Well I don’t know how long the GTAV script is, but A Girl Who Chants Love At the Bound Of This World: YU-NO came out in like, 1996 and its script has ~1,300,000 words in it.
That’s more words than Mass Effect 1-3’s scripts combined.
That’s about 100,000 words less than the combined scripts of the entire Metal Gear Solid series excluding MGS5.
And YUNO was made by like, 25 or less people I think. At a time when making computer games was not so easy. They didn’t have the tools that make game development easy like we do these days, they mostly had to write their own software and had to deal with a lot of hardware limitations.
Effort to make good games these days has actually gone down a lot. There is really no excuse to have such a massive budget and still release a bug ridden, unfinished mess.
Even if it does, thats still too much money. How much money did Hollow Knight spend on marketing? Or what about Terraria? Or Minecraft pre-buyout? How much was spent on marketing for games like Deep Rock Galactic? I can guess probably less than $100 million each. Maybe even less than $10 million.
You’re listing outliers that did well despite their smaller marketing budget. There are tons of great games from smaller studios that get buried because nobody knows about them.
The budget is also a marketing ploy. The average person hears about a game costing hundreds of millions to make and they think “well then, it MUST be good”. It’s more or a pissing contest among publishers. Most of that budget does indeed go to marketing and executive wages/bonuses.
And from the publisher’s perspectives, that’s really a good investment of the budget, because it doesn’t just drive up sales. It also cultivates customer loyalty and fanboyism (e.g. “we are spending all that money because we believe in the game, and we want to give our loyal fans the best experience possible” is a very common line in pre-release interviews).
For example, there’s a false equivalency among gamers, propagated by this kind of propaganda: “I have to pay the high prices and engage in microtransactions/DLC, because that supports the game developers and their high budgets”. In reality, the people who actually make the game see very little of that money. Their wages, in most instances, are shit and do not reflect the hours they put in. However, gamers rarely want to understand that, and instead extend the publisher pissing contest among themselves (“the game I’m playing now spent more money than the game you are playing, therefore it’s the superior product”).
Seriously, I worked in media creation and like looking at movie budgets is painful for me cause so much of it is to pay people already at the top and overpaid more than enough.
Production and material costs haven’t grown as much as marvel movies would make you think so it is all going to executives lawyers and heads of the sweat shops of special effects houses.
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.
We don’t need super high quality graphics for every AAA production. Sometimes, Just good enough graphics, but with better interactivity with the environment like ToTK and Baldurs Gate 3. I mean , I love RDR2, but honestly, shrinking horse testicles is a bit too much attention to detail.
As an example, cell shading of ToTK still looks amazing and far more enduring as a graphics style. Also, Elden Ring, arguably has worse graphics than RDR2 or the latest CoD. But, because of it’s amazing art direction it will age pretty well.
I’m done giving developers a pass for not even putting in the minimum. Larian and Bethesda didn’t even put horses in their games because they’re so afraid of rendering the sack.
Everyone says Phantom Liberty will finally redeem Cyberpunk, so I can only assume CD Projekt has spent the past three years creating a perfect horse with the most dazzling balls we’ve ever seen. Can’t wait for those RTX and DLSS 3.5 rendered oysters.
They can still have similar production value and not be open world games that take 80 hours to finish. It just makes far more sense to me to bet small with tons of projects than to bet big with only a few, because then you'll find the PUBGs and the DOTAs that Phil is talking about eventually.
Spencer’s analysis is just an overview of the current symptom.
This is the real disease:
because it sees a new platform it can scale to feed the financial growth demanded by investors.
Investors/shareholders demand infinite growth, but there’s finite space to grow (millions of games, few customers). This is why, in the past 2 decades we’ve been seeing the scummiest of practices being employed again and again, as well as a 300% hike in base prices. Capitalism has eaten gaming.
But we’ve been observing this trend in AAA and AA publishers/developers mostly. Indie gaming is alive and well and evolving towards being better and better. Why? Because indie developers are not usually beholden to investors.
Once you hear a gaming company you used to like has gone public, say your condolences and then run away.
It’s the same shit across every industry. Successful company goes public, investors demand yearly double digit growth, and after a few years they are imploding.
Investors do not care about the future, sustainability, or anything except immediate profitability. What you described is exactly what happens, in gaming and everywhere else. It sucks.
This is why, in the past 2 decades we’ve been seeing the scummiest of practices being employed again and again, as well as a 300% hike in base prices.
Two decades ago, games were $50 which, due to switching to discs, was a price reduction over cartridges, so this point in time is a bit cherry picked. But even rolling from there, a 300% hike in base prices would mean games cost $200, and that's just not true.
That wouldn't be the base price; the base price is $70 for the biggest games. I think people are also a bit liberal with labeling games as "incomplete", when really they mean, "this game will have DLC after the fact because it's the best way to make games that take years to make without laying people off". And just to take a brief look along some games in my library, Cyberpunk 2077 would cost a maximum of $100 with DLC, by the time Guilty Gear Strive is sunset (if it runs for 5 years) it will still be shy of $200 in a worst case, and I'm seeing far more games without DLC than with DLC.
So don't play those games. The only way that's "almost all games" is if you're looking at the mobile market. Once again, still not included in the base price.
50 dollars were console games. On PC you’d often find the same game at 30 dollars (disk) or 20 dollars (steam) on release. The difference was due to console makers taking a standard fee cut from every sale.
The first AAA games back then to be released at 40 and 50 dollars on PC were COD MW1 and BF3, which set the trend for all other games since then. This was pure profit for the publishers, since there was no cut for console makers on PC. And before you say it, no, the Steam cut back then wasn’t even comparable (much less since it was a % cut and not a standard fee). In fact Steam hiked their cut because of the price hike triggered by EA and Activision, which is what then made EA pull their games off Steam and create Origin.
I don't know where your information came from, but a lot of it is very wrong. I thought maybe you might be from some other country, but that would mean it's a country that uses dollars that are stronger than US dollars, which I don't think is a thing.
$50 was the standard set by PlayStation for its biggest games, which N64 couldn't match due to cartridge costs, but this standard carried over to the next generation and continued very, very briefly into the life of the Xbox 360. By 2006, all 360 and PS3 games were $60.
I bought many PC games on disc back in the day. Call of Duty 2 (not Modern Warfare 2; Call of Duty 2) was $50. You can see here via the wayback machine that a week after its release, Modern Warfare 1 is $50. Here's the PC version of Flight Simulator 2004 and the first Knights of the Old Republic for PC at $50 in December 2003. I remember there was a push to make those $50 games into $60, and the likes of Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 could sort of get away with it back when others couldn't. After buying Call of Duty 2 on disc for $50, I got the $60 version of (original) Prey, because the $60 version came on a DVD instead of several CDs, and installing games from 5 or 6 CDs was a pain that I was willing to pay $10 to not deal with back then (it also came with other collector's edition stuff).
Steam still does, and always has, taken a percent cut from game sales and not a flat fee. They priced it at 30%, because that was better than brick and mortar retail. These days it starts at 30% and follows a sort of regressive tax system once your game is super successful so that you're not as tempted to leave Steam for other platforms.
EA pulled their games off of Steam because 30% of a lot of sales is a lot of money, and they wagered they'd stand to do better if they made their own storefront, but after the first couple of years, they stopped trying to make a platform to compete with Steam and really only cared about keeping their own releases there for that 30% cut that they no longer had to pay to someone else.
That last sentence is so spot on. After reading a topic yesterday, I was trying to think of one time a game company went public, and it ending up a good thing for the gamers in the long run. If anyone knows of one, I’d love to hear it.
Check back in on Devolver, Paradox, and TinyBuild in 10 years. They're scaling up to cover the market that Ubisoft, Activision, EA, and Take Two abandoned.
If the primary objective here is to engage in constructive dialogue, then name-calling and overgeneralization serve no purpose and only fuel the fire. The issue at hand has been conflated to be about political affiliations like Republican vs. Democrat, when that’s not the core point of discussion at all. We’re here to debate the merits and drawbacks of mod removal, not to stereotype one another based on our political leanings or otherwise.
I must point out, albeit reluctantly, that much of the stereotyping and overgeneralizing in this thread seems to be coming from those who are in favor of the mod’s removal. This does little to advance a constructive conversation and only serves to deepen divisions.
If we’re truly interested in finding common ground or at least understanding the other side of the argument, we need to stop dismissing each other’s viewpoints out of hand. Only through respectful and open discussion can we hope to reach a resolution that considers the full complexity of the issue.
Are people seriously bitching that a handhelds performance doesn’t match current PlayStation or Xbox specs which are ten times it’s size?
If the switch 2 is a handheld, it has so many more physical, power, and heat constraints and I am impressed that it even matches the previous gens consoles.
I‘m legit happy as long as it can do 720p60fps for stuff like TotK in portable without any upsampling and whatnot.
I‘m not playing Nintendo cause of cutting edge graphics but because of cutting edge gameplay and entertainment. Doesn‘t matter how realistic a game looks when Mario Odyssey runs laps around it in terms of the fun it provides.
Just… provide backwards compatability, please. And as a bonus I‘d love a way for „old“ games to get better resolution and fps ideally without patches (cause we know the majority of games would never get patched).
It better be, because I’m tired of having so many games running like molasses on the baseline Switch - it’s literally just an overclocked, slightly improved Ouya in the inside, and it shows
So stop playing games that are more graphics than gameplay. It is strange when Nintendo actually decides that graphics shouldn’t matter and releases a good, baseline system that has broad appeal with a lot of simpler games then suddenly they get scared that some ELITE GAMERS need ultramegasuperHD graphics and everything goes out the window.
It’s really pathetic. It’s what’s holding back PC gaming, the idea that its “top” games (style over substance trash) need $2000+ computers to run acceptably.
The gaming industry as a whole is on a downward spiral with how it’s headed, I would definitely be much more inclined to buy a much more artistically styled fun game than the new COD 52 NOW WITH REALISTIC GRAPHICS ONLY AT 3TB OF SPACE!!! PRE ORDER AND GET HALF OF THE GAME!!! type of bs were getting to. It really seems that indie is almost the only way to go
The Switch is, in literal actual factuality, an underclocked Nvidia Shield and if you have an older one you can hack it, then restore the clocks to their spec. ToTK runs really well when the CPU, GPU and RAM run at the Shield’s stock speeds.
It’s because Nintendo knows that portables sell massively higher than consoles for them, and that’s the reality of making a portable. Nintendo cares massively about the hardware and put a lot of effort into making something that fits their ambitions and audience.
A simplified Legion Go looks like something we can probably expect the next device to be then. Most people have compared the Rog Ally power with the Z1 extreme as being similar to PS4/X1 .
What they could do is a true “docked” mode where it can connect to a GPU to have it output 4K. Highly doubt as the cost would become exorbitant.
That's true, but also we rarely use the switch as a portable in our house and my kid could care less. We don't need Mario Kart to be 4k 120 and Breath of the Wild is designed to look great with lower graphics quality. We have a PS5 and a 4k TV with VRR and we switch between the two all the time.
The thing I always thought would be in the Switch’s benefit is if the dock itself also contained hardware. On the small handheld screen, the quality looks fine enough at lower resolutions, but then looks pretty bad when blown up on a 4K TV. If the dock had additional expandable hardware to boost performance when docked, that could go a long way to help it keep up.
That's actually kind of how the switch works. But it's not hardware in the dock, it's just the ability to draw more power when plugged in allows it to increase performance.
The Switch 2 is also (likely) a handheld, and the Steam Deck is also similar in performance to the ps4/xbox as well, and only came out a year ago, so I wouldn’t expect anything much more than that (especially since the Switch 2 will probably be smaller and have a bigger battery).
Man, I have no interest in a handheld… I just don’t get the appeal there. I have a handheld already, it’s my phone. I want the next nintendo creation to bring me back to wii bowling, and that sort of crazy cool stuff.
Instead, the last console brought us worse controllers that cramp your hands, and lack innovative design.
I played Wii bowling on my steam deck. Using Dolphin, a Wii mote connected through Bluetooth, and a USB sensor bar. Then just a dock to put it on the TV and charge it.
Only thing that gave me trouble was the speaker in the Wii mote.
I’ve got a question. Does anyone really care if the specs are x.xxGhz and XGB of RAM? It’ll be +YGhz and YGB of RAM more than the last generation at least.
As long as it can still play the games then no. If it can’t handle new generation games then obviously that’s an issue. Just like devs game up on games for older Gen consoles.
If you have a switch for Zelda and only Nintendo games then you are probably golden. It’s only really an issue for games being ported over. They will require more power for those games. Not graphics but actually to run the beasts.
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