Saturday Morning Gaming: The Gamers are Revolting
Last year, Warner Brothers Games published Hogwarts Legacy and found that they had stumbled across a gold mine. According to Google, Hogwarts Legacy sold 12 million units in its first two weeks of release and a lifetime total of 24 million units with a retail sales gross of 1 billion U.S. dollars as of December 2023 (that’s as of January. It has probably sold a non-trivial number of units since then given that it’s the #10 best selling game for 1Q 2024).
By comparison, they also published the new Suicide Squad game. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League reportedly lost Warner Brothers $200,000,000. That’s 9 figures! And the first figure isn’t even a 1!
Just 4 days ago, EA held an earnings call and they announced that the next Battlefield was going to be “another tremendous live service“. The stock price tumbled about 4 percent the next day.
After spending $7.5 Billion dollars acquiring Arkane Studios, Microsoft is shutting down Arkane Austin after the flop that was Redfall.
And, this one is actually funny, Helldivers 2 announced that you would have to link your PlayStation account to your Steam account to play Helldivers and the game was review bombed back to the stone age.
Helldivers fans — we’ve heard your feedback on the Helldivers 2 account linking update. The May 6 update, which would have required Steam and PlayStation Network account linking for new players and for current players beginning May 30, will not be moving forward.
We’re still…
— PlayStation (@PlayStation) May 6, 2024
Of course, there are still going to be attempts going forward to force members of the gaming community to enjoy *THIS* instead of enjoying *THAT* or to do something as trivial as link their PlayStation accounts to their Steam accounts…
But it seems like people are finally voting with their wallets and saying “No thanks!” to the games that they don’t like in addition to saying “Shut up and take my money!” to the ones that do.
The best selling game last year? Hogwarts Legacy. The year before that? Call of Duty but the #2 game was Elden Ring. There is money to be made out there by any given company that is just willing to bother to put out non-awful content. (Hogwarts wasn’t even *GOOD*. It just pandered to the people who wanted to play it.)
It’s so very frustrating to see companies just shovel out tons of cruddy games over and over again that it’s gratifying to see there be an actual cost associated to this.
Not often enough, of course… I went through the transcript of the EA earnings call and none of the questions were “What in the heck are you thinking?” but… maybe gaming companies are learning that there’s more to making a game than providing a cartoon wrapper around GaaS.
So… what are you playing?
I didn’t buy or play it, but Hogwart’s got decent reviews for gameplay and was still #1 despite efforts to sink it because of all the JK Rowling hatred.
But I don’t know what’s going on in the games industry. How there can be so much money and so much crap and the recent moves by Xbox. Well, I guess I should know, because the same problems exist in Hollywood.
I am still really, really enjoying modded but vanilla Fallout New Vegas. No bugs, modernized, updated graphics and lighting and other things (not modern Cyberpunk quality by any stretch but decent enough) and it’s just such a pleasure to play. What a great game. If Bethesda was smart they’d do an updated version of this game fixing everything and rerelease it like Skyrim.Report
The problem with Hogwarts is that it would have been a perfect 20-hour game but they made it a 60-hour game. The stuff in 20 hours of the game is pretty good. The stuff in the 40? Dull and a slog. It feels like eating oatmeal that has only a few cranberries in it. Every now and again you get a really pleasurable experience… but those are outweighed by spoonful after spoonful of the mush.Report
I’m playing Persona 3 Reload. I’m a big JRPG fan and they are my preferred forms of games. It is somewhat surprising that some of them haven’t become targets of a social justice protest since Japan, while a modern secular society, doesn’t exactly have a social system that translates well to very online social codes and can come across as somewhat reactionary.Report
A safe place to let your freak flag fly is one heck of a release valve.Report
I just got back into playing Shin Megami Tensai V. I started it a while back, but I got distracted. I have been seeing stuff about the upcoming rerelease, and I decided it was time to finish it. I think I am between 1/3 and 1/2 of the way through.Report
…why are you comparing Hogwarts Legacy to Suicide Squad? What do those games even vaguely have in common? One of them a looter-shooter, the other is open-world RPG-ish.
Why are you comparing total sales for a year to profits over half a year? Wait, why are you comparing gross sales to profits anyway? What is any of this supposed to be?
Wouldn’t a more logical comparison be Hogwarts Legacy be Cyberpunk 2077, games that are much more similar…although they sold almost the same, so not sure what the point of that is.
And they both sorta were blah and coasted on their license…although at least Hogwarts Legacy seems to have actually not been bug-riddled.
Of course, Cyberpunk 2077 made much less money than Hogwarts Legacy, because it took forever to develop and was so bug-riddled it required repeated fixes to get it playable.
So I think there actually is a point here: We have one studio that was extremely ambitious, went repeatedly over budget, constantly slipped deadlines, and ultimately shipped a broken game, that sold well but obviously cost a lot…and we have another studio that tried a game with much smaller scope and just…padded it out, and sold almost exactly as well…which obviously made it a lot more money.
I’m not sure _either_ of these things are good things!
I think maybe in an ideal world, we’d have had a 20 hour Hogwarts Legecy (Well, in an ideal world, no one would be supporting that IP, but that’s an entirely different discussion.) that sold at the correct price for a 20 hour game…but would that have made enough money?
And how much would a correctly priced Cyberpunk 2077 have been, and also _how long_ would it have taken?
It truly is astonishing how video games and movies are breaking at exactly the same time in almost exactly the same way: Everyone tries to make extremely-expensive blockbusters, and only that.Report
They were both published by Warner Brothers. They share a publisher.Report
You’re right. I should have put that in the first paragraph. I’ll fix it now.Report
Note that despite Sony rescinding the PSN-account requirement, Helldivers 2 is not available for purchase in countries that do not have PSN access.
It’s not entirely clear at this point whether:
* Players who purchased the game in those countries can still play it (and if not, can they get refunds for it)
* It’s Sony who ordered the countries cut off because they’re mad about the PSN thing
* It’s Valve who ordered the countries cut off because they’re being super-cautious about the PSN thing
As for myself, this ain’t my first rodeo; I’ve got two different dump Gmail accounts to handle spam, and I’m not worried about Sony’s databases getting hacked because as far as PSN knows I’m a 90-year-old woman living in Alaska. I guess it was a hassle to set up a PSN account before playing the game, but I didn’t even consider it worthy of note until people who are allergic to rules started freaking about it.
*******
What’s interesting to me here is that it’s 2024 and big companies are still showing that they’re vulnerable to a mob, that they’re still willing to do what a mob says rather than put in the legwork to shut the mob down. These were not customers voting with their wallets; these were guys who had hundreds of hours over two weeks into this game and had enthusiastically recommended it to their friends, now putting in negative reviews everywhere they could find just because the company selling the game had dared to do something they disliked.Report
I keep seeing ads for Fortnite and/or Lego and/or Star Wars. I guess it’s some kind of cross-promotion. Like when Doritos and Taco Bell crossed over, but with three products, like Doritos / Taco Bell / Chevy Trucks?Report
‘dare to do something they disliked’ seems like a bit understated of a way to say ‘made it where millions of people lost access to a game that they had paid for’
If we are going to trust services like this, and I don’t just mean game services like steam but anywhere that we buy electronic goods that are distributed by a company that could cut them off, we need these sort of ‘overreactions’ every time it happens, or it will become commonplace for them to do that, to just withdraw things that we’ve bought from them.
Consumers need to draw the line and say that this is absolutely unacceptable, that no company should withdraw access to something that has been purchased without a full and automatic refund, and they should even think twice about doing that. I’m in favor of laws saying that, but they don’t actually make laws controlling corporate power anymore, so it’s up to the consumers to threaten to burn the place down when companies do that.
Valve, hilariously, is possibly the only company that understands this. Probably because it’s essentially privately owned (it’s technically public, but the president and co-founder own over half of the shares) and thus is not randomly operated by complete idiots who swoop in and destroy the company’s reputation for a 2% increase in the stock price.Report