The appeal of Nintendo console is first party exclusives and whatever the new gimmick may be (I don’t mean that word as a bad thing, I have loved most of their gimmicks). Powerful hardware just means that it can potentially have a good third party support, so that you’re not left playing just the first party games.
Specifically, they’re cutting off purchases of new games - but people can still download games they own.
The PS3, I believe, did this a while back. Up to a point, patching the device’s internet security so that the credit card info isn’t stolen in transit takes more effort than it’s worth. But, letting people still download their games has no real internet security risk.
One question that lingers in my mind though, is whether you can still buy new games using a desktop browser. I think that was something PS3 allowed for for some time.
I think it’s opposite with the PS3. They kept the option to buy PS3 games because of reactions. But it’s only possible through the PS3, so the PS3 games won’t clutter PSN.
Purchases of new games on the Xbox 360 console itself. You will still be able to purchase Xbox 360 games on a newer console or their website then download them to your 360 console.
Call it the SuperSwitch to mimic the nes -> supernes era. No new gimmick, just double the specs and ride the wave of portable consoles being “good enough”. Rival the steam deck and all the clones coming, with Nintendo’s amazing first party titles and milk the next 5-7 years
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.
You’re probably on point with the branding (and that’s probably why Nintendo reportedly delayed their official announcement when Sony announced the PS5 Pro).
Corporate loga are cancer. I don't give a fuck about your shiti brand. I paid you for use the license. You don't get to fucking stick your shiti advert into my life after I pay you.
See, now before you used to be able to buy an individual copy of the game. Then you did have the right to edit those out. Can’t do that when you only buy a license.
In case you needed another reason not to by this collage of shite, here’s a reminder that Ubisoft is a hateful company run by a hateful man and no one should be buying their games anyway: gamesindustry.biz/ubisoft-has-reportedly-made-min…
This is actually what I look forward to most in gaming in the next decade or two. The implementation of AI that can be assigned goals and motivations instead of scripted to every detail. Characters in games with whom we as players can have believable conversations that the devs didn’t have to think of beforehand. If they can integrate LLM type AI into games successfully, it’ll be a total game changer in terms of being able to accommodate player choice and freedom.
I wonder if they’ll spend as much time defining what an LLM shouldn’t be talking about/doing as they would defining what a non-LLM should be talking about/doing.
This is something I used to be excited for but I only have been losing interest the more I hear about AI. What are the chances this will lead to moving character arcs or profound messages? The way LLMs are today, the best we can hope for is Radiant Quests Plus. Not sure a game driven by AIs rambling semi-coherently forever will be more entertaining than something written by humans with a clear vision.
Characters in games with whom we as players can have believable conversations that the devs didn’t have to think of beforehand.
Correction: characters in games will have soulless cookie cutter paint by numbers responses that sound hollow and lifeless. AI doesn’t generate, it only remixes.
Also, have you interacted with a LLM? They’re full of restrictions and they’re not very good at finding recent data. How would that implement in a video game? Devs would have to train the LLM to basically annihilate their own job as writers. Which still wouldn’t really save the dev company/publisher any money or time.
That sounds like “guys we’re totally not going to announce the Switch 2 soon, don’t worry, we still support the OG Switch so you can still buy consoles and games for Christmas, k? Don’t need to wait for the next console, that totally doesn’t exist.”
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