MEASH

GTA 6 is about to teach the whole industry a lesson it doesn't want to learn. Big budgets were never the real problem. Making games players didn't ask for was. The game isn't even out yet and people are already rearranging their lives. HR company BambooHR says time-off requests for November 19 are up somewhere between 9% and 17%. People are taking PTO for a video game. Think about that. The install size is reportedly over 200 GB and nobody cares. They'll delete half their library to make room and not think twice. 🤣 Now look at the other side of the industry this same month. EA shut down BioWare. Thirty years of history, gone. The next Mass Effect, canceled. Around 400 jobs cut across the company. And BioWare's last game? Dragon Age: The Veilguard reportedly hit about 1.5 million players in its first two months. That's roughly half of what EA was expecting. Critics were fine with it. Players just didn't show up. Fans crowdfunded Save Mass Effect billboards outside EA's headquarters and the petition is past 250,000 signatures. That's real love for a series. But a billboard doesn't fund a sequel. Sales do. Players vote with their wallets. Period. Then you've got Marathon. Tom Henderson is publicly asking Bungie to look at matchmaking because he keeps landing in lobbies with two teams, sometimes one. A dead lobby in an extraction shooter is about the worst thing you can see. Granted, Marathon is a whole Article in and of it self. Very special situation there. So how does one studio (Rockstar) have people burning vacation days while another can't fill a match? Not really a fair question when you look at the quality and consistency from Rockstar. Big studio names used to be enough to carry a launch. It used to. Bu not anymore. My take is pretty simple. Rockstar didn't make GTA 6 cheap or fast either. They went over a decade between mainline games. The difference is they built exactly what their audience was begging for, and they didn't ship it until it was ready. A lot of studios spend years and huge money chasing whatever genre looked hot when the project got greenlit. By the time it ships the trend is dead and the players have moved on. That's a leadership call, not bad luck. Here's my prediction. November 19 is going to be one of the biggest launch days gaming has ever seen. And a lot of publishers are going to study it and walk away with the wrong takeaway. They'll think the answer is spend more. The ones who survive the next few years will be the ones who figure out what their players actually want first, and then spend. So be honest with me. What's the last game you'd actually take a day off work for? And what does that studio do that the others keep missing?