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VAMatt on 03 January 2019
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shikamaru317 said:
GOWTLOZ said:

You're right. But there is no reason Ubisoft can't put the same resources in Assassin's Creed as Rockstar did in Red Dead Redemption 2. If Ubisoft stuck to do something similar with the same time and money Odyssey would have been the game to follow Brotherhood, which sold over 10 million and would have sold as well as Red Dead Redemption if it didn't have so many sequels since then as it has 8 games between Odyssey and Brotherhood.

We should not make excuses for these publishers. They charge the same $70 for their games and are hugely successful so they should be held in the same regards when it comes to expected quality. I appreciate Rockstar for investing in their product instead of having games made in production lines. I enjoyed Odyssey but it felt really dated compared to other games I played this year, it was also very bloated and they even reused the soundtrack from Assassin's Creed 2. Stuff like that really puts me off and I bought Odyssey at a discounted price and still think its among the worst games I played this year. Its only better than Far Cry 5 and Octopath Traveller.

I don't really think that Assassin's Creed as a series could be profitable if the games had the budget and man hours that Rockstar games do. GTA V had a $250m development + marketing budget and it is rumored that RDR2's budget was even higher. We don't know the budget for AC Odyssey, but the most recent Assassin's Creed budget we do know, Assassin's Creed 2, was $24m development budget alone (the marketing budget is unknown), while Ubisoft's 2014 released Watch Dogs had a $68m development + marketing  budget, so it is likely that the budget for all of Ubisoft's recent AAA's like AC Origins, AC Odyssey, and Far Cry 5, were under $100m. That is a big gap in budget. In order to break even on a $250m budget you need to sell like 6m copies at full price, then you an start making a profit on discount sales. AC games, even at the height of the series popularity, don't really sell enough to make a budget that high viable for Ubisoft. While the higher budget could boost reviews, there is no guarantee that higher reviews would result in higher sales (4, Origins, and Odyssey are some of the highest reviewed in the series, and they still didn't sell as well as 3 did).

Could Ubisoft afford to boost the budget and man-hours for AC some? Yes, with the budget that AC Odyssey likely had, it probably broke even within a few weeks of release, which means that all of it's legs will be profit, and the game has micro-transactions as well which results in even more profit. Ubisoft could probably afford to boost the AC budget by around 30-40%, and give each AC team 4 years to make a game instead of 3 (Origins is the only AC game in the series to get 4 years of development as far as we know). Anything more than that though would be a huge risk. Take-Two was only willing to throw a GTA V tier budget behind RDR2, when they first game only sold 14m lifetime, because Rockstar's GTA V was a massive success, Take-Two was banking on the increased popularity of the Rockstar name boosting the sales of RDR2, and it paid off for them. 

I agree that there probably isn't much room in the market for 5 plus year development cycles and $200m+ budget games.  But, there certainly is room for more than just Rockstar. A few of these other guys could throw some big time and money behind a game here and there.  It would be nice to see what somebody else could do.

With that said, other developers do sometimes claim  to be doing this kind of thing. One of the best recent examples I can think of is Destiny.  We heard talk of massive budget there.  The product delivered certainly wasn't on a Rockstar level. But, I will credit Destiny for polish. The game did not have a bunch of bugs, and the gameplay generally felt great. There are other problems with the title, some of which may have been a product of Activision and Bungie not really understanding how to make something on the scale they talked about.

Excuse me for taking the comment off-topic there a little bit. I'm kind of typing out my thoughts here. As I work through this comment here I'm starting to think that maybe some other developers and publishers have tried to do the Rockstar thing. I'm not sure really. But, certainly nobody has been able to pull it off like Rockstar and Take Two.  Hopefully, somebody else illl compete on that level some day.