There was a time when players anxiously awaited the next game from EA and Activision.
Today, traditional game publishing is a dead model - a dinosaur of ages past. Here's why (๐งต )
1) Culture Rot
Game publishers were once a haven for geeks and creatives geeks who didn't fit into society. Rebel culture created a private world of freedom and innovation.
These days publishers are best known for excessive overtime, sexism, and clueless executives.
2) Broken Business Models
In the old days, the primary role of publishers was to fund, market, and distribute a game. Secondarily, they provided tools that lowered the cost of creating and producing games.
Today there are better alternatives for each.
3) Rise of Influencers
In the old days pr, paid media and advertising were the primary way to connect with players. Today it's social media and influencers. With the rise of groups like 100T, Loud, Faze, OTK, etc., influencers are finally realizing they're stronger together.
3 cont.) Although these new groups are just another kind of for-profit company, they're beholden in a different way to their customers, making their motivations more pure. However, they live at the mercy of aggregators like Google / YouTube for their primary source of revenue.
3 cont.) Thus, the only option to expand their business is to move down not up the value chain, creating new products for their fans. The most natural one to tackle first is games.
3 cont.) Influencer groups are accustomed to having full creative control, and because of that many will try, but most will fail, at making their own games. This is the wrong strategy for many reasons.
3 cont.) The primary reason is that influencer teams are vastly underestimating the difficulty in making a game (many have died on this hill) while at the same time repeating Amazon's mistake and hiring the wrong people to do it anyways.
3 cont.) Ultimately most will abandon making games and realize it's more effective to support the thousands of quality games out there that are unable to effectively find an audience.
3 cont.) Once this shakes out, we're going to see 100T, Faze, OTK and others become a new and more effective kind of publisher.
Phew! If you got here, I'm impressed. Please RT the first post, and then tell me why I'm wrong!
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