RolStoppable said:
Because they refuse to learn from history. (And even go as far as quoting Youtube comments from average gamers in an attempt to prove a point. See above.) Current PS5 games may not look all that amazing, but it's par for the course on PS consoles that the generational leap takes time to be realized and that this is taking longer with each passing generation due to the ever-increasing development times. It doesn't matter how the games of today and the past two years looked like, because it will be about how they look at the time Switch 2 launches and that's still a year away. The launch of Switch 2 will coincide with the timeframe of PS5 games finally looking like PS5 games instead of mostly being prettier PS4 games. The default stance of a lot of third parties happens to be that the Nintendo system will fail, so Switch's success doesn't provide much of a default advantage for initial third party support on Switch 2. What will play a bigger role is PS's failure in Japan, meaning that small and mid-sized Japanese third parties have no choice but to support Switch 2; even then, it's more realistic to expect that they'll rather take a wait and see approach while putting out games for the original Switch until at least through 2026, many of which will be cross-gen and as such not really an argument to buy Switch 2 hardware. I hope Nintendo does not take success for granted. Their own preparation should include a year 1 first party lineup that rivals Switch, because relying on third party support to lift the boat is extremely risky. |
It's not just an issue of development times. Diminishing returns is real. PS4 level visuals were already approaching a certain level of photorealism/reality.
People just thought you could continue to scale up and up and up nonstop and there wasn't ever going to be a budget reality coming into play.
That was always stupid. There is a development cost to that, just like movies with CGI can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. You think Hollywood likes to pay their CGI people? Most certainly not. There are strikes right now because they're trying to weasel out of paying their creatives anything. It's because the closer to photorealism that you want, the more that is going to cost you because the people working on those movies (or games) will not work for free and you will need a lot more of them.
You're not getting a game with visuals of even the first Avatar movie without that costing a fortune.
This was all inevitable. $200-$300 million dollar budgets for a video game ... unless you are GTA6 is totally insane. How do you even recover if you make a game with a budget that high and it fails to meet sales targets? You're totally fucked. None of these Japanese studios like even Capcom or Square-Enix are going to be able to afford to make high end games if the budgets for them keep going up and up and up.
Square-Enix is probably coming up against that cold hard reality right now actually. I don't think FF16 is going to sell what they hoped and isn't really breaking out in the West (so much for the "who needs the Japanese audience!" gamble) and that game probably cost them a lot even though it doesn't look miles better than FF7 Remake. All of the sudden a Switch 2 probably looks pretty decent to them, if they ever want the FF series to reach the sales highs it used to have, they're going to need it and the 25+ million it could sell in Japan on top of the 75+ million elsewhere.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 12 September 2023
