DonFerrari said:
impertinence said:
Obviously, you can't expect every new idea to be profitable, but this strategy seems an awful lot like the 'every electronics' strategy that has brought Sony itself to a very unhealthy position. (For those who don't understand the comparison, Sony has for a long time attempted to position itself in every single electronics market and let the hits pay for the many misses. So they carry a toxic TV division for ages for example, hoping big hots in whatever will pay for their position as a premier TV provider).
The problem here is that 'supporting talent' is becoming more and more expensive (game budgets are going up) while there is significant push back from the consumers against increasing cost of the games (whiny gamers don't want to pay $70 for extremely expensive to make games), on top of that despite what people want to believe here, the customer base is constantly bleeding people to lower cost options such as phone and tablet gaming.
In short: AAA model is unsustainable. |
AAA isn't unsustainable... throwing too much money at all games and wanting everyone to release just AAA is bad though... but in another thread about this we saw a lot of people complaining about Shuhei saying he doesn't understand the mentality of people wanting only AAA. And also people complaint about the "expect fewer games".
And Sony saying only 2 bring big money, another 2 break even and 6 is a miss (but if he don't disclose how much it lost we can't afirm it was a failed AAA, could be a smaller game that even costing little still didn't profit).
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By 'AAA' I mean cutting edge technical games, if you want to use 'AAA' to mean 'top tier games' then sure, there will always be some games that are bigger and more expensive than others. What I call the 'AAA model' though is the current structure where developers and publishers chase technological benchmarks in a quest to produce the most technically advanced games they can and use that as a selling point. For a reference, see the retarded resolution wars currently going on for example.
The problem with this model is that costs are outpacing the gains in the customer base. The customers are already balking at increasing the price for the product and the growth in customer base is very slow (I would say it's even declining). Of course, cost of development will go down over time for the same assets, but if you want to be on the cutting edge, the cost will only continue to grow. This model is unsustainable and the lack of insight into this simple fact in the industry has already caused a lot of harm.
