Embracer's Lars Wingefors on the "brutal truth" of the AAA market. CEO also discusses the possibility of raising the price of games to combat increasing development costs

Lol. "No one is playing our games, better raise prices". Genius.

“Why do people pirate?”

Ya fuckin morons.

Or maybe, you could be more intentional about where you put your effort during the development process. But hey if you want AA and indies to eat your lunch go right ahead and raise prices while releasing the same shovelware.

Are they going to start making AAA games worth more than 60? You make something like RDR2 I'll gladly pay over 100. You make another boring assassins creed I'll wait until it's 15.

I'm just waiting for the video game market to crash so they stop making games altogether. Then indie developers and open source games can rise in the aftermath.

It's getting to the point where more and more games are overpriced privacy invasive trash and frankly I'm tired of buying new hardware all the time just to get to play this regurgitated dogshit. I only play old stuff now. I'm playing descent for msdos right now and having a blast, later I'll play some 2005 battlefront 2. Fuck enshitification.

He talks about playtime and that gamers are mostly playing games 6yrs and older but doesn't even speculate on why that is. Could be technology, better gameplay, or some other factor. He's just, "we have a small window we're competing for" but doesn't seem to want to understand why some new games get more playtime than others.

The days of me paying full price for AAA titles is over. Even some of the series I used to love were disappointments when new titles came out. Indie games have been giving me far more enjoyment and repeatability so until the big AAA studios figure shit out they can take their overpriced shovelware and cram it where the sun don't shine.

Pretty much the only time I am throwing down full price for a game is when the dev team is a handful of people, if not a single person.

These days my purchases are a support of the demonstrated development effort, not a valuation of a franchise or series.

YO HO HO

The truth of the matter is that AAA games have become so risk adverse and so determined to get all the money that they've become a risky purchase for players. Though recent publisher action has proved that's true of some indies too. Getting players to pay full price in this market is going to be increasingly hard.