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Rpruett on 25 March 2009
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NJ5 said:
Rpruett said:
NJ5 said:
RolStoppable said:
NJ5 said:

Rpruett said:

(...)

Plenty of other studios are doing just fine. (Rockstar, Blizzard, Valve, Guerilla, Naughty Dog, Bungie, Insomniac, Epic, to name a few).

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I scratched off the ones who aren't 3rd parties or aren't doing well. What remains is basically PC based developers.

You forgot to mention that Blizzard has a cashcow in World of Warcraft, Valve has their Steam service and Epic is profiting because HD development costs are so high and pretty much everybody is licensing their Unreal Engine 3. So how could those studios do bad anyway?

Yeah. From another angle, both Blizzard and Valve don't care much about high-end graphics.

 

I wouldn't say that.  Blizzard is more of a case of making games that run well first and are graphically pretty second.  Given the game genres that Blizzard makes (MMOs, RTS, Hack N Slash with tons of Enemies on Screen),  performance is everything.   But don't make the mistake of acting like their games aren't graphically powerful when they are released.  They are still very good looking games with superb artwork.

and Valve certainly cares about High-End graphics.  Half-Life 2 was easily the best looking game on the market during it's release.  So while outdated a bit now,  You can guarantee that HL3 will be the best looking game on the market when it arrives as well.

 

But other of Valve's games like Portal and TF2 don't rely much on graphics. Half-Life is a huge franchise, and of course it's no problem to invest a lot of money on the huge franchises which will generate loads of revenue anyhow. There are only a handful of such franchises though.

 

Both Portal and TF2 just rely on the HL2 engine. (Which was very very impressive when it came out).  It's such an impressive engine that years later they can still make games thats graphics are still good looking.  TF2 has different art direction but the graphics are impressive in the game.  Portal is essentially just HL2 reskinned in some way, but I don't consider Portal a full game really though. Counter-Strike has excellent graphics are far as I'm concerned.  (While not Crysis esque they are quality).

 

Regardless,  The industry needs to change it's production model.  (I'm sure they will).  Older methods aren't going to work as well as they have.  You mentioned artwork being a high cost of development.  I agree artwork is an area of high cost but it's not the only area.   Look at how much money these developers are spending on R&D, it's astonishing.   These types of costs and investments will certainly decrease as time goes on.  Also things like Motion Capture technology are an expensive cost that will certainly continue to spiral downward as time goes on.  One other factor is tons of game engines have been crafted from the ground up causing games to be that much more expensive.   I believe this generation will last quite awhile because of this and developers who perfect their HD game making will be all the richer when it's all said and done.

 

The market is there with record revenues, all that needs done is reduction of costs.