archive.is link
Designers of last year’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 used the processing power of the PlayStation 5 so Peter Parker’s outfits would be rendered with realistic textures and skyscraper windows could reflect rays of sunlight.
That level of detail did not come cheap.
Insomniac Games, which is owned by Sony, spent about $300 million to develop Spider-Man 2, according to leaked documents, more than triple the budget of the first game in the series, which was released five years earlier. Chasing Hollywood realism requires Hollywood budgets, and even though Spider-Man 2 sold more than 11 million copies, several members of Insomniac lost their jobs when Sony announced 900 layoffs in February.
Cinematic games are getting so expensive and time-consuming to make that the video game industry has started to acknowledge that investing in graphics is providing diminished financial returns.
It was clear this year, however, that the live service strategy carries its own risks. Warner Bros. Discovery took a $200 million loss on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, according to Bloomberg. Sony closed the studio behind Concord, its attempt to compete with team-based shooters like Overwatch and Apex Legends, one month after the game released to a minuscule player base.
“We have a market that has been in growth mode for decades,” Ball said. “Now we are in a mature market where instead of making bets on growth, companies need to try and steal shares from each other.”
Ismail is worried that major studios are in a tight spot where traditional games have become too expensive but live service games have become too risky. He pointed to recent games that had both jaw-dropping realism — Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (individual pebbles of gravel cast shadows) and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II (rays of sunlight flicker through the trees) — and lackluster sales.
Many people (including me) consider the best game of 2024 to be Balatro.
Balatro. A game made by one guy who legitimately didn't even think anyone other than his friends and family would buy it.
AAA studios do not understand what people enjoy at all.
Balatro is 1) a fluke, an exception, a rarity and 2) not something big studios could even possibly replicate. What would be the point of a big studio trying to make a game that one developer can pull off? The closest the likes of Ubisoft in particular are getting to games like Baltro are their Indie-esque side projects that parts of their bigger studios engage in on the side, like Valiant Hearts. Those can never be enough to finance a big operation though.
...and why not?
...money?
Because Balatro is a single developer's vision realized without compromise, without producers, writers, tech people, art directors, etc. all meddling with the production in the usual "design by committee" approach that large studios are using. This kind of game can only exist as a solo or very small team project.
The mantra of big studios and publishers is to spend lots of money to make lots of money. Balatro sold a mere 3.5 million copies over the course of a year, for a price of $14. That's just $34.3 million taking Steam's 30% cut into account. Huge money for a solo dev (especially given that the budget was just $125,000), but both the sales figure and the sales revenue are in serious flop territory by big studio standards. Star Wars outlaws underperformed at 5.5 million copies sold, since it cost hundreds of millions to develop and market, including having the highest marketing budget of any game ever made. To put this into perspective, this means they spent significantly more than $150 million (the usual figure for a top of the line AAA game these days) on marketing alone.
You can not generate the kind of money that large publishers and studios need to survive with little Indie games.
They don't have to use that.
That's just very clearly wrong.
Wrong again. If anything, only large publishers can lose the kinds of money that they sometimes do.
You're missing my point and arguing against a strawman here. All I'm arguing is that the things AAA studios focus on (like hyper-realism) are not the things that make a game fun, and AAA studios sound be putting fun as the focus.
I'm not arguing against a strawman, but against someone who might want to look into this topic a bit more closely. Balatro sold two million copies less than Star Wars Outlaws. People obviously want flashy spectacle more than tight mechanics - it's just that even those higher sales figures weren't enough to compensate for the bloated development budgets. That's the real lesson. The old method of spending more and more money to make more and more money isn't quite working anymore - not that people don't want pretty graphics anymore (because they still do want those more than basic Indie art).
Yeah you're still not even contradicting what I'm saying, you just think you are. You're arguing against positions I don't hold lmao.