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.
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.