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Comment by huffmsa | Hacker News Reader

Here here.

The only "big studio" I pay any attention to is Nintendo, because they make games like a midsize to indie firm: Fun gameplay

Otherwise, I think all of the things a "big studio" does now, primarily the backend for online and p2p services is going to have it's open source / platform killer app soon. Valve almost did it with HL/Garry's Mod/ etc but they've stalled out recently.

Whomever develops a truly plug and play infrastructure module, handling networking, server config, deployment, etc will own a big boat by 2029.

As will the guy who figures out distributed PnP microtransactions.

AI and ML will likely be capable of full service character design and modeling in the next 5 years.

So things will change, and democratize like almost all of the rest of tech has as things become less human capital intensive.

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I spend maybe $25 a year on games for myself, maybe seeing something at a re-seller at the mall. I spend hundreds on my son who just recently figured out why Garry's Mod is fun, and is finally able to play Mario by himself and not just operate the hat while I play Mario. I still don't think he can appreciate why the latest Zelda was amazing. But I've shelled out a lot to Nintendo, and he has to have the new Mario Maker. I don't know what the cool kids are into, but Steam and Nintendo are friends with my PayPal.

Just wait till he discovers minecraft...

Even Nintendo has been willing to lean back on its cash-cows lately -- Mario (platformers, Party, and Kart) and Pokemon get minimal-change frequent-releases, Kirby's been static even by its own standards for the last few years, lots of their other first-party stuff hasn't seen a release in ages.

Zelda's looking good between BotW and an upcoming remake of a relatively-small and especially old game, Fire Emblem has something that looks like an interesting shift coming up, and Metroid... well, Metroid's been a mixed bag since Other M, but if they were willing to scrap and start over on Prime 4 then there's room to hope. So it's not all bad.

Nintendo always moves slowly (except for wacky-ass hardware ideas). It's a bit painful at times, but the alternative is that they crash and burn explosively.

Pokemon not making the jump to a real time open world is disappointing. But I suspect they'll do it for the next generation. Now that the consumer is finally feeling burnt out on when they're offering.

They probably didn't think they could get open world right this go around.

My one big hangup is that they're so reluctant to develop a proper, system agnostic platform for their retro content. If they weren't the sworn enemy of emulator developers, I could see them in-housing a few to jumpstart the retro platform. But they won't. Though Disney got it's ass into gear about opening up the vault, so maybe Nintendo will too.

if it's fun, why do you need major changes?

I'm certainly not upset that Mario Kart 8 plays basically the same as the old SNES Mario Kart.

More of the same is definitely something people want sometimes -- but other people want something new (or more-of-the-same of something else that hasn't been done as much, e.g. a sequel in a smaller series). The article is about (among other things) the stagnation and general tendency of big developers towards increasingly-stale safe bets.

Mario Kart is an example of that: Nintendo is perfectly willing to make more-of-the-same for Mario Kart, but when asked in interviews about the possibility of a new F-Zero, the answer has generally been "we don't want to just release more of the same, we want to come up with some new twist on it". It's not about novelty (or if it is, their standards for novelty are inconsistent), it's about one being a cash cow and the other not.

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