By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Soundwave on 04 March 2024
Edit Thread
Chrkeller said:
Soundwave said:

Even $600 million is not feasible, there's only 2 whopping games on the PS4 that have sold over 20 million copies ... GTAV and Spider-Man, nothing else has sold more than that. 

If budgets continue to double from what they are becoming today because a small part of the audience demands bettererererrrererer graphics every 5-6 years, you're going to have a business where a lot of studios simply cannot even play in that sandbox at all. 

Cyberpunk 2077 is already north of $400 million and really that budget is probably more like $600 million anywhere else, they get away with paying people less in Poland. 

Hollywood is also in big trouble, the problem there was all big movies now have a standard budget of $200 million+ ... it's not just "well only Avatar does it", it's every big blockbuster movie basically has to have that as a minimum to even compete. So Aquaman has that budget, The Flash has a $220+ million budget, this freaking movie has a $200+ million budget:

That's the problem, it's not just one game going up in budget, the budgets for all types of games are being pushed upwards every 5-6 years, and the price of the games should really be $90-$100 to account for that. 

In gaming $300-$400 million looks like the new standard cost for a lot of big games already, Spider-Man 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Starfield are all over $300 million. GTA will obviously blow that away. 

AI tools are coming and will reduce development costs.  RT has massive benefits to developers.  More than the benefit to consumers.  More will be coming.  The market will adjust, it always does.  Big games aren't going away.

The number of studios willing to make "big games" will decline and the number of studios will to take a risk and make a new IP with a top budget will decline. The only Japanese studio for example that could compete in the space of making games for $400+ million a pop would be like Nintendo and they're too smart to get caught up in spending that kind of money. Capcom, Square-Enix, all these other companies will get priced out even Sony won't give their Japanese teams that kind of money to spend. 

And the truth is these games are not even close to photorealism either. If 1 billion still gets you a game that looks fairly cartoony, what is the cost to go well beyond that? $4 billion dollars? Who is financing that exactly? And that of course I assume is still only going to cost $70? lol. 

Thirdly, any kind of setup where these companies are going to fire actual humans in favor of AI is something I will never support. They want to do that, I will not buy those games, simple as that. Ray tracing already exists if a developer doesn't want to do baked lighting that hasn't brought budgets down at all. If we're talking the automation of the actual development process, I'm not going to support the wholesale destruction of thousands of peoples' livelihoods for something stupid like having better lighting in a game. Anyone naive enough to think that will only be limited to industries like film/TV/games is kidding themselves. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 04 March 2024