Dallinor said:
You have to factor in rising development costs and rising development time. That's a huge difference. It has meant bigger studios slowing down releases. Naughty Dog PS3: 4 games PS4: 2.5 games Sony Santa Monica PS3: 3 games PS4: 1 game This problem is industry wide. As costs continue to rise over the $100 million mark for a AAA title, publishers will be wary of releasing a title early (Anthem/Cyberpunk) and will double down investment/increase development time. Gamers demand higher quality and standards and the games industry will continue to more and more closely mirror the movie industry. Where blockbusters are king, risks are more calculated, investing in sequels is safer than producing new IP and games become more formulated to a specific standard that's proven to sell. Your analysis is flawed though. You're assuming Sony are making the decisions, when in reality its the market. Those 63 games sold more than those 139 games. So are they losing out on console buyers who would have purchased a console for Warhawk, Singstar or Folklore? Or are they gaining customers because a single title like Spiderman can now move over 20 million units? Their new IPS during the PS4 included: Horizon- GG biggest game ever GOT- SP biggest game ever Spiderman- IG biggest game ever Along with the likes of Bloodborne, Death Stranding, Days Gone and Until Dawn. Not 'Horizon and a few VR titles'. |
The success of those titles is moreso linked to the success of the system. All the people that bought in to the mass hype campaign during the early years of the PS4 needed something to play eventually.
It's much like how the unprecendented success of new series entries for Nintendo on the Switch are closely tied to the booming success of the system. Even Pokemon Sw/Sh which had minimal effort put in and I'm assuming a reasonably low budget to match, is still going to end up as one of the best-selling games in the series.
Absurd productions costs are just a by-product of the current industry 'standards', mostly for the higher-specced systems, but hardly any of that equates to higher quality titles outside of technical aspects. Almost all the highest-selling exclusives for the current and likely next generation will be Nintendo titles and their production costs are nowhere as absurd.
Sony's philosophy for console manufacturing and game distribution has helped mold the current market. If anything, they've recently been leading the charge in making the industry more forumlated to a specific standard, because that's exactly what they've done with their recent console designs and associated services. Everything about their transition from the PS4 to PS5 reeks of it. They're likely already planning out the ideal time to move on to PS6 while watching for what little things they could've done better this time, but there won't be any thoughts of great risk or innovation until they're absolutely forced to. When Gamepass becomes a serious enough threat to challenge their market share, that's when they'll consider rolling out a truly competetive service to match becaue that's how they operate.
shikamaru317 said:
The thing is that the AAA budget doesn't really need to be as high as it is. These $100m+ AAA's are starting to feel more like a brand new quadruple A tier to me, with games like Sony releases and Rockstar's RDR2 far too big and high budget for their own good sometimes. In this day and age you can still make a good AAA game for less than $50m if you budget well, for instance Remedy released Control with a $41m budget and it sold 2m+ copies, made a profit, and got great reviews (85 meta on PC, was nominated for many GOTY awards). At this point I'd say that 3 or 4 of Sony's studios are more AAAA than AAA, Naughty Dog, Guerilla, and Sony Santa Monica in particular seem more AAAA than AAA, with Sucker Punch being a bit of a question mark, on the one hand they are the 2nd smallest out of Sony's big studios with only around 162 devs (only Bend is smaller), but on the other it took them 6 years to develop Ghost of Tsushima, which is definitely more of a AAAA dev cycle than AAA. I personally think that Sony should try and refocus some of those studios into multi-team AAA instead of single team AAAA, allowing for faster dev cycles, lower budgets per title, and less creative risk. |
The amount of 'A' in your post is making me dizzy bro.
