[goldcd]

Activision Blizzard googles 4k employees and.. Last year managed to re-make Crash Bandicoot & Spyro - and a CoD. That's it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Activision_video_games

That boggles my mind.. That CEO salary seems rather on the high side. I could have told them to "do another CoD" and rummage in the vault.

[Negitivefrags]

They also supported a large number of ongoing games-as-a-service games. I suspect they have more employees working on released games than working on non-released ones.

[goldcd]

EA seems to be doing better - there's a few new things in there once you strip out Battlefield, Sims and the Sports stuff - but still.. ..For some reason I'd still thought the big publishers were some massive force of nature, crushing all in their path. We could stand on the side-lines booing their latest monetization strategy, but I'd still considered them to be invincible monsters. I'd imagined I'd see a list of a load of games I'd never heard of. Games they'd taken a punt on that hadn't paid off - as that's what I imagined you did as a corporate monster. 80% would vanish breaking even if lucky, and 20% would make 80% of your income. That's how you stay big. Instead their entire output appears to be just rubber-stamping iterations of past glories. I genuinely feel a bit sad now I've looked into it. They're still monsters, but of the dinosaur variety.

[freeflight]

> We could stand on the side-lines booing their latest monetization strategy, but I'd still considered them to be invincible monsters.

I think that's been falling apart for a while now due to fan backlash. Activision has never been very popular, now Blizzard fans have finally gotten the message that they are one and the same, reacting in overblown ways to mobile announcements.

EA struggles from the same reputation issue as Activision. The latest Battlefield was met with quite some hostility and afaik hasn't been doing very well commercially, while the last Mass Effect received luke-warm reception killing the franchise for good.

If it wasn't for that very smart PR move of keeping Apex Legends under wraps, until release, EA would also be in quite some trouble now. Particularly with Anthem underwhelming people everywhere, confirming the notion that whatever made Bioware special, is by now long gone.

Doesn't look that much better at Bethesda with their Fallout 76, after years of taking the fan-goodwill for granted, they've now managed to really piss people off.

Take2 and Ubisoft have mostly managed to pull through unscathed so far, but imho overall this is the result of indie development and publishing having gotten as strong as they are now. Nowadays consumers can choose from a wide selection of very high-quality games, often sold below the usual full-retail price and they've become very aware of it.

If the established big players want to keep their dominance they need to change their course heavily, show actual goodwill instead of constant willingness to exploit every commercial angle available.

[taurath]

The big guys got addicted to the “stamp” AAA games over the last 15 years and their competitors are eating their lunch in terms of gameplay. They have tons of resources and could pivot to making just plain great games but probably not sustain the sheer buckets of guaranteed money their investors priced into their stock ticker. Monetizaion strategy is all Wall Street wants to hear about during product announcements, and players are listening for it so they know not to go.

Of course, massive amounts of games are still being sold. Just competition is taking a big bite out of them.