You just answered your own question... they ARE tweaking dev costs, starting with the recent spate of layoffs across the industry. There will also be a concerted effort to tweak (raise) prices until the gain/loss of subscriptions goes south. Until people stop buying/subscribing at a rate that exceeds revenue gain, this will continue.
That's not how profit/loss statements work. A loss would be income minus expenses. What you're talking about is growth and/or the lack thereof.
Greed is inherent in all of us. Most individuals are self-serving and greedy; but few of us will admit as much.
The game industry is in a period of consolidation after publishers went all-in during (and even before) the pandemic. The reality is that the market hasn't grown significantly, and ROIs have actually eroded due to the declining dollar, inflation, and competing forms of entertainment and subscription models. Publishers can see that continuing to pump more and more money into their projects is futile, and there is a sense that a pullback, both in scale and quantity, needs to happen.
The fact that new big budget games are only $70 is one of the reasons that we have all these micro transactions. When you have diverging variables (one side = size of staff/overall game budgets, other side = price of games relative to historical buying power), market forces will be forced to pull the sides together. So that means either game prices OR game revenue increases, or game staffing and game budgets decrease. Since the latter has persisted, publishers must find ways to increase re...
Same thing happened with GTA. The first two games were 2D and found limited success. The third game brought things into the third dimension and connected with a MUCH larger audience. Based on basic fundamentals, but the execution is where it matters most.
Not sure if it's "spiteful", but it's in the interest of all publishers to move towards an all-digital landscape. The market is moving in that direction, and unless there is some sort of significant backlash that impacts their sales, there is no incentive for them to cater to a shrinking base.
This is from someone with a huge physical collection.
Yikes. I guess we can agree that we all have different expectations for the definition of "excellence".
Without going down a rabbit hole of analyzing semantics, the general point is that the overall volume of entertainment choices out there most certainly impacts that sales/success of individual offerings, and just being a great product doesn't guarantee that you won't be overlooked. This is a real problem in the entertainment industry... competition for...
It may not get “ignored” by critics and the general opinion, but that doesn’t mean this feeling will be commensurate with dollars pumped in. The CODs, Fortnites, Minecrafts, Assassin’s Creeds, and Maddens of the gaming world soak up a lot of the potential dollars in the market. Gaming dollars are finite, and we can all agree that the most of those titles aren’t exactly the definition of “excellence”.
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.
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.
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.