phaedruss on 29 July 2014
| zarx said: Visual fidelity ≠ budget The best looking games are usually not the most expensive ones. The death of mid tier games isn't because of visuals but the market moving to fewer and fewer bigger titles. Now this is bigger in production values but also far more importantly marketing. Activision spends 100m+ on marketing every year on CoD, the games have never been the best looking games around but they are usually the biggest sellers of the year. You have to realize most people buy 1-3 games a year. When the marketing concentrates on a handful of titles that drives most people towards a few games, which in tern means the word of mouth in the mass market will be concentrated on fewer games. Just look at the Wii the graphics were crap but Nintendo spent a crazy amount on marketing especially for stuff like Mario Kart, New Super Mario Bros and Wii Sports which were some of the best selling games last gen. Activision didn't spend $500 million on Destiny to make the graphics the best around but to market the shit out of it, and that is why it has a good chance to be the best selling game of the year. And it's more effective to concentrate marketing on a few titles than to dilute the message pushing too many games which means that publisher focus on fewer bigger titles. |
And the market is moving to fewer and fewer big titles because of the rise in development costs which is related to graphical fidelity in part at least.
