I don’t really see how this can be true outside of parent companies dissolving studios and looting them for parts if they have one flop.

Like Arkane, the studios that made Dishonored, Prey, and Deathloop, some incredibly successful games especially for their budgets, didn’t go bankrupt when Redfall flopped, they were dissolved by Bethesda. If Bethesda hadn’t done anything they probably would’ve recovered from their one flop, and likely they wouldn’t have pushed it in that state in the first place without Bethesda’s influence.

It’s not that something has changed in the gaming market, it’s just like every other industry right now; The capitalists are stripping the copper out of the walls

I miss when you could have an entire franchise subsist off ~100,000 sales per entry

To use another horror franchise as an example, Fatal Frame got 5 games, 1 remake, 1 spinoff and 2 remasters despite selling in the 50-200k range for most entries

Can we just start making PS2 games again? You could make a game in less than two years without needing hundreds of people on staff

I’ve been playing through the Onimusha games and it’s crazy to think Capcom made 3 games, 1 soft reboot, 1 fighting game spinoff and 1 GBA spinoff in 6 years. Inbetween 3 and 4 they also made a completely unrelated game

I didn’t even know there was a new Alone In The Dark

Kind of a weird article that seems 10-15 years out of date, it’s probably easier than ever for small projects to thrive, just look at Vampire Survivors or Balatro that were both made by one person.

>originally owned by Atari SA

>sold to THQ Nordic under Embracer Group

Doomed before it was announced, as is everything that gets sucked into the black holes of hatred and cynicism mentioned here. Inshallah Embracer goes belly up by next year, beware any company that wears the skin of another. Also the last time an Alone in the Dark game was good, the twin towers still stood

As @ClimateChangeAnxiety said though, it doesn’t have to be this way, the economics of hyper expensive games mixed with copper-stripping parent companies are just stupid. Tons of indie studios release smaller games that can flop and be fine.

It’s also comical to me that this author (surely younger than me) writes of the seventh generation as some sort of golden age of the middle market, as if HD development pipelines did not sound the death knell for a litany of smaller (often Japanese) developers who were still comfortable with smaller-scale games and handy middleware on PS2. As if this currenr landscape is somehow the fault of digital distribution? Lol, lmao even. Demon’s Souls was the edge case as smaller studios like Millenium Kitchen, Factor 5, Genki, Free Radical, Hudson Soft and Cavia all burned down right alongside massive names like Namco and Konami, all of whom couldn’t adapt to the expectation of increased expense in mainstream games. In fact, Bizarre Creations got shut down by Activision after Blur bombed in 2010 exactly this way, actually. Sony crushed a bunch of its first and seconsd party studios between 2006 and 2013. Japan Studio is just the latest.

One last note, I never personally understood the “find one game and stick with it” people or mindset, though; players who exclusively played Call of Duty multiplayer back in the PS360 days confounded me just as much as the 500,000 hour League of Legends players, as do the Helldivers-II-only people now.