Further Iniquities of the Video Games Industry
If you are naïve enough to think that the video games industry is an equal partnership between those a pursuing an artistic vision and their benevolent financial benefactors, then todays news that Activision Blizzard is laying off approximately 800 staff despite a enjoying a “record year”, must have comes as a surprise. For the rest of us who are fully conversant with the iniquities of the business, this sad news has an air of tedious inevitability to it. If you want a coherent distillation of the unsustainability of the triple A games industry, then Jim Sterling’s latest episode of The Jimquisition pretty much nails it. Simply put the current levels of revenue growth seen of late by a lot of the major publishers cannot be maintained and will eventually end in a hard crash, further job losses and a migration of venture capitalists looking to make a killing somewhere else. For those who work in games development it means job insecurity, stress and financial worries. For gamers it could lead to popular titles being shutdown because they don’t make “sufficient” revenue.
Variations on a Theme or More of the Same?
While recently playing Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey I was struck by the similarities between some of the game’s mechanics and those found in Ghost Recon: Wildlands which I played extensively last spring. Using your eagle companion to spot enemies and tag them on the map in the former is virtually identical to launching a drone and scouting the terrain in the latter. However, as both games are Ubisoft titles this is hardly a revelation. Yet the more I’ve played ACO, it has become very clear that many of their top titles share a great deal of common systems and mechanics. This makes sound business sense especially when you’re a company that releases multiple titles each year. Why rebuild a system when you can simply re-use an existing one? Yet even after recognising the practical benefits of such an approach to games development, I couldn’t help but feel that if you play a great deal of Ubisoft games, there must come a point when they all begin to feel a little too familiar. Even more so when you’re playing different iterations of the same franchise.