LudicrousSpeed said:
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. |
I mean you said in your post basically ... budgets have to come down. But that means visual complexity is likely going to hit against a roof.
You can't also ask developers to keep massively increasing the visual complexity every 5-6 years for games and then say "well, you don't actually get compensated for that huge amount of work you did". For developers wanting to make games like that something is probably going to have to give.
Games that have a visual complexity way beyond a game like say Horizon: Forbidden West are going to be extremely expensive. You have to pay people who work on games their fair due.
Movies have expenses like movie stars but games also have massive expenses a movie won't have. Movies generally only have a limited number of environments in each film and are limited to 90-120 minute experiences for the most part and you can cheat a whole lot with shots where the environment also has to be rendered to extent of anything that's actually in a film frame, anything beyond that doesn't matter.
Games can be 30-60+ hour experiences with 4-10x more environments that have to be fully realized, many times more characters ... but if you keep pushing the fidelity of these assets every couple of years ... who is paying for that added cost? People can wave their finger at publishers for being evil, but the reality is the publishers are not lying when they say games cost way more than they did even just a few years ago. The Tekken producer (Harada) just said that Tekken 8 cost almost 3x more than Tekken 7 ... does it cost 3x more? Will it sell even 40-50% more?
The other thing is forget about development costs solely, what about development times. We've already gone from games usually taking 2-3 years to make, to now games frequently take double that amount of time. Are we really prepared to keep bumping that number higher and higher? 8 years becomes the average development time at some point? 10 years? And of course for the publisher that means they have to pay the staff for that entire 8-10 year period.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 29 February 2024
