He says that like big budget studios are barely scraping by. Piss off. AAA games are massively profitable. What he really means is that endless growth is the most important thing for investors/shareholders and that we should all just shut up and accept it.
They could get the regular £50 from me for the game, but their greed means they’ll get £0. I’ll just pirate it (if/when it releases on PC). And I’m sure there will be a lot of people with the same mindset.
Some AAA games are massively profitable. If you want to see which ones weren’t, look at the studios that got shut down or went through massive layoffs in the past few years. But if they’re not selling that many copies at $60, the thought that seemingly never crosses their minds is to stop spending $200M on a single project that’s make or break for the studio.
Back of the napkin math on a number of them says that a number of them probably took a bath on what was put into them. I get the cynicism, and in many cases you’re right, but it’s been a bad time for video games lately. An industry-wide number of how many billions of dollars video games make is almost entirely coming from only a handful of games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. Games like Star Wars Outlaws and Forspoken probably did lose a ton of money. Games like Concord, Avengers, and Suicide Squad lost so much money that it was impossible to not notice it, and they were each to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. There are a lot of games out there, and the dollars tend to flow to very few of them, relatively speaking. But I’d still argue the solution is to cut costs, not increase prices.
But I’d still argue the solution is to cut costs, not increase prices.
This is the solution moving forward and is probably what most studios are doing right now (see: publishers shelving low-profit studios, massive layoffs, etc.), but the issue is that the games launching right now with $70-100 price tags have been in development for years. Their budgets were written under contract during the boom a few years ago, they can’t just “unspend” that money, but at the same time, they’re probably seeing that gamers are being a lot tighter with their wallets these days.
I’m obviously never one to praise higher prices for the same thing, but I at least get why major releases are feeling justified to charge a higher door fee for the base game than to gamble on the freemium market (See: Concord).
That boom also just led to a market with way more games in it every year. With more supply and less demand, you can’t spend as much making the game and expect to be a success unless you’ve got a sure thing. So the higher prices will only be afforded by the games that would have been a success charging less than $70.
It’s true, there are outliers like that. But if you’re looking at shutdown studios or massive layoffs at random, it’s going to be because the game they made lost money. In Hi-Fi Rush’s case, to the best anyone can tell, it’s because Satya Nadella changed the direction of Microsoft at a time when Tango Gameworks was starting a new project, which means there’s the least sunk costs on a project that was going to be several years away from returning a profit.
A small portion of the Rivals team was laid off for similar reasons to Hi-Fi Rush in that the CEO changed the direction of the company. This would still be an outlier compared to the rest of the industry. Respawn got hit with layoffs because their live service isn’t making anywhere near as much money as it used to, and live services need to keep making tons of money to justify new content for them; yes, this is wholly unsustainable. A live service team getting laid off has nothing to do with whether or not it was a hit and everything to do with whether or not it’s still a hit.
I’m disagreeing with the idea that Hi-Fi Rush and the one branch of the Marvel Rivals team being let go are a regular occurrence. In general, teams are being let go because their games aren’t making money. Their games aren’t making money because there are too many games out there that are also spending too much money on their production, and they’re being subsidized by a consumer base that’s stretched too thin to make it all work for everyone that was in the industry as little as 3 years ago.
So, their solution is to charge $90 (lets not kid ourselves, the premium, deluxe, anticipated access, special edition is going to be over $120), so even less people buy it?
LMAO, Rockstar made 9 billion dollars off GTAV micro-transactions. Fuck that noise, ain’t no one crying for billionaires. They could finance and market more than 40 different $200 million games, then give them away for free, and still break even! This is pure greed.
I will wait until GTA 6 has been out a few years lol. I have a long enough backlog already. Still haven’t started Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Forbidden West, and about 30 other games I mean to play. Patient gaming is the best way
We can’t make less money! I promised Susan a new yacht^[Obviously with two heliports, olympic swimming pool, on-board beer brewery, bowling alley, crew of 20, escort yacht for utilities - just the bare necessities, nothing fancy.] for her name day!
Meanwhile I’m still enjoying Schedule I, which is made by a single dev and has “low quality” graphics by choice. We don’t need AAA games left and right; we need good, fun ones with strong foundations. Games that don’t demand paid DLC, or season passes, or fucking Shark Cards.
I truly understand that Rockstar is under a lot of pressure as the creator/publisher of GTA. But not every company/developer needs to be like them.
And also knock it off with the fucking microtransactions and shit. I wouldn’t mind games costing something appropriate for inflation if we were getting complete, high quality games without the expectation that we spend even more money afterwards. As it stands, they’re complaining about the low cost of games while also milking players for every penny they can on top of the purchase price. Fuck these guys.
Precisely this. If Baldur’s Gate 3 was 100$, I still would have bought it in a heartbeat because I know that the developers are never gonna ask for any more of my money.
I would say gta is one of the only few games I would pay that much for and I know I’ll get my moneys worth, but I’m not interested in gta online. I wish we could get story dlc like we did with gta 4
They did both, and it could fund the next 5 GTA games for 500 years and still turn a profit if they never took another cent. Whatever this “journalism” is, delete it, block it, and forget about it. They are the enemy.
i picked your comment specifically for this reply.
i am so happy that you found a game that you love withe a great dev and a supportive community.
but i still can’t figure out why this game is so big.
i know, i know. and i feel like a dad trying to figure out why all these kids love the minecraft on their nintendos these days.
you might think i want you to explain or convince me. but i’m just happy knowing you love a game i’ll never understand the way you do. that’s actually really fucking cool.
Do you mean Stardew Valley or Haunted Chocolatier?
Stardew Valley is a combination of a creativity toy, a dating simulator, a soap opera and a security blanket. You’re actually able to return to a humble artisanal life, make absolute bank doing it, and beat the giant megacorp should you choose do to so. A decreasing number of places offer that kind of hopeful feeling in reality.
Haunted Chocolatier? I don’t know, didn’t really see the appeal when it was explained to me.
people are gonna hate me, but i never got into Star Wars. however - and i can’t explain why - Spaceballs was my favourite movie as a kid. i recoded it off CityTV on Beta.
The initial appeal for me was that I enjoyed harvest moon, except for how the old tech made the experience of playing it suck so bad, I couldn't replay it. It was annoying doing any of the basic tasks like switching tools iirc. so there was a huge opening in the market for a new harvest moon that wasn't annoying to play. And where you were allowed to be gay.
So the initial buzz came from that, imo. the people who wanted a new harvest moon game were like 'wow, finally!' and then word of mouth did its thing. these days, nostalgia for it specifically drives people back to play, along with extensive modding and occasional free updates keeping things fresh.
i think other people can explain better why the harvest moon formula itself is so appealing, but i just think it's interesting how an indie game can get so popular by just being like "what if i made this big corporation game people want a new entry from, but fixed the stuff in it that sucks?'
i don’t know anything about harvest moon, but you said something that stood out for me.
i thought it was neat that you could flirt with anyone in that game, but that’s as far as i got with that. i assume, though, that you can pursue relationships with anyone and that it’s totally not an issue at all. that’s the impression i got, and i thought that was pretty cool. didn’t come off as anything political when i saw it at the time, though, i just figured it was the inevitable evolution of characters in fiction. i miss my old naivity.
iirc, there was one old harvest moon game where you played as a woman and you could marry a guy OR live forever with your female bestie. i don't remember if that one made it to the english speaking world.
stardew valley really upped the game when the guy who made it decided it'd be no big deal if you wanted to pursue a same sex relationship in it. now it feels like a standard of the genre to let you do that, and it really wasn't always like that. other games did it, too, but it still felt exceptional back then.
(but, yeah, the gay thing was a big deal for me personally, especially at the time sdv came out. i don't know if it was generally a big deal for most players, but that's definitely a reason for it to catch a certain sort of player's eye back when it was first becoming popular.)
i thought there was something special about just making it that way and not making a point of it. it’s just the way it is. that’s just really cool to me.
Chiming in with why I love SV: While the game itself is a new thing (well 9 years old at this point), it really feels like a product of an earlier time. And not just the graphics, music, gameplay, and plot. It lacks all the dark pattern mechanics and monetization that’s nearly inescapable in modern games. It just feels good to play, but always feels good to put down.
I just find the game endlessly charming. Every time I pick it up it reminds me of my childhood playing SNES.
Lmao who would believe that gta 6 is not going to make an absolute bank? They could give it away for free and still make more money that they could spend.
I don’t even wanna know how much money they made or make with shark cards. Because of the dumbasses who buy that, they know exactly what people are willing to spend.
What a bold-faced clearly obvious motherfucking lie.
Rockstar has released only 2 full games in the past 13 years because everything they’ve done since then has been funded by microtransactions. The price of entry is negligible to them when whales pay for multiple copies of the game every fuckin month.
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Aktywne