As per the article, the signs we’re seeing are that the market size has stopped growing, which is why something else has to give. Klima hopes that prices will be permitted to increase post GTA6 (I certainly don’t think so), but the situation is bleak for the industry if they can’t. Mathematically, executive bonuses are just not moving the needle, but cost of living in certain parts of the world is.
Pragmata is in the ballpark of what a Series X or PS5 can do, with that level of performance. The best benchmark might be 007 First Light, and even then, it smells suspiciously like they cut content that they couldn’t get running well. The biggest bottleneck at that level of fidelity and performance is the development cost, which is why so few games can output what these games are doing, and it’s a contributing factor for why so few of us feel like we need a PS6.
Oh my god, what a pull, lol. “Since I haven’t heard any disturbance, I assume, while they’re listening, they’re PC gamers.”
In the last decade or so, this became more common so that they didn’t have to make 3 SKUs of the same collector’s edition and could also sell these items to digital purchasers. But in this case, there is no disc, so how hard could it be to ship these things with a download code for your $400?
Not only is this nonsense for the obvious reasons, but it’s the kind of nonsense that someone who has no idea how game development works would state without ever bothering to check how it actually works.
Honestly, if they are hiring people back, I don’t know how you sustain them with such reduced revenue. It sounds more like false hope to me.
Marathon did not hit, and they laid off half the studio.
Without a crystal ball, I can put about 99% confidence in a future where Bungie continues to charge for microtransactions like they always have, and they won’t take a route like No Man’s Sky of being a single purchase. With a crystal ball, I could give you 100% confidence.
There was a car interstitial that was throwaway, but the parts I was talking about were one where you chased a plane and one where you ran a garbage truck through an alley like a tank, both of which are pretty on-brand.
Wow, I didn’t know that. Those sections are just supposed to be moments that feel cool and stitch together other parts of the game, so they help pacing, but that game’s use of vehicles in general was pretty underwhelming.
Like how they build up the entire game that you get to use this really fancy car in Q branch, and then it’s only used for a glorified turret sequence. It smelled a whole lot like the scene they wanted to make wouldn’t run well and had to be cut.
It wasn’t even that difficult! That meme had been circulating for years, but it only took me like three tries.
Destiny was running the studio into the ground regardless of Marathon. Behind the scenes reporting says it had been a while since Destiny turned a profit, and by the time The Final Shape came out, the damage was already done. The reason they’re not continuing with it is that it just burns through money.
They’re reworking it into something else now in an attempt to salvage it, but for me personally, unless that involves being able to host the server myself, I’m not giving it the time of day.
How is this being written as some sort of success story?
Because this is still somehow better than what Sony is doing, as they have no plan for backward compatibility with your disc games. I agree that people portraying this as a success story are very shortsighted.
The other gaming-related thing he’s famous for is being responsible for Sneak King, the official Burger King Xbox 360 stealth game about sneaking around as the Burger King macot to feed people Whoppers or something.
And that will help as well, but wherever you spend your money, or don’t spend it, is effective. People just like to ignore the times that it’s visibly caused change and focus on the ones where they can’t see it or it hasn’t happened yet.
I already outlined two things you could do instead. Casually overheard on the subway, I know the average Joe who just plays NBA 2K is becoming more and more aware of his other options as the one he liked grows to be worse in some way, whether his line in the sand is physical media or not.
Yes, Netflix got worse; buy some Blu Rays instead…you might find that they’re higher quality video than what Netflix has been sending you anyway, and you can get them pretty cheap on sale. PlayStation got worse; play your games somewhere else, even old or low spec ones that run on machines you already have or that you can afford. You won’t be the only one in this predicament, and game developers are going to have to start targeting a lower spec to survive. These companies get you used to a thing and either cut benefits or raise prices or both, but they’re not essential to your survival or happiness, and there are other things you can do in response.
And even if it was, we’re long past the point of voting with your wallet anymore in this age of tech oligopolies.
Respectfully, the hell we are. Telling yourself there’s nothing we can do about it perpetuates the cycle. For one thing, you could probably stick to just the physical media that already exists and never run out of great video games to play, and besides that, depending on what’s important to you, there’s DRM-free games.
They’re quite different, but I think the more you try to adhere to classic Tomb Raider, the more visceral distaste you’ll get from people about how poorly those old games controlled. The puzzles in that reboot trilogy, though they often could have benefited from multiple additional steps to make them more interesting, were better than anything in Uncharted, since Uncharted loved to just give you the answer out of a magic notebook rather than let you solve things yourself. The second and third games in that TR trilogy were better about this than the 2013 game. The Legends era of Tomb Raider didn’t have much in the way of high highs, but there were definitely very low lows, and you end up with RPG skill trees in the reboot trilogy so that you can both A) decide how much optional content you want to do but also B) have a tangible incentive to do it, unlike what SkillUp pointed out in Wolverine’s progression elements in how those systems can be thoughtless.
As for chasing trends, they did a bit, but it became a real ouroboros when Uncharted 4 added a mechanic or two from the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy into its kit, and at least if TR was going to rip off some stuff from Uncharted, the combat in those three games was the best across either franchise.
I’d also recommend that recent Indiana Jones game, if you haven’t played it, speaking of ouroboros.
They’re not meaningless, but at a macro level, there are much bigger fish to fry. I know it’s ridiculous to see one person make tens of millions of dollars, but most of that is stock, and that person is typically responsible for multiple large teams. Even if it was all cash, a $10M bonus would instead pay for about 80 people in the US for one year, and it’s quite typical for a AAA game to have teams of hundreds. Meanwhile, your money will go twice as far in Asia or parts of Europe.
From what we’ve seen from other recent efforts to raise game prices, I don’t think we’re about to see one after Grand Theft Auto. The market expanded for years, in part, because prices rose so slowly relative to inflation. Sure, they found tens of thousands of people willing to pay $70 for an N64 game, but you might get hundreds of thousands willing to pay $40 for the equivalent game today. I think raising the price further at this point is going to end up cutting out the customer that this market expanded to, which is why prices aren’t going to go up, generally.
But then that’s still very bad news for the industry. One of the ways studios will survive in high cost of living areas is to scope their games down, but that’s going to make it tougher to compete with low cost of living areas and will result in job losses any way you slice it.