Sanunes
N6
Just a flip of the coin.
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Prime Posts: 4392
Prime Likes: 882
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Just a flip of the coin.
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Post by Sanunes on Feb 5, 2018 16:37:24 GMT
Sorry, a conspiracy video on YouTube is not enough for me to change my opinion on the cost of game development. Agree. 'Extra Credits' have solid video game industry credentials. I'll take their word over a ranty video... AskAGameDev also did an article as well. I have posted it before, but if someone hasn't an wants to here is the link. LinkBetween Extra Credits and AskAGameDev there just seems to be a large gap between the people that seem to be taking the analytical approach and the emotional approach when seeing these YouTube videos.
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Post by SofaJockey on Feb 5, 2018 17:20:20 GMT
Between Extra Credits and AskAGameDev there just seems to be a large gap between the people that seem to be taking the analytical approach and the emotional approach when seeing these YouTube videos. Perhaps the internet is suffering from a loss of 'nuance'?
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Post by Link"Guess"ski on Feb 5, 2018 18:11:51 GMT
If video games are so expensive and consumers are angry about the ways they alleviate it, just make less expensive games ffs. You can have all this technical fidelity but with smaller scopes of content. The constant one-upmanship of gaming as it develops is pretty self-harming.
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Post by SofaJockey on Feb 5, 2018 18:52:06 GMT
If video games are so expensive and consumers are angry about the ways they alleviate it, just make less expensive games ffs. You can have all this technical fidelity but with smaller scopes of content. The constant one-upmanship of gaming as it develops is pretty self-harming. In the same way that Skyrim became 'let's make something like that...' I expect The Witcher III has become the new model of good (Assassin's Creed Origins is said to have borrowed from it). I'd be surprised if the AAA open worlds get smaller... Though mid-range developers may do just as you suggest.
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Post by ShadowAngel on Feb 5, 2018 18:53:43 GMT
If video games are so expensive and consumers are angry about the ways they alleviate it, just make less expensive games ffs. You can have all this technical fidelity but with smaller scopes of content. The constant one-upmanship of gaming as it develops is pretty self-harming. What about the gamer mindset that you need more and more every game? Time is the most valuable resource to a developer and they don't get enough of that when deadlines need met and players continuously asking for more. I think if they were to cut back on content, you'll easily find people calling them out on regressing and going backwards. This is an age where people want endless amounts of content to play and developers just aren't going to meet that. It's because of that mindset that developers are seen making comments on how reveling is "hard" and why certain expectations just aren't realistic. There are people expecting fixes to a game/DLC/expansion the day it comes out, that isn't going to happen and then you have those people bitching for every day that issue is plaguing them. to me it's because of the gamers overall wanting more and more, that you'll find a lot of quantity over quality.
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Sanunes
N6
Just a flip of the coin.
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Prime Posts: 4392
Prime Likes: 882
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Just a flip of the coin.
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Post by Sanunes on Feb 5, 2018 18:55:41 GMT
If video games are so expensive and consumers are angry about the ways they alleviate it, just make less expensive games ffs. You can have all this technical fidelity but with smaller scopes of content. The constant one-upmanship of gaming as it develops is pretty self-harming. Where can they cut back costs aside from firing people? Its not like they can move studios to China and pay them less in salaries and people have extremely high expectations on what a game should look like. Even look at Andromeda how big a deal people made out of bad facial animations. Even making a game smaller doesn't mean it is a success either. In that post from AskAGameDev he mentions that to his knowledge Hellblade didn't make a profit and it was leaving the three month period where a game makes the majority of its money. The increased costs in game development is that there are more and more features being added to games and that means the increases in costs is associated with the cost of labor. Back with the PS2 era of games it was about 25 people or so on a team and now it is hundreds to try and give consumers what they want. 4K graphics means that you need more people to do asks for the job is larger and more complex then a 8-bit game. Its things like that.
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Sanunes
N6
Just a flip of the coin.
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Prime Posts: 4392
Prime Likes: 882
Posts: 5,917 Likes: 8,949
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Just a flip of the coin.
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Post by Sanunes on Feb 5, 2018 18:57:36 GMT
If video games are so expensive and consumers are angry about the ways they alleviate it, just make less expensive games ffs. You can have all this technical fidelity but with smaller scopes of content. The constant one-upmanship of gaming as it develops is pretty self-harming. In the same way that Skyrim became 'let's make something like that...' I expect The Witcher III has become the new model of good (Assassin's Creed Origins is said to have borrowed from it). I'd be surprised if the AAA open worlds get smaller... Though mid-range developers may do just as you suggest. I don't even think smaller sized developers are going to be able to meet those expectations. You can see them struggling now as well as they try and balance a smaller budget and making a game that consumers will actually buy instead of thumbing their nose at it.
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Post by rras1994 on Feb 5, 2018 18:58:52 GMT
If video games are so expensive and consumers are angry about the ways they alleviate it, just make less expensive games ffs. You can have all this technical fidelity but with smaller scopes of content. The constant one-upmanship of gaming as it develops is pretty self-harming. Where can they cut back costs aside from firing people? Its not like they can move studios to China and pay them less in salaries and people have extremely high expectations on what a game should look like. Even look at Andromeda how big a deal people made out of bad facial animations. Even making a game smaller doesn't mean it is a success either. In that post from AskAGameDev he mentions that to his knowledge Hellblade didn't make a profit and it was leaving the three month period where a game makes the majority of its money. The increased costs in game development is that there are more and more features being added to games and that means the increases in costs is associated with the cost of labor. Back with the PS2 era of games it was about 25 people or so on a team and now it is hundreds to try and give consumers what they want. 4K graphics means that you need more people to do asks for the job is larger and more complex then a 8-bit game. Its things like that. Hellblade broke even after 3 months, it was in their development blog, and I think it was actually ahead of what they expected. But you are right that the majourity of sales happen in 3 months and since Hellblade was such a critical success, got a lot of promotion and won awards, it's a bit disheartening it took 3 months to breakeven. It shouldn't take making a near perfect game for the genre to just breakeven.
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Post by Lazarillo on Feb 5, 2018 19:03:56 GMT
What about the gamer mindset that you need more and more every game? Time is the most valuable resource to a developer and they don't get enough of that when deadlines need met and players continuously asking for more. I think if they were to cut back on content, you'll easily find people calling them out on regressing and going backwards. This is an age where people want endless amounts of content to play and developers just aren't going to meet that. It's because of that mindset that developers are seen making comments on how reveling is "hard" and why certain expectations just aren't realistic. There are people expecting fixes to a game/DLC/expansion the day it comes out, that isn't going to happen and then you have those people bitching for every day that issue is plaguing them. Link"Guess"ski makes a really good, point, IMO. The problem isn't necessarily that "video games can't be produced at a cost that reflects the cost they are sold for", but rather "video games are being produced at high cost even though they don't need to be". Unfortunately, for the reasons you note, any attempt to curtail that is basically closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. That doesn't mean the games-as-service model is a good one. Personally, I think it's crap. But I admit I don't have a better answer that would fix things without something on the scale of a 1983-level crash of the industry.
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simit
N3
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
XBL Gamertag: Chris2k30
PSN: Simit2k30
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Post by simit on Feb 5, 2018 22:11:39 GMT
Game as a service, tbh i like the idea an feel like a number of games/franchisees could/can benefit from it not to mention fans benefiting from a mmo style updat/dlc/expansion release, thats not to say that currently its been done right but i do like the idea, i prefer the idea of exploring a game solo sp style with noone else or opting in to co-op for matchmaking harder content or just exploring with a friend an then if i like the game knowing it be supported with updates an new content for x amount of years is nothing but good.
The Division i felt out done Destiny in the regard of the world is your own an only time you seen others was in safehouses, dark zone or matchmaking whereas, to me, Destiny leaned more on mmo an Divison was more sp with alot of co-op features i gotto say i preferred Divisons approach. Thats no to say Destinys way was bad, it wasn't, there a argument for it in dynamic events which can be great experiences with random ppl just taking down some random boss/elite spawns but someone stealing yer spawns can get annoying, hence i prefer Division approach.
Another interesting "wait an see" how Anthem does it tbh, either is fine with me but obviously with it being BioWare i'd prefer The Division approach with possibility of recruiting npc to join you possibly from a freelace corp or something
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Sanunes
N6
Just a flip of the coin.
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Prime Posts: 4392
Prime Likes: 882
Posts: 5,917 Likes: 8,949
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Just a flip of the coin.
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Post by Sanunes on Feb 5, 2018 22:49:45 GMT
Game as a service, tbh i like the idea an feel like a number of games/franchisees could/can benefit from it not to mention fans benefiting from a mmo style updat/dlc/expansion release, thats not to say that currently its been done right but i do like the idea, i prefer the idea of exploring a game solo sp style with noone else or opting in to co-op for matchmaking harder content or just exploring with a friend an then if i like the game knowing it be supported with updates an new content for x amount of years is nothing but good. The Division i felt out done Destiny in the regard of the world is your own an only time you seen others was in safehouses, dark zone or matchmaking whereas, to me, Destiny leaned more on mmo an Divison was more sp with alot of co-op features i gotto say i preferred Divisons approach. Thats no to say Destinys way was bad, it wasn't, there a argument for it in dynamic events which can be great experiences with random ppl just taking down some random boss/elite spawns but someone stealing yer spawns can get annoying, hence i prefer Division approach. Another interesting "wait an see" how Anthem does it tbh, either is fine with me but obviously with it being BioWare i'd prefer The Division approach with possibility of recruiting npc to join you possibly from a freelace corp or something The funny thing from what I have been seeing is that the internet is interpreting games as a service differently then developers. I have seen a couple of articles (the one I remember the most is from AskAGameDev) and developers seem to consider games as a service to be a non-patch update to the game. So things like the weekly events in ME3MP / MEAMP or maybe even The Keep from Dragon Age: Inquisition. If that is how they see it, I think it could be really interesting for then it would have some random events or at least goals to complete and for some people that is enough to keep playing if they game is good enough. I do agree, I think right now The Division is a better game then Destiny so I would rather see it be more like The Division, but in reality I would want it to be what BioWare wants to make. My biggest problem with Destiny 2 when I was playing it was that even in the "social areas" I felt completely alone for they did their best to cut all means of contact to prevent harassment which made those areas fairly useless with a really long wait time. One thing with The Division is they could have had event areas that you would reach and could see other players. If you played Destiny 2 think of the public events, but hopefully you can see more then 10 people.
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simit
N3
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
XBL Gamertag: Chris2k30
PSN: Simit2k30
Posts: 790 Likes: 1,042
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Post by simit on Feb 5, 2018 23:21:01 GMT
Yeah FF15 had like a weekly mission an it was ok to lvl up other characters but just like The Divison, leaderboards were always full of ppl glitching/cheesing to get the top spots so makes me not to interested in that sort of "live service", take leaderboards out an replace with tier system an approach i think i'd prefer. Defer want BioWare to have there own take on this, more variety the better tbh, funny thing is i played Desting an went through all dlc an enjoyed it but D2 from moment i seen it never interested me, if i pick it up it prob be when all dlc been released an you can buy it all for £25 lol.
I mind when supply drops for season pass folks was added to Divison all i could think was notification like that for something like "enemies are massing" public event would've been awesome, take the rogue system out an as the dark zone setup i'd love to see in main pve zones, i guess west side peer lol
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Post by therevanchist25 on Feb 6, 2018 8:19:12 GMT
Costs are being cut all over the place in the industry. Digital Distribution alone is saving them likely hundreds of millions, because physical disk expenses ate probably about 40% of the profit per unit sold. These companies also massively overspend on Marketing, often their marketing budgets are just as high, or higher than the actual cost of the game. These companies are clearly incompetent at marketing since the games they spend all this marketing on, are all the big name titles are already guaranteed money makers like COD, Battlefield, Assassin's Creed etc. IPs and franchises that will make these companies dump trucks full of money regardless of marketing. But when these companies try to publish a fresh idea, or an indie title, they give it almost no marketing at all, despite the fact it's a game that actually NEEDs proper marketing, and these titles often flop due to a lack of exposure then they point out how fans don't enjoy said title because no one bought it and go back to making more remakes and sequels.
Likewise the Licensing of Third Party game engines has become astronomically cheaper over the years, because most of these companies don't make their own Engines anymore. Remember when Square would just make New Engines all the time for basically no reason? Yea, no one does that now, because they all use the same handful of engines now. Likewise, these companies spend excessive millions on "Hollywood Actors" to come into their games to do Voice Overs, taking jobs away from real voice actors, who 95% of the time, are vastly superior at doing voice work and get paid less than a tenth what these big name Hollywood guys get, and I want to point now that absolutely no one even asks for these fancy Hollywood actors to be in these games, that's just something these companies decided on their own. That is 100% an expense they don't need make. No wonder Voice Actors are on strike.
Also, remember awhile back when Nintendo was struggling financially? What was the first thing Satoru Iwata did? he took responsibility for it and gave himself a massive pay cut, rather than layoff like 100 employees. Never mind how these Publishers and Studios often manipulate the 90 day probation system and constantly lay people off before 90 days to avoid having to give these people benefits like Health insurance, which is a big reason you often see such high turnover across the industry. Then lets not forget how Ubisoft said how they have to hire like 900 people in order make these giant open world games as if this is some unreasonable burden for them. Despite the fact Ubisoft said themselves at the start of this Generation that "Open World is the future" and made a knowing commitment to basically doing nothing but Open World. They made the choice to go in that direction when they didn't have to. So if making these open world games are simply not profitable, then why did you declare them to be the future and commit you're entire business future to the en devour? Simple, because they ARE profitable, they make Ubisoft money hand over fist, they wouldn't do it otherwise, unless of course Ubisoft are all brain dead and are utter buffoons as businessmen, which I suppose is possible.
Lastly, the problem of graphical fidelity. No one asked for these companies to focus on graphics to the exclusion of everything else. No one demanded these things originally. Even now I question it's value, with games like Minecraft and Stardew Valley and Undertale making money by the truck loads. Not one single person I know demands that Lara Croft's head contain 1000 individually animated strands of hair. Things like that are utterly unimportant fluff that no one asks for. It is once again something the industry itself decided was important, and went out of it's way to program the public into believing this is important. IF, and imo it is a massive if. IF these companies truly barely break even, barely get by, then everyone in corporate positions should be fired, because they obviously have no idea how to manage money and run a company properly. All of their problems, if any, are all self inflicted, and I see no reason why we as consumers should pay the price for it.
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Post by SofaJockey on Feb 6, 2018 10:21:44 GMT
astly, the problem of graphical fidelity. No one asked for these companies to focus on graphics to the exclusion of everything else. No one demanded these things originally. 'My face hurts?'People were screaming at CDPR when The Witcher III launched because of claims the grass and the bricks in 'The Wall' were graphically downgraded. Graphics in Anthem will need to be first-rate to avoid getting memed to death.
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Post by therevanchist25 on Feb 6, 2018 11:05:06 GMT
astly, the problem of graphical fidelity. No one asked for these companies to focus on graphics to the exclusion of everything else. No one demanded these things originally. 'My face hurts?'People were screaming at CDPR when The Witcher III launched because of claims the grass and the bricks in 'The Wall' were graphically downgraded. Graphics in Anthem will need to be first-rate to avoid getting memed to death. I said originally, as in, decades ago. The public has already been conditioned, by these companies, to believe graphics is God. As an aside, My Face Hurts is a meme, because of lack of animation, and because that line is pants on head retarded, not because we can't count the individual pores on her skin. No logically thinking individual can claim Frostbite is an ugly engine. Andromeda is not ugly, and that is not why it was mocked.
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Sanunes
N6
Just a flip of the coin.
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Prime Posts: 4392
Prime Likes: 882
Posts: 5,917 Likes: 8,949
inherit
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Just a flip of the coin.
5,917
Sept 13, 2016 11:51:12 GMT
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Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda, SWTOR, Anthem, Mass Effect Legendary Edition
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Post by Sanunes on Feb 6, 2018 13:17:40 GMT
Costs are being cut all over the place in the industry. Digital Distribution alone is saving them likely hundreds of millions, because physical disk expenses ate probably about 40% of the profit per unit sold. These companies also massively overspend on Marketing, often their marketing budgets are just as high, or higher than the actual cost of the game. These companies are clearly incompetent at marketing since the games they spend all this marketing on, are all the big name titles are already guaranteed money makers like COD, Battlefield, Assassin's Creed etc. IPs and franchises that will make these companies dump trucks full of money regardless of marketing. But when these companies try to publish a fresh idea, or an indie title, they give it almost no marketing at all, despite the fact it's a game that actually NEEDs proper marketing, and these titles often flop due to a lack of exposure then they point out how fans don't enjoy said title because no one bought it and go back to making more remakes and sequels. Likewise the Licensing of Third Party game engines has become astronomically cheaper over the years, because most of these companies don't make their own Engines anymore. Remember when Square would just make New Engines all the time for basically no reason? Yea, no one does that now, because they all use the same handful of engines now. Likewise, these companies spend excessive millions on "Hollywood Actors" to come into their games to do Voice Overs, taking jobs away from real voice actors, who 95% of the time, are vastly superior at doing voice work and get paid less than a tenth what these big name Hollywood guys get, and I want to point now that absolutely no one even asks for these fancy Hollywood actors to be in these games, that's just something these companies decided on their own. That is 100% an expense they don't need make. No wonder Voice Actors are on strike. Also, remember awhile back when Nintendo was struggling financially? What was the first thing Satoru Iwata did? he took responsibility for it and gave himself a massive pay cut, rather than layoff like 100 employees. Never mind how these Publishers and Studios often manipulate the 90 day probation system and constantly lay people off before 90 days to avoid having to give these people benefits like Health insurance, which is a big reason you often see such high turnover across the industry. Then lets not forget how Ubisoft said how they have to hire like 900 people in order make these giant open world games as if this is some unreasonable burden for them. Despite the fact Ubisoft said themselves at the start of this Generation that "Open World is the future" and made a knowing commitment to basically doing nothing but Open World. They made the choice to go in that direction when they didn't have to. So if making these open world games are simply not profitable, then why did you declare them to be the future and commit you're entire business future to the en devour? Simple, because they ARE profitable, they make Ubisoft money hand over fist, they wouldn't do it otherwise, unless of course Ubisoft are all brain dead and are utter buffoons as businessmen, which I suppose is possible. Lastly, the problem of graphical fidelity. No one asked for these companies to focus on graphics to the exclusion of everything else. No one demanded these things originally. Even now I question it's value, with games like Minecraft and Stardew Valley and Undertale making money by the truck loads. Not one single person I know demands that Lara Croft's head contain 1000 individually animated strands of hair. Things like that are utterly unimportant fluff that no one asks for. It is once again something the industry itself decided was important, and went out of it's way to program the public into believing this is important. IF, and imo it is a massive if. IF these companies truly barely break even, barely get by, then everyone in corporate positions should be fired, because they obviously have no idea how to manage money and run a company properly. All of their problems, if any, are all self inflicted, and I see no reason why we as consumers should pay the price for it. Just because games might save an additional 20% because of going digital it doesn't mean that it is able to keep up with rising costs of labor. As far as marketing goes that is what happens when you invest millions of dollars in a product, they want people to know about it. Otherwise going by your logic any of the popular movie studios out there don't know anything about marketing either. Things like celebrity voice actors are an added expense, but do you really think they would be spending the money if it wasn't paying off for them? They are regularly made to be out to be bean counters and only interested in making money. So do you think they wouldn't have tested it out to make sure they weren't getting a profit off of using a celebrity instead of an average voice actor. Studios aren't making their engines anymore, Frostbite is something Dice has been making for years, but now instead of one studio making a game engine its an entire publisher that uses it. Could they save money by going to Unreal or one of the other engines, again I would say they have done the math. Its just like when a movie studio spends tens of millions of dollars on getting someone like Dwayne Johnson, he is a known quantity to drive ticket sales, pretty sure they view celebrity voice actors the same way. The reason why they committed to making open world games is first, I am not sure if you were on the old BSN, but there were a lot of people stating that Open World is where BioWare games needed to go or some morons would make comments about how EA should give the Dragon Age/Mass Effect IPs to Bethesda because they are the only company that can make a good RPG (I guess that would be CDPR now). Again market research is the problem here, they are doing math and see what they think people are going to want to buy. The mistake is that it is a survey for right now and not three years into the future. As far as laying people off, with EA closing two studios I have not heard of anyone being fired outside of a couple specific people, the rest have been moved around to other studios such as Motive which if I recall correctly has taken the majority of people from BioWare Montreal. With how the YouTube creator section works if EA fired or laid off hundreds of people I am pretty sure people would make videos about it decrying how horrible they are since we saw that with Microsoft and their studio closings. Graphic fidelity was a huge ask and you see it all over the place. Do you think the whole Facial Animation debacle wasn't about fidelity when people bitched and moaned about how bad the animations were and how bad they looked. After the release of Mass Effect 2 and 3 there were plenty of people whining about how "they look so last generation". Just because console developers are pushing it now it doesn't mean that people were not asking for it. The problem with your comparison is that Nintendo as a whole was doing badly and losing money from its coffers, EA and other publishers are protecting themselves with risk and if anything they would pay the CEOs more if they could guarantee that it would lessen the risk of development. If EA was losing money you would probably see salaries being cut, but that isn't the situation.
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Post by Kappa Neko on Feb 6, 2018 13:18:29 GMT
Where can they cut back costs aside from firing people? Its not like they can move studios to China and pay them less in salaries and people have extremely high expectations on what a game should look like. Even look at Andromeda how big a deal people made out of bad facial animations. Even making a game smaller doesn't mean it is a success either. In that post from AskAGameDev he mentions that to his knowledge Hellblade didn't make a profit and it was leaving the three month period where a game makes the majority of its money. Hellblade broke even after 3 months, it was in their development blog, and I think it was actually ahead of what they expected. But you are right that the majourity of sales happen in 3 months and since Hellblade was such a critical success, got a lot of promotion and won awards, it's a bit disheartening it took 3 months to breakeven. It shouldn't take making a near perfect game for the genre to just breakeven. THIS is the real problem. That no matter how well made a game is, big franchise titles are the ones that reap in all the money even when they are shoddy cash grabs designed to cheat the player out of their money. Paradoxically, the lower the quality, the better something sells. Look at all the fast food chains. People like familiar things, they like popular things. Just like developers, consumers don't really like taking a gamble either. Stick to what you know and previously enjoyed. If consumers themselves do not cherish a quality product that's not mainstream, why should developers/publishers risk a huge financial loss? Chances are this creative grand idea they had won't sell. Even if the game ends up being praised in reviews, that means little from a business perspective. If most people don't buy, your game was a failure. I've seen so many great games with poor sales. Developers forced out of business because the majority would rather eat their Call of Duty burgers. I kickstarted a game called Bloom: Memories 5 (!) years ago and still receive depressing updates how they (two people left, I think) don't have enough money and the demo they released recently was downloaded like 200 times, mostly by the press. Nobody cares about a small indie game with beautiful art design. So the original creator moved in with her parents again because she wants to finish that game that will never make a profit. And yet, knowing all this I too haven't bought Hellblade yet because I'm waiting for a good sale... I never buy short indie games full price. So I'm part of the problem. Consumers always want a lot but pay little for it. Big open world games offer hundreds of hours of gameplay for little money. Paying 20-30 bucks for an 2-8 hour story indie game in comparison seems a lot. People generally prefer quantity over quality. But high quality indie games are expensive too. So they need to charge a relatively high price to make small profit. That creates a conflict between their goal to make money and the consumer who could just buy a game that offers more bang for their buck. The issue of videogame budgets and consumer expectations is complicated. Open world titles are unfortunately the "best" compromise between developer interest (make money) and player interest (spend little money, get a lot). I assume this is why open world as well as online MP are so popular. Endless fun. And MT promise endless cash flow. Win-win, in theory.
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simit
N3
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
XBL Gamertag: Chris2k30
PSN: Simit2k30
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Post by simit on Feb 6, 2018 13:20:11 GMT
Tbh i will agree i asked for none of it, years ago i have to say i had more enjoyment out beating magicland dizzy with 3 lives or just mindlessly trying to beat my last score in asteroids but games moved on an it was the developers themselves that did it, or was it consoles or tech mmm, anyhow we are where we are the game gfx of old are basically now niche an i for one do now want nice graphics aswell as the rest of the perks associated with todays gaming, out of snyc facial animations/dialogue dont bother me in slightest though an i'd say graphics as they are the now are more than enough for me, i really really dont want realistic and dont understand the need to have it in games i play.
No one gamer may initially have asked for what we now get but lets be honest everyone now wants it, if the companies/developers never pushed what they could achieve the industry would've been left behind not to mention console markets or pc hardware sales, so ultimately we may not have verbally said wee want but our thirst for new technology, well it says otherwise. While new tech is constantly being brought out the game companies, much like every other industry, need to keep evolving there games whether you or me like it or not
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Post by rras1994 on Feb 6, 2018 13:45:36 GMT
Hellblade broke even after 3 months, it was in their development blog, and I think it was actually ahead of what they expected. But you are right that the majourity of sales happen in 3 months and since Hellblade was such a critical success, got a lot of promotion and won awards, it's a bit disheartening it took 3 months to breakeven. It shouldn't take making a near perfect game for the genre to just breakeven. THIS is the real problem. That no matter how well made a game is, big franchise titles are the ones that reap in all the money even when they are shoddy cash grabs designed to cheat the player out of their money. Paradoxically, the lower the quality, the better something sells. Look at all the fast food chains. People like familiar things, they like popular things. Just like developers, consumers don't really like taking a gamble either. Stick to what you know and previously enjoyed. If consumers themselves do not cherish a quality product that's not mainstream, why should developers/publishers risk a huge financial loss? Chances are this creative grand idea they had won't sell. Even if the game ends up being praised in reviews, that means little from a business perspective. If most people don't buy, your game was a failure. I've seen so many great games with poor sales. Developers forced out of business because the majority would rather eat their Call of Duty burgers. I kickstarted a game called Bloom: Memories 5 (!) years ago and still receive depressing updates how they (two people left, I think) don't have enough money and the demo they released recently was downloaded like 200 times, mostly by the press. Nobody cares about a small indie game with beautiful art design. So the original creator moved in with her parents again because she wants to finish that game that will never make a profit. And yet, knowing all this I too haven't bought Hellblade yet because I'm waiting for a good sale... I never buy short indie games full price. So I'm part of the problem. Consumers always want a lot but pay little for it. Big open world games offer hundreds of hours of gameplay for little money. Paying 20-30 bucks for an 2-8 hour story indie game in comparison seems a lot. People generally prefer quantity over quality. But high quality indie games are expensive too. So they need to charge a relatively high price to make small profit. That creates a conflict between their goal to make money and the consumer who could just buy a game that offers more bang for their buck. The issue of videogame budgets and consumer expectations is complicated. Open world titles are unfortunately the "best" compromise between developer interest (make money) and player interest (spend little money, get a lot). I assume this is why open world as well as online MP are so popular. Endless fun. And MT promise endless cash flow. Win-win, in theory. Yep, this is all true. The fact is most Indie games fail and they fail hard. There's a few sucess stories which people bring up as a way to follow, but they are the outliers, not the trend. It's like winning the lottery and expecting that everyone can replicate it. We've mainly talked about the difficulties of economics for AAA gaming, but the Indie space has problems of it's own, with the over release of games and the sales culture that has arised. Also the fact an AAA game has stayed at $60 (despite actaully being worth more but using other monetisation methods to make the difference), means that games lower down the totem pole can't raise their price as they are seen as worth less. And Indie devs don't really have the same ability to use other monetisation strategies to make up the difference.
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Post by therevanchist25 on Feb 6, 2018 13:55:48 GMT
Costs are being cut all over the place in the industry. Digital Distribution alone is saving them likely hundreds of millions, because physical disk expenses ate probably about 40% of the profit per unit sold. These companies also massively overspend on Marketing, often their marketing budgets are just as high, or higher than the actual cost of the game. These companies are clearly incompetent at marketing since the games they spend all this marketing on, are all the big name titles are already guaranteed money makers like COD, Battlefield, Assassin's Creed etc. IPs and franchises that will make these companies dump trucks full of money regardless of marketing. But when these companies try to publish a fresh idea, or an indie title, they give it almost no marketing at all, despite the fact it's a game that actually NEEDs proper marketing, and these titles often flop due to a lack of exposure then they point out how fans don't enjoy said title because no one bought it and go back to making more remakes and sequels. Likewise the Licensing of Third Party game engines has become astronomically cheaper over the years, because most of these companies don't make their own Engines anymore. Remember when Square would just make New Engines all the time for basically no reason? Yea, no one does that now, because they all use the same handful of engines now. Likewise, these companies spend excessive millions on "Hollywood Actors" to come into their games to do Voice Overs, taking jobs away from real voice actors, who 95% of the time, are vastly superior at doing voice work and get paid less than a tenth what these big name Hollywood guys get, and I want to point now that absolutely no one even asks for these fancy Hollywood actors to be in these games, that's just something these companies decided on their own. That is 100% an expense they don't need make. No wonder Voice Actors are on strike. Also, remember awhile back when Nintendo was struggling financially? What was the first thing Satoru Iwata did? he took responsibility for it and gave himself a massive pay cut, rather than layoff like 100 employees. Never mind how these Publishers and Studios often manipulate the 90 day probation system and constantly lay people off before 90 days to avoid having to give these people benefits like Health insurance, which is a big reason you often see such high turnover across the industry. Then lets not forget how Ubisoft said how they have to hire like 900 people in order make these giant open world games as if this is some unreasonable burden for them. Despite the fact Ubisoft said themselves at the start of this Generation that "Open World is the future" and made a knowing commitment to basically doing nothing but Open World. They made the choice to go in that direction when they didn't have to. So if making these open world games are simply not profitable, then why did you declare them to be the future and commit you're entire business future to the en devour? Simple, because they ARE profitable, they make Ubisoft money hand over fist, they wouldn't do it otherwise, unless of course Ubisoft are all brain dead and are utter buffoons as businessmen, which I suppose is possible. Lastly, the problem of graphical fidelity. No one asked for these companies to focus on graphics to the exclusion of everything else. No one demanded these things originally. Even now I question it's value, with games like Minecraft and Stardew Valley and Undertale making money by the truck loads. Not one single person I know demands that Lara Croft's head contain 1000 individually animated strands of hair. Things like that are utterly unimportant fluff that no one asks for. It is once again something the industry itself decided was important, and went out of it's way to program the public into believing this is important. IF, and imo it is a massive if. IF these companies truly barely break even, barely get by, then everyone in corporate positions should be fired, because they obviously have no idea how to manage money and run a company properly. All of their problems, if any, are all self inflicted, and I see no reason why we as consumers should pay the price for it. Just because games might save an additional 20% because of going digital it doesn't mean that it is able to keep up with rising costs of labor. As far as marketing goes that is what happens when you invest millions of dollars in a product, they want people to know about it. Otherwise going by your logic any of the popular movie studios out there don't know anything about marketing either. Things like celebrity voice actors are an added expense, but do you really think they would be spending the money if it wasn't paying off for them? They are regularly made to be out to be bean counters and only interested in making money. So do you think they wouldn't have tested it out to make sure they weren't getting a profit off of using a celebrity instead of an average voice actor. Studios aren't making their engines anymore, Frostbite is something Dice has been making for years, but now instead of one studio making a game engine its an entire publisher that uses it. Could they save money by going to Unreal or one of the other engines, again I would say they have done the math. Its just like when a movie studio spends tens of millions of dollars on getting someone like Dwayne Johnson, he is a known quantity to drive ticket sales, pretty sure they view celebrity voice actors the same way. The reason why they committed to making open world games is first, I am not sure if you were on the old BSN, but there were a lot of people stating that Open World is where BioWare games needed to go or some morons would make comments about how EA should give the Dragon Age/Mass Effect IPs to Bethesda because they are the only company that can make a good RPG (I guess that would be CDPR now). Again market research is the problem here, they are doing math and see what they think people are going to want to buy. The mistake is that it is a survey for right now and not three years into the future. As far as laying people off, with EA closing two studios I have not heard of anyone being fired outside of a couple specific people, the rest have been moved around to other studios such as Motive which if I recall correctly has taken the majority of people from BioWare Montreal. With how the YouTube creator section works if EA fired or laid off hundreds of people I am pretty sure people would make videos about it decrying how horrible they are since we saw that with Microsoft and their studio closings. Graphic fidelity was a huge ask and you see it all over the place. Do you think the whole Facial Animation debacle wasn't about fidelity when people bitched and moaned about how bad the animations were and how bad they looked. After the release of Mass Effect 2 and 3 there were plenty of people whining about how "they look so last generation". Just because console developers are pushing it now it doesn't mean that people were not asking for it. The problem with your comparison is that Nintendo as a whole was doing badly and losing money from its coffers, EA and other publishers are protecting themselves with risk and if anything they would pay the CEOs more if they could guarantee that it would lessen the risk of development. If EA was losing money you would probably see salaries being cut, but that isn't the situation. "Do you think the whole Facial Animation debacle wasn't about fidelity when people bitched and moaned about how bad the animations were and how bad they looked." Animations, and Graphical Fidelity, are two mutually exclusive things. You can have a game look like Crysis and still have horrendous animations. "but do you really think they would be spending the money if it wasn't paying off for them? They are regularly made to be out to be bean counters and only interested in making money. So do you think they wouldn't have tested it out to make sure they weren't getting a profit off of using a celebrity instead of an average voice actor" Destiny hired the Game of Thrones guy to do the voice overs for the game, they were so horrible they re-recorded the entire character with a real voice actor afterwards. So no, it was not a smart investment. they picked a guy who is popular not someone who is good. That was my point. "As far as marketing goes that is what happens when you invest millions of dollars in a product, they want people to know about it" Activision does not need to pay Robert Downey Junior millions of dollars to show up for 3 seconds in an F-16 in a commercial for Battlefield. You can get your point across without excessive spending. "Just because games might save an additional 20% because of going digital it doesn't mean that it is able to keep up with rising costs of labor." Prove to me, that they ONLY saved 20% from going purely digital, I would bet almost anything it is more than that. Secondly, what rising cost in labor? employee raises? ha, you actually think the poor devs get regular pay increases? If the Voice Actors guild does not what makes you think the devs do, because the people trying to sell you a product tell you so? "If EA was losing money you would probably see salaries being cut, but that isn't the situation." Right, because Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and every other major corporate interest totally weren't giving themselves giant bonuses during the global financial crisis. Nope, that never happend, they totally cut each others pay because things were getting bad.
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Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
XBL Gamertag: Chris2k30
PSN: Simit2k30
Posts: 790 Likes: 1,042
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Post by simit on Feb 6, 2018 14:55:56 GMT
Did a good looking triple a game reject you m8 cause you seem bitter
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Post by therevanchist25 on Feb 6, 2018 15:18:37 GMT
Did a good looking triple a game reject you m8 cause you seem bitter No, I'm simply tired of consumers arguing against their own self interest, and defending amoral companies that don't give a rip about them. I simply refuse to let myself be that guy who walks onto the Used Car Lot and let myself believe all the bull crap the salesman tells me, as if the word of someone trying to sell you something should be taken as gospel and dismissing anything that even hints to the contrary of what that salesman says as ridiculous conspiracy. It is the most anti-consumer attitude I've ever witnessed, going so far as to call each other entitled for simply demanding better as any customer should.
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N3
Games: Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect Andromeda
XBL Gamertag: Chris2k30
PSN: Simit2k30
Posts: 790 Likes: 1,042
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Post by simit on Feb 6, 2018 15:32:01 GMT
Then stop listening/reading it m8 an just enjoy whatever games you can.
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Post by river82 on Feb 6, 2018 20:52:51 GMT
Costs are being cut all over the place in the industry. Digital Distribution alone is saving them likely hundreds of millions, because physical disk expenses ate probably about 40% of the profit per unit sold. The cost of manufacturing and distributing discs to stores is about 5% of the cost of the game (going by a $60 game.) Retail mark up (from the store) is 20%, so the stores keep 20%. The cost of distributing a game on Steam 30% (30% goes to Valve, same with GOG,) same as the cost of releasing a game on XBox digitally or physically (30% goes to MS) and on PS (30% goes to Sony). Digital distribution only saves anywhere close to that figure is developers can avoid Steam, or GOG. Because like everywhere else, they need to pay for the privilege of using that "marketplace/platform".
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Post by Superhik on Feb 9, 2018 2:58:23 GMT
Nothing so far on E3 list of companies. Imo, it's pretty odd how they're handling this.
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