HoloDust said:
Apparently, they have 70 animators doing episode for a week. Not sure what their salaries are, but I think episode costs around $1.3M (that is whole budget, not just animation). Not sure why it's that much, Star Wars: Clone Wars episode was $1M, SW:Rebels is $500K. Family Guy is $2M a pop, American Dad is $1M per episode (or other way around, can't recall). Lot of that money goes to actors, I suppose...
Yeah, South Park might not have high end AAA art budget, yet it is hand animated, and that still costs pretty penny - I'd wager much more than retro visuals of Octopath, given that South Park (at least first one) is treated as lower cost AAA. I think the whole problem with $60 is that it's accepted as sort of a ceiling (bar some fancy editions) - which in turn, at least in my view, should warrant a game that has both content and production values at highest level. Not just one...or the other. In the case of Octopath, from everything I heard, content value is quite high...but I don't think production value is up their with the best. Let me give another example from fairly similar, yet different field - boardgames. Video games, on the other hand, are stuck in the mass market - for example, Witcher 3 (game that I rate as 8/10) is high quality both in content and in production - yet it's $60 game, because of that cap that is there cause of mass market. If you take that $60 cap into account, you can understand why I think only highest quality content + production value deserves that price tag. I can see why Octopath might be worth for many $60 - I'm guilty of similar thing with Combat Mission games (tactical simultaneous turn-based wargames) for last 17 years, games with high content value (for its genre), yet not that great production values - $60 per pop, sold only on their site - because they're worth that much to me - yet, not for a second, would I ever think that in this $60 capped video game economy, value of those games is actually that. |
1) South Park animation does not cost a lot. It is cheap compared to any other AAA game. It is cheap compared to Cuphead which is not considered AAA. It is supposed to look cheap. That is intentional. The writing, voice acting and humor in the South Park games are better than 99% of games out there. That is why they are selling it with a $60 price (or they did at launch at least).
2) Every medium is different in how it does pricing. When I go to see a movie I pay the same amount regardless of the budget. Infinity War had a budget of over $300 million, while Sorry to Bother You has a budget of about $3 million. They charge the same price to see both movies.
Video games are somewhere between board games and movies. Most games that get a physical release end up with a $60 price tag, while indie games usually plan to be digital only and so they end up with a much smaller price tag, although sometimes they also get a physical release too with a similar (or perhaps slightly higher) price. And that has kind of blurred things, so that now every game with a physical release has to determine if they are going to charge $60 or not. With Octopath Traveler they decided to go with the $60 price tag. Clearly that was the right decision, because they are selling out of stock even at that price.
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