So far, it’s a pretty looking game. The trouble is finding things to do in it.
That was the end of the quest. All setup, no punchline.
There was no one to thank me. All I had was a little more loot. Where’s my impact on the world?
If these quotes ring true in the final game, that’s a hard pass. I want RPGs, action-oriented or not, to allow me to play a role. A million games can make fantasy look pretty, Obsidian needs to make it interesting.
that’s what i’m saying! I hope the quests are more dense with writing in the final release. Well-designed quests with clever writing are the entire appeal of an Obsidian RPG!
After playing part of their game Outer Worlds, I’m not surprised. I thought the writing was alright, but the game felt lacking and empty. I was surprised because I’ve only ever heard good things about New Vegas. I haven’t played New Vegas yet but I’m assuming it’s a much better time
You’d be right in my opinion. New Vegas is incredible. But something felt missing from the outer worlds, and I was hoping they would find it in avowed.
it’s interesting to think about the logistics here. How much money should Rockstar have allocated for the soundtrack, to offer a better deal to artists? The article mentions that they licensed over 240 songs for GTA5. At $7500 a song (who knows what they actually paid), that’s $1.8 million. The total budget for GTA5 was around $265 million, so that $1.8 million is less than 1% of the total budget. Some songs surely cost more than $7500 to license, so let’s assume it added up to 1% of the budget by the end. Evidently GTA6 is looking like a $2 billion budget game atm (absolutely bonkers), and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to allocate at least the same percentage to the music licenses, given how central the soundtrack is to the GTA experience.
If they allocated 1% of $2 billion to the soundtrack, that would give them $20,000,000 to play with, or average $83k per song if they are going for about the same size of soundtrack. Now, this is all just my quick napkin math based on the assumption that Rockstar paid about $7500 per song for GTA5, but I think this indicates that either A) they are massively underballing Heaven 17 here, or B) Rockstar senior management has not allocated a music licensing budget that matches the size of the game they are making.
What do y’all think? Is $83k per song a reasonable rate for the kind of license Rockstar is asking for? Or is even that too low?
I’ve never heard of Heaven 17. On GTA V, there are a lot of bands than I had never heard of too. Rockstar introduced me to those bands, their other work, solos from those members, and other artists in those genres.
Frankly, if I was a musician that wasn’t already a huge star, I’d do it for FREE because of the massive GUARANTEED exposure.
artists die from “exposure”, because it doesn’t pay the bills. I think you are right that the exposure has value, but it definitely doesn’t have $83k worth of value, because musicians simply do not make money from album sales anymore. Most artists barely break even from doing concert tours.
Artists die from not getting exposure. This isn’t one of those “play my wedding for exposure” things. It’s being a regular song playing in one of the world’s most popular game franchises.
They should get paid, sure, but telling them to fuck off because the rate wasn’t what they want is dumb.
It takes upward of 200 streams of a track on Spotify to earn a single penny. 20,000 streams to earn a dollar.
(For me and my personal expenses, this would mean I would need 40,000,000 streams per month to pay rent/pay bills/eat. I’m dirt poor and live a dirt poor budget. 40,000,000 streams to pay $1400 in rent is INSANE.)
That “exposure” can still add up to “not paying the bills.”
Also, if he gains no new listeners? He would have made a huge mistake not angling for more money.
This guy is being smart, and the rich just want people to THINK that exposure is worth it. Even Oprah pays in exposure and its bullshit. The company has got the fucking money to pay it they just don’t want to.
You, as an individual, buy enough of their stuff to support them month-to-month? How generous of you.
Now that the snark is out of the way: Clearly an individual doesn’t make enough money to do that, and if you’re the only new fan they gain that’s still nowhere near enough to make a living.
You could have responded without being an asshole. If we had discussed this politely we probably could have reached an acceptable middle ground and both learned something from the other person’s experiences and ideas.
You’re coming out here arguing in favor of a megacorporation keeping even more money for itself instead of artists getting paid for their work. I feel like you should have expected to have upset people.
It’s the internet. Calm down. Not everything has to be a fight. Use that energy to yell about something more important, like genocide or climate change. Goodbye
To be fair, they were smart enough to get some exposure even without accepting the deal. This is not the first place I see this discussion and some people are definitely going to check their stuff now out of curiosity.
But this exposure is short-lived with an incredibly limited audience Who may or may not listen to it. I did not look them up. I don’t have the time right this moment and I will definitely forget.
I just think that in this particular video game franchise, even if they did not receive the amount of money they wanted upfront for royalties, They could not pay for this kind of Marketing opportunity.
Sometimes, when I play a AAA game and something expensive is visible on screen (e.g. half of New York getting destroyed during that long quick-time event in Spider-Man), I like to shout “Production value!” at nobody, like that director self-insert kid in “Super 8” (2011).
I get a feeling I would ruin my voice doing this every time in GTA 6.
To answer your question, I think we would have to look at what music licenses usually cost. Some quick googling tells me that $7500 is hardly an outrageously low sum for a song from a middle of the road '80s band. They aren’t exactly Depeche Mode. I think they would have benefited far more from the inclusion of their song in this game financially (since it would cast them into the limelight again, providing streaming revenue and perhaps gain them new fans) than the little and likely very temporary publicity they gained from rejecting the offer.
But your assumption is that every artist gets the same deal. Some maybe more valuable and expensive than others. Then the question is, if this group was valued very low and that is whats upsetting. But come on, 7500 for lifetime rights is really bad payment. I wonder what the deals with prior games and songs was.
Sony is also encountering similar issues in terms of the cost of games being unsustainable and Moore’s Law kicking in. The difference is that they’re making games that move consoles and Microsoft just aren’t.
At this point, I don’t know what strategy Microsoft has at this point. If you say “Xbox everywhere”, what does Xbox even mean any more for the enthusiast? I don’t think Xbox is done, but if they were looking to be HBO before, they are now going for the Netflix approach - high quantity content, mediocre product - and possibly alienate the existing audience they have.
I say this as an Xbox Series S owner, I’m happy with my purchase, but as a consumer I don’t think I’ll be upgrading my console to anything Microsoft ship any time soon.
“I may have stolen your wallet, but it’s okay - I gave it back. Surely it wasn’t because several police officers were walking over with curious expressions.”
If their game was that good, we would read about it up and down the net. The fact that I read about it here for the first time tells a different story.
Completed both 100% and they’re such great fun games.
Hogwarts was awesome to walk through the wizardry world. Battling wizards, poachers, spiders, etc. Finding all the secrets and going through the story. Finished the game in a week, I just couldn’t put the controller down.
That was my reaction as well. I wonder if they’re just trying to reassure people since they announced today they’re discontinuing online services for Wii U and 3DS.
Crazy that the Sands of Time remake was supposed to come out early 2021… Remakes are supposed to be quick projects for easy money, how could Ubisoft mess it up that much? Sands of Time isn’t even a long game!
One was a cancelled mobile game but now I’m curious what the other 4 were. I guess we’ll never find out as they funnel all that money to their successful live-service stuff.
The entire industry was flooded with mouthpieces for developer statements, and opinion piece hottakes. How many of those people does an industry really need? (Or more importantly: How many of those people can it financially support?)
As for reviews, they are for the most part similarly worthless and hard to trust. There’s about five YouTubers who I actually trust the opinions of, and I haven’t felt left out at all with that as the extent of my gaming journalism intake.
I can’t be certain, but I suspect a lot of gamers are completely burnt out on the professional gaming journalism industry.
Most “reviewers” get a version of the game with infinite money and health to get through the game quickly and only talk about story and size.
I bet there’s bosses and quests that have a special place in our rage that these people just breezed through and they don’t remember them a single bit.
The most I’ve heard about reviewers getting extra help is that they have a small tip sheet for the trickiest parts, and only sometimes. If they need extra help beyond that, they’re messaging their colleagues on Discord who are also under embargo.
I’ve gotten release copies of games for review. Unless they have another secret tier of pressers, this is nonsense. If anything, review copies are more likely to have bugs that making completing the game harder.
It would be difficult to measure if that was the case, but what does seem to be the case is that the old revenue model these outlets relied on just paid less and less over the years.
About time. The PSP and Vita were beautiful devices that gave a great playing experience. Sony obviously knew how to make a good portable, and throwing that away was a big mistake.
Vita was a little too ahead of it’s time - trying to use psn without consistent network traffic was awful.
You shouldn’t need to reconnect just to see if you have messages. Hopefully they don’t require propriety memory or abandon the unit months after release either
Imo the biggest failure of the bits was the egregiously priced proprietary memory cards. Outrageously expensive for very little space. Made the value proposition compared to the post price drop 3ds (which used micro SDS) a no brainer unfortunately
Honestly the biggest failure IMO, was because like usual, they didnt actually support it after release. I’ve fallen for this one too many times with Sony, but no more. Whenever Sony releases something other than their mainstream products, they immediately stop developing for it and basically rely on a bunch of third parties. Who usually give up shortly thereafter when they notice the dwindling support.
My vita is collecting dust with my PSVR, my PS proprietary headphones, and all the other useless shit Sony has released over the years.
They didn’t support either VR’s. Most of the titles for PSVR were third party, there was very little AAA support after the first few months around it’s release. Two years later it was dust and echos, just like PSVR2 (Blood & Truth arguably an exception, but I also believe it was still released within that two year window).
I recently dug up my vita and installed CFW out of boredom. With the built-in PSP and PSX emulation, decent retroarch support and a fair few source ports, it’s quite a respectable retro handheld these days. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend sourcing one over say, an anbernic unit, but if you already have it, it’s a fairly easy jailbreak and worth the effort IMO.
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