Are you willing to compromise your favorite company for your enjoyment's sake?

[Otakumegane]

osed125 said:

Unfortunately for some people those publishers you mentioned are enough. 

But anyway, devs and publishers will need to "lower standards" to keep them as a profitable business company. Some games today need to sell 2m+ copies to break even (at a full price), and not many really reach that mark (at least not when those games are still at $60). Having said that I think there are two possible scenarios:

1) Publishers and devs continue with this high budget stuff, forcing the middle devs to "compete" against the big boys (because if it doesn't look like Killzone then people will not want it) and thus resulting in a lot of failures and studios closing (similar to this gen but at a higher scale). That will leave us gamers with only two options: the high budget AAA games and the indie games. All things in the middle will "disappear" or will become less common.

2) Publishers and devs finally realize this budgets are getting out of control and start to lower standards. Not making big emphasis in graphics and more on the artstyle (aka not going for photorealism). Stop hiring actors to do your characters voices. Trying to make "smaller" games but without making it less fun. By reducing cost you also don't have to invest more millions in marketing. Devs need to stop making games like movies, and by doing so the dev cost could at least stay the same they are right now (the average AAA game cost between $20m-$40m). So if we go this way we could have a very similar gen to the previous one, which is better than nothing I guess.

3.Go the Nintendo route.