Soundwave said:
$200 million+ honestly makes sense for games like Horizon Forbidden West, look at the visuals and detail and that's what? 30-40 hours? If 2 hour movies cost $250+ million, do we really think the manpower working on these games will magically work for that much less? If I'm a talented artist doing high end assets for a game company busting my ass for 60 hour weeks, why should I accept less of a salary than someone working on a movie? And there's people who aren't even happy with current level visuals lol, they want another leap above the standard of PS4/most PS5 titles to push even further, so what are getting to then? $300 million? $400 million? GTAVI can afford that, but at some point it becomes completely untenable. Looks like Sony hit that point. And an above poster made a good point here too, it's not even if these games make a profit, most of Sony's big titles will because they will push them through mass hardware bundling too to drive their numbers up, but when games take 6, 7, 8 years now for some of them to finish even one title, that's a $200+ million dollar investment that you see no return on for 6 years. That's ... not great. Days where you could make a game in 2-3 years or even have like 3-4 major releases on one platform from one big ticket studio are becoming rare to none. |
Movies aren’t an apt comparison because the breakdown on the budgets are nothing alike. Paying stars tens of millions each, very large travel budgets for everyone involved in making the movie, and the last few years even COVID has added 25-50% to some movies budgets.
You don’t have to pay your developers less. Just have them making smaller games. It doesn’t mean big budget blockbusters have to stop. As a whole, the average budget just needs to be less. Sony has abandoned this type of game this gen. They’re all big budget games outside of games they pay tiny unknown studios to make. In fact maybe Helldivers 2 is the first one to be a success and that is a shorter game with a $40 price tag.
