Is it possible, even a little bit, that people just have a different opinion than you about a video game? Surely if there was flagrant bribery happening, someone would have receipts and a conscience that compelled them to share it.

Reviewers get early copies so that there’s a review score available in time for people to buy it.

But that’s what I mean by how quickly you can accumulate wealth at a quarter million per year. Of course something could go wrong early in your career, but the average case is far better than that. Could I stop working and live comfortably? For a while. We’d have a lot of runway, far better than a 6-month emergency fund. Given a bit more time and saving into index funds, that can become indefinite, and that’s on our far-lower salaries than Schreier lists.

The combined income of my wife and I comes in under one of the figures he gave, and with a 2 BR apartment in NYC, we are very, very comfortable, even after splurging the past few years on a far nicer location for an extra $1k/month in rent. The rest of what you describe is what I would call lifestyle inflation, and I’m not living the life of a pauper because I don’t own a car; if anything, that’s extraordinarily wasteful around here, and it’s something that less than half of this city even bothers to do.

What he doesn’t explain that would actually be helpful is why teams are so big.

Can you not see the difference in money on the screen between Halo 1 and Destiny 2? One person can make Halo’s relatively simple models, complete with nutcracker-esque mouth syncing, much faster than you can make the likes of Destiny’s quest givers with far more complexity to them. So if you want to make more of those kinds of NPCs, you need more people making them. The same goes for any other discipline involved in making a game.

Like what are all the departments that work on AAA titles, what do they do, how many people on staff relative to other departments, what does a 3D modeler make vs. a gameplay programmer?

That all comes out in the average cost per employee, which is the same ballpark math the publishers are using to estimate, and he says that in this video.

Yeah, it’s a reboot. I just played through the original recently, and I can see the vision for how they’re expanding on a lot of the promises of that first game. There’s a really good chance they do justice by it.

There are for sure tiers of how rich you can be. But when you’re beyond the point of financial stress and can at any time stop working for the rest of your life and not worry about making ends meet, I think most of us would call that rich. If you’re pulling in a quarter million per year, even in an expensive city, the slightest bit of sense with your money allows you to accumulate wealth so quickly that I think you qualify.

It’s not that long of a video, and he gets to the answer fairly quickly, then outlines examples using back of the napkin math. (average cost per developer per month) * (months of development) = cost of game. And then it’s the difference between real world numbers for those in 2015 and today. Average salaries have gone up, especially in major cities in the US, as have staff sizes to make AAA games, as has time needed to develop substantially larger games than we typically made in 2015, and that number balloons very quickly.

I’m not sure why so many people are down voting this. The only part I took issue with was what kind of salary Schreier said would make one rich versus middle class in an expensive city. I live in an expensive city, I don’t make anywhere near as much as some of the high salaries he cites, and those who do around me are certainly rich.

Yeah, that’s pretty common. That type of demo was what Perfect Dark was, and it was obvious. You learn to spot one from the other, and I have a hard time explaining why Fable’s comes off as real, but at least part of it is its proximity to release and how much of what they showed was left to your imagination.

Unlike something like Perfect Dark, this game seems far closer to being done, and what they showed of it was really impressive. Plus, if you thought shutting down Tango Gameworks was stupid, nothing would sink Xbox…sorry, XBOX…faster than shutting down this studio, since they’re the goose that lays the golden eggs known as Forza Horizon.

Yeah, but they’ve had a really high hit rate, and this could interfere with that.

Play Double Exposure first, as this is a direct continuation of that.

Yup. The Max stories have been the best ones. The character writing remains strong in this one after Double Exposure, but the game loses track of some of its own time travel rules, and the actions that determine your ending could have been telegraphed better.

XBox’s new CEO is on a goodwill-gathering streak right now. Brought down the price of game pass and seems to want to bring people back to the brand proper

Oh, you sweet summer child.

You do you. The Ally is a better value today. Good spot; pass it on until they sell out, because it currently looks like Best Buy is pricing it as a thing that’s in their inventory and not selling. I would recommend that you don’t trust that Xbox is going to right the wrongs of Game Pass price increases just because the removal of Call of Duty brought it down to still-higher-levels-than-it-was-in-the-very-recent-past. And definitely don’t trust lip service to things the new boss is “thinking about” and “treating seriously”. In a world where the next Xbox is definitely for sure just a PC that allows you to buy games from any store you like, and the Ally is that too, they’re not subsidizing hardware. Neither is Valve, hence the price hike.

They will jack up their prices if they sell through their stock and decide that that demand will stick around long enough to justify another batch of them at higher prices. As it stands today, it is doing your fellow Lemming a solid to point out the current price discrepancy in favor of the Ally. When both of those devices are priced for stable market conditions, my recommendation leans heavily toward Steam Deck, but we are not currently in stable market conditions.

Playing on the go is all I do with mine. Beats the hell out of a laptop.

Set your expectations accordingly. ROG Ally is only cheaper until they have to build more with today’s component prices (if they choose to). And it’s not like Microsoft executives don’t have yachts or sell kids gambling boxes.

I mean…how big is that backlog and how much are you playing on the go? There’s been no better device for handheld gaming, IMO, though I can see why it isn’t tempting at that price.

They are, but they’re not beloved for it. The companies still selling to consumers now have less competition for fewer available parts, which is why prices are higher.