Fei-Hung said:
No I like your point. But I think there is a huge difference in buying takeaway food every day and then saving up for that juicy Micheline star meal. Or the number of people who watch trash TV (reality TV) and how much money that makes and how cheap it is to produce, but will still go out and pay £25 to go and watch the latest big blockbuster in cinema. The smaller games tend to be a fine Dustin and can be found on any platform. The big hitters are different in the other hand. Its what separates these consoles from generic platforms and developers. The big hitters is what brings people into the ecosystem where you make your money on hardware, accessories, games, royalties, microtransactions etc. The best selling game point, the game was a blockbuster. Nintendo are Apple. They can release shit and it will sell. There are the only company who gets away with pricing, remake of Remakes, crap online and still are golden. You don't need to look far. Watch YouTube reactions to GOW, Spidey, Horizon and you will see people eating up those trailers. Watching live streams you see people switch off and go meh when they see smaller titles. These big games then go beyond the games. You now have GOW comics, TLOU series, merchandising. These big games have their own life beyond games... Naturally as do fortnite and Minecraft, but those games are mostly one hit wonders, unlike your Halos, Mario's, Uncharteds. |
You seem to have a very romanticized version of the facts. There is enough AAA games to keep everyone busy for a generation, nobody needs to buy "takeaway food" if they want to only get "refined food". Question is most of people still watching crappy TV because they find it enjoyable. In the same way, people play Fornite because it's fun, nobody cares if it doesn't have the best specs among online shooters because production value is not its selling point
I'm not denying big blockbusters have a insane hype value, but in this industry a game like Hollow Knight developed by only 3 programmers and created by crowdfunding managed to sell about as same of supposed big hitter, like Death Stranding. The disconnection in expenses vs revenue in gaming is just too high to ignore. More money spent on production don't translate in bigger appeal or bigger sales. Branding, marketing and even gameplay have much more impact than production specs could ever reproduce
So, I ask again? Why spending so much if it will not push sales? I can only think it's more a bout a long therm plan. Those studios want to increase the barriers to entry in gaming industry. And to be quite honest, they already succeeded, they are just even going further
Look as we are talking about Fornite and Overwatch as if those were some kind of indie games, when both are games with already millionaire budgets from fucking Blizzard and Epic Games, just not as expensive as... I dont Know, Uncharted?
If you want to release a competitive product you need a shit tons of money to back you up, there is no other way. Big studios knows if they keep releasing more and more expensive games they will be much less likely to see a surge of medium sized studios popping up to compete in their market space.
They know games are still software, and in software department innovation, creativity, convenience and accessibility are the way to create a very high value proposition. Money can't make this up, so what to do? Artificially increase the budget of games, so you can lure your target audience with them. When the occasional indie hit the industry like a Storm (like Minecraft) then you just need enough money to buy it!
