Do You Really Just Need to Make a Good Game?

Or is it actually a bit more nuanced and complicated than that?

There’s this repeated thing I keep seeing in large sections of the gaming community that all you need to do to have a successful game is to make a good game. That it’s really just that simple. That the reasons why so many games are flopping is because they just aren’t good.

This thought process has bothered me for a while and my partner and I have had a lot of conversations about it as a result. The idea isn’t inherently bad, good games are important to a successful game. But there’s far more to it and much more nuance that the internet nowadays isn’t capable of dealing with.

So today I’m gonna dive into that nuance. I’m gonna talk about how good games don’t automatically equal success, about how plenty of good or great games recently have failed financially because of a variety of reasons, which I’ll go over, and how the whole thought process I’m criticizing here isn’t actually asking to just make good games but to actually makes the next critical darling and that only that is acceptable. About how one of the biggest problems right now impacting the games industry isn’t “bad games” but actually the gaming community as a whole. And finally, I’m gonna try to make a new argument for what developers can do to try and make their games as successful as possible. Let’s get going.

Important note: the games I mention here that were financial failures all had some degree of anti-woke assholes going after them. Unfortunately, when it comes to some of the games the thoughts these people pushed forward got repeated so much that it turned a lot of people off of the games thus leading to them selling less (and people who believed these opinions, made them their own, only to later try the game and find out it’s actually a really great game thus depriving the game of early success leading to, often, canceled sequels or complete team layoffs). Personally if anti-woke snowflakes hate a game I actually find myself drawn to it to see why they hate it so I can dissect what they’re thinking, and how bullshit it is. I enjoy that kind of thing as a very guilty pleasure. Anyway, this is all I will be talking about when it comes to those cringe filled idiots as I don’t want to give them any more of my attention than they deserve. Plus that’s a whole other article in and of itself so just doesn’t fit here. Anyway, moving on.

Make 10/10s not 8/10s

I’m someone who has liked a lot of the supposed flops in the industry, besides Concord as I’m just not a big fan of that kind of thing. Avowed (review), Star Wars: Outlaws (one of my first reviews and not as good as my later ones), The Outer Worlds 2 (review), Dragon Age: The Veilguard (review), and now I’m playing Doom: The Dark Ages and loving it. All of these games have one thing in common, they were financial failures. But they didn’t deserve to be. Sure, they have flaws, but every single game has flaws, there are of course unique problems for each of them but there’s also one through line as well (besides all the anti-woke BS), they needed to be 10/10s to be viewed as a true success.

Now, I don’t grade on an out of ten scale, personally I think it’s reductive and puts the idea of a 10/10 as this insane bar that no game ever really deserves because all games have flaws. I like my scoring system (check it out here) because it focuses on enjoyment and seeing if I am able to put aside the flaws to be able to see the magic that is the game I am playing. For all of the games I listed I am very capable of putting aside the flaws, of seeing them for the journey that they are.

Yet, they were financial failures. Why? Well, again, because they needed to be masterpieces to overcome the prejudice that was an anchor around their neck, whether a deserving one or not (again the anti-woke BS should always be ignored). In the case of Avowed this was the idea that it was an Obsidian Skyrim instead of it being closer to a Mass Effect like journey, and that it should have been 50 dollars to help push for people to play it. In the case of Star Wars: Outlaws it was that it was a Star Wars game and an Ubisoft game so despite it being one of the only genuinely fun open worlds Ubisoft has created in recent memory, it couldn’t overcome the Star Wars fatigue. For The Outer Worlds 2 it’s that the game first started as an 80 dollar experience before being brought down to 70 which was still too much and also obviously felt like some possible critiques and gameplay elements were left on the table because of the chaotic 7 year development. For Dragon Age: The Veilguard it was that the game went through multiple reboots, had to have its live service version adapted into the single player experience we got without being given the standard practice of going back to the drawing board with said reboot, had to deal with the prior game being a decade ago where it released on 5 platforms across 2 generations of consoles so likely sold significantly more because of that, and it also had a horrible first trailer that genuinely turned a lot of people immediately off of it, as well as multiple more things that stacked up against it meaning it had to be the best game ever or it just wouldn’t be able to overcome all of these anchors. For Doom: The Dark Ages it was, mainly, that the prior game came out early COVID where it got a bump in sales, but Doom is just more niche so it living up to those sales numbers was just unrealistic plus it made the gameplay more like Doom of old and less like Quake which ruffled some feathers. Of course Avowed, Outer Worlds 2, and Doom also had the gamepass anchor where it’s hard to actually know how much of a failure they are. What we know is that they didn’t sell well despite having lots of players on gamepass and that means they at least weren’t super successful (I’ll go into more detail further down).

These games are all good games. They’re fun to play and journeys worthy of peoples time. But they aren’t masterpieces. So here we face the first problem with the phrase I’m here to criticize, you don’t just need to make a good game because if that was true these games wouldn’t have failed. Or at least would have sold more. The phrase is more about how you just need to make one of the best games in the genre.

Take Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (review here). A truly fantastic turn based RPG that has style and substance in the story, world and gameplay. Sandfall interactive made a flawed game but is easily one of the best games in its, arguably, JRPG genre. It made the game into a critical darling. The same can be said of Baldur’s Gate 3 (review here), a game that is easily one of the very best CRPGs in the industry, despite its very obvious flaws in Act 3. Both of these games were massive successes. Both of them one of the best in their genre.

So, the phrase might say that developers just have to make a good game, but that doesn’t lead to success with the modern industry anymore. What does is that they just have to make a genre defining game. Which is a much more difficult feat. Even more, they have to compete in an industry where...actually that’s the next section so let’s get into that.

The gaming industry as a whole is the problem

I often think back to when the industry had a lot of games coming out that would sell a couple million units and be super successful. When you’d look at them you wouldn’t be expecting them to have been the next Skyrim or GTA, you were simply expecting a fun time. But things are different now. For multiple reasons.

I think there are two reasons for a lot of this, firstly the proliferation of live service games. A decade ago live service games were just beginning, there was so much more space in the average gamers gaming time for a variety of games. But now? Now there’s Fortnite, CoD Warzone, and GTA Online. These three games dominate a fuck ton of players time. They’ve taken up space that otherwise good games could have taken up. You basically have to make a truly amazing game in order to actually pull people away from them.

As much as I liked Destiny 2, I think it was also a driver of dominating players time making it harder for them to find new games.

For instance, Baldur’s Gate 3 managed to pull a lot of people away from them, even if that was a completely different genre. It was a generational title and with the massive increase in DnD players, it was the perfect time for it. Generational games are what pull people away. Generational games are what get the good sales and are viewed as successes. Gone are the days of a game like, for instance, Dead Space selling only about a million units, being a “commercial disappointment” for EA, and still getting a sequel because it had a small user base that adored it. Or a game like Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune which took 10 weeks to sell a million units which wasn’t amazing but was enough for Sony and Naughty Dog to realize they had something there they could iterate on (it continued to sell more and more units). Or a game like Spec Ops: The Line which absolutely tanked financially but was adored critically and became an industry touchstone for how influential a narrative can be for shooters since its release in 2012. Or a game like Alpha Protocol that Obsidian made back in 2010 which, despite being a bit janky, was beloved by many in the industry and flopped financially but you can clearly see some of the same spy DNA in the most recent James Bond game 007: First Light. These games all either flopped or were a slow burn and all of them were critically acclaimed and the studios still survived (at least for a while when it came to Visceral Games who made Dead Space). Point being, gone are the days good games still get seen enough to be loved by some, even leading to later industry influence or franchises.

Nowadays if you don’t sell millions upon millions of units you’re viewed as a flop and end up either ending long running franchises or don’t get opportunities to make your game into a franchise because of less sales, or the whole studio gets closed down or massive layoffs. Partially this is because of how much it costs to make games now but I think that’s a bit of a more complicated issue deriving from mismanagement and a tremendous amount of wheel spinning when developing thus causing games that should have taken 3-4 years end up taking 7 or more. My point is just that the industry being so overcome with live service games has meant that only the best of the best of the best games manage to be successful enough to sell a ton of units.

Secondly, there’s the gamepass of it all. I still have a gamepass article in the works where I talk over more of how I think it needs to change but I think, when it comes to AAA games or really just first party Microsoft games, it has completely fucked up what it means to be a success. Gamepass moved people from looking at sales numbers to understand success to looking at playercounts, and in the case of a game like Avowed which had 6 million players at launch that number can even not be representative of success.

On bigger games I think day one on gamepass is a horrible thing as it kneecaps the game and its potential sales.

Then, the problem proliferates when the industry continues to look at the sales of the day one games on gamepass as a way to try to understand success. So, for instance, Doom The Dark Ages was seemingly not considered a financial success as it sold less than a million copies, despite reaching over 3 million players and being iDs biggest launch ever because of that number. But that million sales number is from mainly sales on PlayStation and some on Steam. Sales numbers back in the day were across all the platforms the game launched on, at least if it was multiplatform, so when you added that up it was a large amount. I mean imagine if we looked at Doom 2016 sales breakdown, which sold best on PC, and judged it by the Xbox One numbers alone. You can’t judge a game by the sales on just 2 storefronts, especially since one of them is the same platform that you could just get gamepass for so arguably wouldn’t count as much.

This is my point though, Gamepass is an industry problem. It muddled what a successful AAA game is, so now good games get fucked by not selling well because they’re on gamepass so never were gonna sell super well. Add in the choice paralysis of gamepass having so many games on it that lets a ton of them go under the radar (this is an article for another day in and of itself) and you’re left with a fucked up massive segment of the industry that means you can make a good game and still fail. Which means the phrase continues to be flawed because just making a good game ignores the state of the industry today.

Have more price variance

So with all of this, what am I saying should happen? I’m not wanting to go into details on my gamepass solution, that’s for another day. I don’t think saying you just have to make good games is good, as I believe I’ve made obvious and provided my rationale for. So what should developers do? What should publishers do?

Well, while I think making good games is important, I think price variance is far more important. The world economy is fucked right now, people are spending less and less on commodities because they need things like food. Because of that they’re hesitant to spend money on 70 dollar games unless they’re truly amazing. This leads to a game like Avowed, a fantastic game that has flaws but isn’t huge, to be viewed as a flop because people didn’t buy it (let’s ignore the game pass aspect here for a moment) at 70 bucks. People were incredibly critical of it, they were charging AAA money for a mere AA experience. I believe if they charged 50 they would have sold far more copies and people would have looked past more of the flaws because they spent less on it so expected less. This also would have meant they would have made more money as they had sold more, even being at the lower price.

An example of this concept in action is one of last years biggest games, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which I’ve already mentioned. The game was 50 bucks and people adored it. The thing is the game has a lot of flaws. The third acts balance is kinda fucked and the gameplay can feel tedious if you’re bad at parrying. Plus, quite importantly, the game uses a fuck ton of free Unreal Engine assets as a way to reduce budget. Many people looked at a 50 dollar game and saw that and shrugged saying “well it’s not 70 bucks so I don’t care if they use those free assets”. When you charge less people judge less.

Peak, priced at 8 bucks, is another good one because it’s janky but people love it and look past it. It’s a game jam game that was released. Also it’s on sale now for 4 bucks!

Another example in the indie space, is the recent hit Meccha Chameleon. The game has sold boatloads and costs just 6 bucks. People love it and look past the, quite frankly, rather annoying controls because it’s fun and was 6 bucks. I believe there is a very direct line between cost and how harsh you’ll be on a game.

So essentially, I think the AAA space needs to give up charging 70 bucks for every game. Good games are failing commercially because they’re priced so high that people expect the fucking world. You don’t “need to just make a good game”, you actually also need to price it at a good deal.

The Conclusion

Welp, those are my thoughts. The phrase has bugged me for so long that I needed to get my thoughts written down so I could move past them onto other things. Like playing more Doom.

What I’d like to leave as a final message is that if you hear about a game flopping, don’t just automatically assume it was a bad game. Plenty of good games flop, that’s just kinda the industry we live in. Try to make your own opinions on the game, don’t believe hate fueled grifters or people who never have anything positive to say about said game. Try to put your biases aside, play the game, and make your own opinion. It’s possible you’ll find out you actually adore it and it’s now one of your most favorite games, or you’ll still hate it. I dunno, just remember that “flopping” doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Meow,

Cat