Fucking why? These dudes always cite the cost of making games increasing as a reason for this nonsense but they never talk about the many many factors working in their favor already.
First, most people are probably not buying physical games very much if at all anymore. And because of that people don’t really buy games used anymore either since used games in general are much rarer. So more people are buying games directly from company storefronts. These same storefronts that also make games stay more expensive for longer periods of time. Not only that but there are literally more people playing and buying games now than have ever done so in the past (at least up until very recently)
All of these factors should be increasing Sony’s profit margins. If anything games should be getting cheaper. Not more expensive.
And I don’t buy that a ps5 game is significantly more expensive to make than a ps4 game. There’s barely a difference between each system’s capabilities in terms of graphical detail in the assets a team needs to produce. Most of the benefits of ps5 come in the way of higher resolutions and higher frame rates. I have yet to see a game release on ps5 that couldn’t have also been ported to ps4 with lower resolutions and frame rates.
Even the games they said needed the ps5’s speed were eventually ported to PC and run on the Steam Deck just fine. (Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart for example)
These statements aren’t anything more than a company executive trying to gaslight people into accepting unacceptable pricing strategies.
Don’t forget the game development is increasingly shoving the hardware burden onto the consumer by using poorly made tools to streamline development with garbage optimization which is why a gaming rig now has to be powerful enough to simulate a gaming rig from 10 years ago down to the atomic level but the graphics haven’t gotten appreciably better.
While thats definitely true for many games it’s less relevant for console makers and its hardly true universally; definitely not true for the insomniac games I mentioned.
Plenty of games are coming out that are optimized very well. Unfortunately, UE5 has gotten way too popular and devs often don’t seem to really know how to optimize games developed on the engine. Kinda the downfall of having an engine that appeals so much to artists but not so much to engineers. I think the only remotely well optimized game I can think of that was made in UE5 is Hellblade 2. And even as impressive as that game is from a technical standpoint (nothing can fix how boring it is) I still have stuttering problems with it. Though my rapidly aging R5 2600 is not helping things there.
But there are still impressive PC games out there. Recently Doom The Dark Ages, indiana Jones, and Kingdom Come Deliverence 2 come to mind as games that are impressively well optimized on PC. Especially KCD2, that game feels like black magic to me.
I think this is less of an issue of cost cutting by devs and publishers, though it’s definitely a factor, and moreso just devs not being as knowledgeable about optimizing games as they used to be.
Can’t say I agree with you there. The handful of games I get around to in a given year that are pushing the state of the art still run well at high settings on my machine built four years ago. The number of games pushing that threshold are so few that I might get a longer life out of my machine than usual.
Fucking thing is 8 years old. That is now going to cost more than 8 years ago. Sure blame tarrifs, but it should be at least $100 cheaper now than launch.
I think it’s Nintendo being Nintendo and in general, a company being a company. The tariffs will be used as an excuse to raise the prices but even if they’d go away, the prices won’t come down. Because why would they? They got away with it. Might as well continue.
We see this trick over and over again. Usually it’s inflation. Oh, we need to raise our prices because of inflation and then inflation goes down but the prices don’t.
Oh, we need to raise our prices because of inflation and then inflation goes down but the prices don’t.
I mean, this is literally how inflation works. Inflation rates go down, but things don’t magically become cheaper again. It just doesn’t get more expensive as quickly. If they raise prices over what you’re willing to pay, then don’t buy it. That’s how prices drop.
Is it bullshit? Absolutely, no argument there. That’s just how things work unfortunately.
Oof, can’t lie, that significantly impacts my desire to get the game. They did such a good job with 1+2 in fighting years of licensing rot, I’d assumed they’d have equivalent success with 3+4.
there are apparently a few cases where they didn’t get the same song, but they got a new song from the same artists. But yeah…it’s a bummer from a game preservation perspective
definitely licensing issues, 100%. The record company owns the old song and doesn’t want to allow it in the game again, at least not for a reasonable price. Could the artists re-record songs to bypass the record company, like Taylor Swift did? Yeah sure, but only if they are still around, and only if they care that much about being in the Tony Hawk remake. Re-recording songs includes re-doing all the mixing and mastering, and that is a decent chunk of time and money for essentially no return on investment. Most of the bands in original Tony Hawk that are still around are pretty focused on ROI at this point.
Fuck Microsoft for buying studios for billions upon billions and then going for layoffs after layoffs, but…
Including its prototype phase, Everwild had been in development for over a decade, with anonymous developers indicating they had struggled to nail down a clear direction for the title, even after a recent reboot of the project.
Quite understandable to me to axe a project that hasn‘t been going anywhere for a decade, only this part is understandable though.
That’s actually pretty standard for Rare. If I had a nickel for every project that they spun their wheels on, I’d have enough money to start my own game studio.
If he thinks any studio is going to pick up his ridiculous ideas for a game without having Hideo can-do-no-wrong Kojima at the helm of the studio, then he’s as self-absorbed as I think he is.
Depending on how detailed the material he leaves behind is (or how detailed they want to pretend it is) they could likely still get some mileage out of it. We might end up with a Tom Clancy situation.
Maybe, but I really doubt it. The only reason his ideas even remotely work is because he has a history of wackjob narratives inside otherwise (metal gear) solid games + complete authorial control over the entire product. Give one of his games to someone else to produce and they need to be exceptionally strong and resilient in the face of a team and investors that will naturally - as a part of development - be asking “what about this, people won’t like it, or it doesn’t play test well.”
The “why” for every little part of the game concept needs to exist or whoever is left in control will have a very difficult time explaining what the value is when that question is raised.
All this is perhaps superseded if Kojima names an heir in addition to passing along a bunch of ideas.
I’m so torn on the subject of a VI remake. On the one hand, it tickles my brain to think of what it would be like if given the full treatment à la VII Remake, but on the other hand I consider the game pretty much perfect as-is and don’t want it sullied.
To be fair, Intergrade and Rebirth remix some things that mean they don’t really replace the original game.
They’re doing something different with the story that we still haven’t had fully explained, which means I’m playing completely riveted to the story, with no idea what’ll happen, even though the original game has existed longer than I have.
And the gameplay is obviously completely different.
It means they’re more than “remakes”, imo. They’re more like adaptations, making changes that alter the source material to fit a new medium. Almost like going from book to TV.
And in the same way, both the “book” and the “TV Series” both remain worthy of being experienced. Different people might prefer one or the other, while others will insist the “full experience” is to engage with both. Either way, both add to the whole by existing.
They are steaming ahead towards becoming another Sega at full power - or in other words, as their consoles are failing to attract customers, they are transforming themselves - intentionally or not - into just another third party publisher in the gaming sector.
i think you’re right, but I think they’re kind of just facing reality. Games cost too much to make, and they aren’t making enough on hardware sales to justify exclusivity. Although, I think the door is still open for them to stay in the console space, and maybe even overtake Sony in the next gen if some weird stuff happens between now and then. More likely, I think they just become another Sega like you said, except they still sell a small batch of hardware on the side, for people that want a Game Pass console.
I would say that map size never was “most important”, at least not to the players, they’ve been complaining about huge but empty maps for years (the poster child of this, AC Odyssey was released in 2018, six years ago). It was just something devs and publishers pushed to one up each other in some kind of “bigger = better” way.
I’m so sick of action rpgs including crafting or an endless list of slightly different weapons. Give me a small mix of situational weapons at most and let the gameplay be how difficulty works.
I heard Concord was originally designed to have an entirely different art style, but some top-down decision came to make it yet another hyper-realistic shooter. That’s why the character designs are so weird, they’d be more at home in their original retrofuture/art deco stylized world.
When asked if he was sure that Albion couldn’t be copyrighted due to its historical context, he replied: “I don’t know if I’m honest, I don’t really know… I hope so. I mean you would think that the responsible person I should be, I would’ve spent the last six months in lawyers’ offices…”
videogameschronicle.com
Ważne