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

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.

This is true though it is a big issue for AAA game makers since many consumers expect the graphics of those to keep improving at a good pace and if progress there suddenly significantly slows many people will feel disappointed. Like if FF17 barely looks any better than FF16 then that would negatively impact its sales. A company like Square is in a really tough position with this since their big games are expected to have high production values and they're not huge sellers but if they pull back on that sales will decline.

The pace of graphical progress is kinda unavoidably slowing down anyway though due to a combination of diminishing returns and the rising costs of pushing the cutting edge. FF7 Rebirth doesn't look massively better than its predecessor on PS4 despite being ostensibly a generation above.

We're gonna have to get used to graphical improvement slowing down whether we like it or not.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 12 March 2024