The Endless Demand for Content is Unsustainable | Unpacked
This week's episode of Unpacked is now available!
The Endless Demand for Content is Unsustainable | Unpacked (YouTube)
Comments (7)
The Family Guy ending is pertinent, because this situation reminds me of the Road to the North Pole episodes. I agree the publishers deserve some blame but I’m putting this on the vocal (hopefully) minority of players constantly complaining and moaning that what they’re getting just isn’t good enough. Which makes the studio heads then push the teams too hard to meet impossible expectations. JM8 mentioned in one podcast about how LoL once forgot to change a character according to the patch notes for a fix but despite literally nothing changing the playerbase went into complete meltdown and I can’t help but think it’s the same for every game. BF6 could have 4, 6, 8, 30 extra maps and there would be people saying it’s not enough. I feel really bad for the Highguard devs because it looked fresh and interesting (from a casual observer) and one I’d be likely to play in another life, but because it couldn’t do the impossible and because of everyone’s 15 minutes of daily hate, it’s just another failure. “We can get out of any mess, if we learn to live with less”.
I’m all for corporate and investor bashing, but content creators, like second wind, are in the feedback loop too, the visual video was an advertisement for BF6. Everyone wants the piece of the money pie, don’t forget.
Ive come to really enjoy Nick's discussion of the state of games and gaming nowadays.
for a lot of games that aren't my usual genre I wait for YouTubers to upload Let'sPlays and see whether I still like watching them after a few episodes before I consider buying them (often even without any sale going on) so anything live service basically drops out automatically because those are often stream games where you want to watch a creator be good at or they're fun to watch the last game that I wanted to buy after a few videos was Hytale. which is nowhere near that rhythm of live service and I'm content waiting for updates because it takes time and I just play the EA when I want to the question though might be: is it time for a mindful gaming movement where you try to consume games in moderation?
I was legit just thinking about that last about an hour ago, and then this video comes out. I think the most important thing to contemplate is the business model behind all this: big publicly-traded companies whose investors demand endless growth at all costs. Follow the money, and that's exactly where it leads; there's no avoiding it. The games they put out are inevitably going to aggressively push an addiction-based model, which hurts players as well as causing the developers and publishers to have to work at an increasingly frantic and fundamentally unsustainable pace. An important tool any player can ask themselves is this: "What if I *don't* play that game? What's the bad thing that happens?" The only real response is FOMO, and it's (it turns out) not that difficult to wean oneself off that fear, simply by saying, this is just another game, there have been others like it, there will be more like it. Nobody plays every game, and nobody is suffering by not having played certain games.
The fault lies with the investors. The boards demand infinitely accelerating growth, which just isn't realistically possible, much less sustainable, and fire anyone who says "no." That's why they're so excited about AI; it promises to accelerate the process of creating new content to levels human beings just can't sustain. Of course, that content is garbage and AI is killing the planet, but who cares as long as the investors can all afford a new superyacht every year, right?
Unfortunately it's not just investors. It's independent studios trying to jump on this train too. Just look at how many single player games have roadmaps these days past 1.0. It's an industry problem.