Nope nope nope. Not going to get me a 3rd time
Got me once with No Mans Sky…got me twice with Cyberpunk 2077
No game no hype.
I blame micro transactions, it uses addiction and predatory tactics.
It’s less that making unique games are risky, and more that there are less risky and more lucrative options available.
Couple that with greedy people finally recognizing gaming as another thing to get perpetual growth from and you get what we have today.
You don’t necessarily start losing people. Every commercial medium is like this. Seeking commercial success comes with an avalanche of self-censorship and cargo cultism. You’re casting the widest possible net and the product that you produce is only evaluated in terms of revenue. Unfortunately, certain kinds of really bad art sell very well.
His latest game looks like yet another version of Bioshock, so that’s kind of a funny thing to say.
There’s a logical fallacy in here somewhere. I don’t think he’s wrong, AAA is much more risk adverse and we haven’t been seeing as many innovative high budget hits IMO but rather call of duty… 12? Madden 24, NBA and fortnight whatever in the top games section.
I think there’s room for both to exist, it’s okay to have sequels but would be nice to also let people be creative with a budget.
No joke, this year’s CoD is the 21st game in the series. (Main series, that is. I don’t even want to know what the grand total including spinoffs/handheld/mobile is.)
I was trying to place the screencap in one of the bioshocks.
The marvel reference is on point, because it’s the exact same thing that’s happened to movies.
To be fair. Taking a risk on something unknown, with half a billion dollars on the line, isn’t smart.
Half a billion dollars ? I don’t see the risk here
then don’t make a half a billion dollar game. red dead 2 would have been fine without dynamically sized horse balls. a lot of people (read: me) don’t care about hyper realistic graphics in games. i’d rather play something with a cool aesthetic that runs smoothly instead of something that looks like a disney live action remake and makes my computer beg for mercy. indie developers have been eating everyone’s dinner recently with a never ending stream of incredible and beautiful looking games. i’m sure it’s possible to make a good game for less than 500 million dollars and with less than 8 years of development time.
i mean thats why you have AA games take the risk first. thr problem is most video games have flushed out most of their smaller dev teams in favor of mainly big AAA budget titles. Thats whats mostly plagued sony for example in the past 2 years, where the only major release was like Spiderman 2, while companies need more teams like Team Asobi releasing smaller shit.
nintendo does it by having cadences and smaller teams working on smaller stuff (e.g Kirby, Mario spinoffs/sports). which bigger players like sony and Microsoft do not do enough
Tbf, a lot of major AAA companies nowadays can probably afford to have a $500m loss. The thing that gets me, however, is that it wouldn’t even be a $500m loss. Just because you don’t make money doesn’t mean it’s a total loss, it just means you didn’t cover your costs.
At what point is the loss worth the knowledge of what did or didn’t work?
At what point is the loss worth having made the thing, because you were doing something no one else had done on a massive budget, even though you didn’t cover your original costs?
Is $50m a reasonable loss?
$100m?
That’s where things get complicated and if all you do is look at spreadsheets then you’re going to miss the fact that your attempt was still worth something, even if it didn’t actually make money.
These companies tend to have cash cows to offset the losses too. Keep developing and supporting your CoDs, Candy Crushes, and League of Legends so you can drop $500m on a high-risk, high-reward release. C’mon, do something interesting… Are you really unable to make up for a potential +$100m loss when you have Candy Crush making billions for you?
I think, a big part of the problem is that much of the cost is sunken into things that don’t really teach you too much. The basic game concept prototype can probably be developed for less than $10m. You do still learn some things by making really nice graphics. But then making those nice graphics as well as sounds, voice recordings and world design for your massive open world, that’s when you’re just doing more of the same at quite the scale.
That’s the major issue with AAA these day. Making game is gambling, you gonna spend all those millions for 3 to 5 years making the thing you think is good, only turn out to be underwhelming or a flop. Publisher is very weary about all these risk so they put their money on safe bet, which left us with bland games.
Actually that’s the major issue with game development, even indie. What we see is the success, there’s a tons of game that tried to be innovative and creative but failed.
The problem with consumers is they are too risk adverse
You can’t play every game so why spend money on something you don’t know if you’d like?
To be fair, you can just return it on Steam if you play less than 2 hours. So you can try every single game first if you really wanted to.
I think that isn‘t really the case though, is it?
Sure, there are those, who just play the latest Call Of Duty each year. But the success of very innovative games like Balatro, Papers Please, Vampire Survivors or even Breath of the Wild shows, that many consumers crave innovation, if it turns out to be fun innovation.
This also shows that these games can be found and appreciated, even if they‘re made by totally unknown people or studios.
They’re oddities not the norm unfortunately, this exists even within the same genre to an extent so I think asking people to leave the genre entirely is difficult to pull off
I don’t think BOTW counts for this though
Sorry, I’m not sure if I’m getting your point. I don’t think anyone’s asking anyone to leave their favorite genre for innovation’s sake. I just think these games show, that customers are totally ready to spend money on innovative games, even if they’re certainly rarer than less innovative titles. So I find it hard calling consumers risk adverse, in general.
I think they’re just adverse to games which aren’t fun, which could arguably be more common with more innovative titles, but, seeing Ubisoft’s downfall over the past few years, I’d argue that samey, “safe” games seem to be very low the average consumer’s fun scale as well.
I think game enthusiasts (i.e. people hanging on the Internet to talk about games) don’t realize the difference in sales for a successful innovative game (Stardew Valley for example) and mainstream games… Sure Stardew sold 40m copies since 2016, but CoD sells 10m+ every year!
