“Maybe the gaming industry deserves to die”

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Canadian video game developer David Gaider is the narrative mastermind behind some of the best role-playing games of all time. He worked for BioWare for 17 years on modern classics such as Baldur’s Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. His best-known work is probably the development of the “Dragon Age” universe. Now he has clear words for the games industry in 2024.

How good are the games Gaider has made? Gaider is the author of some of the best role-playing games of all time:

  • It started with Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn – which scored 95 percent on Metacritic in 2000
  • The Star Wars epic “Knights of the Old Republic” (2003) has a 94 percent rating on Metacritic
  • Dragon’s Age Origins (2009) got at least 91 percent

    • He was also responsible for the story of Anthem, but left BioWare in January 2016. After that, the story of the Everyone is Iron Man online game was rebooted.

    Maybe not Gaider’s favorite game, but an important game for many readers of MeinMMO – Anthem:

    Anthem shows the four different battle suits in the launch trailer

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    Overtime, 1,000 hours of playtime and photorealistic graphics

    That’s what he says: In an interview with PC Gamer, he spoke about the difficult state of the gaming industry for developers. Many nominally successful companies have reported in recent months that they have had to lay off hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of employees. Some smaller studios even closed their doors entirely.

    Gaider believes that the way things are going now doesn’t have to continue forever. But the current path leads to ruin:

    “There’s a fear going around: If we don’t let everyone work overtime and don’t make AAA games with a $200 million budget and photorealistic graphics and 1,000 hours of playing time, then we have to start doing exactly that now and make everyone work until they die, and the same thing you make video games.

    And if that’s really true, then maybe the industry deserves to die. But I don’t think it has to be that way.”

    How can it be better? Gaider says his new studio, Summerfall, has a four-day week and a schedule that’s realistic and doesn’t require lying to his bosses.

    In an environment like that, you’d have people who love their work and don’t feel like they’re just resources being tapped into.

    Has he been successful with it? Gaider’s game “Stray Gods” has 94 percent positive reviews on Steam, but was released in August 2023 and, like so many games, was flattened at the time by the “1,000 hours of play” behemoth Baldur’s Gate 3. There are currently around 30 players on Steam.

    But Gaider seems to like his new work.

    BioWare has an Anthem trauma

    This is what lies behind it: Gaider shared the fate of many developers at BioWare:

  • He had been an extremely successful developer of single-player games for more than a decade and had developed a reputation as an expert.
  • But then the team had to develop a complex “service game” because games like GTA Online or Destiny are every publisher’s dream because they have a stable cash flow.
  • As we now know, the chaotic work on Anthem left many BioWare employees sick and depressed, and the game simply wasn’t finished.

    • You can understand that Gaider longs for other working models.

    The YouTuber Maurice Weber criticizes exactly this type of “service games”:

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    What is seen as the reason for the crisis in gaming? Experts see various reasons for the crisis:

  • A changed economic climate – rising interest rates have made money more expensive. This has made it extremely difficult to finance new games.
  • Gaming studios have grown too much during the pandemic and will now have to cut jobs.
  • Huge games like Baldur’s Gate 3 would have captivated games for months and everything that was released during this period would have flopped.
  • The ever-increasing demands on games and therefore ever more expensive production – but the income is not growing with it.

    • More about the terrible work on Anthem back then: An insider report on Anthem casts a dark light on BioWare

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