Yikes, kinda expensive on mobile. I already repackaged it from my Steam copy and side-loaded it on to my phone so I’ll stick with that. It would be nice if I could keep my progress from one to the other though.
I continue to be a little perplexed by views like this. If the game is $15 on steam, why is $10 on mobile viewed as expensive?
I understand that mobile games typically are cheaper or freemium, but I feel mobile games would be higher quality overall if people actually wanted to spend money on them
Because I already bought the game. Why should I have to pay more based on where I play it? That’s ridiculous. If I buy it, I should be able to play it how and where I want.
I mean that’s fine. Like you said you can continue to use your version that uses the steam files, that’s the version you paid for. But the game sold on another store is cheaper than the other. I don’t think that makes the game too expensive
I don’t have a problem with low-resolution artwork; I think that it’s often an effective way to reduce asset costs. But when a game makes it big, as Balatro has, I’d generally like to have the option to get a higher-resolution version of it. For some games, say, Noita, that’s hard, as the resolution is tightly tied to the gameplay. But for Balatro, the art consists in significant part of about 150 jokers. That’s not all that much material to upscale.
EDIT: And specifically for Balatro, I think that it’s worth pointing out that there’s a whole industry of artists who make (very high resolution) playing cards for print.
That’s a large variety of competently-done, high-resolution artwork.
Now, granted – Balatro doesn’t use a standard deck; it’s not a drop-in approach using existing decks, the way it might be with a typical solitaire game.
But it seems kinda nutty to me that there are artists out creating decks, but only selling them in small volume, and also video games that sell in large volume but don’t have much by way of card artwork options.
they DID add those crossover decks recently, and the dev has indicated that there is more additional content coming. Idk, I think having the cards in HD wouldn’t look right, because the entire game has a specific kind of pixel art. Even the smooth, swirly background has a pixel art filter on it, bc that’s the vibe that the dev really wants the game to have. Mixing them would be like when pixel art rpgs have super hi-res fonts. It just doesn’t fit right.
Firewalk, the studio that made Concord, used to be a part of a parent startup called ProbablyMonsters. Firewalk was sold to Sony last year, in April 2023.
ProbablyMonsters only had a total Series A investment of $250 million, and Firewalk was not the only studio that it was funding - it had multiple.
But let’s just say all $250mil went to Firewalk (of which is impossible because ProbablyMonsters still exists and has other studios). In order to hit this mythical $400mil figure, Sony would have had to spend $150mil in ONE YEAR.
The most significant cost of making a AAA game is paying for the developers, of which Firewalk has about 160 of them. In what world would Sony pay over 900k per developer to see Concord through to the finish line?
The more likely figure that each developer got paid on average is about 180k, that’s still just short of 30mil for 1 year.
Firewalk didn’t start with 160, so you can’t extrapolate that cost to its 8 years of development.
They also outsourced a ton to make CG cut-scenes and such, which can rack up a bill very quickly. ProbablyMonsters was an incubator, not a parent company, as I understand it. I too am skeptical of there only being one source in Colin Moriarty, but I trust Jordan Middler to vet the story, even if he isn’t corroborating it, and as others have mentioned, the credits are literally over an hour long, which is evidence that supports the high costs.
Unless someone from Sony AND ProbablyMonsters confirms the real numbers, I would have nothing concrete to add to the validity of the claims, other than I think it’s bullshit.
But even if I did have this bulletproof info, why would I do what you suggest? So that games journalism can continue to beat a dead horse?
News like this doesn’t do the industry and the people who work in it any favors other than to serve the masturbatory curiosity of people who claim “I can’t believe they spent this much on a game that was clearly going to fail!”
All this kind of reporting does is continue to pull money away from investors who are willing to take chances on new teams making new games (regardless of how derivative they might seem), and cause anguish for the passionate developers who poured their lives into what they believed would have succeeded.
The games industry is in absolute shambles now thanks to years of psychopathic ravaging from large corporations with milking profits, studio shutdowns and layoffs.
Contributing to unconstructive reporting will only worsen it, and I would instead encourage you to ignore news like this.
why would I do what you suggest? So that games journalism can continue to beat a dead horse?
Because the truth is worth knowing, and it sucks that this stuff is obfuscated the way it is compared to something like the movie industry. If true, I’d call it constructive reporting if the message becomes clear that this is an example of what’s ravaging the industry; trend chasing with absurd amounts of money designed to extract some mythical amount of money from people rather than building good products on sane budgets that keep people employed. But the point is moot if you not only don’t agree but also aren’t in a position to refute it.
This is the defacto argument that gets pulled into reporting, good or bad.
What is the in the point in the truth in this article’s reporting? What about this story told you anything, or anyone, about what’s ravaging the industry? What message does a supposed $400 million cost tell you other than Concord failed? Do you think 160 developers worked on this project over 8 years with the intent to ‘chase the trend’? Do you think they spent 8 years of their lives building a bad product they didn’t believe in? Or was Sony and the entire leadership team able to fool all 160 people that they were building something special when all they really wanted was a trend chaser?
If this article has enlightened you in a way that has somehow eluded me, I would very much like to learn what you’ve gleaned.
The average person has absolutely no idea how much it costs to make a game, so any report that comes out for any game is enlightening. When Skullgirls developers tell people that it’ll cost $150k to make a single new character, and when other fighting game developers weighed in and said, “actually, that’s insanely cheap,” it level sets expectations for what a customer can actually expect out of a producer. The largest productions of their day during the era of the original Xbox and PS2 didn’t even typically come in at $50M per game. There are a lot of reasons why it can’t be exactly that anymore, but ballooning budgets are why the industry is in this spot where it’s wholly unsustainable, because if you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars and you didn’t make one of the most successful games in the history of the medium, it won’t be making its money back.
Iterating on a trend is smart business. Iterating on a trend over the course of 6 to 8 years is not, not only because it makes the game more expensive to make and raises the floor for success, but also because the audience for that trend has likely moved on. If Concord truly cost $400M to make, it adds one more data point for people to understand how much a game can cost, and maybe, just maybe, it will make more companies focus on building a game that they know they can afford to make rather than being all or nothing on one of the riskiest projects in history. That will keep people employed rather than rapid expansion from investment into a bubble and hundreds of layoffs when the project goes south.
When Skullgirls developers tell people that it’ll cost $150k to make a single new character, and when other fighting game developers weighed in and said, “actually, that’s insanely cheap,” it level sets expectations for what a customer can actually expect out of a producer.
You’re just grasping at straws here.
The average consumer doesn’t give a damn about how much a game costs to make, nor do they care about the cost to make content. Do you think people judge their experiences based on the cost it took to make said thing?
There are a lot of reasons why it can’t be exactly that anymore, but ballooning budgets are why the industry is in this spot where it’s wholly unsustainable
Grasping at straws again, but let’s entertain this for a moment. Did this article about the cost to make Concord teach you anything about the reasons why games cost so much to make?
Iterating on a trend over the course of 6 to 8 years is not, not only because it makes the game more expensive to make and raises the floor for success, but also because the audience for that trend has likely moved on.
What raises the floor of success is the growing expectations that gamers have of their games and the complexity of making them, not everyone trying to one-up each other on how much it costs to make them. Do you think publishers and studios think “oh shit, Sony spent $400mil, we should spend MORE!”?
maybe, just maybe, it will make more companies focus on building a game that they know they can afford to make
That will keep people employed rather than rapid expansion from investment into a bubble and hundreds of layoffs when the project goes south.
Was this the line of thought that Microsoft had when they shut down Tango Gameworks for producing the cult hit Hi-Fi Rush?
How do you think an article like this can somehow change the minds of executives making the decision to overhire and lay people off?
My point is the same as I stated before: putting out unsubstantiated articles like these does absolutely nothing good for the industry. The only purpose it serves is ad-revenue for the tabloid, and potentially pulling more money out of the industry.
Or you could do a 60 fps bloodborne remaster that people would actually play for orders of magnitude less money, but what do I know I’m just a plebe who didn’t lose 400 million dollars
When are publishers going to realize there is only a market for like 2-3 Live service games at any one time?
You cannot underestimate the stupidity of games publishers. I’d be willing to accept that sunk-cost alone is the explanation for this outrageous budget. It probably started out as “what’s $200m for the next Fortnight?” and just went in $5 or $10 million dollar increments from there.
Sony apparently saw this as their “Star Wars moment”, and went all in. Apparently there was also a culture of “toxic positivity” there where people were too reluctant to criticize things.
videogameschronicle.com
Gorące