JadedGameDev

15 years in game dev.
I know why they made that decision. It's worse than you think.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

Fifteen years inside the greed machine. Watched good games get gutted by bad decisions, watched executives try to smuggle in a "live service" like it was an original idea, but really just a money grab. Watched studios burn through goodwill they spent a decade building.

Not bitter about the games. Bitter about what happens to them once the suits take control.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@pathofexile Mixed feelings on this. The implementation is great, but isn’t part of the fun of ARPGs making your own unique build, rather than blindly following a cookie cutter meta build?

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@devsanddorks A semi-idle PBBG, with a sci-fi mech theme

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@eurogamer Three years of "Xbox exclusive" headlines, and this is what PS5 players got at the end of it. The studio had time. They just didn't spend it on QA.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@pcgamer 37% said it wouldn't matter how good it looked. That's what happens after years of shipping AI generated frames and calling it 'rendering'.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@pcgamer The scariest part isn't that someone proposed this. It's that it took employees threatening to quit before the plan was dropped.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@IGN Thirty years of precedent broken in one generation. No supply chain excuse, no inflation that hits only one console line. Just a new floor. When the next generation starts, the base price won't be $499.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@IGN The June date gives them time to milk the remaining whales for one last revenue cycle before flipping the switch.

Bethesda built the monetization model to extract maximum value over the game's lifetime, and now they're at the extraction phase.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@charlieINTEL 2020: PS5, $500. 2023: PS5 Slim, $450. 2024: PS5 Pro, $700. 2026: PS5 Pro, $900.

There's no competitive pressure forcing this. Xbox is an afterthought. The price goes up because it can.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@GamesRadar Cinemersive Labs turns photos into 3D volumes. That's the technology.
Sony's quote about "unlocking new levels of visual fidelity" is a smokescreen to deflect criticism.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@GameRoll_ Zelnick wasn't lying when he said AI won't replace artists at Rockstar. He was just talking to a different group than the people now losing their jobs.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

Helldivers 2 launched promising that a live-service game could treat players fairly.

Now there's been 2700 negative reviews in one day and a Reddit thread cataloging exactly where that went.The precedent didn't hold. It never does.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@GTA6Alerts GTA Online printed money for 12 years off a $60 game from 2013.

Now imagine what they've got planned for a $3 billion pricetag. 😬

The base game is the appetizer. Always was.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@pcgamer In other words, the genre has been embarrassing itself for years and someone finally noticed. Good.

What it doesn't say: who approved the budget, who owns the IP, and what the monetization model looks like.

Time will tell.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@IndieGameJoe The X algo seems much better at recommending posts from smaller games as of late.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@iiamcloudman @geoffkeighley Geoff Keighley is a PlayStation insider the same way Ryan Seacrest is a music industry analyst.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@TimSweeneyEpic What he's actually saying: we fired top-tier people for financial reasons and dressed it up as a recommendation letter.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

Paying for the deluxe edition and then getting a "grind-or-pay" system on top is not an accident.
https://t.co/gyKsLp3YlI

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@EpicNewsroom Stagnating console sales. TikTok. Missing "magic." Anti-trust costs.

Four reasons, zero of which are "we spent money badly." A thousand people just lost their jobs so the C-suite could list external forces at a press conference.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@HYPEX A billion-dollar company blaming TikTok for why it had to fire a thousand people is a sentence that tells you everything about who's running it.

[JadedGameDev @JadedGameDev]

@Kotaku "We have taken a lot of bullets in a battle which is only in the early days of paying off."

Translation: we burned half a billion dollars on bets that haven't worked yet and the people who made those bets are keeping their jobs. The people who didn't are not.