this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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My (completely uninformed) theory: It's competitive advantage. Indies succeed on their creativity, but that works because there are thousands of indie devs out there and we get to see the best (and luckiest) ones. It's not easy to replicate that creativity by just throwing more money at the problem. So what is a company with ooodles of money but no creativity to do? Make games that only a company with way too much money could make. No indie dev is going to make the next Far Cry or Assassin's Creed or Fortnite because they just don't have the budget to make that happen. So they know that even if they keep churning out generic crap, at least it's generic crap with very little real competition.
Of course then all of them got the bright idea to compete in a game business model that is inherently winner take all with already well established leaders. So yeah now it just seems like they're lighting money on fire for fun.
Heres a gamer-brained analogy:
You know how all the manosphere types describe 90% of women as only being willing to date the top 10% of men?
This is that.
90% of all the money in gaming is going toward developing a game with a 10% chance of being rhe next Minecraft, the next Fortnite, the next big huge thing that will generate a stupid amount of money by functionally acting as its own MTX ecosystem with widespread adoption.
It is: We don't sell consumer model economy cars because our financial situation is so wound up in financing (read: debt obligations) that we can actually only afford to sell high end luxury models, otherwise our profit margin is too small, and then we can't afford our operating costs and debt obligations, so then we have to downsize and fire everyone and most importantly, our shareholders don't get as much ~~wealth extraction~~, I mean profit.)
The ... problem with this obviously is that if 90% of the money in gaming is shooting for making basically the same kind of game... well then it is all competing with itself, thus causing a gametheortic prisoners dilemma situation where everyone acting out of maximum self interest actually results in the worst possible outcome.
Another problem with this is that these games are very expensive to make, and they must be made very fast... so, everything other than the MTX system in these games will be buggy and sloppy and garbage tier...
So, yeah. Game companies are the same kind of delulu that the manosphere thinks 90% of women are, chasing a wildly unrealistic outcome via wildly unlikely to work means.
(Disclaimer: I am not saying I endorse or believe in this manosphere idea, I am using it as a gamer-brained analogy, assuming it is true for sake of argument and comparison.)
For the car analogy, the incentives are even more perverse than that!