wfz said: What are you all babbling about? Rising costs? Developers having issues? That's just Nintendo fanboy talk. Developers haven't been having a hard time at all. We definitely haven't been seeing numerous reports of studios shutting down, people getting laid off, or entire companies going under.
Some of those companies were absorbed or merged, such as Hudson Entertainment is now owned by Konami.
I would like to add that, the HD systems arent the only systems which these companies could of flourished, with the introduction of games on mobile devices and tablets, they could of profited from that.
Some of those companies have been plagued for years such as THQ.
Edit: Half of those companies, I've never even heard of lol
More and more the revenue of the video game industry is heavily relying on the top AAA game releases each year, even WHILE software trends are down. That means the entire middle market (everything under the AAA market) is falling apart. This is extremely problematic for many companies developing on traditional consoles.
I saw a graph a month or two ago that displayed the revenue of the console industry and it showed how the top 1-5% of games (I forgot the exact percentage) are taking up a much larger portion of yearly revenue for the industry (I think it was 90%+) while showing how outside of that, software trends are severely down. I don't know how this can be seen as anything other than a problem for our traditional console gaming platforms.
wfz said: What are you all babbling about? Rising costs? Developers having issues? That's just Nintendo fanboy talk. Developers haven't been having a hard time at all. We definitely haven't been seeing numerous reports of studios shutting down, people getting laid off, or entire companies going under.
Some of those companies were absorbed or merged, such as Hudson Entertainment is now owned by Konami.
I would like to add that, the HD systems arent the only systems which these companies could of flourished, with the introduction of games on mobile devices and tablets, they could of profited from that.
Some of those companies have been plagued for years such as THQ.
Edit: Half of those companies, I've never even heard of lol
More and more the revenue of the video game industry is heavily relying on the top AAA game releases each year, even WHILE software trends are down. That means the entire middle market (everything under the AAA market) is falling apart. This is extremely problematic for many companies developing on traditional consoles.
I saw a graph a month or two that displayed the revenue of the console industry and it showed how the top 1-5% of games (I forgot the exact percentage) are taking up a much larger portion of yearly revenue for the industry (I think it was 90%+) while showing how outside of that, software trends are severely down. I don't know how this can be seen as anything other than a problem for our traditional console gaming platforms.
But hasnt this been happening for years? I mean obviously as a new generation comes along, some companies wont be able to compete with other larger companies. You know there were alot of developers back in the 1990s, some of them were closed out completely or absorbed by bigger companies. This is just another one of those phases that the gaming industry is going through.
You have to remember the way the World Economy is like is playing some part in the sales as well, news of lay offs are becoming more common within the game industry, I mean especially what happened with that THQ team who got laid off during E3.
Its gonna get worse, I dont think it'll matter whether how powerful a system is or not, even the Wii-U is gonna be affected by the low sales.
Whats happening with the 3DS and PSVita was obvious, look who they are competing against, Mobile devices and Tablets are far more acceptable over pure gaming devices, which is why Nintendo and Sony are heavily trying to find ways to attract people to buy their systems. The same thing is happening to the consoles (i.e. Kinect, smart glass, etc).
AAA gaming domination (the top handful of titles each year) has taken over substantially more in the last 3 years than it was at any time since the beginning of the NES.
I've been posting a tad different responses in a number of threads this evening regarding NPD, but you generally addressed the points I believe to be true. Handheld gaming is not necessarily dead, but in severe trouble due to tablet/mobile gaming. Will we have dedicated handhelds next generation? I don't think so...
Yes console gaming revenue is severely down and it's due to quite a number of factors, not necessarily only rising dev costs. Although as the generation matures and players know what to expect from these high-end console games, they seem to be getting pickier and pickier - or just not buying as many games anymore. Will a new generation kickstart sales again? To some degree... what really matters are the other factors affecting the huge decline in software sales.
I agree with Iwata, imo we won't see that much of a difference between the consoles next gen, and we definitively won't see a graphical leap like PS2 to PS3. I pretty confident that next gen games will look like the UE4/Agni philosophy demo and I'm going to be optimistic here and say the Wii U can handle those graphics
i tink the WiiU is not going to get UE4, but its ok, since most devs are going to push UE3 for a couple of years more, when the UE4 becomes a standard, a new Nintendo console will be on the way...
wfz said: What are you all babbling about? Rising costs? Developers having issues? That's just Nintendo fanboy talk. Developers haven't been having a hard time at all. We definitely haven't been seeing numerous reports of studios shutting down, people getting laid off, or entire companies going under.
that is just part of the industry maturing, we are in an age where a game has to be exellent in every area to be a blockbuster and most publishers want every game to be a blockbuster. Studios closing is not a new phenomenon anyway there are dozzens that closed down last gen as well. And there are more game studios today then there ever has been.
Raising dev costs is not because of better hardware running the game in a higher res, with better AA, shadows, motion blur and dozzens of other effects that come with every major game engine doesn't make the game more expensive to make. Professional vocie acting, licenced music, motion capture, dozzens of different NPC, varied game worlds, game areas, testing, advertising and any peice of content all do. Yes more powerful hardware does allow more of some of these things but it doesn't make games more expensive to make. Some of the most expensive games arround are still last gen games things like Final Fantasy VII which cost $45 million (plus $100m for marketing) which ajusted for inflation is $64 million meaning it cost almost 3x as much to make as Assassin's Creed 2 at $24m or Crysis at $22m. Huge game budgets have been a part of the industry for years, it's just now all the major developers want blockbusters so they spare no expense. And average game budgets will keep going up even without new hardware.
And there is nothing stoping devs making games on the cheap, it's just they think that customers don't want it. Which is totally wrong but what can you do, some devs have figured it out that not every game has to be a AAA game and they are very successful for it. And others have found a way to make a AAA game without breaking the bank like CDProjekt RED who made The Witcher 2 for $8 million and that game has some of the best graphics of any RPG and also had a tonne of content, so much content that they did something that almost no one else would ever do they made 2 different versions of the 2nd chapter that were in different areas with different quests depending on your decisons and still managed to offer more play time in a single play though than many other ARPGs.
Besides we live in an age where 2 people can make this
from scratch including their own engine.
And on top of that devs already make assets at much higher quality than they can put in games.
Nintendo is the only one out of the three that manages to sell 20+ million copies of their $30-50 games and is still ridiculously reluctant to spend significant money to make those games.
While Sony spends tons and tons of money on lots of new IPs and is happy to sell 1 million copies while doing 10 billion dollar yearly loss as a company.
capitalism leads towards totalitarism and monopoly, this can be also applied to the vg industry, i think that in the end only a few third partys will survive or they will be absorbed by the hw makers...
Bull! PC games are pretty solid evidence that high end hardware won't kill developers. In my opinion it's actually the opposite. Let's take Uncharted 3 for example. Why does it look so much better than Uncharted 1? Obviously it is optimized for the hardware. I've done my fair share of game developing and trust me when I say it's not that hard to make something look great. What is hard is getting it to run at more than one frame a second. HD games cost so much today because the hardware is being pushed way beyond its normal limits. With much stronger hardware it will actually be cheaper to make games on par with today's graphics. Only later in the generation would optimization again become an issue. In my opinion it's much better to do that instead of releasing Wii U powered consoles that without optimization are only as good as today's graphics.
that is just part of the industry maturing, we are in an age where a game has to be exellent in every area to be a blockbuster and most publishers want every game to be a blockbuster. Studios closing is not a new phenomenon anyway there are dozzens that closed down last gen as well. And there are more game studios today then there ever has been.
Raising dev costs is not because of better hardware running the game in a higher res, with better AA, shadows, motion blur and dozzens of other effects that come with every major game engine doesn't make the game more expensive to make. Professional vocie acting, licenced music, motion capture, dozzens of different NPC, varied game worlds, game areas, testing, advertising and any peice of content all do. Yes more powerful hardware does allow more of some of these things but it doesn't make games more expensive to make. Some of the most expensive games arround are still last gen games things like Final Fantasy VII which cost $45 million (plus $100m for marketing) which ajusted for inflation is $64 million meaning it cost almost 3x as much to make as Assassin's Creed 2 at $24m or Crysis at $22m. Huge game budgets have been a part of the industry for years, it's just now all the major developers want blockbusters so they spare no expense. And average game budgets will keep going up even without new hardware.
And there is nothing stoping devs making games on the cheap, it's just they think that customers don't want it. Which is totally wrong but what can you do, some devs have figured it out that not every game has to be a AAA game and they are very successful for it. And others have found a way to make a AAA game without breaking the bank like CDProjekt RED who made The Witcher 2 for $8 million and that game has some of the best graphics of any RPG and also had a tonne of content, so much content that they did something that almost no one else would ever do they made 2 different versions of the 2nd chapter that were in different areas with different quests depending on your decisons and still managed to offer more play time in a single play though than many other ARPGs.
Besides we live in an age where 2 people can make this
from scratch including their own engine
I appreciate the response! I saw that trailer and it is indeed beautiful. But it IS just a trailer...
Anyways, if you read through my later posts in this thread I ended up opening the topic to more than just dev cost. I've been posting in a number of threads this evening about NPD and In light of trying to not post the exact same comment in each one, I mixed them up a bit and now I realize I should have just made them all inclusive of my points.
"And there is nothing stoping devs making games on the cheap, it's just they think that customers don't want it"
I'm glad we-- what the hell happened to my font? Anyways, I'm glad you see similarly to how I do! Aside from a few phenomenons, the middle market for consoles is entirely falling out and gaming appears to be taking a huge split as things shift to mobile/tablet and consoles rely more heavily each year on the handful of extremely top tier AAA titles. It's a problem for the console industry that either needs to be grown out of with growing pains or a major shift in the business.
Currently Online 
