Gaming is insane right now. I can buy a game for $10 that would have won game of the year every year straight for an entire decade. Even saying this there’s probably like 15 games that fit this category.
Gamers today get what they deserve. If they want to consume triple A slop they’re going to get fucked. Its really simple.
I almost never pay more than 5$ for a game, get the free game from epic each week since last year, and I have hundreds of amazing games in my livrary. I litteraly could stop working and play super fun games 24/7 for the next 2-3 years without spending a dime. Up to a last year, I was litteraly playing on an overclocked i5 750 (16 y/o cpu) with a 1060i gpu, and can’t think of a game that wasn’t playable. I even worked on a small VR project on that computer lol.
I agree. There is a lot of great content for reasonable prices and a lot of terrible content for high prices. It’s a thriving industry. We just need to be intentional about our purchasing decisions.
Obligatory:
No war but class war.
get absolutely abused by employers squeezing every penny they can while blocking union efforts
He forgot that part
More of a late stage capitalism issue than a millennial issue
Gen X is running those companies, they’re the ones to blame for this shit.
I’ve been curious lately if the original Ape Escape is as good as I remember. I heard the sequels weren’t as good, but I have fond memories of the first game on PS1.
I prefer the sequels to AE1, with 3 being the best of the bunch (no pun intended).
As a millienial software dev:
Imo: What happened is twofold:
- The business grads also played games, and saw the money to be made.
- The best devs are smart enough to *not work in AAA Gamedev.
MBA = Megalomaniacsl Bastard Accountant
(with the fun bonus of almost no actual math required!)
MBAs, cause we gotta justify nepotism hires somehow.
I phone screened for a game dev position. The ad said about half my salary. It was going to be a big sacrifice. Then on the phone screen they said 10k less than that.
When I sounded concerned about money, I think that killed my chances. “Tell me more about this profit sharing” was almost certainly the end. It was for the best.
Which is depressing as hell. I considered switching to game dev (since anyway want to change my stack and language), then realised that would be sacrificing too much for too little and abandoned the idea. I will have a better time making money doing something else and playing in free time than diving into this madness that does not even pay adequately in pursuit of the off-chance of getting to work on something great
Millennials killed gaming. And coffee. And avocado toast.
‘Easy’ ‘solution’: Do game dev as a hobby, release as FOSS
They played too many videogames instead of learning good skills. 😥
I don’t know, games are getting really good these days. If you ignore the aaaaaaa slop you’re going to find some awesome stuff
Serious, genuine question:
Has a team of, or single Zoomer game dev(s) … made… any… game?
I am not gonna pretend that I somehow know all games and all game dev teams by age, but uh…
Yeah, are there any notable games made by a team that is majority composed of people born after '96 ish?
Like… I am a millenial, and I am well aware of the ludicrous greed and mismanagement of AAA studios, how even most AA studios end up getting fucked by some kind of IP rights/funding issue, if they live long enough… I’m still pissed that EA killed Maxis… and I am also well aware of many games with primarily millenial dev teams… very often devolve into, or revolve around ‘millenial speak’ / ‘millenial writing’ …
Most of us millenials, outside of the tiny number of mod teams that actually stuck together long enough to form a game studio, or just outright form an indie dev studio… yeah most of us just jumped into the megacorp game dev meat grinder and then acted both entitled and surprised to find out that ‘corporation bad, actually.’…
But I seriously cannot think of a mainly zoomer game dev team that’s made anything other than pretty much shitty asset flips and/or outright scams, enternal alpha/early access type bullshit… or maybe mobile, gacha type games?
I would love to be informed that I am an idiot and there are some really good zoomer made games, but I am ignorant of their existence.
Hell, even a seriously good mod by zoomers would count, I know I was modding many games before I even got out of highschool.
The interesting answer by the way is that there is a glut of them as Roblox, is actually a game mostly about making other games.
Its a more realized version of VR chat essentially for kids and alpha and Z is full of game devs who though are unfortunately in a single engine but with skill can actually transition to others and often do.
Some real talent is being cultivated but they are mostly unseen by looking at the places they aren’t.
See, I am aware of the … Im gonna call it ‘Roblox Capture’ phenomenon… and I am very, very concerned by this.
As you say… there legitimately are tons of neat gamemodes being made up by Zoomer (and presumably also Gen Alpha) budding game devs…
But as you say… its quite difficult to transition out of Roblox and learn all the other stuff you need to make your own game, especially if you are incentivized not to, by both the carrot of potential income, and the stick of everyone throwing a shit fit (cough, I mean uh, ‘difficulty in overcoming the momentum of the network effect’) if you try to move to your own platform.
Roblox… has a very, very predatory digital and real world currency scheme.
The Roblox owners are making way, way, waaaay more money off of their young gamemode devs than the tiny slice of the pie they actually get.
And… its also basically a lottery, like being a youtuber or an OF model or whatever: 99.9% of people make basically no money, 0.1% make a decent or sizeable amount… and you only ever hear about, or from, the tiny minoirty of successful people.
And thats to say nothing of how fucked up MTX and dark patterns are for the average user.
Basically, Roblox achieved a huge scale, fully realized version of what many pay to play GMod Roleplay Servers do/did as well as Roleplay Servers for like GTAV and RDR2 and other games…
You are right though that this is the interesting answer =D
But I seriously cannot think of a mainly zoomer game dev team that’s made anything other than pretty much shitty asset flips and/or outright scams, enternal alpha/early access type bullshit… or maybe mobile, gacha type games?
You didnt exclude game jam games and there are a lot of those. There are also quick games that are not meant to be expanded so they wouldnt count as eternal early access
Thats true, I did not explicitly exclude those, but I think you can tell that … I am trying to mean a game that… someone would actually pay for, a game that has at least some level of popularity, general cultural impact.
Some game jam games do kind of achieve this, some are later expanded into more fully fleshed out games that later release…
But generally speaking, a game jam is more or less a speedrun tech demo of you or your team’s ability to whip up something fairly basic… and most of these do not usually go on to have any real impact or popular awareness or even a niche following that expands outside of other game devs.
Its like a training routine / job interview process for a game dev.
I am not trying to insinuate no zoomers are technically capable of making a game, of course many obviously are.
I am trying to match the context and language of the OP, referring to a much more generalized: ‘what has been the effect of zoomer game devs on the kinds of games produced by game industry broadly?’
A huge amount of games in the indie scene are made by zoomers. Lethal company was made by a 21 year old. The current game industry is composed of mostly millennials, but still a lot of zoomers.
Hey there ya go!
I didn’t know Lethal Company was made by a Zoomer.
Apparently he has been modding/making Roblox gamemodes/doing itch.io releases since he was 10!
LC isn’t exactly my cup of tea personally, but that is definitely a good example, LC has been quite popular.
Thank you for informing me =D
Yee game development is very accessible nowadays. Fortunately it still requires great effort to make a good game.
The people who break there bakes making the games. Are the ones who enjoyed them as kids. It’s the executives and managers who run the decisions. Who have never played games before.
the entire us went to shit, what’s your point
Mobile and fast broadband internet is what ruined gaming. Back in the day, it was impossible to download a game very reliably plus it was super slow if you tried. It was far easier to go to a store and buy the disks.
Mobile showed that there is an enormous crowd of extremely stupid people willing to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at adolescent half baked code and that the best retention and monetization is often with junk that is never fixed or is even broken worse over time. That standardized garbage and flooded the space with loads of slop. Just sorting through the slop is a chore now and fools have proven that it is profitable to take a giant shit of slop and dump it on everyone to let people pay their way through searching for undigested corn kernels in these places. The same is true of streaming. You pay for it to waste your time. You lower your expectations, and the cycle continues. It is profitable to target the stupidest people. Culturally, it will require the majority to stop being brain dead zombies, but good luck with that. We’re both zombies on an idiot brick right now.
I’d argue management ruined gaming but broadband and mobile enabled it.
People are making these choices.
