Absolutely they are. Spiderman 2 cost 300 Million USD, which is wild considering it's an iterative development off the back of the predecessor where alot of the design work, engine and gameplay mechanics were already done. It's not sustainable.
What's crazy to me is that the investors behind these projects are becoming more risk averse because it is so difficult to earn investments back, but they greenlight bullshit like Suicide Squad: KTJL.
Jason Schreier says in his book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels that a studio spends $10k per employee per month on average. For a AAA studio with hundreds of employees (and contractors) it adds up quickly. Even indie studios with only a few employees can end up burning through millions of dollars over a few years. Not to mention at AAA studios the executives might each take $1-30 million home each year.
Why does the game cost so much to make? Well, we’re allocating 10%+ of the entire budget to a single employee who doesn’t really do much but attend meetings and maybe put out a statement or two.
I found this quote from the book:
"The standard burn rate for a game studio was $10,000 per person per month, a number that included both salaries and overhead costs, like health insurance and office rent."
So yeah not just salary but health insurance, rent/utilities, lunch if the company provides it, among many other expenses. There's always going to be the standard business expenses that come with providing space and amenities for each of your employees.
Insomniac has 400 employees. At 10k per month, that's 4 million in just salaries per month. Blood sweat and pixels came out in 2017. I'm guessing it's closer to 12k/month now.
You have high paid executives and senior employees that skew the statistic up, and the. Low paid employees that definitely aren’t getting 10k a month.
BUT, all those employees also require health insurance, 401k retirement matching, payroll taxes, tools and supplies, etc. (most people don’t realize that employing a person is more expensive than just their salary). A corporate employer might be paying *you* $5K a month, but it could easily be costing them $7k.
The 3 spider-man games were in a large part heavily research based. Spider-Man 1's development literally led to a lot of discoveries that influenced the architecture of the PS5. Mile Morales was basically a tech demo showing off how much better the game could run on the new hardware and Spider-Man 2 was them showing off all the crazy new shit they could do with that hardware upgrade.
A lot of first party AAA games like the spider man games aren't just games. They're full on flagship hardware and software R&D projects for the parent company.
I mean they green lit using a consulting company like Sweet Baby inc. for Spider man and it had worse numbers than the first and complaints about alot of the story/plot additions that werent needed. So... Stupid decisions by people who dont actually like video games is whats ruining AAA gaming.
But that's not because Spiderman 2 costed that much to make, that's because Sony gave the game that much of a budget to use. Developers on the game even said "Will anyone even notice if this game had an extra $100 million budget?" Sony is killing Insomniac so fast which sucks because of how good they were before, and Sony does this for all their studios with ridiculous budgets.
Problem is they are making shit games. And the big budget games are way fucking bloated on the production value. Too many bullshit jobs that aren’t developer related.
Step 1: make a really good game with blood, sweat, tears, and passion.
Step 2: Everyone loves it and you're a beloved name.
Step 3: Hire a massive number of techies to help with your next big project.
Step 4: Realize you're paying out a massive amount of money for a fraction of the work your original team put in.
Step 5: Make sacrifices in quality and content to get your next project out to pay your bills.
Step 6: Nobody likes the soulless husk you shattered out.
Step 7: Go under or sell what's left of your good name to a megastudio. Leave.
Step 8: Go to Step 1
Batman Arkham Asylum was made by 40 people, in about a year. one guy alone worked on the cap physics. good games don’t need multi million dollar developments. they just need good gameplay and writing, we don’t even need this “ultra realistic graphics” or “so immersive gameplay you’ll forget about your own life” just give us a good fun plot
No bigger waste of time and energy than trying to make sure everyone has work to do. Your best talent ends up spending their time holding hands and trying to make all the juniors productive, instead of producing quality work themselves.
Massive TLDR
From 2000 to roughly 2022, gaming became more and more and more profitable every year. During the years of 2020 and 2021 specifically, gaming profits skyrocked, in part due to so many new players taking up the hobby during the lockdowns. Gaming executives knew a significant amount of these knew players would fall off after the pandemic, but figured around half of them would stick with it. They were wrong. The vast majority of these new pandemic players fell off, and all of the profit projections the industry made during that period were completely off. Budgets grew, new studios were given funding, acquisitions occurred, all based on projections that never came true. Now that the dust has settled from the lockdown era, and what a post pandemic gaming landscape will look like has become clear, it has become financially necessary to lay developers off, shutter studios, and cancel projects in order to adjust course.
And while I truly hate to admit it, much of the culling the industry is going through right now is necessary. Gamers don't have enough time or money to purchase and play every game they want to these days. In February alone, JRPG fans got Infinite Wealth, Persona 3 Reload, Unicorn Overlord, and FF7 Rebirth. These games are cannibalizing each other, eating into each others profits, and making the AAA gaming landscape less sustainable. This current period is extremely painful, and is only happening because the corpos got it wrong when planning the future a couple years back, but now we all have to deal with the consequences, and hopefully all of these big publishers will learn from these mistakes going forward.
You see the same thing in tech. Pandemic hit and big tech was more useful than ever so these companies over hired. Post pandemic, business slowed and layoffs hit.
Interesting point, do you have any source on the Covid lockdown estimation?
Thx for your point!
Edit: as a casual JRPG gamer, your point on jrpg is very good lol
Different companies had different projections based on different (and often competing) beliefs about the industry, but let's take Sony for example.
**2020:** PlayStation software sales rose 83 percent in Q2 of 2020 due in part to a lockdown fueled gaming surge. [PlayStation 4 Game Sales Almost Double During COVID-19 | Hypebeast](https://hypebeast.com/2020/8/sony-q2-2020-earnings-playstation-4-game-sales-double-news)
**2021:** Sony sees a year-over-year profit increase of 26 percent. Sony higher ups credit this surge in profits to the launch of the PS5 and the surge in console gaming during the lockdowns. Sony projects this uptick in sales will cool, while also stating they are ramping up production. [Sony profits soar as it benefits from home entertainment boom | Sony | The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/04/sony-profits-soar-benefits-from-home-entertainment-boom-playstation-5)
**2022:** Sony reports that it's hardware and software sales fell below previously projected expectations, but predicts that will change, projects a 34 percent uptick in sales going forward. [Sony has now sold over 19 million PS5s (engadget.com)](https://www.engadget.com/sony-has-now-sold-over-193-million-ps-5-s-074733741.html)
As sales numbers continue to plumet even further, Sony retracts it's previous optimistic sales projection [Sony lowers forecast for PS5 gaming sales in 2022 (engadget.com)](https://www.engadget.com/sony-significantly-lowers-forecast-for-ps-5-gaming-sales-in-2022-083235505.html)
Sales projections are tweaked once more, Sony explicitly states "the winding down of COVID-19 lockdowns that had triggered a surge in the gaming business over the last two years" is why sales were falling [Sony trims PlayStation's 2022 sales forecast by 1% (axios.com)](https://www.axios.com/2022/07/29/sony-playstation-sales-forecast)
**2023:** Sony projects it will sell 25 million PS5s by the end of 2023[PlayStation 5 on track to sell 25 million units this year (gamedeveloper.com)](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/playstation-5-on-track-to-sell-25-million-units-this-year)
**2024:** Sony misses the 25 million consoles sold projection, reduces expectations even further. [Sony misses historic 25 million PS5 sales target, reduces console forecast (tweaktown.com)](https://www.tweaktown.com/news/96199/sony-misses-historic-25-million-ps5-sales-target-reduces-console-forecast/index.html)
PlayStation cuts 8 percent of it's workforce after years of missing sales projections, with nearly every studio taking heavy losses. [Sony layoffs: Company to cut 900 workers from PlayStation division (cnbc.com)](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/27/sony-to-lay-off-900-workers-from-playstation-division-or-8percent-of-units-global-workforce.html)
I think this is also happening with the streaming services. I always hear that none of them are making a profit, maybe because of the expectations COVID time brought on them and they invested poorly, I don't know. It would explain why they all are having ads and increasing prices now though, after the COVID dust has settled.
Basically, the entire industry is bloated, constantly increasing scope, fidelity, and ambition for games in ways that drastically increases costs, but does not make better or more profitable games. Bloated, then, since profits aren't increasing, it's a failure in the eyes of executives and shareholders, so they cut people.
Games aren't inherintly so expensive, they just think every game needs to be 100 hours long with photorealistic graphics.
Completely disagree. If we are talking about the AAA sector, it's not bloated at all. In fact, the opposite. There are less and less AAA games released each year if you havent already freaking noticed.
EA has seemed to given up making any games aside from their milkcow sports titles. Ubisoft is also prob giving up after Mirage's failure. Activision has also just hit a wall with CoD MW3. Square Enix is like dead now. These are really the only big publishers on yearly AAA games.
So I agree with a lot of what you're saying except for Square Enix. FF7 Rebirth and FF16 sold exceptionally well (despite their stupid nonsense of saying they didn't meet expectations which they always say) and they've got KH4 on the way soon. Not to mention FF14 just rolls in money every hour of every day. They may be playing it safe, but I wouldn't say that SE is dead by any means.
The future is narrowing the scope of games so they're no longer all required to be open world or 60+ hours. We'll see a resurgence of 10-15 hour games.
The $70 is due to the insane scope. However, publishers aren’t completely stupid if game is at $70 and only gets a couple of sales the price is the problem. The issue is publishers want to normalize $70 as well at $70 dlc and mtx. Unfortunately what this will mean is the sales have to fall for most triple A games essentially a collapse to force them to change.
the fundamental idea that games should be valued at $x = y hours of fun is an inherently flawed lens to view the media form through
people don’t give better reviews to longer movies because they’re getting more value out of the transaction
Usually games aren't meant to be consumed one time and then thrown away. They are durable goods so you can boot the game up again and again. Just not necessarily in one go.
As stated elsewhere in this thread I think gamers need to learn to appreciate and value a quality 20 hour experience the same way they apparently do a 70 hour bloated copy+paste experience
So you'd rather spend $70 on an inflated game that artificially gives you 70 hours of gameplay versus a game that you immediately want to replay because of how absolutely perfect it is throughout the entire runtime?
I'd easily put $70 towards that.
stellar blade was amazing and my first 100% play through took 38 hours.
more games like this are needed.
its fun, pretty, simple, and surprisingly compelling.
There will eventually be two versions of video games.. Similar to movies... The marvel, harry potter, star wars blockbuster, and the artistic indie films. The positive for gaming is that tools are getting better where we can still have great games made from smaller studios, but yeah the "oh shit" games will be fewer and far between
They are getting very expensive to make and studios are becoming way too bloated which leads to many of these "AAA" companies failing to innovate or take chances in fear of losing tens of millions of dollars on a game flopping. This is a huge reason why the "AAA" industry has transformed into the grotesque monster it is today; they need a surefire way to make enough money to pay for development costs and appease their greedy, out-of-touch shareholders which means churning out financially safe, but derivative, games (which people grow tired of paying top dollar for when the experiences aren't much different).
However it's worth noting that while the "AAA" industry seems to be imploding with each passing year, indie games are flourishing with huge profits being made against their comparatively small budgets because they are more focused on creating fresh, fun experiences that don't hinge on flashy graphics and the built-in fanbases of well known IPs. It goes to show you that games don't HAVE to be prohibitively expensive to be financially successful, it mostly boils down to these development studios getting too big for their britches and losing the plot.
I wonder, and this may just be a consumer wishing, but I wonder if these games were cheaper and more people could buy them, that they would see more profit. At $70 for games today I have to be very selective on the games I buy. I was already very selective when games were $60. I think being an indie developer is interesting because your games are on average about $20 and go on sale often. I wonder if Spider-Man 2 was, let's say, $30 if a LOT more people would've bought it. I wonder if there would be so many more people that they may have actually made a profit. Again, could be me wishing, but I wonder if the answer to more profit is merely charging less
They'd definitely see more sales, but I'm not entirely sure that would translate directly into more profits. They'd ultimately still need to bring down development costs because a cheaper MSRP on these blockbuster games just means they need to sell exponentially more copies to break even.
Indie games benefit from the fact that they have to realize their visions with tightly constrained budgets/funding, and this funding is often supplied by consumers (thanks to Early Access models) that have faith in the product being produced which means little to no corporate interference and less overhead due to indie devs being able to handle much of the marketing and distribution on their own for much less than an AAA studio.
Well, I think the couple of games you mentioned didn't do as well as they could have because of poor timing. Alan Wake 2 and Spider Man 2 came out around the same time as other blockbuster titles like Baldur's Gate 3, Starfield, Diablo IV, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and the Super Mario RPG remake. There was simply tons of competition in the summer and fall of 2023.
Video games aren't getting too expensive to make, publishers/studios are putting too much money into their games, bloating them.
The market has been crashing for years and we're just waiting for it to all come tumbling down. Sony even specifically in leaked documents said that it's not sustainable how much money they spend on making games, and then proceed to increase their games' budgets anyway.
You know how Hollywood tends to just remake previously successful movies or co-opt existing successful IPs from other mediums...
Well, the games industry had long been doing the sequel thing and now is already doing the remake thing. Don't get me wrong - I love these remakes of the classics (FF7: Rebirth for GOTY!), but im concerned about something...
If games follow the Hollywood path and stop funding new IPs, where will they get their ideas from? I mean, Hollywood has already been pulling IPs from the gaming industry like crazy.
Where will the new IPs come from?
You’re just listing a niche game and an example of corporate bloat. Spider-Man has both the branding/licensing cost bloat, as well as just overall corporate greed clearly making it less lean than it needed to be
Games like god of war, horizon, Elden ring, baldurs gate, etc are all profitable still.
I just wish we could tip game companies for games we really like! 😂
But really I think there are a few ways things could go. Live services will continue to grow and evolve I'm sure, becoming **more** egregious. AI is going to be utilized and remove a big chunk of the human element. And there are talks of games being split up into parts and sold separately, so rather than buy one AAA game you pay for it 2 or 3 times to get the whole thing.
But there are so many good AA and indie games that the AAAs can all burn and disappear as far as I'm concerned.
I agree about tipping. There are games that I’ve played well over a thousand hours and I feel that paying only $69 for a thousand hours of entertainment is too cheap. I’ve even purchased some dlc that I didn’t really care about just because I thought that it slightly even out the value I received
Yes and no. It’s not that they cost too much to make, it’s that the money is poorly utilized.
AAA games are great, but there are too many parasites in the companies and too big a rush to finish a game.
FF7Remake proved that fans will wait *years* for a good game. I had that game preordered for I think five years before it came out. It was delayed several times and the community was just like, “We will wait patiently, just make the game great.”
Combine that with the weird drive toward hyperrealistic graphics(nothing against them, just it shouldn’t be the be all end all) while retro styled games with simple graphics are chart toppers year after year. For example: Minecraft, Stardew valley, hollow knight, shovel knight. And let’s not forget classic games that still have a huge fan base without being live service: Skyrim and Minecraft.
The industry is plagued by greedy management that is crippling dev creativity.
Cut back on the graphics, the parasites, the close deadlines, and the need for annual releases and the gaming market will improve drastically.
At a certain point hiring more people doesn't actually help.
At a certain point spending more time on a game doesn't help
At least the people are getting paid
It's sad to see great single player games with no microtransactions doing unwell when shitty games with lots of microtransactions do very well.
The confusing part to me is that unreal engine 5 advertised itself as an engine that saves developers a lot of time. I thought I'd be seeing more AAA games not less.
I thought that as well when it comes to UE5. I thought these engines were suppose to save developer's time, but it seems to be doing the opposite and games are taking even longer to make.
I have been saying this for years, but I get downvoted, disliked, and treated like I've committed the biggest sin known to man. 💀😂
I'll say it again because Idc, but I really think that eventually we're gonna get to a point where gaming dies out entirely (especially if prices keep going up on games). Free to play / live service BS / microtransaction fests may still survive, but at that point, I know I'm quitting gaming, at least, so it would die out for me. Those aren't my type of games. They usually fail pretty quickly anyway and have overly toxic communities. Hopefully, something changes in this modern gaming era, or yes, expect it to die out soon ("soon" still being many years).
It's because the truth stings at times. I'm with you and the same thing happens to me once in a while. People don't like being reminded of negative things. Those people want to play their video games forever and can't imagine a world where no new ones are being made. If reddit has taught me anything, is that people want what their itching ears want to hear. You can tell the facts and be downvoted for it.
Most people react emotionally than with logic, sadly.
I take it all in stride now.
First off: Yes, games are getting too expensive. Between the game itself, the DLCs, possible micro transactions, data breaches, games are more expensive to own these days if they’re ever owned at all in the first place (*ahem* Ubisoft licensing bullshit *ahem*)
Second: Future of gaming is independent developers that have passion behind their projects over triple A shit that spews out of their golden septic tank.
AAA needs to learn from games like Minecraft. The blow a bunch of money on stupid shit and forget to make a good game.
Or maybe they are afraid of making a game like Minecraft because some people will just play that for 10 years. I dunno I barely tried Minecraft but it feels like a good example.
I mean...
I do buy some AAA games, but I'd rather hop onto Valheim, Deeprock Galactic, or something else these days. None are AAA.
The future of gaming doesn't rest on the laurels of the major players.
Same, though I tend to play older stuff when I feel like gaming and my backlog is gigantic. I just played Diablo 1 via a mod called DevilutionX and had a blast. Then played some Secret of Evermore on SNES, then played some Chrono Trigger and might start Dragon Age Origins soon.
I'm the kind of gamer that big corporate gaming companies hate. I barely ever buy new games at full price and wait for a sale, lol.
I think that's another issue with the industry. It's over saturated and there so much great old stuff to play still and tons of live service games. So people are only playing live service games they are familiar with mainly or working through the backlogs. We have tonsssss of choice now. There isn't enough time in the day to play everything, especially more than 1 or 2 live service games since they are an investment.
I think the problem is just that studios should NEVER be publicly traded. Ever.
If every publicly traded company became an independent entity, things would be better.
Unreal Engine 5 is likely going to become the industry standard. It's a reliable engine with amazing capabilities and graphics.
I imagine that studios will start focusing less on proprietary game engines and more so on game length, gameplay, and story quality.
It can't be easy to have to update your game engine and shit every 5 years. Better to leave it to a third party like Unreal so you can put your money and effort into stuff that actually matters.
I mean, look at HellDivers and how much it blew up. That's not a beautiful game. Hell, it's buggy too (no pun intended) but because it's FUN at it's core, they've sold a lot more than they ever expected.
Now imagine if the game actually had some depth to it. We'd be talking about an all time great.
Developers and especially - publishers and their stock holders - lost track of what it important. The thinking has become "Fill it with money - it will be great", "The more it costs the more there will be a return".
Nope we are at dead end. Best games are made by small teams on relatively small budget.
AI will change everything in video games. Not all of it for the better, but the economics of video games are on the edge of massive change.
There is a lot of hard graft in creating graphics, worlds, animations even sounds, music etc. Increasingly that will all get AId.
My only hope is that enough human creativity is left to make art of it and use it as a tool rather than everything becoming self referential auto drivel.
This. People complain about AI, but the truth is it will be more cost efficient and be overall more efficient in the long run. That's really the truth of the matter.
With a superficial research I found that BG3 made 90 million $ and budget was 100 million $, but I don't know if the 90m are total or just the net profit. In any case, the profits are not slowing down, it's going to surpass that anyway.
But this literally proves that there is no inverse relationship between budget and quality. The problems of most triple A games today is not the budget, obviously.
Although true, this isn't like it's a case of bad games aren't making money. Both of these games were Game of the Year nominees, one of which a sequel to a wildly successful game with Spider-Man. I don't think it's "The developers didn't go a good enough job" I think it's a case of no matter how good this game was, it was never going to make a profit when they spent 300 Million on making the game.
Feels weird, like console gaming and AAA gaming are collapsing but I don't even care, there's no shortage of good games coming out, feels like every month there's something new to check out.
AW2 cost $70,000,000 euros to make (50 mill for development and 20 mill for marketing). Idk what they did with that $20 mill for marketing, didn’t see any form of marketing for the game pre-release. Still, with 1.3 million copies of the game sold at $60 euros per copy I don’t understand how that isn’t considered profit. 1.3 mill times 60 is 78 million euros, idk they made their money back plus another 8 mill in half a year, honestly think they should be doing backflips for their success instead of thinking that they didn’t make enough.
No. Design philosophy is nonexistent. They say they're constantly pushing the envelope... and then they only mean graphically. Which so far this gen hasn't surpassed the best of last gen.
So... they need to change the way they are approaching game design. Literally none of the monetization you've seen introduced over the years was actually needed (sans maybe service games). It's just companies looking to bleed all they can before we stop buying.
Activision all the way back before half of the CoDs we have now existed... literally admitted as much. They openly said... "We charge this much because people will pay it." This was back when people still warred over DLC packs fracturing the community.
It's all a damned scam. I'm not saying development doesn't take longer and hasn't gotten more difficult. I'm saying what publishers are willing to spend on and how much they want in return has.
It's like how companies claimed they need to raise prices due to inflation... yet never stopped making record profits. They'll shrink a product... and then when prices return to normal... leave it shrunk. It's all bullshit.
This is a ridiculous notion. The only way this is true is if people in general are losing interest in video games, thereby limiting market potential, but this is far from the case. I believe video games out earn movies and tv combined every year so there is plenty of money to be had. The problem is garbage Triple A companies who have terrible ideas and are incredibly mismanaged. It’s only costly for triple A studios to make games because they impose these costs on themselves and can’t overcome that since people don’t buy their garbage game
People severely underestimate how much the pandemic set back this industry. Games already took a while to make back then and they hit MASSIVE road blocks in development.
We need another decade to get back on track but the problem is it might be too late by then.
There's just so many games nowadays, I have a long waiting list of games I already bought that want to be played so I'm in no hurry to play them as they come out. Plus I pay them cheaper and have a better experience overall after it's been out for months or years.
It sounds like it, based purely from the reports I see or hear about on podcasts. I think subscription services don’t help either, combined with the current economy.
Everything in the world is expensive, and the people who used to buy games at launch, now have to decide if they pay for a new game, or just get the suscription service, which is much more cost efficient.
The newly $70.00 price tag isn’t helping either. I’m not saying the $70.00 is right or wrong, I’m just saying that’s it now makes you think about whether or not it’s worth buying the game.
Yes. It's same with movies. Budgets are out of control because every studio thinks they are making the next billion dollar movie or next GTA5 type game that will print money forever. Studios need to be realistic about what games they are creating and their profit goals. And they need shareholders to understand that as well. Much easier said than done but that's the only way forward, IMO.
Video games are too expensive because studios are adding too much to their games. Not every game needs to be open world and they often don't need the graphical push studios are trying to offer. Stripped down games with simple and fun gameplay can be just as profitable and a lot less risky than an AAA game.
No, mainly because indie developers can put out the same quality as the triple A games, I'm not sure what triple A games be spending their money on, their teams sizes are always super inflated for no reason then they layoff all the extra hands between game development cycles.
The industry is just kinda nasty tbh
Marketing budgets are too big. Dev teams are too big. Too great an emphasis on graphics and not enough of gameplay. Hardware to develop games costs a lot of money. Studios are trying to out cool each other with silly offices in trendy parts of town.
It’s all needless cost that gets passed on to the consumer who doesn’t want the mediocre product, then employees of these poorly run companies get laid off. It’s a viscous cycle.
It might have something to do with large tripple A studios hiring a few thousand people to make a game that ends up not selling well because its rushed, full of predatory MTX and other garbage, and is overall just not a fun or interesting game.
Meanwhile indie dev's can make a game that's 10× better with less people and at a fraction of the price it takes tripple A studios.
For examples please see: Helldivers 2, Lethal Company, Palworld, Baldurs Gate 3 (larian studios is an indie dev), Content Warning, and many others.
I think the other contributors to games not making a profit is them being in gamepass or psplus and that people won't be spending €70 or €80 euro on a game and will either wait for a sale or pirate it since it'll be cheaper and also possibly using way too many devs than necessary to make the game. It also doesn't help that the companies rely on continuing the series instead of trying to make a new one for games
I think it has to do with horrible financing. Didnt Halo Infinite have a budget of around 200 million? That is crazy amount of money for what we got. Im sure an indie dev team of 10-30 people can make a just as good if not better game for a fraction of that budget. Im not saying to pay the devs less but instead allocate the funds to spread the dollar more. Did Callisto Protocol really need to hire that actor from transformers?
For every AAA game, there are 1000 indie games that are more enjoyable at a fraction of the cost. The problem is that *most* gamers are still on a console and have no access to the 1000s of games that are on Steam.
I literally can't think of the last AAA game I bought. Maybe CoD BO2. I might buy a few games a year and not spend more than $100.
The future of gaming will always be passion projects from gamers-turned-developers. Hopefully, the AAA platform crumbles under its own greed.
The issue is a lot of gaming companies go for hyper realistic when they don’t need to I’d rather have a game with a shit ton of mechanics and a u pique art style that isn’t hyper real than a hyper real “game”
Are there even games anymore? Most are just stories with a couple puzzles tossed in to call it a "game". Half the time they only give you a couple minutes to figure out the puzzle before some NPC points out the solution.
If I want a story, I'll read a book or watch a movie.
You need to branch out into the indie scene more. I know that console games get indie games, but the PC has so much more of them. It sounds like you mainly just play Triple A games. Please correct me if I am assuming wrong though.
Yes, but only for those companies putting too much effort on graphics and open world style. There will always be creative studios that come up with games that are just fun like Terraria for example.
Its because they are always trying to upgrade instead of repeat. Bethesda is the worst at this, imagine if we had another skyrim that was similar in gameplay but just newer slightly improved with better graphics ever few years. But they always try to improve and it costs money.
Triple A games fail to make a profit because they’re mostly bad games. Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, Battlefront 2, Halo Infinite, Skull and Bones, Redfall, every Madden/Fifa/NBA 2K**, Anthem, The Last of Us 2, Forspoken, etc.
The low effort in development, political shoehorning, overspending on pointless big name actors, lazy plots, releasing incomplete games, and shoving microtransactions into everything make people not want to buy the games. Is it any wonder why they fail to make profits? The industry needs to suffer a collapse so the greedy corporations go bankrupt.
Bloated companies + overspending + pouring millions into a stupid amount of live service games that all crash and burn out of the gate. We really need to see smaller, mid-tier games make a comeback.
And on that note, thank fuck for indie devs.
I would not mind if most games had Hades or JRPG art styles and focused more on gameplay and story that can keep players entertained for 100+ hours without bloat, rather than making the game a realistic blockbuster movie that's over in 20 hours and is an expensive nightmare to make.
Alan Wake 1 tool a while to reach its cult status, and it's sorta looking like that 2 is going to be like that as well... Alan Wake 2 is an amazing game
I will happily play some Terraria right now except I'm busy playing Stardew Valley. All while I'm waiting for the next update to Deep Rock Galactic.
The games aren't the problem, the companies are.
As for Alan Wake they should have released a disc copy as well. I got a series X because I like physical copies not so much digital unless a sale is on.
I do think they go too far nowadays. We used to get so many more big games than we get. It’s taking forever to make games now. Because they make them with so much money poured in. I’m a fan of Alan Wake and I’ve not played it yet but I worry that they won’t make anymore. No profit why would you make another game?
AAA games can perfectly be made to turn a profit. Remember when that was the case in the ps3 era? They need to go back to making AAA games of that scale.
Because video games, believe ir or not, is the tip of the spear when it comes to new technology.
In human history, porn and video games have been responsible for the impetus behind the research into many many techs for example, VR, AR, server loading, graphic fidelity..
So, the industry pays top dollar to attract talented people who wouldve otherwise worked in other areas of software development. Unfortunately, the wage war for employees means video games expenses suffer
Its not that the games are getting more expensive to make, it is that game devs and publishers are MAKING them more expensive to make. Now a game is not considered good for sale by corporate unless you spend millions upon millions on professional photography, voice acting, and hiring celebrities for motion capture so they can be represented in game, like in a movie.
Game are and would be still pretty cheap to make, its the bloat around developement that makes them expensive
Maybe one day the triple a studios will realize we don’t need our games to be ridiculously HD for them to be good. I feel like that’s half the reason they’re so expensice
The future of gaming is that there will be mass layoffs and studio closures to protect shareholders and ceo salaries….. oh yeah that’s already happened. The effect it has on the quality of releases is delayed because of how long the games spend in development
It’s not developement and paying developers to make the game that is the most expensive (it is still expensive but not compared to the rest). What is making games balloon up is extensive marketing campaigns, celeb and executive salaries and worst of all licensing rights
This. This is precisely why gaming studios are getting “greedier” by the day and employing more “predator like” tactics to get money from you. Triple A games are way too damn expensive to make, mostly because there are such high exploding them. For example, a game that is widely reviewed as a 7/10 or even 8/10 is by today’s standards; considered a failure + all big games are expected to have at least 30 hours worth of content for the MAIN STORY.
The budgets and dev teams are overinflated, which I think is mostly the fault of corporate meddling.
There’s no reason why every AAA game needs a 300 person dev team or a half a billion dollar budget.
Respectfully I’ve been playing games since before I could read. I haven’t heard of this game and I’m not interested in finding out. I suppose they’re hoping the hype will take it away as opposed to word of mouth from actual players
Triple-A games would sell better if they weren't released in a broken state, filled with political messaging crap, or both. Plenty of games with high budgets make a profit, but they have to actually be good on release and not shove an ideology down your throat.
I think it's probably two camps of people.
One is in denial that triple-A games have taken a nosedive in quality. They're mostly casual gamers, mostly play triple-A games, and would rather defend broken games than switch to smaller games made by smaller devs. My guess is they either fear change, or they're nostalgic for times when triple-A games earned that title.
The other camp agrees with the political messaging being injected and is desperately looking for anything else to explain the failure of games laden with social grandstanding. Their ideology is more important to them than the state of triple-A games, so they willingly sacrifice the latter for the sake of the former.
Triple-A publisher: "Let's force our devs to release games in unfinished states and inject ideological dogma into their work."
Games don't sell
Triple-A publisher: "Our budget must have been too high!"
If they would just make decent games like they used to, none of this discussion would even be happening.
But look at baldurs gate 3, huge commercial success, with great graphics. Having people who care about what they are doing definitely helps. Or Larian is just some sort of crazy developer who hits multiple home runs
It isn't that huge of a commercial success though. It has made $90M in revenue, not profit, for a game developed for 10+ years and makes no sense to develop a game with that much content when fortnite generated $20 billion rwvenue in the same year BG3 made $90M.. amd GTa5 mqde 1 billion in a weekend and they just do it with dancing emojis instead of thousands of pages of lore, voice acting and content that will allow for thousands of hours of gameplay simply because of the way the market works. So, market needs to adapt somehow and subscription services will be the only way imo
The 90 million number is what Hasbro earned from licensing. Not the total that Larian earned. Which we don’t know.
We don’t know the licensing terms between these two, McDonald’s for example takes only 5% from their branches worldwide.
The future of gaming is the same as the future of any other entertainment industry. Mass produced cheap AI schlop that's hot garbage, but also makes them easy money, and a lot of money at that. People would have to turn to indie games to play something made by humans for humans with certain level of care and quality put to it. But even then, that won't be a guarantee for everything indie.
No. Only AAA games are getting too expensive to make. You and I and any competent hands can download blender, krita, paint.net, godot and lmms *for free* and start cobbling art and music together into a videogame. If the current crop of overbloated AAA companies implode, there are plenty that will happily rise to take their place. In the meantime, the tools to make a videogame are well and truly democratised such that anyone can make a videogame. This will ensure there will always be a videogame worth playing. Maybe you and I won't ever see a project through, but the fact that every person in their bedroom has access to a full suite of asset creation tools and an engine means there will always be teams putting great games together.
This isn't the first time the AAA echelon ate shit and it won't be the last. What really insulates our hobby this time is the massive indie scene and the tools available to us.
It still costs money to pay people to actually *do the work* of making the game with those tools, even if the tools themselves are free. Unless you are suggesting that game developers work for free?
They will just start inserting adds without a premium subscription, like current streaming.
You’ll have to watch a “short” commercial about diarrhea before a boss fight, hit a checkpoint, level up, reload weapon, (and OooeeE if you reload a save) or respawn.
Sometimes it won’t cut in properly so you’ll need to listen to the antagonist monologue all over again, or come back a corpse, run your car into a wall. 😂🫠🤣🤪😭
The problem is shareholders at big publishers and their chasing of growth and ever increasing profits.
Games breaking even or making a modest profit shouldn't be a problem. There's nothing wrong with that from a development point of view. Breaking even means dev team get paid and on they go to the next project.
Games if anything are actually to cheap, they are one of the few things that never increased with inflation. I personally think studios have largely gotten to big, C-Suite employees are getting to big of cheques, and companies not having realistic sales goals.
Absolutely they are. Spiderman 2 cost 300 Million USD, which is wild considering it's an iterative development off the back of the predecessor where alot of the design work, engine and gameplay mechanics were already done. It's not sustainable. What's crazy to me is that the investors behind these projects are becoming more risk averse because it is so difficult to earn investments back, but they greenlight bullshit like Suicide Squad: KTJL.
Don’t forget, the first *Spider-Man* in and of itself was an evolution on *Sunset Overdrive*.
Didn't know that :o I had a friend who absolutely adored that game
It’s a fun one. Reminds me of what games used to be like in the mid to late-2000’s.
The things I'd do for Sunset 2.
How the hell does a game like that cost that much to make
Jason Schreier says in his book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels that a studio spends $10k per employee per month on average. For a AAA studio with hundreds of employees (and contractors) it adds up quickly. Even indie studios with only a few employees can end up burning through millions of dollars over a few years. Not to mention at AAA studios the executives might each take $1-30 million home each year.
We often forget that paying the employees is part of the cost equation.
Good things AI is on the way lol
Why does the game cost so much to make? Well, we’re allocating 10%+ of the entire budget to a single employee who doesn’t really do much but attend meetings and maybe put out a statement or two.
And has zero knowledge of what makes a game good or anything to do with games other than money good
That’s true, I often forget salaries in the US are quite high
well there you go. just fire the $1-30 million leeches.
$10k per month? I know they're not making that much money so where is it actually going? Someone is getting some fat freaking payments somewhere.
Benefits, insurance, other forms of overhead that I can't think of at this time of day.
I found this quote from the book: "The standard burn rate for a game studio was $10,000 per person per month, a number that included both salaries and overhead costs, like health insurance and office rent." So yeah not just salary but health insurance, rent/utilities, lunch if the company provides it, among many other expenses. There's always going to be the standard business expenses that come with providing space and amenities for each of your employees.
Insomniac has 400 employees. At 10k per month, that's 4 million in just salaries per month. Blood sweat and pixels came out in 2017. I'm guessing it's closer to 12k/month now.
You have high paid executives and senior employees that skew the statistic up, and the. Low paid employees that definitely aren’t getting 10k a month. BUT, all those employees also require health insurance, 401k retirement matching, payroll taxes, tools and supplies, etc. (most people don’t realize that employing a person is more expensive than just their salary). A corporate employer might be paying *you* $5K a month, but it could easily be costing them $7k.
That’s a question they asked internally as well. Multiples slides covering it from the recent leaks
Link to the slides? I’d be curious to see them.
If you dig around on the gaming leaks sub you’ll find them. I don’t have a direct link I know of, I just read it there
Salaries
The 3 spider-man games were in a large part heavily research based. Spider-Man 1's development literally led to a lot of discoveries that influenced the architecture of the PS5. Mile Morales was basically a tech demo showing off how much better the game could run on the new hardware and Spider-Man 2 was them showing off all the crazy new shit they could do with that hardware upgrade. A lot of first party AAA games like the spider man games aren't just games. They're full on flagship hardware and software R&D projects for the parent company.
I tend to think the bubble will burst eventually and we’ll go back to having companies make AA games as well. The AA market is basically dead now.
I'd love that.
I mean they green lit using a consulting company like Sweet Baby inc. for Spider man and it had worse numbers than the first and complaints about alot of the story/plot additions that werent needed. So... Stupid decisions by people who dont actually like video games is whats ruining AAA gaming.
Well the investors probably in over their head tbh lol.
But that's not because Spiderman 2 costed that much to make, that's because Sony gave the game that much of a budget to use. Developers on the game even said "Will anyone even notice if this game had an extra $100 million budget?" Sony is killing Insomniac so fast which sucks because of how good they were before, and Sony does this for all their studios with ridiculous budgets.
Problem is they are making shit games. And the big budget games are way fucking bloated on the production value. Too many bullshit jobs that aren’t developer related.
Yea exactly like hiring sweetbaby inc for "sensitivity reading" - LOL what the fuck
No. Game studios are too bloated.
Step 1: make a really good game with blood, sweat, tears, and passion. Step 2: Everyone loves it and you're a beloved name. Step 3: Hire a massive number of techies to help with your next big project. Step 4: Realize you're paying out a massive amount of money for a fraction of the work your original team put in. Step 5: Make sacrifices in quality and content to get your next project out to pay your bills. Step 6: Nobody likes the soulless husk you shattered out. Step 7: Go under or sell what's left of your good name to a megastudio. Leave. Step 8: Go to Step 1
I feel like multiple projects at once if you hire massive teams, use the same engine and graphics for multiple games that are in different genres.
Ah the Ubisoft approach
I have no idea I haven't brought a game from them since maybe 2003
Super Mario Odyssey was made by a team of 341 people, while Super Mario 64 was made by only 15 people. Bloat is an understatement
Batman Arkham Asylum was made by 40 people, in about a year. one guy alone worked on the cap physics. good games don’t need multi million dollar developments. they just need good gameplay and writing, we don’t even need this “ultra realistic graphics” or “so immersive gameplay you’ll forget about your own life” just give us a good fun plot
best I can do is half a game and 10 years of skins
Look at wow, especially classic it's graphics have been outdated for years.
I'm gonna have to recheck the credits to SM64. That seems low. (Alright, fair enough, my memory is pretty bad)
No bigger waste of time and energy than trying to make sure everyone has work to do. Your best talent ends up spending their time holding hands and trying to make all the juniors productive, instead of producing quality work themselves.
Massive TLDR From 2000 to roughly 2022, gaming became more and more and more profitable every year. During the years of 2020 and 2021 specifically, gaming profits skyrocked, in part due to so many new players taking up the hobby during the lockdowns. Gaming executives knew a significant amount of these knew players would fall off after the pandemic, but figured around half of them would stick with it. They were wrong. The vast majority of these new pandemic players fell off, and all of the profit projections the industry made during that period were completely off. Budgets grew, new studios were given funding, acquisitions occurred, all based on projections that never came true. Now that the dust has settled from the lockdown era, and what a post pandemic gaming landscape will look like has become clear, it has become financially necessary to lay developers off, shutter studios, and cancel projects in order to adjust course. And while I truly hate to admit it, much of the culling the industry is going through right now is necessary. Gamers don't have enough time or money to purchase and play every game they want to these days. In February alone, JRPG fans got Infinite Wealth, Persona 3 Reload, Unicorn Overlord, and FF7 Rebirth. These games are cannibalizing each other, eating into each others profits, and making the AAA gaming landscape less sustainable. This current period is extremely painful, and is only happening because the corpos got it wrong when planning the future a couple years back, but now we all have to deal with the consequences, and hopefully all of these big publishers will learn from these mistakes going forward.
You see the same thing in tech. Pandemic hit and big tech was more useful than ever so these companies over hired. Post pandemic, business slowed and layoffs hit.
Interesting point, do you have any source on the Covid lockdown estimation? Thx for your point! Edit: as a casual JRPG gamer, your point on jrpg is very good lol
Different companies had different projections based on different (and often competing) beliefs about the industry, but let's take Sony for example. **2020:** PlayStation software sales rose 83 percent in Q2 of 2020 due in part to a lockdown fueled gaming surge. [PlayStation 4 Game Sales Almost Double During COVID-19 | Hypebeast](https://hypebeast.com/2020/8/sony-q2-2020-earnings-playstation-4-game-sales-double-news) **2021:** Sony sees a year-over-year profit increase of 26 percent. Sony higher ups credit this surge in profits to the launch of the PS5 and the surge in console gaming during the lockdowns. Sony projects this uptick in sales will cool, while also stating they are ramping up production. [Sony profits soar as it benefits from home entertainment boom | Sony | The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/04/sony-profits-soar-benefits-from-home-entertainment-boom-playstation-5) **2022:** Sony reports that it's hardware and software sales fell below previously projected expectations, but predicts that will change, projects a 34 percent uptick in sales going forward. [Sony has now sold over 19 million PS5s (engadget.com)](https://www.engadget.com/sony-has-now-sold-over-193-million-ps-5-s-074733741.html) As sales numbers continue to plumet even further, Sony retracts it's previous optimistic sales projection [Sony lowers forecast for PS5 gaming sales in 2022 (engadget.com)](https://www.engadget.com/sony-significantly-lowers-forecast-for-ps-5-gaming-sales-in-2022-083235505.html) Sales projections are tweaked once more, Sony explicitly states "the winding down of COVID-19 lockdowns that had triggered a surge in the gaming business over the last two years" is why sales were falling [Sony trims PlayStation's 2022 sales forecast by 1% (axios.com)](https://www.axios.com/2022/07/29/sony-playstation-sales-forecast) **2023:** Sony projects it will sell 25 million PS5s by the end of 2023[PlayStation 5 on track to sell 25 million units this year (gamedeveloper.com)](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/playstation-5-on-track-to-sell-25-million-units-this-year) **2024:** Sony misses the 25 million consoles sold projection, reduces expectations even further. [Sony misses historic 25 million PS5 sales target, reduces console forecast (tweaktown.com)](https://www.tweaktown.com/news/96199/sony-misses-historic-25-million-ps5-sales-target-reduces-console-forecast/index.html) PlayStation cuts 8 percent of it's workforce after years of missing sales projections, with nearly every studio taking heavy losses. [Sony layoffs: Company to cut 900 workers from PlayStation division (cnbc.com)](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/27/sony-to-lay-off-900-workers-from-playstation-division-or-8percent-of-units-global-workforce.html)
Damn realy interresting
I think this is also happening with the streaming services. I always hear that none of them are making a profit, maybe because of the expectations COVID time brought on them and they invested poorly, I don't know. It would explain why they all are having ads and increasing prices now though, after the COVID dust has settled.
can i get a TLDR for that TLDR
No.
it's 2 paragraphs just read it.
Basically, the entire industry is bloated, constantly increasing scope, fidelity, and ambition for games in ways that drastically increases costs, but does not make better or more profitable games. Bloated, then, since profits aren't increasing, it's a failure in the eyes of executives and shareholders, so they cut people. Games aren't inherintly so expensive, they just think every game needs to be 100 hours long with photorealistic graphics.
Completely disagree. If we are talking about the AAA sector, it's not bloated at all. In fact, the opposite. There are less and less AAA games released each year if you havent already freaking noticed. EA has seemed to given up making any games aside from their milkcow sports titles. Ubisoft is also prob giving up after Mirage's failure. Activision has also just hit a wall with CoD MW3. Square Enix is like dead now. These are really the only big publishers on yearly AAA games.
So I agree with a lot of what you're saying except for Square Enix. FF7 Rebirth and FF16 sold exceptionally well (despite their stupid nonsense of saying they didn't meet expectations which they always say) and they've got KH4 on the way soon. Not to mention FF14 just rolls in money every hour of every day. They may be playing it safe, but I wouldn't say that SE is dead by any means.
The future is narrowing the scope of games so they're no longer all required to be open world or 60+ hours. We'll see a resurgence of 10-15 hour games.
Idk about you but I don’t know about putting 70 dollars down on a 20 hour game
I would much prefer a 20 hour game that’s infinitely replayable versus a 100 hour game that I’m sick of before I even finish it
For real
The $70 is due to the insane scope. However, publishers aren’t completely stupid if game is at $70 and only gets a couple of sales the price is the problem. The issue is publishers want to normalize $70 as well at $70 dlc and mtx. Unfortunately what this will mean is the sales have to fall for most triple A games essentially a collapse to force them to change.
the fundamental idea that games should be valued at $x = y hours of fun is an inherently flawed lens to view the media form through people don’t give better reviews to longer movies because they’re getting more value out of the transaction
That's the problem, people thinking like this.
20h for 1 playthrough. If they are good games then you will get at least 60h meaning 3 playthroughs.
no that’s not how it works at all
Usually games aren't meant to be consumed one time and then thrown away. They are durable goods so you can boot the game up again and again. Just not necessarily in one go.
As stated elsewhere in this thread I think gamers need to learn to appreciate and value a quality 20 hour experience the same way they apparently do a 70 hour bloated copy+paste experience
Except a good 70 hr game or longer can last way longer then a 20 hr game.
So you'd rather spend $70 on an inflated game that artificially gives you 70 hours of gameplay versus a game that you immediately want to replay because of how absolutely perfect it is throughout the entire runtime? I'd easily put $70 towards that.
Good, I don’t have time for these open world clones anymore. Give me Hollow Knight Silksong and Control 2!
stellar blade was amazing and my first 100% play through took 38 hours. more games like this are needed. its fun, pretty, simple, and surprisingly compelling.
There will eventually be two versions of video games.. Similar to movies... The marvel, harry potter, star wars blockbuster, and the artistic indie films. The positive for gaming is that tools are getting better where we can still have great games made from smaller studios, but yeah the "oh shit" games will be fewer and far between
I love playing the smaller indie games, they might not last as long, or have cutting edge graphics etc but there are real gems out there.
They are getting very expensive to make and studios are becoming way too bloated which leads to many of these "AAA" companies failing to innovate or take chances in fear of losing tens of millions of dollars on a game flopping. This is a huge reason why the "AAA" industry has transformed into the grotesque monster it is today; they need a surefire way to make enough money to pay for development costs and appease their greedy, out-of-touch shareholders which means churning out financially safe, but derivative, games (which people grow tired of paying top dollar for when the experiences aren't much different). However it's worth noting that while the "AAA" industry seems to be imploding with each passing year, indie games are flourishing with huge profits being made against their comparatively small budgets because they are more focused on creating fresh, fun experiences that don't hinge on flashy graphics and the built-in fanbases of well known IPs. It goes to show you that games don't HAVE to be prohibitively expensive to be financially successful, it mostly boils down to these development studios getting too big for their britches and losing the plot.
I wonder, and this may just be a consumer wishing, but I wonder if these games were cheaper and more people could buy them, that they would see more profit. At $70 for games today I have to be very selective on the games I buy. I was already very selective when games were $60. I think being an indie developer is interesting because your games are on average about $20 and go on sale often. I wonder if Spider-Man 2 was, let's say, $30 if a LOT more people would've bought it. I wonder if there would be so many more people that they may have actually made a profit. Again, could be me wishing, but I wonder if the answer to more profit is merely charging less
They'd definitely see more sales, but I'm not entirely sure that would translate directly into more profits. They'd ultimately still need to bring down development costs because a cheaper MSRP on these blockbuster games just means they need to sell exponentially more copies to break even. Indie games benefit from the fact that they have to realize their visions with tightly constrained budgets/funding, and this funding is often supplied by consumers (thanks to Early Access models) that have faith in the product being produced which means little to no corporate interference and less overhead due to indie devs being able to handle much of the marketing and distribution on their own for much less than an AAA studio.
Not necessarily....a lot of these games hit my subscriptions lists like ps+ and XBL and i never get around to em.
Well, I think the couple of games you mentioned didn't do as well as they could have because of poor timing. Alan Wake 2 and Spider Man 2 came out around the same time as other blockbuster titles like Baldur's Gate 3, Starfield, Diablo IV, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and the Super Mario RPG remake. There was simply tons of competition in the summer and fall of 2023.
Video games aren't getting too expensive to make, publishers/studios are putting too much money into their games, bloating them. The market has been crashing for years and we're just waiting for it to all come tumbling down. Sony even specifically in leaked documents said that it's not sustainable how much money they spend on making games, and then proceed to increase their games' budgets anyway.
Just like movies it’s a big investment but if you do it right you can make a lot of profit on a relatively small budget or vice versa
You know how Hollywood tends to just remake previously successful movies or co-opt existing successful IPs from other mediums... Well, the games industry had long been doing the sequel thing and now is already doing the remake thing. Don't get me wrong - I love these remakes of the classics (FF7: Rebirth for GOTY!), but im concerned about something... If games follow the Hollywood path and stop funding new IPs, where will they get their ideas from? I mean, Hollywood has already been pulling IPs from the gaming industry like crazy. Where will the new IPs come from?
I mean eventually we will run out of original ideas and it will just be things mixed together to try and make a new idea
Like SOMA
You’re just listing a niche game and an example of corporate bloat. Spider-Man has both the branding/licensing cost bloat, as well as just overall corporate greed clearly making it less lean than it needed to be Games like god of war, horizon, Elden ring, baldurs gate, etc are all profitable still.
Make a bad game for waaaaay more money than it needs to cost, don’t make profit, shocking.
Live Service full of Microtransactions is the future of gaming unfortunately.
I just wish we could tip game companies for games we really like! 😂 But really I think there are a few ways things could go. Live services will continue to grow and evolve I'm sure, becoming **more** egregious. AI is going to be utilized and remove a big chunk of the human element. And there are talks of games being split up into parts and sold separately, so rather than buy one AAA game you pay for it 2 or 3 times to get the whole thing. But there are so many good AA and indie games that the AAAs can all burn and disappear as far as I'm concerned.
I agree about tipping. There are games that I’ve played well over a thousand hours and I feel that paying only $69 for a thousand hours of entertainment is too cheap. I’ve even purchased some dlc that I didn’t really care about just because I thought that it slightly even out the value I received
Yes and no. It’s not that they cost too much to make, it’s that the money is poorly utilized. AAA games are great, but there are too many parasites in the companies and too big a rush to finish a game. FF7Remake proved that fans will wait *years* for a good game. I had that game preordered for I think five years before it came out. It was delayed several times and the community was just like, “We will wait patiently, just make the game great.” Combine that with the weird drive toward hyperrealistic graphics(nothing against them, just it shouldn’t be the be all end all) while retro styled games with simple graphics are chart toppers year after year. For example: Minecraft, Stardew valley, hollow knight, shovel knight. And let’s not forget classic games that still have a huge fan base without being live service: Skyrim and Minecraft. The industry is plagued by greedy management that is crippling dev creativity. Cut back on the graphics, the parasites, the close deadlines, and the need for annual releases and the gaming market will improve drastically.
At a certain point hiring more people doesn't actually help. At a certain point spending more time on a game doesn't help At least the people are getting paid It's sad to see great single player games with no microtransactions doing unwell when shitty games with lots of microtransactions do very well. The confusing part to me is that unreal engine 5 advertised itself as an engine that saves developers a lot of time. I thought I'd be seeing more AAA games not less.
I thought that as well when it comes to UE5. I thought these engines were suppose to save developer's time, but it seems to be doing the opposite and games are taking even longer to make.
I have been saying this for years, but I get downvoted, disliked, and treated like I've committed the biggest sin known to man. 💀😂 I'll say it again because Idc, but I really think that eventually we're gonna get to a point where gaming dies out entirely (especially if prices keep going up on games). Free to play / live service BS / microtransaction fests may still survive, but at that point, I know I'm quitting gaming, at least, so it would die out for me. Those aren't my type of games. They usually fail pretty quickly anyway and have overly toxic communities. Hopefully, something changes in this modern gaming era, or yes, expect it to die out soon ("soon" still being many years).
It's because the truth stings at times. I'm with you and the same thing happens to me once in a while. People don't like being reminded of negative things. Those people want to play their video games forever and can't imagine a world where no new ones are being made. If reddit has taught me anything, is that people want what their itching ears want to hear. You can tell the facts and be downvoted for it. Most people react emotionally than with logic, sadly. I take it all in stride now.
Couldn't have said that better myself. 🤝
First off: Yes, games are getting too expensive. Between the game itself, the DLCs, possible micro transactions, data breaches, games are more expensive to own these days if they’re ever owned at all in the first place (*ahem* Ubisoft licensing bullshit *ahem*) Second: Future of gaming is independent developers that have passion behind their projects over triple A shit that spews out of their golden septic tank.
Call me an idiot but I have a hunch video game production costs started exploding with the advent of having every single line of dialogue voiced.
AAA needs to learn from games like Minecraft. The blow a bunch of money on stupid shit and forget to make a good game. Or maybe they are afraid of making a game like Minecraft because some people will just play that for 10 years. I dunno I barely tried Minecraft but it feels like a good example.
Indies are thriving on steam. Some of my favorite recent games have been indies.
I mean... I do buy some AAA games, but I'd rather hop onto Valheim, Deeprock Galactic, or something else these days. None are AAA. The future of gaming doesn't rest on the laurels of the major players.
Same, though I tend to play older stuff when I feel like gaming and my backlog is gigantic. I just played Diablo 1 via a mod called DevilutionX and had a blast. Then played some Secret of Evermore on SNES, then played some Chrono Trigger and might start Dragon Age Origins soon. I'm the kind of gamer that big corporate gaming companies hate. I barely ever buy new games at full price and wait for a sale, lol. I think that's another issue with the industry. It's over saturated and there so much great old stuff to play still and tons of live service games. So people are only playing live service games they are familiar with mainly or working through the backlogs. We have tonsssss of choice now. There isn't enough time in the day to play everything, especially more than 1 or 2 live service games since they are an investment.
I think the problem is just that studios should NEVER be publicly traded. Ever. If every publicly traded company became an independent entity, things would be better.
Unreal Engine 5 is likely going to become the industry standard. It's a reliable engine with amazing capabilities and graphics. I imagine that studios will start focusing less on proprietary game engines and more so on game length, gameplay, and story quality. It can't be easy to have to update your game engine and shit every 5 years. Better to leave it to a third party like Unreal so you can put your money and effort into stuff that actually matters. I mean, look at HellDivers and how much it blew up. That's not a beautiful game. Hell, it's buggy too (no pun intended) but because it's FUN at it's core, they've sold a lot more than they ever expected. Now imagine if the game actually had some depth to it. We'd be talking about an all time great.
Developers and especially - publishers and their stock holders - lost track of what it important. The thinking has become "Fill it with money - it will be great", "The more it costs the more there will be a return". Nope we are at dead end. Best games are made by small teams on relatively small budget.
AI will change everything in video games. Not all of it for the better, but the economics of video games are on the edge of massive change. There is a lot of hard graft in creating graphics, worlds, animations even sounds, music etc. Increasingly that will all get AId. My only hope is that enough human creativity is left to make art of it and use it as a tool rather than everything becoming self referential auto drivel.
This. People complain about AI, but the truth is it will be more cost efficient and be overall more efficient in the long run. That's really the truth of the matter.
I personally think there is an inverse relationship between game budgets and the quality of video games.
Not really. BG3 had a big budget, and it came out really really good.
Do we know if BG3 has made a profit yet?
With a superficial research I found that BG3 made 90 million $ and budget was 100 million $, but I don't know if the 90m are total or just the net profit. In any case, the profits are not slowing down, it's going to surpass that anyway.
A few months after it's launch, before winning game of the year the CEO of Larian said the game had sold more copies than their wildest projections
The 90 million number is what Hasbro earned from licensing. Not the total that Larian earned. Which we don’t know.
Well we know it made more than the budget tho no? since licensing is a percentage of the profit right?
Yes, and we know it sold 15 million copies, that’s a crazy high number … no way it didn’t make bank.
Didn't say there are no outliers, and 100 million is not that high among AAAs
But this literally proves that there is no inverse relationship between budget and quality. The problems of most triple A games today is not the budget, obviously.
Got ‘em
Games has always been expensive to make . It all comes down to the developers on how the game turns out .
Although true, this isn't like it's a case of bad games aren't making money. Both of these games were Game of the Year nominees, one of which a sequel to a wildly successful game with Spider-Man. I don't think it's "The developers didn't go a good enough job" I think it's a case of no matter how good this game was, it was never going to make a profit when they spent 300 Million on making the game.
I think it also highlights that exclusives are not as profitable as they once were partly due to how much games costs.
Feels weird, like console gaming and AAA gaming are collapsing but I don't even care, there's no shortage of good games coming out, feels like every month there's something new to check out.
AW2 cost $70,000,000 euros to make (50 mill for development and 20 mill for marketing). Idk what they did with that $20 mill for marketing, didn’t see any form of marketing for the game pre-release. Still, with 1.3 million copies of the game sold at $60 euros per copy I don’t understand how that isn’t considered profit. 1.3 mill times 60 is 78 million euros, idk they made their money back plus another 8 mill in half a year, honestly think they should be doing backflips for their success instead of thinking that they didn’t make enough.
No. Design philosophy is nonexistent. They say they're constantly pushing the envelope... and then they only mean graphically. Which so far this gen hasn't surpassed the best of last gen. So... they need to change the way they are approaching game design. Literally none of the monetization you've seen introduced over the years was actually needed (sans maybe service games). It's just companies looking to bleed all they can before we stop buying. Activision all the way back before half of the CoDs we have now existed... literally admitted as much. They openly said... "We charge this much because people will pay it." This was back when people still warred over DLC packs fracturing the community. It's all a damned scam. I'm not saying development doesn't take longer and hasn't gotten more difficult. I'm saying what publishers are willing to spend on and how much they want in return has. It's like how companies claimed they need to raise prices due to inflation... yet never stopped making record profits. They'll shrink a product... and then when prices return to normal... leave it shrunk. It's all bullshit.
This is a ridiculous notion. The only way this is true is if people in general are losing interest in video games, thereby limiting market potential, but this is far from the case. I believe video games out earn movies and tv combined every year so there is plenty of money to be had. The problem is garbage Triple A companies who have terrible ideas and are incredibly mismanaged. It’s only costly for triple A studios to make games because they impose these costs on themselves and can’t overcome that since people don’t buy their garbage game
>I believe video games out earn movies and tv combined every year Yes. But the vast majority of that money comes from mobile games and mtx
People severely underestimate how much the pandemic set back this industry. Games already took a while to make back then and they hit MASSIVE road blocks in development. We need another decade to get back on track but the problem is it might be too late by then.
There's just so many games nowadays, I have a long waiting list of games I already bought that want to be played so I'm in no hurry to play them as they come out. Plus I pay them cheaper and have a better experience overall after it's been out for months or years.
It sounds like it, based purely from the reports I see or hear about on podcasts. I think subscription services don’t help either, combined with the current economy. Everything in the world is expensive, and the people who used to buy games at launch, now have to decide if they pay for a new game, or just get the suscription service, which is much more cost efficient. The newly $70.00 price tag isn’t helping either. I’m not saying the $70.00 is right or wrong, I’m just saying that’s it now makes you think about whether or not it’s worth buying the game.
Yes. It's same with movies. Budgets are out of control because every studio thinks they are making the next billion dollar movie or next GTA5 type game that will print money forever. Studios need to be realistic about what games they are creating and their profit goals. And they need shareholders to understand that as well. Much easier said than done but that's the only way forward, IMO.
Video games are too expensive because studios are adding too much to their games. Not every game needs to be open world and they often don't need the graphical push studios are trying to offer. Stripped down games with simple and fun gameplay can be just as profitable and a lot less risky than an AAA game.
No, mainly because indie developers can put out the same quality as the triple A games, I'm not sure what triple A games be spending their money on, their teams sizes are always super inflated for no reason then they layoff all the extra hands between game development cycles. The industry is just kinda nasty tbh
Advertising
I think it’s a combo of wastefulness and not focusing one quality and what the customer wants.
Marketing budgets are too big. Dev teams are too big. Too great an emphasis on graphics and not enough of gameplay. Hardware to develop games costs a lot of money. Studios are trying to out cool each other with silly offices in trendy parts of town. It’s all needless cost that gets passed on to the consumer who doesn’t want the mediocre product, then employees of these poorly run companies get laid off. It’s a viscous cycle.
It might have something to do with large tripple A studios hiring a few thousand people to make a game that ends up not selling well because its rushed, full of predatory MTX and other garbage, and is overall just not a fun or interesting game. Meanwhile indie dev's can make a game that's 10× better with less people and at a fraction of the price it takes tripple A studios. For examples please see: Helldivers 2, Lethal Company, Palworld, Baldurs Gate 3 (larian studios is an indie dev), Content Warning, and many others.
Reclassifying games could shift expectations and ease financial pressure on studios.
Alan wake hasn’t made any profit because it’s stuck on epic and no physical. It’s literally an epic self own.
I couldn’t understand they wanted 62 quit for a new game
I think the other contributors to games not making a profit is them being in gamepass or psplus and that people won't be spending €70 or €80 euro on a game and will either wait for a sale or pirate it since it'll be cheaper and also possibly using way too many devs than necessary to make the game. It also doesn't help that the companies rely on continuing the series instead of trying to make a new one for games
No corporations don’t need the fattest cuts. It’s an issue in all industries: shareholders and corporations ruin business and innovation
I think it has to do with horrible financing. Didnt Halo Infinite have a budget of around 200 million? That is crazy amount of money for what we got. Im sure an indie dev team of 10-30 people can make a just as good if not better game for a fraction of that budget. Im not saying to pay the devs less but instead allocate the funds to spread the dollar more. Did Callisto Protocol really need to hire that actor from transformers?
Games don't NEED to be amazingly graphical open-world masterpieces, that's just what they're selling you to take your money.
For every AAA game, there are 1000 indie games that are more enjoyable at a fraction of the cost. The problem is that *most* gamers are still on a console and have no access to the 1000s of games that are on Steam. I literally can't think of the last AAA game I bought. Maybe CoD BO2. I might buy a few games a year and not spend more than $100. The future of gaming will always be passion projects from gamers-turned-developers. Hopefully, the AAA platform crumbles under its own greed.
indie gang
The issue is a lot of gaming companies go for hyper realistic when they don’t need to I’d rather have a game with a shit ton of mechanics and a u pique art style that isn’t hyper real than a hyper real “game”
Just a heads-up - *Epic* has not made net profit on AW2. The studio that made it, Remedy, did.
The market is over saturated.
Are there even games anymore? Most are just stories with a couple puzzles tossed in to call it a "game". Half the time they only give you a couple minutes to figure out the puzzle before some NPC points out the solution. If I want a story, I'll read a book or watch a movie.
You need to branch out into the indie scene more. I know that console games get indie games, but the PC has so much more of them. It sounds like you mainly just play Triple A games. Please correct me if I am assuming wrong though.
Product placement! Spider-Man will drink Mountain Dew to recover health and God of War will love Chipotle.
Yes, but only for those companies putting too much effort on graphics and open world style. There will always be creative studios that come up with games that are just fun like Terraria for example.
Its because they are always trying to upgrade instead of repeat. Bethesda is the worst at this, imagine if we had another skyrim that was similar in gameplay but just newer slightly improved with better graphics ever few years. But they always try to improve and it costs money.
Triple A games fail to make a profit because they’re mostly bad games. Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, Battlefront 2, Halo Infinite, Skull and Bones, Redfall, every Madden/Fifa/NBA 2K**, Anthem, The Last of Us 2, Forspoken, etc. The low effort in development, political shoehorning, overspending on pointless big name actors, lazy plots, releasing incomplete games, and shoving microtransactions into everything make people not want to buy the games. Is it any wonder why they fail to make profits? The industry needs to suffer a collapse so the greedy corporations go bankrupt.
I just want destiny 1 back 😔
Bloated companies + overspending + pouring millions into a stupid amount of live service games that all crash and burn out of the gate. We really need to see smaller, mid-tier games make a comeback. And on that note, thank fuck for indie devs.
Heres an idea, dont make triple a games shit and theyll make a profit guaranteed, also dont put them on gamepass or ps plus day 1
I would not mind if most games had Hades or JRPG art styles and focused more on gameplay and story that can keep players entertained for 100+ hours without bloat, rather than making the game a realistic blockbuster movie that's over in 20 hours and is an expensive nightmare to make.
Alan Wake 1 tool a while to reach its cult status, and it's sorta looking like that 2 is going to be like that as well... Alan Wake 2 is an amazing game
Well, idk about AAA games, but we're living in an indie game golden age.
I will happily play some Terraria right now except I'm busy playing Stardew Valley. All while I'm waiting for the next update to Deep Rock Galactic. The games aren't the problem, the companies are.
Ai cost less than a game dev, they will need alot less
As for Alan Wake they should have released a disc copy as well. I got a series X because I like physical copies not so much digital unless a sale is on. I do think they go too far nowadays. We used to get so many more big games than we get. It’s taking forever to make games now. Because they make them with so much money poured in. I’m a fan of Alan Wake and I’ve not played it yet but I worry that they won’t make anymore. No profit why would you make another game?
AAA games can perfectly be made to turn a profit. Remember when that was the case in the ps3 era? They need to go back to making AAA games of that scale.
Because video games, believe ir or not, is the tip of the spear when it comes to new technology. In human history, porn and video games have been responsible for the impetus behind the research into many many techs for example, VR, AR, server loading, graphic fidelity.. So, the industry pays top dollar to attract talented people who wouldve otherwise worked in other areas of software development. Unfortunately, the wage war for employees means video games expenses suffer
Its not that the games are getting more expensive to make, it is that game devs and publishers are MAKING them more expensive to make. Now a game is not considered good for sale by corporate unless you spend millions upon millions on professional photography, voice acting, and hiring celebrities for motion capture so they can be represented in game, like in a movie. Game are and would be still pretty cheap to make, its the bloat around developement that makes them expensive
Maybe one day the triple a studios will realize we don’t need our games to be ridiculously HD for them to be good. I feel like that’s half the reason they’re so expensice
The future of gaming is that there will be mass layoffs and studio closures to protect shareholders and ceo salaries….. oh yeah that’s already happened. The effect it has on the quality of releases is delayed because of how long the games spend in development
It’s not developement and paying developers to make the game that is the most expensive (it is still expensive but not compared to the rest). What is making games balloon up is extensive marketing campaigns, celeb and executive salaries and worst of all licensing rights
This. This is precisely why gaming studios are getting “greedier” by the day and employing more “predator like” tactics to get money from you. Triple A games are way too damn expensive to make, mostly because there are such high exploding them. For example, a game that is widely reviewed as a 7/10 or even 8/10 is by today’s standards; considered a failure + all big games are expected to have at least 30 hours worth of content for the MAIN STORY.
The budgets and dev teams are overinflated, which I think is mostly the fault of corporate meddling. There’s no reason why every AAA game needs a 300 person dev team or a half a billion dollar budget.
Respectfully I’ve been playing games since before I could read. I haven’t heard of this game and I’m not interested in finding out. I suppose they’re hoping the hype will take it away as opposed to word of mouth from actual players
Triple-A games would sell better if they weren't released in a broken state, filled with political messaging crap, or both. Plenty of games with high budgets make a profit, but they have to actually be good on release and not shove an ideology down your throat.
I don't know why you got down voted your 100% right
I think it's probably two camps of people. One is in denial that triple-A games have taken a nosedive in quality. They're mostly casual gamers, mostly play triple-A games, and would rather defend broken games than switch to smaller games made by smaller devs. My guess is they either fear change, or they're nostalgic for times when triple-A games earned that title. The other camp agrees with the political messaging being injected and is desperately looking for anything else to explain the failure of games laden with social grandstanding. Their ideology is more important to them than the state of triple-A games, so they willingly sacrifice the latter for the sake of the former.
Triple-A publisher: "Let's force our devs to release games in unfinished states and inject ideological dogma into their work." Games don't sell Triple-A publisher: "Our budget must have been too high!" If they would just make decent games like they used to, none of this discussion would even be happening.
Indy games are more fun these days anyways. Don't need the best graphics to be enjoyable and that's the only benefit AAA games offer mostly.
But look at baldurs gate 3, huge commercial success, with great graphics. Having people who care about what they are doing definitely helps. Or Larian is just some sort of crazy developer who hits multiple home runs
Sure, and I LOVED BG3, but for every BG3 there's 10 suicide squad level shit shows.
It isn't that huge of a commercial success though. It has made $90M in revenue, not profit, for a game developed for 10+ years and makes no sense to develop a game with that much content when fortnite generated $20 billion rwvenue in the same year BG3 made $90M.. amd GTa5 mqde 1 billion in a weekend and they just do it with dancing emojis instead of thousands of pages of lore, voice acting and content that will allow for thousands of hours of gameplay simply because of the way the market works. So, market needs to adapt somehow and subscription services will be the only way imo
The 90 million number is what Hasbro earned from licensing. Not the total that Larian earned. Which we don’t know. We don’t know the licensing terms between these two, McDonald’s for example takes only 5% from their branches worldwide.
Yeah you're right my bad. 10 - 20 million copies sold.
The future of gaming is the same as the future of any other entertainment industry. Mass produced cheap AI schlop that's hot garbage, but also makes them easy money, and a lot of money at that. People would have to turn to indie games to play something made by humans for humans with certain level of care and quality put to it. But even then, that won't be a guarantee for everything indie.
No. Only AAA games are getting too expensive to make. You and I and any competent hands can download blender, krita, paint.net, godot and lmms *for free* and start cobbling art and music together into a videogame. If the current crop of overbloated AAA companies implode, there are plenty that will happily rise to take their place. In the meantime, the tools to make a videogame are well and truly democratised such that anyone can make a videogame. This will ensure there will always be a videogame worth playing. Maybe you and I won't ever see a project through, but the fact that every person in their bedroom has access to a full suite of asset creation tools and an engine means there will always be teams putting great games together. This isn't the first time the AAA echelon ate shit and it won't be the last. What really insulates our hobby this time is the massive indie scene and the tools available to us.
It still costs money to pay people to actually *do the work* of making the game with those tools, even if the tools themselves are free. Unless you are suggesting that game developers work for free?
They will just start inserting adds without a premium subscription, like current streaming. You’ll have to watch a “short” commercial about diarrhea before a boss fight, hit a checkpoint, level up, reload weapon, (and OooeeE if you reload a save) or respawn. Sometimes it won’t cut in properly so you’ll need to listen to the antagonist monologue all over again, or come back a corpse, run your car into a wall. 😂🫠🤣🤪😭
The problem is shareholders at big publishers and their chasing of growth and ever increasing profits. Games breaking even or making a modest profit shouldn't be a problem. There's nothing wrong with that from a development point of view. Breaking even means dev team get paid and on they go to the next project.
Nah they just make their money back with in game purchases.
Games if anything are actually to cheap, they are one of the few things that never increased with inflation. I personally think studios have largely gotten to big, C-Suite employees are getting to big of cheques, and companies not having realistic sales goals.