I tried it a couple of months ago. It’s playable, but even on a Ryzen 5 5600, it barely managed to maintain 30 fps at 640x480. Performance might have improved since then though.
Nuance is lost. Simplistic narratives are everywhere - and there’s nothing simpler than blaming the big boogeyman for everything. I’m not saying that they haven’t made mistakes and aren’t to blame for a great many things, but not every time and everywhere for everything.
Ulrich, mate, you’re more German about this than I am - and that’s not meant as a compliment. Allow me to take the scepter as the most anal German user in this discussion back with another pedantic, probably too condescending reply.
I don’t remember if I explained this to you directly or someone else in this discussion, but the thing with large studios is that they are incredibly art-heavy (lots of texture artists, 3D modelers, animators, etc.), because you can compartmentalize art and have many little worker bees work on their little flowers (both figuratively and literally) in parallel and then assemble it all together into one big mess of an open world game with a billion map markers for you to ignore. For many years now, ever since the seventh console generation, this has been the ticket, this brought in the big bucks in the gaming industry.
The Western studios that pioneered this approach are now being threatened on two fronts: 1) Eastern (non-Japanese) studios that use the same art-heavy approach (but with different organization, which doesn’t matter here, because they too are spending lots on many worker bees) on F2P and Gacha games, which offer spectacle and impressive vistas and a billion trillion map markers (but for free*) and 2) a tiny handful of absolutely ginormously successful Western titles - Indies, former Indies and AAA - that don’t care one bit about the presentation, spectacle and artist-driven content beyond the most basic of necessities (see: Minecraft’s blocky blocks and unfiltered textures) or a litany of tie-ins simulating variety and freshness (e.g. Fortnite, Rocket League), but instead shine through organic player interaction and user-generated content.
It’s not Indie darlings like Balatro and Stardew Valley that threaten these publishers. Like I explained before, the revenue those games are generating is not sufficient to sustain large enterprises and because their success is incredibly random and unpredictable, big studios can’t just divide their armies of worker bees into smaller teams that each work on a little game, with all those little games then in bulk creating the same revenue as a large titles. Since it’s possible to find 500 people that can draw horse testicle textures, but not possible to find 500 people on the job market that can write a good script for a game or design a fun gameplay loop (seriously, those are the rarest talents in the entire industry) and finish the damn thing in time too, the idea you’re proposing simply isn’t realistic. The most you can hope for is that Ubisoft and others find a few people in their large studios and allow them to work on little artistic high-concept side projects every now and again (like for example Grow Up/Home), as an image boost for the company, a treat for fans, but not to make money, because these projects really don’t.
The unfortunate thing is that the likely reaction to the success of Chinese and Korean F2P/Gacha games is that Western studios will try to emulate those. It’s not even a thing for the future - this has already started. The whole loot box nightmare we’ve all been moaning and groaning about is a direct copy of South Korean MMO mechanics - and Ubisoft’s AAAA(AAAAA) pirate MMO disaster was a blatant attempt at going after the kind of audience, but they wanted to have the cake and eat it too, release it as a full-price game and keep people busy with busywork loot boxes. Same thing with Bioware’s Anthem. One of few successful Western games of this type is Destiny. Ubisoft, EA, ActiBliBethMic (and Japanese publishers) are likely going to bet hard on the large Gacha game idea (at least that’s what I’m expecting), because they can use their existing experience with managing large art departments in those games as well, only having adapt mechanics, monetization and marketing accordingly. I doubt they’ll be successful, but maybe this can save them. Our hope as players who aren’t enjoy game mechanics and monetization that are optimized to drive up the credit card debt of whales [players who spend a fortune on F2P games] is that these projects end up making enough money so that some of the profits will get spent on games that aren’t thinly disguised Skinner boxes.
Feel free to tell me whether or not this makes sense to you. I have a love/hate relationship with this discussion and topic. They are both equally frustrating and interesting.
Okay, I’ll bite: Since I’m very clearly wrong about everything, show me a large studio that doesn’t use the design by committee approach, makes small games on Indie budgets and survives on that.
I’m not arguing against a strawman, but against someone who might want to look into this topic a bit more closely. Balatro sold two million copies less than Star Wars Outlaws. People obviously want flashy spectacle more than tight mechanics - it’s just that even those higher sales figures weren’t enough to compensate for the bloated development budgets. That’s the real lesson. The old method of spending more and more money to make more and more money isn’t quite working anymore - not that people don’t want pretty graphics anymore (because they still do want those more than basic Indie art).
Because Balatro is a single developer’s vision realized without compromise, without producers, writers, tech people, art directors, etc. all meddling with the production in the usual “design by committee” approach that large studios are using. This kind of game can only exist as a solo or very small team project.
…money?
The mantra of big studios and publishers is to spend lots of money to make lots of money. Balatro sold a mere 3.5 million copies over the course of a year, for a price of $14. That’s just $34.3 million taking Steam’s 30% cut into account. Huge money for a solo dev (especially given that the budget was just $125,000), but both the sales figure and the sales revenue are in serious flop territory by big studio standards. Star Wars outlaws underperformed at 5.5 million copies sold, since it cost hundreds of millions to develop and market, including having the highest marketing budget of any game ever made. To put this into perspective, this means they spent significantly more than $150 million (the usual figure for a top of the line AAA game these days) on marketing alone.
You can not generate the kind of money that large publishers and studios need to survive with little Indie games.
Balatro is 1) a fluke, an exception, a rarity and 2) not something big studios could even possibly replicate. What would be the point of a big studio trying to make a game that one developer can pull off? The closest the likes of Ubisoft in particular are getting to games like Baltro are their Indie-esque side projects that parts of their bigger studios engage in on the side, like Valiant Hearts. Those can never be enough to finance a big operation though.
Good games don’t automatically sell, on the contrary. Your average Ubisoft open world slop is “good”, but that’s not enough. Even very good, exceptional games don’t automatically sell. Game development is inherently risky. Large publishers tried to game the system by making “safe” bets, by offering spectacle in combination with tried and true mechanics and narratives. This worked for a long time, but due to changing market conditions, the core audience for these types of games getting tired of them and younger gamers not caring about the presentation, these publishers are spending more on a shrinking segment of the market.
The problem is that they maneuvered themselves into a corner. They have built huge, art-heavy studios in expensive cities to make large games that bring in large sums of money that finance this costly development. You can’t easily downsize this kind of operation, you can’t easily change your modus operandi after having built entire companies around it. I’m convinced that this will result in the death of most large publishers and developers. Ubisoft is only the start.
Why should EA, Microsoft or Sony fare any differently? Each can only hope that enough of their major competitors die so that they don’t have to fight around the same segment of the market anymore. They are all fundamentally unable to meaningfully capture the P2W and Gacha markets (same thing, really), especially in Asia, a segment where companies that were built to serve these types of games are truly at home. Those will slowly take over, until they too are too large and bloated to respond to changing market conditions - or until some event outside of their control, like a major conflict and/or economic crisis, wipes them off the map, paving the way for someone else entirely to lead the industry. The only thing that will remain constant is millions of small Indies fighting for scraps, with a tiny handful having the right combination of luck and skill (although mostly the former) to make a decent living.
It’s actually a deliberate stylistic choice. The colors are washed out with a post-processing filter. Textures are actually much more colorful. You can fix this in an emulator, but the problem is that it’s difficult to find a color preset that works in all lighting conditions. BotW has a consistent, almost painterly art style, even if it’s relatively muted.
The player with the highest upload speed and most stable connection should be the one running the game on their machine. You could use Steam’s family feature to create a “family” and share the game with the friend with the best Internet connection so that they don’t have to purchase it.
Note that some games explicitly block family sharing (usually titles that have their own launcher). I haven’t checked if this applies here.