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.
Your are cherry picking and oversimplifying the issues. Helldivers 2 is a great game and a solid single-A or maybe even a AA experience. But it is a GAAS type game that is subsidized by micro transactions. It was a relatively low budget effort and the underneath the veneer, it is a fun game that is built on fairly simple development assets.
I’m a guy that is more interested in retro games now than I am in any of the big budget stuff coming out. I don’t have the time nor des...
In the future, when a burger will cost $30 and minimum wage will be $40 an hour, people will still feel like videogames aren’t allowed to cost more than $60. Silly.
So you think that Stellar Blade would have been developed, as-is, if it were priced at $39.99 in 2024? It’s not 1998 anymore. If it was okay for a game to be priced at $50 in 1998 (equivalent to over $90 in 2024), why isn’t it for a game that cost magnitudes more to produce to be priced at $70?
It’s all psychological. People can’t break through this psychological dollar threshold despite the fact that inflation has reduced a dollar’s buying power by half in two decades.
Pick your poison…. $70 in 2024 or half the time, money, effort, and risk put into game development.
Economics needs to become a core class for everyone.
The only “right” you had was to not purchase the license to rent the game in the first place. Once money changed hands and the agreement was made, you were at the whim of the fine print.
It’s not about rights. It’s about the legal fine print that you inadvertently (or perhaps knowingly) agreed to when you purchased your license to “rent” the game.
You only purchased a license, unfortunately. The attorneys have already worked their fine print and will have your lunch if you try to challenge it.
Agreed. The first remake was stylistically beautiful and a very noticeable improvement over the original in every regard. And it was reasonably priced and sustainably developed (i.e. not some mega big budget game that was do or die for the developer).
I played the first remake and absolutely loved it. The quality of life and control improvements were very noticeable. I tried playing the PS1 original and gave up halfway through at the janky controls.
Expect the same for part 2. The PS1 version is janky as heck, but I would gobble up an improved remake day one.
The beauty of this kind of stuff is that I find myself enjoying more retro gaming today, so a relatively low budget classic remake (call it a sin...
I feel like the writing is on the wall. The never-ending growth cycle of AAA game development and astronomical expectations are coming to an end. Konami and Microsoft saw it coming in that the risk/reward of increasing scope and budgets was a dead-end road. Why spend $100M on a three year game development project that has equal chances of tanking and losing money as it does barely squeezing a profit? Why not, as a company, just invest in something like pachinko machines that have a far great...
HiFi mode in GT1 was only a stripped down 60 fps mode for one track. Should have been called "Performance Mode" or "High Frame Rate" mode.
Good news is that Sony released a final update to Gran Turismo Sport to allow it to function offline. Expecting the same for GT7 at some point in the future.
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 ...