While Baldur’s Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.
While Baldur’s Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.
All the greatest games ever made were created in capitalistic economies so i cannot see how that is a determining factor. I don’t know what games your thinking of. Tetris?
I think you’re missing the point. They’re just saying the incentive structure of capitalism doesn’t necessarily encourage the best types of games. We see this with borked EA launches, predatory MTX, loot boxes, battle passes, etc
I think there is a difference between “capitalism” and “capitalism”.
I think a more nuanced argument is that better games come from companies that are not primarily driven by the quarterly revenue cycle of Wall Street, that is defined as “capitalism”.
I think it’s more of a hit-and-miss, and good corporate leadership is the kind that people forget it’s there when good games come out. I mean CDPR had a CEO both when Witcher 3 was the thing, and also when Cyberpunk 2077 was the thing that flopped. Obviously, people were more interested in the beancounters’ influence in the latter case.
Without capitalism Tetris would have remained an obscure piece of shareware probably vaguely known outside of ex-soviet nations. It’s only the desire to monitise the IP that saw it on every platform under the sun and packaged with every Gameboy.
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Yeah, the creator didn’t profit at the time because of communism and their belief that his creation belonged to the state. If he had been in a capitalist country at the time he could have copyrighted his game asap and exploited it for profit himself.
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At the very least a smart creator in the US can go to a solicitor and make sure he isn’t being mugged off before they sign a deal, you didn’t have that that with the Soviet Government.
Yes lots of creators have been screwed by the people that worked for, notably in the comics field. But a lot of the time it’s because they signed a contract having no inkling how big the work would be.
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I don’t believe some people were tricked but we’re a victim of their own success. Take Alan Moore and Watchman for example. He signed the deal that he would get the rights to the book back once it went out of print as that’s how the industry model worked at the time. The book was so popular that it’s stayed in print for the last 40 odd years, so the rights didn’t revert. Maybe DC should have renegotiated things in light of that, but I see that he and they went into the deal on good faith based on industry realities at the time.
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Counter point: Baldur’s Gate is selling well within capitalism because it satisfies what the customer wants, which capitalism rewards in an environment with lots of competition, and video games have lots of competition. As big publishers like Ubisoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard, and Take Two have scaled back their offerings of lots of different types of games, including the type of RPG that Larian makes, it’s no surprise that the likes of Larian are rewarded for making that type of game. It’s why companies like Embracer, Anna Purna, Devolver, and Paradox are going to be growing a ton over the next decade.