What a treat of a read. Always nice to see a new story like this pop up, thanks for sharing!

Unless they can’t see the difference between the dickhead and themselves.

Typed out a whole thing because I didn’t really agree with you that it’s not just the people up top, but also this perpetual growth, zero sum game most C-suite level people seem to think the world operates on.

Most of my points ended up agreeing with you, but I do want to add that profit seeking isn’t a bad thing, but that the constant desire for more profit, ‘growth’ is where the real evil lies.

I think that’s where his point kind of lies tho. Don’t get me wrong, I share the same sentiments, but scale doesn’t necessarily translate to production costs. Larian has been in the CRPG genre for a while, and they have engines, proprietary tools, and design philosophies based off their past successes and failures. Other companies won’t really have that edge, and will likely make many of the same mistakes that earlier titles did, which is what Rami Ismail is probably fearing.

There aren’t many other ideal solutions to deal with this tricky problem. Capital like engines and tools aren’t really built so easily, and even when they are built, there’s tons of tiny little details that CRPGs make, ranging from camera to how dialogue is handled, to control schemes, character building (I don’t think Larian got away with utilizing the 5E system without a hefty licensing fee) and plot.

Not to say all these things need to be at quality and comparable to BG3, but that due to it’s popularity and success, it will be a frame or point of reference when thinking about another CRPG, and thus when a game doesn’t do anything new or drastically different, it’ll be framed as a ‘lower quality BG3’ because it won’t have anything to help it escape that direct comparison.

As for doing something different, using a different TTRPG system, or other unique quirk that set it apart drastically enough to free itself from that looming shadow, that’s a pretty hefty risk for a TTRPG or studio to take up, with no guarantee that the game itself will come out okay. You only need to look at Shadowrunn Returns, a CRPG for Shadowrun a cyberpunk fused fantasy world. Sounds like a great time, no? Well, I wouldn’t say it did badly, but that it didn’t do well enough for the people making or funding to entertain the risk of a sequel, and thus the ‘tightening of the noose’ that he’s referring to.

With a step down in price, or for new entrants to enter a market, we’ll either need to understand that new games likely won’t have the same polish or quality of current ones, but they will still need to earn a profit from these games. This either translates into enough sales (which I doubt people would do as people generally don’t care about things unless they’re incredibly passionate, which naturally limits the quantity of people) or a high enough price to still make a profit with a lower amount of sales, which means that smaller scale 20-30$ CRPG is just not feasible if they don’t have some other way to raise funding or keep costs down. You’d basically be looking at maybe 5-10 hours of gameplay for that kind of price, and the quality still would not be the same, missing a lot of things we take for granted in a AA or AAA setting.

It’s not really about consumer interest in a genre or style of game, it’s more to do with people’s flawed perspective that games are constantly getting better, and while it’s not to say new ideas aren’t being tried, and those can be done with indie teams, they just need to be either completely distinct when compared to it’s competitors, so the flaws aren’t fixated on, and accepted as a form of the medium, or reinvent the wheel in a way to subvert the genre they’re currently in. I could go on all day, but this is already a wall of text, and you get my point.

I think it’s because there are a couple of problems with higher education.

One, it really doesn’t have any rules or regulations outside of FERPA laws. Everything else is the wild, wild west in terms of how colleges treat students, so that leaves a lot of room for colleges to mistreat or take advantage of students until they’re motivated enough to litigate, if that’s even possible for all but the wealthiest of students.

Two, there’s no standards of higher education. There are standards for primary education, but little checks on the quality of your education beyond that. Only other way to “check if the product is good” is to take personal time showing up to lectures but that’s not really a feasible solution.

Three, all colleges are for profit companies. Public or Private, it doesn’t matter, the only difference is the scale of greed. The real goal here should be to rip the money and profits out of the hands of executives and committee members. Personally, I’m in favor of eminent domaining all colleges.

Four, why is a national good (the education of it’s citizens) being held by individual colleges? Seriously, the Department of Education has about two to three decades worth of work trying to catch up on all this BS.