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Soundwave on 12 June 2024
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zeldaring said:
Soundwave said:

I believe it is in the documentation though (there's a ton of it, so it's a dense read) ... in fact one thing we learn from the Sony leak is internally at Sony and Insomniac there is a lot of hand wringing and worry about why Spider-Man 2 costing 3x more in budget due to graphics. 

In fact they even had a slide where Insomniac themselves states essentially this

"We spent 3x the budget from S1 to S2 but we doubt the general consumer can even tell the difference". 

I'm not saying graphics can't get better, but the idea that we can double/triple from here I think is crazy talk. We are reaching the breaking point when even Sony is worried. 

GTA6 can be all that it is, but that's also a 2 billion dollar game, 1 billion at least on the budget of the game itself ... if that's the future of the industry, that's just untenable. You would need to sell like 70-80 million copies before you start seeing a return on investment.

I honestly don't think it's graphics that much,  for example  Industry experts speculate  TOTK it could range from $100 million to $150 million. That game engine ran on wiiu, Horizon forbidden has graphics better then spider man 2 and way more variety cost 200 million and is a much bigger game. gtav on 360/ps3 cost 200 million, i think marvel taxed them big time or they went over budget.

Time = money from a business POV as well though, it's not only budgets skyrocketing but the time to make these games is skyrocketing. 4 years is now like the low end dev cycle, 5-8 years standard, 10+ years entirely possible. 

If you're running any kind of office with employees you have to pay people every day of that period, with no return on that investment until the game releases and sells into the red. If you have a game that's taking like 10 years to develop, I can see why as a president you would be well not happy. 

I just don't see how we double/triple from here in a tenable way. What are we talking about, 500 million budgets being the normal budget with a 10 year dev cycle? I don't see how that works. Again at 500 million a game like Spider-Man 2018 wouldn't have been profitable on the PS4 (maybe with the PS5 re-release you get it, but I believe that cost another $120 million or something lol) but no return on captial until like 5 years later? Needing to sell like 15-20 million copies just to make your 1st dollar in return. That's insane. The days of being able to make a fairly "epic" game in 2-3  years for maybe 20 million are long gone and have like 2-3 installments of an IP on one system seems to be dead outside of indies. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 12 June 2024