I get everyone’s sentiment here, boiling it down to “better games are better” but also keep in mind the development costs and times for making new games are constantly going up. Yeah of course there are fantastic indie games out there (and I love them myself) that have a fraction of AAA game budgets and dev time but those are the gems in the rough, not the norm.
I’m all for better gaming experiences but they do come with tradeoffs. Also, flops are now death sentences for studios so the pressure to perform is even higher
He's not wrong, though. Game development is a business, like any other, and larger-scale games require exponentially more resources to produce than smaller indie titles.
Obviously one could make the argument "Well they shouldn't be making every single game into a huge, multi-billion dollar blockbuster title that costs the player an arm and a leg to gain access to, then they wouldn't need that amount of resources to begin with", and that would be a fair argument. But ultimately, people keep buying those games, anyway. And not by force, they buy them of their own volition. So those games continue to be profitable. There's no incentive for big studios to change their ways when consumers keep giving them money, so they're going to keep making huge games that require huge resources and huge payments from the players.
I'm not sure what you mean. Were you offering some sort of insight into what I or the other person was actually saying, or just whining? Some of us are having a conversation here.
It’s mind boggling when the costs of games get leaked (or revealed during court cases). It makes me sad that so many studios have pivoted to the strategy you’ve described because it means we’ll have less games of a franchise I enjoy since the development takes so long or the developement is never even started because people have decided the profit won’t be as high as making a blockbuster game. Hell, look at Rockstar milking whales with GTA V, that’s a slightly different conversation, but it’s crazy how long the gap between GTA V and GTA VI are
Click baiting video. Other devs don’t care. As long as they can make money pumping out mediocre games then they will continue to do so. Acting like this is the first good game to come out in a decade or something.
Looking at how many games have stood in Dragon Age: Origins’ shadow over the past decade, I get the sense that lots of studios wanted to create the true spiritual successor but couldn’t come up with the resources to do so.
The managers who make the decisions don’t. Doesn’t matter if they are a publisher or the development company itself. It’s a bit blurry these days anyway, what with how easy it is to self publish and how many publishers have their own internal development studios.
The managers who make the decisions is also unclear as power differs on the company. They could care all the way up to the CEO but if the CEO puts an unrealistic deadline, the game has an unrealistic deadline
It might be, but what would that change about the story? Unless Larian is paying other studios to say that they're panicking (which I doubt, for a million reasons), then I'm not so sure there's any difference to the situation.
Sites like IGN must follow gaming trends to survive. BG3 is a huge release and I've been seeing this story everywhere for weeks, increasing in frequency.
EA is an immensely useful tool for game devs, the issue is EA as an excuse to ship unpolished games or to leave games unfinished forever. Neither of which are problems intrinsic to early access, they’re just bad business practice that should be shunned like any other
As a gamedev: Early Access was useful for devs, back when it was real Early Access. Think: Kerbal Space Program (the first, not the second).
Nowadays it’s mostly a marketing tool, that allows to generate the hype for launch twice… Publishers and players expect “Early Access” games to be feature complete and polished before the “Early Access” launch…
I liked what Daemon X Machina did, where they released a demo, sent out questionnaires to everyone who downloaded it, published a video about the results save how they were planning to act on it, and a few months later released a new demo with a new questionnaire.
Yep, that’s probably the most helpful thing for devs. This sadly often conflicts with publishers’ announcement schedules. There are, however, companies that do NDA-protected play-tests, where you get the same kind of information, without publicly announcing the game.
Ubisoft did (does?) it to a degree with their Rainbow 6 TTS (beta) servers to test the sandbox and did so for a few technical alpha/beta releases acting as selected pewviews to see how the game is received and where bugs are.
Early access worked well for them, part of the start of the game was able to be play tested, the community got to give feedback, and they actually listened, its how it should be done
Yeah but not how the remaining whole industry treats it.
I saw literally no outcry regarding BG3 and early game bugs. Comparing it to CP2077 it was a stellar release in terms of PR.
... proceeds with another yearly installment of game X that could have been released as DLC, but instead built it as "a new game", selling at 1 cent per bug.
I might just buy this at full price even though I don’t have any intention of playing it any time soon, just to show support for a game studio that is still doing it right.
This reminds me of the time Ubisoft developers decided to have a removedfit about Elden Ring because it didn’t have any of the same shitty monetization or trash formulaic design choices as their games.
It’s like these developers think that because they’re painfully mediocre, every other studio is required to be as well.
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Aktywne