GB: "So here we are—AAA gaming development is headed towards a contraction that will be imposed upon it by the market, because if developers aren’t willing to do it themselves of their own volition, the market will end up forcing it upon them."
Strauss Zelnick says price of GTA 6 is being carefully considered and that Rockstar is focused on "making the most spectacular piece of entertainment on Earth."
If GTA 6 abandons everything that made GTA 5 great, it will crash and burn right out of the gate. GTA 5 was funny and not at all PC. My worry is that they will cave to the PC crowd and ruin the vibes.
They got freaking BBLs twerking on the top of trucks for the gram, the freaking Flordia joker, and dude running down the stree in their undies and you are worried about it being 'too PC'? The internet has runied gamers. It doesn't matter how non-PC they make the game, you will all listen to the grifters telling you not to believe your lying eyes lol.
"Rockstar Games’ co-founder and former VP of Development Jamie King said he envisions GTA 6 as a game that’s “maybe not quite as edgy or quite as funny” as its satirical predecessors."
oh yeah, totally internet grifters spreading rumors...
That's part of the plan, they destroyed you but they need to destroy the shareholders? Only 1 shre holder is the true elite that don't care
Meh.., if it’s above £55 I ain’t buying it.
Rockstar are genuinely not half the company they used to be. I was a die hard GTA fan I’ve purchased every game and expansion and spin off day 1.
My opinion of GTA6 is that I can take it or leave it. Not bothered. They burnt too many bridges.
So they're actually leaving the door open for an L.A. Noire sequel? Nice!
He should just come out and say it already it's getting stupid it's going to be a 100 bucks $200 for the special edition🤡🤡; 29315;🤣♿
I won't be getting this game until I can get it for $70. SHoot, I could wait for it to be even lower. I don't need the game that badly as my backlog is still huge and I am enjoying playing other things.
Skewed and Reviewed have posted an interview with Author Mike Diver about his pending book on Aliens video games.
Xbox boss Asha Sharma has discussed how component shortages will impact the company's plans for Project Helix.
When does this end? Its killing everyone. Consoles and PC. And for what? AI? The benefits of AI are completely outweighed by the negatives. And the government should have never allowed one company to buy up all the RAM.
This kind of proves this is an after thought product, most products like this are in r&d 5 years before they start mass producing. So they typically have the cost of components and things worked out long before assembly starts.
This is an assumption still, but I wouldn’t be surprised if project helix is similar to Scalebound,perfect dark and sod3. They had an idea but no actual execution other than concept stage. Being impacted by the ram shortage likely would also put this device 3-4 years out.
I’m not even sure MS has that endurance with Xbox yet
I mean.... what?
We're at a point that Samsung wont even provide their own phone department ram because they can sell it at higher prices to 3rd parties (AI). Its more profitable to sell the ram than make their own devices with it.
You think because R&D starts 5 years ago the 3rd party component manufacturers will honour that price? They'll sell it to whomever is paying the most today, not some gentlemens agreement they made years ago. AI farms will buy more volume at higher prices than any console manufacturer will. It'll be the same for Playstation.
Contractual agreements are not the same as “gentlemen” agreements. If you think that they work with their distributors a month before production then their entire business model is trash. They work with companies like nvidia constantly for building the graphics cards they need. They work with companies that build motherboards years in advance. This is what proper business planning does.
They are not buying components on a whim like a consumer. So again, considering the ram isn’t a singular module and is integrated into the motherboard I highly doubt they wouldn’t have a final schematic that they are supposed to be building around.
If they are delaying production another 3 years then it’s obvious again this is an after though project and is just trying to be responsive to their bad execution they had the last 14 years.
It also isn’t far fetched to use their failure to produce first party titles the last 7 years including the highly anticipated games I mentioned all being cancelled. That they would continue to you know… lie
Helix is going to be stupidly expensive
Instead of leaning into smarter upscaling techniques they're brute forcing hardware that will cost them dearly and it remains to be seen if it's genuinely going to provide a meaningful differential
I know in the oc.doace people like to brag about not using frame gen or dlss to get to high on a game but for the majority of players they happily use those technologies without a second thought
That's going to be ps6 vs Helix
While this does seem to be the case, I am encouraged by the statement from Microsoft about wanting to provide affordable options. If this means a Series S style Helix, at least there will be something affordable being offered.
It's called systematic inflationary. Yes we get it Microsoft, keep raising in the name ofall kinds of stuffs
Honestly if there was thing I learned from this generation is that new consoles arnt day one anymore.
I can wait 1-3 years.
Another important lesson from this generation: while Nintendo showed us that prices don't necessarily need to ever drop, we've now learned that waiting 1-3 years does carry some risk that prices increase. This generation is just bizarre in all the wrong ways.
The factors are largely external. Covid and Russia-Ukraine war causing inflation led to the first price increase in 2022.
Then we get Trump's tariffs increasing hardware prices, AI boom causing a RAM crisis, war on Iran causing a worldwide fuel crisis which impacts the cost of everything.
Gaming doesn't exist in a vacuum. The last few years have been a shitshow and lot of it was definitely avoidable.
LucasRuinedChildhood,
For sure. No disagreement on the external factors doing a lot of this. Where I have to gently push back however is on two fronts:
1. The pandemic definitely caused some issues: asynchronous development was a big issue and really complicated timelines and affected game quality. At the same time, when it comes to price hikes, it's really difficult to know what was genuine necessity and what was taking consumers for a ride. The pandemic brought about "stag-flation" which was increasing prices and stagnant wages, which was a problem caused by supply chain constraints. There was also "Greed-flation", where companies that were slightly affected or had no issues took advantage of the situation and squeezed everyone citing supply chain issues when there were none.
2. It's definitely true that the tariffs, AI boom, and RAM crisis were all things enabled by tech broligarchs throwing money at this caricature of a world leader, one of them being Satya Nadella. I don't think Sony and Nintendo have contributed much to this problem if at all, but Microsoft's Nadella I feel was instrumental in causing every one of those issues. Microsoft as a company contributed to both candidates (though they gave Harris 4x as much if I recall), but Nadella was all in on letting AI run wild. He paid for unregulated AI, and got a war that's not a war (even though Trump called it that at least five times on television) that screwed up helium access. So for me, I feel that one of the players in the gaming industry is a key architect of these issues, and for that reason I struggle a bit to think of it as "external".
Really?
Horizon Zero Dawn sold 10 million
Spider-Man is probably at 15 million units sold by now
God of War maybe at the 10 million units sold by now
RDR2 is at around 25 million units sold now etc etc etc
Amy stop being a mouthpiece for EA's "single player is dead" slogan.
"There are exceptions to the rule, for sure—look at Sony, for example, and their western studios, which engage in AAA development without falling prey to most of the alarming symptoms I have highlighted."
"Shawn Layden, who will continue to front Sony Interactive Entertainment America and act as the Chairman of Worldwide Studios, will “concentrate his focus on [...] providing platform-defining content” for the company. According to a press release, the firm’s “mission to create and develop the most attractive and powerful first-party titles has become more important than ever”.
Poor Amy come back to Sony. Don't waste your talent on EA.
I heard this 10 years ago.
Just focus on quality, and listen to your customers.
"AAA game development [financed by publicly held corporations] is becoming unsustainable."
There, fixed. Good AAA games make hundreds of millions of dollars, against a budget of around 100 million. They are plenty profitable, but still not profitable enough for stockholders who demand constant year-over-year growth in the double percentage digits. If we could somehow put some of the AAA space back into the hands of companies who just want to make good games, and haven't sold their souls to Wall Street, we'd be better off. If the big companies step back from making good SP games, someone is bound to pick up the slack. Example: CD Projekt Red.
No, not by developers who know what they are doing. Look at Sony and it's studios - Horizon ZD - over 10 million sold (this is an exclusive title available on only 1 platform so if 10m does not impress you, nothing will). God of War - over 9 million sold (same again, an exclusive). Spider Man PS4 - well over 12 million sold. These games are all still selling so who knows the final number will be, but what they show as do games like RDR2 which has sold well over 20 million by now is that single player AAA games made by studios that know what they are doing are selling and are very successful. I am surprised the Amy Hennig should say what she does but perhaps there are other reasons for the situation such as greed - by studios that wish to maximise the amount they will earn from each game to the extent that the game is loaded with content made by so many teams that the whole exercise of chasing the dollar takes too long and too much and games are released not completely finished and not playing as they should which result in rejection by gamers. Fallout 76, Anthem, SW Battlefront 2 (best example of a game that appealed to all players on it's original release but had little to offer by comparision in its present generation version). These have failed for a good reason and nothing to do with AAA development being unsustainable - just unsustainable by the way EA and some other studios want to make games.
Games have to go the advertisement route, put them in multiplayer games, posters in game, loading screens, maybe provide game content from the advertisers. It will provide a boost to production on top of profits.
You also cannot keep charing more and more you will end up with less players and people will find alternative gaming.