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Designers of last year’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 used the processing power of the PlayStation 5 so Peter Parker’s outfits would be rendered with realistic textures and skyscraper windows could reflect rays of sunlight.
That level of detail did not come cheap.
Insomniac Games, which is owned by Sony, spent about $300 million to develop Spider-Man 2, according to leaked documents, more than triple the budget of the first game in the series, which was released five years earlier. Chasing Hollywood realism requires Hollywood budgets, and even though Spider-Man 2 sold more than 11 million copies, several members of Insomniac lost their jobs when Sony announced 900 layoffs in February.
Cinematic games are getting so expensive and time-consuming to make that the video game industry has started to acknowledge that investing in graphics is providing diminished financial returns.
It was clear this year, however, that the live service strategy carries its own risks. Warner Bros. Discovery took a $200 million loss on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, according to Bloomberg. Sony closed the studio behind Concord, its attempt to compete with team-based shooters like Overwatch and Apex Legends, one month after the game released to a minuscule player base.
“We have a market that has been in growth mode for decades,” Ball said. “Now we are in a mature market where instead of making bets on growth, companies need to try and steal shares from each other.”
Ismail is worried that major studios are in a tight spot where traditional games have become too expensive but live service games have become too risky. He pointed to recent games that had both jaw-dropping realism — Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (individual pebbles of gravel cast shadows) and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II (rays of sunlight flicker through the trees) — and lackluster sales.
...and why not?
...money?
Because Balatro is a single developer's vision realized without compromise, without producers, writers, tech people, art directors, etc. all meddling with the production in the usual "design by committee" approach that large studios are using. This kind of game can only exist as a solo or very small team project.
The mantra of big studios and publishers is to spend lots of money to make lots of money. Balatro sold a mere 3.5 million copies over the course of a year, for a price of $14. That's just $34.3 million taking Steam's 30% cut into account. Huge money for a solo dev (especially given that the budget was just $125,000), but both the sales figure and the sales revenue are in serious flop territory by big studio standards. Star Wars outlaws underperformed at 5.5 million copies sold, since it cost hundreds of millions to develop and market, including having the highest marketing budget of any game ever made. To put this into perspective, this means they spent significantly more than $150 million (the usual figure for a top of the line AAA game these days) on marketing alone.
You can not generate the kind of money that large publishers and studios need to survive with little Indie games.
They don't have to use that.
That's just very clearly wrong.
Wrong again. If anything, only large publishers can lose the kinds of money that they sometimes do.
Okay, I'll bite: Since I'm very clearly wrong about everything, show me a large studio that doesn't use the design by committee approach, makes small games on Indie budgets and survives on that.
You're wrong because of the specific words you're choosing to use. Even if they aren't, it doesn't mean they can't.
Ulrich, mate, you're more German about this than I am - and that's not meant as a compliment. Allow me to take the scepter as the most ~~anal~~ German user in this discussion back with another pedantic, probably too condescending reply.
I don't remember if I explained this to you directly or someone else in this discussion, but the thing with large studios is that they are incredibly art-heavy (lots of texture artists, 3D modelers, animators, etc.), because you can compartmentalize art and have many little worker bees work on their little flowers (both figuratively and literally) in parallel and then assemble it all together into one big mess of an open world game with a billion map markers for you to ignore. For many years now, ever since the seventh console generation, this has been the ticket, this brought in the big bucks in the gaming industry.
The Western studios that pioneered this approach are now being threatened on two fronts: 1) Eastern (non-Japanese) studios that use the same art-heavy approach (but with different organization, which doesn't matter here, because they too are spending lots on many worker bees) on F2P and Gacha games, which offer spectacle and impressive vistas and a billion trillion map markers (but for free*) and 2) a tiny handful of absolutely ginormously successful Western titles - Indies, former Indies and AAA - that don't care one bit about the presentation, spectacle and artist-driven content beyond the most basic of necessities (see: Minecraft's blocky blocks and unfiltered textures) or a litany of tie-ins simulating variety and freshness (e.g. Fortnite, Rocket League), but instead shine through organic player interaction and user-generated content.
It's not Indie darlings like Balatro and Stardew Valley that threaten these publishers. Like I explained before, the revenue those games are generating is not sufficient to sustain large enterprises and because their success is incredibly random and unpredictable, big studios can't just divide their armies of worker bees into smaller teams that each work on a little game, with all those little games then in bulk creating the same revenue as a large titles. Since it's possible to find 500 people that can draw horse testicle textures, but not possible to find 500 people on the job market that can write a good script for a game or design a fun gameplay loop (seriously, those are the rarest talents in the entire industry) and finish the damn thing in time too, the idea you're proposing simply isn't realistic. The most you can hope for is that Ubisoft and others find a few people in their large studios and allow them to work on little artistic high-concept side projects every now and again (like for example Grow Up/Home), as an image boost for the company, a treat for fans, but not to make money, because these projects really don't.
The unfortunate thing is that the likely reaction to the success of Chinese and Korean F2P/Gacha games is that Western studios will try to emulate those. It's not even a thing for the future - this has already started. The whole loot box nightmare we've all been moaning and groaning about is a direct copy of South Korean MMO mechanics - and Ubisoft's AAAA(AAAAA) pirate MMO disaster was a blatant attempt at going after the kind of audience, but they wanted to have the cake and eat it too, release it as a full-price game and keep people busy with busywork loot boxes. Same thing with Bioware's Anthem. One of few successful Western games of this type is Destiny. Ubisoft, EA, ActiBliBethMic (and Japanese publishers) are likely going to bet hard on the large Gacha game idea (at least that's what I'm expecting), because they can use their existing experience with managing large art departments in those games as well, only having adapt mechanics, monetization and marketing accordingly. I doubt they'll be successful, but maybe this can save them. Our hope as players who aren't enjoy game mechanics and monetization that are optimized to drive up the credit card debt of whales [players who spend a fortune on F2P games] is that these projects end up making enough money so that some of the profits will get spent on games that aren't thinly disguised Skinner boxes.
Feel free to tell me whether or not this makes sense to you. I have a love/hate relationship with this discussion and topic. They are both equally frustrating and interesting.