Enshittification is coming for all the corporations.
Yes, that’s what a said… 
Or, and hear me out here, it could just be that Sony has embraced modern neo-liberalism like every other global spanning corporation…
6 Likes
I often wonder about this. On the one hand, AAA is the surest path for big profits for large game publishers, but on the other hand, AAA as a whole is increasingly unsustainable. AAA has been appealing because the market is really big these days, but also really unreliable - the top selling games sell orders of magnitude more than the others. The only reliable way of getting a top-grossing game is to make it AAA, but the cost of developing (and then marketing, because marketing costs are based on dev costs) a AAA game has ballooned as game technology has gotten more complex and player expectations have grown. That’s created a reliance on existing franchises, because they’re the safest, with their established audience, but that’s problematic overall because if a single game doesn’t do very well, that tends to be the end of the franchise, and creating new franchises is too risky, as we see here. So the number of AAA games/franchises has decreased with time.
Outside of AAA, the competition is incredibly fierce because of an over-saturated market and you’ve got smaller, more unreliable sales numbers, so a large publisher might have to juggle 50 or more projects to hope to get the total sales of one AAA game. Which means more publishing costs and maybe overall more marketing costs, as you try to cut through the noise and make your games stand out. Which isn’t so appealing for a large publisher. (They frequently, but half-heartedly get into publishing smaller games, but increasingly they’re doing it under terms that are extremely ugly for the actual developers - pushing all the risk onto independent developers while taking all the profits, for example.) It leaves room for smaller publishers to fill the niche, but their existence is more precarious. There’s been a bunch of consolidation there (the whole Embracer fiasco), too. Right now AAA seems to be (desperately) betting that better, more automated development tools can bring dev costs down, but we’ll see.
The trend for “live service” games with loot boxes, favored by most large publishers, essentially is gambling. Though Konami went that route a little more directly and cut a lot of their production divisions in favor of making pachinko machines.
Given the industry layoffs of the last year, I argue we’re already well into a crash.
3 Likes
I reread your original comment. Yeah I kinda misread what you said sorry about that
4 Likes
yeah, but it’s gambling aimed at children, so basically it’s okay 
2 Likes
and annapurna, who had carved out a really good niche
panic ( who made the playdate ) has started to publish some games like that now. but they’re still a very tiny company
eta:
aka, ai. and that’s surely not a money sinkhole
4 Likes
But, should Kaizen apply. Of course. I agree, it didn’t. And now, we may blame capitalism and its out-of-touch execs and product managers for the failure because they fostered a culture of positivity that ignored touchy, sensitive issues that should have long ago been addressed by quality improvements and updates.
2 Likes
That may be the ultimate decline of all corporations. Or, maybe Honda just wants to keep us putting gas in our vehicles.
1 Like
Enshittification isn’t inevitable. The way to fight it is government regulation (and regulation via interstate treaties, institutions, etc). The “market”, as we have seen in the modern era of mass deregulation, will devolve to exploitation and accumulation of wealth by a few elites. That’s the nature of the capitalist system, as Marx pretty aptly described back in the 19th century. Corporations will not regulate themselves, especially when they have monopolies or collusion among a few big players (cartels). That recent book by Doctorow and Giblin describes the process pretty well… they are focused on creative arts and how a few companies have created a monopsony, but it’s really a good description of the larger shift in how capitalism is functioning in all parts of the economy, with a few corporations dominating.
I think we understand better when we look at what corporations are doing rather than accepting what they say they are doing (which they claim is for the betterment of us all).
6 Likes
I’m merely speaking from my personal experience when I worked for a subsidiary of a Japanese company that loved talking Kaizen; but I’d be shocked to see an outfit that has traditionally done it just abandon it in favor of telling everyone to focus on Q4 and the Gordon Gekko poster gazing down on them.
What I would be deeply unshocked by is a dedicated preservation of the forms and processes, along with alteration of the metrics and who measures them and how, that massively changes the effective objective of the exercise without any admission that there has been a change.
Overt deviation seems especially unlikely when there’s so much Kaizen-and-Kaizen-adjacent stuff that is about various sources of waste reduction or process optimization that aren’t even obviously in conflict with neoliberal market fundamentalist imperatives. Sure, it hits differently when you are doing it because efficient production means getting to fire some headcount and spend the savings on stock buybacks; rather than because Toyota-san believed that doing things right was the right thing to do; but it’s not as though sloppy process timing has any friends.
It’d be sort of like seeing an organization that has traditionally espoused cost-benefit analysis or competitive bidding just outright repudiating the idea. You’d never just outright do that. But there are so very many details involved in how you measure costs and benefits or construct RFPs and compare bids that it’s simply not necessary to be so crass as to let someone put their thumb on the scale, where everyone can see it, in order to ensure that the process delivers the desired answer.
3 Likes
I think if a company is gonna compete on the international market, then they have to embrace at least some of the ideology that rules that system (which is neoliberalism). And the traditions of Kaizen doesn’t rule out embracing the logic of neo-liberalism. It’s not an either/or, I don’t think, as capitalism has long been effectively plastic enough to embrace a variety of variants that conform to local culture. Capitalism with local characteristics, in other words.
But it’s also kind of weird to imagine that Japanese culture is so static and rigid that it can’t absorb other ideologies and incorporate it in a way that makes sense locally. That was what happened during the Meji restoration, after all, seeking out aspects of western systems that they felt would work with their own culture. That’s part of how they were able to shift gears from a feudal system to a modern economy so quickly back then. It wasn’t just imposed on them, it was an active project in order to not only survive western imperialism, but to compete as an imperial power in their own right. You can see that in the postwar period, too, where they shifted from an imperial/colonial system to a modern democratic system. Japanese culture (and in fact, most cultures) is nothing if not adaptive, as they’ve show across their modern history.
3 Likes
I’ve never played Overwatch but its gameplay must be really riveting for it to be such a success. Because everything I have ever seen from it has looked bland and derivative to me. No wonder Sony thought they could get in on the action with a bland and derivative shooter…
oh! thank you for the book recommend
success for games like this depend on network effects.
and you don’t need a great game for success. you just need a good enough game and a reason for enough initial players to play it to create the network draw
concord might have been just fine, but there’s too many competitors now doing exactly the same thing. there’s no particular draw.
they’d have been better off building a big beta group, long before ship. if they couldn’t build that, they never should have bothered to finish it
1 Like
… in software development, crunches and crises are planned in advance 
3 Likes
I kinda don’t understand how it was supposed to be the Next Star Wars. Like, I am not that into games, but I had NEVER heard of it before it came out and no one bought it. There wasn’t any hype or advertising. I have seen ads for other games in the past, like the new CoD. Seems hard to have a block buster if you just release it cold.
I know people were dogging on the design some, but honestly the character images I saw were ok. Some of them I even liked. They definitely tried to do something different.
Was the game play crap? Or not different enough from the half dozen other similar games?
2 Likes
I definitely don’t think that it’s an either/or, or imagine Japanese culture to be static and rigid; just in large part because I’m not sure that there actually is all that much distance or that much tension between an outfit doing Kaizen and one embracing neoliberal corpo behavior and because companies doing Kaizen is itself a recent combination of invention and absorption for local context. I’m completely unqualified to say how much of what they wrote was inspired by prewar domestic sources; but all the “Kaizen” material that people now refer to is the stuff either written by or about successful post-WWII Japanese manufacturing corporations. Barely older than neoliberalism (at least in application, rather than the aspirational stuff that people didn’t really try to pull off while there were still any actual communists around); and at least heavily inspired by some of the TWI material that came with the US occupation government.
If anything, I’d suspect a tension between “Kaizen” and “neoliberalism” to look strong in the US because (while in theory it doesn’t have to be; and can be applied elsewhere) “Kaizen” totally has its heart in manufacturing; and American neoliberalism largely concluded early, hard, and damn the consequences, that manufacturing was something you outsource because financial services is truly the most favored son of the invisible hand, so outsource that shit and let’s focus on some core competencies! Feeling Pumped!
In places where The Market has deemed it appropriate to manufacture things I’d be less sure that there would be nearly as much perceived tension. The tendency to see information from the line as actually useful definitely puts it at odds with more Taylorist theories of management; but it has been about getting results for a manufacturing operation in a market capitalist context from day one.
2 Likes
Speaking of the beta…peaked just under 2400 concurrent players. It wasn’t all that long before release, though I’m not sure how far they could have pushed it while still having something that would qualify as ‘beta’; but not an encouraging result.
I’d be fascinated to know what the breakdown was between at least somewhat active disinterest(either installed and abandoned or at least looked at steam page and couldn’t be bothered) and pure ignorance or indifference so great as to not even look it up was; but those figures are obviously hard to come by.
Purely anecdotally; I know I saw zero about it pre-launch; and I get hit with game ads reasonably frequently(anything for a hero shooter is either mistargeted or just being blanketed; but I’ve definitely seen some of those); which leads me to suspect that Sony was either astonishingly overconfident or had already given up by launch day.
2 Likes
Sounds like several people are embezzling project funds.
2 Likes
Although it seems like they were always a subsidiary of Annapurna (film), rather than there being any consolidation.
Yeah, but not limited to generative AI (though there’s been a lot of talk about that lately). There is room for automation of various time intensive development tasks, with smarter tools. The generative AI stuff seems like a total dead end, for game development. At best (i.e. worst) you end up with the situation in China, where gen AI is being used to produce a ton of generic illustrations. (It’s being applied to other tasks - e.g. generating 3D models- but it’s absolutely terrible at those, and will likely never be good.) It doesn’t help with AAA development - and probably hurts it, if anything.
3 Likes
Apparently, Sony isn’t dedicated to the “promotion of continuous improvement”. At least, they aren’t at all times, in all cases. Nor is anybody else. Humans are gonna human. Zero surprise here.
1 Like
