My wife spent about $130 for a year subscription to a service that she figured would always have her favorite show on it, because they own that show. Then like 10 seasons of it left for an exclusivity deal on another service. This was a contributing factor to pushing me into self hosting. Some of it is saving money, but some of it is also making sure you actually got what you paid for.
Yacht Club suffered layoffs trying to put a bow on that $20 game, and they were already way smaller than Warhorse making a much smaller game.
It’s natural, but it’s going to be painful, and even though Klima benefits from the economic shift, he’s still concerned about it. I imagine a lot of institutional knowledge he acquired came from parts of the world where those jobs are rapidly disappearing.
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.
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.
Oh, nice. Monkey Island is definitely a gap in my gaming experience, but I’m not sure I have much patience for adventure game moon logic.