Tales Of Kenzera Director Slams Publishers' Desire To Create "The Next Fortnite"

Everything in the world is about money.

We’ve got a rotten world, the gaming business isn’t an exception to that, unfortunately. It was, but everything that can be exploited for money will get the attention of corporate greedy people eventually.

It is also why I really like indie games. They are made by a small group of enthusiastic and talented people, just like the old times, and they usually focus on being unique in some way or another. Super Mario World was made by a group of ten people... Can you imagine?

I agree. The chase for the next Fortnite is what is ruining a lot of the industry.

I wouldn't mind but the industry all ready went through this with MMOs, and again truing to emulate the CoD map pack model. Gamers only have so many hours in the day and there just isn't enough support more than a handful of them.

I thi k the problem is more nuanced than just money. Artful games often don't sell well since many people write them off as artsy fartsy. Take the witness for example or gris or pentiment. Pentiment loos fantastic but the game simply didn't do it for me and I feel alot of people feel like this. Games live and die ny their gameplay and that is hard to nail when the tastes vary so much between your audience. Live service even tough we can hate it all we want seems to work in driving numbers. Unless we talk about concord.....or suicide squad....

Absolutely agree. Games take years to make to a certain quality too, so Concord was probably way less stale at an early point in development. It’s just too late to chase that Fortnite buzz.

His game wasn't that good either, and I hate online multi-player games like Fortnite...
Ultimately if your game is good it will sell well (Baldur's Gate 3, Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, etc...).

I agree with the devs here. Everyone is out to make a franchise, not a game. This is partly why we get so many flops as well. This won't change any time soon though as long as our socio-economic system allows this, there will always be greedy people and companies. For now, I'll keep supporting the devs that actually care about games first and money second

games are in most cases not a well fitting medium for story telling.
Most games have poor writing and when you try to make a game more story heavy, it will lose what makes it a game in the first place, the interactivity

@PluckyRicky there are many good games that don't sell and there are many crap games like choo choo charles that sell extremely well.

Oh, goodness, that image takes me back to 2018--my online multiplayer phase before I got a Switch. Those were good times.

Finally, somebody with a decent mindset. I'm still baffled that developers will still continue this stupid trend - even though most if not all Fortnite type of games tend to fail.. Miserably. Yes, Helldivers was a hit.. but Concord, Suicide Squad, Skull and Bones and many others were a complete and utter failure.

Here's hoping developers will finally grow a spine - and brain - and make ACTUAL games again.

I think it's silly to call out big pubs over chasing Fortnite. They are huge corporations with tons of shareholders. Do I want them to champion artsy games? Sure, but I get why they don't- I think his game is a perfect example, I don't think EA had any idea how to market it.

There are spaces for these games with numerous indie pubs now. I don't know if ZAU would have done better there but it would have made more sense.

I actually really enjoyed ZAU. I think it was a challenging game to market, period. We don't see a lot of games with African settings and roots, and frankly the hook for me was the story, which is not easily communicated, nor something I think many players would be drawn to.

I miss the days when games were made for a smaller groups of people dedicated to gaming and not for the mainstream casuals nowadays.

P.S. With big audience restrictions become a necessity and the games starting to lack in every department especially in artistic vision.

This is known

@jojobar
We all have a limited amount of money and time to spare, so obviously there will be good games that we won't be able to play.
Plus some genres are niche so it's even harder to sell beyond certain figures.
But in general we play games to have fun, if a game is not as good as what the competition releases the sale numbers will suffer. ZAU was not even close to POP The Lost Crown in terms of metroidvania exploration and combat. You can blame Fortnite, sure, its easier than looking in the mirror and admit your own shortcomings...

@Solomon_Rambling Actually, the Campbell Soup cans were about money…..

When you have a public wanting more and more entertainment, quality isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. There are reasons why reality TV became a thing.

Not to mention, there are plenty of gamers and gaming media personality who diss the idea games is an “artistic expression”. To them, games need to be fun and entertaining first and foremost. However, they fail to address how “fun” is relative.

It's all about the money - Meja ~ 1998

Always has and always will.

@jojobar i disagree, as some games like the superb 1000x resist benefit greatly from being in the medium. the problems you listed are for individual games not the medium as a whole!

There's just too much money in gaming industry, the industry need some of kind of reset like in 1983, at least for western AAA games.

In the other hand korea and chinese devs now just starting to make great AAA games like stellar blade and wukong, and japanese AAA games still good too, oh and the indies, so maybe there's still hope for gaming 😃

It's all about the money, and that's OK. Money isn't evil. Money is a brilliant and necessary invention as it's a far superior medium of exchange than barter, favors, or relying on the kindness of strangers.

@Anti-Matter Selling skins is a bad thing?

I hope good games make good money.

Every era has these single braincell-sharing companies trying to copy something with minimal thought, resulting in minimal return.

Sometimes you do get a passionate retooling of what worked al la Punishing Grey Raven riffing on Honkai 3rd, other times you get a CEO rapidly bashing their finger at the current trend and saying "do this or we will die!!!" while still having billions in the bank.
It happened when companies copied Mario Bros, DooM, Devil May Cry, Call of Duty, God of War, Uncharted, ect. It's gonna keep happening.

Unfortunately that's just not how the world works

Publishers aren't charities set up for the benefit of artists to realize their dreams. They're always going to look for stuff that will sell, first and foremost.

The best ones will find passionate teams whose work is excellent and also marketable.

The real issue with the trendchasing from big corporations is that games take so long to develop now that they often miss the boat entirely with such releases. Suicide Squad and Concord were great examples of this in 2024.

Anyway, if this developer wants their next game to sell better, they should look at finding a way to distinguish it from about 50,000 other similar games in that genre also being released by other indie devs. The indies that make it big now are ones creative enough to be distinguishable and/or create new genres.

It's easy to demand artistic integrity when you're using someone else's money to make it.

If a publisher decides to invest money into your artsy game project, they are expecting it to make the money back and then some. If it doesn't, it failed to find an audience. Simple as that.

If you want to keep complete creative control and make games as an art form and not a business, fund it yourself or find folks who are willing to give you money out of their good will and not expect to get it back.

@Anti-Matter no, not really.

Whilst I don’t endorse all of Epic Games policies, they’ve become one of the more transparent companies, especially when it comes to skins and limited time items to purchase.

But look, the game and its multitudes of experiences are free to play, nothing bought provides an advantage beyond cosmetic satisfaction - no one is forced to buy any of their crap let alone download their game either.

The real cancer is from the online service titles that stemmed from the success of Fortnite, where other publishers try to copy the model and get lost in the greed without understanding the need to appeal and put focus on their players first.

If you charge big bucks for access to an online service then focus on FOMO alone then you’re heading down an ugly road indeed.

Games made by hundreds or even thousands of people cannot be art. Most games made by single individuals are not art either, although I guess they could be. Even a company with a dozen employees has to aim to make enough money to pay those dozen employees their salaries. You can’t make art if what you’re making also HAS to make money.

I’ve always viewed the making a video game to be delicate dance between being a fun experience for players, allowing developers to make the games they enjoy making, and publishers giving developers a regional budget to make those games and making a decent profit off the games they sell.

The big problem with gaming today I feel (and other forms of entertainment if you ask me) is that the knowledge of how to pull off that delicate dance has been lost over the years due to varying factors (Developers clamoring for the same fame that comes from being a movie director and learning the wrong lesson from the late Roger Ebert’s scathing “video games cannot be art” comment, players becoming more polarized and taking Reggie Fils-Amié’s “if it’s not fun, why bother?” statement too seriously, and publishers giving developers massive budgets and trying to chase the next big craze).

This is probably going to get buried in the comments. But they're both right.

Everyone WANTS the next Fortnite, they WANT the next franchise to funnel money to other projects, stay afloat or simply have a tangible evidence to your success. Even this dev wouldn't balk at the idea that Kenzera turned franchise success if it happened.

The problem is the drive for it to be one. Many companies look around to see the next Fortnite, the next Shovel Knight, the next Undertale, the next Splatoon, the next Overwatch. They hope to get in so fast that the mere proxy is a win. That is just poor business, because gamers catch on far too quickly for that appeal to stick, if at all.

The reasons these games did such a success is because it was different, in some ways, abstract from the formula which still played into the core gameplay loop which was ultimately fun. The problem chasing these new hits is simply the time it would take to get there, and honestly, isn't worth it.

But I get it. Companies want a tentpole franchise to rely on, that their name sticks out because of its success. Maybe the money is used to experiment with greater projects, or just buy a lambo, but the safety net of not having to rely on your next game breaking even every release is tentalizing. Every company wants that, in every industry.

I agree with the sentiment but it's also a business at the end of the day. This guy made a game for himself that no one wanted, partners up with sweet baby Inc, attacks gamers the wonders why his game flopped. Read the room brother.

I get his point but every business wants the lowest risk for the highest reward. Even Nintendo. Some devs end up getting so much goodwill and success that they can go on to create passion projects, but that's pretty rare unless you're a self funded indie dev.

Man is still big mad that no one cared about his game. Sorry dude, but it comes with the business. The game's industry is an industry, same as movies and comics, or any kind of artwork on the market. There are millions of artists devoted to their work here and most of them will inevitably be buried into obscurity by mainstream projects, especially those who don't know how to sell their art.

And that's not a bad thing, you don't have to be the next big trendy release, you can make something really good that caters to a niche audience and will sell modestly - my favorite game this year is Emio -The Smiling Man, and there was no world where that game was going to sell gangbusters. But that's fine, because what it lacks in mass appeal it makes up for in its own supreme qualities.

Like, this guy thinks that maybe if publishers weren't trying to make "the next Fortnite" (something that a large subset of gamers clearly do have an interest in btw as much as we may hate to admit it), somehow a game like Zau would get more appreciation. But it wouldn't, it would do exactly the same, because there is ultimately a limited market for the kind of game Zau is.
And if he has a problem with that, then maybe instead of complaining about Hero Battle Royale #800, he should've thought of something better than Indie Metroidvania #9000

Oh, and no one thinks that games aren't a medium for storytelling, that's ridiculous. All the biggest games of every year are largely single-player adventure games with a heavy devotion to narrative.

The most parroted "best game of all time" was Ocarina of Time for like 20 years, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

He's 1000% right. We just saw with a game that starts with a C and ends with oncord how trying to force a live service game can be a VERY costly mistake, but these companies are so starved for profit that they'll keep making the same mistakes in hopes that it will go right for them one day. It's the same thing with shows and movies nowadays as well: anything that's not immediately a billion dollar hit is garbage so they'll keep wasting money on "proven success" until they luck up and make one.

@Ralizah re: your last paragraph

That's the thing though, Zau DID stand out and it got lambasted by bigots bc of it. And unfortunately unlike Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (which got hate for similar reasons) it didn't have a big franchise name or budget to offset some of that.

@BlublacMH I meant more distinguishable as a gameplay experience, not distinguishable because a portion of the gaming community loses its mind any time they see a black person in a game.

Ultimately it didn't review all that well, and failed to set itself apart in the genre most oversaturated with up-and-coming indie developers.

The idealistic point of view is refreshing, and I agree, but trying to ask people not to monetize things is like asking the world to spin backwards. That's why you have to develop what you love and do it for the love of it. Try to publish your own or try to get with a publisher who sees this vision.