DerNebel said:
What we'd get from longer development cycles is fewer games, that's it. Publishers would bet their money on their biggest franchises even more, but those would then maybe only release every 3 years instead of 1 or 2. The smaller experimental games would become even more rare, because they're a financial risk and with publishers not having their save yearly income from their mega franchises, they're less likely to take such risks. Also I don't know why you're drifting into the whole visual department, that has nothing really to do with this and I don't see how taking more time = concentrating less on visuals and why would you choose Xenoblade and SotC as examples of this, when both of those games are considered among the best looking on their platform? |
Well I actually never talked about longer dev cycles. Taking the time to make a game great/to polish it does not equal same amount of people working longer. It can also mean having less people that do the graphics work and more programmers etc and then doing it in the same amount of time.
@ bold. Lol? In what universe would that happen? If publishers would stop their "same game as everyone makes it but with better visuals" then ONLY the better and more experimental games would be left. Thats the whole point of not focusing on graphics and taking more time for gameplay. If the graphics arms race would stop then noone would buy those shit games. And when you stop focusing on the visuals you automatically need LESS money to make a game.
You could invest more money/manpower into important things and/or hire even more people to help working on that game. Both will result in better games and dev cycles would not be longer. If you keep the same approach as devs do today then polishing will obviously result in loger development time but thats not what I am talking about/suggesting. Devs and publishers need to learn hot to economize properly.
What did IGN's Greg Miller say a few days ago about SquareEnix and TombRaider? "You expected it to sell this many millions. And it just sold how many millions? FAILUUUUURE!!!!!!!!!"
If a game thats pretty good but nothing super special fails even tho it sold MILLIONS then something is completely wrong. On the other hand there is japanese games that sell 100k and are a huge success without being worse games. (btw not the graphics made TR a good game other stuff did. So I would focus on that other stuff instead of graphics)
Why am I talking about graphics/visuals? Because third party focuses on those instead of making good games which is the reason for alot of people not buying their games. Its all visuals and nothing else. And the visuals are whats holding games back from becoming better 90% of the time.
Making the visuals more and more realistic/"inpressive" = no place for risky games because if they fail they would burn more money than NOT so visually impressive (in terms of newest effects etc) games.
Why was I using xenoblade and Sotc as examples? Because those are great games and by far better than 90% of the PS360 games even tho they are visually inferior. The graphics are sufficient and if you take a close look you will see that I chose emulated 1080p screenshots. (to show that expecially Xenoblade in 1080p is sufficient and still way less expensive to make than lets say FF13 etc.)
If we would get more games like those 2 you know games without all that shiny cutting edge stuff and mega polycount BLAH (lets say android/IOS/PSvita visuals) but with better story/better gameplay and with polish. I would go "STFU AND TAKE MY MONEY!"-mode.
if you are German or understand German as your name suggests let me tell you this. Today's games are "mehr schein als sein". In a few years you will have alot of mediocre games with then outdated graphics and in 10 or 20 years when you think back to this day and your kids ask you "what were the special games of year X on console X" you will wonder how it was possible for almost every dev to only make forgettable games. No Chrono trigger or Castlevania or Megaman or whatever. You will most likely say something like MINECRAFT or some other random Indie game.
