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| Ryuu96 said: With recent events, Microsoft needs to stick to focusing on modest budgeted AAAs, I don't care if Avowed doesn't have the best graphics ever, I don't care if Hellblade II isn't 20+ hours long. Industry needs to bring back smaller, shorter experiences, most non-RPGs don't need to be over 30 hours long, or sometimes even 20, not every game needs the absolute best graphics, art-style is more important. I hope Microsoft keeps the smaller experiences too, the unique titles, the Double Fine's of the world, the Pentiment and Grounded-like experiences, allowing developers to work on multiple projects, the reason why Obsidian and InXile aren't huge AAA studios is likely cause of them both being based in California which is insanely expensive. We need to think about the health of the studios, I expect more layoffs from Sony and Microsoft this year alongside everyone else, I think Ubisoft will be hit soon. Thus far I don't believe any of the XGS acquired after 2018 were hit, Zenimax was minorly hit, it has largely been 343i and ABK, I think we'll see more layoffs to ABK before the year is over. Just hope they realise the smaller games are important too, important to filling gaps, while the AAAs take years and they can become hits out of nowhere like Grounded for a relatively low investment or something crazy like Palworld. It'd be a mistake Imo to focus largely on the bigger projects and not allow some smaller experiences to flourish and try to breakout. |
If I still had to buy their games, I would definitely prefer longer to shorter so that I felt I was getting my money's worth, but since everything is day one Gamepass now, and I can fund Gamepass entirely through rewards points, I'd be ok with them sticking to shorter games and lower budget AAA's mainly (though they do still need some higher budget tentpoles like Halo and CoD and Gears obviously).
Besides, I have a big enough backlog right now that I don't really need most games that Xbox releases taking me 40+ hours to complete, because completing those longer games will just grow my backlog more and more as new games release while I'm playing those longer games.
But yeah, overall the industry is going to need to reign in these AAA budgets like most of the movie studios have done with their blockbuster budgets. These $300m+ AAA games just can't continue unless you're Rockstar or some other dev that can consistently count on 25m+ sales per game, even $200m isn't sustainable for most AAA devs these days. Get those AAA budgets back down below $150m again for most games, below $100m even if you can manage it.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 28 February 2024
