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DJEVOLVE on 13 June 2013
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DirtyP2002 said:
Euphoria14 said:
DirtyP2002 said:


No, it hasn't been this way forever.

- development costs are as high as never before
- marketing costs are as high as never before

And this is not about the Call of Dutys, Halos or Battlefields. It is about the AA titles like the ones THQ released (Saints Row, Homefront) or 38 studios with Kings of Amalur. Those were not bad games at all, yet they weren't able to survive. Another example would be Socom. Why do you think Sony shut Zipper down and those guys lost their job? Sony Liverpool? BigBig? Rockstar Vancouver? Bizarre Creations? Team Bondi? (All of them are just examples of the past 24 months)

We are at a point where you either make a AAA game with a HUGE budget and marketing costs (CoD, Halo, BF, etc) or a smaller XBLA / PSN game (Limbo, Minecraft, Walking Dead etc.). The market for medium seized games totally collapsed. Those games need to make money as well and used games and piracy are not helping so I can understand every publisher that tries to protect these studios and their games.

We know why THQ died and it all starts and ends with UDraw.

38 Studios died because they made promises they couldn't keep and never had money to begin with. They were based off a loan by Rhode Island that they couldn't pay back. They bit off more than they could chew.

Zipper went belly up because they kept making crap games that nobody wanted to buy.

Rockstar Vancouver was shutdown in favor of merging them with Rockstar Toronto.

Team Bondi had allegations of poor working conditions and due to nobody wanting to hire them for a new project, they were placed into administration and liquidated.

 

As for your second point, check out this thread with an article by Jim Sterling.

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=162417&page=1#16

 

yeah there is an explanation for everything. At least one that is barely scratching the surface and does not provide a solution and raises the next questions, but I won't go into detail about this one. (Just one example: Why did Team Bondi had these poor working conditions? Because their financial situation was already tight. Why was it tight? ... you get the idea.)

 

And Jim Sterlings article was lacking basic knowledge. He refuses to see a connection between quality, budget and sales. He says: Make games cheaper to develop, problem solved. That is his argument.

You know what happens when the budget is reduced by a big margin?
People will say: "Zipper went belly up because they kept making crap games that nobody wanted to buy."


Nailed it.