It’s going to be more convenient and economical just streaming games and renting them forever and then upping the subscription rates and making them exclusive to game stream platforms.
In cost of the game itself for sure, but then you’d have costlier price in the disc too.
With the discs the scratches and storage were a bitch of a problem and later games even needed internet connection to activate games running on disc. It had pros but wasn’t all rosy either.
Part of why Sony nowadays is a game company with a movie hobby is that discs were dirrrt cheap compared to cartridges. They’d fund any stupid bullshit people wanted to make, get finished cases on shelves, and know whether consumers loved it, before N64 developers had finished negotiating a production run. Their cost per disc was measured in cents and their manufacturing turnaround was measured in days. One of the slowest and riskiest aspects of game publishing suddenly cost next to nothing.
Digital distribution isn’t necessarily cheaper per-gigabyte… but there’s no mastering. There’s no lead time. There’s not even the concept of a production run, anymore. Developers can ship whatever they want, whenever they want, to whoever they want, essentially for free.
Or, you know, Unreal if you are after making a 3D game. Between that and Godot, I wonder if Unity is just slowly strangling themselves to death? They don’t have much to offer. Perhaps most of what they have is existing tutorials, community and general knowledge of the engine, but if you piss off those people and/or they have to learn something else because you make it harder for them to profit, that could disappear fast.
I thought the standards people were talking about were the exceptional treatment the players received (Larian provided a full game experience. This is no abusive DLC scheme, no predatory microtransactions and way more polished than the average AAA game experience)
It turns out all the fuss was about the game size?
I think it was about all of the above. The actual quote is about the game size, but not all the way. He says that smaller studios may not have the resources to do what they did by having a multi-year early access period. Remember, they have to pay people that whole time without getting much money from the product. Also, he points out that larger studios such as the one making Starfield should have the resources to do what they did and more.
The size of Baldur's Gate 3 isn't the standard I want it to set anyway. I just want RPGs to be that deep with that level of production value. I finished Act 1 in the time it took me to finish all of Mass Effect 1, and I can't believe I've still got two thirds of the game left. This game is the entire Mass Effect trilogy in one game, but Mass Effect didn't give me a ton of ideas for different ways to play the game I just finished. You can play a Shepard who kills more with powers than with guns or more with guns than with powers, but it's nothing like this.
Also, here's the other standard. The game has multiplayer, but it's not a horde mode. It's not a live service hero shooter. It's just co-op; the video game version of playing tabletop with your friends. It's got LAN mode and direct IP connection. It's available DRM-free. It supports controllers and mouse/keyboard really well. Other than that weird Larian launcher that you can disable easily enough, this game is doing everything I need it to do from a software perspective and to stand the test of time in a world where live services inevitably keep dying.
In my country the big box stores are starting to pull videogames from shelves.
You go to Mediaworld (equivalent to best buy) and all you see is a sad shelf with a switch lite and 3 Mario games. Sometimes you see some playstation accessories. Xbox is completely missing.
I’m in Canada and it’s not quite so dire. But I have noticed we are only getting like “main” titles in stores. If I go into a gamestop, their Xbox and play station sections are a quarter of what they were in 2008. The switch is in a much better state with a lot more physical copies (my guess is kids go into stores with their parents and ask for games, so it makes sense to have more physical copies).
I’m really torn because I like physical copies, but I’m also literally running out of living space. Additionally, so many games have patches with bug fixes on day 1. I’ve also been finding online has much steeper sales.
I kinda feel like the shift to online screws us all, though. Idk I’m just a giant ball of being conflicted about it lol
That’s a cool read. I would much rather play a smaller passion-project of a game than a AAA one anyway, but it’s cool to see markets shifting that way on the large
What the fuck are you on about? They’re talking about using AI to replace the incredibly talented human labour at studios they own. Y’know, like the people who made Valheim, Deep Rock Galactic, Satisfactory, the new Tomb Raider titles, Metro Exodus…
Embracer are shit, but what makes them shit is that they’re fucking murdering a lot of genuinely talented studios that produce great work.
Listen, if AI was replacing executives instead of hardworking creative types, I’d be all for it.
Christ, with how limited the brainpower of your average c-suite is, you wouldn’t need “AI”. I could probably replace most of them with an excel spreadsheet.
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