One unfortunate side effects of rising game budget is now game studios are less willing to be risky, which makes games today a lot more samey. At least at big budget scales (AAA).
I also feel that publishers and studios have too many exterior forces trying to dictate direction of games with regards to story and character development even art direction. Games are no longer an escape from reality but a parody of it itself.
@@ToeMcTagginsagreed I think they need to figure out how to better parse through feedback. It’s a much harder job than it used to be. Ideally every game director would have their own vision instead of building games out of player requests. Creative development is collaborative but it’s not a democracy. At least not if you want games like Elden Ring which go against what people claim to want and instead delivers an experience gamers didn’t know they needed.
When a company goes public it's no longer in the hands of the studio. It's in the hands of shareholders. Same when they take private equity from investment banks.
Also compounding complexity (i call it "rocket fuel" effect): the more people you need to make stuff (high-end art, features) the harder it is to manage (scheduling, testing, maintaining) which in turns make you need even more people (e.g. producers, QA) which in turn makes managing even more complex (which requires more people... 🔁). Just like with making bigger rockets 🚀: you need more fuel to lift the added fuel.
I know all the "Creative types" would love it if this industry could employ the whole world... but I don't think it's conservative dogma to point out that there's just too many coattail riders who aren't lifelong gamers and only bring diminishing returns to the final product
@@iller3why is because a life long gamer a prerequisite to being good at your job? You need to be good at coding, or art, or sound design. It feels like you are tiptoeing around the DEI is forced into games argument (sorry if you aren't).
I had a talk regarding this with the creator of Battletech and mechwarrior during IGDC. And after a long conversation the conclusion unfortunately was... "it is what it is" 😂 Companies today, especially private equity, thinks you can artificially create relevance, success and more by just throwing money. While at the same time not giving funding to smaller studios who can make a reliable but small profit. But a profit nonetheless. They'd rather spend 400 million on concord than spend 10 million on a decent AA game with promise. Sony has so many dead IPs they just refuse to revive all the while pushing more and more towards bloated lice service games. It's saddening to see ngl...
If you have a large fund, placing it becomes a problem. There are practical reasons why such sources of financing are not suitable for smaller projects/teams. Equally important is the fact that funds look for a particular return across their portfolio. You're going to have a high failure rate, so you need the winners to produce outsize returns to hit the overall goal for returns (say 20%). So even if it were practical to fund a lot of smaller projects, some of which return a respectable profit (respectable if they were standalone, self-funded businesses), it would still be a failed strategy for a fund. Embracer attempted this strategy and got their funding pulled with disastrous results as soon as interest rates went up.
I keep remembering that interview with Shinji Mikami where he told a story of how *GOD HAND* was made in 12 MONTHS, outside of CAPCOM on a budget because Mikami just couldn’t handle it, just REALLY wanted to make a game. Right now. The result of that labor of love was one of the most iconic, original and tough as nails game in the entirety of the beat em up genre. The first part of the 2000s was a magnificent time when that kind of thing was possible. It did not sell, forcing Mikami out of CAPCOM, but you won’t ever hear him complain about it - he had a blast.
@@UlissesSampaio IIRC nintendo wanted a quick turnaround since OOT took a long time to create (for the standards of the time). Thats why it is such a different game. They were forced to reuse a lot of assets since making more would take too long. Putting them in very different situations and environments was needed to prevent it from feeling like a clone.
An additional thing to consider. A lot of modern games will use well-known hollywood actors and celebrities as some their voice actors. Sure it happened in the past now and again, but now it's almost becoming standard to have a few in your big budget game.
@@armadilloseller Sure, but I imagine they are the exception, and not the rule. I was actually thinking about that very thing (and those two, along with maybe Tara Strong, etc. Ashley Burch? Not sure where she lands but I bet she's getting up there at this point).
@@adventuresinAI1982 is this a new thing? Mark Hamil was a prolific voice actor in gaming (and TV) all the way back to classics like full throttle and wing commander. Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillion were in ODST back in 2009, during what I would consider the golden era of AAA, before GTA V marked the significant growth of budgets & dev times. Thinking of GTA, San Andreas had Samuel L. Jackson back in 2004, 20 years ago. It's a contributing factor to budgets, but it has been ever since the start of VO.
@@TotallySlapdash Hamill was always a big nerd (and I love him for it). He was actually the first person I thought of when I thought of celebrities in games, specifically for FT and WC. But he was an exception back then. As was Tim Curry and even Michael Bein turning up (and a few people who later became big stars). But I've really noticed the increase over the last decade or so. Also, I'm in my 40s, so that's recent to me.
One thing that NOBODY who argues in favor of rising videogame prices touches on is the massive market size. 20-30 years ago, when games were $50-$60, like today, they were considered a huge hit if they sold 50.000 units. All those units were sold in a brick and mortar store so a large chunk of that price was manufacturing and logistics. Today, with digital distribution, not only is that cost gone, so more of the unit price goes to the developer/publisher, but the market is also much larger. To the point that AAA games are selling multiple millions of units. That means that for the same price, even ignoring inflation, the revenue has also drastically increased. On top of that, digital distribution also allowed developers to defer some development costs, by shipping incomplete, buggy games knowing they can "fix it later" with patches. That means at least part of the development cycle overlaps with the stream of revenue from sales, reducing the upfront cost of development. Let's not forget that even games that "cost $60" don't cost just $60 anymore. Between DLCs, microstransactions, GOTY editions, etc. the real total cost of a AAA game can be much more than $60. The Sims 4 basegame is now free, but all the DLC costs over $1300 dollars. Paradox is also famous for balooning DLC costs. Not to mention "live service" games with stuff like battle passes, cosmetics, loot boxes, etc. At the same time a lot of developers have proven that small budget games can still be major hits if they listen to their audience and focus on making the game fun. One recent example is Helldivers 2, even with the up and down they've gone through (most of the problems coming from the publisher, Sony, rather than the devs).
Helldivers 2 was absolutely not a small budget game. It was in development for at least 8 years during which the team size grew from about 50 people to about 100 people. 100 people at 50K a year is 5 million a year. Not counting the cost of rent, equipment, servers, etc. It was likely between 30 million and 100 million to produce, neither of which are small numbers. Also, brick and mortar stores still sell games in cases. Sure, most of the time they're glorified download codes, but they're still printing disks and putting them in plastic cases and shipping them all over the world. Hell, Nintendo actually still gives you the physical game in the case. Game companies are probably shipping plastic cases to more places in the world now than they were 20 years ago.
Sorry, but you're ignorant of the realities of the business. Yes, the addressable market is huge now. However, the demands of that market are now huge as well. Try to release a game of the same standard as back-in-the-days-of-50k and watch it flop with < 100 Steam reviews. The fact is, as soon as the addressable market grew, competing studios/publishers ratcheted up the amount and quality (in terms of 3D, number of assets, polygon count, texture res, rigging etc) of content in games because those larger budgets were now viable. This raised the plank for both AAA and AA releases - if you try to charge $60 for a game that doesn't *look* like AAA, you're dead. Frankly, most AA games that don't look like AAA games at $40 are DOA. No one is making 50% margins besides a few outliers at the very top. In fact, the business has never been more risky - budgets are huge and require massive sales numbers just to break even. Also, like you've been told, Helldivers is not some plucky underdog making a game with 2 guys in a basement for $2 and a case of burritos story.
@@paulie-g Helldivers is a Sony in-house published game, people just apply that "indie" label to any game they like these days. Like folks saying Larian is a plucky indie startup, like come on now...
@@mandisaw To be fair, Larian *was* a plucky indie to begin with, grew with their successes and they do self-publish. There's a lot of 'indy spirit' about them, especially if you compare them with exclusively profit- and line-go-up driven studios/publishers. But yeah, it's a bit silly to label a company that can deploy hundreds of people to work on one of the biggest IPs in the world over many years 'indy'.
Nodded throughout. People don't really understand the business-side of economics, so they see a final cost (or a top-line budget number) and have no idea where that number came from. I'd add supporting more platforms and device-types as well. In mobile, testing takes almost as much time as actual feature development if you have a broad, backward-compatible userbase. Also, you could scratch off "game budget" and make it "college tuition", same issue. Teachers don't get paid as much as developers (one reason I switched), but both want to be paid more next year than last year. Had to explain to people that most colleges pre-2000s didn't have internet, much less in-room ethernet and campus-wide Wi-Fi. More features, more staff, more money.
Basically, while the barrier to entry (especially for indies) has plummeted, the player expectations and amount of work has increased for everyone from the biggest AAA to the smallest indies and everyone in between.
I’ve been a huge CRPG fan for 20 years and I’m genuinely shocked that Pillars of Eternity was that cheap to make. It’s my favorite game of that genre. Appreciate your work Tim!
The caveat is that Pillars got out-featured by Divinity: Original Sin. Josh Sawyer gave an interesting talk at Digital Dragons about the impact of D:OS on the development of Pillars 2, esp rising user expectations. CRPGs didn't used to support full-3d or much voice acting, but fans have made that a new genre necessity, even as the actual size of that fanbase hasn't necessarily increased all that much.
@@mandisaw imo the bigger problem for Obsidian there isn't that Larian out featured them, it's that Larian out featured them on a very similar budget. At least if we're talking DOS1. DOS2's budget was like 3x that of Pillars and DOS1.
I just generally don’t care too much about that. I just played Arcanum a few months ago and it’s a little janky but it was incredibly unique. Idk visuals and voice acting seem like a problem younger gamers overly focus on
@puxtbuck6731 "Younger gamers" goes all the way to late 30s, early 40s now. And at that point you start flipping over - players have less time to play, so they want more QoL features, more game for their time, etc.
@@mandisaw I don’t mind QoL options I wasn’t saying I don’t like VA or graphics/cutscenes but people often just hate on something that has a lower budget for no reason. I’m only 30 anyways. I’m talking more about like 15 to 25 year olds now. I worked at a library for a while and no kids really wanted to play any games that weren’t just huge productions.
I know this is a topic that will make a lot of people groan but this video got me thinking about the Games as a service market and how all this tension with design becomes a far bigger problem when development is interwoven with needing to constantly please player bases. A lot of players of these games expect community involvement in the development which always seem to turn dreams into desires, desires into demands, and demands into death threats.
8:30 I feel like gamers have changed their demand for better and better graphics. Some of the most popular and best selling games in the last few years have had graphics on par with games 10 years ago. Fortnite, Among Us, most of Nintendo's catalogue. The hate that most AAA games have gotten in the past 5 years have rarely ever been graphics related. It's always gameplay and quality control. Look at Starfield as a prime example. Or Diablo 4.
Actually, Fortnite is on the bleeding edge of graphics. Most people play it on lower settings because its a competitive multiplayer game. Curiously enough, it seems like the "bleedingedge-ness" of Fortnite is due to it being THE Unreal Engine game, and so it functions as a publicity to drive adoption of the engine.
None of those games are classic single-player experiences. People may be willing to sacrifice fidelity for multiplayer titles for understandable performance limit reasons, but market data clearly demonstrates they refuse to do so for single-player titles. The existence of statistical outliers like Among Us does not a viable strategy make any more than the undeniable existence of lottery winners justifying dumping your savings into lottery tickets. Steam is littered with the corpses of thousands upon thousands of games with "Among Us" level graphics (and Among Us was nearly a corpse as well, the devs just miraculously had enough runway - more than a year or two iirc - and a streamer eventually found it by chance and helped it go viral).
@ They absolute will compromise on graphics for single player titles. Look at Nintendos entire mainline lineup which pales in comparison graphically to single player titles on PC/XSX/PS5. There are tons of other games like Hades, Stardew Valley, Balatro that prove it's more than just a statistical outlier. And for all the flops the last 3-5 years, none of them flopped because of the graphics. Starfield, Outlaws, and plenty of other single player titles were panned because of the gameplay. Nobody cared about the graphics.
@@TT92348 You are confusing realistic vs stylized for graphics quality. Nintendo's lineup is stylized, but still high-fidelity and graphically challenging on their tech. I just got the new Zelda game, and even though it's got that simplified chibi aesthetic, the textures, models, and animations are butter-smooth, and they are working dark magic to squeeze every drop of performance out of the Switch. Similar deal with Fire Emblem Engage from a couple yrs back - devs had an article in CG World (Japanese tech mag) about how they made detailed anime graphics in Unity. The eye shader alone had like 20 properties and came in boy vs girl versions so the eyelashes and highlights would look "cool" vs "cute". Don't mistake polycounts for technical skill-challenge.
@@TT92348 Outlaws was absolutely panned for graphics, as was Immortals of Aveum, SS:KTJL, Gotham Knights, Saints Row, Pokemon Legends, etc. Some of these were because of resolution targets that were far too restrictive, others were because of a bland visual presentation, and some like Outlaws were possibly due to the fidelity of the game being too high for the bitrates that Ubisoft were using when they recorded the advertising material.
With the exception of facial animations... I disagree that gamers demand more realistic Graphics. It's the Hardware marketers and advertising departments who are pushing that meme and it's very topical to the so called "Game Awards" arguments cropping up right now. I don't think Gamers themselves are _divided_ on it at all. I think a hyper vocal minority wants us to think we're divided
I hear lots of gamers *claim* they value gameplay over graphics. However, it is an undeniable fact that games with graphics that are attractive enough to make them stand out among the tens of thousands of games that hit Steam each year sell disproportionately more. When I say 'undeniable fact', I mean indie game marketing experts have gone through the sales data and demonstrated this very clearly. Yes, any given gamer might overlook less than AA-quality graphics once they're playing and like the game. The problem is that games without them will simply never be surfaced to enough eyeballs because they won't have the wishlist/sales numbers to be promoted. Yes, there are statistical outliers (games that went viral), but it's about as reliable as part of a strategy as buying lottery tickets with your dev budget instead.
Even with the facial animations one, Elden Ring launched in 2022 as FromSoftware's first "souls" game to feature lip syncing. 2019 if we're counting Sekiro, but the point stands. It doesn't even have full facial animation either, the only thing that moves are the character's mouths timed (poorly) with their dialogue. In Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1-3 and Bloodborne, NPC faces are all completely static. And if you want another example, Divinity Original Sin 2 (i.e. the game that succeeded well enough to secure Larian the Baldur's Gate bag), was the same. Zero facial animation. Most people don't care about any of this if the game is actually good. The reason it's such a big deal in some games is _usually_ because that's the only thing those games have going for them. Generic third person action slop with underdeveloped combat, virtually zero environmental interaction, and non-existent level design. Or interactive movie games, but I'm a bit more forgiving of it as an expectation in that case, because that's basically the entire point of those games. It's basically just a form of key jangling. And yeah okay with that second example, Baldur's Gate 3 was obviously a much more popular game, and it has good facial animation. But Divinity Original Sin 2 cost $15 million to make, and sold 7.5 million copies. Baldur's Gate 3 cost $100 million, and so far has sold 15 million copies. In terms of % profit, DOS2 is a more successful game than BG3.
@@yewtewbstew547 I don't think DOS2 was AAA-priced, was it? Think it was always $45 or $40. Also a much longer long tail of sales. Facial animation issues were widely accepted at a certain point because of technical and performance limitations (you need a ridiculous amount of fine muscle modeling to do it well) just as janky movement across terrain with an incline/decline was accepted at one point. Like I will never tire of pointing out, this is not about a single smash hit game. You will always have statistical outliers and lightning-on-a-bottle projects where enough things are so great people learn to love the flaws. It's about the average team setting out to do a project and what their reasonable expectations for how easy it will be to even get their game in front of eyeballs never mind sell it to them afterwards. The DOS series was lauded for its gameplay. Now imagine a team who sets out to make a game with similar quality gameplay, but only has the capability/budget for pixel art. What do you think their chances are to even get noticed among all the other indy "don't mind the look, you'll love it once you play it for 40 hours" games?
I was thinking about this yesterday whiles watching a documentary on Japanese Games and Localization. Localization is now such an expected thing that I found it weird that there were games that were released exclusive to Japan.
Another recent jump in game budgets is financialisation of the industry in the wake of COVID. During COVID everyone stayed indoors and played videogames and watched Netflix, so there was a very sudden jump in revenue in the industry. That made private equity investors sit up and take notice because there was gold in them thar hills, and they jumped onboard. Thing is, their desired outcome isn't "a good game people will buy that makes some profit", it's "share price goes up". And share price goes up on big smash hits. So about five years ago a lot of games pivoted to or began development as the sort of things that would be a big smash hit, and got the sort of money invested in them that would make the biggest splash possible and so make the share price go up for the equity investors. (And it's ruined everything, as financialisation does when it gets its tentacles into an industry or economy)
Bro, they were there in the early 2010s lmao. It didnt start with covid, the quantity of money increased but they were already rapidly devouring the industry way back
On the plus side, as the wave of 2020-21 funded games dies off in 2029-32, we should also get a wave of interesting smaller scale games developed in 1-5 years by creative-but-previously-unfulfilled people previously laid off from those large publishers who cut their teeth on those massive boondoggles (of which maybe 1 or 2 will reach fortnite levels of success amongst a sea of failures). I'm crossing my fingers that the 2030s will be a second 90s of innovative 5-30 man studios (I predict a few new subgenres and a rediscovery of piloting games, god games, arcade racers and single-player-focused FPSs).
It's always been about money. It's always been a business. All the way back to Atari, Midway, Namco, Capcom, et al they used to compete hard and dirty in the arcade and early-console days. It only got more intense when Nintendo, Sega, and later Sony [and Microsoft] got into it and the market grew several orders of magnitude. They used to bribe retail stores for placements, publish magazines that were glorified ad catalogs of only their games, and ripping off each others' successes was commonplace. A good game that makes players happy is just the most effective means of trying to make a lot of money. Business is business, that has never changed.
Its the same with movies, you have more tools, positions, and moving parts resulting in $100 million budgets while at the same time you can make an indie film with a phone in your pocket.
Hello Tim, it's me, a random youtuber commenter. I think it might be worth mentioning and explaining why the hiring/training process is also super expensive, it is extremely interesting to see how hiring can become a two edged sword very, very rapidly, to the point where the whole production gets delayed. It happened to a certain studio with a certain popular MMO, those guys released almost no content for two years because of hiring, I didn't understand it until I became part of a studio, and had to train the new members and still do my job as a lead game designer, fortunately for me, I love my job xD
About player expectations: if anything they are lower than ever. No joke, WOW players already feel nostalgic about the WoW Classic launch 5 years ago. The greatest thing that happened to WoW community in the last 10 years was the relaunch of a 15 year old version of the game. I like battlefield and I feel the same way - release bf3 remastered without actually remastering it, and I’ll buy it instantly. Yet they keep pumping hundreds of millions into the things fans don’t want.
I'm certainly thankful for all the passionate indie developers on Steam. I'm likelier to find a depthful, satisfying experience with them than with today's large studios. RDR2, Elden Ring, and Baldur's are the only AAA games I've bought in the last decade.
12:22 Marketing. I grew up in the 80s in Germany, on TV you always had adds. In the 80s all you had was Government paid TV stations that showed 3 minutes of ads before a show/movie and after. It was fine, you could have your eyes take a break, or take a bathroom break while still hearing the commercials. Then the 90s rolled around, and we got more TV stations that where not funded by a fee everyone owning a Radio or TV set. Suddenly you had ad-breaks in the middle of a movie/show. Suddenly the break was not 3 minutes but 5 or 6. People went away from the TV because it was just wasted time sitting there and being flooded by commercials, where most of them where not fun to watch. Not fun especially the 5th time that day. So they SPLIT that 6 minuted commercial break, they went even to put in 4 commercial breaks each 1 minute long to prevent people from leaving the TV in fear of missing out on the movie/show. At that point, it was the early 2000s I was just turning OFF the TV, because... you had so many sources from which you could watch something. Renting Movies, or outright buying them. That or playing a game. Now with UA-cam, it feels like UA-cam tries to waste the users time. You would think they show you TARGETED ads... but nope. It is like a bag of skittles or M&Ms... all colors within. And honestly I don't watch UA-cam to be flooded by ads, more often then not the same ads over and over. They wasting my time with those. What UA-cam should do is add some form of add that is not interfering with you watching videos. Maybe ad-banner would be better, ones that quickly and to the point show you a product and you can click it to be lead to a commercial video on UA-cam if you want to know more about it. That way the user could give them feedback on how they like the ad video. There are many ad videos that are FUN TO WATCH... even repeatedly. Most of them are bland and non-fun. So what I do to get information, is just refresh UA-cam's main page, if a new game is out it surely shows up there. Which can be a pain for indie games, but there are people making videos showing off handfuls of indie games soon to be released that look good.
Relatively recently I watched a video on jobs for music tours (what does a tour manager do, what does a band manager do, what does a promoter do, what do this tech and that tech do, etc). Could you do something like that breaking down jobs in the game industry?
Increasing fidelity indeed add a lot more cost. I see it as encouraging when some people have started making quality, low fidelity games like Compound Fracture. That is good thing for game developers. Take example from movies, not all movies target on 4K sharp image. Like Jackie that was filmed on 16mm camera. Or 28 days later was taped mini-DV camera. Games can be made to different styles and fidelity. Input pixels can be lower and use those to generate textures, or use some shader to add style. They don't need to be targetted on some ancient hardware, but I understand that is also art. Also, one good trick that is used by game developers and in movies, is to put restrictions how to do things, and then use creativity to make the game/movie with restrictions. There are movies that avoids CGI, or movies that are shot with black and white and so on. Games do same thing. Ancient times there was technical reasons but now restrictions can be made differently.
hey Tim! I agree that expectations have definitely gone up and that is a factor, however I feel like this is disproportionate when considering how many people work under bad conditions in NA and loose their jobs, meanwhile many CEOs receive 100s of millions of Dollars as a bonus for their "good work" and profits also go up massively. This doesnt excuse the extreme monetization for me and also customers should never be guilt tripped into excuses
CEO compensation is never part of a game's budget, therefore their salary and other emoluments can not, by definition, contribute to rising game *production* budgets.
I think a big plus in modern game development is what I would call Test-Fail-Redo. Many companies spend a lot of money and resources testing versions, because in modern game development, the vision of the complete game takes much longer to come together. And throughout the process, many prototypes are made, and sometimes with great quality. And these don't even see the light of day. It is true that today it is much easier and faster to make games. But as the video itself said, taking risks is very costly. So companies spend months and months testing and experimenting with versions of games that could be a complete game in themselves. I would also include the cost of including renowned names in the industry (artists, directors, composers and actors) in the project. And the problems of not having such well-qualified people, since in a consolidated industry, people often appear who only work in it for the money, so their commitment, knowledge and capacity are very limited.
The marketing budgets is money wasted. Games being hyped for years in videos and commercials "developer directs" and the like for most games nowadays releasing buggy unfinished and with already nearly finished DLCs ready to be marketed right next to the game before the release even only to come out and be starfield or cyberpunk or geez let's not even go Star citizen. I can see why they're pushing so hard to push developers out and start to use AI as well and that's not good at all I would rather every developer get paid what they're worth and they cut other things out of the budget like marketing management costs and stuff like that. In a multi-billion Dollar business that we prop up by purchasing these games it's unfair to continue to try to push all of this on to us because we're already at a breaking point when it comes to hardware and software costs.
Hi Tim, I really appreciate all of your videos! The ones about perception of production vs actual production always come with such great detail and specifics with examples. I was recently rewatching Double Fine's Psychodyssey and I was wondering what your thoughts were on documentaries about game development? Do you think they miss stuff? What would you want to see more of? How transparent should devs be about their creative work? Do you think these somewhat post-mortem looks could be helpful in comparison to other forms of post-mortems? Psychodyssey portrays a lot more of the internal strife that goes on in a studio and I saw a lot of your lessons in game dev on UA-cam shown first-hand in it. Specifically with people in different positions wanting input on the game, issues between art and design, and an ever-looming deadline. I couldn't recommend the doc enough. Sorry for the many questions. If you ever answer this, feel free to reply to as many or as few as you want. I hope anyone who is reading this has a nice day =^)
Don't even need to play older games. Every time I play a Japanese game, I travel back in time 20 years. No qol, no ui customisation. Don't like damage numbers popping up or health bar covering entire screen? Too bad.
@@UlissesSampaio what CDPR have done so far is the best they'll ever do. Any games they make in the future will be a disaster because they accepted to have overlords above them now
I can't wait for the days when 1 game will take up 1 TB of storage. I think the graphics and gameplay from the 360/PS3 era are still good though I'm sure most people might not agree. I would like to see the option to not have to install ultra textures or languages I don't need.
I'm tired of developers telling me what I should expect or not in a game and that I should feel bad for not wanting to put down more money for worse products. The consumer's expectations are not wrong, the developer's scope is. Since the late 2000's, Western devs (AA, AAA) want every living soul to play their game, so they make their games to appeal to a "mass audience". Thing is, this mystical mass audience, or the generic casual player, does not exist. People have different tastes and want different things. Western devs will either realise this or keep losing to the Asian studios.
Marketing also needs to take a step back too. A lot of games that even see ok success aren't getting it from how its usually marketed in bigger budget games. It feels like they have missed the boat with it big time really.
With Substance Designer and such a massive library of materials and scanned assets, with Unreal Engine being really very easy to use, with tons of skilled artists on the market, AI to iterate on concepts, I would love to see a modern breakdown of the art portion of the budget. OFC depending on the world style and uniqueness (ex something like Dishonored where they can't use scans), I don't understand how the art budget portion of game dev could be the part that is going up above normal inflation rate.
A bit more than a year ago I started making a zelda clone to learn some graphics and to practice Java. And I've been doing it on and off and and here and there when I'm not busy with university. I'd say now that the engine is quite stable and scalable enough the majority of my time is spent either thinking about mechanics or doing art the latter being something which I learned I'm not as good at as I thought. Instead the programming part which is the part I enjoy best I spend barely any time on since Im quite fast at it. Really agree with the point about art.
Not uncommon. It usually goes like this, if you are highly technical, if you really like math, graphics and engine programming. Usually you don't like as much design, art or gameplay programming. Nevertheless, I'd say bite the bullet and spend that time working on it, you will eventually start liking it, not as much as engine programming, but enough for your to make good games solo.
I think the reason why game price is such a complex topic is that your product does not really have costs per product. So as the industry naturally grew, so grew your potential playerbase and the rising costs got covered by shipping more digital copies, which cost you virtually nothing other than store share. Even if you doubled the cost of making a new game compared to before, if your playerbase tripled thanks to better PC availability and overall popularity of gaming, you are actually in the green, no? Personally I would love for developers to be paid more, but so far from what we have seen... do they really get paid more with rising game prices? What I keep seeing is shareholders making more money than god while they let a big part of their development team go. If I could make sure those 10 extra bucks really go to devs, then yeah, I am all for it. But with big companies like EA? I doubt your regular dev will feel it.
Look...I dont think this would "fix the industry" or anything but I feel like we need more Double A kind of games in the scene. Mid to low budget games that take about 3 years or less, smaller teams and not some 200M$+ investments. I hope the market accepts these types of projects and supports them.
Re: sales price of games, they have gone down by quite a bit after inflation. In the early 90s, Nintendo and computer games cost about 45 to 50 USD. Ultima 6's original April 1990 cost was 69.95 USD, which is 171.30 USD in today's dollars. (Worth every penny!) Of course, the volume of games sold now is so much higher so the total revenue you can get is so much higher and almost all the cost of creating games is fixed costs. The variable cost of producing an additional copy of a game is low and I BELIEVE entirely comes from distribution costs (12% for Epic Games for example). In any case, I wouldn't be averse to paying a high price for great games (200 USD or even more) or even a great book given the number of hours of entertainment that a game / book gives versus a movie. If that means developers get paid more, are less likely to be laid off, investors are more willing to take risks on off-beat ideas, it would be worth it, but practically, the market equilibrium landed somewhere else (which is fine--one consumer doesn't get to dictate the entire industry).
If more people thought like this, the industry would be in a better place. Sadly, people only look at the whole number and ignore how games have stayed relatively the same price despite everything else going up 2 to 3 times since the 90s. But thats more of a blame on how the only thing more stagnant than gamd prices are wages.
Considering the price for complete editions of games I wouldn't say the price has gone down. I'd say not only has the price gone up, but we're expected to buy the game in early access on release day and send the next 2 years buying all the dlc needed to finish it.
The reason why people complain about costs is because inflation is felt differently between investors and workers. The minimum wage in 1995 was 4.25 an hour (or $7.44 in todays money). The minimum wage today is... $7.25 an hour. People are making less money today with a higher cost of living. A little more than half of people in the united states even own some sort of stock; and the bottom 50% only own 1% of the stock. For the workers and petty investors, a lot of numbers on paper do not translate to their wallets. I can really go off on this (and other issues related to the economics of games). But I would get way off topic. Short answer is buy indie games and support the people who are doing what you love.
@@AlucardNoir yh that's true. We aren't getting a complete game with base editions depending on the game. Ultimate Editions, Complete Editions etc are $100 almost $130 for some editions which includes expansions, cosmetics and other content.
Paying $60 for Zelda OoT in 1998 was getting a complete game that wasn't a buggy mess. That's $114 now which would be like some 'Ultimate Edition' nonsense that is probably half broken for the first week/month (because the players will beta test it for us) and have a bunch of micro transaction nonsense and a second season pass one year later for a bunch of minor additions.
Nobody ever mentions that budgets are higher because development time is significantly longer now. Every game seems to be in development for 7+ years now.
Hi Tim, I've been considering how to ask this question for some time now. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on video games that are simulators, for example Farm Simulator, Flight Simulator, etc. How do the priorities change in a game like that, and what are some things that you like to see in a simulator if you ever play these? There's quite a diverse range of "simulator" games like city builders etc, would love to hear your thoughts on these types of games and how they may differ regarding development practices & design versus more "traditional" games. Should simulators have a story? What's most important to you in a simulator-type game?
There are definitely diminishing returns when it comes to fidelity stuff. Especially with advancements in path tracing and AI/procedural scene generation/reconstruction (lighting, resolution, interpolation, motion, object placement etc). Capable hardware hitting budget segments is the best thing the gaming industry can hope for. It'd mean there'd be more leeway when it comes to fidelity compromises, because these methods can make up for a lot of that fidelity deficit, and it'd be faster and easier for the designers and artists to iterate. Of course, gameplay, performance and appropriate art direction, would be preferable.😁
There's another factor: far more game publishers are large publicly traded companies now, which means they have to pay shareholder dividends, and that's usually a lot of money.
I'm not so sure about the demand for ever more high fidelity presentation. The success of games like Valheim, Vampire Survivors etc... and the increasing numbers of people playing older games over newer ones suggests this isn't the case. I think most "gamers" just want good games and will forgive a lot in the visual department if the games are engaging and fun to play. The video games media gushing over things like RDR2 shrinking horse balls feeds into this narrative, but I do believe it's more a narrative than a reality.
Well the good news is that graphics seems to be hitting a point of diminish returns where the amount of money and time is no longer equal in more sales for graphics. More and more games with limited graphics are more and more popular. Not to say good graphics is not appreciated, but i feel that Cyberpunk/Baldur's gate level of graphics is like the top. So around base PS5 level of graphics is like the good middle ground. Lots of devs are dumbfounded with the PS5 Pro because well, using that kinda of power demands so much more dev time its not worth it. Even the consumer start to not see the difference it provides. Although features wise, i tend to agree with you. Gamers has a lot of expectation when it comes to: - good level design - good story/choices - good voice acting - lots of options - build diversity/endgame for RPG - etc And i could go on. I would argue even Indie games has that problem unless you have a very unique idea/concept. Then and only then, you can escape having not enough features.
speaking of marketing(hype), how does that correlation between dollars and success work, on the one hand you have larian saying its flushing money but on a well established IP with a multi year early access time where (seemly) every update was covered extensively compared to the myriad of games that flopped with several people (generally redditors in my experience) commenting they never even heard about it. At what point does a game achieve an exit velocity to pierce the gaming strata to have a chance to not need a high budget marketing campaign but carried by hype
One model for awareness is the onion model. If a topic is super-important to you, part of your identity, you will go out of your way to find out info, subscribe to news sources, follow the zeitgeist, etc. The center of the onion. But as you go further out, each layer is less personally invested in that topic, and is less likely to know what's going on just from their own actions. Marketing begins with awareness - you need ppl to know the product exists way before they can be hyped to want it. Companies are paying for that awareness, and the bigger the game, the more of the onion you need to reach. Anyone watching Tim's channel basically lives pretty close to the center of the onion, particularly for BG3-type games. But even then, there are a ton of high-profile games & updates you probably have no idea about (mobile, non-English, genres you don't play, etc). Center of one onion, outer layer of countless others. There is no "exit-velocity," basically. There are only trade-offs where you balance how many paying customers you need vs how much of the awareness-onion you can pay for. That's where the targeted advertising comes into play, because you can do fewer "onion layers," but catch more ppl who are likely to be deeply invested in the sort of game you're selling.
Hey Tim are CRT monitors still the best for old games since they were made for it? Im trying using CRT shaders for a similar result but its not as good.
All I can hope is that Balatro wins Game of the Year and blows the competition out of the water. We need more indie dev, shorter time to market, more mobile-friendly well-developed games. How long has it been since “mobile game” wasn’t synonymous with trash?
I'd like to know about UI design. How do you decide on what amount of UI is necessary and what elements should be represented in the game itself. Like in Halo the elites have shields, but there isn't a bar that shows how much armor they have. You slowly see their shields get brighter and then burst, showing the player their shield has broken.
People have so many games on their backlog that they can play games for the rest of their life without buying anything new. So as the development of the games is a business, developers need to seek new ways to optimize their game budget no matter how much the cost is justified in their opinion. Many people just don't see that value in more expensive games.
Hey Tim, fellow Tim here! I was wondering how you have gone about creating fictional religions in your games. I guess I'm mostly thinking about the OSI in the Outer Worlds, because I find their belief system pretty fascinating. But just in general, I'm curious what goes into that sort of process, especially since I imagine pains have to be taken to avoid too many similarities to real world religions in case their fictional counterparts are the subject of ridicule or portrayed as villainous in some respect. Really love all of your videos, and hope that this question hasn't already been asked/answered!
I have said I won't play a game without voiceover for decades. I think people didn't become that way, I think it's just more people like me play games now. Games are one of the most popular things now.
@@pbacon95 I don't play enough games, and I can't recall the games where I stopped playing them due to the lack of dialogue. The last one I bought that was like that was Shadowrun Returns. And before there was an rpg with a lot of dialogue options, a 3d game that I don't quite recall. Both now that I reflect are like from a decade ago. Maybe I just don't like this type of game and I claim it's lack of voice acting. Tho even in the past I've been annoyed by games having silent protagonists when they're action games or other genres.
Games nowdays are too expensive and have too many people working on them. Result? 'Safe' games instead of daring with waiting time being 8-10 years per sequel..
I usually just follow monkey island's advice when purchasing games. (Adjusted for inflation) And I am happy. People can have their high expectations. I just want a good game.
1:04 This is very interesting, Tim. It's funny how you guys were able to do comparatively so cheaply games that went on to become history, like Fallout 1 and 2. Interesting that Arcanum costed more than those 2 considering you did that on your own studio and the top-down, isometric, 2D pre-rendered CRPG formula was already figured out I would think that it would cost less. And if you think that both Pillars and Tyranny were developed in Unity, that shows how more efficient you guys were in the late 90s and early 2000s that you had to write the whole engine and still made it cheaper. But the more interesting part of course, is how steep the price of games gets when it comes to making a first-person game. I have always noticed that in my experiments, when you go first-person the price really shoots up, because every single asset must have so much more detail when to be looked at first-person. That is why I have suggested to you to get out of your retirement with classic "isometric" (not necessarily, but top-down) CRPG, that you can make by yourself! Or maybe with one or two partners or some art contractors!
Best game I ever played was WOTR and it has some of this stuff but not most of it. Most of my favorite games came out before all this was expected, I'm definitely not going to pay more for a game that has a bunch of features I never really cared about. Especially since a lot studios seem to have no good writers left (Bethesda, Bioware).
Going to piggy back off your comment on why games take longer. And this is just my perception as a consumer. Because designer, like all creative people, love to iterate on their work until they it's "just right" and producers who either believe them or also want that work done "just right" don't have the foresight or the guts to just pull the plug. So they are wasting days, weeks and months working on assets that get scrapped and can't be re-used effectively wasting everyones time and money. From what i've heard in interviews and postmortems AAA development is a lot like a sculptor who needs a 10 ton block of marble and 5 years to make a fist sized figurine. And that is just the obvious waste. Then there are location scouting trips to some village deep in the cambodian jungle to take pictures for photogrammetry because the game has 2-3 missions set in cambodia and somebody on the team really wants to get the environment "just right". Or writers who need a 2 week all expenses workshop in egypt to overcome their creative block. But what i think is the worst offender is just straight up bad management. Producers and project leads who fail to provide a clear direction for the game because they themselves don't really know what the final game is exactly supposed to be. So they rather let their departments brain storm features, mechanics and systems for weeks of which 90% will never make it into an alpha. Changes in management, changes in vision, changes in scope - whoops we just scrapped half the game 5 years into development. Let's start over. That is pretty much how you end up with a 4 hour game that takes 4 years to develop or a big RPG that is 10 years in the making, comes out broken and unfinished and the company spends another 2 years fixing it because the minimum viable product wasn't quite ready for market.
MVP works well on business software but games are different, to give value to users, they need features in place. Business MVP application can be just one feature that gives value to customers. I don't know exactly how things are done in studios but I believe games can benefit from something like concept -> game design document -> preproduction -> production -> maintenance. What I mean by preproduction is that it should start by adding features, as minimal as possible. Game can be made using single button if wanted so Is see that there should be minimal developer team implementing features from game design document and all assets can be some 16x16px icons or something absolutely minimal. Just enough that gameplay works and game is playeable from start to finish and there stuff from game design document are implemented. Then actual game production can be started, making thousands of assets, adjusting lights, polishing and may add something if something important was missed. When moving preproduction to production, that should be too late stage change story and maps. That kind of development process should remove uncertainty from development, because all necessary work can be then estimated much better when the game actually works.
Tim, it would be great if you could try to break the budget for a game like Fallout but made in 2024. I understand all the costs related to AAA games, but I wonder what stops folks from doing games like Fallout with a modern touch.
Game budget goes up because projected revenue go up. The cart always follows the horse. Development is a fixed cost - if you spend $500 million dollars making a game and you sell 1 million copies, you paid $500 per copy. (Ouch!). If you instead sell 205 million copies like GTA V your development costs you $2.43 per copy. Games are selling more copies than ever and thus budget go up to try and convince a larger slice of that 90 million console install base to buy your game.
Hi Tim, you mentioned this in this video. But what are some equipment needed for creating video games? The obvious ones like computers and stuff like that but what are some ones we gamers wouldn’t think of. Thanks😊
The kind of game you or I would make at home really does just need a computer. Maybe a drawing tablet if you are an artist and more comfortable with that approach. You can even make mobile games for your own phone. Play with the framework or engine software of your choice, and have at it :) What Tim is describing is the kind of game a midsize company makes. Anything from 5-10ppl up to 100+. There's also an even larger scale, where multiple dev-studios around the world work together, your Assassins' Creeds, or Call of Duty types.
It's not all games. The indy game market of one single dev with limited support by contractors making a decent to good game never was bigger than today. In my opinion it's games wanting to be movies that make the budgets explode. The motion capture tech and the actors/ stunt people you need for that tech alone eat more money than entire games used to cost in the past.
Hi Tim! Have you spoken on the topic of tradmarks and your experience of trying to protect the rights to your IP, perhaps during your time with Troika? I'm wondering if you would have any "don't forget x" game industry advise on the topic that would be useful for the less legally learned among us (e.g. Me). Thanks for all the videos and insights!
Tim, do you think the video game industry could transition to a Hollywood guild model where you don't keep people on staff but hire for the project (union rates) since, as you said, lighting design people have a specialty that sounds awfully like a trade like a grip or camera operator.
Hollywood only got that guild model because of 3 things. 1- Big-name actors & directors worked together with rank-and-file layers to form their own studio (United Artists, later part of MGM-UA). Solidarity and pushback against the studios forced them to acknowledge the guilds, although as you see, there's still tension nearly 100yrs later. 2- Film & TV crews were initially drawn from theater crews, and theater has its own long history of stage guilds. Video games for good or ill has been modeled more on the tech industry, which has its own long history of being against union representation (in the US at least). 3- Before Hollywood even formed, the US media business was centered in New York City. The parties were different then, but not the politics - NYC has been a fixture of the Labor movement since its inception at the start of the 20th century. Books, theater (incl dance & live music), radio, and then television all started in the US via New York, and that's where those industries remain centered for the most part. Movies kind of inherited the politics along with the personnel.
It would be safe to say that devs don't have enough confident in their game and their direction of the game and instead they pack everything in it, and thus rasing the cost of making the game.
Games are more expensive because people think they need everything you mention like gigantic open world game with next gen graphics, motion capture FMVs, etc. They are wrong. Gamers want fun experiences and everything else is secondary. Were this not so we would not have a thriving indie market Marketing is not needed. Send your game to a few streamers on twitch and if it is good it will catch on.
Sending your game to streamers on twitch IS marketing. You have to coordinate that. You also have tons of games fighting for attention of those streamers so having a good trailer and steam capsule is important. Then they finally play it and the first thing they’ll say is ‘wow there’s almost no settings’ which is not a great way to start off a game. I think your point of view is very naive. If what you were saying actually worked, studios would already be doing it.
@@CainOnGamesthey may not know what they want, but most will probably choose interesting gameplay and story over motion capture or whatever else. I often come back to vtmb, fnv, etc. These are old games lacking most of the features mentioned, yet people play them years later. Will I ever come back to whatever the latest ubisoft/ea/sony creation is? I doubt I will even play it.
I wish people would be willing to pay at least $80 or so for a AAA game. The decades of $50-60 titles has kept indie developers stuck at selling games for 10-20. It's getting to the point where even making a game solo, you need to sell tens of thousands of copies to survive. A decade ago, you could survive on like 5000 sales at $10 (taking home about $5 per copy).
On graphics: No, you don't need those things. You don't need to continually bid up polycounts, textures, animations, voice-overs, etc. You *CHOOSE* to add those features, but they are not necessary. The way I know is, there have been many successful games that don't have those features. Valheim, Minecraft, V Rising, Helldivers 2, Crusader Kings. World of Warcraft has 7.25 million subscribers, 20 years after launch, and it's still got the same 2004 game engine and 2014 graphics. Sure, they sprinkle in a little machinima where there would have been a wall of text, but this just in: Nobody cares. We're here for gameplay.
There is no expecations for games to look better and better, games didn't change a bit from past 5-7 years. Nobody gives a damn. Entire studios get bloated for no good reason, and too many cooks spoil the broth
@@Mark-nh7zgdid anything change on pc over these 5-7 years? Other than games becoming so unoptimised that you are forced to use upscalers to have a playable framerate?
You can throw tons of money in make a game and it still turn into a stinker. You have so called AAA games costing hundreds of millions, and turn into a stinker. Meanwhile you have indie devs turn out gems at a gum and shoe string budget.. Maybe the industry should just focus on make good games players want. Know your audience and they pick up your bills.
Rising game budgets are only a problem for studios that fired all of their talented employees like Bioware and Ubisoft. Larian and CDPR make good games so they will make a profit.
The largest factor into budgets are salaries. CDPR have over 1000 employees with 600 dedicated to the core dev team. The more staff you have the more you need to sell. Don't see how firing people increase costs?
Firing ppl doesn't increase your cost, that's literally what companies do if they need money because that's the quickest way to get some cash for your financial Quarter
@@heavyartillery-qm5hu it changed nothing to what i've said... You can hit your target sales and still have a poor financial result due to cost and firing ppl to get quick cash so no, it changed nothing
What's your take on the impression many people have that visuals haven't advanced much in a visible way since Doom 2016 and GoW 2018 but system reqs have increased substantially?
Great video. One point of criticism. I'm not a huge fan when the graphic covers the presenter. It looks a bit odd to see your face replaced with a graph, for instance. I think the video would look better (or at least less uncanny) if you did had the graph as the full screen and kept yourself/your office as an inset instead of the current method.
"dev salaries gone up." Are you sure? Yeah, rando keyboard warrior questioning a senior developer with decades of experience in all kinds of gaming studios. Sorry about that but the cost that I see rising more than the salaries itself is the ballooning of the size of teams. And throwing more bodies at a project have diminishing returns. And the worst part, in my opinion, is that you need more people with management skills. And that is a rising cost with a high risk of low return. A lot of "managers" and leaders without those skills
He (Tim) is right, this is a basic understanding in economics, at some point you have to increase the salaries of your workers to adjust to the inflation, now that increase can be small but it still increase to counter the effect of the inflation. So just like any other jobs, yes devs salaries have increased. The problem is the expense that are not anticipated very well and that's why you need great managers or hell you end up with projects like Concord.
never tried classic fallout or any isometric. I AM LOVING book of ys I&II on TURBOGRAPHIX PC... way better than link to the past, voice acting, faster combat, harder secrets, perfect retro graphics
And by your logic I should be paying $6,000 for a PC. Let's not pretend that it isn't easier now than 30 years ago to make a game. Advancements in frameworks and languages have drastically cut down both the time and skill required to create a game.
Why not 200? Maybe then everyone would finally quit buying unfinished trash and gamers will be split between playing 10-20 year old games that stood the test of time and indy stuff with actual soul put into it.
One unfortunate side effects of rising game budget is now game studios are less willing to be risky, which makes games today a lot more samey. At least at big budget scales (AAA).
I also feel that publishers and studios have too many exterior forces trying to dictate direction of games with regards to story and character development even art direction. Games are no longer an escape from reality but a parody of it itself.
@@ToeMcTagginsagreed I think they need to figure out how to better parse through feedback. It’s a much harder job than it used to be. Ideally every game director would have their own vision instead of building games out of player requests. Creative development is collaborative but it’s not a democracy. At least not if you want games like Elden Ring which go against what people claim to want and instead delivers an experience gamers didn’t know they needed.
@@pavx45elden ring and fromsoft are overrated
When a company goes public it's no longer in the hands of the studio. It's in the hands of shareholders. Same when they take private equity from investment banks.
They feel 'safe'
Also compounding complexity (i call it "rocket fuel" effect): the more people you need to make stuff (high-end art, features) the harder it is to manage (scheduling, testing, maintaining) which in turns make you need even more people (e.g. producers, QA) which in turn makes managing even more complex (which requires more people... 🔁). Just like with making bigger rockets 🚀: you need more fuel to lift the added fuel.
I think most AAA are past the optimum point in complexity management capabilities vs positive results achieved.
I know all the "Creative types" would love it if this industry could employ the whole world... but I don't think it's conservative dogma to point out that there's just too many coattail riders who aren't lifelong gamers and only bring diminishing returns to the final product
@@iller3why is because a life long gamer a prerequisite to being good at your job? You need to be good at coding, or art, or sound design. It feels like you are tiptoeing around the DEI is forced into games argument (sorry if you aren't).
And coordinating all of that takes more time which then adds even more to the budget.
I guess Unreal Engine 5 is space X of video game development
I had a talk regarding this with the creator of Battletech and mechwarrior during IGDC. And after a long conversation the conclusion unfortunately was... "it is what it is" 😂
Companies today, especially private equity, thinks you can artificially create relevance, success and more by just throwing money.
While at the same time not giving funding to smaller studios who can make a reliable but small profit. But a profit nonetheless. They'd rather spend 400 million on concord than spend 10 million on a decent AA game with promise. Sony has so many dead IPs they just refuse to revive all the while pushing more and more towards bloated lice service games. It's saddening to see ngl...
I think thats why I love Koei Tecmo and a few small european publishers.
They focus almost entirely on aa and smaller studios and it shows.
If you have a large fund, placing it becomes a problem. There are practical reasons why such sources of financing are not suitable for smaller projects/teams. Equally important is the fact that funds look for a particular return across their portfolio. You're going to have a high failure rate, so you need the winners to produce outsize returns to hit the overall goal for returns (say 20%). So even if it were practical to fund a lot of smaller projects, some of which return a respectable profit (respectable if they were standalone, self-funded businesses), it would still be a failed strategy for a fund. Embracer attempted this strategy and got their funding pulled with disastrous results as soon as interest rates went up.
I keep remembering that interview with Shinji Mikami where he told a story of how *GOD HAND* was made in 12 MONTHS, outside of CAPCOM on a budget because Mikami just couldn’t handle it, just REALLY wanted to make a game. Right now. The result of that labor of love was one of the most iconic, original and tough as nails game in the entirety of the beat em up genre.
The first part of the 2000s was a magnificent time when that kind of thing was possible. It did not sell, forcing Mikami out of CAPCOM, but you won’t ever hear him complain about it - he had a blast.
Majora's Mask was made in a single year iirc
@@UlissesSampaio IIRC nintendo wanted a quick turnaround since OOT took a long time to create (for the standards of the time). Thats why it is such a different game. They were forced to reuse a lot of assets since making more would take too long. Putting them in very different situations and environments was needed to prevent it from feeling like a clone.
In early 2000s, Rockstar was dropping new GTA games for fun, now we have to wait 13 years...
An additional thing to consider. A lot of modern games will use well-known hollywood actors and celebrities as some their voice actors. Sure it happened in the past now and again, but now it's almost becoming standard to have a few in your big budget game.
I also imagine popular actors like Troy Baker and Nolan North are now as expensive as some celebrities were back then
@@armadilloseller Sure, but I imagine they are the exception, and not the rule. I was actually thinking about that very thing (and those two, along with maybe Tara Strong, etc. Ashley Burch? Not sure where she lands but I bet she's getting up there at this point).
@@adventuresinAI1982 is this a new thing?
Mark Hamil was a prolific voice actor in gaming (and TV) all the way back to classics like full throttle and wing commander. Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillion were in ODST back in 2009, during what I would consider the golden era of AAA, before GTA V marked the significant growth of budgets & dev times. Thinking of GTA, San Andreas had Samuel L. Jackson back in 2004, 20 years ago.
It's a contributing factor to budgets, but it has been ever since the start of VO.
@@TotallySlapdash Hamill was always a big nerd (and I love him for it). He was actually the first person I thought of when I thought of celebrities in games, specifically for FT and WC. But he was an exception back then. As was Tim Curry and even Michael Bein turning up (and a few people who later became big stars). But I've really noticed the increase over the last decade or so. Also, I'm in my 40s, so that's recent to me.
One thing that NOBODY who argues in favor of rising videogame prices touches on is the massive market size. 20-30 years ago, when games were $50-$60, like today, they were considered a huge hit if they sold 50.000 units. All those units were sold in a brick and mortar store so a large chunk of that price was manufacturing and logistics.
Today, with digital distribution, not only is that cost gone, so more of the unit price goes to the developer/publisher, but the market is also much larger. To the point that AAA games are selling multiple millions of units. That means that for the same price, even ignoring inflation, the revenue has also drastically increased.
On top of that, digital distribution also allowed developers to defer some development costs, by shipping incomplete, buggy games knowing they can "fix it later" with patches. That means at least part of the development cycle overlaps with the stream of revenue from sales, reducing the upfront cost of development.
Let's not forget that even games that "cost $60" don't cost just $60 anymore. Between DLCs, microstransactions, GOTY editions, etc. the real total cost of a AAA game can be much more than $60. The Sims 4 basegame is now free, but all the DLC costs over $1300 dollars. Paradox is also famous for balooning DLC costs. Not to mention "live service" games with stuff like battle passes, cosmetics, loot boxes, etc.
At the same time a lot of developers have proven that small budget games can still be major hits if they listen to their audience and focus on making the game fun. One recent example is Helldivers 2, even with the up and down they've gone through (most of the problems coming from the publisher, Sony, rather than the devs).
Yup.
And even if the prices for the base game would double or triple, companies would still pull this crap.
Helldivers 2 was absolutely not a small budget game. It was in development for at least 8 years during which the team size grew from about 50 people to about 100 people. 100 people at 50K a year is 5 million a year. Not counting the cost of rent, equipment, servers, etc. It was likely between 30 million and 100 million to produce, neither of which are small numbers.
Also, brick and mortar stores still sell games in cases. Sure, most of the time they're glorified download codes, but they're still printing disks and putting them in plastic cases and shipping them all over the world. Hell, Nintendo actually still gives you the physical game in the case. Game companies are probably shipping plastic cases to more places in the world now than they were 20 years ago.
Sorry, but you're ignorant of the realities of the business. Yes, the addressable market is huge now. However, the demands of that market are now huge as well. Try to release a game of the same standard as back-in-the-days-of-50k and watch it flop with < 100 Steam reviews. The fact is, as soon as the addressable market grew, competing studios/publishers ratcheted up the amount and quality (in terms of 3D, number of assets, polygon count, texture res, rigging etc) of content in games because those larger budgets were now viable. This raised the plank for both AAA and AA releases - if you try to charge $60 for a game that doesn't *look* like AAA, you're dead. Frankly, most AA games that don't look like AAA games at $40 are DOA. No one is making 50% margins besides a few outliers at the very top. In fact, the business has never been more risky - budgets are huge and require massive sales numbers just to break even. Also, like you've been told, Helldivers is not some plucky underdog making a game with 2 guys in a basement for $2 and a case of burritos story.
@@paulie-g Helldivers is a Sony in-house published game, people just apply that "indie" label to any game they like these days. Like folks saying Larian is a plucky indie startup, like come on now...
@@mandisaw To be fair, Larian *was* a plucky indie to begin with, grew with their successes and they do self-publish. There's a lot of 'indy spirit' about them, especially if you compare them with exclusively profit- and line-go-up driven studios/publishers. But yeah, it's a bit silly to label a company that can deploy hundreds of people to work on one of the biggest IPs in the world over many years 'indy'.
Nodded throughout. People don't really understand the business-side of economics, so they see a final cost (or a top-line budget number) and have no idea where that number came from. I'd add supporting more platforms and device-types as well. In mobile, testing takes almost as much time as actual feature development if you have a broad, backward-compatible userbase.
Also, you could scratch off "game budget" and make it "college tuition", same issue. Teachers don't get paid as much as developers (one reason I switched), but both want to be paid more next year than last year. Had to explain to people that most colleges pre-2000s didn't have internet, much less in-room ethernet and campus-wide Wi-Fi. More features, more staff, more money.
Thank you Tim for such a succinct and detailed answer. Much appreciated!
Basically, while the barrier to entry (especially for indies) has plummeted, the player expectations and amount of work has increased for everyone from the biggest AAA to the smallest indies and everyone in between.
I’ve been a huge CRPG fan for 20 years and I’m genuinely shocked that Pillars of Eternity was that cheap to make. It’s my favorite game of that genre. Appreciate your work Tim!
The caveat is that Pillars got out-featured by Divinity: Original Sin. Josh Sawyer gave an interesting talk at Digital Dragons about the impact of D:OS on the development of Pillars 2, esp rising user expectations. CRPGs didn't used to support full-3d or much voice acting, but fans have made that a new genre necessity, even as the actual size of that fanbase hasn't necessarily increased all that much.
@@mandisaw imo the bigger problem for Obsidian there isn't that Larian out featured them, it's that Larian out featured them on a very similar budget. At least if we're talking DOS1. DOS2's budget was like 3x that of Pillars and DOS1.
I just generally don’t care too much about that. I just played Arcanum a few months ago and it’s a little janky but it was incredibly unique. Idk visuals and voice acting seem like a problem younger gamers overly focus on
@puxtbuck6731 "Younger gamers" goes all the way to late 30s, early 40s now. And at that point you start flipping over - players have less time to play, so they want more QoL features, more game for their time, etc.
@@mandisaw I don’t mind QoL options I wasn’t saying I don’t like VA or graphics/cutscenes but people often just hate on something that has a lower budget for no reason. I’m only 30 anyways. I’m talking more about like 15 to 25 year olds now. I worked at a library for a while and no kids really wanted to play any games that weren’t just huge productions.
I know this is a topic that will make a lot of people groan but this video got me thinking about the Games as a service market and how all this tension with design becomes a far bigger problem when development is interwoven with needing to constantly please player bases. A lot of players of these games expect community involvement in the development which always seem to turn dreams into desires, desires into demands, and demands into death threats.
8:30 I feel like gamers have changed their demand for better and better graphics. Some of the most popular and best selling games in the last few years have had graphics on par with games 10 years ago. Fortnite, Among Us, most of Nintendo's catalogue. The hate that most AAA games have gotten in the past 5 years have rarely ever been graphics related. It's always gameplay and quality control. Look at Starfield as a prime example. Or Diablo 4.
Actually, Fortnite is on the bleeding edge of graphics. Most people play it on lower settings because its a competitive multiplayer game. Curiously enough, it seems like the "bleedingedge-ness" of Fortnite is due to it being THE Unreal Engine game, and so it functions as a publicity to drive adoption of the engine.
None of those games are classic single-player experiences. People may be willing to sacrifice fidelity for multiplayer titles for understandable performance limit reasons, but market data clearly demonstrates they refuse to do so for single-player titles. The existence of statistical outliers like Among Us does not a viable strategy make any more than the undeniable existence of lottery winners justifying dumping your savings into lottery tickets. Steam is littered with the corpses of thousands upon thousands of games with "Among Us" level graphics (and Among Us was nearly a corpse as well, the devs just miraculously had enough runway - more than a year or two iirc - and a streamer eventually found it by chance and helped it go viral).
@ They absolute will compromise on graphics for single player titles. Look at Nintendos entire mainline lineup which pales in comparison graphically to single player titles on PC/XSX/PS5. There are tons of other games like Hades, Stardew Valley, Balatro that prove it's more than just a statistical outlier. And for all the flops the last 3-5 years, none of them flopped because of the graphics. Starfield, Outlaws, and plenty of other single player titles were panned because of the gameplay. Nobody cared about the graphics.
@@TT92348 You are confusing realistic vs stylized for graphics quality. Nintendo's lineup is stylized, but still high-fidelity and graphically challenging on their tech. I just got the new Zelda game, and even though it's got that simplified chibi aesthetic, the textures, models, and animations are butter-smooth, and they are working dark magic to squeeze every drop of performance out of the Switch.
Similar deal with Fire Emblem Engage from a couple yrs back - devs had an article in CG World (Japanese tech mag) about how they made detailed anime graphics in Unity. The eye shader alone had like 20 properties and came in boy vs girl versions so the eyelashes and highlights would look "cool" vs "cute".
Don't mistake polycounts for technical skill-challenge.
@@TT92348 Outlaws was absolutely panned for graphics, as was Immortals of Aveum, SS:KTJL, Gotham Knights, Saints Row, Pokemon Legends, etc. Some of these were because of resolution targets that were far too restrictive, others were because of a bland visual presentation, and some like Outlaws were possibly due to the fidelity of the game being too high for the bitrates that Ubisoft were using when they recorded the advertising material.
With the exception of facial animations... I disagree that gamers demand more realistic Graphics. It's the Hardware marketers and advertising departments who are pushing that meme and it's very topical to the so called "Game Awards" arguments cropping up right now. I don't think Gamers themselves are _divided_ on it at all. I think a hyper vocal minority wants us to think we're divided
I hear lots of gamers *claim* they value gameplay over graphics. However, it is an undeniable fact that games with graphics that are attractive enough to make them stand out among the tens of thousands of games that hit Steam each year sell disproportionately more. When I say 'undeniable fact', I mean indie game marketing experts have gone through the sales data and demonstrated this very clearly. Yes, any given gamer might overlook less than AA-quality graphics once they're playing and like the game. The problem is that games without them will simply never be surfaced to enough eyeballs because they won't have the wishlist/sales numbers to be promoted. Yes, there are statistical outliers (games that went viral), but it's about as reliable as part of a strategy as buying lottery tickets with your dev budget instead.
Even with the facial animations one, Elden Ring launched in 2022 as FromSoftware's first "souls" game to feature lip syncing. 2019 if we're counting Sekiro, but the point stands. It doesn't even have full facial animation either, the only thing that moves are the character's mouths timed (poorly) with their dialogue. In Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1-3 and Bloodborne, NPC faces are all completely static.
And if you want another example, Divinity Original Sin 2 (i.e. the game that succeeded well enough to secure Larian the Baldur's Gate bag), was the same. Zero facial animation.
Most people don't care about any of this if the game is actually good. The reason it's such a big deal in some games is _usually_ because that's the only thing those games have going for them. Generic third person action slop with underdeveloped combat, virtually zero environmental interaction, and non-existent level design. Or interactive movie games, but I'm a bit more forgiving of it as an expectation in that case, because that's basically the entire point of those games. It's basically just a form of key jangling.
And yeah okay with that second example, Baldur's Gate 3 was obviously a much more popular game, and it has good facial animation. But Divinity Original Sin 2 cost $15 million to make, and sold 7.5 million copies. Baldur's Gate 3 cost $100 million, and so far has sold 15 million copies. In terms of % profit, DOS2 is a more successful game than BG3.
@@yewtewbstew547 I don't think DOS2 was AAA-priced, was it? Think it was always $45 or $40. Also a much longer long tail of sales. Facial animation issues were widely accepted at a certain point because of technical and performance limitations (you need a ridiculous amount of fine muscle modeling to do it well) just as janky movement across terrain with an incline/decline was accepted at one point.
Like I will never tire of pointing out, this is not about a single smash hit game. You will always have statistical outliers and lightning-on-a-bottle projects where enough things are so great people learn to love the flaws. It's about the average team setting out to do a project and what their reasonable expectations for how easy it will be to even get their game in front of eyeballs never mind sell it to them afterwards. The DOS series was lauded for its gameplay. Now imagine a team who sets out to make a game with similar quality gameplay, but only has the capability/budget for pixel art. What do you think their chances are to even get noticed among all the other indy "don't mind the look, you'll love it once you play it for 40 hours" games?
Plus localization, there are some games that have ridiculous number of full or partial localizations
Good catch. We used to just do EFIGS, which is English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Now we do a lot more than that.
I was thinking about this yesterday whiles watching a documentary on Japanese Games and Localization. Localization is now such an expected thing that I found it weird that there were games that were released exclusive to Japan.
Another recent jump in game budgets is financialisation of the industry in the wake of COVID.
During COVID everyone stayed indoors and played videogames and watched Netflix, so there was a very sudden jump in revenue in the industry. That made private equity investors sit up and take notice because there was gold in them thar hills, and they jumped onboard.
Thing is, their desired outcome isn't "a good game people will buy that makes some profit", it's "share price goes up". And share price goes up on big smash hits. So about five years ago a lot of games pivoted to or began development as the sort of things that would be a big smash hit, and got the sort of money invested in them that would make the biggest splash possible and so make the share price go up for the equity investors.
(And it's ruined everything, as financialisation does when it gets its tentacles into an industry or economy)
Bro, they were there in the early 2010s lmao. It didnt start with covid, the quantity of money increased but they were already rapidly devouring the industry way back
On the plus side, as the wave of 2020-21 funded games dies off in 2029-32, we should also get a wave of interesting smaller scale games developed in 1-5 years by creative-but-previously-unfulfilled people previously laid off from those large publishers who cut their teeth on those massive boondoggles (of which maybe 1 or 2 will reach fortnite levels of success amongst a sea of failures).
I'm crossing my fingers that the 2030s will be a second 90s of innovative 5-30 man studios (I predict a few new subgenres and a rediscovery of piloting games, god games, arcade racers and single-player-focused FPSs).
I see a lot of AI slop being used in game development with higher prices due to embezzlement.
Can't forget that Stimmy Check too.
It's always been about money. It's always been a business. All the way back to Atari, Midway, Namco, Capcom, et al they used to compete hard and dirty in the arcade and early-console days. It only got more intense when Nintendo, Sega, and later Sony [and Microsoft] got into it and the market grew several orders of magnitude. They used to bribe retail stores for placements, publish magazines that were glorified ad catalogs of only their games, and ripping off each others' successes was commonplace.
A good game that makes players happy is just the most effective means of trying to make a lot of money. Business is business, that has never changed.
Its the same with movies, you have more tools, positions, and moving parts resulting in $100 million budgets while at the same time you can make an indie film with a phone in your pocket.
Love your videos Tim. Thank you for providing all this insight into game development.
Hello Tim, it's me, a random youtuber commenter.
I think it might be worth mentioning and explaining why the hiring/training process is also super expensive, it is extremely interesting to see how hiring can become a two edged sword very, very rapidly, to the point where the whole production gets delayed. It happened to a certain studio with a certain popular MMO, those guys released almost no content for two years because of hiring, I didn't understand it until I became part of a studio, and had to train the new members and still do my job as a lead game designer, fortunately for me, I love my job xD
it's actually crazy how cheap Outer Worlds cost compared to other AAA games.
But by the same token it's crazy how much it cost compared to Pillars and Tyranny. Because both of those are better games lol.
About player expectations: if anything they are lower than ever. No joke, WOW players already feel nostalgic about the WoW Classic launch 5 years ago. The greatest thing that happened to WoW community in the last 10 years was the relaunch of a 15 year old version of the game.
I like battlefield and I feel the same way - release bf3 remastered without actually remastering it, and I’ll buy it instantly. Yet they keep pumping hundreds of millions into the things fans don’t want.
I'm certainly thankful for all the passionate indie developers on Steam. I'm likelier to find a depthful, satisfying experience with them than with today's large studios. RDR2, Elden Ring, and Baldur's are the only AAA games I've bought in the last decade.
12:22 Marketing. I grew up in the 80s in Germany, on TV you always had adds. In the 80s all you had was Government paid TV stations that showed 3 minutes of ads before a show/movie and after. It was fine, you could have your eyes take a break, or take a bathroom break while still hearing the commercials. Then the 90s rolled around, and we got more TV stations that where not funded by a fee everyone owning a Radio or TV set. Suddenly you had ad-breaks in the middle of a movie/show. Suddenly the break was not 3 minutes but 5 or 6. People went away from the TV because it was just wasted time sitting there and being flooded by commercials, where most of them where not fun to watch. Not fun especially the 5th time that day. So they SPLIT that 6 minuted commercial break, they went even to put in 4 commercial breaks each 1 minute long to prevent people from leaving the TV in fear of missing out on the movie/show.
At that point, it was the early 2000s I was just turning OFF the TV, because... you had so many sources from which you could watch something. Renting Movies, or outright buying them. That or playing a game.
Now with UA-cam, it feels like UA-cam tries to waste the users time. You would think they show you TARGETED ads... but nope. It is like a bag of skittles or M&Ms... all colors within. And honestly I don't watch UA-cam to be flooded by ads, more often then not the same ads over and over. They wasting my time with those. What UA-cam should do is add some form of add that is not interfering with you watching videos. Maybe ad-banner would be better, ones that quickly and to the point show you a product and you can click it to be lead to a commercial video on UA-cam if you want to know more about it. That way the user could give them feedback on how they like the ad video.
There are many ad videos that are FUN TO WATCH... even repeatedly. Most of them are bland and non-fun. So what I do to get information, is just refresh UA-cam's main page, if a new game is out it surely shows up there. Which can be a pain for indie games, but there are people making videos showing off handfuls of indie games soon to be released that look good.
Relatively recently I watched a video on jobs for music tours (what does a tour manager do, what does a band manager do, what does a promoter do, what do this tech and that tech do, etc). Could you do something like that breaking down jobs in the game industry?
ua-cam.com/video/DEnlUqYkMTk/v-deo.html
@@CainOnGames Danke.
Increasing fidelity indeed add a lot more cost. I see it as encouraging when some people have started making quality, low fidelity games like Compound Fracture.
That is good thing for game developers. Take example from movies, not all movies target on 4K sharp image. Like Jackie that was filmed on 16mm camera. Or 28 days later was taped mini-DV camera.
Games can be made to different styles and fidelity. Input pixels can be lower and use those to generate textures, or use some shader to add style. They don't need to be targetted on some ancient hardware, but I understand that is also art.
Also, one good trick that is used by game developers and in movies, is to put restrictions how to do things, and then use creativity to make the game/movie with restrictions. There are movies that avoids CGI, or movies that are shot with black and white and so on. Games do same thing. Ancient times there was technical reasons but now restrictions can be made differently.
hey Tim! I agree that expectations have definitely gone up and that is a factor, however I feel like this is disproportionate when considering how many people work under bad conditions in NA and loose their jobs, meanwhile many CEOs receive 100s of millions of Dollars as a bonus for their "good work" and profits also go up massively. This doesnt excuse the extreme monetization for me and also customers should never be guilt tripped into excuses
CEO compensation is never part of a game's budget, therefore their salary and other emoluments can not, by definition, contribute to rising game *production* budgets.
I think a big plus in modern game development is what I would call Test-Fail-Redo. Many companies spend a lot of money and resources testing versions, because in modern game development, the vision of the complete game takes much longer to come together.
And throughout the process, many prototypes are made, and sometimes with great quality. And these don't even see the light of day.
It is true that today it is much easier and faster to make games. But as the video itself said, taking risks is very costly. So companies spend months and months testing and experimenting with versions of games that could be a complete game in themselves.
I would also include the cost of including renowned names in the industry (artists, directors, composers and actors) in the project. And the problems of not having such well-qualified people, since in a consolidated industry, people often appear who only work in it for the money, so their commitment, knowledge and capacity are very limited.
The marketing budgets is money wasted. Games being hyped for years in videos and commercials "developer directs" and the like for most games nowadays releasing buggy unfinished and with already nearly finished DLCs ready to be marketed right next to the game before the release even only to come out and be starfield or cyberpunk or geez let's not even go Star citizen. I can see why they're pushing so hard to push developers out and start to use AI as well and that's not good at all I would rather every developer get paid what they're worth and they cut other things out of the budget like marketing management costs and stuff like that. In a multi-billion Dollar business that we prop up by purchasing these games it's unfair to continue to try to push all of this on to us because we're already at a breaking point when it comes to hardware and software costs.
starfield is bland but it isn't unfinished.
Hi Tim, I really appreciate all of your videos! The ones about perception of production vs actual production always come with such great detail and specifics with examples. I was recently rewatching Double Fine's Psychodyssey and I was wondering what your thoughts were on documentaries about game development?
Do you think they miss stuff? What would you want to see more of? How transparent should devs be about their creative work? Do you think these somewhat post-mortem looks could be helpful in comparison to other forms of post-mortems?
Psychodyssey portrays a lot more of the internal strife that goes on in a studio and I saw a lot of your lessons in game dev on UA-cam shown first-hand in it. Specifically with people in different positions wanting input on the game, issues between art and design, and an ever-looming deadline. I couldn't recommend the doc enough. Sorry for the many questions. If you ever answer this, feel free to reply to as many or as few as you want.
I hope anyone who is reading this has a nice day =^)
Don't even need to play older games. Every time I play a Japanese game, I travel back in time 20 years. No qol, no ui customisation. Don't like damage numbers popping up or health bar covering entire screen? Too bad.
(Eastern) European are the (immediate) future: Warhorse, Larian, CD Project Red.
@@UlissesSampaio what CDPR have done so far is the best they'll ever do. Any games they make in the future will be a disaster because they accepted to have overlords above them now
I recently bought Dragon's Dogma, and it has full VO and UI customization. I was pleasantly surprised.
I can't wait for the days when 1 game will take up 1 TB of storage. I think the graphics and gameplay from the 360/PS3 era are still good though I'm sure most people might not agree. I would like to see the option to not have to install ultra textures or languages I don't need.
I'm tired of developers telling me what I should expect or not in a game and that I should feel bad for not wanting to put down more money for worse products.
The consumer's expectations are not wrong, the developer's scope is.
Since the late 2000's, Western devs (AA, AAA) want every living soul to play their game, so they make their games to appeal to a "mass audience". Thing is, this mystical mass audience, or the generic casual player, does not exist. People have different tastes and want different things. Western devs will either realise this or keep losing to the Asian studios.
Bro, go back to your pseudo gaming drama rage channels.
dae western gaming???
No one is actually responding to your arguments. Seems you've struck a nerve somewhere.
@@virginiasaintj stellar blade goty?
💯
The advertising is literally Space Balls. "Merchandising!" "Space Balls the Flamethrower!"
Why was fallout 1 so expensive? Or was that the normal price for developing a game in 1997?
I would assume because of engine development and other fees like licensing. With success comes better negotiations for budget etc.
Voice talent probably ate unto it a lot.
it's probably considered a bargain price considering it's success and brand value
while it seems every game now has some behemoth 100 mill+ budget
Love the choice of thumbnail 👍
Marketing also needs to take a step back too. A lot of games that even see ok success aren't getting it from how its usually marketed in bigger budget games. It feels like they have missed the boat with it big time really.
With Substance Designer and such a massive library of materials and scanned assets, with Unreal Engine being really very easy to use, with tons of skilled artists on the market, AI to iterate on concepts, I would love to see a modern breakdown of the art portion of the budget. OFC depending on the world style and uniqueness (ex something like Dishonored where they can't use scans), I don't understand how the art budget portion of game dev could be the part that is going up above normal inflation rate.
A bit more than a year ago I started making a zelda clone to learn some graphics and to practice Java. And I've been doing it on and off and and here and there when I'm not busy with university.
I'd say now that the engine is quite stable and scalable enough the majority of my time is spent either thinking about mechanics or doing art the latter being something which I learned I'm not as good at as I thought.
Instead the programming part which is the part I enjoy best I spend barely any time on since Im quite fast at it.
Really agree with the point about art.
Not uncommon. It usually goes like this, if you are highly technical, if you really like math, graphics and engine programming. Usually you don't like as much design, art or gameplay programming. Nevertheless, I'd say bite the bullet and spend that time working on it, you will eventually start liking it, not as much as engine programming, but enough for your to make good games solo.
@developerdeveloper67 thanks. I'll take your advice.
I think the reason why game price is such a complex topic is that your product does not really have costs per product. So as the industry naturally grew, so grew your potential playerbase and the rising costs got covered by shipping more digital copies, which cost you virtually nothing other than store share. Even if you doubled the cost of making a new game compared to before, if your playerbase tripled thanks to better PC availability and overall popularity of gaming, you are actually in the green, no?
Personally I would love for developers to be paid more, but so far from what we have seen... do they really get paid more with rising game prices? What I keep seeing is shareholders making more money than god while they let a big part of their development team go.
If I could make sure those 10 extra bucks really go to devs, then yeah, I am all for it. But with big companies like EA? I doubt your regular dev will feel it.
Look...I dont think this would "fix the industry" or anything but I feel like we need more Double A kind of games in the scene. Mid to low budget games that take about 3 years or less, smaller teams and not some 200M$+ investments. I hope the market accepts these types of projects and supports them.
Re: sales price of games, they have gone down by quite a bit after inflation. In the early 90s, Nintendo and computer games cost about 45 to 50 USD. Ultima 6's original April 1990 cost was 69.95 USD, which is 171.30 USD in today's dollars. (Worth every penny!)
Of course, the volume of games sold now is so much higher so the total revenue you can get is so much higher and almost all the cost of creating games is fixed costs. The variable cost of producing an additional copy of a game is low and I BELIEVE entirely comes from distribution costs (12% for Epic Games for example).
In any case, I wouldn't be averse to paying a high price for great games (200 USD or even more) or even a great book given the number of hours of entertainment that a game / book gives versus a movie. If that means developers get paid more, are less likely to be laid off, investors are more willing to take risks on off-beat ideas, it would be worth it, but practically, the market equilibrium landed somewhere else (which is fine--one consumer doesn't get to dictate the entire industry).
If more people thought like this, the industry would be in a better place.
Sadly, people only look at the whole number and ignore how games have stayed relatively the same price despite everything else going up 2 to 3 times since the 90s.
But thats more of a blame on how the only thing more stagnant than gamd prices are wages.
Considering the price for complete editions of games I wouldn't say the price has gone down. I'd say not only has the price gone up, but we're expected to buy the game in early access on release day and send the next 2 years buying all the dlc needed to finish it.
The reason why people complain about costs is because inflation is felt differently between investors and workers. The minimum wage in 1995 was 4.25 an hour (or $7.44 in todays money). The minimum wage today is... $7.25 an hour. People are making less money today with a higher cost of living. A little more than half of people in the united states even own some sort of stock; and the bottom 50% only own 1% of the stock. For the workers and petty investors, a lot of numbers on paper do not translate to their wallets.
I can really go off on this (and other issues related to the economics of games). But I would get way off topic.
Short answer is buy indie games and support the people who are doing what you love.
@@AlucardNoir yh that's true. We aren't getting a complete game with base editions depending on the game.
Ultimate Editions, Complete Editions etc are $100 almost $130 for some editions which includes expansions, cosmetics and other content.
Paying $60 for Zelda OoT in 1998 was getting a complete game that wasn't a buggy mess. That's $114 now which would be like some 'Ultimate Edition' nonsense that is probably half broken for the first week/month (because the players will beta test it for us) and have a bunch of micro transaction nonsense and a second season pass one year later for a bunch of minor additions.
Nobody ever mentions that budgets are higher because development time is significantly longer now. Every game seems to be in development for 7+ years now.
Hi Tim,
I've been considering how to ask this question for some time now. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on video games that are simulators, for example Farm Simulator, Flight Simulator, etc. How do the priorities change in a game like that, and what are some things that you like to see in a simulator if you ever play these? There's quite a diverse range of "simulator" games like city builders etc, would love to hear your thoughts on these types of games and how they may differ regarding development practices & design versus more "traditional" games. Should simulators have a story? What's most important to you in a simulator-type game?
There are definitely diminishing returns when it comes to fidelity stuff. Especially with advancements in path tracing and AI/procedural scene generation/reconstruction (lighting, resolution, interpolation, motion, object placement etc). Capable hardware hitting budget segments is the best thing the gaming industry can hope for. It'd mean there'd be more leeway when it comes to fidelity compromises, because these methods can make up for a lot of that fidelity deficit, and it'd be faster and easier for the designers and artists to iterate. Of course, gameplay, performance and appropriate art direction, would be preferable.😁
There's another factor: far more game publishers are large publicly traded companies now, which means they have to pay shareholder dividends, and that's usually a lot of money.
I'm not so sure about the demand for ever more high fidelity presentation. The success of games like Valheim, Vampire Survivors etc... and the increasing numbers of people playing older games over newer ones suggests this isn't the case. I think most "gamers" just want good games and will forgive a lot in the visual department if the games are engaging and fun to play.
The video games media gushing over things like RDR2 shrinking horse balls feeds into this narrative, but I do believe it's more a narrative than a reality.
Well the good news is that graphics seems to be hitting a point of diminish returns where the amount of money and time is no longer equal in more sales for graphics. More and more games with limited graphics are more and more popular. Not to say good graphics is not appreciated, but i feel that Cyberpunk/Baldur's gate level of graphics is like the top. So around base PS5 level of graphics is like the good middle ground. Lots of devs are dumbfounded with the PS5 Pro because well, using that kinda of power demands so much more dev time its not worth it. Even the consumer start to not see the difference it provides.
Although features wise, i tend to agree with you. Gamers has a lot of expectation when it comes to:
- good level design
- good story/choices
- good voice acting
- lots of options
- build diversity/endgame for RPG
- etc
And i could go on. I would argue even Indie games has that problem unless you have a very unique idea/concept. Then and only then, you can escape having not enough features.
speaking of marketing(hype), how does that correlation between dollars and success work, on the one hand you have larian saying its flushing money but on a well established IP with a multi year early access time where (seemly) every update was covered extensively compared to the myriad of games that flopped with several people (generally redditors in my experience) commenting they never even heard about it. At what point does a game achieve an exit velocity to pierce the gaming strata to have a chance to not need a high budget marketing campaign but carried by hype
That is a good question for a marketing person in the game industry. I don't know the answer.
One model for awareness is the onion model. If a topic is super-important to you, part of your identity, you will go out of your way to find out info, subscribe to news sources, follow the zeitgeist, etc. The center of the onion. But as you go further out, each layer is less personally invested in that topic, and is less likely to know what's going on just from their own actions.
Marketing begins with awareness - you need ppl to know the product exists way before they can be hyped to want it. Companies are paying for that awareness, and the bigger the game, the more of the onion you need to reach.
Anyone watching Tim's channel basically lives pretty close to the center of the onion, particularly for BG3-type games. But even then, there are a ton of high-profile games & updates you probably have no idea about (mobile, non-English, genres you don't play, etc). Center of one onion, outer layer of countless others.
There is no "exit-velocity," basically. There are only trade-offs where you balance how many paying customers you need vs how much of the awareness-onion you can pay for. That's where the targeted advertising comes into play, because you can do fewer "onion layers," but catch more ppl who are likely to be deeply invested in the sort of game you're selling.
Hey Tim are CRT monitors still the best for old games since they were made for it? Im trying using CRT shaders for a similar result but its not as good.
All I can hope is that Balatro wins Game of the Year and blows the competition out of the water. We need more indie dev, shorter time to market, more mobile-friendly well-developed games. How long has it been since “mobile game” wasn’t synonymous with trash?
I'd like to know about UI design. How do you decide on what amount of UI is necessary and what elements should be represented in the game itself. Like in Halo the elites have shields, but there isn't a bar that shows how much armor they have. You slowly see their shields get brighter and then burst, showing the player their shield has broken.
People have so many games on their backlog that they can play games for the rest of their life without buying anything new. So as the development of the games is a business, developers need to seek new ways to optimize their game budget no matter how much the cost is justified in their opinion. Many people just don't see that value in more expensive games.
Hey Tim, fellow Tim here! I was wondering how you have gone about creating fictional religions in your games. I guess I'm mostly thinking about the OSI in the Outer Worlds, because I find their belief system pretty fascinating. But just in general, I'm curious what goes into that sort of process, especially since I imagine pains have to be taken to avoid too many similarities to real world religions in case their fictional counterparts are the subject of ridicule or portrayed as villainous in some respect.
Really love all of your videos, and hope that this question hasn't already been asked/answered!
I have said I won't play a game without voiceover for decades. I think people didn't become that way, I think it's just more people like me play games now. Games are one of the most popular things now.
What games does that apply to? Can you name a game recently that turned you off because it didn't have a voice-over?
@@pbacon95 I don't play enough games, and I can't recall the games where I stopped playing them due to the lack of dialogue.
The last one I bought that was like that was Shadowrun Returns. And before there was an rpg with a lot of dialogue options, a 3d game that I don't quite recall.
Both now that I reflect are like from a decade ago.
Maybe I just don't like this type of game and I claim it's lack of voice acting.
Tho even in the past I've been annoyed by games having silent protagonists when they're action games or other genres.
Games nowdays are too expensive and have too many people working on them. Result? 'Safe' games instead of daring with waiting time being 8-10 years per sequel..
I usually just follow monkey island's advice when purchasing games. (Adjusted for inflation) And I am happy. People can have their high expectations. I just want a good game.
1:04 This is very interesting, Tim. It's funny how you guys were able to do comparatively so cheaply games that went on to become history, like Fallout 1 and 2. Interesting that Arcanum costed more than those 2 considering you did that on your own studio and the top-down, isometric, 2D pre-rendered CRPG formula was already figured out I would think that it would cost less. And if you think that both Pillars and Tyranny were developed in Unity, that shows how more efficient you guys were in the late 90s and early 2000s that you had to write the whole engine and still made it cheaper. But the more interesting part of course, is how steep the price of games gets when it comes to making a first-person game. I have always noticed that in my experiments, when you go first-person the price really shoots up, because every single asset must have so much more detail when to be looked at first-person. That is why I have suggested to you to get out of your retirement with classic "isometric" (not necessarily, but top-down) CRPG, that you can make by yourself! Or maybe with one or two partners or some art contractors!
Best game I ever played was WOTR and it has some of this stuff but not most of it. Most of my favorite games came out before all this was expected, I'm definitely not going to pay more for a game that has a bunch of features I never really cared about. Especially since a lot studios seem to have no good writers left (Bethesda, Bioware).
Going to piggy back off your comment on why games take longer.
And this is just my perception as a consumer.
Because designer, like all creative people, love to iterate on their work until they it's "just right" and producers who either believe them or also want that work done "just right" don't have the foresight or the guts to just pull the plug. So they are wasting days, weeks and months working on assets that get scrapped and can't be re-used effectively wasting everyones time and money. From what i've heard in interviews and postmortems AAA development is a lot like a sculptor who needs a 10 ton block of marble and 5 years to make a fist sized figurine. And that is just the obvious waste.
Then there are location scouting trips to some village deep in the cambodian jungle to take pictures for photogrammetry because the game has 2-3 missions set in cambodia and somebody on the team really wants to get the environment "just right". Or writers who need a 2 week all expenses workshop in egypt to overcome their creative block.
But what i think is the worst offender is just straight up bad management. Producers and project leads who fail to provide a clear direction for the game because they themselves don't really know what the final game is exactly supposed to be. So they rather let their departments brain storm features, mechanics and systems for weeks of which 90% will never make it into an alpha.
Changes in management, changes in vision, changes in scope - whoops we just scrapped half the game 5 years into development. Let's start over.
That is pretty much how you end up with a 4 hour game that takes 4 years to develop or a big RPG that is 10 years in the making, comes out broken and unfinished and the company spends another 2 years fixing it because the minimum viable product wasn't quite ready for market.
MVP works well on business software but games are different, to give value to users, they need features in place. Business MVP application can be just one feature that gives value to customers.
I don't know exactly how things are done in studios but I believe games can benefit from something like concept -> game design document -> preproduction -> production -> maintenance.
What I mean by preproduction is that it should start by adding features, as minimal as possible. Game can be made using single button if wanted so Is see that there should be minimal developer team implementing features from game design document and all assets can be some 16x16px icons or something absolutely minimal. Just enough that gameplay works and game is playeable from start to finish and there stuff from game design document are implemented. Then actual game production can be started, making thousands of assets, adjusting lights, polishing and may add something if something important was missed. When moving preproduction to production, that should be too late stage change story and maps.
That kind of development process should remove uncertainty from development, because all necessary work can be then estimated much better when the game actually works.
Tim, it would be great if you could try to break the budget for a game like Fallout but made in 2024. I understand all the costs related to AAA games, but I wonder what stops folks from doing games like Fallout with a modern touch.
do you think productivity has gone down? sure seems like it from the outside.
Game budget goes up because projected revenue go up.
The cart always follows the horse. Development is a fixed cost - if you spend $500 million dollars making a game and you sell 1 million copies, you paid $500 per copy. (Ouch!).
If you instead sell 205 million copies like GTA V your development costs you $2.43 per copy.
Games are selling more copies than ever and thus budget go up to try and convince a larger slice of that 90 million console install base to buy your game.
Hi Tim, you mentioned this in this video. But what are some equipment needed for creating video games? The obvious ones like computers and stuff like that but what are some ones we gamers wouldn’t think of. Thanks😊
The kind of game you or I would make at home really does just need a computer. Maybe a drawing tablet if you are an artist and more comfortable with that approach. You can even make mobile games for your own phone. Play with the framework or engine software of your choice, and have at it :)
What Tim is describing is the kind of game a midsize company makes. Anything from 5-10ppl up to 100+. There's also an even larger scale, where multiple dev-studios around the world work together, your Assassins' Creeds, or Call of Duty types.
Lmao im terms of face animations, we actually added mouth sprites for characters talking even though it's a Mega Man game.
It's not all games. The indy game market of one single dev with limited support by contractors making a decent to good game never was bigger than today. In my opinion it's games wanting to be movies that make the budgets explode. The motion capture tech and the actors/ stunt people you need for that tech alone eat more money than entire games used to cost in the past.
Hi Tim! Have you spoken on the topic of tradmarks and your experience of trying to protect the rights to your IP, perhaps during your time with Troika?
I'm wondering if you would have any "don't forget x" game industry advise on the topic that would be useful for the less legally learned among us (e.g. Me).
Thanks for all the videos and insights!
Except at Troika, trademarking would happen at a level above my paygrade. And at Troika, we never worked on IP we owned (Sierra owned Arcanum).
@@CainOnGames Ah, gotcha! Thanks for the reply!
Tim, do you think the video game industry could transition to a Hollywood guild model where you don't keep people on staff but hire for the project (union rates) since, as you said, lighting design people have a specialty that sounds awfully like a trade like a grip or camera operator.
This has nothing to do with budget but potentially heal some of the abuse problems in the business.
Hollywood only got that guild model because of 3 things. 1- Big-name actors & directors worked together with rank-and-file layers to form their own studio (United Artists, later part of MGM-UA). Solidarity and pushback against the studios forced them to acknowledge the guilds, although as you see, there's still tension nearly 100yrs later.
2- Film & TV crews were initially drawn from theater crews, and theater has its own long history of stage guilds. Video games for good or ill has been modeled more on the tech industry, which has its own long history of being against union representation (in the US at least).
3- Before Hollywood even formed, the US media business was centered in New York City. The parties were different then, but not the politics - NYC has been a fixture of the Labor movement since its inception at the start of the 20th century. Books, theater (incl dance & live music), radio, and then television all started in the US via New York, and that's where those industries remain centered for the most part. Movies kind of inherited the politics along with the personnel.
hey tim.
fire thumbnail ❤
It would be safe to say that devs don't have enough confident in their game and their direction of the game and instead they pack everything in it, and thus rasing the cost of making the game.
Goodness, sounds like players really need to tone down their expectations, certainly at least with graphics.
I just came here to comment that 250 Million is loony tunes territory for a game studio, thats a damn DOD contract
Games are more expensive because people think they need everything you mention like gigantic open world game with next gen graphics, motion capture FMVs, etc. They are wrong. Gamers want fun experiences and everything else is secondary. Were this not so we would not have a thriving indie market Marketing is not needed. Send your game to a few streamers on twitch and if it is good it will catch on.
I think a very good and relevant question would be "do gamers know what they want?". I think I will make a video on that topic.
Sending your game to streamers on twitch IS marketing. You have to coordinate that. You also have tons of games fighting for attention of those streamers so having a good trailer and steam capsule is important. Then they finally play it and the first thing they’ll say is ‘wow there’s almost no settings’ which is not a great way to start off a game.
I think your point of view is very naive. If what you were saying actually worked, studios would already be doing it.
@@CainOnGamesthey may not know what they want, but most will probably choose interesting gameplay and story over motion capture or whatever else. I often come back to vtmb, fnv, etc. These are old games lacking most of the features mentioned, yet people play them years later. Will I ever come back to whatever the latest ubisoft/ea/sony creation is? I doubt I will even play it.
I wish people would be willing to pay at least $80 or so for a AAA game. The decades of $50-60 titles has kept indie developers stuck at selling games for 10-20. It's getting to the point where even making a game solo, you need to sell tens of thousands of copies to survive. A decade ago, you could survive on like 5000 sales at $10 (taking home about $5 per copy).
You worked on Bloodlines?! No wonder it is one of the best games ever made. :D
On graphics: No, you don't need those things. You don't need to continually bid up polycounts, textures, animations, voice-overs, etc. You *CHOOSE* to add those features, but they are not necessary. The way I know is, there have been many successful games that don't have those features. Valheim, Minecraft, V Rising, Helldivers 2, Crusader Kings. World of Warcraft has 7.25 million subscribers, 20 years after launch, and it's still got the same 2004 game engine and 2014 graphics. Sure, they sprinkle in a little machinima where there would have been a wall of text, but this just in: Nobody cares. We're here for gameplay.
Tack!
Thank you!
I wonder how much fallout 1 would cost to make today
There is no expecations for games to look better and better, games didn't change a bit from past 5-7 years. Nobody gives a damn. Entire studios get bloated for no good reason, and too many cooks spoil the broth
You must be a console player lol
@@Mark-nh7zgyou add nothing to what he said... Instead of trying to be condescending, counter his argument or don't bother commenting that..
in principle i agree, but there’s big swathes of people who still expect some nebulous idea of “better” graphics, despite diminishing returns
@@Mark-nh7zgdid anything change on pc over these 5-7 years? Other than games becoming so unoptimised that you are forced to use upscalers to have a playable framerate?
@@kirya312 Show me one game from 7 years ago that looks as good as Black Myth Wukong.
8:32 Fallout 1-2 still looks better than a lot of slop today
13:09 cyberpunk, call of duty
Sponsored by Raid: Shadow Legends
You can throw tons of money in make a game and it still turn into a stinker. You have so called AAA games costing hundreds of millions, and turn into a stinker. Meanwhile you have indie devs turn out gems at a gum and shoe string budget.. Maybe the industry should just focus on make good games players want. Know your audience and they pick up your bills.
Rising game budgets are only a problem for studios that fired all of their talented employees like Bioware and Ubisoft. Larian and CDPR make good games so they will make a profit.
The largest factor into budgets are salaries. CDPR have over 1000 employees with 600 dedicated to the core dev team. The more staff you have the more you need to sell.
Don't see how firing people increase costs?
@ because you make games that sell fewer copies. DA Valeguard is an embarrassment. Bioware is an embarrassment.
Firing ppl doesn't increase your cost, that's literally what companies do if they need money because that's the quickest way to get some cash for your financial Quarter
@@xNemesis_ read my second comment to find out why you are wrong
@@heavyartillery-qm5hu it changed nothing to what i've said... You can hit your target sales and still have a poor financial result due to cost and firing ppl to get quick cash so no, it changed nothing
Wtf, my name is Cain and whenever I use a fake name online its 'Timothy' lol.
Capitalism :D
...making wages rise ❤
@@UlissesSampaio the 1000 outsourced devs from india: 👁👄👁
@@D4C_LoveTrain1 so increased wages in the US plus creation of relatively (to local standards) high paying jobs in India? Double win!
@@UlissesSampaio so why has wages stagnated for the past 4 decades in every first world country?
@SenkaZver didn't Tim say that wages rose in game industry (at least)?
What's your take on the impression many people have that visuals haven't advanced much in a visible way since Doom 2016 and GoW 2018 but system reqs have increased substantially?
Great video. One point of criticism. I'm not a huge fan when the graphic covers the presenter. It looks a bit odd to see your face replaced with a graph, for instance. I think the video would look better (or at least less uncanny) if you did had the graph as the full screen and kept yourself/your office as an inset instead of the current method.
"dev salaries gone up." Are you sure?
Yeah, rando keyboard warrior questioning a senior developer with decades of experience in all kinds of gaming studios. Sorry about that
but the cost that I see rising more than the salaries itself is the ballooning of the size of teams. And throwing more bodies at a project have diminishing returns. And the worst part, in my opinion, is that you need more people with management skills. And that is a rising cost with a high risk of low return. A lot of "managers" and leaders without those skills
He (Tim) is right, this is a basic understanding in economics, at some point you have to increase the salaries of your workers to adjust to the inflation, now that increase can be small but it still increase to counter the effect of the inflation. So just like any other jobs, yes devs salaries have increased.
The problem is the expense that are not anticipated very well and that's why you need great managers or hell you end up with projects like Concord.
never tried classic fallout or any isometric. I AM LOVING book of ys I&II on TURBOGRAPHIX PC...
way better than link to the past, voice acting, faster combat, harder secrets, perfect retro graphics
Laura Ingrahan is trans. Very woke of Fox news for hiring him.
We should be paying $100 for a AAA game. 95% of the problems would be solved if gamers werent so cheap. Sorry not sorry.
Or they could make games on a cheaper budget.
And by your logic I should be paying $6,000 for a PC. Let's not pretend that it isn't easier now than 30 years ago to make a game. Advancements in frameworks and languages have drastically cut down both the time and skill required to create a game.
what a stupid argument. You could give em 200$ for a game and most of these studios would run into the same problems as they do now.
@@rigell2764spoken like a non-dev who hasn't tried making a game before
Why not 200? Maybe then everyone would finally quit buying unfinished trash and gamers will be split between playing 10-20 year old games that stood the test of time and indy stuff with actual soul put into it.
Tack!
Thanks again!