait for sales.

love the shirt BTW. One of my favorite bands

Warhammer should take note on Helldivers 2 because it's the new tight.

About 80% of the MANY games i've played over the last 5+ years have been indies. I can hardly keep up with all the great stuff that's coming out all the time. I LOVE pixel art so i'm naturally drawn to those games, but even outside that there's so much to play that i'd barely even notice if traditional "Triple-A" just stopped to exist.

I feel like we are entering into a golden age for indi games. The market is right for the lower prices and the tools available make it easier than ever to make great games.

20:05 Dude I was jaded with gaming to. Last game that hooked me was DOS2, and then for those few years of the C it was disappointment and flat. The streak ended with BG3, it remind me how much I love games as a hobby, then Balatro, that with pure gameplay reminded me of the wider scope, like FTL or Slay the Spire. It's a shame that we don't have more of prime meat on the regular, but I can feel a shift given the wild successes of the last few months..

One night a friend told me to try it out, that i may like it. i just wanted to try one game. it was morning before i notice.

I fully agree, really good take on todays games industry.

Mac os version has been out for some time already, fwiw

The first time i made a 5 of a kind play, the next planet pack had "Planet X" which buffs your 5 of a kinds points. That is some awesome game design! The only criticism i have of this game is that i wish you could carry over your decks to new games. It's so sad spending all this time building a deck and then having to start over due to a bad boss matchup or bad RNG

More money does not translate into better games. This is true for developer and the consumer. In my 40 years of gaming I’ve found the best games come from a passionate team or person with a vision, and talented studio executing on that vision. As soon as you start trying to shoehorn things into a game that don’t support the vision, you get where we are at today. Publishers need to just let artists make their art.

Hey man this is my first video I've seen of yours but I agree with you. I wanted to shine a light on two games that I played the demo of recently on Steam that I also think could be a breakout games if it had enough attention. It's called victory heat rally and it's an arcade racing game that's styled in the late 80's/early 90s. Think OG sonic style and outrun style gameplay. The other one is bears in space. It's an FPS that people say remind them of ratchet and clank but for some reason it reminds of me putt putt games? I know very odd but both of these games are great and you can try the demos for them for free. Bears in space is out already and I'm not sure when victory heat rally will be out but they are worth checking out and the price is reasonable unlike "AAAA" supposed nonsense.

I live in canada saskatchewan. A full priced standard edition game is 99.89 after tax.. fuck that I only buy games that are on sale

This is a great video. All I have to say is that I've spent $100 on a steak before and it has far outdone anything I've ever been able to do in the kitchen and took me to heaven, haha. That being said, I get your analogy. Little Ceasar's Pizza is in my top 3 pizza places. Why? Because for $6 I'm happy with the product that I receive. I feel like the quality of pizza is satisfactory for a $6 pizza and I know what I'm getting into, so my expectations are reasonably managed, yet I'm still spending only $6, whereas ,for me, if I spent $15+ on a Pizza Hut pizza, I feel like I'm spending twice as much for a product that's probably only marginally better than the $6 pizza, so the value proposition just isn't there. UPDATE: Adding to this after finishing the video. Why the heck would publishers or GAMEPASS, the majority of the time, spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a product that has a higher chance to NOT recoup its cost while they could spend $1-10 million dollars (give or take) on funding an indie-game, or middle-market game that could potentially bring much higher returns on investment, and if they fail, they've only lost 1/10th or 1/20th of the money that they spent on a failing over bloated AAA game?

Something I think you don't touch on quite enough here is that costs do not scale linearly with the time it takes to produce a game. It took one person two years to make this game. But it's not necessarily the case where two people will make this game twice as fast. This is the AAA trap. The more the game increases in scope and complexity, the more resources you need to add to do those things, and it needs to be the right resources, and also account for the additional overhead of the meetings necessary to ensure alignment between teams and all those other knock-on effects. Plus, some things are just naturally more expensive. Voice acting, motion capture, performance capture (with Hollywood-caliber talent) ... those costs are not proportional. It's a runaway train of costs. This is why VC companies make lots of bets on companies they invest in. They know a lot of them will fail, and they don't know which ones, but they know when one hits, it'll hit for 20x or better. So they make lots of little, early bets to spread the risk and increase the chances of that hit. For whatever reason, this is something the big publishers keep failing to recognize. For example, in the live service genre, each of the major hits in that space started off as smaller, riskier bets. But now that they are entrenched and dominating their respective spaces, you can't get into that area in the same way. In chasing the "sure thing" of a live service money printing machine, they practically ensure it will fail because they can't replicate the same circumstances that led to those earlier successes. First mover advantage is gone, low customer acquisition cost is gone, and now you need to throw massive amounts of money at the problem just to compete, but if you can't get a customer base or immediate compete against games that already have hundreds of hours of content tuned over years, you WILL fail. Making smaller bets on smaller games just makes so much more sense, but these big publishers are addicted to the big payday and the glamour of AAA titles (or, JFC, a AAAA game because Ubisoft doesn't know what a sunk cost is), that these smaller games use end up looking like rounding errors in a publisher's budget ... not worth the time to bother with.

Fromsoftware isnt afraid of the ImPeNdInG D0Oo00mm because they make good games. Not all AAA companies will go under, only the bad ones, and im happy about it.

I must've missed when the talk of upping the price of games from $60 to $70 became reality. The way these companies talk you'd think the past 20 years never happened. Honestly I'm just astounded anyone still even pays attention to the AAA studios. They dont make good games and haven't for years, so why do we need to talk about them at all? They don't matter.

Good thing i kept all my systems as far back as the nes. I will go back to the classics.

Considering how much i get addicted to solitaire spider when this is out on Android I'll be gone

Amen

It's not helping that AAA companies largely choose to, or "have" to, follow "consultancy services." Perhaps not in all cases, but in some, this is also driving up costs.

Thank you Mike Bethel

I haven't bought a game over 20€ in many years, and most of the games I own were actually around 5€ after discounts. I just don't see the point on even considering expensive games when better games exist for much cheaper

we need these titles like elden ring, helldivers 2, balatro, etc.. the way i see it, we should view those games as benchmarks, they give us everything we love about video games without the monetization, “day one early access” all that bs. never thought i’d be boycotting part of my favorite hobby, but im sick and tired of being nickel and dimed by multimillion/billion dollar companies that are making me pay for their poor budgeting.

I feel like halo campaign is not something I am interested in but my brother really wants to play it, i can’t justify the purchase of at full price but i feel like it would be a good purchase for 15-20 dollars

Finally only took yas 10 years...

So this game changed your life? Great video, I hope mentioning the game's name in the title works

I just wishlist anything and only buy on sale. The only games I buy full price are the ones I deem worthy of that price. That's how free market works.

I'm waiting for Balatro mobile with baited breath. Literally cannot wait to have a good mobile card game that doesn't extrort the player for money at every turn.

KRACK!

Commenting to boost the algorithm 📈

Mod friendly indie games are gonna rule on the market for a long time.

What I'd like to know is WHAT all that money goes into? Just looks? Graphics? Scrap it and put focus on art style, look at elden ring, you don't need to set a GPU on fire to have a good looking game.

Necrosmith ❤

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor has been my moment of clarity. $10 for endless satisfying fun.

One question: how can you buy something 12 hours ago and log in 30 hours of playtime in 12 hours?

Pricing is a terrible measure of quality. Nowadays, the lower the price is tends to be indicitive of not needing to please a publisher or investors monetarily and simply providing a solid product thats REFLECTIVE of its price.

Hey, I think you misspelled the game in your title.

The steak thing is real. That’s how I measure value of a game

"Cheap games are making the industry worse!" Hades 2: "Are you sure about that?"

I am glad you mentioned dragon's dogma 2. The reason I loved dragon's dogma one so much is that I only spent $8 on it. I avoided buying dragon's dogma 2. It didn't look like a $100 game to me. Baldy's Gate 3. On the other hand, I bought it on PC and on Xbox. I didn't mind spending $160 on that game because it was worth it

Even the prices in steam are dropping. Last year I saw little to no worthy sales on steam, now I'm struggling to keep my wallet close!

out of ideas? next video BALATRO CHANGED MY LIFE. p.s. i do love your shit

Never heard of "Belatro"

Baldur's gate 3 scared the shit out the bug wigz

Bungie. 343. Activision. Blizzard. EA. These are just some of the studios that have chased me from AAA titles. I can't even remember the last time i spent money on a major studio. I've completely converted to an anti-AAA consumer. Even a 75% off sale isn't enough for me, as I almost don't buy their content just to stick it to them for ruining what used to be some of my favorite games and universes as I grew up. I'm talking with my wallet, and letting them know I'm done with their BS. One purchase may not mean a lot, but I'm done being taken advantage of by these massive studios spitting out expensive garbage that does nothing for me, especially when these smaller studios and indie developers have been creating (in my opinion) some amazing games.

I very rarely buy any games at full price. I typically wait for discounts and play them a year or more after they release. The only exceptions are some Nintendo properties. Nintendo games take forever to get any discounts and I trust Nintendo to make a good quality product. I pre-ordered Smash Ultimate, Tears of the Kingdom, and Metroid Dread. I'll be pre-ordering Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Whereas all my Steam games I've bought over the last couple of years have required at least a 25% discount for me to grab them.

Balatro on mobile when..!?

It's a highly competitive arena, and for a big ship to be viable it has to be state of the art, meaning in tune with the times, i.e. Larrian, CDPR, and that's it. Nothing prevents big studios/developers to support smaller vessels, but they need to have a good zeitgeist that they lack obviously, if they had it, they would change their mega ship for the better. There is a huge hole in the "adult" narrative driven action, adventure, arpg, rpg, single player. The markets eats up all that comes even close, but till now the only ones that "get it" is Larrian, CDPR, and I'm worried about CDPR.

AAA game industry have been pushing their limits WAY too much, now they see that their tactics are not working, they'll try to choke us in for another business model. Now that alot of Indies have taken off, we can be assure that quality is affordable.

If this game had been priced higher than 15 bucks, I doubt anyone would've given it a shot regardless of how many hours you can log into it. It's a card game developed by one guy for a portfolio project. From a business perspective, pricing a game like dragons dogma at 15 bucks wouldn't be fiscally possible or responsible for the dev time and cost sunk to make the game. If you want to complain about dlc, microtransactions, and other predatory practices, etc. That is fair and join the club, many of us have been shouting about the direction the industry was heading for years now. I think there is a place for big budget games, but they just can't be done now because publishers and their share holders are too concerned with "the message" and maximized profits, that they forget the very essence of games in the first place. It's why we are seeing medium sized independent studios, like the blizzards and biowares of old before they were bought out by publishers starting to succeed. These smaller studios not beholden the social credit scores and milking of the consumer and craft titles they actually want to play.

The future of gaming is in small studio, indy and community content games. AI will remove a lot of busy work in development, increasing quality and shorting time to market with less people.

Take a shot every time Leg Drop says he loves Dragons Dogma 2 lol

6:20 This is why i switched to pirating triple A around 2018. I think the last 3A game i bought was rdr2

The whole "video game prices haven't changed in X years" is fairly bogus. Namely since publishers have cut costs by primarily going digital. This not only cuts material costs but it can cut costs on contracts for selling them out of brick and mortar stores. Also microtransactions add to the price tag indirectly. These are minimum effort and cost addons that are then sold for exorbitant amounts most of the time. This helps incease their profit margins thus earning them more money. The argument for wanting to increase the price tag is for the sake of achieving that immense growth that most companies are obsessed with these days. Part of that obsession is due to the higher ups wanting to keep their bank accounts overly stuffed and the other part is to take care of the self imposed costs they now have.

Given the state of the AAA gaming space (microtransactions, mass layoffs, overpriced products), it's becoming almost morally indefensible to buy games from some of these large studios. As this channel (and your influence) grows, I hope you continue to put a spotlight on indie games.

My favourite Alarm service right here folks. Ya'll should subscribe! It's dependable is what it is.

As long as we're discussing recent indie (and AA) releases, I wanted to give a shoutout to Reverse Collapse, which hasn't received the attention I think it deserves. It's a 2D turn-based tactics sci-fi game that plays like a combination of XCOM, Advance Wars, and Fire Emblem, with a lengthy visual novel-style story and a buttload of mechanics to sink your teeth into. Unfortunately, RC released on the exact same day as Dragon's Dogma 2, and even got review-bombed in the first 24 hours for basically no reason. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm 30+ hours in and feel like I've only scratched the surface of the story, which other players have spent 80-100 hours on, according to Steam, and it's only $25. It's a really well-made labor of love kind of game that pulls from a wide variety of inspirations, it being an XCOM-esque game developed by a Chinese studio with Japanese voice acting and a story inspired by S.T.A.L.K.E.R taking place in post-apocalyptic Russia. Highly recommend you check it out.

70 dollars is crazy... there is no fucking way i'm going to buy a game for 70 dollars

It’s not even $70 though is it, then you have the season pass, microtransactions, more paid content that should have been there at launch and on top of that, to get the best experience, AAA games need a further 12 months of patches to be properly finished. Greed and shareholders are the issue.

Indie games aren't killing gaming. Gaming industry is killing indie games.

i wanna preface by saying i dont want anybody to lose their jobs, but i do want these big triple a companies to feel some type of consequence for stupidly investing hundreds of millions of dollars into a project (more than likely a live service), and than getting surprised when they don’t make back that $300+ million. almost every triple a studio needs to scale back a bunch, and reduce their scope if they don’t want to be overshadowed by all the great indie games.

Told my dad to buy it like 2 weeks after release coz he will like it, he did, still playing it, and considering he would typically be playing some gacha simp game, its an improvement. Ill never forget the review "The rogue-like casino must grow" i mean i think everyone can get behind that, why pay real money to gamble when you can lose it all on the toilet.

I predict a bigger crash as we continue on. I don't think AAA's can stay afloat with the recent fails and would not be surprised to see yet another lay off wave.

Avowed will suck - ill put money on it

AAA studios have priced themselves out of the market. Costs to make games has skyrocketed and as a result AAA studios need to up the price and nickel and dime it's playerbase for every last cent for less and less product. The vast majority of people cannot afford $70 games and those that can have to be real picky on which one they buy since they cannot buy them all.