Not so much covered in this article, but the vast majority of the spending is in paying more developers, and executive pay, which is largely in stock, isn’t a large contributing factor. Your favorite game from 25 years ago was probably made by 30 people in 18 months, and now the equivalent level of production value today is made by somewhere between 300 and 1500 people over a longer stretch of time.
It’s broken down by scope of the project, into four main buckets, seemingly not by country.
You’re not playing 500 games per year. Realistically, you’re playing a dozen or so if you’re a real enthusiast. Focus on the ones you like, support them with your time and money, and the market makes more of them. There are so many good games coming out in a year that I can’t keep up with them; I’ve got a spreadsheet and something resembling an Agile planning methodology to get through them more efficiently, and I still don’t have a chance of playing everything that looks good. Hardly any of those have any microtransactions (I definitely don’t buy them in the ones that do), and none of them waste my time.
I mean, funny enough, I head to a pub to play board games every other week, including tonight. I was more referring to suburbia and sprawl destroying “third places”, as well as younger folks’ tendency to drink less. It’s possible that online gaming expanded our ability to choose our social circle more than simple geography used to dictate.
There’s a lot more to what destroyed hanging out in the pub than scheduling, but yes, the games themselves have a lot of value in the socializing part of the equation.
They are not “most games”. They might be most games you’re aware of, because those games spend the most money on marketing. The type of game you want is downright abundant, and even some of the games you’re ranting about have more substance than you give them credit for, though they may not be your cup of tea.
From last year, check out Split Fiction, The Alters, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (it has a season pass, but you can take it or leave it), Dispatch, or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. From this year, I can recommend Escape from Ever After first-hand, and I’ve got plenty on my radar that I hear good things about.
Oh, so, so many differences. This is my wheelhouse. I doubt you’d see too much in common between Invincible VS and Street Fighter 6.
I definitely value my eyes more than you do.
They improved their support ticket throughput by orders of magnitude by automating a lot of it already. There are lots of versions of automation, too, like collecting information about the user’s problem before you even get to a human.
My guess, and it’s a personal pet peeve of mine, is that it’s the term that people use to refer to anything that isn’t live service. In this case in particular, it’s a perfect example of how stupid it is for that to be the term we use for that. While both can be played with only one player (so can Fortnite), they were both marketed as games that you would be playing primarily multiplayer.
The official PS blog says the disc version of the PS5 is $649 and discless is $599. It’s currently on sale on Amazon, but the regular list price for a PS5 with disc drive there is $649.
If you’re a Batman: Arkham combat sicko like me, and you’ve been waiting for an imitator to come along and do it right again, Dead as Disco might be the real deal in a way that the likes of Spider-Man are not.
Sounds like you asked him right after he finished the Tanker chapter but before “Iroquois Pliskin” showed up on the Big Shell.
100%
As for the ending, it was already getting pretty postmodern, so I doubt it would have been substantially different otherwise.
The layoffs across the games industry over the last two years have been widely framed as a cost correction.
They are. Maybe you were fortunate enough for your 1200-person company to sustain itself on one big hit, but an economic downturn shrinks your audience considerably and makes it tougher for you to break even, and that’s assuming the quality of your game and marketing are just as good as your last hit.
I saw this firsthand while leading the external production team during the development of Immortals of Aveum. The project makes a useful case study precisely because it was ambitious and structurally complex: one of the first major titles built on Unreal Engine 5, with multiple external teams contributing across characters, creatures, weapons, and first-person gameplay assets in a multi-vendor AAA environment.
Maybe the problem was that a brand new team made something so ambitious on their first go?
The question is no longer whether external development is essential. It’s whether the industry is willing to treat production continuity as infrastructure — or continue optimizing for short-term cost while the capability that made AAA possible quietly fragments.
Maybe we ought to question whether AAA as the author knows it is really necessary. We can get excellent production value out of small teams that reduces the risk of not breaking even, and Unreal 5 is pretty damn good at enabling that. There’s an enormous success like Clair Obscur, but then there’s also a more modest success like The Alters or The Thaumaturge. I find it interesting that, despite their name and some pretty undeniable successes, a US studio like Supergiant Games can still measure their workforce in the dozens, not hundreds. I’ll bet they’re pretty good at retaining that talent.
And then in 2019 Kojima would make a game about a guy delivering Amazon packages to people hunkered down and social distancing amidst the imminent threat of death.
In middle school, in homeroom, I sat behind a guy who could not contain his excitement for MGS2. It was the first week or so of school. Every day it was a countdown to when he could play the game. “One more day, man. One more day until Metal Gear Solid 2.” So the next day, I asked him, “So how is it?” He was shellshocked. “Snake died, man.” Excitement was gone. His day at school was ruined. I didn’t check in with him later, but presumably, a 7th grader couldn’t make heads or tails of the ending of that game, if he made it that far. I didn’t play it myself until a few years later, and it was one of the most talked-about endings in all of video games, because it was so barely comprehensible, at best.
If you played it at launch though, it did have a rough time scaling up to PC hardware that was better than consoles. It was pretty infamous for that back then.
I was a Goldlewis main for a while too. I hope you can get in on zoners without White Wild Assault now.
Certain engines form certain reputations, but those people need to see enough counter examples to realize that the engine is just a contributing factor to what the resulting game is. Unity had “a look” for years, because so many devs used the default lighting, but then you realize that stuff like Cuphead, Hollow Knight, and Subnautica all run on Unity, and that reputation fades.
This is also survivorship bias. Plenty of companies would love to support their game post launch and make this much money, but they go under trying to follow the same playbook; even the ones that were successful doing so before.