The magic sauce is a government caring about their worker base...

Which has led to a much better strategy that Nintendo is following. Instead of hire for crunch (which isn't effective anyway), release broken, fire after its patched, Nintendo tends to keep their people around working on different projects. Long term planning vs short term money grab.

Shawn Layden head of the Playstation division even said AAA gaming is unsustainable. No one can seriously say are more clued in than this guy, he's worked with Playstation from day 1, he was the head of Playstation for PS4 and development of the PS5, he's even cited as one of the architects of Sony's strategy of huge budget cinematic games.

And even he has been ringing the alarm bell the last few years, some quotes from him:

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/shawn-layden-gamelab


"The problem with that model is it's just not sustainable," he said, explaining that the current generation has seen the cost of development reach between $80 million and $150 million for most AAA games -- excluding marketing costs -- with production taking up to five years from start to finish.

"I don't think that, in the next generation, you can take those numbers and multiply them by two and think that you can grow," he continued. "I think the industry as a whole needs to sit back and go, 'Alright, what are we building? What's the audience expectation? What is the best way to get our story across, and say what we need to say?'

"[AAA development] won't be less expensive than the current generation of game development," he said. "4K, HDR art and creating worlds don't come cheap.

And this is from a couple of years ago, development costs have skyrocketed way above even the numbers he's talking about here, lol. $80-$150 million he cited as being too high already, Spider-Man 2 is past $300 million, Starfield over 400 million, there's murmurs that GTAVI will actually be close to a billion dollars in initial budget and then another billion on  top of that for additional content, lol. 5 year development times? Try 6-8 years now starting to become the norm for a lot of games. 

This is a more recent tweet from Shawn Layden:

I reckon we're going to be hearing A LOT on this topic in 2024. 🤔 https://t.co/sH6Ar6EjVu

— shawn layden 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🇺🇸🇯🇵 (@ShawnLayden) January 3, 2024

PS4 tier games with some shiny bonus effects layered on top is basically going to become the most many studios can afford. And honestly that's fine. PS4 games already look realistic and nice enough and cost a fortune as is, what is the point of doubling/tripling your budget to $300 million, $400 million just to make it look a bit better. When even Insomniac games is saying they question why they even spent all the extra money on Spider-Man 2 for something a lot of gamers won't even really be able to notice you know there's a problem here. 

That's the other issue too, these costs are not scaling linearly. Like going from PS1 to PS2, if you doubled the budget at least you got dramatically better visuals as a result of it and could really bank on that to sell your game. Today to go beyond PS3/PS4 tier visuals, just even a little bit costs a fortune. The closer you venture to photo real, the more you have to pay for much less of a leap. 

Heck given the recent EA talks about title consolidation, you could also point out that Nintendo seems to know how to make both small and large titles work for them. Heck they're happy when you manage to turn a sub million series like Xenoblade and Fire Emblem into a couple million sellers. 

Yes, Nintendo doesn't manage to keep every franchise well fed, but honestly compared to seemingly everyone else...

...Of course as I (believe) I've mentioned before, half the trouble is also cultural on a fanbase level. Nintendo fans might rag on the odd tree in a Pokemon game, but they lack the graphic obsession that seems to be have kickstarted the graphics race that is hitting problematic levels at the moment. Heck I remember some people, I think an ex-God of War guy, making a 'better' cover for Zelda with AI that basically just makes it graphically more 'realistic' instead of the art style Tears and Breath use. And you've got to wonder how many more fans would that bring in for how much more cost. 

...Billion dollar GTA6, is all I'm saying. Doing a rough estimate based on some old numbers, if GTA6 was a first party exclusive game and selling at 70, it would take somewhere around 25 million copies sold to break even. As a third party it will take more (you have to pay a cut Steam, Sony, Microsoft....I'd say Nintendo but they never even put GTA5 on the Switch, so even if the Switch 2 could run every PS5 game I doubt it would get it), and also have more platforms to sell on, but that's an insane number as your lowest end. And GTA is one of the few franchises that might be able to handle that...

It seems working in the gaming industry invovles crunches and layoffs. Reminds me of the railroad industry where "layoffs" are part of the business at certain times.

Rumor that Ghost of Tsushima for PC announced this week. I bet Ghost on PC is going to look stunning, especially with high fps. Outside Nintendo, exclusives are just dead. Which is great from my perspective.

Actually I looked this up, apparently the hacker guy who hacked Rockstar saw that the budget for GTA6 is 2 billion dollars ... lol. Now granted that is supposed to cover all costs for the game's entire product cycle including DLC/online stuff ... but still ... 2 billion dollars?

I guess that would be close to a billion for the main game and then another billion for the extra content to come over years.

But like how in the world is a normal developer even a relatively big one supposed to compete with that? That's complete insanity.

And don't get me wrong, the game looks pretty, but not 1 billion dollars pretty, lol. 

Starfield started with a budget of 200 million that ballooned into 400 million by the time it was finished. 

It seems obvious to me that maxxing out a PS4 (as say Horizon FW does) is insanely expensive to begin with, but going past that becomes obscenely expensive. 100 million dollars for a game should be an enormous budget but its becoming basically nothing. 

Insane budget. Looking at movies, Star Wars The Force Awakens sits on top with half a billion for budget.
GTA6 will make it back over time, GTA5 sold 195 million copies! But it's clear GTA6 will be milked like GTA5 for the next decade at least. GTA5 came out in 2013. GTA5 cost 265 million and generated close to 8 billion in revenue.

Almost half the budget goes into marketing (75% to 100% of the game budget), nearly a billion dollar marketing campaign seems a bit much!

Could GTA6 actually sell like, 50 million units at full price to make up that difference? Probably. Should any game have that expectation, no. 

GTA6 will easily sell 50 million copies and make hundreds of millions in net profit.

The problem isn't that GTA will or won't sell, the problem is it raises a bar no other sane studio can match.

If to get to that visual fidelity with that scope is 1 billion dollars in cost, almost no one else can afford that.

It also means yeah these games will be milked for like 10, even 15 years.

Also even 50 million copies at a $40 average net profit per copy still only comes to 2 billion dollars, lol. So 50 million copies just covers their dev + marketing + DLC cost. Like this game probably has to sell more like 75 million units on the low end.  

A huge chunk of GTAV sales came at way below the standard MSRP too, I paid $10 for my copy during a Steam sale, not really my cup of tea gameplay wise but for that price I thought why not.

These budgets are accelerating out of control, if like $300-$400 million + 5+ years of development is the new standard cost for any kind of AAA large scope game with higher end graphics, it's a huge problem. And that's now, today, what about in 5-6 years from now. Is that supposed to double again? The president of Playstation already said $150 million is not sustainable.