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.
Everyone should have to study macro and microeconomics in HS so that they understand how a market economy works. I don't really hold college degrees with any reverence, as I feel that many degrees are outright scams, but I have studied economics for many years and at the graduate level. It's fascinating stuff and helps explain so much of the world we live in even since ancient times.
Not sure what you're going on about with complete vs. incomplete games. DLC ...
The industry will and is already imploding due to double standards relative to prices everywhere else in society. Just as with food, housing, transportation, and other forms of entertainment, costs will increase even if only due to the constant rise in inflation.
Inflation is a fact of our modern world, and is a consequence of normal (usually healthy) economic activity. It is a result of a slow and continuous growth due to increasing money supply, and the complex relationsh...
Agreed that you will probably never see a separate line of games specifically for the handheld (a la PSP or PSVita). The modern economics and expectations of game development make that cost prohibitive. What makes more sense is if the full-fat game on PS5 or PS6 has a special "handheld" profile that is automatically optimized for the lower spec handheld. There would be some significant compromises compared to the bigger console variant, but it would be the same game overall and w...
This looks like the future of the game industry... all three platforms with a handheld option.
I wonder if the Playstation Portal is a technology test-bed/prototype for a future Playstation handheld?
Seriously. This is exactly what I’ve been harping on. The expectations of today’s gamers is a death spiral feedback loop.
People are going to complain about texture resolution for a game that is already massive at nearly 150 GB. Compared to previous gens, when we were just happy to have games that looked decent and struck a balance in performance and gameplay, today we will nitpick the smallest thing like it would actually make a difference. The law of diminishing returns i...
Not rocket science. Compare sales numbers, development cycles, and budgets to the previous gens. We are all collectively burning up the industry from the inside out. Expectations are ludicrously high now for every release and sales are dropping for even the most prestigious of series.
We used to be satisfied paying $50-60 for a game that took 1/100th the budget and staff to make. Now gamers feel cheated if they have to pay the same for a game that took 100x the budget. We m...
What are they doing? Sales are falling and the costs are out of control. Big releases need to be absolute sales home runs now, and Final Fantasy sales have stagnated.
Now we know why Square didn’t fall over themselves to remake the original FF7 all these years ago. It certainly wasn’t a license to print money, at least not with what the expectations were. Each of these full on remakes drains an enormous amount of company resources for a razor thin profit margin.
The industry implosion is continuing. Sky high budgets, prolonged development windows, stagnant sales numbers, and falling currency values (inflation) are wreaking havoc on the legacy industry. AAA games will slowly become the rarity.
It’ll be announced. Unless they are going to eat the loss for the principle of it all.