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Soundwave on 12 March 2024
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curl-6 said:
Soundwave said:

The bottom line is all hardware platforms are basically getting to the level now where you can spend to your hearts content and bankrupt your studio even on the lower spec platforms, lol.

PS4 level games can cost more than $200 million if you want to pump out Horizon: Forbidden West of GOW 2018 tier visuals, Switch 2 will be able to likely do that and then some, same with tablets, smartphones are getting there.

So really a "retreat" to like PS3 tier visuals isn't going to happen, you're just going to have PS4 tier as your floor for everything and then many studios struggling with really pushing past that floor because the budget quickly balloons out of control if you want to make an epic game.

Even with Square-Enix we're seeing this ... FF7 Rebirth looks fine, but it's not like a monstrous upgrade over FF7 Remake or something that looks any better than Horizon: Forbidden West. 

For the "we love graphics!" studios, fine, great, you can jerk off on graphics even on lower tier platforms now and make games that will rake up a massive bill if that's what you're looking to do, you don't even need the highest end hardware to do that any longer. 

PS4 tier games do not need to cost $200 million plus though.

Nobody is putting a gun to these publishers' heads and forcing them to make every game graphically cutting edge, 50+ hours long, and spared no expense. The mass market is clearly fine with games looking good enough rather than best in class, as the sales charts prove.

There's room on the market for your beautiful showpiece blockbusters and your lengthy expansive adventures, but not every major game needs to follow this path. If you cannot profit from selling a single player game at $70 then you need to rein in your budget. The live service push is about greed, not necessity.

If you want a game that looks like a PS4 title like Horizon Forbidden Dawn ... they actually do kind need to cost $200 million dollars. People deserve to be paid for the work they do on these games, frankly, the people who work on these games are underpaid because they're not unionized. 200 million is actually not even the norm for much longer, it will be 300 million as the low base line soon and 400 million standard soon enough, watch.

$200 million is frankly probably a bargain to these studios relative to the labour worth they are getting from these poor people that work 6-7 days a week, tons of overtime, don't see their kids/families during crunch time, sleep at the studio, etc. etc. etc. 

If these people were paid properly under a union system, these $200 million games would probably cost substantially more. 

They won't let go of this model because they don't know how to drive hardware sales or make their games stand out in other ways. Why buy a PS5 if a PS4 just runs the same games. Not everyone has a Mr. Miyamoto or Nintendo's design heritage to fall back on either.