I spent a little time over the weekend playing Ker Nethalas. It’s a solo-focused pen-and-paper dungeon crawler, thematically dark with a heavy emphasis on dice-chucking combat.
There’s not a lot of story to the game. If you’re looking for the great narratives that systems like Ironsworn generate, you won’t find them wandering through the endless necropolis of Ker Nethalas. Still, it’s a kind of heavy-bookkeeping RPG gameplay I find soothing if I’m in the right mood.
Explore a room; encounter a slathering monster; chuck some dice. After the week the game industry had, I found myself in dire need of precisely the kind of classic dungeon-crawling the game delivered.
by chucking fistfuls of dice and
scribbling maps on graph paper.
So this week’s blog is a rant. I’m frankly not in the mood to wax rhapsodic about games. After witnessing a seemingly endless string of layoffs last year, I figured we were over the worst of it.
I was wrong. Much like the COVID pandemic or a bad houseguest, the game industry’s current downcycle is seriously overstaying its welcome. Last week was marked by a couple of unconnected events that encapsulated everything wrong with the game industry in 2024.
The relatively minor misstep was Sony’s ill-advised Helldivers 2 announcement that the game would soon require a PSN account, even for PC players. In the grand scheme of the modern gaming ecosystem, requiring a player to sign up for an account isn’t the worst sin.
These days, most players have arrived at a state of weary acceptance. Giant corporations are collecting our data, and if we want to engage with their products, we have no choice but to let them.
Yet Sony underestimated how hostile the PC audience would be to a major console player forcing account creation into a game that had already built a passionate, engaged fanbase on Steam. The move smacked of greed – an attempt to squeeze a golden goose for an extra egg.
Sony spent the week doubling down on the strategy before finally relenting. Along the way, Helldivers 2 was removed from sale on Steam in regions where PSN accounts aren’t supported – a step that simply reinforced the notion that signing up for a PSN account was actively reducing the value proposition of the game for customers overall.
on Steam in early May. Can you
spot the moment Sony screwed up?
The second and much more tragic misstep was Microsoft’s – closing down several studios under the Bethesda umbrella, including the veteran team at Arkane Austin that built Prey and Tango Gameworks, creators of this year’s acclaimed Hi-Fi Rush and the Evil Within games.
And yeah, it’s just another few studios to add to the pile of shutdowns over the last year – we’re all a little numb to it now. And yeah, I’m not privy to the numbers inside the bowels of Microsoft’s bean-counting departments. I don’t know how expensive those studios were to run, or what the financial projections showed.
What I do know is how hard it is to build a functional game development team. It’s an enormous challenge to get a group of talented, creative individuals moving a product forward, much less shipping something that players love.
Both of these studios had done that – not just once, but multiple times. Arkane Austin certainly swung and missed with the poor showing of last year’s Redfall, but their long track record showed they were one of the best teams around at building compelling immersive sims.
The mixed messages that tumbled from the lips of Microsoft executives explaining the shutdowns haven’t clarified the thinking in any way that makes sense to gamers. All we knew for sure was that a couple of beloved and highly creative teams were gone, and the company’s new strategy appears to be doubling down on existing, aging franchises.
What the Sony and Microsoft missteps have in common is that they both highlight a serious disconnect between executives still trying to do business the “old way” and a new generation of savvy, engaged customers. Today’s players, presented with a buffet of great ways to spend their entertainment dollars, are showing increased skepticism for the same old high-budget regurgitated triple-A sequels – especially ones with expensive live service seasons attached, or $60-70 price tags.
There’s a reason the indie scene is thriving. Some of the most-talked-about games in the last year were quirky titles that seemed to come out of nowhere. When a big-budget title does get a lot of gamer love – Baldur’s Gate 3, for instance – it’s often because it doesn’t follow the “tried and true” monetization hooks of the last ten years, and is built by developers who care about their craft and the value they’re delivering to the audience.
What’s especially sad is how, prior to the shutdowns, Microsoft’s gaming division had been riding a wave of goodwill. Gamepass, though it’s arguably driving some developers into a race to the bottom for project funding, has been an unquestionably great value for consumers. The Fallout adaptation on Amazon was fantastic and added a legion of new franchise fans.
So as we move into the next long, hot summer, the industry has a little spring cleaning to do. We’re overdue for a thoughtful re-evaluation of how we do business, and a solid round of kicking-to-the-curb for studio executives clinging to the old ways.
The game industry thrives when it constantly adapts, staying agile and vital. It thrives when it nurtures newcomers and their fresh ideas. It thrives too when it doubles down on successful existing creative teams and lets them follow their passions, rather than forcing them to churn out flavorless sequel after sequel.
At the moment, the folks at the top – the people who should be the stewards of the industry’s long-term success and advocates for their teams – are the ones standing in its way.
I’ll be holed up in my office playing Ker Nethalas while the industry burns around me. 🙂 Back next week with a less gloomy topic.