No one knows the future hey i thought we would get every game at /1440/60fps on ps5 cause i thought graphics were good enough and thats all i really wanted but it looks like i'm gonna have to upgrade to a ps5 pro at some point. probably for GTA6, wilds and black myth wukong if they are great and can provide a much frame rate, but in the future they find way to make ray tracing godly and developers need much better hardware we could see huge strides in graphics.

Right now maybe but 10-15 years from now the best quality graphics of today won't cost nearly as much. With how insane UE5 is UE6 might let indie devs have access to photoreal or at least close to photoreal level visuals.

I told him this. I told him why some of them don't explode due to either having issues, bad writing/gameplay loop that doesn't keep people around longer, or more critically; sold on one unpopular storefront/system.

We all know AW2 would be doing more had it been on Steam. Same with Control (even though Control has sold decently, it could have done more from being on Steam day 1 instead of year 2).

I don't really think this is true, if this was true, then CGI should be going down in cost not up. 

Even in 10 years to make a 20 hour game that for example has the visual fidelity approaching like the 1st Avatar movie from 2009, I think you are looking at over $1-2 billion easy. You have to consider also inflation on top of that, what is $500 million today is not going to be $500 million in 2034.

Even today, it's not like we have Avatar 1 level visuals in high budget TV shows and mid budget movies, not even close, to get that level of visuals in even a 2 hour movie today would still cost a small fortune even though it's not cutting edge any more. You have to pay people and they deserve to be paid for their work. 

Is the cost of CGI in general going up or just top notch CGI? My point is that while peak visuals are getting increasingly costly the average is gonna be fine and keep increasing in quality over time. Just look at Palworld, its budget was under 7 million and while it doesn't look amazing or anything like that for 2024 standards it still beats big budget games from 10-15 years ago in terms of graphics due to things like modern tools.

We understand you love nintendo and want them to take over gaming and everything else to die. you been pushing this narrative for people not caring about powerful  hardware anymore and ps4 hardware is more then good enough let it go. There is enough room for everybody to eat as soon the numbers were released that most PC users have more powerful hardware then ps5 and how PC gaming  revenue is catching up to all consoles combined, that should have been the end of the discussion and yes it's not some fetish to care about graphics and performance like you make it to be cause switch was huge with the younger audience. 

Games aren't made and advertised for specific generations of PC GPU's.

You aren't looking at the bigger picture here...
This is an industry-wide phenomena where during COVID, the entire gaming industry went stupid with sales, people also started to work from home which necessitated some changing in staffing and investment.

During post-covid, people are going outside and spending less time inside, where video games exist.

Add on the massively high expenditures that pretty much every government on the planet performed, printing "free" money which devalues the dollar as there is more currency in circulation (Called inflation), means that the costs of goods and services goes up and peoples ability to spend on "luxury" items like video games gets reduced.

Right now, every big player in the industry is cutting costs because it's a necessity, the extra staffing isn't required.

But in saying that, games like Call of Duty, Diablo 4, Hogwarts Legacy, Elden Ring, Mortal Kombat and more all did fine last year.

Have you ever thought that maybe, sales aren't being accrued because they aren't standout games that beg to be different? Look at Baldurs Gate 3 for example, fairly average budget... But absolutely brilliant game that was simply different and ended up selling like hotcakes.

Sales are a tricky thing, but right now the big issue is inflation.

Historically Movie/TV based video games have done fairly average in the sales department.

Hogwarts was a massive success because it's actually a very good game and not just because it's simply Harry Potter.

Some games don't need to break even, that's not the point of their existence.

Alan Wake 2 was exclusive to the Epic store on PC, where the vast majority of PC gamers don't exist.
It was meant to accrue gamers to that specific platform, which means it can be a loss leader.

Not only that, but Alan Wake 2 hasn't started to accrue royalties and DLC which will garner extra revenue.

We also need to remember that PC games have long legs... A simple sale can sky-rocket a game to the top of the sales charts even if it's 20 years old.

You need to look at the bigger picture rather than just the news headline.

Debuted at number 1 on many charts. I.E. Australia.
https://www.vgchartz.com/article/459424/australia-weekly-week-49-2023/

It's marketing was also scaled back.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Avatar/comments/1af19tn/avatar_frontiers_of_pandora_was_intended_to/

The sales charts only tend to track physical sales, not digital, we are in a post-physical media world now if you hadn't noticed.
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/95135/digital-to-make-95-of-video-game-revenues-in-2023-or-174-5-billion/index.html

Nice try at trying to twist some facts though.

I do need to give you some praise that you finally learned to link to some evidence for the first time in the history of this entire thread, so bravo. You are learning.

Again. These are meant to drive platform growth, not accrue individual sales.
Final Fantasy tends to be synonymous with Playstation, so if Sony can attract 1 million customers to the Playstation 5 with that game... And Sony has an average attachment rate of 10 titles per console sold, then Sony in the long term just sold 10 million copies of video games.

That is how "loss leaders" can continue to be justified and is a common tactic in many markets.

For example, many Supermarkets across the world will heavily discount a heap of items for the week, potentially selling them at a loss in the hopes it will attract customers who will also make extra supplemental sales.

Starfield has actually done well.
Was it to the level it was hyped at? No. But... It was still a big seller.

Same with Cyberpunk, didn't sell at the level of expectation on launch, but was still highly profitable.

Again. Senua's is a loss leader franchise meant to accrue gamers to Xbox.

We are still in a cross-generational period. Case in point: Call of Duty.

Gamers are still hanging onto the Xbox One and Playstation 4 and that is perfectly fine, the cost to justify a hardware jump for many households just simply isn't tenable with the current financial climate.

It's Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo's job to incentivize upgrading, so I am interested to see how Nintendo manages to do that with the Switch 2.0 being just another Switch, but with beefed up, but still very low-end hardware.
Sony and Microsoft need to do better and likely will, Microsoft hit it out of the park with their recent showcase.

You have not provided evidence for 99.9999% of your claims. You have only ever provided a single link in this entire thread.

And until you can provide evidence for your claims, it cannot and will not be regarded as fact, regardless of your proclamations.

The Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 are trying to push new rendering technologies like Ray Tracing and they simply are not up to that task.

They don't have the GPU power for it... And they are RAM constrained, 12.5/13.5GB of Ram for games out of 16GB is not enough... Especially when you are chasing 4k with all the bells and whistles.

Better graphics doesn't always cost money anyway, often it does the opposite and decreases cost and development time.

Global illumination removed the need for artists to create assets by hand with lighting details baked into textures to make a scene look good.

Tessellation removed the need for modellers and artists to spend a significant amount of time building terrain, they can use the tessellator to scale and add in those smaller geometric details.

There is 0 chance Starfield has broke even let alone made a single penny in profit for Microsoft/Bethesda.

We can see from Sony's data what kind of money a blockbuster hit game brings in, Spider-Man 2018 was over 20 million in sales against a $128 million budget + $44 mill marketing spend.

Starfield is reportedly over $400 million in budget + marketing. Who honestly thinks this game has even close to 20 million in sales? Probably not even 10 million, if they had even that they would have made a press release saying so (not "players" actual sales). 

This game more than anything else probably actually destroyed the XBox brand, when Microsoft did not get any kind of return on an investment this massive all of the sudden a few months later they're suddenly "open" to putting bigger XBox games on the PS5 (and likely soon Switch 2). My what a coincidence. More like they were horrified with the return on this game and realized they can't support the XBox + PC with those types of exclusives at that kind of spending.  

If this happened to a "normal" 3rd party that doesn't have billions in the bank like MS, a flop like this probably sink a company outright. For Microsoft it just sank the XBox by pushing MS into full blown multi-platformism and not even giving the XBox a chance to see how some other exclusives may have done. They sobered up damn quick, much like Square-Enix going running for multiplatform hills as soon as those FF7 Rebirth sales kicked them in the nuts. 

That's the other thing when a big budget game underperforms it's not like the old days where it was "well, there, there try harder next time". Now if a big budget game doesn't deliver big numbers, the consequences are much more severe. Management wants a total change in strategy, the bean counters take over, etc. etc. 

That's a good point. It's like how the adoption of ray tracing is gonna make developers jobs easier. Though to reply to what you said above that doesn't apply to those games since Square Enix does not own Playstation. Cause of the recent FF games not doing as well as they wanted they're gonna transition away from taking exclusivity deals and towards multiplatform development.