Well, I don’t know about “corporate greed.” A larger proportion of games being made right now are being made by indie teams, outside established game companies. Much of what’s happening in AAA gaming, with corporate consolidation, etc., is just what’s financially required to make the kinds of AAA games that gamers…

No, statements lauding the “great progress [made] building a diverse and talented team and establishing a strong lineup of Stadia exclusive games,” aren’t going to make anyone think they will have a job “for 100 years,” but they absolutely suggest that at least there’s corporate intent to finish the goddamn product…

Well, the economics of game development were quite different in the ‘90s, but it was not necessarily “cheaper” to make games.

Mass layoffs were announced a few days later, part of an apparent pattern of Stadia leadership not being honest and upfront with the company’s developers, many of which had upended their lives and careers to join the team.

To be fair, some fandoms are worse than others, and gaming is one of the absolute worst.

Ha, yeah, though probably quite quickly dollar coins would have been ideal - but even there, people weren’t regularly using Susan B. Anthonys enough for that to work. It worked better in countries that regularly use higher-denomination coins (e.g. Japan, which is part of why arcades have survived there).

Even capitalism isn’t quite it

Well, game hardware makers and publishers fund the entirety of the game awards, and even choose who gets to nominate and vote for games. Even if we’re being charitable, when deciding which games to showcase (versus which are nominated for categories), they’re picking them based on which have money behind them, under…

Obviously on some level some work had been done, as they had to develop a set of character and environment designs for the announcement trailer, even if none of that ended up being used for the game, but based on an interview I read, they apparently didn’t get seriously started on pre-production until a couple years…

I think there’s a particular set of circumstances required for games to be developed further and have it make financial sense. It helps if they’re part of a franchise (don’t want to diminish the value of an IP) or part of plans for a future franchise, they need to have already spent a huge sum of money on development…

Consolidation is a factor - bigger companies have the (enormous) resources to continue to develop a game post-release, after having already spent a lot of money developing and marketing a game. Another factor is that game sites are happy to be part of the hype machine that starts years before a game is released,…

Not just industry consolidation, but the ever-increasing costs of AAA development (which has been a major cause of industry consolidation). Once a publisher has invested that kind of money (plus the greater sum needed to market it), spending more to fix a game and give it a long sales life makes financial sense.

Most games at this stage of development don’t see the light of day. Given that they’re working on multiple spin-off games, reportedly, it doesn’t have to be terrible to get canceled, even - it just has to eat into the market share of one of the other games. If someone decides the market for this is the LoL playerbase,…

Cyberpunk 2077 got announced some years before they even started working on it. And that was an official announcement with a video and everything...

Looks at the list of officially announced games that I worked on, that didn’t get released... (Also, that wasn’t remotely an official announcement, even - it was more of an accidental acknowledgement.)

Yeah, those are points in its favor, but it’s also reportedly one of a number of games in development, which means they might start conflicting with each other. I.e. games end up being too similar to all release, so something gets canceled or games get merged.

versions of Diablo 3 that were never shown

I’m sure they have something to show, but they probably don’t want to because of where it is

No teaser trailer, no expensive cinematic video, no concept art, no press release, just a tweet with the barest details imaginable.

Hopefully this doesn’t turn into: “Cool, now that you have all your work material at home, you can easily work 10 12 16 hours a day!” (Unless they’re crunching, of course. I know people in the Korean and Japanese game industries who ended up working 20-24 hours a day, where the only breaks they got were when they lite…