I think the data shows that advertisement is super effective, not that people prefer to be advertised. If people preferred advertising over a better product then games like Balatro, Vampire Survivors etc. literally couldn’t be successful, because those games had effectively zero marketing budget. Their success came from word-of-mouth because the game itself was great.
TLDR Bloated staff sizes and poor workflow management means salary costs skyrocket while a lot of people on staff are left waiting for things to do. The article keeps saying the costs aren’t just about better graphical fidelity, but I think this issue is somewhat related because a big chunk of staff are going to be artists of some variety, and the reason there are so many is to pump up the fidelity.
Not that it much matters to me personally. I’ve said before that games have long ago hit diminishing returns when it comes to technical presentation and fidelity. I’d rather have a solid game with a vision, and preferably a good visual style rather than overproduced megastudio visuals. Those kinds of games are still coming out from solo developers and small studios, so it doesn’t affect me one bit if big studios want to pour half a billion into every new assemblyline FPS they make.
Youll probably be waiting for a while since most indies are solo devs. Its hard to make 3D models and textures of the PS2/GameCube/Xbox era quality as a solo dev in a reasonable amount of time, especially for every object a game would need.
The programming isn’t even the hard part. Its mostly the amount of time and work required for making art assets that take the longest in game developmemt.
Games of that era were frequently made a dozen or so people in 18 months. Whether that passes some arbitrary line in the sand for what counts as “indie” or not, I don’t much care; it’s just a market segment that’s been left behind by AAA that I’m waiting for someone to pick up the mantle on. Most genres that AAA have left behind have been filled by now, but FPS games that fit the mold of what we got between ~1998 and ~2016 are still an itch I need scratched. From what I can see on the horizon, there’s Fallen Aces in early access that I’d like to see once it’s 1.0, Core Decay going for a Deus Ex sort of thing, and then Mouse: P.I. for Hire, but I’d still like to see the full package with co-op and deathmatch modes like we got back in the day.
The new C&C is Tempest Rising. The new Neverwinter Nights has a variety of answers, from Baldur’s Gate 3 to Solasta to Pillars of Eternity, depending on what you’re looking for. Commandos has spawned an entire genre at this point; not only is there a new Commandos coming soon that looks good, we just had a series of three and a half games from the sadly-now-defunct Mimimi that all fit the bill, as well as that game Sumerian Six just last year.
No worries. There are lots of kinds of games we used to get a lot of back in the day, but their successors or spiritual successors don’t get the kind of attention or marketing that the industry giants do. Often times, if you miss a certain kind of game, just start searching for “modern games like X”, and you’ll probably find it.
Zortch is a neat one, less Quake and more early 2000s FPS feel. Pre-Doom 3, pre-HL2 in gameplay, but with the style of comedy and charm you’d get out of a Shiny Entertainment game. Very much a solo labor of love, and it’s only like $5 if memory serves me right.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll check it out. I’ve got Phantom Fury from this past year, and even with a ton of criticism heaped toward it, it was still in the ballpark of what I wanted to scratch this itch.
As someone who works in corporate America this is 10000% true. Giant corporations are hugely bloated, inefficient, slow, and stupid. I honestly can’t believe they are somehow the best way to do things in groups of people. I have never had less work to do than working in a huge corporation.
It’s no surprise that indie games can compete with them. Working in startups compared to huge corporations, I did more code and we got more done in shorter amounts of time vs big corps. There’s no red tape, there’s no committees or directors or people you have to please. There’s no political games, you just do your work. As simple as that. You come in, you code for 7-8 hours, you push your feature, and you go home.
In a megacorp you come in, you get 5 minutes for coffee before 3 people are pinging you on slack for some stupid downstream thing they didn’t read the manual on or was never documented, and then you have 5 hours of meetings, lunch, 2 hours of ad hoc meetings, and then Shirley has to swing by to ask you to take another HR training. So you get maybe 20 minutes of coding done in a day.
For you engineers who have never coded in a megacorp - As an example, most megacorps have an ID service (usually named after a comic book character). This is usually a real service deployed somewhere that nobody maintains anymore, but it’s where you get your… IDs from. Really wrap your head around that. It’s a microservice who is in charge of returning Guid.NewGuid(). Then they get pulled into meetings because the ID service doesn’t support this or that, they never thought of this case or that case, how can we upgrade off the old ID service to the new one. In a startup, you’re calling Guid.NewGuid()
The main issue corporations run into that cause this bloat is a situation like the following: Project A needs 500 people to meet schedule and workload. Project B begins spinning up and will need the same 500 at it’s peak. Project A ends and the workload is really only for 200 people on Project B. Do you lay off Project A folks you know you will need in a year? No, that’s a waste of all the talent/training/know how that was built. So you bloat and carry them until you actually need them. Still have to pay them though
Studios are subcontracting so much shit nowadays that I’m more interested in seeing what comes out of non AAA outfits than anything else. US games are mostly shit presently, the lion’s share of the work is done by low income workers and the peeps stateside get all the money and easy well paid consultant gigs and just enough to cash in on the DEI state subsidies and gov support. It’s absolutely 0 surprise the games are shit, it’s basically sweatshop game making. The funny part is Neil Druckman playing the saviour super woke evolved writer (after stepping on Hennig) but then subcontracts sweatshop work to make his assets. You couldn’t make this shit up.
DEI for Americans but not if you’re from overseas. Only US BIPOC count, the rest are shithole fodder.
Tax credits from WOTC are quite steep and consultancy can be offset in the R&D tax credit. That’s before mentioning local state incentives.
Typical US companies playing dirty and acting high and mighty. Neoliberalism at its best! And, ofc, the useful idiots that believe in the myth of US exceptionalism being terminally offended at reality checks.
Several people who have worked for Naughty Dog say Druckmann and Straley stopped seeing eye-to-eye with Hennig, and that they had fundamental disagreements on where to take the Uncharted series. When Hennig left, she signed a non-disparagement agreement with the studio that would prevent both her and Naughty Dog from making negative public comments about what had happened, according to people familiar with the arrangement.
From “blood, sweat and pixels” which I own. I guess Schreier is also an unreliable source…
You reply like the typical reddit chud: Find something to latch on to, ignore the wider message, ad hominem, leave feeling victorious. Use vote manipulation to feel good about their chud selves with fake internet points.
At the end of the day, Mr woke Druckman doesn’t care for equality, if he did, he wouldn’t hire slavers.
Perhaps you should have started with that source, then. I just pointed out your other source meant nill.
As for the rest, I haven’t downvoted you at all, but my guess on what your personality was like seems to be correct with all the choice buzzwords you spout. Not really a good look for the crusade you’re trying to expose, friend.
Can you believe this headline? I have this weird feeling where the video game industry now only presents itself as former of former of… Everyone is referred to as their past roles, there’s no present or future anymore, just looking back at what we had and pretending to offer something similar
How else can you judge what direction they might go in? If you like the projects they worked on in the past does it not make it more likely that you’ll like their next project? Effectively we are getting a merger of two of the better publishers that are going independent from more corporate overlords? Maybe I’m being overly optimistic…
It’s not you, I’m probably on the opposite spectrum, being overly pessimistic. I’m not criticising this acquisition in particular and you’re right, we can’t know how this will go ; it’s more of a jab at the industry as a whole : a lot of new releases are advertised as being made by ex devs of whatever studio was once praised, and turn out to be ersatz of the original material (Back 4 Blood, Stormgate, Kerbal Space Program…). This kind of marketing is super disingenuous!
Rebirth is already out, but it’s still exclusive to the PS5. The PC port was announced for early 2025 I think. so OP is either making a jab at Rebirth not being available on PC because PC players hate exclusives, or they’re just saying they’re waiting for the 3rd part of the remake trilogy (probably to be expected some time in 2027), which is what a number of players are doing.
Personally, I started on the first part of the remake trilogy, then stopped when I realized how annoyed I would be about waiting for the sequels. So now I’m waiting for all of it to be out on Steam before I start again.
astro bot (4 titles over 11 years), dragon quest (11 titles over 38 years), ace attorney (11 titles over 23 years), or balatro (winning best indie game at both the game awards and the golden joysticks this year)?
However, Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Gambit was something that went untranslated (officially, there was a fan patch) for a long time. Fan translation came out 2014, official translation 2024. The base game came out in Japan in 2011 for the DS. It’s definitely not new so I’m not sure it goes on a 2024 list. On the other hand, seeing this series get acknowledged is pretty cool so…
I also live under a rock. I do not play console, and although I do play some mobile games I’m very uninformed about what most of them are. I have heard of Balatro, the Dragon Quest series in general, Astro Bot, the Final Fantasy series in general, and Metaphor: ReFantazio. I clearly know about Ace Attorney. The other games are totally new to me.
Uncharted 2, from Sony Group Corp’s Naughty Dog, was released in 2009 and had a budget of $20 million. The studio’s latest game, The Last of Us: Part 2, cost more than $200 million.
So, uh…why can’t we do that anymore? Even if you account for salary increases and avoiding crunch and such, $40M-$50M for a game as good as Uncharted 2 sounds great!
Because graphics still sell games. You can do simplified graphics like Nintendo and still sell games, but lots of people want the photo realistic experience and the bar for that has gone way way up incrementally over the years.
I think we’re seeing that that’s no longer true. Minecraft is the best-selling game ever, for instance. If you want to build the photo realistic experience, maybe aim for a smaller scope of video game, like the more linear action games we used to get, because otherwise, the industry ends up in the state it’s in.
Yeah, maybe I’m just wrong in general … The above doesn’t look that different from say black ops 6 footage.
I definitely wish for a return to the linear format (or simi linear where there are a few concurrent linear quests going on). I think straight up open world just lends itself to making a lot of walking simulators.
Halo Infinity was one of the most boring games I ever played between the weapons sounding like toys and the spread out objectives with no clear central mission.
I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong on this. Part of the problem is new IPs are risky, and I’m sure market research is telling the big publishers that you’d better not suddenly downgrade your graphics on an established property. Nintendo’s very comfortable in this space because they haven’t really gone this route with first party. They’ve even managed to thread the needle on Mario, Metroid, and Zelda by having both 2D and 3D offerings.
Nintendo is in a very envious spot in general. Hell, I think Nintendo makes some great games, I just wish they wouldn’t force me to buy yet another computer solely for the purpose of playing their games. I haven’t owned a Mario Kart or Zelda game in years but I’d love to play if I could do so on PC/Linux.
Uncharted and Last of Us are first party Sony games. If they were to say that a game can still be enjoyable without cutting edge graphics no one would want to buy the latest PlayStation iteration.
I think they’re already running out of people who want to buy the latest PlayStation, and Sony clearly can’t afford to throw hundreds of millions of dollars after this level of graphics anymore, because it’s not resulting in equivalent growth of console sales to make up for it.
I am a pc gamer and I have the latest-ish video card. I got an expensive card so that I can play any game, but really don’t consider graphics much anymore. You are correct, some people still chase that aspect of video gaming. I think if you have been around for a while, that desire fades. I have lots of low res games these days.
Also a PC gamer and I’ve discovered as I’ve aged, CPU has been more of a bottleneck for me than GPU. Games like Factorio or Path of Exile need a powerful CPU, but their graphics are secondary at best.
Same here. My favorite game is Kerbal Space Program, and the graphics look like they are straight out of the early 2000s, but even with a 12 core CPU I still get crazy lag during explosions, staging, and other physics interactions. Transitioning from "on rails" flight to actually modelling physics when within a few km of something else has also not ever been smooth.
There are plenty of games that don’t do high-end graphics and are still very good, even games that look intentionally low res/quality like Valheim did very well.
Graphics are only really a thing for games that aim for realistic visuals in the first place, but even then it doesn’t need to be so overly high in visual fidelity and pushing better graphics every time. The average gamer isn’t going to care about being able to see reflected objects in windows that you can see in the reflections of puddles, or that a leaf from a tree has a diffused shadow 300 meters away. Yet a lot of these big studios are pushing this tech and stuffing it in their games.
Not saying that’s a bad development, but they’re creating a lot of these budget problems for themselves by setting bars so insanely high and focusing on side-stuff that only increase the scope of the project. Where small indi developers create masterpieces on a budget barely a percentage of what those corporations are throwing at their projects.
I’m not sure this is going to directly affect that, because their deal talks mainly about financing for the Control game, and the other news is about movie adaptations, so probably it is going to be another team, lead by the newly re-hired Hector Sanchez, working on that…
But who knows, this kind of things are always hard to follow from the outside
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