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I really dislike how it's become normal to say things like "gamer entitlement" or "gamers are this or that" because it's not like "gamers" are some kind of different species. You just pointed out that 40% of the world play games so wouldn't it make more sense to say "people are entitled" or when it comes to games "people are this or that" saying "gamers" makes it sound like it is some isolated group who are the problem but it in instead modern society in general that is the real issue. We as a species especially in the west have become entitled. If I was to follow your logic I would think that you are a gamer because you said you like a bunch of AAA games that means gamers entitlement applies to you? Do you sit there and compare games graphics side by side? I don't and I play games everyday and I have a massive library full of old and new games from many different genres because I really love the medium of video games.
As someone who enjoys playing video games I don't see a problem with the industry at all in fact I think it would be a better industry if the AAA games melted away or at least the length of them shortened drastically so that we get less filler and more quality for say 8 to 12 hours. The real issue is that people keep buying these AAA games and buying all the micro transactions which only encourages these companies to continue acting the same way. I only get the odd AAA game and never get it on release except for fromsoftware games because they deserve it. I will get the physical copy months later for less money and I'll trade it in or sell it for cash when I'm done but I'll gladly pay $20,30,40,45 for a solid indie game. That's where most of my games are from these days and it's never been better if you like playing games then you are very lucky right now thats for sure.
Hey salari since u talked on racism in gaming community earlier I wish to say thanks for that Recently the hatred and racism against South asians are at all time high
I'm currently sleep deprived cause I started playing it last night... And couldn't go to sleep till I finished playing it. Short game without doing the sides but well worth the play ... And confusing my cat via spamming the meow button. On PS5, the meow comes from the controller's speaker 😸
Not a fan of that one as much of the game is just "press button for automated action" and it doesnt fully take advantage of you being a cat doing cat things, and focuses more on a cliche story about robots.
Same for Untitled Goose Game, not a long game, not a premise that any investor would be excited about, but they put a lot of care into it and made it fun to play!
This is honestly the main reason why I never pre-order games and just patiently wait to see if it holds up, since a lot of games now are very rushed and buggy and they also never keep their promises that they make.🐱
Yup. Literally the only games I pre-order are FromSoft games because their games are always good to play through at least once (I personally don't like DS2 in retrospect, but I had a good enough time while playing and don't regret the preorder)
Even if every game released is absolutely perfect there is no reason whatsoever to preorder a game. You preorder something to ensure you have access to a limited item, and since digital distribution has exploded games simply do not run out of stock. Game preorders are an artifact from a time when games were only physical, and disc manufacturing was often stressed due to the amount of physical media that was being preased in multiple mediums all the time. Now it only exists so publishers can show investors how much money they've managed to get before even delivering a product to coax them into investing more. It doesn't serve the consumer in any way at all.
@@Durrutitv There are still reasons to preorder. There are deluxe/limited editions that will probably be gone if you don't preorder-for example, I preordered the deluxe physical edition of Elden Ring that comes with a collectable statue of Malenia. Also, even if you're only getting a digital version, for instance through Steam, if it's from a developer and you know you'll like their game, then preordering can allow you to download most of the game before launch day, so when it does launch you only have to download the final portion of a game to play it. With how large some game files are, this can be a good time saver. Yeah, it's not that big of a deal, but if you know 100% you're gonna play the game anyway, might as well preorder so you can play the game a little bit faster. But yeah, 99% of the time, I agree with you and would not preorder a game. I think everyone needs to consider what their situation is, but I wouldn't say there is never any point in preordering.
@@topcat59People used to say the same thing about CDPR, and Blizzard before them, and Bethesda before them. Success under capitalism is a double edged sword, every project needs to be more successful than the last to continue providing growing returns to investors, lest they pull their investments. Eventually you reach a quarter where you're up against a wall and compromise your ethics. For CDPR it was publishing CP77 2 years before it was finished in order to cash in on all of the hype sales. For Blizzard it has been chasing WoW's financial success with post-launch monetization strategies that grow more and more predatory year over year. For Bethesda, a lil bit of both: sacrificing quality while cranking up the monetization. From has had a slow and steady growth curve for the last couple decades, each game expanding their audience and making more money, so the pressure hasn't really been on them; that is until Elden Ring exploded with significantly more sales than anything else they've developed and now there's going to be significant pressure going forward for them to out perform those numbers. Don't get me wrong, I love From, but if push comes to shove and they need to choose between putting their investors or consumers first, they will choose the investors like every beloved studio that has come before and will come after. It's just the nature of capitalism, if the stuff you love is good, capital get it's slimy tentacles around it and strangle it.
I think the cost and scale of AAA games has to shrink back at some point in the near future. There’s only so many times you can spend the GDP of a small nation on a software project that can’t make its money back
As long as people are willing to buy the games they will keep making them with big budgets. The AAA industry only real advantage is their graphics and scale in any other category a solo developer can outdo them at a lower price point for the customer. They push these new consoles whose purpose is to push more graphics and greater scale. Nintendo makes their money back and Sony has quite a few high seller like gow, gran turismo and spiderman that pay for themselves and than some. A big help would be putting these games on pc day one ignoring one of the biggest gaming markets until the hype dies out years later is bad for 300 million dollar games even microsoft figured that out and put games on pc day one. Another thing would be stop putting hours upon hours of cutscenes in games trying to make an action movie as well as a game is no doubt a big money sink, but I know that's Sony style.
@@kennethyoung7457I agree - PS would suffer the most out of all three, for the reasons listed above. Not every game needs to be a multi-billion dollar production will bells and whistles, just make good games.
"You can put your eggs all in one basket if you've convinced everyone that your eggs are the best" I've never heard it put so eloquently, regarding the tendency for companies to spend more on less projects...
I think the games industry is well overdue for another crash, because the current attitude that surrounds the whole industry is severely stunting the creativity of game developers and harming the people that work hard to create these experiences. Every single year I see more and more SLOP get announced, put together using default Unreal Engine 5 assets and the same exact gameplay formula. If the scene collapses under its own weight, it'll be a deserved death, and indie developers deserve to be treated way better than they are.
Sadly its not just AAA that are doing this shit, but many "indie" cashgrab whaling mobile slop is not helping industry ether. I would even go as far as to blame a lot of shit we are dealing with on Social media games, shit like Zinga did and then was exported to mobile phone market, that ended up racing to the rock bottom, already digging deeper with drills and excavators. AAA saw all that bullshit and how profitable it became and emulated it. Do not forget AAA studious are the slow moving monoliths that take years to pivot.
I recently watched a video recapping the saga of Atari (by Melody Nosurname, if you're interested), and I slowly came to the realization that we're falling into the same tragic prophecy.
@@varspartoidac LJN say otherwise. And companies that made good games had to ether make subsidiaries (Konami-> Ultra games) or go around (Tengen). Gatekeeping wont help. Making these practices unprofitable is only way this can be fixed. That, or literally jailtime. Sadly law enforcement do not give a fuck.
The stockholder model of business is antiquated, in no normal world would one not be content with a steady, reliable stream of money. It's the need for constant growth every three months that's strangling a lot of businesses, especially creative ones. When you're mandated by law to be the leviathan then nothing is off limits given enough time. I imagine we'll see more game dev co-ops or at least privately owned ones.
You guys have no idea how business works from the comments. Guys, the stockholder model is private ownership. When you buy a stock, you own a part of that company. The issue you guys are talking about is an issue that started from the 70s and that's mostly because of how public businesses structure C level and executives bonuses and comp plans. The way that works incentizes these C level leaders to do stupid, shortsighted but quick result grabbing actions.
And that's why indie games are usually more fun and more creative. I rarely play AAA games nowadays because after having played so much in the past I can often already tell from the trailers in what way the game will feel like a chore.
I can’t remember the last time I payed anywhere near full price for a AAA game, because I generally find them boring and generic. Don’t mind paying £20 for some but rarely do they get finished or sometimes even played 🤔 Indie games however is where I live, these titles continue to experiment and grow. I feel that the core gamers of the 90s/00s have now migrated away from the herd again AAA gaming is now normalised actual gamers have now largely huddled around indie devs.
Yeah, companies used to say dlc was "necessary" because 60 dollars was too cheap. Now we have more expensive games with exactly the same amount of dlc and microtransactions.
@@loadishstone there was some executive a few months back saying the price of a AAA game should be $100. I think it was a Capcom exec. And honestly, if I could have a no BS, full, MTX free, DRM free game, I'd probably be willing to pay that.
The biggest problem with gaming right now is it became too corporate, once they saw how much money there is it just became all about the money, no point in making a great game when you can just make once that's mediocre or better yet, make a shit game and just sell it on marketing. I'm willing to bet that just like me many gamers tried various different games and over the years we just saw what types we liked best, so it's not necessary that we're too comfortable with one type so we don't bother venturing outside of that.
This is something I've wondered about as well. I'm already morbidly curious how much GTA 6 or the next Elder Scrolls game will cost. Especially as the demand for hyper-realistic graphics and physics engines increases, it's going to inflate those budgets and time scales even more. It'll be interesting to see how it all plays out, but I just hope the indie market can balance this out some.
Just to think what fighting games cost now. Fighting games, those virtual buggers with the least amount of content necessary. Buy them with preloaded content and 100+ bucks is a sure thing. For fighting games. There is a reason I leaned back, getting just an Xbox series and load it with kinda older games that cost no more than 20 or 25 bucks at the most. Now I can play like forever. If I was getting all games brand new or preordered I would have maybe like ten games only now. It has to tickel me very hard to buy a game new. It does happen though. But most of the time I pass.
Although it hasn't been confirmed, analysts estimate GTA6 will cost $1-2 billion to produce, making it the most expensive game ever produced by a wide margin. Obviously as success goes, it's a safe bet, and it'll more than likely be the next most profitable entertainment product ever produced, but I guess it's worth considering what else could've been made with all that cash.
The problem with huge budgets is that with something like GTA 6, you can see where that money went, CP2077 could've been cheaper if they didn't rework the story to accommodate Johnny Silverhand becoming a much bigger character. And then you look at something like Forspoken, and it's rumored to have cost 100 million to develop, where did that money go to? The map is empty and the gameplay is repetitive, not to mention abysmal PC performance. An example of not needing that much money to make a good game is Ghost of Tsushima, it cost 60 million to develop. Something is going very wrong inside game studios and I don't want to have to pay more for my games because of that.
@@brenomedeiros8460I bet it's a fail upward situation... Corporations waste cash via upper management who's buddy buddy with each other but are utterly incompetent and just screw up and burn through money.
Higher ups making it difficult for the developers should never happen. I personally have experienced developing games, but higher ups let me do my job. I get the guidelines and ESRB concerns, but other than that, they should always stfu.
Something funny to consider is that by Triple-A standards, Nintendo is a real oddity in that they typically don't follow the traditional Triple-A formula that almost every studio follows nowadays. They purposefully gimp their platform's power to develop around those constraints so they can keep development costs relatively cheap compared to their contempories and produce more games across the board as a result. Because of this, failures generally don't cause catastrophic consequences while the successes end up being wildly successful. If Nintendo didn't follow the philosophy they have currently, we wouldn't have seen games like Pikmin, Xenoblade, ARMs and Astral Chain exist or have seen surprising revivals such as Kid Icarus Uprising and Metroid Dread. More Triple-A companies need to follow the philosophy of Nintendo and go "Hey, it's okay if we don't put as much money into a single project or have to push current high-end hardware to its limits. It would be better for everyone involved if we revert back to the philosophy of developing games to be more cost and time-effective!"
You can't seriously think that PlayStation and or Xbox could just replicate what Nintendo has. That's like the same as if someone would try to make a copy of WoW, you know that is just not possible.
I've been so content with baldur's gate 3 that I've put off getting more games. that may be bad to hear for developers and studios, but if you've got a really solid game, you can spend more time making the next one great too
Same, I keep seeing all these games coming out and I'm still in Act One of BG3 because I keep making new characters, (and I like to explore and roleplay). It's so incredibly fun, I have no desire to play other games... besides the odd roguelike here and there, like Dead Cells.
People like you are too statistically insignificant in order for any dev to feel bad. You guys are too unique. Hella lot of games rely on player rotation, not retantion. In other words, there is no shortage of people to enjoy other games. It's a matter of finding your target audience, not competing with BG3
Thats a really bad take. People said the same thing for Elden Ring last year but more games came out with unique experinces. I remember I said the same thing for Berserk and how it shits all over other medieval fantasy stories. But its so dumb, close minded and rude.
BG3 is very niche title. I understand that you D&D fans love it but........ the vast majority of ppl are NOT into D&D. To most ppl the game is extremely boring.This sentence isn't directed towards you, but the rabbit nerd fan base is the worst I've ever seen. Super annoying and demanding that everybody praise the game despite ppl bringing up legitimate flaws and reasons not to like it.
@@drago7807I think you would be kind of surprised how many people talk about and play bg3. Also the DnD fanbase is massive. Like almost everyone these days have at least played one session. You kinda underestimate how big DnD actually is.
Witcher 3 had $32 million budget and $35 million for marketing. $67m in total. what happens now is game developers spend money uncontrollably, so the cost increases exponentially. game devs need to learn how to manage money.
Another reason is the cinematics, cutscenes are expensive and that because the medium wants to immitate another industry that has it own expenses to that formation of telling a story, so because gaming needs to tell a story they copy a formation of another industry to tell it...which is expensive.
Is it wrong for a game to have cinematics or cutscenes in them? This is like some Regi Nintendo take. We are long past the point where games are only "supposed" to be "fun" and prioritize being a toy over having meaning in them. A cutscene is just as valid a way to add in that meaning as text or a character shouting dialogue while you play.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047I don't think anyone is saying that, it's just that sometimes it is excessive and it does inflates the budget, somerimes unnecessarily
I understand that some people want games to be their own thing and are probably not playing games for the story, but I don't think cinematics and cutscenes are an objective issue. Not every game that has cutscenes and cinematics is making them like Naughty Dog. Games like HiFi Rush, Psychonauts 2, Nier Automata, Persona 5, The Last Guardian, and As Dusk Falls, are just a few examples. There are more indie/AA level games that are cinematic in nature that don't blow their costs on photorealism. I grew up with JRPGs so story in games was always important to me. I don't have the nostalgic fond memories of 90's gaming without stories like most people I see online. I think it is shortsighted to assume implementing cutscenes or cinematics is done to copy movies and TV.
Aliens Colonial Marines is probably what killed game hype for me. I don't let myself get excited for video games anymore until I have them in my hands.
That era was my blackpill as well, I was disappointed by Halo 4, Bioshock Infinite, and just got fed up after Colonial Marines. Little did I know all of that was a warning of what would be standard in the future, and if not even worse. At that point I started veering more towards nonwestern games and indie games and it really hasnt changed much for me since. Better for it.
That’s unfortunate. I love getting hyped for games. Gaming is my main hobby and the lead up to a highly anticipated game is part of the fun. Life is too short to be skeptical and sullen all the time. Live a little! 😊
if you hang around r/GameDeals, there are free PC games handed out all the time, many of them with low requirements. And these are often what were AAA games when they released.
It use to be so much cheaper to buy physical copies and get a decade old console .. like 1 - 5 dollars a Pop .. a new game was 30 dollars and I thought that was high.
It's insane to me that CRPGs are considered niche when D&D is more popular than ever. The game industry seems to think all the fans of a genre just lose interest in it when it's not prominent for a while. Everybody who bought Dragon Age didn't just cease to exist.
cRPG's were always niche. All major publishers have been trying to murder that genre since like begginings of 2000's. Like last wave of proper cRPG's before indies, was what Planescape Torment from 1999 to I believe something from Troika Studio .. Temple of Elemental Evil perhaps ? Arcanum of Steamworks and Magick Obscura was in 2001. I know that because I was for whole my teenage yearning for proper cRPG's. Thank gods for Pillars of Eternity I and II and Tyranny.
D&D is more popular than ever and it's still niche, I know literally 0 people who play RPG because it is not popular everywhere. Estimations are that 50 million people play it worldwide, that's not that much people, and someone playing it does not mean they have income to buy other games.
Yeah the only real dead genre I would say are RTS games but that is mostly because it evolved to other genres like MOBAs, which simplified the game more. Instead of controlling many units, you focus on 1. Yeah those games still exist, but it is mostly a handful that are mostly remasters of an existing game like Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, Star Craft, etc. Maybe dead might not be the best term, but maybe stagnate would be better? Most genres see a fluctuation in popularity, but I almost hear nothing about RTS games anymore. Dawn of War 3 really screwed itself trying to make the game more into a MOBA game in an already saturated market at the time. Should have tried focusing more on the base building aspect of 1 or the squad combat of 2. In a way the squad combat of 2 might actually fall in line with a CRPG, which is fine. Probably made those decisions trying to appeal to the esports hype. The thing about esport games is that most games that got popular into esports were not really designed with esports in mind. It was that they were good games first that people then turned it into a competitive thing.
Here's the thing, there's a natural entryway gap to both TTRPGs and CRPGs, it's not as accessible to a younger generation with a shorter attention span and casual consumers. I think that this is a good thing, because devs have an audience in mind that they can cater to, rather than watering down their art for consumers.
I worry about gaming mafias after that. Everytime i think of Unions, i thought about the Mafias that hijack them so workers have nowhere to turn to. Scary thought.
@@joshuamoore553lol, okay. It's a proven fact that unions not only help union members, but even non union workers. One example being the UAW strikes. Not only did the Big 3 raise wages and benefits for their workers, but Toyota and Honda also raised their wages. The SAG strikes saw actors have a voice in whether or not they were property of the movie industry after they died, and saw (yet again) better wages and working conditions. Same with UPS. The only time a union action failed is when things like the President of the US made it federally illegal to strike, because "Christmas was too important", and that ended with a derailment over the safety issues they wanted to strike over. Are they perfect?? No. Is it better than having zero voice in your work experience through labor solidarity?? Yes. And this is in the US. Imagine how powerful unions are in countries that aren't completely fucking broken!!
Honestly, graphics in AAA games have confused me for a long time, since they spend SO MUCH MONEY on things that are, sure, impressive, but not actually better, at least in my opinion. I remember when NWN1 came out, and because you could import your BG2 character into it I kind of expected it to look similar, but instead of beautiful backgrounds and fine animated sprites, everything was just low poly shapes, and there was so much emphasis on "modern graphics" for something that just looked so much uglier. Realism can be a fine artistic choice, but it's not the only good one. I've spent hours adding mods to Skyrim to make it look nicer, and lots of skilled modders have done wonderful work there, but it still doesn't look as stylish as Hades, or Persona 5, or Untitled Goose Game, or countless other games that spent so much less for graphics because they knew that more complicated/realistic is NOT the only way to make a great looking game.
TES V is hardly realistic. TES V is sketchy. And that sketchiness is normal artstyle of TES. It was return to sketchiness of TES III in particular. It's gritty and sketchy. You want eye candy given you put these titles as 'good' looking. I was ecstatic that they returned to sketchiness. Yeah it's no eye candy. And it shouldn't be eye candy. It's TES. A melting pot of mutual hatred universe lol. Bethesda was given a flack for forgetting this sketchiness and more grittiness in TES IV, TES IV was too much like Disneyland and npc's looked psychotic downright. Betha always listens to it's fanbase. I am pleased with how things look on ESO even if it still tries it's best to capture SOME semblence of sketchiness on characters regular TES has. Back to your complaint on your copy of game. Of course it will never look 'stylish' because game had it's artstyle already. And you and the modders make alteration to it, so coherence of artstyle falls apart. There is no direction once you try to outdo general art direction. That's why I avoided visual mods like a plague to Betha games. Another example would be Sims, you had loads of mods for new hairstyles etc .. yet modders ALWAYS deemed original artstyle of game as 'inferior' so you ended up with modders making hairstyles for your sims that looked anything but like natural hair from game. They looked jarring. What I did to my Sims, is what you did to TES V. And in both cases we messed up general game artstyle so now it's incoherent mess with jarring differences in qualities and looks. You like way too cartoony flashy things, given how the games you put as example of 'stylish' look. Ironically to me they look .. boring. And way too flashy. Like it's fine if it's going for kids vibe ? But definately too flashy and one could get diabetes from looking at them. That being said style is personal opinion, you like candy like graphics, I was fine with sketchy and gritty.
@@cracmar03 I'm not entirely sure why you felt the need to write all this? I wasn't insulting Skyrim, just giving it as an example of a game that seems to be trying for a more realistic aesthetic than the other examples, and given that Skyrim SE launched with much more realistic water effects and other visual effects compated to the original, and marketed itself on the basis of those graphics, I don't think that's a controversial observation. I think you're the first person I've ever heard describe that games aesthetics as "sketchy", and having played and loved Morrowind (unmodded, I didn't discover mods for it until after I'd stopped playing that one), I wouldn't have described it that way either. That's subjective I suppose, you're free to call them that, I just don't quite understand what sketchy quality you're referring to. The point I was making is that, while AAA game companies justify their prices, budgets, and too often horrific crunch time on the need for graphics and aesthetics that are extremely labor intensive, games can look just as good, sometimes even better, without all that. But me giving a few examples hardly means those examples are the only things I play.
I dont think expensive Games are something Bad for the Industry in itself. The Problem is that Most of them are just expensive without any Ambition. Like bg3 got that expensive bc the ambitions of the developers and the price is reflcted in the Game. Cyberpunk in Exchange promised too much, couldnt keep it and got even more expensive to fix it
Also devs shove a lot of useless stuff into their games that do nothing like the famous RDR2 horse private parts. Like who asked for this, why is this a thing and would it really break immersion if they didn't include it?
As much as 3A games get ramped up, people are enjoying games a single dude made in his basement just as much. Nothing is going to happen to the "industry" unless your talking about indies destroying behemoths that don't deserve to exist in the first place.
"people are enjoying games a single dude made in his basement just as much" sure, but Activision made around $6 billion just from microtransactions in 1 year. can the single dude do this? no. the behemoths are PUBG, Fortnite, Minecraft, etc. in 2023 PUBG had 380 million active monthly players and it was the 1st most played game. an indy is gonna destroy this? nope. stop deluding yourself. indies will remain niche.
@@SapiaNt0matathat’s crazy cause I’ve never once touched PuBG To me all the people playing these games (Fortnite apex PUBG or buying the shitty micro transactions on single player games like the assassins creed games) are the reason the game industry is dying. They keep buying shit and spending money on literal dog crap. The destiny community let bungie take away content and RE-SELL it to them later on and the community just went “yes shit in my mouth more daddy bungie” it’s insane how indoctrinated these players are I’ve put more time in inscription than I have on any recent AAA game
@@SapiaNt0mata Granted, Minecraft was an indie game made by a single person for a while. Sure, not anymore, but even still it’s not that much more complex than it used to be. Although Minecraft is more of an exception.
"The industry as a whole needs to sit back and..." Industries don't usually come together to discuss lowering profits (which is what lowering budgets would mean), in fact it never happens, due to the Prime Directive of capitalism: "profit curve must go up, every quarter, to infinity". Every other action taken by a corporation is subject to this, meaning it will attempt buy-outs, do mass layoffs, sell subsidiaries, do stock splits, take massive loans, declare bankruptcy, even bend or break laws, before it accepts lowering shareholders expectations. Nothing is off the table when profit is threatened. No industry voluntarily dials down the greed, it always has to be enforced from without.
Hades was amazing. Binding of Isaac was my go to boredom killer for years. Im currently playing power wash simulator and loving it. As a former skateboarder, the recent skate sims are still so fun to dick around in. I love great indy titles. Some of them arent even really that short, and if is a game is really good most people want it as long as possible. Were definitely living in simultaneously the best and worst time for gaming. Lol
It depends... I'd say there's a sweet spot. For example, Fallout New Vegas, I tried playing it, but the graphics were too ugly. I just couldn't. It's a good game, but I can't look at that puke yellow. Sure, a game doesn't need to be perfect in terms of graphics, but in my case, I'd need a game to meet some minimum threshold.
@@octavianpopescu4776What annoyed you wasn't actually the quality of the graphics, it was the art direction, most often less realistic games with strong art direction stand the test of time more easily.
@@octavianpopescu4776yea it wasn't the graphics, the graphics are just your standard ps3 era stuff. Think gta4. The problem was fallout 3 and new Vegas are cursed with browns, and piss yellows, and everyone is covered in dirt all the time. It's just an ugly gross world.
The reason games were so profitable was because their budgets were smaller than movies yet their revenue was comparable, if the budget surpasses that of a movie blickbuster... video game development stops being sustainable.
C-level, board, share holders and marketing are literally 90% of the total cost... marketing alone can double the cost... for what, it's a fucking scam.
The bigger you are, the harder you fall. I'm glad you brought up the stat about all those layoffs across the industry. I'm not a developer or even work in games but I can notice just how many people from 2022-2023 have been layed-off as a sign that something is going to give way.
Armored Core 6 has been my favorite game in about a decade. Finished the first play through in about 20 hours. I’m now 300+ hours in and still having fun and I’m not alone. Game length doesn’t matter, overall enjoyment will determine how long people want to play.
Hi there! Gavedev here, thanks for video, very interesting points. The problem with overgrown budgets is that not only it's expensive to produce on it's own, because you have to compete with finance and IT spheres for software engineers, lion share of the money goes to marketing, not development. And you can't really cut marketing cost, because media is oversaturated with new products, you compete for people's attention with movies and various streaming services, and you have to make yours more visible to the consumer, otherwise it will fly under the radar, even if it is cool. Very few studios have enough recourses to pull it off on their own, so they partner up with publishers. And publishers are known for pushing risk management and profit maximization tactics. Aka more formulaic mechanics, more streamlined narratives to cut costs, or some evil shit like microtransactions or crunch inducing deadlines to squeeze more money out of single title, which undoubtedly compromise artistic integrity. But it still better to compromise your vision a little, than waste years developing a game nobody will see. I don't really know how we can get out of this cycle. On one hand Larian and BG3 is a shining example of independent developer with integrity and dedication, who set out to do their thing exactly as they wanted, even if it didn't make sense in market's eyes, and won hard. But even they had to go through cheeky dance with certain publisher at the beginning of their existence and spend years doing smaller projects and growing their community and reputation before they were able to produce masterpiece such as Baldurs Gate 3. And it all was deep in debt, to steps away from bankruptcy, collecting donations from dedicated fans to keep going. I can imagine the stress of living like this. One have to be very special kind of crazy to stick it out to the end, and those people are rare.
IMO games peaked in the Xbox 360 era. If we can get more games like that with moderately increased graphics (i.e. higher res amd frame rates, improved lighting, hi res textures), Id be happy. Those games didnt take 10 years to make or cost a fortune. Increases in resolution and realtime lighting should be easily added with modern hardware and game engines. Instead, we get games that are inferior to Skyrim and Dragon Age Origins, but cost many times more just because they look nice.
These days, they sometimes DON'T ever get to be in a playable state. “What about fan hacks?” Sometimes they don’t get enough interest to get hacked or even preserved, making hacks impossible.
At the end of the day, gaming is an artistic medium. The problem with the industry is that they're trying to standardize everything and not take any risks. It's like trying to make art that will appeal to everyone; it just ends up bland and unwanted.
Imagine needing to sell between 3-5+ million products to barely have a chance at breaking even (that's without factoring in how much retailers take and is purely based on gross revenue)...
As a huge RPG fan, I've been saying it would be awesome to see more games made in an early 2000s graphic fidelity like Final Fantasy X but hi res. Those games used to be developed in 2-3 years and they were great. I'd love to see more games developed like that today.
Not even that long it was as quick as 1 and a half to 2 and a half years max for the majority , a good portion took no longer than a year and a half for the early first part of 6th gen.
In a year where Fear and Hunger (maybe the least accessible game of all time?) low key exploded in popularity i do think the slow shift over to indie games and double A studios is only gaining more traction. Indie games and smaller releases have been really solid for years. My corner of the internet has been very excited about Signalis and ultrakill more recently. The bigger conversation is moreso just that the average gamer™ is slowly starting to pay attention to them more; as is also evident by steam promoting their indie game of the year banner more.
I hadn't bought a AAA game in years. Then I fell for the Starfield hype and got the early release edition. Big mistake. Guess I need to do this every couple of years to remind myself why I don't buy AAA games.
I feel like another Hideo Kojima-esque situation would be the Xenoblade franchise by monolith soft For a Nintendo published game, it's extremely unique, strikingly directed, and an absolute delight presentation wise It's not a cashcow but it definitely looks like it has the budget and the staff Since Monolith helps Nintendo with 3D models, technical stuff and specifically cartography with botw and totk, Nintendo, who bought Monolith way back in the mid-2000s since they had some bizarre interest in a niche deeply philosophical series (Xenogears and Xenosaga, and I guess Baten Kaitos's weird gameplay), is fully willing to fund Xenoblade games and allow for full creative freedom Xenoblade Chronicles X is a gigantic unbelievably massive single play MMO styled open world rpg which clearly inspired botw's world design (potentially justifying *that* delay) released on the Wii U, and its environments still hold up today. Xenoblade 2 had some extremely bizarre mechanics and direction which would trigger most western critics but it was still a big hit with those who were willing to look through all the "anime bullshit exterior" to find an incredible game with amazing exploration, combat, characters, music, story and themes. And obviously my absolute favorite game ever, Xenoblade 3, well quite frankly I can't do much but recommend it to everyone, it's probably the best game I have ever played, and I cannot undermine just how much it means to me, and YES, it should've won best OST and be nominated for narrative and art direction I highly recommend monolith soft's games, seriously they're some of the most overlooked modern jrpg games of all time and are all some absolutely unforgettable adventures that most people tend to hate on with... Honestly no reason at all besides its anime artstyle, writing and some anime tropes here and there
Another problem is that if you have dozens of 100+ million dollar budget games or films or whatever appearing every year, they are going to cannibalise one another. We saw that this year with all of the blockbusters that cost 200, 300 million to make, and ended up losing money because one stole the momentum at the box office from another. Add to this that the economics for the average consumer (and do not kid yourself, the middle class was eliminated a while ago) make it impossible for them to keep every project in the black. I am not sure what the math is for videogames, but films, thanks to the way theatres and distribution work, have to make two and a half times their budget to break even. In a world where people are, adjusted for inflation, making less money than they did in the 1980s when sixty million dollars was a newsworthy expensive film (or in 1991, when a hundred million was flabbergasting), this is impossible. Even if the same number of people were going to theatres as was the case in the 1930s, twelve 200-300 million dollar blockbusters a year cannot break even if the customer only has the same purchasing power or less than when 60 million was a big deal. To bring this back to the videogames thing, well, back in the late 1990s, I was on a forum on which a person stated that videogames are more profitable than films. I said yeah, that is because the cost of making videogames is lower. Come back when both things cost the same to make, then we will talk. Well, here we are. Videogames are costing just as much, if not more, to make. And the industry is in danger of collapsing. I hope the exact same thing happens as I caught the tail end of in the early 1980s. I was too young to understand why everyone had a games console and seemingly hundreds of cartridges. The console wars between Nintendo and Sega were hilarious at times. But I would love to see another crash because, ironically, Microshaft is the least suited to survive it. Nintendo can huddle up and wait for it to blow over, using similar tactics as in the 1980s to start over, Sony can reorganise their film business and other electronics business and weather it, but Microshaft only has Windoze and computer shite to keep going with. The IT and videogame industry is the only industry that has never been under any real regulation. It shows.
Never say never. The big thing is go find something to enjoy about life. There have been AAA games like Max Payne 3 that bombed. The big joke was that if Max Payne 3 hadn’t been a 200 million dollar budget to make that game, it would have actually been profitable because of the budget and the niche noir audience.
I think it's a bit simplistic and almost romanticizing to say that in the past developers could be creative and original and weather the occasional flop. It's obvious that the ballooning costs of AAA development have made publishers even more risk averse than they used to be, but it's not like in the 90's and 2000's we got that much more creative or original games. The thing is that in those days, the formulas weren't discovered yet. Stuff like the standard control scheme for third person shooters and skill tree RPG-lite mechanics weren't invented or normalized yet. Any larger production (which would still be tiny by today's standards) was still looking to hit the largest common denominator, but the gaming audience wasn't as homogenous yet. PC games were fundamentally a different type of game than console games, etc. Everything was so much more fragmented, so a mega hit like a CoD MW or GTA5 wasn't possible. Developers were often just making guesses as to what could prove popular as often as they were led by actual creative vision and we look back at it now and marvel at the many weird and out-there ideas and think "wow, gaming used to be so free from AAA profit pressures as if profits weren't important back then too.
I think the PS2 era had alot of creative games not so much the 90s but I do with the early 200s allowed more risk taking. The PS 3 era was less so risky. With Elden Ring and BG3 in terms of game Type they are risk talking but both games are High fantasy so setting wise they are not a huge risk like Something on the lines of Death stranding.
@@John-996the ps2 is also the most successful gaming console full stop, so maybe it has something to do with that, more people playing, more people making games.
The argument from "more gaming hours = higher prices" is weird. I plaxed games on the NES, Atari 2600 and Master System. Most games reached from 30 minutes up to maybe two hours. And 50 bucks was quite a lot for that. Now I may compare Street Fighter 6 to Super Street Fighter II. And while SF6 has some extra content, the main game as such has not changed too much. It looks better of course. Or does it? Imagine SF6 been done in classic 2D graphics - no big deal since SF6 plays in traditional 2D style anyway. Now add some furious online play shit to it. Tag this useless rpg mode on to it and viola. How much would that cost?
True, and this wouldn't even be considering hypothetical hours in the game. Like Dark Souls for instance, you can go up to ng+7, so you beat the game, get to credits, and restart the game on that same character with all your gear, except the enemies get harder. Up to 7 game replays iirc, at which point the enemies are leveled higher than your character to a degree. But, with this in mind, and the fact you can get multiple endings. Even if the game is completed after you complete it, there's still those 7 ng+ modifiers you can add to enemies, there's the endings, and upgrades to rings in ng+. Base game or ng+0 you'll find a "Leo ring" and then ng+2 you'll find a Leo ring +3. This is all optional and purely for if you want to 100% it, but could be considered extra hours of content if the dev wants to make max profit per sale. There's also the magic types, you have Sorceries, Miracles (invoking the powers of God), and pyromancies, so acquiring all of those will take hours. There's covenants that have unique weapons as rewards, which requires pvp that is unpredictable and will likely take longer than you think or hope. Boom, more hours. If a game technically never ends for instance how many hours of gameplay do you charge for? If it's just a sandbox game like mine craft, you can play for many many many hours and still do the occasional new thing, make a discovery.
Anyone looking for a cool game with simple graphics: Dave the Diver. Fishing, sushi, and a cute storyline. Go for Dredge if you want fishing but with horror vibes
Lol it was 2014... A game called destiny was on the horizon. It was being made by bungie who at the time, just released 5 halo games over the course of the past decade and they are basically the best shooting games ever made. WHAT A AMAZING TRACK RECORD! Can't wait to see what their new destiny game will be like! What's this? The rpg elements of diablo, the world exploring of elder scrolls, and the gameplay and story telling from halo? All in one game? And I can enjoy this grand experience with others online? WOW this is going to be great!!! Sounds even more epic than those last 5 halo games. The future of shooters looks great!!!!!!! Closer to launch I learned it was online only, had cod like mechanics like hard aim down sights and default sprint, and it was lacking split screen, something every shooter should have. As disappointed as I was, I still got the game. 2 copies actually. So I could play with my bro : ) The clerk even said it was great! Couldn't wait to play it! Pop the disk into my 360 and what's this? Long boring update has to kick off first... Ooookay lol. This has never happened before with halo games but whatever... No big deal... About a hour later we finally got to play and well......... CRAP this game suuux lol. I don't care about the characters or the story. Some characters don't even have names they are just, the queens brother... Many chars just have big butt face robot faces and are not the most appealing to me. Art style from halo was better than this... The thing I started noticing most of all after the first day, was how lied to I was... "If you can see it you can go there" talking points went out the window once I learned that there were invis kill barriers everywhere. "Tough enemies drop tons of sick gear" Lol no they don't. I killed tons of bosses who dropped basically trash... The bosses are a joke too. Just take cover, shoot, take cover, shoot, take cover, shoot over and over again. No strategy really... Just mindless cover shooting... They promised players could join you in the heat of battle. That was a lie. They said you could trade gear. Also a lie. They didn't however say much about the bull crapp MICROTRANSACTIONS that they put into the game. Back then I wasn't up to speed on this corporate bs. This was my first online only micro transaction game lol. I didn't know what I was seeing. All my attempts to get good gear were failures, but I could simply spend real life money for better gear. That option was always there lol. As a young kid waiting tables, I could barely afford the game itself lol why do you think I got the 360 version? Didn't even have a ps4 or xbox one yet lol. Then I noticed they liked to update the game from time to time. Not so much in ways that make the game better sooo much... But just change for the sake of change. It didn't make much sense. One week the autorifles are the go to weapon... The week after that it's hand cannons that are the best. Whatever lol... Dumb game... Also noticed the drivable vehicle list was less than the drivable vehicle list of halo 1... A 2001 game... That's disappointing... No map editor... No theater mode... Was there even customs? I don't think so... I know there wasn't jack shiz for a ranked competitive mode like in halo 3. Lastly I learned they disk locked content. I remember seeing trailers for the game showing a big forest planet to explore. It was no where to be found in the game though! Turns out it was DLC. DLC that was clearly finished before launch, but they cut it to sell it to us later. It was already on the disk actually. Just locked up until your credit card could unlock it. What a bunch of scum bags lololol. The game is bad lol. It's not very good and was made to sucker cash more than it was made to dispense fun gaming moments. The story goes no where and the end is literally just "keep playing and buying micro transactions please this game doesn't ever actually end hahahaha" They story is so bad. All the cool stuff happened before off screen and what's happening in the current story is boring af... Clearly bungie went from great to not so great lol. This experience shattered my hopes for gamings future. I worried this kind of thing would ruin gaming and welp, I was right lolz. Fast forward to today and we got tons of unfinished, online only, micro transaction games... Many of which are from once great franchises like halo, gears of war, counter strike, rainbow 6, battle field, etc etc No wonder I stick to games mostly around 2010 on down haha. Sorry for the long one. Just wanted to sum up my gamer bro feelings on the future of gaming. Doesn't look that great lolz. As we get better controllers/controls, visuals, and frames... We get worse everything else... And sometimes we STILL get bad controls, visuals, and frames lol lets get real. Gollum and kong are 2023 games as odd as that is to say lolz. Even this years game of the year wasn't finished at launch lol. And in a year with tons of strikes and lay offs... Is there much left here to praise? Not really... Gaming today is mostly a joke lol. Great video boss mann! You sum up the face of gaming so well! And I agree. Tears of the kingdom is soooo fun and micro soft made some dumb choices this year... As usual lolz.
I agree with the micro transactions points, but if you didn't play the raids in destiny, you were missing out on some of the best content in video games EVER
Theres absolutely no reason why a game should be sold in an incomplete state; the people in charge can extend the release date, but they usually dont. Cyberpunk being the most popular example. I dont mind paying 70$, but it needs to have a ton of content like Baldurs Gate 3. Enough with the bare minimum!
Baldur's Gate 3 was however on early access for years and years though. It wasn't one release and game was full of content, it was years of work while taking people's money.
So I watched this yesterday when I was a bit semi busy with other things, but I came back to it and I absolutely love this essay video from you. You're speaking so many facts that will probably be so relatable for so many people. A lot of games these days seem like such a huge thing to get into. And then when it actually releases due to rushed release dates they release it with so many bugs too. Nobody likes it, the production team feels like crap about it too. Why? Art takes time. Digital work takes time. Let creators properly create and don't push them to finish it within an unreasonable amount of time for an unreasonable amount of payment.
Gaming is the biggest media entertainment industry now, but it's important to look at where that money is, because it's not enough to assume that mobile games share all the same characteristics as indie games. There's a ton of very ethically questionable cash being made in exploiting how kids make purchases on Fortnite and Roblox and it's really not the same as me playing Disco Elysium or Spiritfarer. But when people critique the gaming industry it all gets lumped in together.
I think studios greatly undermine peoples willingness to try new things. I have never played dnd, knew nothing of the rules or the world but decided to jump in head first into Baldurs Gate 3 and i loved the experience. I do think though more games should be available in demo form for free seeing how the cost of gaming is getting higher and higher with modern games costing up to $70, its reasonable for people to not want to pay that much for a game which they may or may not enjoy, and then have to deal with the hassle of -maybe- getting a refund.
The thing is, most people don't have that much disposable income, so they will most likely buy something they know they already enjoy if theur budget is limited, games in my country are incresibly expensive, so I only buy indies and sail the high seas for triple A.
I prefer indie games over triple A for a long time now. One of the few exceptions would be Elden ring. But other than that I just have more hope seeing great, interesting and creative games in the indie scene.
Considering how the gaming world reacted to the release of DA:O - turn future games of the series into less role-play versions but give it massive open worlds instead - and Mass Effect - cutting down on the roleplay elements while strengthening the shooter aspects - I doubt that Baldur's Gate III will have a massive influence on the upcoming gaming market. Modern RPGs in general are much harder and much more difficult to craft than shooters or open-world-games so they seem to be "spamproof".
people think that all publishers want to make good games for the gamers. meanwhile Ubisoft said that all their games will be live service. publishers want to make money and not make good games, so people need to wake up. some exceptions like Larian and BG 3 are not the standard, but exceptions. look at the upcoming Suicide Squad game. do you think that game devs will learn from BG 3? nope.
It's funny how the AAA gaming industry seems to be a perfect reflection of current western society's consumerism: bigger, shinier, louder, longer etc. And the more you get, the unhappier you are strangely because in the end, its all the same boredom. I for myself sometimes like the aspect of knowing the product already by the name of the studio - a FromSoftware title will always frustratingly difficult. However the studio that overdid it is Ubisoft: there is not one single game which was really remarkable or fun to play on a longer term. We need smaller studios with big, unconventional ideas, producing one or maybe two-timers at max and the 15th iteration of Battlefield or 10th round of AC
You won't see EA make a Baldur's Gate. The lack of predatory monetization and endless bullcrap is BG3's charm, and the other boys just can't NOT try to pick our pockets.
@@StakeFromJateFarm What does that have to do with my point? Dude said EA won't release a game without microtransactions I just listed 2 recent games that they did release without any.
It is worth adding that the earnings of people outside the USA should be taken into account. For example, in my country, which is located in Europe, the national average is about $600-700, so $70 is a lot for us, which is why many people no longer buy AAA games at the premiere, but on Steam they are discounted by a good 50%. . I have many games that I would like to play (Elden Ring, Sekiro and Baldur 3 are good examples), but I would rather wait 3 or 5 years until the price drops to a few or a dozen or so dollars, because I don't think these games are actually worth that much, what for the premiere. I also ignore the rampant piracy and the fact that I and many others don't care if the graphics are particularly good. Just yesterday I played through an RPG game from 2001 for the umpteenth time and I played it as well, if not better, than in the case of the most praised RPG games released 20 years later, and soon I will be playing games such as Dark Souls 3 and God Of War (2018) for the first time, because sale prices dropped to a tolerable level. In other words, because of such high prices, studios earn less than they could, because people buy and play their games after a good 5 years. And then there is the problem that nowadays many people expect that AAA games will be full of errors at launch, which is another reason to refrain from buying them for several months to years. And finally, new graphics cards and other parts cost a lot, and because of trying to achieve better and better graphics, you don't buy new games because you have to spend several hundred dollars on a new PC, which is not worth it, and not everyone likes playing on a console. I only have PS2 and PS3 and I didn't see the need to buy newer ones.
I take issue with the idea that games with lower fidelity graphics have worse graphics than those of AAA titles. The developer of two of my favorite game series is frequently ridiculed and belittled for either's graphics (to the point of comparing them to PS2 or PS3 games when probably neither could even run their latest ones), but I'd argue that they have much more interesting visuals than any with photorealistic graphics, which I'd say would be better suited for tech demos than a common choice for art direction. Like, if I want to see real people, I'll watch a movie or show. I'll take a game that looks like a PS2 remaster and has some cool gameplay over a boring open world where the only thing to do other than advance a generic Hollywood story or randomly find yet another horde of enemies to gun down is zoom in on things like a character's face to see how much detail was put in for no real reason.
The obsession with realism is so strange! It's viewed as the mark of quality, even though photo-realistic graphics can be very ugly, from an artistic standpoint. I much prefer simple but beautifully stylistic art to hyper-realism, and that style never ages poorly.
@@paintingwithkarmiya6149I dissagree with games like Kingdom come, RDR2, Last of us 2, GTA6 it makes sense but for a fantasy game making it realstic makes little sense when the game is not realstic at all.
The only hope that the industry has is if the companies start cutting back on the budget for the games. The highly realistic graphics are not necessary for every game, something both developers and consumers need to learn to accept.
Game devs are the ones who push that myth that photo realism is required. It's "free" advertising for them. No it isn't actually free, but it's cheaper to be able to show off how good the games graphics are than to create and sell an interesting add campaign. Consumers might say "Wow, this is the best looking game I've ever seen" or "Hmm, this texture is pretty muddy" if they have been sold the game with the idea it will be photo realistic but they don't say stuff like "I want 3000 more strands of hair with independent physics". It is just marketing, and bc of how insane the price of marketing is it's cheaper to just pay a team to create ridiculously high fidelity graphics than it is to market the game in other ways. Game publishers spread the myth of audiences wanting hyper realism, but they are the ones who want audiences to want hyper realism. When the customers stop caring about graphics, many companies will need to spend a bunch more money on marketing, and they know it. It also a good way for big companies to beat out competition. "There game doesn't looks as realistic as ours therefore you shouldn't buy it, give us your money instead"
This! Games can be pretty and realistic without being too close to the irl world. I LOVE more artistic games like Totk or When the Past was around and they look nothing like actual people. But I was also stunned at how beautiful FF7 Remake was and it got me hyped to see the Aerith scene even tho I know it will destroy me. In the end, I really think it's a choice from the devlopper but I would love more triple A games to have a more artsy style
I've been saying for a while how important art direction and art styles are. There is nothing wrong with photorealism when you have a highly competent team with the budget behind it, but different art styles and playing with art direction can help give your game an identity while also helping keeping costs down. I personally feel a lot more soul and excitement from looking at something more impressionistic or something more stylized. I think gaming is still stuck in the weird uncanny valley for me. The more of these games that look realistic the more I'm finding "off" about them. A lot of them don't have the animations, interactivity, A.I., and physics to match the graphical fidelity. I really like the approach Nintendo made with Splatoon. They came up with the core gameplay premise first and designed an art style around it. It is oozing with style and identity. HiFi Rush is another title that has a style that matches its gameplay.
@@meru-chanowo graphics are expensive when you use your own shitty impossible to use engine and force all your devs to use said shitty engine (frostbite!!!) just so you can then lease said engine to naïve devs XD
Man, you're so close. New Hollywood was able to take off in the first place because we successfully busted up block booking and studio cartels. You say a lot about publisher's risk-aversion without ever once talking about how that's a structural feature of a monopolized industry. It directly results in exploiting their workers and grifting their customers. A smidge of material analysis would really help tie your points together. E.g.: Accumulation drives higher tech standards, bloating games for meaningless benchmarks, crunching fewer and fewer artists in shorter and worse contracts, and ultimately destroying value all around. Counter example: Tears of the Kingdom was so good because Fujibayashi took an extra year to polish the game.
This problem is not just with the game's industry but also the movie industry. When a product costs 300 million to make, adding in marketing costs and all, it has to atleast make 500 million. And for a product to make 500 million it needs to have mass appeal. Which is why movies and games today take no risks, don't offend anyone, and in the end become bland because of it. Its still insane to me how spiderman 2 cost 300 million. Where the hell did that money go? We genuinely need more mid budget stuff these days. Movies and games both. When you have movies or games that cost 10s of millions instead of hundreds, you can take risks, you can atleast break even if you do a well enough execution and find a niche market that likes it.
Excellent breakdown! The tendency to rush out broken cookie cutter games is why I rarely buy AAA these days and never pre-order. I'd rather wait for reviews from users and a few game journalists I trust the opinion of. They're just too expensive, too. Indie games, however, I'm much less suspicious with and I love that they are so unlike the big budget AAA games. Art style, game mechanics, story genre, etc are all more likely to be unique. BTW, those baked goods looked amazing and I need to find those recipes. Holy hell that bread, especially looked immaculate.
Rockstar with RDR2 with 500million budget were able to make profit but its also why they have RDR and GTA online. Maxpayne 3 was 100million Great TPS game but they were unable to sell enough. This way Rockstar are not making games like Manhunt, Bully, Table tennis, Agent, The Warriers, Midnight Club and so on. Its a massive risk They are always really ambitious with their games and they put alot money into them. One of reasons Cyberpunk came out earlier Acording to Pawel Sasko is they could not afford to keep it in devlopment. This is why they also had talks about Cyberpunk online. So many games can not afford this Calistio Protocol Studio went under i would like to see more linear games but at a 200million Budget i can see why they do not make more of them. We need more double A games but at lower price.
Just like with movies, the budgets of "AAA" gaming companies habve bloated beyond reason, and that also lead to them trying to appeal to everyone and making blader products for general audiences. So far people are still buying them, but that bubble will eventually pop.
I like to experiment on what games I try playing. Though I generally play JRPG type games, I'll even try a niche in the genre like Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia (an oldschool SMT-like Touhou game) I do miss when companies experimented with gameplay concepts, like Katamari Damacy, NiGHTS into Dreams, and Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons. Harvest Moon is probably one of the riskiest games of its time since it's a game where you control a character in a topdown perspective, and you don't go fight battles; you till the land, plant seeds, water, take care of cows and chickens, make money from foraging from the forest/mountain, and give gifts to the townsfolk to get closer to them and potentially marry someone and have a child. Then Rune Factory released as a fantasy Harvest Moon that adds magic and combat to the formula. Eventually one man made Stardew Valley, which brought new life to the genre, and sparked a lot of new farming sim due to its success. I do love looking into what more the indie scene has in store, rather than see what the AAA game industry produces.
Vaush just had a segment on this and i was blown away at how expensive these games are, and for (seemingly) not THAT much of a bump in quality... if any. Glad to see more people are talking about this. Its genuinely unsustainable.
I remember when I got Final Fantasy VII for the PS1. The back of the case had a bunch of quotes and info about the game and one of them was boasting that it cost over $40 million to make the game. Now look at where we are.
I loved when Naughty Dog put out Uncharted Lost Legacy in 2017. A nice little 8-10 hour adventure was a nice refreshing change of pace from the usual 30-60 hour campaign. It had AAA graphics and performance but on a scaled down level. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice was the same way. If I only played those bloated AAA games I'd run myself into the ground with it all and completely turn my back to the hobby. A lot of times I'll follow up a Horizon: Forbidden West with something like Little Nightmares, a telltale game, Dark Pictures Anthology game, or Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart. Keeps me from being burned out as a gamer.
I would only accept shorter games if the cost came down as well. I'm not going to pay 60 or even 70 dollars for a 5-8 hour game where the bulk is meant to be played in some uninspired MP mode. I am an older guy who works 12 hour shifts and have familial responsibilities, but 60-70 bucks for that is a damn joke.
I am not so sure about that Maxpayne 3 was much shorter game then RDR1 and was not open world but was more expensive. Last of us 2 and Calisto protocol being shorter but still more expensive then game like Ghost of Tushimia or Kingdom come.
I've moved to VR for my gaming, it makes even bland games more interesting and a person can't physically spend too long playing which works out perfectly for stopping and getting other stuff done
Spore was the last game I got hyped for. After getting burned by it's release, I learned to never follow development of a game and never to pre-order a game. I keep track of games that I might like and wait for them to release and get reviewed by the community.
"Gamers" have adopted the mindset of the "casual gamer." Standards have fallen. In my opinion. Secondly expensive games are long to explain its length. But games could and should be shorter and thus cheaper. We as gamers are getting hosed.
This is a really good video. Every point was well spoken. I think the industry definitely needs a shift. Hopefully in the next couple years we will see a shift into riskier projects
As triple A games become more and more realistic, and the technology more and more impressive, I believe we are soon to hit a huge stagnating point on realistic game. As Unreal Engine 5 got released last year and already demonstrated extremely impressive graphic, the first thing I wondered when looking at it was... what's next? The selling point of games were the realism. But once realism hits its highest point, these games will be harder to differenciate, too expensive, and thus way less accessible and potentially sell less, unless you already have an established fanbase (and still, you need to surprise them with enough new things every time). I always stand behind "i want shorter games with worse graphics", specifically because I literally can't run AAA on my PC, I only have a Switch. But the other reason I'm all for worse graphics is also because these less realistic games are not only way more ORIGINAL and stand out way more than realistic games, but they usually age wayyyy better than realistic games. Take The wind waker and its cell shading graphics. It's totally bearable to play today. However, I'm not sure it would be the same for the first GTA games. In the end, is graphics that important for a game ? It is, of course, but it doesn't have to be super realistic and crazy to be appealing. This is why indies are so popular : they have "worse" graphics (aka : pixel art, low poly 3D...) are way cheaper and need less ressources to run. And I firmly believe this is what a lot of people want, too : they want novelty. THey want innovation. That's why Baldur's gate 3 was so popular. It's a triple A game, but even the camera angle of this game is so different from what we're used to see. People STARVE for difference, for new experience, and i don't think they care as much to need to see every grain of skins of the protagonists.
People say they'd want shorter games with worse graphics, only to criticize Nintendo games for not being as high budget as its Triple A competitors and want them to have bigger storage space in their systems to withstand said high budget Triple A games, even though their games fit exactly what they are asking for.
Yes, I've noticed people ask for a lot of contradictory things, although it might not come from the same people. One such thing for me was "Souls games are good because they don't hold your hand, but Starfield is bad because it doesn't have maps" So, don't hold my hand, but hold my hand. People complained they couldn't remember where some locations were... the cities aren't that big, can't people learn and remember? There's plenty of fair criticism to level at Starfield, but not this.
These people are probably not all the same people, I like Nitendo games and I have never criticised their graphics other than Pokemon, because their textures are horrible, Nitendo Games have some of the best art direction in the industry, if you don't want everything to be gritty and realistic.
@@octavianpopescu4776Probably not the same people, I cannot remember without a map, specially if I take some days off the game, I have horrible sense of direction in real life and in games, and sometimes I feel like I have Alzheimer because I don't remember anything.
I don’t remember the last time I bought a triple A game at full price. Too many games in my backlog and too many smaller games that are just as great if not better than triple A games.
"if you're bored of the landscape of gaming as it is, try more indie games, play something that you didn't think you would like but others love, you never know if something is for you unless you try it" So true! My most vivid memory of a moment like this for me was in the early days of Minecraft. It'd already been popular for a year or two and I always said "it's not for me, the graphics and gameplay look too basic". Eventually when I didn't have anything else I wanted to play I gave it a shot and to this day it's one of my all-time favorite games. You never know if it's for you unless you try it, indeed. Fantastic video, I've had a lot of similar thoughts recently about the state of the gaming industry. There are however many glimpses of hope in terms of more realistic workloads for the devs and artists working on these behemoths of products. More bad than good unfortunately, but I tend to focus on the good and hope others will take inspiration.
Your section about how little risk there is now in games is a perfect example of why “capitalism makes good games” is such a stupid thing to say. The effects are that we live in sequel / shareholder appeasement infinite repeating AAA cycle
I really appreciate this take by Salari. I'm 50 years old and casually game. One thing that was mentioned was threats against game devs. That is absolutely crazy. Just quit. Your gaming experience is not that important! Per other things discussed. It seems to me that the owners/investors are the ones making all the money in the gaming industry. The artists, coders, story writers are probably/most likely getting shafted. Pay these people more. I'm surprised with the harassment at work (most likely happens), and the harassment on line which is happening they don't walk to hell out! Frankly as a 50year old nothing much impresses me much anymore. But people complaining the graphics are not good is just insane. Are you kidding? It is a game. Do you want your game to look exactly like real life? I know I don't. Games are supposed to be a way to escape from reality. Third I tried a AAA game, namely Starfield because it was available on Xbox Game Pass, and yes it is horrible. Not because it doesn't look good it does. It is because these developers are being forced to be woke, hire people who are not coders and gamers but DEI hires who could care less. And that pressure is coming from all the wrong places like investors and shareholders ect who only want $$$. That's gotta go. Quit harassing the actually coders and artists people. It is not a good look and might end you up in jail if your threat seems viable enough.
I think shorter games is just going to make a consumer market of "fast fashion" for games. I don't want a library of 600 games I bought on the winter Steam sale I've never opened. I want experiences I can close and come back to when I have time and I'll know there is still plenty of game left to explore, so I don't need to fill the hole with more games. I also find I rarely replay games that are a shorter experience. They're not bad, there is just no reason to. That's just me tho. But yeah, there is room for both!
I'm the exact opposite, longer games will be games I abandoned, while I tend to finish shorter games in one sitting, we are all different, that's why we need to have a wide variety of studios and projects.
This whole thing of "games feel the same" is why I ended up playing Thirsty Suitors off the recommendation of a good friend, and I just... absolutely loved it. It has its moments of things I don't like (clunky skateboarding), but it's just so damn cute and sweet and fun and enjoyable. So if anyone needs a recommendation, take that and run with it. Granted, I've also been playing Ghostwire: Tokyo recently and just... It's a game that, in so many ways, I should love a lot more than I do (and I'm really pushing through the slog parts because I like the main story, the side stories, the dog-feeding mechanic, and the location-finding/exploration side quest). But so many of the go-to mechanics that are always present in games supported by Bethesda just don't fit the narrative, and it would've been so much fun to see something that was definitely more in line with the "I've been possessed by a spirit and am tasked with saving people we care about" than magic shooty hands and a bow.
Like many others I strongly agree with the points stated but don't have anything to add. So instead I'll take this moment to compliment the baked goods shown at the end, they looked absolutely scrumptious and make me want to try baking again. Cheers!
Not only that the budgets are getting out of hand, but those don't account for an increase in employee salaries. In fact, I'm willing to bet many of the devs, designers, etc. that work in the industry are still severely underpaid compared to their CEOs who undeservedly earn way more.
No AAA gaming will not destroy the gaming industry. Most of those budgets are including marketing & merch not just the development tools or the staff. Plus most of the AAA games do make their money back. What's going destroy the industry are subscription services like Gamepass & Games as a Service model due how unsustainable those gaming models are. As for game prices, they much much HIGHER in the 80s & 90s due to cartridge manufacturing on each console out. Versus today where universal formats & digital exist. Retail is also why digital games are still the same price as physical games, store like Best Buy, GameStop, & Amazon would refuse to stock the systems if the digital was cheaper. As for the Consumers wait for a sale if you all don't want to spend $70. Gaming is a hobby, spend the money or don't, move on. Indie gaming will not save the industry as most gamers don't care for them, people want COD not some random indie title from some hipster anti-AAA gaming crowd who are pissed off they bought an Xbox instead of PlayStation where most of the AAA discord is aimed towards right now
I'm done with the AAA for now, open world, all that shit with unskippable boring cutscenes, and honestly the graphics aren't going to get much better, but being a gamer since 1984 what do I know. Well at least I'm cool enough to play indie games! Go indie. Go.
I think games like BG3 out doing all of the big budget games will only see those big budget companies suffer economically. Indie game developers and Japanese game developers in general don’t seem to have this problem
And BG3 wasn't even cheap to make or anything, but they took their time and the corpos let the devs do what they do best. It should be a lesson for every big game dev out there.
@@butHomeisNowhere___ they did a great job with BG3 but like everything on the internet this days it's all white (as for BG3) or black (almost everyone else) and seems like everything they did on that game is morally superior or the key of success. Be a bit realistic, the way BG3's development was handled wouldn't be considered acceptable for both the audience of 3A games and also for the publishers. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it's quite obvious you cant release a major blockbuster 3A game as an early access (as it was BG3), then with feedbacks and cash from previews complete the full game in 3 years. If GTA 6 or The Elder Scrolls VI followed this development cycle, it would be considered unacceptable and probably scandalous. Of course we have long awaited 3A games that get release as basically early access sold as full games (Cyberpunk 2077 and i would say also Starfield), but as for the games i mentioned, it's not considered acceptable. BG3 was born in a AA contest with an AA dev team size (like 150 people), and then during the early access and as the game was being completed the team grew up to more 400 (as big as Bethesda) and with an almost 3A game budget.
@@erminioottone1344 don't forget money from timed exclusivity deal from Sony. That one was really shitty move on Larian part - especially since game was relying to be developed by people donation and that didn't stopped Larian from blatantly taking a deal that is based of screwing up x amount of people just because. Which makes them fortunate enough to morally land next to CD Projekt Red over Cyberpunk's NDA where they forbade you to use your own footage of game.
@@cracmar03 Larian did not sign a deal with Sony. The only reason it came to PlayStation before Xbox is that they were having issues getting splitscreen to run on Xbox Series S. They would've released simultaneously if those issues weren't present. Larian said this months before the game released.
Tools need to evolve. I think that's already happening though. Smaller teams can make solid AA experience with very little effort. I think the problem is bigger studios are stuck in a rut with the inhouse tools they've married to that have no assistive development tools embedded. Those studios need to build those features themselves or find a way to adopt better tools already available. Ultimately, the budgets are ballooning because games require more and more people to be made but given where standard engines are leaning, it's clear the industry is looking for solutions to those problems on its own. Automation and generative tools will make AAA games feasible and the studios that can't adapt will obviously have to close. It's also important to note that there's no future where we'll need as many developers as we do now... that's just a reality we have to accept.
I think AAA developers should split into multiple teams and create more indie to AA experiences more than putting all of their bets on a big AAA game being a success nowadays. Especially with franchise fatigue setting in for a lot of these series that they keep pushing sequels for. Heck one of my favorite games from this year is basically an indie game from a AAA studio and that's Fuga Melodies of Steel 2. CyberConnect2 is mostly known for their higher production anime arena fighter games, but I've honestly never really cared for their Anime games as reexperiencing what I watched before as a game doesn't really appealed to me. Not to mention I'm not a fighting gamer. Their original IP on the other hand have always been the reason why I keep coming back to them, which sucked for most of the 2010s as no publisher trusted their original games anymore after Asura's Wrath and Solatorobo both bombed badly. They had to start self publishing in order to actually make these kinds of games again. I don't really care if they're budget games either as I can tell there's a lot of heart put into these titles, which is honestly missing in their Anime games since it isn't their story/vision but them adapting someone else's. Unfortunately like many of their original games they get heavily overshadowed by their Anime games. I've heard more people complain about how poor the quality of Naruto Connections is than anything about the Fuga series. I guess that's what happens when Naruto UNS4 sells 11 million units and the 2 Fuga games have only sold 300,000 units so far. More people will be annoyed if the next Naruto game is junk than look into the rest of CC2 catalogue for these awesome hidden gems. This is kind of the problem with AAA developers going this route too. Most gamers prefer style over substance, and that's why a lot of the popular games nowadays are the AAA games while some really good indie games barely get noticed. Square Enix recently stated that they're refocusing on AAA games and doing less of their smaller games, and this is probably the reason they're doing that. Most gamers don't care about these smaller games and will be happy with the latest COD game much like most movie goers used to just go and watch the latest Marvel movies. Though times are changing and big franchises like that are losing their appeal and losing it fast. COD MW3 was heavily criticized, and the Marvels is the lowest preforming Mavel movie to date. Maybe some people will develop their taste for more niche/hidden gem content and check out more stuff outside of the mainstream as a result of these franchise falling apart. As for me I'm going to keep an open mind and probably check out some of the hidden gems in my backlog while keeping an eye out for some that are coming out in the future.
@@fawkkyutuu8851 Heck the budget could go even lower than that and still be a compelling experience. Fuga apparently had a budget of just over $2 million. Even though each game in that series just sold 150,000 units they definitely made that back due to how low they were able to make the budget for those games. Sometimes keeping in mind how much appeal your game might have and budgeting appropriately is more important than having a seemingly unlimited budget so you can make a AAA. I remember when Square Enix said one of the Tomb Raider games sold like 10 million units and they were still a financial failure. Now that AAA game budgets are getting up to $300 million I'm not that surprised to hear these games struggled to make their money back. They could be working with the most popular IPs and still lose money because they didn't budget appropriately for it.
The reset (crash) might be good for gaming industry. As for what you said towards the end I look towards smaller (not necessary indie games) with lower asking price day one: - a plague tale - both games were like 40$ if I remember correctly - Hellblade - 30$ (big financial success) - HiFi Rush (30$) - Pentiment (30$) There is a lot to choose from. Big gaming companies need to diversify their portfolios
I might be misremembering, but I read an article from the 2000's along the lines of "why make a $100 million blockbuster when you can make 100 $1 million horror movies?". And the answer was opportunity costs. A runaway hit blockbuster may only make 3-5 times its budget back while a hit horror movie can make 10-100 times its budge back. But that one blockbuster would still make more money with a modest return that a dozen runaway success horror movies. Blockbusters are also a safer investment as most blockbusters don't fail, while you need to make dozens, if not hundreds, of horror movies to get that once a generation mega hit. But I can't think of a single mega hit horror movie that wasn't immediately turned into a franchise and milked for every last cent the fans will tolerate. Not to mention that blockbusters have a tendency to suck the air out of the room, or the dollars out of the audience. "Barbenhimer" was such a novelty because hugely anticipated movies haven't been released on the same weekend like that in decades. I'm not going to pretend I actually understand the economics here. But multiple industries have been following this same trajectory towards consolidation and monopolization. Sure, it could lead to a crash like when the studio system imploded, but we are living in a business landscape that has already learned those lessons. As long as the imperative is to make more money than you spent, this pattern will keep happening.
The real problem is they consolidated to hold steady incomes and instead are getting shut down to save a buck leaving most IP locked in increasingly tightened purse strings with little corporate interest in developing them, we aren't headed towards a crash, we're headed towards artificial scarcity.
AAA games could could saved if every industry was employee owned. Not Public, not bowing to the whim of people whose only purpose is to skim profits off the top.
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Based on your analysis, when are you expecting Take Two Interactive / Rockstar to announce they are closing? Will it be soon?
I really dislike how it's become normal to say things like "gamer entitlement" or "gamers are this or that" because it's not like "gamers" are some kind of different species. You just pointed out that 40% of the world play games so wouldn't it make more sense to say "people are entitled" or when it comes to games "people are this or that" saying "gamers" makes it sound like it is some isolated group who are the problem but it in instead modern society in general that is the real issue. We as a species especially in the west have become entitled. If I was to follow your logic I would think that you are a gamer because you said you like a bunch of AAA games that means gamers entitlement applies to you? Do you sit there and compare games graphics side by side? I don't and I play games everyday and I have a massive library full of old and new games from many different genres because I really love the medium of video games.
As someone who enjoys playing video games I don't see a problem with the industry at all in fact I think it would be a better industry if the AAA games melted away or at least the length of them shortened drastically so that we get less filler and more quality for say 8 to 12 hours. The real issue is that people keep buying these AAA games and buying all the micro transactions which only encourages these companies to continue acting the same way. I only get the odd AAA game and never get it on release except for fromsoftware games because they deserve it. I will get the physical copy months later for less money and I'll trade it in or sell it for cash when I'm done but I'll gladly pay $20,30,40,45 for a solid indie game. That's where most of my games are from these days and it's never been better if you like playing games then you are very lucky right now thats for sure.
that ws a very solid vid.....
Hey salari since u talked on racism in gaming community earlier I wish to say thanks for that
Recently the hatred and racism against South asians are at all time high
Let's not forget last year's Stray. Who would think people would want to play an apocalyptic story as a ginger cat that interacts with robots??
Yes! That was such a good little game. That’s one of the very few games I’ve bought in the last 3 years or so.
I'm currently sleep deprived cause I started playing it last night... And couldn't go to sleep till I finished playing it. Short game without doing the sides but well worth the play ...
And confusing my cat via spamming the meow button. On PS5, the meow comes from the controller's speaker 😸
Not a fan of that one as much of the game is just "press button for automated action" and it doesnt fully take advantage of you being a cat doing cat things, and focuses more on a cliche story about robots.
Same for Untitled Goose Game, not a long game, not a premise that any investor would be excited about, but they put a lot of care into it and made it fun to play!
Are you talking about Horizon for the PS? 😂
This is honestly the main reason why I never pre-order games and just patiently wait to see if it holds up, since a lot of games now are very rushed and buggy and they also never keep their promises that they make.🐱
Yup. Literally the only games I pre-order are FromSoft games because their games are always good to play through at least once (I personally don't like DS2 in retrospect, but I had a good enough time while playing and don't regret the preorder)
@@CosmicPotato true from software is probably the only one you don’t have to worry about any of these issues.🐱
Even if every game released is absolutely perfect there is no reason whatsoever to preorder a game. You preorder something to ensure you have access to a limited item, and since digital distribution has exploded games simply do not run out of stock. Game preorders are an artifact from a time when games were only physical, and disc manufacturing was often stressed due to the amount of physical media that was being preased in multiple mediums all the time. Now it only exists so publishers can show investors how much money they've managed to get before even delivering a product to coax them into investing more. It doesn't serve the consumer in any way at all.
@@Durrutitv There are still reasons to preorder. There are deluxe/limited editions that will probably be gone if you don't preorder-for example, I preordered the deluxe physical edition of Elden Ring that comes with a collectable statue of Malenia.
Also, even if you're only getting a digital version, for instance through Steam, if it's from a developer and you know you'll like their game, then preordering can allow you to download most of the game before launch day, so when it does launch you only have to download the final portion of a game to play it. With how large some game files are, this can be a good time saver. Yeah, it's not that big of a deal, but if you know 100% you're gonna play the game anyway, might as well preorder so you can play the game a little bit faster.
But yeah, 99% of the time, I agree with you and would not preorder a game. I think everyone needs to consider what their situation is, but I wouldn't say there is never any point in preordering.
@@topcat59People used to say the same thing about CDPR, and Blizzard before them, and Bethesda before them. Success under capitalism is a double edged sword, every project needs to be more successful than the last to continue providing growing returns to investors, lest they pull their investments. Eventually you reach a quarter where you're up against a wall and compromise your ethics. For CDPR it was publishing CP77 2 years before it was finished in order to cash in on all of the hype sales. For Blizzard it has been chasing WoW's financial success with post-launch monetization strategies that grow more and more predatory year over year. For Bethesda, a lil bit of both: sacrificing quality while cranking up the monetization.
From has had a slow and steady growth curve for the last couple decades, each game expanding their audience and making more money, so the pressure hasn't really been on them; that is until Elden Ring exploded with significantly more sales than anything else they've developed and now there's going to be significant pressure going forward for them to out perform those numbers.
Don't get me wrong, I love From, but if push comes to shove and they need to choose between putting their investors or consumers first, they will choose the investors like every beloved studio that has come before and will come after. It's just the nature of capitalism, if the stuff you love is good, capital get it's slimy tentacles around it and strangle it.
I think the cost and scale of AAA games has to shrink back at some point in the near future. There’s only so many times you can spend the GDP of a small nation on a software project that can’t make its money back
Movies have been doing it for a while with quite bad writing.
As long as people are willing to buy the games they will keep making them with big budgets. The AAA industry only real advantage is their graphics and scale in any other category a solo developer can outdo them at a lower price point for the customer. They push these new consoles whose purpose is to push more graphics and greater scale.
Nintendo makes their money back and Sony has quite a few high seller like gow, gran turismo and spiderman that pay for themselves and than some. A big help would be putting these games on pc day one ignoring one of the biggest gaming markets until the hype dies out years later is bad for 300 million dollar games even microsoft figured that out and put games on pc day one. Another thing would be stop putting hours upon hours of cutscenes in games trying to make an action movie as well as a game is no doubt a big money sink, but I know that's Sony style.
This is happening in other industries as well for a while now. Movies, firearms etc
@@kennethyoung7457I agree - PS would suffer the most out of all three, for the reasons listed above. Not every game needs to be a multi-billion dollar production will bells and whistles, just make good games.
Remember that LA Noire was profitable but Team Bondi went bankrupt because they were screwed on the profit sharing.
"You can put your eggs all in one basket if you've convinced everyone that your eggs are the best" I've never heard it put so eloquently, regarding the tendency for companies to spend more on less projects...
I think the games industry is well overdue for another crash, because the current attitude that surrounds the whole industry is severely stunting the creativity of game developers and harming the people that work hard to create these experiences. Every single year I see more and more SLOP get announced, put together using default Unreal Engine 5 assets and the same exact gameplay formula. If the scene collapses under its own weight, it'll be a deserved death, and indie developers deserve to be treated way better than they are.
Sadly its not just AAA that are doing this shit, but many "indie" cashgrab whaling mobile slop is not helping industry ether. I would even go as far as to blame a lot of shit we are dealing with on Social media games, shit like Zinga did and then was exported to mobile phone market, that ended up racing to the rock bottom, already digging deeper with drills and excavators. AAA saw all that bullshit and how profitable it became and emulated it. Do not forget AAA studious are the slow moving monoliths that take years to pivot.
Nintendo was right.
Gatekeeping for videogames is mandatory.
The industry has been crashing for a while now. It's just that it's been a slow burn, rather than a firework.
I recently watched a video recapping the saga of Atari (by Melody Nosurname, if you're interested), and I slowly came to the realization that we're falling into the same tragic prophecy.
@@varspartoidac LJN say otherwise. And companies that made good games had to ether make subsidiaries (Konami-> Ultra games) or go around (Tengen). Gatekeeping wont help. Making these practices unprofitable is only way this can be fixed. That, or literally jailtime. Sadly law enforcement do not give a fuck.
The stockholder model of business is antiquated, in no normal world would one not be content with a steady, reliable stream of money.
It's the need for constant growth every three months that's strangling a lot of businesses, especially creative ones.
When you're mandated by law to be the leviathan then nothing is off limits given enough time.
I imagine we'll see more game dev co-ops or at least privately owned ones.
Private ownership needs a comeback in a big way. Collective ownership through stockholders has ruined creative mediums.
Yup, the bottomless sharehodler desire for infinite growth is a guaranteed road to ruin.
@@TheBananamongerSeems to be a false dichotomy. Collective ownership by the developers?
@@TheBananamonger Put a limit on how much can be owned by people who don't work there. Require a minimum of 90% non-management employee ownership.
You guys have no idea how business works from the comments. Guys, the stockholder model is private ownership. When you buy a stock, you own a part of that company.
The issue you guys are talking about is an issue that started from the 70s and that's mostly because of how public businesses structure C level and executives bonuses and comp plans. The way that works incentizes these C level leaders to do stupid, shortsighted but quick result grabbing actions.
As an indie game Dev, we have the freedom to experiment without the higher up breathing down our necks.
And that's why indie games are usually more fun and more creative. I rarely play AAA games nowadays because after having played so much in the past I can often already tell from the trailers in what way the game will feel like a chore.
@@SaHaRaSquad I see exactly where you're coming from
I can’t remember the last time I payed anywhere near full price for a AAA game, because I generally find them boring and generic. Don’t mind paying £20 for some but rarely do they get finished or sometimes even played 🤔
Indie games however is where I live, these titles continue to experiment and grow. I feel that the core gamers of the 90s/00s have now migrated away from the herd again AAA gaming is now normalised actual gamers have now largely huddled around indie devs.
"I am free" * *actually limited by cash and livining in a capitalist hellscape.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3?
70 dollars isn't the price of a mega game. It's the starting price of that game.
Yeah, companies used to say dlc was "necessary" because 60 dollars was too cheap. Now we have more expensive games with exactly the same amount of dlc and microtransactions.
$70 is the cover charge.
@@loadishstone there was some executive a few months back saying the price of a AAA game should be $100. I think it was a Capcom exec. And honestly, if I could have a no BS, full, MTX free, DRM free game, I'd probably be willing to pay that.
cough cough Paradox and Creative Assembly
@@seanwilliams7655Only next gen game I would’ve paid $100 for is Elden Ring so far
The biggest problem with gaming right now is it became too corporate, once they saw how much money there is it just became all about the money, no point in making a great game when you can just make once that's mediocre or better yet, make a shit game and just sell it on marketing. I'm willing to bet that just like me many gamers tried various different games and over the years we just saw what types we liked best, so it's not necessary that we're too comfortable with one type so we don't bother venturing outside of that.
This is something I've wondered about as well. I'm already morbidly curious how much GTA 6 or the next Elder Scrolls game will cost. Especially as the demand for hyper-realistic graphics and physics engines increases, it's going to inflate those budgets and time scales even more. It'll be interesting to see how it all plays out, but I just hope the indie market can balance this out some.
starfield didnt even look that good i doubt they're gonna spend kazillions
Just to think what fighting games cost now. Fighting games, those virtual buggers with the least amount of content necessary. Buy them with preloaded content and 100+ bucks is a sure thing. For fighting games. There is a reason I leaned back, getting just an Xbox series and load it with kinda older games that cost no more than 20 or 25 bucks at the most. Now I can play like forever. If I was getting all games brand new or preordered I would have maybe like ten games only now. It has to tickel me very hard to buy a game new. It does happen though. But most of the time I pass.
Although it hasn't been confirmed, analysts estimate GTA6 will cost $1-2 billion to produce, making it the most expensive game ever produced by a wide margin. Obviously as success goes, it's a safe bet, and it'll more than likely be the next most profitable entertainment product ever produced, but I guess it's worth considering what else could've been made with all that cash.
The problem with huge budgets is that with something like GTA 6, you can see where that money went, CP2077 could've been cheaper if they didn't rework the story to accommodate Johnny Silverhand becoming a much bigger character. And then you look at something like Forspoken, and it's rumored to have cost 100 million to develop, where did that money go to? The map is empty and the gameplay is repetitive, not to mention abysmal PC performance.
An example of not needing that much money to make a good game is Ghost of Tsushima, it cost 60 million to develop. Something is going very wrong inside game studios and I don't want to have to pay more for my games because of that.
@@brenomedeiros8460I bet it's a fail upward situation... Corporations waste cash via upper management who's buddy buddy with each other but are utterly incompetent and just screw up and burn through money.
My neighbors daughter works for Naughty Dog, all I can say is that it’s a constant back and forth fighting between the developers and the higher ups.
Higher ups as in higher ups at Sony or the management of the studio? Those are 2 very different issues. I'd be very curious to hear more about this.
@@mrroams5812 Probably both.
Higher ups making it difficult for the developers should never happen. I personally have experienced developing games, but higher ups let me do my job. I get the guidelines and ESRB concerns, but other than that, they should always stfu.
Why people who don't even play games decide everything about development process
Something funny to consider is that by Triple-A standards, Nintendo is a real oddity in that they typically don't follow the traditional Triple-A formula that almost every studio follows nowadays. They purposefully gimp their platform's power to develop around those constraints so they can keep development costs relatively cheap compared to their contempories and produce more games across the board as a result. Because of this, failures generally don't cause catastrophic consequences while the successes end up being wildly successful. If Nintendo didn't follow the philosophy they have currently, we wouldn't have seen games like Pikmin, Xenoblade, ARMs and Astral Chain exist or have seen surprising revivals such as Kid Icarus Uprising and Metroid Dread. More Triple-A companies need to follow the philosophy of Nintendo and go "Hey, it's okay if we don't put as much money into a single project or have to push current high-end hardware to its limits. It would be better for everyone involved if we revert back to the philosophy of developing games to be more cost and time-effective!"
You can't seriously think that PlayStation and or Xbox could just replicate what Nintendo has. That's like the same as if someone would try to make a copy of WoW, you know that is just not possible.
Nintendo biased
Some of their fellow Japanese companies have begun to adopt Nintendo’s stance. It’s taking slow though.
Not a Nintendo Fanboy like I use to be , But I can unbiasly say Nintendo stepped in to Save the industry During the 1980s video game crash
I've been so content with baldur's gate 3 that I've put off getting more games. that may be bad to hear for developers and studios, but if you've got a really solid game, you can spend more time making the next one great too
Same, I keep seeing all these games coming out and I'm still in Act One of BG3 because I keep making new characters, (and I like to explore and roleplay). It's so incredibly fun, I have no desire to play other games... besides the odd roguelike here and there, like Dead Cells.
People like you are too statistically insignificant in order for any dev to feel bad. You guys are too unique. Hella lot of games rely on player rotation, not retantion. In other words, there is no shortage of people to enjoy other games. It's a matter of finding your target audience, not competing with BG3
Thats a really bad take. People said the same thing for Elden Ring last year but more games came out with unique experinces. I remember I said the same thing for Berserk and how it shits all over other medieval fantasy stories. But its so dumb, close minded and rude.
BG3 is very niche title. I understand that you D&D fans love it but........ the vast majority of ppl are NOT into D&D. To most ppl the game is extremely boring.This sentence isn't directed towards you, but the rabbit nerd fan base is the worst I've ever seen. Super annoying and demanding that everybody praise the game despite ppl bringing up legitimate flaws and reasons not to like it.
@@drago7807I think you would be kind of surprised how many people talk about and play bg3. Also the DnD fanbase is massive. Like almost everyone these days have at least played one session.
You kinda underestimate how big DnD actually is.
This is true. Games shouldn’t take over $150-100 million to make.
Thanks for the detailed financial analysis
@@DeathsInverseyour mother is in the trunk of my 1993 caddilac deville
Yes. Just lower the saleries and fire more people
Based on what?
Witcher 3 had $32 million budget and $35 million for marketing. $67m in total. what happens now is game developers spend money uncontrollably, so the cost increases exponentially. game devs need to learn how to manage money.
Another reason is the cinematics, cutscenes are expensive and that because the medium wants to immitate another industry that has it own expenses to that formation of telling a story, so because gaming needs to tell a story they copy a formation of another industry to tell it...which is expensive.
This is thanks to sony, trying to make video games into movies...no thanks, keep that passive content away...movies are meant to enjoy differently
Is it wrong for a game to have cinematics or cutscenes in them? This is like some Regi Nintendo take.
We are long past the point where games are only "supposed" to be "fun" and prioritize being a toy over having meaning in them. A cutscene is just as valid a way to add in that meaning as text or a character shouting dialogue while you play.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047I don't think anyone is saying that, it's just that sometimes it is excessive and it does inflates the budget, somerimes unnecessarily
@@haruhirogrimgar6047I'm with you, cutscenes do a great job at enhancing the stories often. They're not the problem.
I understand that some people want games to be their own thing and are probably not playing games for the story, but I don't think cinematics and cutscenes are an objective issue. Not every game that has cutscenes and cinematics is making them like Naughty Dog. Games like HiFi Rush, Psychonauts 2, Nier Automata, Persona 5, The Last Guardian, and As Dusk Falls, are just a few examples. There are more indie/AA level games that are cinematic in nature that don't blow their costs on photorealism. I grew up with JRPGs so story in games was always important to me. I don't have the nostalgic fond memories of 90's gaming without stories like most people I see online. I think it is shortsighted to assume implementing cutscenes or cinematics is done to copy movies and TV.
Aliens Colonial Marines is probably what killed game hype for me. I don't let myself get excited for video games anymore until I have them in my hands.
Fallout 4 is what did it for me. Not because it was abysmal, but because it didn't feel like it was worth 60 bucks.
That era was my blackpill as well, I was disappointed by Halo 4, Bioshock Infinite, and just got fed up after Colonial Marines. Little did I know all of that was a warning of what would be standard in the future, and if not even worse. At that point I started veering more towards nonwestern games and indie games and it really hasnt changed much for me since. Better for it.
Watch dogs did that for me
That’s unfortunate. I love getting hyped for games. Gaming is my main hobby and the lead up to a highly anticipated game is part of the fun. Life is too short to be skeptical and sullen all the time. Live a little! 😊
My broke ass has never been able to partake in the gaming culture, but it's nice hearing a profound stance on the industry.
You and most of the world, most gamers in the world actually play on mobile because it's the cheaper alternative.
Got steam?
if you hang around r/GameDeals, there are free PC games handed out all the time, many of them with low requirements. And these are often what were AAA games when they released.
In the USA libraries have games that they lend out for free. Mine even lends out the Nintendo switch.
It use to be so much cheaper to buy physical copies and get a decade old console .. like 1 - 5 dollars a Pop .. a new game was 30 dollars and I thought that was high.
It's insane to me that CRPGs are considered niche when D&D is more popular than ever. The game industry seems to think all the fans of a genre just lose interest in it when it's not prominent for a while. Everybody who bought Dragon Age didn't just cease to exist.
cRPG's were always niche. All major publishers have been trying to murder that genre since like begginings of 2000's. Like last wave of proper cRPG's before indies, was what Planescape Torment from 1999 to I believe something from Troika Studio .. Temple of Elemental Evil perhaps ? Arcanum of Steamworks and Magick Obscura was in 2001. I know that because I was for whole my teenage yearning for proper cRPG's.
Thank gods for Pillars of Eternity I and II and Tyranny.
D&D is more popular than ever and it's still niche, I know literally 0 people who play RPG because it is not popular everywhere.
Estimations are that 50 million people play it worldwide, that's not that much people, and someone playing it does not mean they have income to buy other games.
@@bluester7177 Where are you getting the 50 million figure from?
Yeah the only real dead genre I would say are RTS games but that is mostly because it evolved to other genres like MOBAs, which simplified the game more. Instead of controlling many units, you focus on 1. Yeah those games still exist, but it is mostly a handful that are mostly remasters of an existing game like Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, Star Craft, etc.
Maybe dead might not be the best term, but maybe stagnate would be better? Most genres see a fluctuation in popularity, but I almost hear nothing about RTS games anymore. Dawn of War 3 really screwed itself trying to make the game more into a MOBA game in an already saturated market at the time. Should have tried focusing more on the base building aspect of 1 or the squad combat of 2. In a way the squad combat of 2 might actually fall in line with a CRPG, which is fine. Probably made those decisions trying to appeal to the esports hype.
The thing about esport games is that most games that got popular into esports were not really designed with esports in mind. It was that they were good games first that people then turned it into a competitive thing.
Here's the thing, there's a natural entryway gap to both TTRPGs and CRPGs, it's not as accessible to a younger generation with a shorter attention span and casual consumers. I think that this is a good thing, because devs have an audience in mind that they can cater to, rather than watering down their art for consumers.
There should be more gaming unions to help change the industry.
I worry about gaming mafias after that. Everytime i think of Unions, i thought about the Mafias that hijack them so workers have nowhere to turn to. Scary thought.
No that would do more damage than good in certain situations.
Unions help everyone (not including police unions).
@@jacobvardy not true. I don't know how much you know about unions, but they aren't always the knight in shining armor that you think they are.
@@joshuamoore553lol, okay.
It's a proven fact that unions not only help union members, but even non union workers.
One example being the UAW strikes. Not only did the Big 3 raise wages and benefits for their workers, but Toyota and Honda also raised their wages.
The SAG strikes saw actors have a voice in whether or not they were property of the movie industry after they died, and saw (yet again) better wages and working conditions.
Same with UPS.
The only time a union action failed is when things like the President of the US made it federally illegal to strike, because "Christmas was too important", and that ended with a derailment over the safety issues they wanted to strike over.
Are they perfect?? No.
Is it better than having zero voice in your work experience through labor solidarity?? Yes.
And this is in the US. Imagine how powerful unions are in countries that aren't completely fucking broken!!
Honestly, graphics in AAA games have confused me for a long time, since they spend SO MUCH MONEY on things that are, sure, impressive, but not actually better, at least in my opinion.
I remember when NWN1 came out, and because you could import your BG2 character into it I kind of expected it to look similar, but instead of beautiful backgrounds and fine animated sprites, everything was just low poly shapes, and there was so much emphasis on "modern graphics" for something that just looked so much uglier.
Realism can be a fine artistic choice, but it's not the only good one. I've spent hours adding mods to Skyrim to make it look nicer, and lots of skilled modders have done wonderful work there, but it still doesn't look as stylish as Hades, or Persona 5, or Untitled Goose Game, or countless other games that spent so much less for graphics because they knew that more complicated/realistic is NOT the only way to make a great looking game.
TES V is hardly realistic. TES V is sketchy. And that sketchiness is normal artstyle of TES. It was return to sketchiness of TES III in particular. It's gritty and sketchy. You want eye candy given you put these titles as 'good' looking. I was ecstatic that they returned to sketchiness. Yeah it's no eye candy. And it shouldn't be eye candy. It's TES. A melting pot of mutual hatred universe lol. Bethesda was given a flack for forgetting this sketchiness and more grittiness in TES IV, TES IV was too much like Disneyland and npc's looked psychotic downright. Betha always listens to it's fanbase.
I am pleased with how things look on ESO even if it still tries it's best to capture SOME semblence of sketchiness on characters regular TES has.
Back to your complaint on your copy of game. Of course it will never look 'stylish' because game had it's artstyle already. And you and the modders make alteration to it, so coherence of artstyle falls apart. There is no direction once you try to outdo general art direction. That's why I avoided visual mods like a plague to Betha games.
Another example would be Sims, you had loads of mods for new hairstyles etc .. yet modders ALWAYS deemed original artstyle of game as 'inferior' so you ended up with modders making hairstyles for your sims that looked anything but like natural hair from game. They looked jarring. What I did to my Sims, is what you did to TES V. And in both cases we messed up general game artstyle so now it's incoherent mess with jarring differences in qualities and looks.
You like way too cartoony flashy things, given how the games you put as example of 'stylish' look. Ironically to me they look .. boring. And way too flashy. Like it's fine if it's going for kids vibe ? But definately too flashy and one could get diabetes from looking at them. That being said style is personal opinion, you like candy like graphics, I was fine with sketchy and gritty.
@@cracmar03 I'm not entirely sure why you felt the need to write all this? I wasn't insulting Skyrim, just giving it as an example of a game that seems to be trying for a more realistic aesthetic than the other examples, and given that Skyrim SE launched with much more realistic water effects and other visual effects compated to the original, and marketed itself on the basis of those graphics, I don't think that's a controversial observation. I think you're the first person I've ever heard describe that games aesthetics as "sketchy", and having played and loved Morrowind (unmodded, I didn't discover mods for it until after I'd stopped playing that one), I wouldn't have described it that way either. That's subjective I suppose, you're free to call them that, I just don't quite understand what sketchy quality you're referring to.
The point I was making is that, while AAA game companies justify their prices, budgets, and too often horrific crunch time on the need for graphics and aesthetics that are extremely labor intensive, games can look just as good, sometimes even better, without all that. But me giving a few examples hardly means those examples are the only things I play.
I dont think expensive Games are something Bad for the Industry in itself. The Problem is that Most of them are just expensive without any Ambition.
Like bg3 got that expensive bc the ambitions of the developers and the price is reflcted in the Game.
Cyberpunk in Exchange promised too much, couldnt keep it and got even more expensive to fix it
Exactly this.
Also devs shove a lot of useless stuff into their games that do nothing like the famous RDR2 horse private parts. Like who asked for this, why is this a thing and would it really break immersion if they didn't include it?
As much as 3A games get ramped up, people are enjoying games a single dude made in his basement just as much. Nothing is going to happen to the "industry" unless your talking about indies destroying behemoths that don't deserve to exist in the first place.
If they're independent from the industry... They are not the "industry"
@@Guimhj Independent from the 3A industry but they are still a part of the game industry.
"people are enjoying games a single dude made in his basement just as much" sure, but Activision made around $6 billion just from microtransactions in 1 year. can the single dude do this? no. the behemoths are PUBG, Fortnite, Minecraft, etc. in 2023 PUBG had 380 million active monthly players and it was the 1st most played game. an indy is gonna destroy this? nope. stop deluding yourself. indies will remain niche.
@@SapiaNt0matathat’s crazy cause I’ve never once touched PuBG
To me all the people playing these games (Fortnite apex PUBG or buying the shitty micro transactions on single player games like the assassins creed games) are the reason the game industry is dying.
They keep buying shit and spending money on literal dog crap.
The destiny community let bungie take away content and RE-SELL it to them later on and the community just went “yes shit in my mouth more daddy bungie” it’s insane how indoctrinated these players are
I’ve put more time in inscription than I have on any recent AAA game
@@SapiaNt0mata Granted, Minecraft was an indie game made by a single person for a while. Sure, not anymore, but even still it’s not that much more complex than it used to be.
Although Minecraft is more of an exception.
"The industry as a whole needs to sit back and..."
Industries don't usually come together to discuss lowering profits (which is what lowering budgets would mean), in fact it never happens, due to the Prime Directive of capitalism: "profit curve must go up, every quarter, to infinity". Every other action taken by a corporation is subject to this, meaning it will attempt buy-outs, do mass layoffs, sell subsidiaries, do stock splits, take massive loans, declare bankruptcy, even bend or break laws, before it accepts lowering shareholders expectations. Nothing is off the table when profit is threatened. No industry voluntarily dials down the greed, it always has to be enforced from without.
Hades was amazing. Binding of Isaac was my go to boredom killer for years. Im currently playing power wash simulator and loving it. As a former skateboarder, the recent skate sims are still so fun to dick around in. I love great indy titles. Some of them arent even really that short, and if is a game is really good most people want it as long as possible. Were definitely living in simultaneously the best and worst time for gaming. Lol
Just have to be choosy with your time and money
Risk of Rain Returns is guranteed fun for a fair price
I played Unpacking recently. It was such a nice game. Very short but great storytelling in an unconventional way
I played that on stream a few months ago. A short, sweet and satisfying experience
I love witch beam's games! You should also check out Assault Android Cactus the previous game they've made
A fun game does not NEED to have the most impressive graphics.
It depends... I'd say there's a sweet spot. For example, Fallout New Vegas, I tried playing it, but the graphics were too ugly. I just couldn't. It's a good game, but I can't look at that puke yellow. Sure, a game doesn't need to be perfect in terms of graphics, but in my case, I'd need a game to meet some minimum threshold.
@@octavianpopescu4776What annoyed you wasn't actually the quality of the graphics, it was the art direction, most often less realistic games with strong art direction stand the test of time more easily.
@@octavianpopescu4776yea it wasn't the graphics, the graphics are just your standard ps3 era stuff. Think gta4. The problem was fallout 3 and new Vegas are cursed with browns, and piss yellows, and everyone is covered in dirt all the time. It's just an ugly gross world.
@@octavianpopescu4776 nah, I'd say it's your personal preference, cause for me that game is perfect and piss filter doesn't change a thing for me.
Dwarf Fortress
The reason games were so profitable was because their budgets were smaller than movies yet their revenue was comparable, if the budget surpasses that of a movie blickbuster... video game development stops being sustainable.
No celebrities involved saving quite a lot of money
C-level, board, share holders and marketing are literally 90% of the total cost... marketing alone can double the cost... for what, it's a fucking scam.
Square eniox does a bad job with marketing and people don't know how many good games they created.
@@lennylink8772 I still think Squeenix is filled with all the crap that it currently has!
The bigger you are, the harder you fall. I'm glad you brought up the stat about all those layoffs across the industry. I'm not a developer or even work in games but I can notice just how many people from 2022-2023 have been layed-off as a sign that something is going to give way.
Armored Core 6 has been my favorite game in about a decade. Finished the first play through in about 20 hours. I’m now 300+ hours in and still having fun and I’m not alone. Game length doesn’t matter, overall enjoyment will determine how long people want to play.
Hi there! Gavedev here, thanks for video, very interesting points. The problem with overgrown budgets is that not only it's expensive to produce on it's own, because you have to compete with finance and IT spheres for software engineers, lion share of the money goes to marketing, not development. And you can't really cut marketing cost, because media is oversaturated with new products, you compete for people's attention with movies and various streaming services, and you have to make yours more visible to the consumer, otherwise it will fly under the radar, even if it is cool. Very few studios have enough recourses to pull it off on their own, so they partner up with publishers. And publishers are known for pushing risk management and profit maximization tactics. Aka more formulaic mechanics, more streamlined narratives to cut costs, or some evil shit like microtransactions or crunch inducing deadlines to squeeze more money out of single title, which undoubtedly compromise artistic integrity. But it still better to compromise your vision a little, than waste years developing a game nobody will see.
I don't really know how we can get out of this cycle. On one hand Larian and BG3 is a shining example of independent developer with integrity and dedication, who set out to do their thing exactly as they wanted, even if it didn't make sense in market's eyes, and won hard. But even they had to go through cheeky dance with certain publisher at the beginning of their existence and spend years doing smaller projects and growing their community and reputation before they were able to produce masterpiece such as Baldurs Gate 3. And it all was deep in debt, to steps away from bankruptcy, collecting donations from dedicated fans to keep going. I can imagine the stress of living like this. One have to be very special kind of crazy to stick it out to the end, and those people are rare.
IMO games peaked in the Xbox 360 era. If we can get more games like that with moderately increased graphics (i.e. higher res amd frame rates, improved lighting, hi res textures), Id be happy. Those games didnt take 10 years to make or cost a fortune. Increases in resolution and realtime lighting should be easily added with modern hardware and game engines. Instead, we get games that are inferior to Skyrim and Dragon Age Origins, but cost many times more just because they look nice.
This is why I never pre-order, I just wait a year and get it for half the price and in a playable state.
Currently waiting for Jedi Survivor to get another sale and be patched up! 😅
Jus pirate at that point honestly 💀
These days, they sometimes DON'T ever get to be in a playable state. “What about fan hacks?” Sometimes they don’t get enough interest to get hacked or even preserved, making hacks impossible.
@@lilpipe7162 how will I be able to support my favourite studios like fromsoftware then?
At the end of the day, gaming is an artistic medium. The problem with the industry is that they're trying to standardize everything and not take any risks. It's like trying to make art that will appeal to everyone; it just ends up bland and unwanted.
Exactly, its the same with music and specially with movies! We live in a crappy time now!
Always said atr is a scam
Imagine needing to sell between 3-5+ million products to barely have a chance at breaking even (that's without factoring in how much retailers take and is purely based on gross revenue)...
As a huge RPG fan, I've been saying it would be awesome to see more games made in an early 2000s graphic fidelity like Final Fantasy X but hi res. Those games used to be developed in 2-3 years and they were great. I'd love to see more games developed like that today.
Not even that long it was as quick as 1 and a half to 2 and a half years max for the majority , a good portion took no longer than a year and a half for the early first part of 6th gen.
@@fawkkyutuu8851Yeah true. I mean, they had multiple teams on it, but in 3 years we got Final Fantasy VIII, IX, and X! That's just crazy.
In a year where Fear and Hunger (maybe the least accessible game of all time?) low key exploded in popularity i do think the slow shift over to indie games and double A studios is only gaining more traction.
Indie games and smaller releases have been really solid for years. My corner of the internet has been very excited about Signalis and ultrakill more recently. The bigger conversation is moreso just that the average gamer™ is slowly starting to pay attention to them more; as is also evident by steam promoting their indie game of the year banner more.
I hadn't bought a AAA game in years. Then I fell for the Starfield hype and got the early release edition. Big mistake. Guess I need to do this every couple of years to remind myself why I don't buy AAA games.
I feel like another Hideo Kojima-esque situation would be the Xenoblade franchise by monolith soft
For a Nintendo published game, it's extremely unique, strikingly directed, and an absolute delight presentation wise
It's not a cashcow but it definitely looks like it has the budget and the staff
Since Monolith helps Nintendo with 3D models, technical stuff and specifically cartography with botw and totk, Nintendo, who bought Monolith way back in the mid-2000s since they had some bizarre interest in a niche deeply philosophical series (Xenogears and Xenosaga, and I guess Baten Kaitos's weird gameplay), is fully willing to fund Xenoblade games and allow for full creative freedom
Xenoblade Chronicles X is a gigantic unbelievably massive single play MMO styled open world rpg which clearly inspired botw's world design (potentially justifying *that* delay) released on the Wii U, and its environments still hold up today.
Xenoblade 2 had some extremely bizarre mechanics and direction which would trigger most western critics but it was still a big hit with those who were willing to look through all the "anime bullshit exterior" to find an incredible game with amazing exploration, combat, characters, music, story and themes.
And obviously my absolute favorite game ever, Xenoblade 3, well quite frankly I can't do much but recommend it to everyone, it's probably the best game I have ever played, and I cannot undermine just how much it means to me, and YES, it should've won best OST and be nominated for narrative and art direction
I highly recommend monolith soft's games, seriously they're some of the most overlooked modern jrpg games of all time and are all some absolutely unforgettable adventures that most people tend to hate on with... Honestly no reason at all besides its anime artstyle, writing and some anime tropes here and there
Another problem is that if you have dozens of 100+ million dollar budget games or films or whatever appearing every year, they are going to cannibalise one another. We saw that this year with all of the blockbusters that cost 200, 300 million to make, and ended up losing money because one stole the momentum at the box office from another. Add to this that the economics for the average consumer (and do not kid yourself, the middle class was eliminated a while ago) make it impossible for them to keep every project in the black.
I am not sure what the math is for videogames, but films, thanks to the way theatres and distribution work, have to make two and a half times their budget to break even. In a world where people are, adjusted for inflation, making less money than they did in the 1980s when sixty million dollars was a newsworthy expensive film (or in 1991, when a hundred million was flabbergasting), this is impossible. Even if the same number of people were going to theatres as was the case in the 1930s, twelve 200-300 million dollar blockbusters a year cannot break even if the customer only has the same purchasing power or less than when 60 million was a big deal.
To bring this back to the videogames thing, well, back in the late 1990s, I was on a forum on which a person stated that videogames are more profitable than films. I said yeah, that is because the cost of making videogames is lower. Come back when both things cost the same to make, then we will talk. Well, here we are. Videogames are costing just as much, if not more, to make. And the industry is in danger of collapsing.
I hope the exact same thing happens as I caught the tail end of in the early 1980s. I was too young to understand why everyone had a games console and seemingly hundreds of cartridges. The console wars between Nintendo and Sega were hilarious at times. But I would love to see another crash because, ironically, Microshaft is the least suited to survive it. Nintendo can huddle up and wait for it to blow over, using similar tactics as in the 1980s to start over, Sony can reorganise their film business and other electronics business and weather it, but Microshaft only has Windoze and computer shite to keep going with.
The IT and videogame industry is the only industry that has never been under any real regulation. It shows.
Never say never. The big thing is go find something to enjoy about life. There have been AAA games like Max Payne 3 that bombed. The big joke was that if Max Payne 3 hadn’t been a 200 million dollar budget to make that game, it would have actually been profitable because of the budget and the niche noir audience.
@@AdrianFahrenheitTepes it wasn't a bomb
I think it's a bit simplistic and almost romanticizing to say that in the past developers could be creative and original and weather the occasional flop. It's obvious that the ballooning costs of AAA development have made publishers even more risk averse than they used to be, but it's not like in the 90's and 2000's we got that much more creative or original games. The thing is that in those days, the formulas weren't discovered yet. Stuff like the standard control scheme for third person shooters and skill tree RPG-lite mechanics weren't invented or normalized yet. Any larger production (which would still be tiny by today's standards) was still looking to hit the largest common denominator, but the gaming audience wasn't as homogenous yet. PC games were fundamentally a different type of game than console games, etc. Everything was so much more fragmented, so a mega hit like a CoD MW or GTA5 wasn't possible. Developers were often just making guesses as to what could prove popular as often as they were led by actual creative vision and we look back at it now and marvel at the many weird and out-there ideas and think "wow, gaming used to be so free from AAA profit pressures as if profits weren't important back then too.
I think the PS2 era had alot of creative games not so much the 90s but I do with the early 200s allowed more risk taking. The PS 3 era was less so risky. With Elden Ring and BG3 in terms of game Type they are risk talking but both games are High fantasy so setting wise they are not a huge risk like Something on the lines of Death stranding.
@@John-996the ps2 is also the most successful gaming console full stop, so maybe it has something to do with that, more people playing, more people making games.
The argument from "more gaming hours = higher prices" is weird. I plaxed games on the NES, Atari 2600 and Master System. Most games reached from 30 minutes up to maybe two hours. And 50 bucks was quite a lot for that. Now I may compare Street Fighter 6 to Super Street Fighter II. And while SF6 has some extra content, the main game as such has not changed too much. It looks better of course. Or does it? Imagine SF6 been done in classic 2D graphics - no big deal since SF6 plays in traditional 2D style anyway. Now add some furious online play shit to it. Tag this useless rpg mode on to it and viola. How much would that cost?
True, and this wouldn't even be considering hypothetical hours in the game. Like Dark Souls for instance, you can go up to ng+7, so you beat the game, get to credits, and restart the game on that same character with all your gear, except the enemies get harder. Up to 7 game replays iirc, at which point the enemies are leveled higher than your character to a degree. But, with this in mind, and the fact you can get multiple endings. Even if the game is completed after you complete it, there's still those 7 ng+ modifiers you can add to enemies, there's the endings, and upgrades to rings in ng+. Base game or ng+0 you'll find a "Leo ring" and then ng+2 you'll find a Leo ring +3. This is all optional and purely for if you want to 100% it, but could be considered extra hours of content if the dev wants to make max profit per sale. There's also the magic types, you have Sorceries, Miracles (invoking the powers of God), and pyromancies, so acquiring all of those will take hours. There's covenants that have unique weapons as rewards, which requires pvp that is unpredictable and will likely take longer than you think or hope. Boom, more hours. If a game technically never ends for instance how many hours of gameplay do you charge for? If it's just a sandbox game like mine craft, you can play for many many many hours and still do the occasional new thing, make a discovery.
Gamers are also partially to blame for AAA open-world games getting increasingly long and bloated. Since they want to get their "moneys worth"...
Anyone looking for a cool game with simple graphics: Dave the Diver. Fishing, sushi, and a cute storyline. Go for Dredge if you want fishing but with horror vibes
Well, Dave the Diver by the industry is considered an indie game; even though it isn’t
I don't even play games but gotta support my boy salari by leaving a like and a comment.
Lol it was 2014... A game called destiny was on the horizon. It was being made by bungie who at the time, just released 5 halo games over the course of the past decade and they are basically the best shooting games ever made. WHAT A AMAZING TRACK RECORD! Can't wait to see what their new destiny game will be like!
What's this? The rpg elements of diablo, the world exploring of elder scrolls, and the gameplay and story telling from halo? All in one game? And I can enjoy this grand experience with others online? WOW this is going to be great!!! Sounds even more epic than those last 5 halo games. The future of shooters looks great!!!!!!!
Closer to launch I learned it was online only, had cod like mechanics like hard aim down sights and default sprint, and it was lacking split screen, something every shooter should have.
As disappointed as I was, I still got the game. 2 copies actually. So I could play with my bro : ) The clerk even said it was great! Couldn't wait to play it!
Pop the disk into my 360 and what's this? Long boring update has to kick off first... Ooookay lol. This has never happened before with halo games but whatever... No big deal...
About a hour later we finally got to play and well......... CRAP this game suuux lol.
I don't care about the characters or the story. Some characters don't even have names they are just, the queens brother... Many chars just have big butt face robot faces and are not the most appealing to me. Art style from halo was better than this...
The thing I started noticing most of all after the first day, was how lied to I was...
"If you can see it you can go there" talking points went out the window once I learned that there were invis kill barriers everywhere.
"Tough enemies drop tons of sick gear" Lol no they don't. I killed tons of bosses who dropped basically trash... The bosses are a joke too. Just take cover, shoot, take cover, shoot, take cover, shoot over and over again. No strategy really... Just mindless cover shooting...
They promised players could join you in the heat of battle. That was a lie. They said you could trade gear. Also a lie. They didn't however say much about the bull crapp MICROTRANSACTIONS that they put into the game. Back then I wasn't up to speed on this corporate bs. This was my first online only micro transaction game lol. I didn't know what I was seeing. All my attempts to get good gear were failures, but I could simply spend real life money for better gear. That option was always there lol. As a young kid waiting tables, I could barely afford the game itself lol why do you think I got the 360 version? Didn't even have a ps4 or xbox one yet lol.
Then I noticed they liked to update the game from time to time. Not so much in ways that make the game better sooo much... But just change for the sake of change. It didn't make much sense. One week the autorifles are the go to weapon... The week after that it's hand cannons that are the best. Whatever lol... Dumb game...
Also noticed the drivable vehicle list was less than the drivable vehicle list of halo 1... A 2001 game... That's disappointing...
No map editor... No theater mode... Was there even customs? I don't think so... I know there wasn't jack shiz for a ranked competitive mode like in halo 3.
Lastly I learned they disk locked content. I remember seeing trailers for the game showing a big forest planet to explore. It was no where to be found in the game though! Turns out it was DLC. DLC that was clearly finished before launch, but they cut it to sell it to us later. It was already on the disk actually. Just locked up until your credit card could unlock it. What a bunch of scum bags lololol.
The game is bad lol. It's not very good and was made to sucker cash more than it was made to dispense fun gaming moments.
The story goes no where and the end is literally just "keep playing and buying micro transactions please this game doesn't ever actually end hahahaha"
They story is so bad. All the cool stuff happened before off screen and what's happening in the current story is boring af... Clearly bungie went from great to not so great lol.
This experience shattered my hopes for gamings future. I worried this kind of thing would ruin gaming and welp, I was right lolz. Fast forward to today and we got tons of unfinished, online only, micro transaction games... Many of which are from once great franchises like halo, gears of war, counter strike, rainbow 6, battle field, etc etc No wonder I stick to games mostly around 2010 on down haha.
Sorry for the long one. Just wanted to sum up my gamer bro feelings on the future of gaming. Doesn't look that great lolz. As we get better controllers/controls, visuals, and frames... We get worse everything else... And sometimes we STILL get bad controls, visuals, and frames lol lets get real. Gollum and kong are 2023 games as odd as that is to say lolz. Even this years game of the year wasn't finished at launch lol. And in a year with tons of strikes and lay offs... Is there much left here to praise? Not really... Gaming today is mostly a joke lol.
Great video boss mann! You sum up the face of gaming so well! And I agree. Tears of the kingdom is soooo fun and micro soft made some dumb choices this year... As usual lolz.
@@TingusPingus-sf4gh I'll sum it up for you then bro. Micro transactions bad lolz.
Bro wrote an essay
@@soyborne.bornmadeandundone1342Dude shut up
I agree with the micro transactions points, but if you didn't play the raids in destiny, you were missing out on some of the best content in video games EVER
Theres absolutely no reason why a game should be sold in an incomplete state; the people in charge can extend the release date, but they usually dont. Cyberpunk being the most popular example. I dont mind paying 70$, but it needs to have a ton of content like Baldurs Gate 3. Enough with the bare minimum!
Baldur's Gate 3 was however on early access for years and years though. It wasn't one release and game was full of content, it was years of work while taking people's money.
@@cracmar03Everyone seem to forget that.
So I watched this yesterday when I was a bit semi busy with other things, but I came back to it and I absolutely love this essay video from you. You're speaking so many facts that will probably be so relatable for so many people. A lot of games these days seem like such a huge thing to get into. And then when it actually releases due to rushed release dates they release it with so many bugs too. Nobody likes it, the production team feels like crap about it too. Why? Art takes time. Digital work takes time. Let creators properly create and don't push them to finish it within an unreasonable amount of time for an unreasonable amount of payment.
Gaming is the biggest media entertainment industry now, but it's important to look at where that money is, because it's not enough to assume that mobile games share all the same characteristics as indie games. There's a ton of very ethically questionable cash being made in exploiting how kids make purchases on Fortnite and Roblox and it's really not the same as me playing Disco Elysium or Spiritfarer. But when people critique the gaming industry it all gets lumped in together.
Both Risk of Rain Returns and Xenoblade 3 are great games
I think studios greatly undermine peoples willingness to try new things. I have never played dnd, knew nothing of the rules or the world but decided to jump in head first into Baldurs Gate 3 and i loved the experience. I do think though more games should be available in demo form for free seeing how the cost of gaming is getting higher and higher with modern games costing up to $70, its reasonable for people to not want to pay that much for a game which they may or may not enjoy, and then have to deal with the hassle of -maybe- getting a refund.
The thing is, most people don't have that much disposable income, so they will most likely buy something they know they already enjoy if theur budget is limited, games in my country are incresibly expensive, so I only buy indies and sail the high seas for triple A.
I prefer indie games over triple A for a long time now. One of the few exceptions would be Elden ring. But other than that I just have more hope seeing great, interesting and creative games in the indie scene.
What about Xenoblade Chronicles 3?
Failden Ring
Hate this type of groups
I really hate this trend of games locking out content behind a pay wall, whether by DLC or Pre-Orders.
What content
All of that money and none of them are as good as low budget games like Hades
Hades uses procedural generation so its kinda cheating
Because they wereade by inexperienced amateurs. Its only made for money
Considering how the gaming world reacted to the release of DA:O - turn future games of the series into less role-play versions but give it massive open worlds instead - and Mass Effect - cutting down on the roleplay elements while strengthening the shooter aspects - I doubt that Baldur's Gate III will have a massive influence on the upcoming gaming market.
Modern RPGs in general are much harder and much more difficult to craft than shooters or open-world-games so they seem to be "spamproof".
people think that all publishers want to make good games for the gamers. meanwhile Ubisoft said that all their games will be live service. publishers want to make money and not make good games, so people need to wake up. some exceptions like Larian and BG 3 are not the standard, but exceptions. look at the upcoming Suicide Squad game. do you think that game devs will learn from BG 3? nope.
It's funny how the AAA gaming industry seems to be a perfect reflection of current western society's consumerism: bigger, shinier, louder, longer etc. And the more you get, the unhappier you are strangely because in the end, its all the same boredom. I for myself sometimes like the aspect of knowing the product already by the name of the studio - a FromSoftware title will always frustratingly difficult. However the studio that overdid it is Ubisoft: there is not one single game which was really remarkable or fun to play on a longer term.
We need smaller studios with big, unconventional ideas, producing one or maybe two-timers at max and the 15th iteration of Battlefield or 10th round of AC
Happy Holidays! Hope you and everyone at home are doing well.
P.S. I miss your fun streams. Pray I return to them.
You won't see EA make a Baldur's Gate. The lack of predatory monetization and endless bullcrap is BG3's charm, and the other boys just can't NOT try to pick our pockets.
I'm not defending EA or anything but they have released 2 Jedi games single player without any microtransactions so it's not impossible.
@@charaznable8072Fallen order 2 was released and is still in a completely unacceptable state.
@@StakeFromJateFarm What does that have to do with my point? Dude said EA won't release a game without microtransactions I just listed 2 recent games that they did release without any.
@@TingusPingus-sf4gh Yeah I'm not debating the quality of the games I'm just saying EA has done it recently.
@@charaznable8072 How is saying "well at least broken game doesn't have exploitative microtransactions" a good point in your brain?
Wake up babe, there's a new Salari video out 😊
It is worth adding that the earnings of people outside the USA should be taken into account. For example, in my country, which is located in Europe, the national average is about $600-700, so $70 is a lot for us, which is why many people no longer buy AAA games at the premiere, but on Steam they are discounted by a good 50%. . I have many games that I would like to play (Elden Ring, Sekiro and Baldur 3 are good examples), but I would rather wait 3 or 5 years until the price drops to a few or a dozen or so dollars, because I don't think these games are actually worth that much, what for the premiere.
I also ignore the rampant piracy and the fact that I and many others don't care if the graphics are particularly good. Just yesterday I played through an RPG game from 2001 for the umpteenth time and I played it as well, if not better, than in the case of the most praised RPG games released 20 years later, and soon I will be playing games such as Dark Souls 3 and God Of War (2018) for the first time, because sale prices dropped to a tolerable level. In other words, because of such high prices, studios earn less than they could, because people buy and play their games after a good 5 years.
And then there is the problem that nowadays many people expect that AAA games will be full of errors at launch, which is another reason to refrain from buying them for several months to years. And finally, new graphics cards and other parts cost a lot, and because of trying to achieve better and better graphics, you don't buy new games because you have to spend several hundred dollars on a new PC, which is not worth it, and not everyone likes playing on a console. I only have PS2 and PS3 and I didn't see the need to buy newer ones.
**RDR2 looming in the corner with a nearly $600 million budget in 2018**
Halo 6 had a $500 million budget
Given what they accomplished, it's fully justified
My god😅
To be fair metroid prime 4 was never meant to have such a high delay
They quite literally had to cancel it and restart the project from nothing
I take issue with the idea that games with lower fidelity graphics have worse graphics than those of AAA titles. The developer of two of my favorite game series is frequently ridiculed and belittled for either's graphics (to the point of comparing them to PS2 or PS3 games when probably neither could even run their latest ones), but I'd argue that they have much more interesting visuals than any with photorealistic graphics, which I'd say would be better suited for tech demos than a common choice for art direction. Like, if I want to see real people, I'll watch a movie or show. I'll take a game that looks like a PS2 remaster and has some cool gameplay over a boring open world where the only thing to do other than advance a generic Hollywood story or randomly find yet another horde of enemies to gun down is zoom in on things like a character's face to see how much detail was put in for no real reason.
The obsession with realism is so strange! It's viewed as the mark of quality, even though photo-realistic graphics can be very ugly, from an artistic standpoint. I much prefer simple but beautifully stylistic art to hyper-realism, and that style never ages poorly.
Is it fromsoftware? They're my favourite at least
@@paintingwithkarmiya6149I dissagree with games like Kingdom come, RDR2, Last of us 2, GTA6 it makes sense but for a fantasy game making it realstic makes little sense when the game is not realstic at all.
The only hope that the industry has is if the companies start cutting back on the budget for the games. The highly realistic graphics are not necessary for every game, something both developers and consumers need to learn to accept.
Game devs are the ones who push that myth that photo realism is required. It's "free" advertising for them. No it isn't actually free, but it's cheaper to be able to show off how good the games graphics are than to create and sell an interesting add campaign. Consumers might say "Wow, this is the best looking game I've ever seen" or "Hmm, this texture is pretty muddy" if they have been sold the game with the idea it will be photo realistic but they don't say stuff like "I want 3000 more strands of hair with independent physics". It is just marketing, and bc of how insane the price of marketing is it's cheaper to just pay a team to create ridiculously high fidelity graphics than it is to market the game in other ways. Game publishers spread the myth of audiences wanting hyper realism, but they are the ones who want audiences to want hyper realism. When the customers stop caring about graphics, many companies will need to spend a bunch more money on marketing, and they know it. It also a good way for big companies to beat out competition. "There game doesn't looks as realistic as ours therefore you shouldn't buy it, give us your money instead"
This! Games can be pretty and realistic without being too close to the irl world. I LOVE more artistic games like Totk or When the Past was around and they look nothing like actual people. But I was also stunned at how beautiful FF7 Remake was and it got me hyped to see the Aerith scene even tho I know it will destroy me. In the end, I really think it's a choice from the devlopper but I would love more triple A games to have a more artsy style
I've been saying for a while how important art direction and art styles are. There is nothing wrong with photorealism when you have a highly competent team with the budget behind it, but different art styles and playing with art direction can help give your game an identity while also helping keeping costs down. I personally feel a lot more soul and excitement from looking at something more impressionistic or something more stylized. I think gaming is still stuck in the weird uncanny valley for me. The more of these games that look realistic the more I'm finding "off" about them. A lot of them don't have the animations, interactivity, A.I., and physics to match the graphical fidelity. I really like the approach Nintendo made with Splatoon. They came up with the core gameplay premise first and designed an art style around it. It is oozing with style and identity. HiFi Rush is another title that has a style that matches its gameplay.
@@meru-chanowo graphics are expensive when you use your own shitty impossible to use engine and force all your devs to use said shitty engine (frostbite!!!) just so you can then lease said engine to naïve devs XD
Man, you're so close. New Hollywood was able to take off in the first place because we successfully busted up block booking and studio cartels. You say a lot about publisher's risk-aversion without ever once talking about how that's a structural feature of a monopolized industry. It directly results in exploiting their workers and grifting their customers. A smidge of material analysis would really help tie your points together. E.g.: Accumulation drives higher tech standards, bloating games for meaningless benchmarks, crunching fewer and fewer artists in shorter and worse contracts, and ultimately destroying value all around.
Counter example: Tears of the Kingdom was so good because Fujibayashi took an extra year to polish the game.
This problem is not just with the game's industry but also the movie industry. When a product costs 300 million to make, adding in marketing costs and all, it has to atleast make 500 million. And for a product to make 500 million it needs to have mass appeal. Which is why movies and games today take no risks, don't offend anyone, and in the end become bland because of it.
Its still insane to me how spiderman 2 cost 300 million. Where the hell did that money go?
We genuinely need more mid budget stuff these days. Movies and games both.
When you have movies or games that cost 10s of millions instead of hundreds, you can take risks, you can atleast break even if you do a well enough execution and find a niche market that likes it.
Excellent breakdown! The tendency to rush out broken cookie cutter games is why I rarely buy AAA these days and never pre-order. I'd rather wait for reviews from users and a few game journalists I trust the opinion of. They're just too expensive, too. Indie games, however, I'm much less suspicious with and I love that they are so unlike the big budget AAA games. Art style, game mechanics, story genre, etc are all more likely to be unique.
BTW, those baked goods looked amazing and I need to find those recipes. Holy hell that bread, especially looked immaculate.
Rockstar with RDR2 with 500million budget were able to make profit but its also why they have RDR and GTA online. Maxpayne 3 was 100million Great TPS game but they were unable to sell enough. This way Rockstar are not making games like Manhunt, Bully, Table tennis, Agent, The Warriers, Midnight Club and so on. Its a massive risk They are always really ambitious with their games and they put alot money into them. One of reasons Cyberpunk came out earlier Acording to Pawel Sasko is they could not afford to keep it in devlopment. This is why they also had talks about Cyberpunk online. So many games can not afford this Calistio Protocol Studio went under i would like to see more linear games but at a 200million Budget i can see why they do not make more of them. We need more double A games but at lower price.
Just like with movies, the budgets of "AAA" gaming companies habve bloated beyond reason, and that also lead to them trying to appeal to everyone and making blader products for general audiences. So far people are still buying them, but that bubble will eventually pop.
I like to experiment on what games I try playing. Though I generally play JRPG type games, I'll even try a niche in the genre like Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia (an oldschool SMT-like Touhou game)
I do miss when companies experimented with gameplay concepts, like Katamari Damacy, NiGHTS into Dreams, and Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons. Harvest Moon is probably one of the riskiest games of its time since it's a game where you control a character in a topdown perspective, and you don't go fight battles; you till the land, plant seeds, water, take care of cows and chickens, make money from foraging from the forest/mountain, and give gifts to the townsfolk to get closer to them and potentially marry someone and have a child. Then Rune Factory released as a fantasy Harvest Moon that adds magic and combat to the formula. Eventually one man made Stardew Valley, which brought new life to the genre, and sparked a lot of new farming sim due to its success.
I do love looking into what more the indie scene has in store, rather than see what the AAA game industry produces.
Vaush just had a segment on this and i was blown away at how expensive these games are, and for (seemingly) not THAT much of a bump in quality... if any.
Glad to see more people are talking about this. Its genuinely unsustainable.
I remember when I got Final Fantasy VII for the PS1. The back of the case had a bunch of quotes and info about the game and one of them was boasting that it cost over $40 million to make the game. Now look at where we are.
Yeah, spot on. I've always thought Jenny Holzer's "Protect me from what I want" is a good approach to gaming :)
I loved when Naughty Dog put out Uncharted Lost Legacy in 2017. A nice little 8-10 hour adventure was a nice refreshing change of pace from the usual 30-60 hour campaign. It had AAA graphics and performance but on a scaled down level. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice was the same way. If I only played those bloated AAA games I'd run myself into the ground with it all and completely turn my back to the hobby. A lot of times I'll follow up a Horizon: Forbidden West with something like Little Nightmares, a telltale game, Dark Pictures Anthology game, or Rachet and Clank: Rift Apart. Keeps me from being burned out as a gamer.
I would only accept shorter games if the cost came down as well. I'm not going to pay 60 or even 70 dollars for a 5-8 hour game where the bulk is meant to be played in some uninspired MP mode. I am an older guy who works 12 hour shifts and have familial responsibilities, but 60-70 bucks for that is a damn joke.
I am not so sure about that Maxpayne 3 was much shorter game then RDR1 and was not open world but was more expensive. Last of us 2 and Calisto protocol being shorter but still more expensive then game like Ghost of Tushimia or Kingdom come.
I've moved to VR for my gaming, it makes even bland games more interesting and a person can't physically spend too long playing which works out perfectly for stopping and getting other stuff done
Spore was the last game I got hyped for. After getting burned by it's release, I learned to never follow development of a game and never to pre-order a game. I keep track of games that I might like and wait for them to release and get reviewed by the community.
Spore galactic conquest was pretty ok it was just dissapointing what happened to maxis games
"Gamers" have adopted the mindset of the "casual gamer." Standards have fallen. In my opinion.
Secondly expensive games are long to explain its length. But games could and should be shorter and thus cheaper.
We as gamers are getting hosed.
This is a really good video. Every point was well spoken. I think the industry definitely needs a shift. Hopefully in the next couple years we will see a shift into riskier projects
As triple A games become more and more realistic, and the technology more and more impressive, I believe we are soon to hit a huge stagnating point on realistic game. As Unreal Engine 5 got released last year and already demonstrated extremely impressive graphic, the first thing I wondered when looking at it was... what's next? The selling point of games were the realism. But once realism hits its highest point, these games will be harder to differenciate, too expensive, and thus way less accessible and potentially sell less, unless you already have an established fanbase (and still, you need to surprise them with enough new things every time).
I always stand behind "i want shorter games with worse graphics", specifically because I literally can't run AAA on my PC, I only have a Switch. But the other reason I'm all for worse graphics is also because these less realistic games are not only way more ORIGINAL and stand out way more than realistic games, but they usually age wayyyy better than realistic games. Take The wind waker and its cell shading graphics. It's totally bearable to play today. However, I'm not sure it would be the same for the first GTA games.
In the end, is graphics that important for a game ? It is, of course, but it doesn't have to be super realistic and crazy to be appealing. This is why indies are so popular : they have "worse" graphics (aka : pixel art, low poly 3D...) are way cheaper and need less ressources to run. And I firmly believe this is what a lot of people want, too : they want novelty. THey want innovation. That's why Baldur's gate 3 was so popular. It's a triple A game, but even the camera angle of this game is so different from what we're used to see. People STARVE for difference, for new experience, and i don't think they care as much to need to see every grain of skins of the protagonists.
Not to mention, the price of games nowadays usually encourages me to buy things second hand... or during huge sales. this isn't profitable.
People say they'd want shorter games with worse graphics, only to criticize Nintendo games for not being as high budget as its Triple A competitors and want them to have bigger storage space in their systems to withstand said high budget Triple A games, even though their games fit exactly what they are asking for.
Yes, I've noticed people ask for a lot of contradictory things, although it might not come from the same people. One such thing for me was "Souls games are good because they don't hold your hand, but Starfield is bad because it doesn't have maps" So, don't hold my hand, but hold my hand. People complained they couldn't remember where some locations were... the cities aren't that big, can't people learn and remember? There's plenty of fair criticism to level at Starfield, but not this.
These people are probably not all the same people, I like Nitendo games and I have never criticised their graphics other than Pokemon, because their textures are horrible, Nitendo Games have some of the best art direction in the industry, if you don't want everything to be gritty and realistic.
@@octavianpopescu4776Probably not the same people, I cannot remember without a map, specially if I take some days off the game, I have horrible sense of direction in real life and in games, and sometimes I feel like I have Alzheimer because I don't remember anything.
I don’t remember the last time I bought a triple A game at full price. Too many games in my backlog and too many smaller games that are just as great if not better than triple A games.
Glad I mostly only play indie games
"if you're bored of the landscape of gaming as it is, try more indie games, play something that you didn't think you would like but others love, you never know if something is for you unless you try it"
So true! My most vivid memory of a moment like this for me was in the early days of Minecraft. It'd already been popular for a year or two and I always said "it's not for me, the graphics and gameplay look too basic". Eventually when I didn't have anything else I wanted to play I gave it a shot and to this day it's one of my all-time favorite games. You never know if it's for you unless you try it, indeed.
Fantastic video, I've had a lot of similar thoughts recently about the state of the gaming industry. There are however many glimpses of hope in terms of more realistic workloads for the devs and artists working on these behemoths of products. More bad than good unfortunately, but I tend to focus on the good and hope others will take inspiration.
Your section about how little risk there is now in games is a perfect example of why “capitalism makes good games” is such a stupid thing to say.
The effects are that we live in sequel / shareholder appeasement infinite repeating AAA cycle
I really appreciate this take by Salari. I'm 50 years old and casually game. One thing that was mentioned was threats against game devs. That is absolutely crazy. Just quit. Your gaming experience is not that important!
Per other things discussed. It seems to me that the owners/investors are the ones making all the money in the gaming industry. The artists, coders, story writers are probably/most likely getting shafted. Pay these people more. I'm surprised with the harassment at work (most likely happens), and the harassment on line which is happening they don't walk to hell out!
Frankly as a 50year old nothing much impresses me much anymore. But people complaining the graphics are not good is just insane. Are you kidding? It is a game. Do you want your game to look exactly like real life? I know I don't. Games are supposed to be a way to escape from reality.
Third I tried a AAA game, namely Starfield because it was available on Xbox Game Pass, and yes it is horrible. Not because it doesn't look good it does. It is because these developers are being forced to be woke, hire people who are not coders and gamers but DEI hires who could care less. And that pressure is coming from all the wrong places like investors and shareholders ect who only want $$$. That's gotta go.
Quit harassing the actually coders and artists people. It is not a good look and might end you up in jail if your threat seems viable enough.
Oh no! Am I gonna start having complicated feelings about Spider-Man 2?!! I'm not ready for this!!! 😭
I think shorter games is just going to make a consumer market of "fast fashion" for games. I don't want a library of 600 games I bought on the winter Steam sale I've never opened. I want experiences I can close and come back to when I have time and I'll know there is still plenty of game left to explore, so I don't need to fill the hole with more games. I also find I rarely replay games that are a shorter experience. They're not bad, there is just no reason to. That's just me tho. But yeah, there is room for both!
I'm the exact opposite, longer games will be games I abandoned, while I tend to finish shorter games in one sitting, we are all different, that's why we need to have a wide variety of studios and projects.
This whole thing of "games feel the same" is why I ended up playing Thirsty Suitors off the recommendation of a good friend, and I just... absolutely loved it. It has its moments of things I don't like (clunky skateboarding), but it's just so damn cute and sweet and fun and enjoyable.
So if anyone needs a recommendation, take that and run with it.
Granted, I've also been playing Ghostwire: Tokyo recently and just... It's a game that, in so many ways, I should love a lot more than I do (and I'm really pushing through the slog parts because I like the main story, the side stories, the dog-feeding mechanic, and the location-finding/exploration side quest). But so many of the go-to mechanics that are always present in games supported by Bethesda just don't fit the narrative, and it would've been so much fun to see something that was definitely more in line with the "I've been possessed by a spirit and am tasked with saving people we care about" than magic shooty hands and a bow.
Like many others I strongly agree with the points stated but don't have anything to add. So instead I'll take this moment to compliment the baked goods shown at the end, they looked absolutely scrumptious and make me want to try baking again. Cheers!
Slay the Princess is a great indie game that you should check out
Not only that the budgets are getting out of hand, but those don't account for an increase in employee salaries. In fact, I'm willing to bet many of the devs, designers, etc. that work in the industry are still severely underpaid compared to their CEOs who undeservedly earn way more.
No AAA gaming will not destroy the gaming industry. Most of those budgets are including marketing & merch not just the development tools or the staff. Plus most of the AAA games do make their money back. What's going destroy the industry are subscription services like Gamepass & Games as a Service model due how unsustainable those gaming models are. As for game prices, they much much HIGHER in the 80s & 90s due to cartridge manufacturing on each console out. Versus today where universal formats & digital exist. Retail is also why digital games are still the same price as physical games, store like Best Buy, GameStop, & Amazon would refuse to stock the systems if the digital was cheaper.
As for the Consumers wait for a sale if you all don't want to spend $70. Gaming is a hobby, spend the money or don't, move on.
Indie gaming will not save the industry as most gamers don't care for them, people want COD not some random indie title from some hipster anti-AAA gaming crowd who are pissed off they bought an Xbox instead of PlayStation where most of the AAA discord is aimed towards right now
I'm done with the AAA for now, open world, all that shit with unskippable boring cutscenes, and honestly the graphics aren't going to get much better, but being a gamer since 1984 what do I know. Well at least I'm cool enough to play indie games! Go indie. Go.
I think games like BG3 out doing all of the big budget games will only see those big budget companies suffer economically. Indie game developers and Japanese game developers in general don’t seem to have this problem
And BG3 wasn't even cheap to make or anything, but they took their time and the corpos let the devs do what they do best. It should be a lesson for every big game dev out there.
@@butHomeisNowhere___ they did a great job with BG3 but like everything on the internet this days it's all white (as for BG3) or black (almost everyone else) and seems like everything they did on that game is morally superior or the key of success. Be a bit realistic, the way BG3's development was handled wouldn't be considered acceptable for both the audience of 3A games and also for the publishers. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it's quite obvious you cant release a major blockbuster 3A game as an early access (as it was BG3), then with feedbacks and cash from previews complete the full game in 3 years. If GTA 6 or The Elder Scrolls VI followed this development cycle, it would be considered unacceptable and probably scandalous. Of course we have long awaited 3A games that get release as basically early access sold as full games (Cyberpunk 2077 and i would say also Starfield), but as for the games i mentioned, it's not considered acceptable. BG3 was born in a AA contest with an AA dev team size (like 150 people), and then during the early access and as the game was being completed the team grew up to more 400 (as big as Bethesda) and with an almost 3A game budget.
@@erminioottone1344 don't forget money from timed exclusivity deal from Sony. That one was really shitty move on Larian part - especially since game was relying to be developed by people donation and that didn't stopped Larian from blatantly taking a deal that is based of screwing up x amount of people just because. Which makes them fortunate enough to morally land next to CD Projekt Red over Cyberpunk's NDA where they forbade you to use your own footage of game.
@@cracmar03 Larian did not sign a deal with Sony. The only reason it came to PlayStation before Xbox is that they were having issues getting splitscreen to run on Xbox Series S. They would've released simultaneously if those issues weren't present. Larian said this months before the game released.
You know that BG3 had more developers and budget than Starfield, right?
Tools need to evolve. I think that's already happening though. Smaller teams can make solid AA experience with very little effort. I think the problem is bigger studios are stuck in a rut with the inhouse tools they've married to that have no assistive development tools embedded. Those studios need to build those features themselves or find a way to adopt better tools already available.
Ultimately, the budgets are ballooning because games require more and more people to be made but given where standard engines are leaning, it's clear the industry is looking for solutions to those problems on its own. Automation and generative tools will make AAA games feasible and the studios that can't adapt will obviously have to close.
It's also important to note that there's no future where we'll need as many developers as we do now... that's just a reality we have to accept.
I think AAA developers should split into multiple teams and create more indie to AA experiences more than putting all of their bets on a big AAA game being a success nowadays. Especially with franchise fatigue setting in for a lot of these series that they keep pushing sequels for. Heck one of my favorite games from this year is basically an indie game from a AAA studio and that's Fuga Melodies of Steel 2. CyberConnect2 is mostly known for their higher production anime arena fighter games, but I've honestly never really cared for their Anime games as reexperiencing what I watched before as a game doesn't really appealed to me. Not to mention I'm not a fighting gamer.
Their original IP on the other hand have always been the reason why I keep coming back to them, which sucked for most of the 2010s as no publisher trusted their original games anymore after Asura's Wrath and Solatorobo both bombed badly. They had to start self publishing in order to actually make these kinds of games again. I don't really care if they're budget games either as I can tell there's a lot of heart put into these titles, which is honestly missing in their Anime games since it isn't their story/vision but them adapting someone else's. Unfortunately like many of their original games they get heavily overshadowed by their Anime games. I've heard more people complain about how poor the quality of Naruto Connections is than anything about the Fuga series. I guess that's what happens when Naruto UNS4 sells 11 million units and the 2 Fuga games have only sold 300,000 units so far. More people will be annoyed if the next Naruto game is junk than look into the rest of CC2 catalogue for these awesome hidden gems.
This is kind of the problem with AAA developers going this route too. Most gamers prefer style over substance, and that's why a lot of the popular games nowadays are the AAA games while some really good indie games barely get noticed. Square Enix recently stated that they're refocusing on AAA games and doing less of their smaller games, and this is probably the reason they're doing that. Most gamers don't care about these smaller games and will be happy with the latest COD game much like most movie goers used to just go and watch the latest Marvel movies. Though times are changing and big franchises like that are losing their appeal and losing it fast. COD MW3 was heavily criticized, and the Marvels is the lowest preforming Mavel movie to date.
Maybe some people will develop their taste for more niche/hidden gem content and check out more stuff outside of the mainstream as a result of these franchise falling apart. As for me I'm going to keep an open mind and probably check out some of the hidden gems in my backlog while keeping an eye out for some that are coming out in the future.
3 modern AA style RoboCop: Rogue City type games Instead of 1 AAA... each 10 hours a peice max... between 20 - 40 million budget a piece.
@@fawkkyutuu8851 Heck the budget could go even lower than that and still be a compelling experience. Fuga apparently had a budget of just over $2 million. Even though each game in that series just sold 150,000 units they definitely made that back due to how low they were able to make the budget for those games.
Sometimes keeping in mind how much appeal your game might have and budgeting appropriately is more important than having a seemingly unlimited budget so you can make a AAA. I remember when Square Enix said one of the Tomb Raider games sold like 10 million units and they were still a financial failure.
Now that AAA game budgets are getting up to $300 million I'm not that surprised to hear these games struggled to make their money back. They could be working with the most popular IPs and still lose money because they didn't budget appropriately for it.
The reset (crash) might be good for gaming industry.
As for what you said towards the end I look towards smaller (not necessary indie games) with lower asking price day one:
- a plague tale - both games were like 40$ if I remember correctly
- Hellblade - 30$ (big financial success)
- HiFi Rush (30$)
- Pentiment (30$)
There is a lot to choose from. Big gaming companies need to diversify their portfolios
I might be misremembering, but I read an article from the 2000's along the lines of "why make a $100 million blockbuster when you can make 100 $1 million horror movies?". And the answer was opportunity costs. A runaway hit blockbuster may only make 3-5 times its budget back while a hit horror movie can make 10-100 times its budge back. But that one blockbuster would still make more money with a modest return that a dozen runaway success horror movies. Blockbusters are also a safer investment as most blockbusters don't fail, while you need to make dozens, if not hundreds, of horror movies to get that once a generation mega hit. But I can't think of a single mega hit horror movie that wasn't immediately turned into a franchise and milked for every last cent the fans will tolerate. Not to mention that blockbusters have a tendency to suck the air out of the room, or the dollars out of the audience. "Barbenhimer" was such a novelty because hugely anticipated movies haven't been released on the same weekend like that in decades.
I'm not going to pretend I actually understand the economics here. But multiple industries have been following this same trajectory towards consolidation and monopolization. Sure, it could lead to a crash like when the studio system imploded, but we are living in a business landscape that has already learned those lessons. As long as the imperative is to make more money than you spent, this pattern will keep happening.
The real problem is they consolidated to hold steady incomes and instead are getting shut down to save a buck leaving most IP locked in increasingly tightened purse strings with little corporate interest in developing them, we aren't headed towards a crash, we're headed towards artificial scarcity.
AAA games could could saved if every industry was employee owned. Not Public, not bowing to the whim of people whose only purpose is to skim profits off the top.
BG3 and Dragon Age has spoiled me, i doubt ill find another game that captures me like that for quite a while
Divinity Original Sin 2 might be up your alley.
@@OneRandomVictorynah, the characters and plot are the pull of DA and BG3. Divinity doesn't really have the same vibe. Good game though.