You realize that most of the cost is salary, right? And you may be right, the way to stop ballooning cost is to reduce the scopes of games/assets by either using AI to generate content, or by reducing staff, which is what is going on right now in the industry.
There's no magic bullet here. Even if a game is profitable (and many today are not), it's about Return on Investment (ROI). If the ROI is low, the company is better off investing somewhere else with less ri...
Supply and demand. Basic economics. Despite the growing number of gamers, there are too many games out there for the number of consumers willing/able to buy them. It’s the Gold Rush principle. Everyone was putting their skin into the market to capture the explosion of dollars during the pandemic, but most of the contestants will end up losers and be forced to capitulate.
That, and the enormous AAA game budgets are just out of control. The days of experimental single-A expe...
I look forward to the days that some of you start your own development studios and create games just for the passion of it. It's an honorable notion. Can't wait to play your Tekken 8 killer.
The greatest cost in just about any business is labor. Do a rough calculation.... Let's say 300 employees x avg salary (plus benefits) of $150k x 3 years of development = $135M just for labor for the game. Last of Us 2 credited over 2000 people for its development, just as a source of context, so 300 people directly tied to a AAA game isn't completely crazy. It's likely that this is even higher. Then figure out the cost of admin overhead and marketing, and we're probably c...
Running a business is not a charity. Just because you are "making a profit" doesn't mean that you can continue to resource and fund parts of your operation that are not providing a return on investment. That's how good companies die - by not adapting, by not changing, and by not reducing areas of the business that are actually a drain on operations. Just look at the graveyard of the thousands of businesses that have come before.
Layoffs and cancellation...
Sigh. Everything is a “cash grab” to people today. Fine, sure. Any game placed out there for purchase is a cash grab. Nobody is putting in hundreds/thousands of work hours to gift a game to you.
This collection is excellent, and the aesthetic and graphical improvements are fantastically done to revamp a classic series. The original Tomb Raider trilogy were quite rough even then, but they were pushing the limits of the tech of their day. This is not just a texture reskin, ...
From my own experience. Most games are too long for my lifestyle. I prefer shorter, tighter experiences that I will want to replay, versus a 100 epic filler campaign that I will burn out on halfway through.
Agreed. I enjoyed Odyssey for a while, but it quickly became very formulaic where each level felt like a checklist of things to do with WAY too many moons to find. The Galaxy series were the best, as they took some of what made 64 great and juiced it up perfectly.
XBox going console multiplatform will end the XBox console business as we know it. The XSX/XSS consoles will become a completely unnecessary and superfluous box to play games in general. In a sense, something like a Steam Deck or Rog Ally in that they are well-built and machines to play games, but have no exclusive place to be abel to do so. I believe that MS will keep manufacturing their boxes as long as they are financially viable, but the box as a flagship for the XBox brand will eventu...
Absolutely can’t get into Paradise. Have it on multiple platforms and it’s just cumbersome compared to the originals. I want to come home, jump into a few events, and as soon as one is completed, pick another one from a menu immediately. Nice and tight, no filler.
I hope it’s not another open world snore fest. Burnout 3 was the pinnacle of the series with tight and focused events that didn’t have you pausing to look at a map every 10 seconds.
"they know what they are doing" is an interesting assumption. Every company has a strategic roadmap, but many strategies end up failing. MS is not immune to this. MS has failed in many hardware industries... they failed with the music industry (the Zune), they failed with the smartphone industry (Windows Phone), and it now appears that their strategies are faltering in the game industry.
Yes.
That’s a stretch.
The bigger issue is that Sony is likely to follow suit now that a precedent has been set. Like many times elsewhere, once the cat is out of the bag, the incentive is there to follow suit since the majority of backlash will fall on the first mover. Much like Apple started with removing the headphone jack from the iPhone, it wasn’t long before the competition followed suit.
MS setting the (negative) trend here. I expect Nintendo to hang on longer than Sony, but they will eve...
To be fair, there are probably millions of MS stock shareholders.
@Eonjay
What is the purpose of a company or any other business?
A bit concerning… if the next batch of titles don’t help GamePass grow substantially, Xbox will be going full third party.
The point that I’m making is that inflation reduces the buying power of the dollar, meaning that every year, you need to earn more “profit” to even out for the decreased buying power. So that, if my profit was $100 in 2024, that would equal a profit of say, $80 in 2017.
So essentially, if profit numbers aren’t increasing (setting records) year after year, it’s likely that the real profit, in Present Value dollars, would actually be less than in previous years. Just as a $1...
This is false. There are many great games out there that did not get their fair share and were neglected due to market conditions. Being a good game is important, but what sucks is that being good is not good enough sometimes. And once a studio is burned one too many times, they will migrate towards the types of games that sell to the majority of the gaming audience. And then you build the risk of oversaturation.