- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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Same thing happened with music.
It doesn’t mean AAA will go away, just like big stadium packing artists like Taylor Swift never went away. They just accounted for less of the industry’s total profits than they used to.
More of people’s disposable money is spent on a wider variety of music and games, often opting for more “indie” and cheaper versions of both. It’s a good thing, honestly, for people’s tastes to be more diversified and unique.
Except almost no one can live with music now, with the spotify model.
I pirate my music and keep it in my local storage.
Can I suggest occasionally buying stuff through something like Bandcamp? You get digital music and support the artist. Or, just buy some merch I guess.
I mean, it’s ok I guess, but as a musician myself that’s not helping much either. Buy some stuff on bandcamp (85% goes to the artists, cheap and often pay what you want) or if you need streaming get Tidal, they give 3x than spotify and didn’t give 100 millions to joe rogan.
Also bandcamp gives you high quality DRM FLAC files (or really whatever audio filetype you want) and those files are yours to keep, forever. You can also stream stuff you’ve bought through the bandcamp website. They also still do bandcamp fridays where 100% of the sale goes to the artist. Next bandcamp friday is May 1st.
Another option is direct-from-artist sales if they have their own website and store. Do vinyls still come with codes for an mp3 copy? I remember my vinyl for The Mean Jeans - Are You Serious? had a code and a link to download an mp3 copy of the album.
Hell you can still buy CDs direct (rarely) do that too. Great for display if nothing else.
Huh. Just found out that Bandcamp isn’t owned by Epic Games anymore. It was sold off to someone else back in 2023. Guess I don’t have a reason to boycott it now
I’m not gonna get started on this, but Epic or not, this is and was one of the only way to give money directly to artists. If you boycott Epic I really hope you boycott steam also cause they’re no better.
Fuck off with your false equivalence bullshit.
EGS has used anticompetitive and anti consumer practices from day one, all because Tim Swiney is a petty asshole that wants to be at the top of the pile.
Meanwhile Valve has generally been pro-consumer and built a relatively good service
Lol, another steam sucker ready to die for billionaire Gabe. They basically invented gambling for chlidren, they actually are the one that have anticompetitive practice lmfao, they dont let you own your games, they take a huge cut of 30% (epic take 12%, but you dont care about game devs right), they make billions in profit but employ less than 300 people.
But I’ve met enough of your kind to know your cognitive dissonance to know that no amount of proofs that steam suck would make you stop kissing their ass. You guys are the maga of gaming lol. So yeah, the hard truth is you don’t like games you like steam, and you dont like music, you like yourself. Now fuck off yourself, you are the problem.
There wasn’t really a reason to boycott it anyway. Epic just wanted “free” access to a massive library for their games, like how EA Trax used to be a thing. Nothing changed about bandcamp in the meantime.
There wasn’t really a reason to boycott it anyway.
Yes there was. It’s called “fuck those monopolistic cunts at EGS, they don’t get my money”
The reason would be fuck Epic.
I love Bandcamp. It does not have much of a filter so I get to find small and under the radar artists.
Personally I buy 90% of my music either on Bandcamp or as a CD in my local store… rip it… throw it on Jellyfin for easy streamikg
It’s funny, I recall Benn Jordan saying in multiple videos of his that his profits went up when he removed all his music from spotify.
Live shows and merch have been the way artists make money since before streaming was a thing
Yeah, except now we would have the capacity to give money directly to artists. Platforms like shittyfy have shown people are willing to pay a couple of bucks a months to get access to music, we need to redirect the money to the artists and not some greedy ceo. Bandcamp is a start, we can do better.
Sounds like you’re someone who thought a little about pricing.
Why should anyone get a royalty for a listen?
There’s a club in my town with a dj who plays each week. Club gets paid, dj gets paid. His sets are like ads for his work in the club. Why would I have to pay for each listen? Why would he has to earn for each listen?
Especially if that DJ is residing somewhere else and won’t ever come to my town because it’s too small for him.
Why do we create superstars? Why does “superstar S” have to be paid millions because millions come to their show. Even though I stand 500 m away, I can’t see them, I can’t hear them properly. Why can’t it be that there is a cover band covering those songs. Maybe even doing a better job. On a loval concert, with great sound, a good stage, less crowd, less people, more fun.
Why do we cheer a dj with electronic music, who just plays one song after the other, with a little bit of mixing now and then and choosing the next track based on the crowd? Why aren’t people in the center of the music (anymore)?
Why is our system so fucked up?
Like when BG3 came out and other devs whined about being unable to deliver such a game? Maybe they shouldn’t be considered AAA studios if all they do is waste their budget.
PC players are always going to lead the trend because we have the most options. Microsoft and Sony are in a race to enshitify their ecosystems, while Nintendo is actively hostile towards it’s customers and fans.
Meanwhile I’m playing through what was originally a Playstation exclusive title that I got on sale on Steam, and run on Linux.
Spider-Man is a fun game
And then there’s the F2P-P2W/ad-riddled-and-sustained hellhole that is most of mobile gaming.
I’ve always thought sony was fine. Good exclusives, not a terrible experience, is fine with you buying your games. A bit expensive, but otherwise better than xbox and nintendo. Nintendo is good if you want nintendo but otherwise kinda shit
This trilogy was really confusing.
Weird how they changed to a new genre every release.
Good! Fuck that generic sludge being pushed out by shit companies ran by sociopaths.
This article seems to be lumping mobile and PC into the same bucket which is probably more of a red flag for the analysis they are doing here. Of course revenue is going to be more split when you add in tons of mobile games that are very effective at taking lots of money with minimal interaction.
All the games I see are PC/console. A few happen to be on mobile too, but that shouldn’t exclude them from the list.
TBH mobile revenue probably dwarfs these games, and must have a very different looking chart.
If it doesn’t run well on mobile gaming consoles, then it’s losing a huge market. It makes sense now that handhelds are popular af.
I feel like this doesn’t account for people who play older games. Like I’m currently playing the God of War reboot. That would count as playing something that’s outside the current top 20, but still very-much AAA.
Hey, so am I! I was never a big fan of the hack and slash of the original trilogy, but have been loving the axe combat and the Norse mythos.
I have been playing it on Steam Deck and am quite impressed with it.
This is revenue. How many people are buying those games now? Older games are also usually heavily discounted so that’s even less money. And if the game was bought second hand then it’s entirely irrelevant.
I’m currently replaying Horizon: Zero Dawn on my wife’s old GTX 1060 machine. Yeah, it’s kinda janky at times, but it’s still a great game.
Because “top 20” are live service games that have been going on for years…
The top, however, remains deeply entrenched. The Top 5 PC games have been unchanged since 2023. In 2025, only Marvel Rivals and Wuthering Waves were among the rare new entrants to break into the Top 20.
If someone buys a hyped up single player game from on of the biggest studios of all time…
Itll most likely still be “outside the top 20” even tho it’s AAA
Do they still make AAA games anymore? They take so long to develop and lots of them get cancelled at the very end or a month after release.
No. AAA games don’t really exist anymore. They’re a thing of the past.
In what way? Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Gearbox, Bethesda, Capcom, etc etc all still make and release new games.
Because AAA doesn’t just mean “new game”. AAA is about budget, the size of development teams, the time it takes to make, and monetization layers. The AAA industry is struggling because they don’t really make games like they used to.
Ok. That doesn’t change anything about the companies I exampled. Those are triple A game companies.
Believe most games people perceive as AAA are actually AAAA but its all a load of hogwash
What game is a AAAA game?
Whatever Ubisoft or Microsoft deem to be a AAAA game because they’re the only ones using that term.
Rank Title Free-to-Play 1 Roblox Yes 2 Counter-Strike 2 Yes 3 League of Legends Yes 4 Minecraft In China 5 Fortnite For modes other than Save the World 6 Dota 2 Yes 7 Valorant Yes 8 World of Warcraft No 9 The Sims 4 No 10 Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 No 11 Escape from Tarkov No 12 Overwatch 2 Yes 13 Marvel Rivals Yes 14 PUBG: Battlegrounds Yes 15 World of Warcraft Classic No 16 Grand Theft Auto V No 17 Diablo IV No 18 Wuthering Waves Yes 19 Genshin Impact Yes 20 Apex Legends Yes I think that a bigger story there is the dominance of F2P games.
Or effectively F2P/MTX based ones, even if they have an upfront cost.
And it’s not even counting mobile.
I hear a lot about the resurgance of honesy, pay-upfront games, but revenue sure isn’t supporting that.
F2P games are subsidized by a small minority who will throw a hundred dollars a month into the game to obtain and max out whatever FOMO event or item/character is on rotation, and by an even smaller group of obscenely wealthy (or mentally ill) players who will spend tens of thousands of dollars just to say they own everything.
I’d honestly be fine with this model if the ones funding it were treated like patrons of the arts or something, but instead the industry hired a bunch of psychologists to run incredibly unethical experiments to create literally addictive design patterns encouraging the weak-willed or mentally ill to spend more.
Modern F2P game design is predatory and downright evil in the way it’s carefully cultivated to be just fun enough to continue playing, while constantly dangling the promise of more enjoyment if you’d only spend a tiny bit more (with that ‘bit more’ often only granting a small chance at getting what you want, with ‘pity’ systems only guaranteeing the desired drop if you spend the equivalent of around a hundred bucks in premium currency). But since it’s obscenely profitable, I don’t foresee it going away without legislation banning those practices.
It depends, it’s certainly inaccurate to describe all F2P games as doing this. Runescape, at least back in the 2000s, was F2P or a monthly sub. That was it.
Runescape also was a free game at a time when those weren’t really common. I honestly can’t think of any others with the scope of RS.
Not only was it free, it ran entirely in a browser window.
That’s how it managed to build its player base, and it coasts on that nostalgia to this day.
There were loads of free browser games back then
Miniclip, Newgrounds, and similar felt more like mini games.
For free and in browser with some actual progression, I can think of RuneScape and those Artix Adventure Quest series games. I played both, but Runescape definitely felt like more of a complete game with 3D models and all.
God, I had forgotten how bad those Artix games were til I remembered them just now.
I played the bejeezus out of Runescape until I picked up Minecraft as a teenager. The free to play section certainly had its limits (only like 30 quests, about a dozen skills and only like 1/4 of the map) but you could absolutely access many, many hours of content purely in free to play. Compare that to another title from around the same era, Disney’s Pirates Online, which gave you an initial 3 days of free premium membership on account creation, you’d largely run out of free content and find everything gated to membership within a couple of days so it was hard to enjoy past those first 3 days unless you could convince your parents to buy you membership.
Of course, both have extremely healthy community-run revival projects in 2009Scape and The Legend of Pirates Online respectively.
There’s also other projects like 2004scape, 2007scape, Darkan, Open RSC etc. depending on your preferred era of Runescape to relive, but ORSC and 2009scape seem to both have the most active development and most active communities by far (and ORSC is early enough to be hard to enjoy if you aren’t deep into vintage gaming)
Yeah, that’s what I hate about Genshin Impact most - the predatory gacha and FOMO-exploiting business model ruining what would otherwise be a peak game I could recommend to basically anyone.
Regardless of whatever fraction most of the revenue comes from, they still draw absolutely massive amounts of players.
And Roblox does it by exploiting kids.
Roblox screws over both the players and the creators who attract and keep them there, both of which as you said are mostly children. It’s actually kind of impressive how scummy the devs are. They’re the poster child for rent-seeking parasites.
Not to mention that in one country the game is being allegedly used as a platform for spreading edgelordism.
https://www.onenews.ph/articles/pnp-terrorists-grooming-kids-through-roblox
Shouldn’t the sims 4 be considered free to play? The base game is free, only the dlc is paid.
Way too many American games in there :(
Free to play, and “ever games” or whatever you want to call them. Solid classics that are easy to return to for years. Left 4 Dead 2 is a great example.
I appreciate the nicely formatted table. :)
Nearly every every on that list is also a live service game that has been released for years. It’s almost like supporting your product post-launch builds a dedicated userbase or something.
(And yeah, I know it’s actually because of the profitability of addictive design patterns combined with microtransactions. Let me dream, please.)
This is also survivorship bias. Plenty of companies would love to support their game post launch and make this much money, but they go under trying to follow the same playbook; even the ones that were successful doing so before.
True. I know Dean Hall (DayZ, Stationeers, Kitten Space Agency) destroyed any hope of his survival game Icarus becoming a major success by releasing hundreds of dollars of expensive DLC during Early Access, then later revealed it was because the money from his previous projects had slowed to a trickle and splitting his current project into a bunch of paid packs was the only way he could stay solvent. Even the megahits of the past all die out at some point.
Doesn’t help that Icarus is such a technical mess. Certainly limits the player base when you shoot for a graphically demanding game and then don’t bother with working on performance.
Maybe I’m just grumpy that I can’t play it anymore since switching to Linux despite upgrading my gpu.
I should totally put release date on there too. Just a sec, will add on a column with that.
Wow, most of them were even older than I’d thought. And even some of the new ones like Tarkov were in Early Access for years before their official release date.
(You flipped the date and country for 16 and 17, btw)Already fixed, never mind!Yeah, but thanks for the heads-up!
One minor correction, I believe The Sims 4 went F2P at some point. They’re funded entirely by expansion packs now.
Yeah, I thought about changing it, but…the problem is that while the base game is playable now for $0, the overwhelming bulk of the game’s content is in expansion packs. Like, I don’t think that people really buy and play just the base game; it’d be more like a demo.
Yeah, expensive but high-quality add-ons are the norm for flight sims.
That’s fair. Though, by that logic would you consider something like that one Final Fantasy MMO F2P or not? I believe it lets you play all the old content for free and only charges for the last (few?) expansions.
EA: hold my A key.
What about the AAAA games, like those that Ubislop put out?
I find this a bit entertaining especially hearing advertisers and executives occasionally vent on stuff like this. A huge portion of modern people especially the younger they are:
- Don’t go outside
- Don’t read billboards, bus wrap advertisements, bus stop advertisements, ignore advertisements in sporting arenas and uniforms, etc
- Use adblockers online/ignore online advertisements
- Mute the television when ads are on
- Don’t have television subscriptions
- Pay for streaming services at a level that removes ads
- Watch like no advertising shows like award shows
- only watches TV for the finals of a sporting league championship and when advertisements comes on mutes the TV or focuses on their friends
- Don’t discuss advertisements with friends like people did in the past
- Show up to the movies late to avoid advertisements
- Generally have an anti-consumption/anti-advertisement attitude even if they are consumerist. Being advertised to is an annoyance enough to buy something else
- Throw away mailers immediately without reading
- Ignore people trying to advertise on the street/passing out flyers
- Don’t answer the door
- Don’t answer the phone
- Generally has no idea when anything new is coming out and mostly exists in a social bubble
- Practically no monoculture
- Etc
Besides the not going outside and problems that can arise from being in a social bubble, it’s all good stuff to me. For decades advertisers and businesses have optimized everything for selling products and now people are so desensitized to it to not care. Like no one actually cares about times square takeover advertisements anymore. It’s not a big deal.
It’s actually incredibly hard to advertise media now. Advertisements have to manage to seem organic or come off as predatory. So in comes the influencers but no influencer is as influential and trusted as a prime time advertisement before social media/YouTube went mainstream with people children to elderly. The vein to sell souless AAA/blockbuster media is busted
This is the way.
You forgot
- pirates a lot of media
When you’re not allowed to own anything, piracy isn’t theft.
Piracy in general shouldn’t be equated to theft.
You wouldnt download a car.
- Don’t discuss advertisements with friends like people did in the past
This one is big and I never noticed it until a few years ago. My wife and I never got cable when we moved into our own place. One time my mother in law was talking to my wife about some commercial and my wife just said she hadn’t seen it. My mother in law got really weirdly upset or something, like my wife was trying to be condescending or something. But she was talking about it the same way people might talk about a funny skit from a show. It wasn’t until being away from it for years that I realized how odd it is.
Still feels crazy though how aware you’re forced to be about ads lurking in every corner. I check many of these boxes plus some others, use independent OSs, 3rd party apps etc. And still, although I hardly see any ads, they are so present just lurking under the surface.
Good example are sponsor comments in yt videos/podcasts. Some I can filter out with Sponsorblock, but the little video glitch reminds you every time that you have to stay safe. Podcast ads can easily be slipped with the fast forward button, but if you’re washing the dishes etc., sometimes you can’t react directly.
It’s really insane how ads are just everywhere these days.
Yould think the ad companies would get the message…
Some of the most wildly out of touch professors and students I’ve shared space with were business peeps.
I think it’s more companies should question whether the advertisement they pay for is actually effective or if they’re just told it’s more effective
Google made record profits last quarter, so it can’t be that bad.
It all costs too much now, and my backlog will hold me over until I die of old age. I’m at the age now where I don’t care about the new stuff.
