Might be a great game but it clearly did not make enough money to justify having the team make another game (under the MS umbrella).
It's never been just about whether your game is good or bad. The industry is full of great/underrated games that have a cult following or critical acclaim, but that fail to make great sales. Sad but true. It's a high stakes game, and at the end of the day, companies have to be profitable and make profitable investments. At the very...
The article is essentially focusing the blame on MS. GamePass was a hail mary play to change the gaming paradigm and carve out a special niche for themselves, emulating the Netflix model, that might have led to MS becoming the leader in the long-term. Unfortunately, the subscriber growth isn't really there, and the model isn't really built to weather that lack of revenue. MS is now in a restructure mindset to figure out how they balance out their model in a way that can still make ...
I'm thinking mid-to-long term. At the beginning of this gen/end of last gen, the focus was still on the blockbuster. That ratio will begin to shift to better economize the library.
And of course as we are seeing, things can change quickly.
The denial is strong with this crowd. The implosion is happening. This big budget “race to the top” that started in the 2000s is reaching its peak, and may fall off a cliff. With MS throwing in the proverbial towel, that leaves Sony with the most to lose. There’s no more growth in the industry to facilitate ever-growing game budgets, and with consumers not willing to pay more than $60 for a new game, publishers have only one choice to survive…. Consolidate, downsize, and downscale.
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This is exactly it. There is more of this coming. MS runs from one bad idea to the next, and GamePass is an unsustainable train wreck that we get to watch in real time.
GamePass is stalled for subscriber growth, and all that they can hope for is to either A) Reduce the quantity of games (i.e. shutter game studios), B) Reduce the quality of games (to make more mediocre but lower budget offerings), or C) Raise prices on existing customers. Or some combination of those.
Didn’t move the GamePass needle and the PlayStation port couldn’t save the return on investment….
This. ^
Publishers are slowly mitigating all development risk since every new big/medium budget game has become too big to fail. Games are too expensive to make and the profitability for titles rests on a hair’s edge. When you need to sell 5 million copies of a game to be profitable, you know that we’ve turned a new page in gaming. The real victims here are the smaller studios/games that bring so much character and variety to the industry, like with Hi-Fi Rush.
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It’ll be announced. Unless they are going to eat the loss for the principle of it all.
Wonder if this is another of the games shadow-planned for a PS5 release.
The choice will be:
A) Live service games and GAAS
B) Emphasis on single player games and $80 MSRP
We created the industry by our purchasing decisions/actions. The industry is slowly imploding. At some point we may be left only with safe mainstays (COD, Fortnite) and franchise/movie tie-ins (Indiana Jones, Spiderman, Batman, Star Wars), along with a contingent of very low budget indie stuff if it can turn a profit.
Sad.
An advanced degree is absolute not necessary to understand basic tenants of a market economy that have been practiced since ancient times. A basic HS course or even a competent YouTube video would likely suffice.
It's clear that we are now dealing with stoic perspectives and a general anger with the industry trends that are largely out of our/your control. We can argue semantics all day about complete and incomplete games, and we can probably make valid arguments both...
You clearly have not run a business before. Unless the job market is terrible, people aren’t going to take up a pay cut or work for you if they can make more somewhere else. We may claim that it’s the corporations that are greedy, but in reality, all/most people are naturally greedy and want to maximize what they make. This is exactly why a market economy works so well, because it taps into everyone’s motivations to maximize inputs/outputs.
What makes you think that game co...
Your DVD example is interesting, but don’t forget that movie studios don’t really sell many DVDs anymore, and that the measure of movie success is still based on box office sales. And don’t forget what has replaced traditional DVD sales….. streaming and online rentals, which are making studious decent returns on their movies after box office runs.
Greed isn’t necessarily the only issue, or even the biggest issue. If you spend a lot to make a big product, you expect that you can recoup the cost and make a profit on it. Many games barely achieve this. So publishers move to safer and safer game types, sequels, and remakes in order to avoid getting burned.
Helldivers 2 is a lower budget title and does a good job with the limited development it had. There’s a lot that they pulled out of relatively simple game mechanics a...
Agreed. See comments above. But the devil is in the details with the “reduce development costs” part. Gamers want bigger, more, and hyper detailed. It’s hard to accomplish that unless you have the staff and experience to do that, which = big money.
How do you create AAA games on a skeleton crew? You’re literally saying that they either need to work harder or longer to make up for fewer staff (hello crunch), fire current experienced (expensive) staff and hire cheaper/less experienced labor, or ask staff to take a pay cut. Either of these options suck and would likely backfire.
The other option is to make smaller non-AAA experiences, use smaller staffs or perhaps break up a large AAA staff into multiple smaller projects...
Exactly this. We don't have to like it, but we at least need to acknowledge the reality of the industry. Devs have to keep pushing the envelope with BIGGER, BETTER, MORE REALISTIC.... and if they don't, they get gamers burning couches in the middle of the road because a puddle was removed from a preview screenshot, or a couple of textures were blurry even though the game is still 150 GB.
You can't have it both ways. Either demand the bigger and better and acc...
I agree with the dev budgets. Would actually prefer devs move away from AAA titles and focus more on smaller budget single-A experiences that touch a variety of genres. But that means we will see a sort of regression in the game industry with the scope of the games being released.
I mean.... okay. While I can appreciate the virtue-signaling of it all, this along with the recent Helldivers 2 debacle is only proving that Metacritic scores really can't be trusted and are just something that can be used to manipulate. If a game/movie/etc is not rated solely on its own merit, what good are the reviews to a consumer actually looking to make the best choice in selecting a piece of entertainment?