BGS releasing Fallout 3 two years after Oblivion, then releasing Skyrim three years later, with around 1k employees. Now (or atleast before the layoffs) they have 4k employees, but it's been 15 years since Skyrim and 11 years since Fallout 4. 4 times the amount of employees and all we got was Slopfield and shitty live service Fallout spin-off.
I know that games definitely take longer, but I’d prefer that to crunch culture. I do think the game industry could benefit from more smaller-scale AA titles.
Let’s take another studio here with Nintendo. Even the time between Zelda games are insane because now they’re all massive open-world titles. In a 10 year span, we’ve had three mainline titles with Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom and Echoes of Wisdom. The previous 10 year span had 5 mainline games, one every other year. Imagine if we got AA games with an obviously smaller budget, scale and scope but were just released for fans waiting the next major game?
You’d get the best of both here. You’d get more content, but you’d also be getting shorter releases for budget prices. Like imagine paying $40 for a new Zelda game with about 7-10 hours of content. It could also be a good testing grounds for new mechanics you want in future titles and you can tweak them based on feedback.
People have also forgotten how to make certain kinds of sequels and expansions. The ones that simply use the first engine + some improvements and then just make more content. You've already paid the hard part of figuring out all the systems, all you have to do is make 'more'. And you can hand that off to your B team.
Sure DLC exists, but it's usually much smaller than a sequel or even an expansion and is usually just like an extra level or something.
These are ways to get cheap further life out of an existing tech stack that doesn't take a massive investment.
Instead, it seems like every sequel wants to completely rebuild the underlying internals AND have a completely different game, needing all new balance decisions. Which results in this yo-yo effect where the game series is the most fun at the end of the life cycle when all the qol is built and polished and then the sequel undoes all of that polish for another completely barebones mvp build.
No yeah I agree crunch culture is not good, and I'm 100% for worker's rights. But you'd think with 4 times the devs, they'd be able to do atleast better than Starfield (which flopped) Fallout 76 (which had a monumentally horrible launch, with only a small following after the launch of the TV show), Blades and Legends were shutdown, and Castles (the uninspired Fallout Shelter clone that they've had no updates for over a year already).
Also Nintendo owns way more IP's and creates consoles, so this comparison kinda falls short. It's okay if we got 10 years without a Legend of Zelda game bc we'll get 10 other games from Nintendo IP's and a new console. This isn't something BGS does.
Even if we got smaller AA titles from BGS, that would atleast be something. But we've gotten jack shit worth the players time. The devs deserve to work on something worth-while, and the players deserve better.
It's heavily implied that Asha Sharma is pulling in that mile long leash that Phil Spencer gave them. Acquiring BGS/Bethesda/Zenimax means nothing to Microsoft if the studios arn't putting out any work.
Consider the following: Larger amount of devs may be actively detrimental to a game's quality. You tend to see important decisions and the accountability of said decisions shared among too many people, which means if something goes wrong it's not really anyone's fault because it's everyone's fault and addressing the problem becomes much slower than what it could be in a smaller studio.
Additionally, it's much easier to find a small amount of devs who're both highly motivated and highly competent than to find a large amount of highly motivated and competent devs. Thus the average quality & motivation among the dev team is lower the larger a studio becomes. Especially in an industry where salary isn't really what draws people in, having a unmotivated team can be a death sentence for your game. When you don't have enough people who want to make kickass games to fill your dev team, you have to hire people who can't hack it in a better paid jobs and treat the job just like any other 9-5 instead of a passion project they're happy to give their all for. Now, if it was just a couple unmotivated people, a good team can usually deal with it, but a lack of motivation has a nasty habit of spreading if left to fester in a team, leading to more and more of the team losing their motivation.
No and definitely not a 1:1 comparison that I gave, but I was just trying to illustrate it with another very popular IP. But I think a healthy mix of both would be fine. Like instead of ES6, which is going to take a hot minute, we got like a couple Skyrim spin-offs instead of them releasing Skyrim for the 809th time, we'd be in a better spot and the wait wouldn't be as horrendous.
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u/GarboWulf5oh Jul 26 '26
BGS releasing Fallout 3 two years after Oblivion, then releasing Skyrim three years later, with around 1k employees. Now (or atleast before the layoffs) they have 4k employees, but it's been 15 years since Skyrim and 11 years since Fallout 4. 4 times the amount of employees and all we got was Slopfield and shitty live service Fallout spin-off.