Is that sunlight?
Nope. Not yet.
Man, so I’m gonna need to explain some lore on this blog. It’s gonna make things really hard when I move to Substack and delete all these blog posts I don’t think fit me that well anymore. Only kidding, but there is a scenario or two I’m going to explain before I really start. I have made references to sports games in the past and the idea of sports games being the same game over and over with the year filed off then readded has reached the second loop of the acceptance cycle. I think we’re on bargaining mark two. But WWE games are the ones that tend to buck the trend. One may argue that they’ve tried too hard to reinvent what worked for one reason or another, but it really doesn’t matter when you grind your employees into hamburger meat, have a yearly release schedule right before a next gen console with no additional preparation, or your main wrestling dev partner decides it doesn’t want to work with you anymore. WWE 2K20 is the culmination of all these things resulting in being able to make not just monsters with the create a wrestler feature, but interdimensional beasts that can assuredly give nightmares to even the hardest built of us. Also it can break, everyone an slide crawl across the ring, your custom title belts can be brought to the ring unfinished, and matches can just be unwinnable at times. This is what a lack of QA can do for you, and WWE realized that they couldn’t just duck this one as they had in the past with bad titles. They literally cancelled WWE 2k21 in order to bring you WWE Battlegrounds, a game that you may not have heard of because its actually a somewhat stable game this time. This was done to give enough time for WWE 2k22 to come out and wow everyone all over again. As of this article’s writing we don’t know what it’ll become but WWE has made certain to fire so much of their current staff that if they didn’t own the likenesses of every character in that game you’d probably have one fifth the selection that the last game did. Either that or you’d see a whole lot of people that died and can therefore not object to being put in your wrestling video game.
However, I’d be lying if I said that I cared so much about a wrestling franchise I haven’t looked to outside of my character creation addiction. My real purpose in this article to end the new year is to revisit my Infamy Slide idea from two years back . To explain it in simple terms, really popular franchises sell purely on name and assurance of quality after a while. When that assurance is shown to be false, people will start to step back and wait for others to dive on the property to make sure it’s not a grenade this time. This means that one of the easiest ways to see if this entry in the series is a failure is to see how the next title in line does because preorders are everything and Fear Of Missing Out is the law of the land. Hilariously, however, things have changed since then. Not only in my mind, but in the industry as a whole. Epic Game Store was not around and Game Pass wasn’t the main selling point of a current generation console when I wrote that. Also, one of my main examples in the Infamy Slide article is both a much stronger example while being completely exempt. Not only because Call of Duty: Vanguard is a severe drop in game quality due in no small part to the Big Sicky but because several people at Activision Blizzard have been caught drinking their coffee with sugar and breast milk while taking photos of employee cooch. That’s enough for just about anyone to decide they don’t want you around.
In much the same way, World Wrestling Entertainment is both a great showing of the infamy slide while also being the poster child for trivializing it. WWE shows have been on a downward slope of viewership for years, something that is only a problem so long as a competitor doesn’t reach more viewers on a regular basis. Going from four million plus in the late ninties to barely over a million this year is nothing to sneeze at. Some may also call it inevitable as time marches on but I doubt a board room full of angry investors wants that answer, necessarily. I’m sure someone more qualified could answer the “How’d we get here” for WWE and that’s not my point. We’re here now and surprisingly that’s not what matters because viewership is not the main way WWE gets its money. For most forms of media, sales are the draw, either that or adverts which will let you know if you’ve managed to move the needle or not. WWE, however, seems to have full knowledge that very few people like them as people and more because they’ve been the only mainstream game in town for almost twenty years. Their unique situation as a show that ideally releases endless live content week by week makes them extremely appetizing for cable and streaming services endlessly thirsty for content in any form. Movies, tv shows, and even sports make time for breaks but wrestling is up all year around, sometimes giving even more than they usually do if the moment is right. In that respect, even if WWE is only appealing to people that don’t buy anything else, so long as they bring in a decent number they’ll be worth even the most expensive deal because all their content will be new and incentivize people to stay on the channel for a little while longer. Maybe, they’ll stick around for what’s up next, like how the Simpsons would follow football games to similar success. Given deals that only pour in more money year by year, they could technically make absolute garbage for years that turns people away in droves so long as they get some form of number that gets them another deal near the end. Oh, and also they have a deal with the Saudi Prince. That might also be a big deal.
What I’m getting at is that the industry is taking a darker turn. The need to spend the most money to get the best graphics was meant to end at some point, hitting either the peak of realism or every AAA publisher going out of business. Bad business practices would eventually be punished and the pursuit of money would eventually circle back around to quality. However, a trend has started to emerge, thanks in no small part to Epic Games and Microsoft. In an attempt to fluff their propriatary services with the Epic Game Store and Gamepass, the former has flat out flown past taking less off the top than Steam does as both has flat out declared to game devs that if companies side with them they will pay out big. In the case of Epic, they have actually paid out the entire budget of a game just to get it first. Not to go doom and gloom on you, but this is a scenario that can only end poorly even with the knowledge that Epic and Microsoft can slit their own throats, letting money pour out and continue on their daily lives with everyone horrified that someone can live with all their blood pouring out. There have been some reports of companies like 505 Games taking the whole payment and pocketing it, denying their development team anything more than the promised amount they’d be given and there is of course the scenario of releasing a microtransaction filled game for sixty dollars yet using Game Pass to have people pay up anyway because it’s “free” there. However, it goes a bit beyond this. Companies are no longer in any danger if they release a game. Outside of some smaller devs or stupider publishers, you can basically make a game, get it all paid for by these companies, release it with no advertising and have no one buy it, yet making massive amounts of money anyway. It’s the same scenario as streaming services and WWE: So long as you’re making anything, you’re instantly getting a profit no matter what. So long as someone at the top doesn’t get really upset about the state of things, there’s no risk and no need to worry about the consumer at all. They don’t matter. Literally tear up their favorite things in front of them, release a buggy and broken game and add enough later that people will say that it was misjudged, be as much of a scum bag as you want because even if this game cost five times as much as the last and got one fifth the playerbase it doesn’t matter. You’ve got paid with every sale afterwards now being extra or is reimbursement for the store front. Imagine getting paid to open a store in a mall rather than renting it; having the mall pay for all your goods, employees, upkeep, and even advertising. If anything, it incentivises money waste. Go the most expensive route and so long as Epic gets a few more players they’ll happily pay for this one, old friend.
However, strangely enough, the Infamy Slide is still a real thing with real consequences. Battlefield 2042 is said to be the worst Battlefield game in years, hot off the heels of World War II one where a real group of soldiers in Norway were erased so a girl boss story could be told instead. Now, given the scenario I’ve just explained, DICE shouldn’t give a s**t, right? Just patch bugs, keep their heads down like last time and just keep creating. Instead there’s been a reshuffling of talent with Respawn’s previous head being brought over to help out with this one. This is because all encompassing is the Infamy Slide, all the way to the top and even assured money is not limitless. Eventually, no amount of content WWE releases will mean anything if no one is watching. Saying that this game has the most lifetime players doesn’t hold much weight if they only played for a minute on no risk at all. In a way, it is pro consumer at the cost of the big corporation, but that means the consumer has to actually want it. Everyone needs to want something, and if less and less people want in then eventually that big payment won’t happen. Why would I want your seventh game when the sixth has no one wanting to play it. In the end, even with no money at stake, the company’s health being safe no matter what, and everyone getting what they want, the opinion of the buying populace still matters most.
At least until they create a bot that makes accounts and plays video games. Then you’ve created a victimless ponzi scheme. I guess the victim becomes the heads of Microsoft and Epic. So who cares?
Tazy's Corner 