It’s because these companies keep driving up production costs on their own. Their next game has to top their last. At what point do we say that graphics are good enough? Who needs these insane amount of details? Why does a game absolutely need to be 100+GB in size? Is Bloodborne not visually appealing enough? What about God of War (2018)?
Can we not find a “good enough” acceptable baseline and just work with that? This infinite growth is annoying as both a developer and a player. Like okay, ooooh, you can render each individual hair on someone’s head and they each have their own physics. Congratulations. How’s the story for the game? Ah, broken to the point of unplayable, but you pinky swear a patch is coming.
This. I genuinely believe that in the near future indie games will be the sole torch-bearer for what I would call “traditional gaming”. Tighter, more focused experiences with no microtransactions or sanitized, inoffensive bloat. Games that are offline and don’t require any server handshake to function. And as the technology available to them advances, it will enable indie devs to be more and more ambitious with their vision.
I feel like this is already the case, and has been for years. Few AAA games interest me these days, especially the ones coming out of the biggest studios like EA, Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard, etc. The only recent one was Baldur’s Gate 3, but that by itself is an exception to the norm.
Most AAA games are just complete soulless profit generators. It often feels as if any fun and experimental things get taken out because it would involve too much “risk”, and stand in the way of earning money, instead of trying to make a good or fun or unique game. Instead they are just being made for as wide of a mass appeal as possible, allergic to anything that could make the game a little more interesting and niche.
Things got very dire in the '10s, but there’s been a bit of a course correction in recent years, at least with EA. It Takes Two and the Star Wars Jedi games were microtransaction free and wonderful experiences. Only It Takes Two could really be considered weird and quirky, but it was phenomenal. First party games are also typically exceptions to the modern AAA paradigm.
I wonder how long EA will put out more interesting stuff for given Wild Hearts and Immortals if Avenum both flopped. Star Wars will always be a guaranteed seller though.
My understanding is that Immortals of Aveum was the first output from a pivot of the genuinely terrific EA originals brand that gave us the likes of It Takes Two, A Way out, Unraveled, and lots more. It used to be a program that helped indie devs publish their games with EA only recouping their costs. Immortals of Aveum, ironically, had none of that magic. It was basically a Marvel story baked into a CoD campaign with magic instead of bullets.
Ideally, this will tell the suits that this pivot was a mistake and they’ll go back to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But they’re much more likely to overmonetize everything into oblivion while laying off massive chunks of their workforce.
It seems most artforms reach the point where the tools are available for the indie efforts to be as good as the corporate stuff.
Games seem to be rapidly reaching the tipping point, and then all the big players have to offer is throwing more money at projects with no guarantee they’ll be as enjoyable.
I still play Dishonored every year. Those are not realistic graphics in the slightest, but it still holds up pretty well. Why? Style. I would 100% take a “lower” graphics game with style than a 100GB game with exquisitely modeled sandwiches.
Stylistic games also age better than realistic games in my opinion. Look at other 2012 games like Mass Effect, Far Cry 3, and Borderlands. Mass Effect and Far Cry went more realistic, and I think they suffered a bit for it in the long run.
Not saying Dishonored didn’t age tho. It does have that 2012 feel, lol.
Borderlands is another good example of this. Cartoony but fun gunplay and fun dialogue made the games (mostly) good.
I think games in that sort of style that don’t aim for realism typically have the best long term play. Jet Set Radio is another series with that sort of non-realism style and has aged fantastically.
Borderlands even looks great on potato settings, , graphics are nice and all but being able to tell what I’m looking at is more important and sometimes that said gets lost in the highest graphics range.
No offense but 100gb really isn’t that big in the year 2023… I keep seeing people complain about this and I just don’t get it. 5-7 years ago? Sure. That was unusual. Now? Nah.
I mean 4k HDR Remux files are often upwards of 80gb, and that’s just a 2-3 hour movie. Games can have hundreds of hours of content and also have high quality textures/HDR/HQ Audio/etc. Is it really that surprising that a bunch of games are 100+ gigs?
Let’s say you buy an Xbox Series S. At the current going rate of games, you can fit four, maybe five games on the thing, assuming you don’t play older or indie titles. You can buy an external USB hard drive, sure, but you can’t play games off it. You’d have to awkwardly shuffle games around any time you wanted to play something else. Wanna expand it with storage that can actually be played off of? You need to pay the same cost as the console for proprietary storage.
It’s different on PC and PS5 since you can upgrade storage relatively easily but even then, a 1TB NVMe disk can hold a maximum of 10 games at today’s storage requirements. Want something bigger? Get ready to shell out some serious cash.
Storage has not kept up with file size. And to be fair, 4k HDR Remux files are just as bad. You can’t tell me the average person can even tell the difference from a 1080p WebRip (a fraction of the size) and one of them. Not unless you’ve got the high end hardware to make use of it, and I highly doubt the average person is shelling out the $5000+ required for that to be a thing.
Yeah, it is interesting that with the exception of GPUs, PC parts like SSDs, hard drives, CPUs, and so on actually have felt like they haven’t increased in price in comparison to phones. If anything prices have dropped and capacities increased and speeds gotten faster for SSDs for example. Same with televisions and monitors where stuff like resolution and hz has seen improvements while being cheaper than in the past.
To an extent, motherboards, too, and even before the GPU prices went ballistic. I bought a Z87 mobo back in the day for 80 or 90€ and the most expensive mobos were around 300€ or so. The X570 mobos in 2019 started at 250€ and 550 mobos didn't even get released until at the end of 3000 series Ryzen. Who in their right mind would pair a 200€ R5 3600 CPU with a 250€ mobo?
I bet most of the budget-minded people who bought a R5 3600 CPU never got to use PCIe 4.0. And to add insult to injury, budget GPU-s started using PCIe 4.0 x8 (or even x4) instead of x16, effectively gimping them on budget mobos.
I kind of want Larian to start making a bunch of promotional videos mimicking Valve’s “Meet the…” series from Team Fortress 2, but for the origin characters.
I kind of never cared for the Overwatch hero videos, they were too serious. The TF2 videos were always absurd and hilarious. (Massively disappointed to this day that Adult Swim never picked up the TF2 show for a full series.)
While the game is very serious, there’s a lot of funny stuff in it (and I don’t just mean Karlach dancing at hilariously inappropriate times). I think Larian has the humorous abilities to pull this kind of thing off, and it will continue to highlight how important the characters and character development are to this game.
EDIT: Yes, this is also so we can get some modern, high-quality video of the absurd shit Minsc got up to before BG3. BG and BG2 callbacks, yeah!
Doesn’t matter. In a few years what will be considered modern will no longer run this game unless the game is updated to just say “yup the game works here too”
Mobile OSes make breaking the knees of legacy support a sport they are champions at
While we're at it, let's remember that this version allows for portable play that can also be plugged into a TV with nothing more than a cable and Bluetooth controller. Or if you really want to play on a PC setup and have a Mac (hint: if you're in the market for an iPhone 15 Pro, it's likely that you do) you can switch to that at no extra cost.
You may not pay an extra $30 for that, but plenty of people would consider that reasonable.
Why does nobody question the price tag in general? 60 USD for a remake, sounds outrageous, no matter what platform.
Because it's a remake. Meaning, it's been re-made. Not remastered. Not reusing assets. Built from scratch. That costs money. If anything, it cost Capcom even more money than the original did, so it's actually impressive that it costs the same now as it did when the original came out.
And porting it to Apple's platforms costs even more money, on top of all that.
By the way you can buy the game for almost half price on other platforms in digital and physical form as well. They are just taking the piss.
Fat lot of good that does for the people who don't own those platforms.
This is being reposted everywhere as news but is super misleading. The $60 price tag gets you the universal app, meaning one purchase lets you play the game on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It’s still a full game just like the Steam version, and if you look at Resident Evil Village, it will surprisingly run super well on M-series Macs.
The distaste comes from mobile apps rarely being over $10, but if you think of it as bonus mobile access alongside a fully fledged macOS game, suddenly nothing is wrong here.
Here’s the thing: I’ve been an iPhone user since the 3GS (over 14 years) and I’m highly skeptical that this price will sell. KotOR retails at $10 on the App Store as does San Andreas, and both go on sale down to $5 and lower very often. I believe the whole bundle for Final Fantasy 1-6 is like $65 and then FF7 is $15 or $16. Who is the audience for a $60 iOS game??
I recall when BioShock was originally available on the App Store. For one, it cost like maybe $15 at the most, but then it got pulled from the store and then the App Store made the change to 64-bit apps, meaning that even if you’d bought BioShock previously, it would no longer run on newer devices.
Over this last decade, I’ve watched fun, old school games get released for iOS and then pulled and then re-released as crappier MTX versions, if they got re-released at all, countless times. How is RE4 going to be any different?
Not sure if it’s an Apple issue or a developer issue, but for a $60 price tag, there’s got to be at least some sort of guarantee that an iOS update or App Store change won’t render the game suddenly unplayable on my device. iPhone 15 might be ready for AAA games but the App Store and iOS in general are not.
Indeed, when I spot an apparently good mobile port I’m often hesitant to purchase it because an OS update may break compatibility at any point, and most developers don’t give a damn about updating their games so they stay compatible.
Until they fix this major structural issue, I don’t see premium smartphone gaming taking off. People will only invest their money if they have the confidence they’ll be able to play their game for the foreseeable future.
If iOS/MacOS becomes a legitimate gaming platform then that problem solves itself. But the challenge is getting users and retaining them and having them make enough purchases to keep the platform viable meanwhile users want to wait for the platform to be proven to make investments in it, thereby the whole process is a vicious circle of fail.
It would probably take a killer app, and short of buying Nintendo I don’t see how Apple ever breaks that barrier
Yeah, we will see how it goes. Apparently one purchase gives you access on all devices running iOS/TVOS/iPadOS/MacOS but even Mac had a bunch of games that used to be available on the Mac App Store that were delisted when MacBooks transitioned to Apple silicon and are no longer available for purchase
The game being available on both iOS and iPadOS should be a given. TVOS also feels like it should be a standard because of the way Apple’s ecosystem works. A MacOS addition is a nice change, but I’m still left wondering about the target audience for this.
If you’re a gamer, your “main” device isn’t usually within Apple’s ecosystem. Most of the Mac people I know who are gamers use consoles, so for them, it would make more sense to buy this for Xbox or PS5 and use either’s virtual play option to play on iPhone if desired. If you’re a PC gamer, the PC Xbox GamePass option is even better. Gaming on MacOS has always been something that you can do if you really want to make it work, but there have usually been better options available.
I’d like to see true mobile gaming take off, but until there is a sense of stability within the mobile space, I just can’t see it. Phones and tablets are different from consoles. I’m not going to carry around my old iPad 2 just to play my 32-bit mobile games, but I still have my original PS1, PS2, and Xbox 360 hooked up to TVs and can jump onto them anytime I’m home. I still play PC games I bought in 2002 on the PC I purchased in 2022. There’s usually some options available to make games designed for Windows XP run well on Windows 10 or 11.
With Apple in particular, there’s never going to be an option to jury-rig an iPhone to play mobile BioShock again, not without jailbreaking which sort of defeats the purpose of having an iPhone in the first place. That sort of thing is acceptable for maybe $10-15, but for the price of a full game, it feels like throwing a bundle of cash back and forth over an open fire and wondering when it will all get singed.
The mobile market has to make a different approach to “proper” gaming because the space itself is far different from console or PC gaming, and the first place to start is the price point.
Pay to play no longer guarantees no microtransactions. There are plenty of modern games that charge 60+ and still contain ingame stores, battle passes, lootboxes, etc
Thing is, there's plenty of Premium games exactly as you describe - it's all I play on mobile or tablet - but they all cost on average between £5-10. Many are ports, some are free to install to play the first couple of levels and then you unlock the game with a one off purchase. The only thing I own good enough to play games on is my tablet and phone so I know this the hard way, but quality is out there, it's just hidden away.
Anyway, £60 is a big step up from the usual £10. I think the Final Fantasy/Ace Attorney ports are about £20. Usually the cheaper price to my mind is that you're playing on a smaller screen and with a touch control system that doesn't always suit the game you're playing (although it can improve certain games - Cultist Simulator, Kingdom Two Crowns and Bad North all feel like they work better with touch controls for me but that's more a genre thing)
Yea, but here, that 60 bucks also gets you the full macOS version of that game.
For sure, it is pretty steep by itself if you only game on mobile, but if you look at it as including a version for your handheld when you buy it for PC… it’s pretty much what Steam already does with the Steamdeck, which makes sense to me.
Now the price itself, yea, I find it a bit expensive, even on PC/Steam and I’ll probably wait to grab it on sale one day.
Yeah, I guess if you own an iPhone and a Mac there's more appeal. I see the prices for things on my son's Switch and he's not old enough to want the really expensive stuff yet, and you don't even get a desktop version there.
I think my original point stands though - that having "you buy it and then you play it" games on mobile is not a new concept.
He’s not wrong. Focusing on getting out large established titles is what Microsoft was doing during the 2010s, and they have fallen because of that. They have moved towards having more smaller titles, but it hasn’t paid off quite yet.
Over the past 5-7 years, the AAA publishers have tried to use production scale as their new moat. Very few companies can afford to spend the $200M an Activision or Take 2 spend to put a title like Call of Duty or Red Dead Redemption on the shelf. These AAA publishers have, mostly, used this production scale to keep their top franchises in the top selling games each year. The issue these publishers have run into is these same production scale/cost approach hurts their ability to create new IP. The hurdle rate on new IP at these high production levels have led to risk aversion by big publishers on new IP. You’ve seen a rise of AAA publishers using rented IP to try to offset the risk (Star Wars with EA, Spiderman with Sony, Avatar with Ubisoft etc). This same dynamic has obviously played out in Hollywood as well with Netflix creating more new IP than any of the movie studios.
Specifically, the AAA game publishers, starting from a position of strength driven from physical retail have failed to create any real platform effect for themselves. They effectively continue to build their scale through aggregated per game P&Ls hoping to maximize each new release of their existing IP.
In the new world where a AAA publisher don’t have real distribution leverage with consumers, they don’t have production efficiencies and their new IP hit rate is not disproportionately higher than the industry average we see that the top franchises today were mostly not created by AAA game publishers. Games like Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, Candy Crush, Clash Royale, DOTA2 etc. were all created by independent studios with full access to distribution. Overall this, imo, is a good thing for the industry but does put AAA publishers, in a precarious spot moving forward. AAA publishers are milking their top franchises but struggling to refill their portfolio of hit franchises, most AAA publishers are riding the success of franchises created 10+ years ago.
The suggestion here is that the type of game that can thrive on a subscription service is either a small one that benefits from better curation and visibility or a live-service one that can make up revenue on the backend by charging all the new players microtransactions (the new store shelves are inside the games themselves).
I’ve been saying this since Game Pass launched: it encourages scummy monetization. The kind of games that come to it are going to have more and more content locked away behind microtransactions to make up the money lost by not selling copies. It’s going to gradually become full of “free” to play garbage, and people will accept it because they didn’t pay for an individual game outright.
Of the two options that Phil says Game Pass encourages (and I agree with his analysis), one is the opposite of scummy and something the market could use more of.
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