Xbox |OT|

[Ryuu96]

Machiavellian said:

the-pi-guy said:

Some of this feels a little alarmist.

The market is pretty different from what it was 15 years ago. Mudslinging competitors between the 3 companies is unusual today. PC is still in the game. Who's to say that a $600+ PS6 wouldn't prompt someone else to try to undercut Sony?

This is also heavily assuming that MS becomes a non-factor, which it seems they still have hardware plans, it just probably isn't going to be their primary driver anymore. (And frankly it hasn't felt like their primary goal in the past few years.)

The issue of $80 games is more complicated. Sony wasn't the first one to make games $70. Take Two was. And a lot of companies have jumped on that train. Even Nintendo has made a $70 game, despite not being directly in competition.

The issue is industry wide. The consumer base isn't particularly growing on consoles. In order to make bigger more competitive games, you have to spend more money, you have to figure out how to get more money out of consumers. A big reason why live service games are so popular right now. A lot of these games from Ubisoft, Sony, Take Two, Microsoft, Activision are costing in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of them are massive successes making a few times that. A lot of them aren't. $80 games would reduce some of the risk. It'll unfortunately probably happen regardless of anything else. Just like $70 has happened, despite MS trying to be a hold out.

The unfortunate reality is that there is no free lunch. Something has to give somewhere at all times. Either the industry has to slow down on their infinite growth or consumers have to start paying more.  

I agree with this take, spending money on the same level as a huge budget film as we have seen with Spiderman 2 cannot be sustained.  A miss which can happen can be devastating and a few misses would be catastrophic.  You only have to look at Suicide Squad to see that a miss which this game is going to be will probably have a big ripple effect for the studio.  I am sure that game cost a lot of money and while reviews seem to be average at best, average reviews do not sell big budget games. 

The cost of producing games is getting really expensive but its gamers expectations that is setting this margin especially in the console space.  I believe gamers on the PC are way more receptive to average if not even so so graphical games where they sell really good but on the console, you basically have to hit all the high points in order to get decent sales and even then might not break even.

Another case in point is Square.  After really snubbing the Xbox for a while, they are not putting in support.  Sales of the last Final Fantasy game did not hit the numbers they wanted and you know with a game like that it cost a pretty penny to make.  This really might be why MS strategy has changed because the numbers for just console isn't pulling in the weight compared to the investment.

It's actually insane how videogames are becoming more expensive than films.

Next gen it won't be uncommon to see $300m+ game budgets...

It's just ridiculous.