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Norion on 13 March 2024
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curl-6 said:
Norion said:

It'll happen eventually yeah though currently the question some companies are facing is if they should keep increasing costs to satisfy expectations but have insane budgets or pull back on that but experience a decline in sales. It'll get a lot better when it gets to the point when it becomes not that expensive to have photorealistic graphics but my guess is that's 10-20 years or so away.

I mean, we're at the point now where you can have a game not look cutting edge or best in class but still look "good enough" for the mass market to be satisfied. The crowd who demand the absolute latest and greatest visuals aren't the majority; if they were the Switch wouldn't be so successful and games like Minecraft and Fortnite wouldn't be so massive.

I never said that group in particular is the majority but them combined with those who don't care as much but are still more likely to purchase a game when it has high quality visuals make up a big chunk. Hogwarts Legacy was the best selling game last year after all and it definitely wouldn't have been as huge a seller if its recreation of Hogwarts wasn't high fidelity. The issue for the sequel is if it's not a notable leap over the 1st it won't be as exciting but making it a notable leap will be costly.  

Soundwave said:
Norion said:

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. 

If it doesn't they'll have a harder time selling it to people. At least UE5 should help alleviate this problem for a lot of developers at least somewhat.

Last edited by Norion - on 13 March 2024