It was speaking more to point #3.

Both Spider-Man 2 and Assassin’s Creed Shadows sold multiple millions of copies and made a substantial profit. They sell to the kind of the person who only buys 1-4 games per year, which is the largest segment of the market.

That’s a little tangential though. When I’m saying (and Schreier is saying) people are expecting more, they’re expecting Spider-Man or Assassin’s Creed to last longer than 10-15 hours. Someone else already made Minecraft.

You can go on any gaming forum, including this one, and see people distill a game’s value down to how many hours they get for their dollar, so there’s definitely some amount of truth to it.

You won’t hear arguments from me on that, but it’s still a problem that happens along a spectrum as you scale graphics up, too.

BG3 has plenty of other strengths over its predecessors. It’s just not its main villain. Gortash and Thorm were both great, but our attention was divided amongst several antagonists rather than how much of the spotlight Irenicus got.

I’ve never heard of anyone taking a game job because it pays extraordinarily well compared to another job they might be able to get with the same skill set. Definitely not recently. I’ve turned down a programming job in games because my non-game job paid way better, and that job I turned down didn’t even exist a year and change later, because the industry is so volatile and competitive.

Astroturfing works where everyone is anonymous, but I don’t know how you expect it to work when every reviewer has a byline and an incentive to reveal corruption.

Oh no, not even because they’re feeling guilty. If anything, those same YouTubers who get their audience angry for a living would have a monetary incentive to present proof if it existed. Actual astroturfers advertise their services on LinkedIn, and in order for this conspiracy to work, you’d have to pay off people who don’t astroturf for a living.

Actual astroturfing often has a paper trail. “Citizens Concerned About the Whatever” publicly listed as funded by companies who directly stand to benefit from Whatever’s opposition. If it was so easy to buy good review scores, why did Microsoft not purchase them for Redfall? Why did Sony not purchase them for that 2D God of War game? Why did AnnaPurna buy them for this game but not the dozens of other games they publish? Why is the Steam user rating for Mixtape also very high if it could only achieve such ratings via bribery? Is the only explanation for Mixtape’s reviews that they were paid off? Or, perhaps, could it be a bunch of people who don’t have to prove that they’ve even played the game leaving 0/10 reviews on Metacritic en masse because they were riled up by Asmongold or some other influencer who traffics in getting their audience mad about “woke”?

The line that stuck with me most was where he picked a random-ass woman, briefly told her life story, and then said, “and now she’s dead”, and killed her in an instant. All-time great villain.

The delivery of Irenicus was so good that every time Irenicus wasn’t on screen, I was asking, “Where’s Irenicus?”

Of course, but I only added my two cents as to it having nothing to do with wanting the game to fail or not getting its chance.

I played Lawbreakers back then, and it was neither too much like Overwatch nor representative of the arena shooters that came before it; there wasn’t a plethora of characters to choose from like the former, and there wasn’t an even playing field with power weapons to fight for control over like the latter. The thing that baffled me about the game was its objectives design. There’s a capture the flag mode where the flag is a battery, but due to the way you have to charge it first, it renders the entire match pointless except for where the battery is when it reaches 100% charge. There’s a point capture/domination game mode where the capture points stop and start for minutes at a time, and I don’t understand the point of that either.

I think the follow up question to your adoration of these two games is: how many Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, or recent Ghost Recon games have you played?

Is it possible, even a little bit, that people just have a different opinion than you about a video game? Surely if there was flagrant bribery happening, someone would have receipts and a conscience that compelled them to share it.

Reviewers get early copies so that there’s a review score available in time for people to buy it.

But that’s what I mean by how quickly you can accumulate wealth at a quarter million per year. Of course something could go wrong early in your career, but the average case is far better than that. Could I stop working and live comfortably? For a while. We’d have a lot of runway, far better than a 6-month emergency fund. Given a bit more time and saving into index funds, that can become indefinite, and that’s on our far-lower salaries than Schreier lists.

The combined income of my wife and I comes in under one of the figures he gave, and with a 2 BR apartment in NYC, we are very, very comfortable, even after splurging the past few years on a far nicer location for an extra $1k/month in rent. The rest of what you describe is what I would call lifestyle inflation, and I’m not living the life of a pauper because I don’t own a car; if anything, that’s extraordinarily wasteful around here, and it’s something that less than half of this city even bothers to do.

What he doesn’t explain that would actually be helpful is why teams are so big.

Can you not see the difference in money on the screen between Halo 1 and Destiny 2? One person can make Halo’s relatively simple models, complete with nutcracker-esque mouth syncing, much faster than you can make the likes of Destiny’s quest givers with far more complexity to them. So if you want to make more of those kinds of NPCs, you need more people making them. The same goes for any other discipline involved in making a game.

Like what are all the departments that work on AAA titles, what do they do, how many people on staff relative to other departments, what does a 3D modeler make vs. a gameplay programmer?

That all comes out in the average cost per employee, which is the same ballpark math the publishers are using to estimate, and he says that in this video.