Corrections :
#1 The picture of “Ghost of yotei” dev-team : https://x.com/SuckerPunchProd/status/971924642901340160 (2018 womens day photo)
#2 (clarification) Marvel rivals let got their US based developers.

Long time viewer here,

Youtube seems to not like recommending your content to me, but i always find it a pleasure to watch your videos, thanks!

Finally, someone saying more than “woke games bad”

And you just ruined Yotei for me

Long overdue karma for the greedy scummy gaming companies.

20:44 I think you downloaded the wrong game. Thats CALL OF BOOTY

Kinda what I feel like looking at big titles nowadays, “AAAaaaahhhhh! D:”

“Well-received Avowed” HAHAHA

The writing in Veilguard was so on the nose at points. Loved all the reveals, really answered some long standing questions, but it did seem like was terrified of someone missing very basic concepts.

Like any scene with Solas, you’d think he has a fetish for regretting things from how much he mentions it

I’m going to actually agree with Jaffe and I hate that guy. Sometimes, a character really does not need some character development arc to be impactful or memorable. Or for us to care about the character. Master Chief, Doom Guy, (Formerly) Kratos. These are all fairly one-dimensional characters that people love to death, in part, _because_ they’re one-dimensional. We want them to be the cool action guys ripping and tearing their way through their enemies.

That doesn’t mean there can’t be any sort of development, but from Jaffe’s perspective (and some of the OG fans), this was almost like a character assassination on Kratos. And with Jaffe, his opinion holds all the weight, he created the character. I’m an artist, no one can ever tell me what is best for the character that _I_ envisioned.

The more money you put in a product the more you risk if it fails so the logical answer is to avoid anything risky if you have a big budget, nobody wants to put in a lot of money into something and have it fail, the problem is if you make a lot AAA games in a row you will encounter several problems the first 2 that pop in my mind is oversachurated market and developer burnout, now you maybe are thinking why not make several AA games instead of 1 AAA game ,my best guess is that since historically bigger games made more profit so management and investers would prefer AAA and another posible problem could be its hard to manage several projects even if they are of smaller size

Most publishers want a game right now and don’t give a damn about quality.
Most devs want to force “the message” and give give a damn about quality.
Investors want a return on their investment and don’t give a damn about quality.

The most important thing that matters to the consumer is the quality of the game.

Oi.. ayay .. some games bing unplayable or worse playable shit bags ( im looking at you starfiled ) dont mean everything is done for..😅 lets hope the next ones are good and it looks like it…

Just let the developers make what they want, and you may just get a good games.

Innovation? I would be glad if they even could keep the old features and quality standards in their games, and politics and predatory monetization out. You would think that being for diversity makes you a good person, but wokeness is mostly tied to good old capitalistic greed. I mean, Avowed has the price tag of a quadruple A title, but it looks like barley soup with cancer, arrows don’t fall from the sky, nothing can be moved, and the only cleavage you can goon on is the one of a blue fish dude.

You say 3 years yet show 4. Come on man. It is the first 10 seconds. There was a Kerbal Space Program 2? Call of Duty MW games were about injecting what the world was going through at the time. There haven’t been many great AAA games in 10 years. Let alone the last 4.

one mistake you make is using steam numbers. some games have the vast majority of their players on console. starfield is a great example of this, having barely 15k concurrent pleaers on steam, in june 2024. however across all platforms they had 7 million weekly players(according to their own numbers)

To me, the downfall of the AAA industry is comedy. The failures of Suicide Squad and Concord are well deserved. So satisfying to see them go up in flames. I always listen to these videos and get a good laugh from it. On the other hand, Japanese/Korean/Chinese, AA and indies are the saviours of the gaming industry and seeing them beat western AAA games will never not be satisfying to see.

After posting their first “gurl powah” picture every studio just goes straight to hell in a matter of months to years.

Why the hell are so many women doing game dev when I can bet those same women hate gaming as a hobby? We live in a supposedly equal opportunity society, maybe take up some construction work instead?

You pretty summed up the main points why the gaming industry is crashing. Nice, job!

Gamers know the difference between a game and social engineering disguised as a game. They’ll buy a game, but if they want to be preached at, they’ll go to church.

Honestly good takes Yam. Regardless of either side of the culture war bullshit, most people want good, well written games that aren’t trying to preach to you or bilk you for money.

Warframe is probably the only live-service game done right, developers don’t try to milk their fanbase dry and actually care. Everything else is based

Just wanted to say, you thumbnails have drawn me In 3 separate times only for me to be happily surprised and think “oh it’s Yamiks”. Keep doing what your doing

The biggest factor in this is the rapid decline, over recent years, in brainpower of the average gamer. No wonder the standard of AAA games has rapidly declined by exactly the same amount. It’s pointless targeting gamers with more than 2 brain cells. It is what it is (and it’s getting worse), unfortunately.

Here’s the pattern I see: a publisher/studio make an awesome game and make money hand over fist. Money attracts investors who want that money. Investors demand more money and force developers to churn out games as fast as possible. Developers suddenly suck to work for because programers are forced to work crunch overtime and their feedback is ignored because the investors want a “safe” game, want to take no risk, and don’t want to risk offending anyone. Experienced designers leave and start their own studios and studios get flooded with inexperienced people who will get fed into a meat grinder/sweat shop. Games are now made to print investors money instead of being passion projects a team of people wanted to see come into existence.

Avowed was well received?

They only need to get one out of two things right, gameplay or story, the best example is Monster Hunter great gameplay, no story 10 out of 10, Undertale and Miside, great story, but not much of a gameplay. But the AAA or AAAA games studios get none of it right. Oh no wonder, they are all white women and half of it(I don’t know he or she) are LGBT

What gets me about writing in some games is the little colloquial words and phrasing like “‘Kay. Bye”… that immediately tosses suspension of disbelief out the window. No longer am I playing a game in a fantasy world, I’m playing a game set in a fantasy MMORPG.

When it comes to writing my Mom always had a saying: “Write like every word costs you a dollar”

The “Industry Factor”.

All modern music – Shite
All modern film – Shite

All looks-over-substance.

Repetitive ‘success’.
All re-packaged depending on the pre-fab notion of social change.

Games being even more sexually exploitative than ever before under the joke of “empowerment”.

At this rate I may sell my ragged soul and go for Raid: Shadow Legends.

Most fun game i’ve played recently- Fallen Aces.
Laughed my ass off so hard in the first 5mins.

I got a “Diversity Insertion” for ya!

Forspoken managed to lodge itself in my brain as “waste of a really nifty looking traversal mechanic”.

At least I won’t need to pay for an over priced GPU to play good video games.

You can say fuck the culture war, but i didnt start a war. They pushed this stuff in to my face until i couldnt stand it anymore, for the next couple of years i just dont want gay or girlboss characters in games.

This video is so correct and on point that its depressing.

Don’t forget the failures in the aviation industry. What we are seeing is the expelling of talent from all industries worldwide. Not the exodus. The expelling.

Ill tell you what happened all companies had to get rid of actual talent because of abuse and sh charges that have never gone anywhere. They were then replaced by their accusers whos entire creative drive is coming up with new pronouns.

The woke media ruined gaming

I really don’t know how we went from Elite Dangerous to this.

And why i can’t stop watching it.

Why should we care? We’re not their MODDIRN AWWDIENS after all.

I actually enjoyed playing Starfield. However I went into the game having never played a Bethesda game in my life. This kept me mostly insulated from the facts that the writing felt like every other Bethesda game ever made.

I thought black ops 6 had a good story…according to act man.

A problem that I see though in criticism of bad AAA games though is that people tend to direct their frustration and anger at the players of said game rather than the developers. Probably because other players are more immediately accessible to rant at than the developers of said games.
For example, I personally enjoy Starfield despite all the backlash and negative press its gotten. I find it fun. However, I’ve been the target of a *ton* of undeserved harassment from other gamers just for playing the game, berating me on things like “How can you possibly enjoy this slop?!” or “You’re just a shill! You don’t actually like the game!”
Attacking people for their choice in games is not the way to go about criticizing these games to be better. All it does is spread toxicity gets nothing done. After all, people’s taste in games are subjective.

That Ghost of Tsushima vs. Ghost of Yotei developers screenshot can’t be real, can it…?

My last AAA game was Baldurs gate 3, before that – Cyberpunk, I play indie, somehow the big guys do not spark the intrest anymoe 🙂

physics being on by default in UE5, yet not being enabled in game speaks volumes about Avowed.

I’d always want a game like New Vegas 2, but I know if that actual game got made they’d fuck it up somehow

Please remove background music next time, it is really bad.

Why is the new Assassin’s Creed game already a failure Yamiks? The game isnt out yet, you haven’t played it yet. Is it because the main character is BLACK? AN AFRICAN? 😱😱😱 THATS REALLY SCARY! Your built-in Nordic racism is showing. Least racist european in 2025 🤣

Actually, I agree with David Jaffe in this very rare case — not every character needs to go through a metamorphisis. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I think Kratos COULD have gone through a change, but he’s right about Indiana Jones — Indiana Jones is like James Bond. We don’t need to re-imagine them, we just need to see them in different scenarios. Just like Master Chief, he doesn’t need to go through some “emotional reawakening”, we just need to see him do what he does best in unique story scenarios. Let the environment tell the story AROUND the character.

As for the topic at hand, you’re definitely right about a lot of it, but I would also add that Vanguard, Blackguard, and the adjacent affiliates have spearheaded the funding for the current AAA industry environment to exist in the way that it does. Until those elements no longer influence the industry, we will keep seeing the spiral take place.

Your pronunciation of “third person game” sounds like “turd person game” and I think that’s very appropriate in the context of this video.

You listed symptoms that vary over the years but all have the same root cause: For AAA companies the actual clients are the investors, making up the boards that grant executives their bonuses if they are pleased. There has always been the classic push to satisfy the desire for infinite growth, as in, shares that always go up. This leads to rent seeking such as focusing on live service models and developing games archetypes with proven success regardless of market saturation… and also cost cutting such as offloading optimization to hardware manufacturers and using gamers as free QA.
But, in the past decade or so, there has been an increase in the ‘activist investors’ such as Blackrock that will actively push for ESG/DEI. Additionally amplified by governments driving ESG/DEI subsidies/incentives that also attract the rent seeking behavior. This is in my opinion, the main factor that has led to a current state where you not only have short sighted rent seeking, cost cutting executives, but now you also have people without merit getting hired for positions in key roles in the development and writing of videogames themselves. Because ESG/DEI inevitably leads to hiring practices centered on crossing off the latest identity politics checkboxes and not merit.

8:17 ☠️☠️

Starfield is probably the worst disappointment, the storytelling just isn’t there like in Skyrim.

AAA studios have a terminal cancer. This cancer is called the “shareholder”. This forces them to be required to financially perform above their previous performance each year.

In order to do this, the studios push for “minimum viable product”. Spend the least possible forcing the least number of developers to do more work with everything in the game being “just barely good enough” without ever having the possibility of overperforming. An independent or privately owned AA studio can just be there to make a game.

A studio without cancer can aim for the moon and even if they fail they still end up in orbit. If they succeed in delivering the moon, you get a Baldur’s Gate 3. A shareholder beholden studio aims for the lowest flight that is still able to be called a game that can later be serviced with microtransactions.. When they fail, they nose dive. Even if they succeed, “minimum viable product” has no chance of becoming an overwhelming success.

20:13 🤮🤮🤮

I have to say it Yamiks… Go Woke go Broke, USAID DEI, FBI Gamer Gate, hiring to meet a quota and not merit. On top of that toxic culture from the DEI, and the original developers left.

Payday 3 had WAY more things wrong with it than just always online. Features like vote kicking, voice chat, rejoin, load out editing before the start of the mission, was NOT in at launch. You know stuff that’s REQUIRED for a Co-Op game, and StarBreeze didn’t even acknowledge the issues till 3 months I repeat 3 MONTHS after the launch, and the first wave of features weren’t added till like 6 months after launch.

Gonna tell you a secret … Avowed is a first person Crpg , its has the same restrictions of one BUT u are in first person and have lesse dialogue options

10 seconds in and I gotta say that you’re being awful generous only going back 3 years. Personally I’d say that on the net balance AAA games have been negative for at least 6 years. 2018 or I guess you could argue for 2019 was he last year AAA games were more often good then bad but ever since it’s only been a few standout AAA games that were any good

Cutscenes in games are almost always dumb. If I want to watch a movie I go and watch a movie and not play a game. And no, games are not interactive movies. Most of the time cutscenes are just annoying and they never get the emotions and sync with speech right so why waste any time trying. At least get some real people and film it if you want to make one but dont waste our time with your shitty face renders.

An industry infested with activist a holes that despise gamers and used our tolerance against us to pry their way in.
Now it all on fire 😆

Never buy a game at launch. Starfield turned pretty good it just took them a little time

I used to be excited ny AAA, I cant even tell you what game killed it, its just disappointing to pay 60+ USD for a “AAA” game that plays as good and looks as good as a 30 dollar game. ¯⁠⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Is it the worst period since the crash? I wouldn’t have said so. We have more games coming out than ever, and while we’ve seen a lot of high-profile games fail we’ve also seen a lot succeed – and continue to do so. The market’s never been bigger, but it’s also never been more saturated; the big names have failed to innovate (& in the case of Bethesda, they’ve actually gone backwards), and now they’re paying the price. If you only look at the big players – the big failures – then you would be justified in thinking that it’s the worst period since the crash but when you look at the small successes and all the innovation we’re seeing elsewhere, the picture changes quite a lot for the positive.

Psst…Capitalism ruins everything

Definitely do the one for successes!

Somehow people love to shove the faults and errors onto “DEI” and “woke” insteada of taking it at facevalue, Publishers and Studios take the easiest path.
Just as the players take the easist path to blame something, ie “woke” “DEI”
Baldurs gate 3 was a good game based on D&D with a lot of “woke DEI” elements? Let’s copy the elements just ignore what actually made said elements good.
Star Wars survivor sold well? Let’s copy it and save money at some unneded stuff, people played the game for the game, not the game + story.

Remember Dungeons, the game that copied dungeon keeper so bad, that some people joked about how it would have been better to make a bad original instead of a bad copy, because at least with a bad original you could try something unique? I feel like we are currently having this, but on a industry wide scale.
Even the “worst” original indie games got more soul than your blockbuster mega production tripple A (or AAAA)
We are currently working through a downtrend initiated by COD-ification of games, COD, Assasins Creed or all the sport games from EA show the trend of least resistance. Once something is raking in the money, everyone jumps in on the bandwagon.

As for something from the video, the interview for Unknown 9 looked like a trained Stockhol Syndrome, as if they were held at gunpoint to follow the board of directors to write this stuff or get fired.
I don’t believe the majority wants to create shit games, but like always, you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

It’s just corporates making decisions that should be made by creatives. It’s the same problem that happens to every company that starts to grow and investors get involved.

Yep yep. Publishers not wanting to take a risk with expensive development and making safe games for misidentified demographics is a great recipe for underperforming sales.

Forced diversity and inclusivity as well as money grabbing practices have definitely had a negative impact.

Games can’t be too fun. They have to be just engaging enough to keep people playing but wanting more, and then you sell them slop that promises, but does not actually succeed, to make the game more fun. This is how mobile cash grab games are designed, and you see the same sort of behavior in live service. Also companies are not willing to take any risks, they want cash cows with as little effort as possible, this is also why the film industry has been such hot garbage.

Triple A when A stands for Arse.

AAA Games, in my opinion, always referred to the amount of money behind the project. It’s not a mark of quality, especially since the biggest industry players gave themselves that label.

A true AAA game is always a game that has massive fan support, positive reviews, and lots of sales. Those can be little indies or big developers.

It boggles my mind that so many executives out there are in their 40’s and 50’s, who grew up in a time when pretty much the ONLY thing that carried games was their gameplay and/or their story, are now turning their backs on the exact things that made gaming so damn AWESOME when I was a teenager (I’m now a greybeard gamer dad pushing towards 60). Developers HAD to pull something special outta their asses to make up for the fact that the platforms they were coding for were not properly sufficient to meet the levels of their dreams.

Now we have games being developed by committee (and social media mob), forcing developers to adhere to a checklist of spurious requirements that exist ONLY to prove to risk-averse shareholders, and cultural thugs and bullies like Sweet Baby Inc (Nazis by any other name would still reek of sweat-stained shit), that GameDev Incorporated is striving to be an “all-inclusive” creator of the Next Big Franchise just waiting to happen – Please, for the love of everyting holy, don’t crucify us if we’re even remotely human and may get something wrong!

This is not to say I don’t WANT representation or inclusion in the games I play, absolutely far from it. I just want it to be an organic and natural part of the narrative in the game I’ve just shelled out hard-earned money for. I would sincerely LOVE it if some game out there took issues like gender identity and the (current) shit-storm of cultural baggage that comes with it and put it into the game under the category of No Big Damn Deal (For Fuck’s Sake). Show, don’t tell, that Tharmgon the Destroyer, (Blender of Skulls, Archon of the Apocalypse, Slayer of Gods, and Ender of Times) is gender-fluid all you want, just make it a non-noteworthy part of the character’s traits and attributes. If you need to FORCE awareness of things like this into someone’s vision, then someone in all of this isn’t paying attention or doing their job right, and it’s sure as hell NOT the consumer who bought the game you just pushed out.

I would laugh my ass off if, months or even YEARS after gaming-fan-favourite anti-hero Tharmgon the Destroyer (Blender of Skulls, etc etc etc) was finally confirmed as being gender-fluid as fuck, and the developers are there saying “Really, it took you all this long to work that shit out? They’ve been like that since the start, we chose NOT to make a big deal of it at the beginning because it shouldn’t be a big deal now. What the hell are you smoking to be this oblivious?”.

Anything else is tokenism-by-fucking-numbers, and there are too many people in my life who deserve a fuck-load more than that bullshit.

Reject AAA, return to Indie.

I think that no woke crap would ever be a problem if the game was good. When the game is good, players will forgive anything, whether it’s bugs, bad writing or propagandas, but if the game is bad, they will stick into every single tiny detai and say “this is why it’s bad”. Just make cool game with heart, give players what they want, that’s why lower budget games are nowadays much better than those mainstream “AAA” productions.

10:25
You may say “I don’t care if things are woke”, but what those people produce in writing is exactly what you’re complaining about. When the writer can’t see past their own noses, and says everything fun is problematic, and that games need to be a “safe space” for everyone, how is any game suppose to have an interesting narrative?

“Utter Garbage and Slop Like React Content” (translation from start image) Are you insulting your own videos Yamiks? lol.

5:40 is this some remote controlled robotic Avatar on a 900 ping connection?

Anybody in the comments claiming that “wokeness” or “dei” is the reason for bad games is admitting they are a fucking moron. Incompetent management and blind profit chasing is the reason

“Turd-person action adventure” is brilliant term. For games and their developers at the same time!

Blame america and the woke freaks whos only purpose is to make us suffer for there own sick enjoyment while they scream about ThE meSsAGe

On top of intrusive money-making strategies that are muzzling gaming, it has simply reached a plateau. In the past, technology was improving fast enough to enable gaming to reinvent itself before going around in circles, but like most things technology is subject to the law of diminishing returns, technology is already only improving at the margin for quite some time now, and the gaming industry simply can’t reinvent the wheel over and over agaiin with the same technology. It is nobody’s fault, apart from gamers, who are used to gaming being a fast-evolving industry. Any game you mention would have een considered a masterpiece 15 year ago. They’re not bad, they’re just more of the same, because technlogy stalled.

Hiring on traits and not merits. Lack of managerial accountability and fear of workplace retaliation. Unskilled writers inserting political commentary so poorly that it appears as political activism. Industry stagnation where the “leaders” of gaming development, particularly the leaders of the recent launch failures, don’t face consequences and are instead allowed to continue working as if nothing happened.

Meanwhile. Space Marine 2, Final fantasy rebirth, Monster hunter wilds (console version), Alan wake 2, Marvel Rivals, Indiana jones the great circle, Astro bot, Spiderman 2, Elden ring and the Erdtree dlc, Stellar blade, Helldivers 2, God of war valhalla, The Finals, Cyberpunk dlc, Metaphor ReFantazio, Baldurs Gate 3, Granblue Fantasy relink, Tekken 8, Street Fighter 6, (Resident Evil 4 and Silent hill but they’re remakes), Final Fantasy 16. And the upcoming Expedition 33 looks amazing. Just play games you like

Yamiks, I think we’re getting old. Our generation is just more critical.. as the so called “modern audience” is taking space, we’ll see more and more of this shit taking place.

We just need our move towards AA – anonymous alcoholics till we get our hands on The Blood of Dawnwalker . witcher 4 and GTA 6

Yes, do a commentary on the good games as well. Balance it all out 🙂

The AAA industry has become so lazy and greedy that i wouldn’t be surprised if there ends up being a world wide video game crash.

My game reaction: https://youtu.be/O1gB_aoVJQY?feature=shared (screaming beaver meme)

I feel like two things happened that caused a shitvalanche of crap games.
First is the fact that video games are now full on mainstream entertainment. Ifnyou cut your teeth gaming in the 80s, you know what I mean. Back then video games were something you circled innthe Service Merchandise catalog for xmas. Today, video games are nearing Hollywood levels of popularity and “main streamness”. Annnnd so, we are seeing the same sort of dump of garbage.
The second issue is sort of a mix of dual selfishness. Both in the company, and the player base, that has led to “early access” as a business model. This needs to stop. Companies want that quick cash flow and off load some of the QAQC load on the player base. And the players all want that “I was here first” thrill. Add in prerelease content creator hype and 2 months into early release, everyone is burnt out on the game, the devs jabe made most of the money they are gonna make on thr game, and things start to fizzle. I mean, how many games out there have been early access on steam for years? Rust, 7D2D, Empyrion, so on and so forth. Right now, the incentive is to get a game out, and get money.
And, you know what, Im glad to see these freaking publishers and studios fail and close. I only hope the rest are paying attention.

have you noticed the birth of the gollumlike genre games like skull island rise of kong is one of them i love gamemill

I love how games proclaim freedom in an outlaw game when you can’t even draw your weapon in a city or kill innocents.

DEI hires. Woke bs. Talent left/forced to leave due DEI/HR bullying…

Wait, there was a game called unknown 9. It’s unknown to me alright.

The problem is publishers failing to understand what gamers want and forcing devs to make what doesn’t sell.

Hilarious that you mention Postal 2 when I’ve recently started playing it again!

All the game publishers are playing it “safe yet greedy” and releasing what they know makes them money instead of taking risk and letting passion drive there development.

which is funny because playing it “safe yet greedy” has gotten then screwed.

the less the better.

I strongly disagree on Dragon’s Dogma II being on the List. It’s one of the good games of the last years.

DEI ruined AAA gaming

First here!! Yeet. I love all your videos. Have an amazing day!