Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt has spoken out about the "ridiculous" state of the video game industry, which regularly endures "cycles of death and rebirth" which has become "unnecessarily brutal" in recent years.
Speaking at a GDC session attended by Eurogamer, Pilestedt took aim at the current state of our industry, which continues to lose talent despite more people playing video games than ever. The problem, as Pilestedt sees it, is that publishers and developers have become too cautious, failing to cater to the increasingly diverse tastes of the gaming population at large:
"The games industry is caught in a vicious circle of death and rebirth. Every so often, we suddenly lay off thousands of people, and then nobody understands why. I think it's just because we converge. Now, that cycle is unnecessarily brutal because we don't diversify enough. We need to make more types of games because more people are playing than ever, and still, we are unable to stay in business. It's ridiculous. If everybody stopped making battle royales and made [different kinds of] games, we wouldn't be in this position."
Pilestedt took aim at the money-men and women in the audience who are ultimately responsible for following these trends, and when they fail, they get to decide who is and is not made redundant: publishers, whose greed the CEO of the independent Larian Studios, Swen Vincke, (and others) have identified as being the primary problem:
"A lot of publishers — I'm sorry, my dear publisher friends — try to play it safe by taking safe bets. But one thing that I can guarantee is that those safe bets are a death sentence for the studios that try to make it. We are in the business of taking risks, and if you don't take risks, you won't be able to succeed. Few people believed that Helldivers would amount to anything, yet here we are."
What do you think of Pilestedt's address, seemingly taking no prisoners and telling publishers how it is? Stand out from the crowd in the comments section below.
[source eurogamer.net]
Comments 23
Safe bets are pretty much impossible in an industry like this, especially with tastes changing faster than development times. If ideas are backed and devs are given time then that’s how we get good games. The industry’s still too caught up in sales figures anyway, most of the best movies I’ve ever seen made barely any money but the world is better for them existing. Some movies are made and the critical acclaim is the reward, games don’t have prestigious enough awards yet to justify pushing the artform beyond what current audiences are ready for.
Again it is finding the easy villain versus just looking at the market and seeing an over supply of games and not enough people to play them all. Look at the last two months, KCD2, MHW, AVOWED, AC SHADOWS, XENOBLADE X. These are all different games that still share an overlap of gamers interested in them. They're also all VERY long, while players still have their go to f2p black hole games.
More people are playing then ever before but more people are unavailable as consumers as games like HD2, GTA O, Genshin have them locked in.
central and eastern Europe is still cheap for labor and areas like Poland etc don't have strong labor laws yet. The cost increases will really hit Eastern Europe in a few years and we will see a change in tune then.
He’s 100 percent right! Publishers forcing devs to make games to follow a trend that will be over by the time the game releases is moronic. The suits in charge would have us play the same 20 games for 15 years if they had the option. They don’t care about innovation and they probably don’t really care about the industry. As long as they have 20k concurrent players filling the coffers every season they’ll be happy.
I think he's Bob on..there needs to be risk taking. I'm loving my gaming hobby even though its changing but if I'm honest it's always been changing. I would like to say evolving but I think devolving is more apt because there seems to be less innovation and more "monetisation." Once upon a time in a decade far,far away rpg's were here and there but they were magnificent things to play. Now it's every game and there just isn't enough time to truly play these behemoths..its not just rpg's it's every genre truth be told. The market is saturated.
This describes the Western games industry very well. The Eastern games industry is actually doing quite well.
"failing to cater to the increasingly diverse tastes of the gaming population at large"
I just preordered Deliver At All Costs, a perfect little "lay lazy in the summer with my portal-kind of game" releasing at the end of may '25.
Not every game need to be enourmous blockbusters a'la Death Stranding 2 or AC: Shadows. For me gaming is a perfect mix between all of the above, just missing Sony's 3rd person adventures lately. Guess I can sort of count in Death Stranding 2 in that category?
It does nothing for me to hear that a new studio has been created knowing that most games take 5+ years anymore to release and many games get canceled or studio shut down before they ever even release it.
I believe I saw news on here this week about some new PlayStation studio that’s been put together with people from a studio that was shut down in the last year.
Gaming is too expensive in the west to make, so publishers didn't want to take risk that can bankrupt them. I think In the end AAA games will be just too expensive to be made in usa and only be made in other country, with the exception like fortnite, cod, and gta, the rest is indie gaming and AA gaming (like robocop rogue city or Split fiction).
On one hand I would agree with @breakneck that there are too many games, and many people are locked into one game or one franchise.
But I for example would spend a bit more if more games would offer VR modes. I cannot say that I know the cost for developing a VR mode, but my assumption would be that the additional people attracted by VR modes would finance the additional development cost (adding VR mechanics, adjusting rendering for stereoscopic views, play testing), but likely not much more. Thus, a VR mode would likely not increase the profit but would increase the risk. So, a risk averse industry would not add VR modes and that is kind of what we see.
Then many studios have been chasing the golden GAAS of infinite revenue, forgetting that the idea of a game is fun not monetization.
And we have seen this massive consolidation of the market, now at the top MS gobbling up half the industry, then tencent and embracer. In an ideal situation a big publisher still could produce a large variety. But, there are very few examples where consolidation lead to more variety. Typically what happens is that products are streamlined, sharing more and more and finally only differing by the coat of paint. The best example here is likely ubisoft.
So, yes I see the problem that a "creative" industry is manged too much in regards of maximizing the profit, rather than honoring creativity.
Since shareholders are not interested in good products produced by the companies they hold shares of, but in the profits. There is likely no way out. Other than creating new, fresh, creative studios which are to some degree financed by the finance oriented part of the industry which ultimately eats up these studios to let them die. And there we have the circle.
Though I guess it becomes harder and harder as a new studio to be recognized by the well fed industry. So I suppose now most studios will die before they enter the circle
At the same time there is the problem that many games are just a reskin of each other. And maybe it is impossible to find the innovative new games which is buried in the catalogue of "identical" games?
This is why I prefer Asian developers to Western ones, they aren't fixated on live service (on console anyway) and don't mind taking risks. For me Western AA and Indie games are the ones taking the risks and it's paying off, so many smaller games are grabbing people's attention and its because they offer a different experience to stale AAA market.
"... If everybody stopped making battle royales and made [different kinds of] games, we wouldn't be in this position."
can someone send it to all bigwigs???
More gamers but these more gamers play the same game in Roblox, Fortnite, Counter Strike for ages. And more people play only mobile. The reality is a lot of games bombed in sales, live service or not.
Unfortunately some "safe bets" still sell a lot of copies, prime examples being Call of Duty and FIFA (Sorry FC now), I would argue that AC Shadows is playing it safe too and not really moving the franchise forward in any meaningful way.
It's hard to put all the blame on publishers. If you are a money man and your job is to make bets with hundreds of millions of dollars, are you going to play it safer, or risk it all? Especially when your job is on the line. They are simply doing their job, just like anyone else.
And when they do take risks, how many failures do we see. How many new IP that remain a one game failure. A lot. WE consumers tend to buy, watch, play the same things. It's why ***** Transformers movies are a multi-billion dollar movie franchise, and why we are on Assassin's Creed #32 (no joke), Far Cry #14 and 'FIFA' #43. Until WE consumers, collectively, start changing our buying habits this will always be the cycle. We have to take some of the blame too.
He’s right , it’s rife in every form of entertainment, big bosses looking at excel spreadsheets making movies we don’t want and games because evidence says it’s safe.
But they land and flop - Give us something new , take a risk push the envelope , don’t try to be the next version of what ever, just do something that you think is going to resonate
He's right. Look at the movie industry, people yawn and ignore movies that are too similar. Every now and then a really diverse masterpiece comes out of nowhere.
We should be looking for that in gaming. Find different dynamics, change up a genre, have multiple USPs not just "it's a battle royale with different character abilities than that last game".
In many cases I think its the investors who want to play it safe. A lot of boring, safe games out there were probably something quite different at an early stage, before being edited into a video game happy meal.
This is why I like smaller companies like Falcom, Inti-Creates, etc. that know what they excel at, know what their fans want, and stick to that, instead of trying to go big with more expensive and generically designed projects.
Not everything needs to be Uncharted or Zelda. I love creatives who make unique projects that can't be found elsewhere.
The problem is the industry has been infested with money grabbing (won't say the word) who have no interest in games or no nothing about games at. Then they have CEOs in place who really don't know about games except how to make money and as much profit with little to no expedenture at all. They grind their Devs to the bone and then set ridiculous deadlines for the game to be finished and put out.
The obsession with Live service is 1 thing that will and I'm shocked how it hasn't yet crashed the gaming industry. Microsoft and Sony want that Epic Fortnite pie but they can't get it right in a marker that's stagnated to death.
The push for high end graphics is also another step as to why games are flopping or not good, as they seem to have weak stories or gameplay. Spiderman 2 is one game that comes to mind I found it very boring compared to the first came, graphics have also come to a point were upscaling is now needed across consoles and PC when we've had native for decades.
Indies for me are were it's at Hades is a fantastic game I've yet to try Undertale, but Dredge is my next game I'm playing
I was caught in a vicious circle of life and death playing Returnal.
Creative destruction is fine, but in gaming it happens at a very high pace.
It ain't like horses to cars, or steam loco's to diesels.
Very uncomfortable industry to work in, and I mean it would be hard to sign up to a long term commitment like a mortgage, when your industry is that volatile.
I mean yeah. It's a creative industry treated like a factory with production to be automated yet it can't be. So it's hilarious.
1 big game, too long to make, dull gameplay, elements that they don't even know if it will be appealing to audiences anymore and the project turns into different structure of models too often and are a mess.
Execs/publishers with no understanding of video games just say 'this makes money, we don't care how long the trend lasts, what your skills are, how you do it, your experts you can adapt right? make me money' mentality is always hilarious to laugh at and see them mess up management.
Staff seem to be lucky enough to be paid hopefully well enough but their contributions become more sad each day.
I come up with more imaginative ideas then they do products exciting to think about let alone care to look at on the shelf and yeah.
Casuals don't care about quality at all but hardcore do. Or are IP attached as well.
Now on the other side of things.
People can voice it but as if veterans don't go to other studios and make the same IP/different license as they already did just a different publisher to offer the same or not as much money and yet those vets don't even learn anything because they were already too IP passionate just without the same people telling them what to mold it into. XD
Other then Hello Games No Man's Sky/Joe Danger, etc or the Nightingale team, even if both going survival game trends or others, many AAA seem to ignore and it's a hard genre to get into.
We get the odd Song of the Deep, Pentiment and more from time to time.
Yeah the rest make basically the same games they already did when they leave. XD I get make what you know/are passionate about but even still they are so close even terminology or other factors are borrowed, it's hilarious.
Eternal Strands uses so many Dragon Age terminology it's hilarious, yet like some JRPGs have just as many 3 different format cutscenes.
Let alone they make successors and they don't have the name/budget/polish or direction people got used to besides their skills sets in the industry, decisions still go either way of what gets approved for the projects and they either pass or flop due to gameplay, atmosphere, story or otherwise customers seek out or game release periods being so bad by publishers and customers go well I know this, and will value this more.
Comfort is one thing, those seeking something different, a middle ground, whatever the case, built up IP/studio reputation & however much we actually see.
What devs actually care about shows in their new studio effects as much as their prior projects even if a different publisher, they still show the same pitfalls to an extent that varies but still noticeable.
It's hilarious they are that close minded/passionate even with a different publisher (demands may be similar or differ) the same mistakes & whichever staff came over with them or left.
Even seeing a clip in a video of the fewer millions for Indie films type response of an award show I was like huh interesting.
So yeah more lower budget games, more focus on gameplay not generic worlds many devs of any budget even Indies that copy paste their inspirations and don't even make their own product distinct enough or spun off enough while others do. Drill that into their heads.
I think the obvious thing thats happening is they are trying to create a monopoly with video gaming only controlled by tenecent, Endurance ,Sony ,Blackrock, and Microsoft all other subsidiaries will/are being absorbed so you'll have limited options to choose from thats my take on whats been going on the last couple of years
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