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Baldur’s Gate 3 is Causing Some Developers to Panic
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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We don't exactly have many non-capitalistic economies.
But we have games that people made outside of the incentives of capitalism. i.e., because they wanted to make the game they wanted to make. This is what has created the absolute best games in existence. Not the incentive of money.
Was terraria made for the purposes of money? Was outer wilds? No. They were passion projects. Of course they had to earn money, because you need to earn money to survive, but that wasn't their primary goals. Contrary to games such as call of duty or whatever. Which are just incredibly bland in comparison.
I mean see how much microtransactions, loot boxes, etc. Is ruining the atmosphere of games and exploiting the hell out of people and kids. Don't tell me devs are putting that in because that is what their dream game would contain. No, they put it in purely because of capitalistic incentives. Would you argue that that is good?
Making a good product is an incentive of capitalism too. Microtransactions, battle passes, loot boxes, and other "live service" trappings dilute once-good products because people are often too attached to brands. As people tire of bad products, good ones can come along and thrive, which is what Battlebit appears to be doing for Battlefield fans, what Baldur's Gate 3 appears to be doing for RPGs, and what Elden Ring and the last two Zelda games are doing for open world games; what Cities: Skylines did for SimCity fans and maybe what Life By You could do for Sims fans. There's money to be made for making a good version of something that the reigning champs screwed up, abandoned, couldn't think of, or didn't bother to bring to market; that's capitalism.
Do you think those games wouldn't have been made without capitalism?
All of those examples are driven by people wanting to make a good game because that is their passion.
If they were given infinite resources to make a game, and would gain nothing else beyond just a decent standard of living or whatever, do you think they wouldn't made them? Because I think they would.
How hypothetical are we getting here? Somehow we live in a world where everyone has infinite resources? Capitalism just distributes the finite ones we have to things that people buy. A government can do that as well, but we don't have a great track record of them being able to buck the realities of where those resources need to go. If there's a UBI, you could end up with more games of the scope of Stardew Valley, or once tools and game engines get to be good enough, you could end up with more games that are feasible to be made by one or two people in a handful of years like that one was. But Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, Zelda...no, probably not. I can't predict the future, but they seem to be impossible to be made by small teams even with magical game engines that automate a lot of work that went in to make them.
Once you get beyond the profit motive, you're now at this point where you need to hire more people. Anything beyond really small teams are going to have a hard time sticking to someone else's vision unless one person is the boss calling the shots; otherwise known as the one with capital, paying those other talented people to work toward that goal. Of the 600 people making Baldur's Gate 3, I'll bet 550 of them disagreed on lots of directions that it went in, and it just becomes an insurmountable problem to wrangle that many people otherwise and keep them on track. If you don't need the money and you disagree with what the boss is doing, you'll just do your own project instead.
Meanwhile, we just got a Titan Quest II announcement, which I'll bet is a reaction to the general direction Blizzard has been going in since Diablo Immortal was announced, much like I was saying earlier. There's also another perspective I'd like to add on here, which proves both of our points. Ryan Clark of Brace Yourself Games, makers of Crypt of the NecroDancer, used to do a YouTube show called Clark Tank, similar to Shark Tank, talking about how to make indie games that make money. Creatives have tons of passion projects they want to make, and you'll never get through all of them in a lifetime. However, you know types of games that you would like to make, that you can observe are also making money, that you're confident you can deliver while they're still popular, so that you can profit, expand, and repeat the cycle. In a sense, passion projects and what the market is asking for via where they're spending their money.
My point was that capitalism and its incentives do not create good games.
Capitalism rewards profit at any cost, and nothing more. In the end this allows for cash grabs and terrible working conditions, which the industry is riddled with. Good games would still have gotten made without these incentives.
There's many assumptions in this text, and it ignores great games that were financial flops (or couldn't get made in the first place), and terrible ones (like gacha games or basically the whole mobile games ecosystem) which are greatly rewarded and successful. There are so many resources wasted on objectively not good things for players such as how to exploit their psyche to spend money which compromises the game design, or resources spent on stuff like marketing just because that's what pays back, instead of spending those on making a better game.
I would argue that capitalism's incentives hampers the creation of good games if anything. Because now instead of thinking what makes a game good, devs are instead forced or incentivized to think what makes money. And they are very much not the same thing.
Someone could make the best game of all time according to one random guy, but if it's not a game I want, I'm not playing it, and there are games I'd like to be made so that I can play them. Great games that people want to play create profit. Exploitative games also profit, but I'd lay that at the feet of poor regulation. If you want to profit, generally, you're making a game that as many people as possible will want to play, or a game that enough want to play but that itch hasn't been scratched by your competitors. How do you make money with Baldur's Gate 3? You make a really good Baldur's Gate game, and then people buy it. Even the exploitative games are desirable to their audience for one reason or another before they get to the exploitative parts.