This makes me wonder, what's the oldest game studio that hasn't devolved into utter garbage or been bought and took out behind the barn?
Blizzard, Maxis, EA, Rockstar, Bungie, Lionhead, every name I can think of from the old days is now utterly disgraced or just dead.
Sierra is still going, kind of. It seems to have devolved into a handful of people with very little money. I actually applied to a job posting from them a couple years ago.
Seems the only source of half decent games that aren't actively exploiting people is just indie studios. Nothing against indie, but it's hard for a couple of people in their free time to compete with the kind of quality and innovation we used to get from the old guard.
Well, if you are asking for exactly one, I can tell: It starts with an "N" and has been around since the 1800s.
But besides that, I can not think of any...
I think it is very hard to consistently make good games and also earn money. A few months ago a smaller German gaming company closed (Mimimi). All their games were well received. But even so it was too difficult to continue with just making "good" games: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/shadow-gambit-studio-mimimi...
There is a middle ground between the massive decrepit zombie studios, and indie. Larian, Grinding Gear Games, Remedy, Valve, and CD Project red are still admirable studios that release mostly masterpieces and are clearly passionate about their product as an art form. Valve and CD project red might have a few caveats, but overall still nailing it if they're capable of HL:Alyx and what Cyberpunk2077 is as of right now. You can't make things of that caliber without being great.
I kind of forgot about Sierra. My opinion at the time was, and still is: Whatever Sierra made (mostly adventures and flight sims), usually Lucasarts made something similar but IMO better.
Sierra released a lot more games, though. LucasArts quality was generally better, and the games more memorable due to clever use of humor, but I think Sierra had an epic feel to their games that LucasArts didn't quite match - and Sierra also had more "adult" games, such as Gabriel Knight and Phantasmagoria (if that's your kind of thing!). I think they are both great from different perspectives.
Let's not forget Access of Tex Murphy fame either :).
I believe op's point is that they're 1) not independent and 2) not making exploitive games. Exploitive monetization is a fairly subjective call but it seems pretty agreeable that being owned by Tencent certainly makes a studio not "indie".
My only real criteria was studios I could think of that seem to still make games like they (and the leadership) are passionate about it and are making S tier games still. I put GGG on it because Path of Exile 2 looks like what a company with the vision of Blizzard in its hayday would be making today.
Earlier in my career I worked with a game director who had done "major arcade franchise which is now a console franchise". He had the same employer and similar co workers since the early 1990s and was coming up on retirement.
Nintendo is the obvious example but there are many others. Japan benefits from other jobs being less competitive work/life balance wise so games are if anything a sweet spot. Plus a focus on stability, which brings stability.
The methods are simple but involve defocusing shareholder returns. Hence how Nintendo has Miyamoto as an executive while Tod Howard is not an executive of Xbox.
What's wrong with Rockstar? Some of their handling of GTA Online is unfavorable (GTA+, porting features to console but not PC), but I don't recall them being bought out or selling out.
They continue to set an incredibly high bar from story to engineering with every major release. It’s full of talent pushing the state of the art. Dead, utterly disgraced doesn’t describe the company. Stories about employees feeling exploited is more of a successful, topical company thing than a Rockstar thing.
I agree 100% with you but I will mention three that, for now, are still decent (although not 100% perfect): ID Software, Valve, FromSoftware.
I had to look at over 20 studios that built my favorite games in 1990-2010 to find those 3. And ID Software had the drama with Mick Gordon, for which I am quite angry at them, I hate Valve's focus on boxes in multiplayer games, and FromSoftware cares too little about hacks and in general don't provide a PC experience up to what I would expect considering the general quality of their games.
So yeah, I only know of indie or very new studios that are building pure, clean, fun games nowadays.
Larian Studios? Been making games since 1996, and while all aren't the massive succcess that DOS2 / BG3 are, they've always been there just pumping out products.
A lot of the stuff they were making that didn't make a splash was pretty good though. I honestly think The Dragon Knight Saga was incredibly slept on, in part it seems due to a bungled release.
Paradox (the studio) has been going downhill recently. Of the games they’ve released since 2016, Imperator: Rome struggled at launch and has since been completely abandoned and Victoria 3 was a massive disappointment. That leaves Crusader Kings 3, which is good but still lacks a lot of stuff from Crusader Kings 2.
Paradox (the publisher) has had a couple of rough launches recently too. I was really looking forward to Cities: Skylines 2 except it launched with absolutely unplayable performance issues. Meanwhile, Star Trek: Infinite is little more than a half baked reskin of Stellaris.
Paradox is also one of the worst offenders when it comes to DLC. Actually buying the full version of any single Paradox game could cost upwards of a hundred dollars. That was fine when the base version of the game at release time was already good but recently that’s not consistently the case.
Yea, it feels like you move into that smaller studio zone. Paradox, Firaxis, even something like Supergiant. Places that have ups and downs, but generally make a specific sort of thing, get paid for it, and move on to the next thing.
My sense is that, for example, the reception of EU4 expansions has generally ranged from lukewarm to absolutely terrible over the past few years, so I'm not sure "they've only been getting better."
CDPR, 2002. Larian, 1996. Valve, 1996. Remedy, 1995. Nintendo 1989. FromSoftware, 1986. Capcom, 1979. That said, before the details, I agree and resonate with your sense of frustration. Every shop you mentioned is one I not just admired for their games, but loved for their games.
I imagine there are others that might pass a bar (seriously, a good exercise to stress the thinking is to argue Rockstar out rather than in). But what's interesting is they're all on a good arc at the moment.
CDPR have 'dug up' for the last few years and Cyberpunk 20077 is now not just a fine game, it's a great game. Their redemption arc will someday be a great documentary or movie. It would not have been hard to see them collapse as an entity, but credit to their grit.
Larian are arguably going to be this breakout AAA, and could imo be a Rockstar/Blizzard level company in terms of gamer attention and production. BG3 is as much a moment as a game. It feels a bit like Doom, or Half-Life, or GTA3, or Halo, or Skyrim. I suspect they have steadily and quietly built out the best game character primitive engine and production setup in the industry by some distance, in the sense the way to compete is year on year capex investment that might pay off in 5-10 years. You might compare Larian to early Pixar or ILM. Even if you were willing to stake, you don't have anything like the network of mo/vo cap talent they do.
Valve is the House of Gabe, it's difficult to quibble with the quality they've put into the new Steam Deck. Looks like a a fine device and worth getting. I get there are criticisms of Valve/Steam but every time I use steam I feel like it was built by gamers. I can't really explain it other than to say Valve has serious, brand authenticity—Your-most-respected-brand-here—for gamers. Sony could be all that but can't be all that because of a broken divisional model. Xbox might well get there. Nintendo are already there.
Were Remedy in cinema or the golden age of tv, we'd be talking auteur level work. It's easy to imagine Alan Wake crossing over in television, and possibly film.
Nintendo are their own category, doing their own thing.
FromSoftware have become like Larian are becoming, this other level company. Elden Ring and Armored Core 6 indicate a serious breadth in ability. They are the biggest surprise to me in the sense of being founded the earliest other than Capcom. I would have said 1990s until I checked for this thread.
Capcom it seems are on a tear, and are just steadily releasing solid game after game after game. They in particular, but all these shops in general, feel deeply understudied in terms of game software production. Especially given the attention on AAA development cycles and cost structures that's driving plenty of the shops mentioned into spirals around live service, e-sports, in game payment that seem more like black holes than flywheels.
It's easy to put the challenges driving these companies at feet of the great god greed. And while that might be a component, I suspect a lot of game studios, backers and publishers are struggling with fundamentals of development and production and delivery at scale. Don't just think about the cost basis of ~250 vo/mo cap actors on BG3 [1], think about what you need to to make that work across the engineers and designers and writers and the actors, and, and, and. That's just extremely difficult to emulate without serious conviction and commitment on the long term. Larian did it, and the question everyone else has to answer, do we have the stomach to follow to create games with a payoff quite reasonably not in this decade or a console generation out? Especially bearing in mind, it's way cheaper to build infrastructure out when it's not obvious the value exists. Followers have all the benefits of knowing the path to take with all the negatives that every step is now priced in at a premium.
Games are now the biggest entertainment medium by some distance, dwarfing film, music, radio and books. It's reasonable to want to bring in adult management at that scale (plus games like GTA5, Minecraft and Fortnite are bordering on being their own categories and not simply, games). How Bungie goes from Halo being an era defining game to Destiny 2 being a burning platform is just extraordinary. And it makes me wonder as an example if the guidance given by them to the team working on TLOU service game, which resulted in a reset, was the best cautionary or worst possible advisory.
We haven't really touched on mobile games. In this space, I feel like King, the K in the ABK acquired by Uncle Phil and Microsoft are highly understudied. Candy Crush is also kind of its own category. So many people get enjoyment from their games while the company seems to avoid the worst forms and excesses of whale/gacha capture that plagues mobile gaming.
Blizzard, Maxis, EA, Rockstar, Bungie, Lionhead, every name I can think of from the old days is now utterly disgraced or just dead.
Sierra is still going, kind of. It seems to have devolved into a handful of people with very little money. I actually applied to a job posting from them a couple years ago.
Seems the only source of half decent games that aren't actively exploiting people is just indie studios. Nothing against indie, but it's hard for a couple of people in their free time to compete with the kind of quality and innovation we used to get from the old guard.