I’m not aware of a AAA game that isn’t made by a publisher. In which case the studio is contracted out, and will make money regardless. So are you saying you think that publishers think they can’t make money just selling AAA games at $60? Because the games industry profits keep on growing; big publishers aren’t struggling to make more money. Their goal is always to grow profits. And sure if you can’t increase how frequently you make a new CoD; can’t charge more for the base price of CoD, then the next way to increase profits is to introduce microtransactions. Corporations job is to increase profits and all the videogame companies will do anything to do that until the consumer base pushes back. They don’t care about the quality of the gaming experience. They will shit on the gaming experience until the consumers say enough.
I have a bit of a fear of buying any of these new games simply because of the in game purchases, as well as the mmorpg thing. I understand servers are expensive to run, but it really ruins the game for me to buy something multiple times. Even if the game cost $300, but everything was all included I would rather go for that.
Since AWS, they are not.
Taking Steams total GB download per month against AWS prices comes out at ~$250 per month in file hosting.
Game servers are cheaper per month.
See, i come from the time when AAA games (back then) were written by a 1-2 man team in their bedrooms.
300 devs for a game is ridiculous.
Yes i know why they have that many - but about 250 of them are part of the problem, rather than pushing the industry forward.
No it’s not. It’s BEYOND ridiculous.
Who asked for that huge of a game? Who IS still asking? AC Unity cost tens of millions and had up to 300 NPCs at the same time being simulated and the game was absolute garbage. Who cares about that kind of things?
Skyrim is all smoke and mirrors and is still super highly regarded as a great open world game from 8 years ago. Yeah it’s a AAA open world thing, but again, it’s all smoke and mirrors, but it’s a good game. An actual good game. You don’t need reflective surfaces, you don’t need ray tracing, you don’t need 300 NPCs being simulated at the same time. You need an actual good game.
Case and point - Dark Souls. Cheap low budget tightly designed good game. No volumetric lights, no billion NPCs, half the game is 2D images, by the way, if you look around in the game you will laugh how much they put together with strings and spit.
On the other hand we have…
That is more than 1 million copies just to break even and then more to cover the marketing, and then more to make profit and then even more to satisfy Ubisoft’s greed… 5 million copies just to be an OK game because they stuffed 68 million dollars into it.
Banished is a city builder, made by 1 person, sold over 100K copies the first month cause it’s really f*cking good and it made serious profit.
AAA game industry is getting into an unsustainable state and is only increasing their spendings and keep pushing monetizations… It’s sad…
This
And very much this
Reinforcing this point… i just spent a huge number of hours this weekend with the megaman series.
Megaman 1-2 could have been made by a team of 5 in the 80s or 90s. And they’re great games.
And they would have been written in assembly. Not high level languages with 3d libraries that do much of the heavy lifting for you. Sure, modern artwork and music needs talent… but not 300 people for several years.