And Counter-Strike, and Marvel Rivals, and PUBG, and Crimson Desert, and Baldur’s Gate 3, and Elden Ring, and (somehow) Delta Force. I don’t think you can say it’s only indie games doing so.

Not quite. There aren’t thousands of releases per year that would qualify as AAA. In fact, since they take so much longer to make, there are very few of them in a given year anymore.

This thread is about AAA game budgets, not indie budgets. Even Stardew Valley took 4 years of living off of his partner’s generosity while he earned no income. It paid off, but that’s the exception to the rule.

I’m not a tax expert, but I think the taxes are applied after gross. Taxes on money coming in, not going out. So that ~$120k is what the company spends, but it’s not what the employee sees.

Halve the employees and double the salary, and you’ll be closer. Few people on a team will gross $120k, but benefits are part of that cost too.

As far as I know from this evidence you brought, he has never made shit up, because the Switch Pro was happening, and then minds were changed before it was announced. The Switch 2 can both be one of the fastest-selling consoles ever and have less demand than they initially budgeted for. Something Nintendo has been doing with the Switch 2 that’s unprecedented with a home console launch, is that they’re trying really hard to meet launch demand rather than being more conservative with their production lines. It’s not surprising to me then that the Switch 2 only lags behind the Game Boy Advance, because from what I know of the history of that one is that the GBA’s design was settled shortly after the launch of the Game Boy Color, and they only postponed its launch because the GBC was still going strong.

All the investment in game development right now is going to where labor is cheapest, which I’ll bet does not include the UK. You’ve probably noticed more rising stars in recent years out of South Korea, China, Japan, and some EU territories. The reason a state might want to fund the arts is because that’s how its own culture spreads on the world stage.

I think I’m going to be picking up Screamer when it has its proper launch on Thursday. I’ve waited so long for a racing game like this to come out again. The only one I’ve had in the past 20 years was Trail Out. The Steam forums for this one are full of people asking who’s going to pay $60 for this when they can buy Forza Horizon, and the answer is me; I have no interest in Forza Horizon, but this is a racing game that speaks to people who don’t care at all about real world racing. Let me check people off the road. Make it over the top. Don’t bother with an open world. Screamer seems to be checking all of the boxes of what’s important for me in a racing game.

Yeah, the 3.5-based systems seem to all have a lot of the same quirks, but I’m having a good time.

Gotcha, that’s disappointing. I assumed it was just buy it and keep it, not free to play.

Where does it say there’s going to be a subscription fee?

lol, well, I think a business would look at those small potatoes and say that it isn’t worth burning your reputation on. Now Star Wars on the other hand…

Owlcat has worked on Pathfinder and Warhammer 40k lately, and fans of those properties seem to be fond of Owlcat’s work on those CRPGs. I’m playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker now, and it’s quality stuff, but I don’t have any existing familiarity with Pathfinder. I expect they’re doing an Expanse game because A) they believe they can make “the next Mass Effect” now that they’ve got smaller projects under their belt, and B) they’re probably fans of The Expanse.

Rue Valley is a game they published, not developed.

This studio doesn’t have a reputation of milking an IP for a cash grab. And if you were going to do that, The Expanse isn’t big enough for that to be a very lucrative idea.

Well, hopefully this inspires more devs to “steer into the skid”, so to speak. Stop fighting what your customers are showing you they want.

Well, this is fascinating. I don’t think anyone’s done anything like this before with an MMO, have they? The thing is, in MMO form, the incentive is to keep you grinding so you keep paying a subscription. Without that incentive, I’d want to have a knob I can turn to adjust the grind, like I can in V Rising server settings. It’s cool that this retains some amount of multiplayer, too.

EDIT: Seemingly still via a subscription, so that makes this far less interesting.

There weren’t all that many more off-the-shelf engines back then, and as that eroded, it all quite visibly gave way to Unreal. Making your own engine during the 7th gen (over 13 years ago now) was very clearly a way to avoid paying Epic for Unreal, because there already wasn’t much competition at that time.

Unreal was the defacto engine for large scale games long before Fortnite.

Just because the Switch Pro didn’t come to pass doesn’t mean they weren’t working on one or planning one. He wasn’t the only one reporting that.

I’m rooting for the demise of what Nintendo currently is, but this isn’t so much of a story. They had lofty projections for sales and manufacturing to make sure that they could meet demand, they’ve met that demand, and it’s high. This is revising one quarter’s production down from 6M to 4M. It’s still doing well for them.

It can be overused, but that one’s useful for avoiding a thousand different “are you sure?” prompts.