It’s really tough to pin it down to just one thing… to me, it’s a perfect storm. This is anecdotal, of course. But companies made several bad decisions in a row. They seemed to think growth during COVID was normal and would continue annually. Some companies bought a bunch of other companies thinking this would be a new big push in gaming. Embracer group comes to mind.
Other companies decided to divert their very talented developers away from the types of games they were so good at developing, and towards what the business wanted to chase as far as revenue opportunities. Gatcha riddled live service games. Ubisoft, WB, Sony, EA, Microsoft, practically everyone chased this trend. Some put everything into it. Others dipped their toes. Some pulled back before it cost them hundreds of millions. Some spent hundreds of millions and got nothing to show for it. Some companies lost a lot of talent when the really good developers left to go work on stuff they care about. Others had no choice but to cut the business down to the bone because of all the money and time they wasted chasing a trend.
The government also started raising interest rates, which makes it more expensive to borrow money. So a lot of companies aren’t willing to spend the kinda money they used to, not without a guaranteed return. So now you will see more consolidation and less risk in the types of games being made by AAA studios.
So yea. I think there’s several factors, all could have been planned for with actual solid management, but that’s not the kind of management running these companies right now.
Well you do have to give it to him, three graphics options (low/med/high) is more than the two graphic options (low/high) that came in the previous game.
If Sony is willing to put up a bunch of money to get a game made with a 3rd party company like Square, and if Square wouldn’t have been able to make the game otherwise, then being an exclusive could be the only reason it exists.
Similar to Alan Wake 2, which I still haven’t played, it’s possible that this game owes its existence to the exclusivity agreement giving the necessary upfront funds to get the game development going.
But this isn’t like the previous generations of exclusive consoles. These consoles are significantly more expensive, development on video games is significantly more expensive, and the profit margin that you could make from being exclusive to just a single console is significantly lower.
This is a combination of ballooning budgets, expensive hardware with lower sales, and the PC gaming market looming over Sony and Microsoft’s shoulders. And don’t forget to mention the explosion of the free to play, micro transaction riddled games they also have to compete with for screen time now.
Does this mean exclusives will go away? Probably not. If it’s financially beneficial to go exclusive, they’ll do it again.
But it does mean that the gap between the potential gained revenue of not going exclusive and the potential locked in revenue from the exclusivity agreement is currently looking razor thin.
Oh don’t dismiss that they’re also graphics and programming wizards. They don’t work with the cutting edge, but they run circles around anyone on the lower end, making games look and run better on potato hardware is no easy feat.
I’d argue the optimization required to make something like that happen is significantly more skillful than all of the crap AAA stuff that takes 250gb and requires shader compilations every boot.
The bounty dispatcher or whatever is a woman version of budget Snake Plissken and a smoker, but the voice actor sounded like she was lifted from a 1940s movie and had never smoked a day in her life (rare, I know, but still). I expected at least a hint of gruffness from her character and got absolutely zero of that.
I felt the same way when I heard her voice. Not near rough enough for how that character looked.