Chazore said:
Who could forget Black Tiger lol, that was such clusterfuck of a release. I know all stores now have their floodgates mostly open. Steam has had theirs open for years afaik, Epic opened theirs I think 2-3yrs ago?, which is now filled with garbage gunk like crypto "games" and other crap, that you now have to sift through, but their client doesn't support as many filters as Steam does or ways to completely block out junk apps. I wouldn't entirely say Ninty is a good middle-ground, as their digital storefront is loaded with crap, I'm talking mobile games bare-bones ported to the switch, and they don't shy away from letting you know it's a mobile game cash grab, but Nintendo for some reason doesn't enforce all those mobile based devs to make their games 100% for Switch. Outside their storefront, they don't really waste money on what they make (unless it's paying lawyers to hunt down anything related to them, but I'm not sure on how much it costs for them to keep doing that, let alone paying the people to actively make it their job to track down that kind of content). They're a lot more flexible than MS and Sony, that's for sure. They managed to sell the Wii U without breaking the bank, unlike Sony from their previous gen, and then MS with their following gen. Also Iwata took his pay cut for the sake of the company/staff, instead of doing what the West tend to do and cut the staff, pocket the money, earn a raise. The West barely does this, because in their minds it's "nothing ventured, nothing gained, it's free money", rather than doing it out of respect, and being happy with what you have (seriously, Bobby and Phil earn more than enough money in their entire lives, that they could easily part with multiple salary cuts and still fund their lavish lifestyles). Budgets have only grown larger sure, but that's mostly down to aspects like marketing (which in this day and age we barely need, because word of mouth now spreads like wildfire, and well, the net exists, influencers now exist, giving us more sources of knowledge than any tv/billboard ad ever will), and getting the studio in order, the amount of staff required to build said project, legalities, lawyers to comb out ToS, the engine and tech for the games themselves, etc. AAA is becoming unsustainable for sure, but it's up to the bigger fish to decide what to cut down on first, and well, they've idiotically chosen the very studios and talented staff who make the actual games, to go first, rather than say, the marketing dept. See the more you keep dismantling studios, the more you fracture talent pools that helped make beloved products, and the more that happens, the more that pool gets shifted about. Now you might get old talent mixed with new talent, and that can sometimes give a good combo of results for a good product (BotW for example was Nintendo mixing old and younger generational talent and it worked well for them). However, if you keep splitting talent up, like say, vet staff who helped make a great trilogy of movies/games, then you wanting that same vibe, that same taste, or what you loved about said movies/games, won't always be the same, because that pool has been split into pieces (sometimes you see them reform as a new studio, it happens, but not s often). Like for a quick example; I loved Disney's animated movies for decades, and while the first generation has literally passed on, the 2nd gen being mostly old and retired by now, means we've still got the current 2 gens of Disney animators, but Disney over the past decade decade and a half, has been moving away from traditional animation and into CGI based, while also just cutting projects and staff left and right. Fast forward to today, and all those movies I liked from the 90's/2000's?, yeah, most of those animators are gone, either going solo or working with some other studios, but fragmented, so I'm never going to get what I experienced way back then, and that's what I'm seeing happening right now in gaming (Arkane being gone now means I won't be getting that Dishonoured vibe for a long time, if at all, same goes for Saints Row, and Rocksteady). |
Dishonored is made by Arkane Lyon, it's Arkane Austin that is shutting down.
