It’s funny how it’s “the game’s are not expensive enough” and not “we don’t know how to manage our or money” or “our profit are too high”. Fuck those capitalists.
Oh the stupid shit head “games are 100 times more expensive to make now” but you sell thousands times more and there no physical media anymore is irrelevant I guess… Assholes…
Whose fault is that, guys? Were those numbers placed on you by a witch’s curse? No. You spent $100M on one game, it made $300M, so you spend $200M on the next game. Games didn’t get twice as hard to make, between those decisions. They didn’t require twice as many people or twice as much time. You’re just treating them like a factory where more capital in means more revenue out.
The original Doom was made in nine months by a team that fits in an elevator. Yeah, it’s simpler than modern games, but they had to make the nearly-unprecedented engine and all their own tools as they went. It’s not like anything’s harder, now. People have basically recreated that seminal title as solo one-week game jam projects. A modern handful of professional computer nerds can pick from a handful of modern high-end toolchains and start banging out content, today.
If the market for video games only supported six-digit budgets - there would still be video games. Big ones, fancy ones, creative ones, whatever. Would they be the spectacles that currently get advertised to death? Nope. But they also wouldn’t produce as many unstable bug-fests as those sprawling mega-projects. Nor would they be announced in 1999, previewed in 2006, delayed in 2017, and launched to middling reviews in 2025.
Studios that aren’t injected with obscene capital and forced to deliver “AAA” money-trees tend to shoot their shot and move on to the next game. That’s how they survived and grew as plucky little private affairs, before some publishers swallowed them whole and turned them into a sequel factory for their breakout hit.
If your games cost too much money to fail, stop giving them more money.
Good, tbh, I think we’ve had to back off Open World RPGs for years now. Smaller scale RPGs can tell a story with far more focus. I think something like Witcher 2 or Baldurs Gate 3 are good examples of balancing exploration and story telling.
Yeah I’ve loved open world games since I first played oblivion as a teenager but being open world isn’t necessarily a good thing in and of itself and being too big often makes you spoiled for choice. Plus I just don’t have time anymore to explore the whole world. For me as long as the story is interesting and it has good systems and mechanics along with new game plus of some kind I can get into a game and play it over and over
I think at a certain point we need to accept that this isn’t sustainable.
And by “this” I mean money flowing directly into the pockets of the rich. People would very much hedge £30 on a game if they didn’t need to budget so much of that money to pay off megacorps. And devs could easily live of £20 per sale if they didn’t need to pay part of their profits to those megacorps.
Sorry for going all Redditlemmy “grr capitalism”, but that’s the issue here and all this Silksong “drama” is just a smokescreen.
You’re 100% right, but it’s also a problem of devs underpricing themselves. They’ll work for 2 years on a game and then set its regular price at $5, which actually limits its reach (shoppers see the price and skip over it, thinking it’s low quality) and helps make a race to the bottom that’s already destroyed the mobile market.
Silksong isn’t going to upend the market, some of the quotes are silly, and it’s not underpriced since they were going to sell millions upon millions of copies anyway. But the wider discussion of pricing is important since lots of developers don’t seem to understand the larger picture.
I think you got the most level-headed take here. It really is about capitalism and the fact that gaming is now a mature market, which means it is now sufficiently saturated in the stink of capitalism and megacorps, just like other media industries. In a world where we weren’t all being squeezed from every direction, games would probably cost less and Silksong’s price wouldn’t seem like an outlier.
I find the switch to hosting communities on proprietary closed platforms kind of bad in terms of access to the vast knowledge and archiving it for future generations. When discord will go full enshittified, it will just charge a subscription fee to access the “servers”. Also they will sure as hell comply with anything if it threatens the bottom line.
It’s god awful for any development discussion too. Used to be you could at least find someone taking about something on Stack Overflow even if it wasn’t solved, now it’s buried in Discord and you have no way of even searching it out to see if anyone has even had that problem before.
I can actually see Horizon working really well as an MMO. It’s already open world, fetch quest-centered with city quest hubs and such. Yeah, you won’t be that one main character, but you could be out there killing robot dinosaurs with friends.
At least two major MMOs have the player being the “main” character, FF14 and WoW both treat the player character (and their friends) as the “hero” (and their party). I’m sure others do the same, but honestly I never get far enough into them to find out.
You’d almost certainly not be Aloy, but that doesn’t mean you’re not the main protagonist of the story in the game.
Another runner played a Mario game on switch using motion controls strapped to his head and feel and then played the in game music on a keyboard at the same time. GDQ was wild this year.
I suppose they wrote battlefield in the headline since it’s an EA franchise, but I totally see where you’re coming from. At least they mention halo directly after.
I partially agree, but I assume these people get a decent amount of donations. There’s a reason they keep coming back for each game. That said, Bethesda should be the ones paying them.
I don’t care that Cyberpunk’s NPCs are programmed to walk to a specific place, stand in a specific way and say a specific thing at a specific time.
Cyberpunk’s main quest claims you have a few weeks to live just when the game really opens up to you, so thematically you are discouraged from pursuing side content, but it doesn’t really matter since except for a few quests most are very generic and most of their “story” is delivered through a call anyway. Great storytelling right there.
The NPCs in Cyberpunk are braindead, and when the game came out the set pieces didn’t work half the time.
I really rather Bethesda spend their time improving the parts of the games people who like their games want them to improve, instead of focusing on stuff their competitors are doing.
It’s too bad you didn’t like the narrative structure with the calls in CP2077. That one ending uses them (or I guess you could call them voicemails, considering) to devastating effect. One of the most harrowing sequences I’ve seen in a game. It might have even saved a couple of lives.
I really don’t understand your reasoning. They use mocap and actors and spend so much time recording these scenes, then you don’t play them and then say you prefer Bethesda npcs? Mocap scenes and npc AI is so wildly different things. Ai That doesn’t even react when you shoot them? That can’t stealth? That clip into environment while looking at you like you are a ghost? I really try hard to understand your take here
You know what, I’ll bite. For this to work though, let’s agree on two things. First, the game they’re selling shouldn’t be a hot pile of garbage on day one. Second, I don’t want to even catch a whiff of microtransactions or subscription based models. If we can nail those down, I would be fine with a price increase. As it stands, the sticker price is just the cost of entry in the vast majority of games. They are still bringing in cash well after the initial purchase.
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