Shinobi-san said:
Just about every one of the latest MS policies is designed to charge the customer more. Costs have already gone up this gen...Day1 DLC, Season Pass & Online Pass, map packs, expansion packs that are so minute on additions that you can hardly justify calling them expansion packs. We really need to ask ourselves why are costs skyrocketing like this? Why is $60 or $70 not enough to profit from when a game sells over 1 - 2 million? I mean look at Square Enix...their games sold reasonable well Hitman, Tomb Raider, cant remember the other one....but then they still didnt make a profit? And when you look at the actual game they got mediocre to high reviews. Why on earth did these games cost so much? Whose the cause of this? There are bigger issues here. It seems as if the publishers and manufacturers are passing on the buck here. They need to look at their own processes and ask themselves why do our games costs so much to develop and distrubute? Theres two options here: either downscale your development and reduce costs, this does NOT mean a lower quality title. Independent small developers and indie developers are proving that good quality games can be made with smaller bugdets. Hell even if the big guys just cut costs a little bit there budgets will still far exceed those of smaller developers. The other option would be to increase the initial cost of the game. The problem here is that consumers probably won't buy games if the initial cost is too high. So really the only option is the first. But now we find ourselves in a situation where the main issue isnt been addressed, instead publishers and manufactures are aiming at profiting off markets they were never ever meant to profit from. Creating DRM policies that are so skewed and stringent that it adversely impacts the consumer experience in multiple ways. This is ridiculous. This is why people are upset. People will speak with their wallets. And yeah at the end of the day MS is running a business but that doesnt mean you intentionally screw over your consumers just to make more money. So many other companies in mulitple other industries have decent relations with their consumers and still profit. So i dont even find this "Well they a business they just need to make money" argument even remotely valid. Not to mention, some publishers and at times manufacturers are just outright greedy with no explanation whatsover. |
The graphics war, and a gen on wich multiplatformwas a requirement (xbox, steam and playstation generated as much revenues). So what do they do then ?
I remember people saying that FFXIII graphics were ridiculous on par with the latest uncharted. This is why we keep raising cost.
You say indies and small devs make good games with low budget, but how much do fail ? 90% of indies just bankrupt. And 90% of indie games are crap.
Even if you take only the exception, world of goo generated 8 million dollars, that's not what will help Square or Ubi.
So they try these DRMs, cause it's easier to say that it's because of the pirates and not because there are more good devs and the market is more fragmented.
When you look at the data from 5 years ago, each and every goog games were either first party either published by the 5 biggest third party publishers.
Now, when you go to metacritics, what are the top score games ?
They are not greedy without reason. The market is hard to dominate more than ever, they all have huge loss. Manufacturers and publishers.









