By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Soundwave on 13 March 2024
Edit Thread
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.

I'll let you in on a secret. 

Final Fantasy 17 isn't going to look much better than 16. 

Lets look at the facts. The series is declining in sales and it's likely already very expensive just to have FF16 tier graphics in a large scale RPG context with big cinematic cutscenes. 

So to go beyond FF16 graphics, you'd likely need a budget that is getting into $250-$300 million, but you're only selling like what? I don't even think FF16 has hit 5 million copies sold yet, if it had Square-Enix would've released some kind of press indicating it did. 

The math simply doesn't math on $150-$250 million dollar budgets for a game franchise that is only putting up 5-6 million in sales. 

Increasing your budget while your sales are going down is obviously not workable. 

Another example of this is Monster Hunter Wilds ... it doesn't really look much better than Monster Hunter World on the PS4. I suspect actually when you're looking at Wilds, you're looking at one of the first big ticket Switch 2 third party games. They simply stand to sell so many copies of this on Switch 2 that there's no way they could look off it.