Too many video games, but maybe also too few
Plus: Palworld's latest eye-popping stats and the Games of the Year in eight words or less
Many years ago, when it was more common for video game companies to run big press events in New York City, Electronic Arts would come to town with so many games that they’d rent out a two-story venue: one floor for the “naughty” games, one for the “nice.”
EA would bring console games, mobile games, PC games, new games, spin-offs, just a load of them all. We’re talking about an EA that not only made The Sims, but The Urbz, too. The EA not just of Fight Night but of Facebreaker.
EA still publishes a lot of games, but not quite enough to fill two floors. Once-annual Sims releases have given way to only two new Sims games since 2014 (plus annual expansions). They haven’t made a boxing game since 2011 and even the UFC games that took their place come out just once every few years.
From Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed to Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto, there isn’t a major game series that comes out more frequently than it used to. They’ve all slowed down.
(Paradoxically, more games than ever are coming out, largely thanks to the proliferation of indie studios.)
The big-game/big-publisher slowdown seems set to continue. Big publishers, including Riot this week and Square Enix late last year, say they’ve simply been releasing too many games.
To thrive, these companies suggest, they need to make fewer.
And that brings us to the second most-important piece of news out of Riot Games this week: The shutdown of Riot Forge.
(The most important news, to be clear, was the company’s announcement that it is laying off 530 people, or 11% of its workforce, with the current CEO Dylan Jadeja and former co-CEO/president (now chief product officer) Marc Merrill calling it a necessity. “Over the past few years, as Riot more than doubled in headcount, we spread our efforts across more and more projects without sharp enough razors to decide what players needed most,” they wrote.
The Riot cuts bring 2024’s game industry layoff tally to a dire 3,800, already more than a third of 2023’s total. Laid-off Riot workers have taken to social media to announce their unemployment, leading veteran indie developer Rami Ismail to grimly note a contrast between the reactions to posts like that this year vs. last year. “Back when 2023 ‘hit’ every layoff tweet was full with replies from people representing other studios hiring,” he wrote. “Now that 2023 ‘continues,’ there are barely other studios left. They're gone too, or can't hire now.”
I asked Riot comms if their execs were taking pay cuts or otherwise making adjustments because of this. In response, they pointed me to the timeline of Jadeja becoming CEO in October (replacing Nicolo Laurent) and Merrill taking the CPO role in December as signs of changes in the C-Suite).
Back to Riot Forge. That program was a side project for Riot, which makes its fortunes on the massively popular multiplayer games League of Legends and Valorant. The Forge games featured characters from League in single-player role-playing and action games made by outside developers.
In theory it was a cool concept—it’s a rare joy to see smaller studios handle a gaming giant’s biggest characters—but evidently not a sustainable one for Riot. The games don’t seem to have been hits, even on PC where Riot’s core fans play. According to Steam DB, the most successful of these games, 2021’s Ruined King, peaked at 16,000 concurrent players on Steam/PC (today alone, 70 games on Steam did better than that). The fifth and most recent, November’s Song of Nunu, peaked at 1,525.
On Monday, Riot announced that after one more release it would end the program: “We’re proud of what we’ve done together to bring these stories to life, but it’s time to refocus our efforts on the ambitious projects underway internally at Riot.”
Riot isn’t alone in thinking that fewer games might be the better way to go.
In November, Square Enix’s new president Takashi Kiryu told investors: “I want to structure our development function so that we are able to ensure higher quality from each title by slimming down our lineup.”
When pressed for why Square hadn’t slimmed things down earlier, he added:
“As our customers’ needs and the types of devices available have diversified, we have tried to produce hits by developing a wide variety of titles rather than by focusing only on certain ones…The market is increasingly polarized between blockbuster and indie titles, but I feel that we have developed many titles that fell somewhere in the middle. I want to make clearer distinctions going forward.”
You see the strategy they’re going for?
They’re wagering that making fewer big games will enable them to make better big games, the better with which to compete.
But, not everyone is thinking quite this way.
Enter Sega, the company that announced five franchise revivals in early December and will release a new game in its Like A Dragon series next week, less than three months since the release of the previous Like a Dragon.
This approach has confused some people who’ve spotted the slim-down trend. Here’s a Sega investor back on December 12 asking management if they’re possibly releasing too many games:
“Other companies are narrowing down their titles and moving toward to achieve home-run-level unit sales. Sega, on the other hand, is increasing its pipelines, and it seems that it will be more challenging to increase the unit sales for each title. What is the reason for adopting this strategy?”
Either Sega’s CEO or one of its COOs replies (the company’s documentation doesn’t specify):
This is due to Sega’s uniqueness. Sega has a diverse range of [intellectual properties], and as the variety of gaming platforms and users increase, more various business opportunities are generated. In particular, most of the time, Sega is approached by platform owners at the launch of new platform. In other words, there are abundant opportunities to aim for a medium hit as well. Since aiming for a home run requires a large amount of cost and also have high risk, we will invest in a low, medium, and high scale while building a portfolio of titles to maximize sales growth and ROI.”
(Side note: That’s not the world’s vaguest Switch 2 hint in there, is it?)
Anyway, this is a conundrum for big game makers: Aim higher fewer times? Or try more stuff?
The reason to try more things is that you never know which games will make it big. Some of gaming’s biggest hits came out of nowhere.
Think Minecraft.
Think Flappy Bird.
Think about how a small team at a Japanese indie studio just hatched what might be the most successful game launch of all time…
Item 2: Palworld takes over
Palworld, the survival game with Pokémon-like critters (often referred to as Pokémon with guns) had two million concurrent players on Steam today, a mark achieved only by one other PC game ever.
Sales: Dev studio Pocket Pair says they’ve now sold seven million copies since launching on Friday.
Back-story: Pocket Pair CEO Takuro Mizobe says the game’s development team ballooned to 40 people (plus outsourcing) across three years of development, according to a Jan. 16 post in Japanese summarized in English over at Polygon. Mizobe estimates development costs of at least ¥1 billion ($6.8 million), which actually seems low, as these things go.
Xbox’s role: The game is also out on Xbox (for $30 or via Game Pass at no added cost to subscribers). No official numbers from Pocket Pair or Microsoft yet, but Circana’s Mat Piscatella said today that on Monday, the game passed free-to-play Fortnite on Xbox in terms of daily active users in the U.S. Average play time was about 200 minutes, which happens to be just about how much time I played it on Monday.
Updates: Pocket Pair said early this morning that they plan to eventually add PvP, raid bosses and more islands and pals.
As for Nintendo: Nintendo has reportedly filed copyright complaints against videos of a fan-made mod that would add actual Pokémon characters to Palworld.
Item 3: In brief…
🤔 Sega has been touting the development of a “Super Game” for many years. According to a newly released transcript, an investor recently asked for more details and was told: “At this point, we can say that it is an online game service that allows users to enjoy various ways of playing, not limited to just play the game, although the focus is on game...”
🎮 Analyst Matthew Ball has published a comprehensive and at times disturbing look at the state of the video game industry. He surveys some recent carnage and notes some reasons for hope: the opening of walled gardens on mobile app stores, the potential shift of the Roblox generation into games outside of that ecosystem, and the development of games better suited for local markets around the world.
💪 Focus Entertainment will go by the name PulluP Entertainment, starting April 1, the company recently announced. Yes, the last P is capitalized.
💡 Lethal Company, the hit indie PC multiplayer game that blew up late last year is the 20th game created by its 21-year-old developer Zeekerss, who cut his teeth making games on Roblox, according to an interview he did with Push to Talk.
🧙♀️ Hogwarts Legacy was 2023’s most downloaded game on PlayStation 5 in the U.S. and Canada, according to Sony. In Europe, EA Sports FC took the top spot.
👀 Half Mermaid, the studio behind 2022’s acclaimed interactive movie/game Immortality, is teasing two new games, dubbed Project C and Project D, PC Gamer reports.
🟥 Netflix says the release of the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy on mobile to its subscribers last month was the company’s “most successful launch to date in terms of installs and engagement, with some consumers clearly signing up simply to play these games.”
🏆 Overwatch esports is returning, following the recent closure of the Overwatch League. The Overwatch Championship Series, announced yesterday by the game’s creators at Blizzard, will include a circuit encompassing North America, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa facilitated by Faceit, the esports company owned by the Saudi-backed Savvy Gaming Group. A circuit in South Korea, Japan and the Pacific region will be handled by Wara.gg.
🔥 Baldur’s Gate III won Game of the Year at last night’s NY Game Awards, a show that began with acknowledgement from its hosts about how rough 2023 was for game creators. (I was among the awards’ voters.)
Item 4: 8 words or less
I hosted the NY Game Awards’ pre-show, where I surprised my expert panel with the challenge of summing up each Game of the Year nominee in eight words, then seven words, all the way down to one for the last game we alphabetically considered.
Here’s what we came up with:
Alan Wake II (8 words): “Disgruntled writer, Twin Peaks, on rails, need batteries” - Dan Ackerman, Micro Center
Armored Core VI (7 words): “War is bad. Fight in giant mechs” - Giovanni Colantonio, Digital Trends
Baldur’s Gate III (6 words): “Roll those dice. Roll ‘em again.” - Ackerman
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty (5 words): “Cyberpunk, but it works. Idris.” - Alyssa Mercante, Kotaku
Hi-Fi Rush (4 words): “Fiona Apple boss fight” - Colantonio
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (3 words): “Link builds stuff.” - Me
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2 words): “Superior Spider-Man” - Tony Polanco, Tom’s Guide
Starfield (1 word): “Space” - Me (Alt: “Todd” - Me)
Update - 7:38pm: Changed some wording in item one to make it clear that Dylan Jadeja followed Nicolo Laurent as CEO of Riot Games. Marc Merrill had not held the co-CEO position since 2017, serving recently as President of Games before becoming Chief Product Officer.
I think micro transactions have an effect on reducing games. If you can make one popular game and then continue to generate revenue from in game cosmetics, booster packs, or DLC why would you start from scratch with a brand new game? I realize that making these things takes time and resources but I would guess a DLC on top of an existing game is a lot easier to make than a new game.
I'm all for fewer games produced if it means that they are higher quality at the time of release.