Today's new games struggle because "evergreen" hits like Fortnite "pull players towards them at all times", says former BioWare GM

rockpapershotgun.com:

Before founding Inflexion in 2021, Aaryn Flynn worked at BioWare. He's got credits on some of the studio's best-loved games, from Baldur's Gate 2 through Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic to Dragon Age: Origins and the Mass Effect trilogy. He was BioWare's general manager for several years, but left the company in 2017 following the release of the less-regarded Mass Effect: Andromeda. New survival sim Nightingale is his first early access project, and it's certainly been a learning experience, with Flynn obliged to rethink many of the things he learned about gamedev during his BioWare days. Speaking to me ahead of Nightingale's launch, Flynn talked about the difficulty of making headway as a new developer in an industry where the most successful competing live service titles have effectively become part of the landscape - indeed, a force of "gravity".

Flynn says the games industry has long been dominated by a handful of companies and studios, but that things are especially tough now for anybody trying to break in - even a nowadays-Tencent-owned studio with a pedigree, like Inflexion - because in a live service era, the most prosperous games tend to stick around. "The idea that the games industry is a hits-driven business where the majority of the success goes to the minority of the developers, the minority of the studios - everybody knows that and everybody gets that, as harsh as that might be," he told me.

"I think there was this historical pattern that games end, and people stop playing certain games, and so then there's a hunger and a desire for new games and interesting games and improved games," Flynn continued.

"I think the calculus that's different now for players is - the total industry revenue is whatever it is for the year, and that used to be all new games, every year. And then the next year it's all new games again. There's this incredibly thick line now of that revenue, which is games that are five, even 10 years old, like GTA Online, and