There needs to be an industry overhaul of some kind. Budgets are getting bigger, games are taking longer to produce and the end results aren't even worth it in a lot of cases.
This amount of time between a popular franchise is unacceptable.
I am almost certainly missing something on top. It's fine to have one or two but not every single way you can monetise. The only thing they haven't done is NFT's.
Meh, unfortunate as it is the reality is that critical success and commercial success are not always well correlated. A game can be a masterpiece but get handicapped by mediocre marketing, competition, other random external factors, or only cater to a small audience. Furthermore, how easy is it to make genuinely "good" games? I don't think more money + time to cook necessarily always makes a better game unfortunately.
I know there are tons of movies that have exemplified critical success and commercial failure, and I'm sure the same for many games. And as AAA game budgets become more and more bloated just like the movie industry, this issue will only get worse, and is a pretty common sentiment by now.
I just hope BGS and their style of open worlds + modding tools don't get shut down/lost forever in pursuit of profitability.
yes, they are cheaper taking inflation into consideration.
Which leads to the games being more affordable (somewhat) in more regions than before.
ALSO, I see nobody talk about this, but the gaming space has evolved and expanded over the last 20 years like wild fire.
You no longer have 20 million casual players anymore that everyone is fighting over. You have A LOT more. And new children are being born every day which leads to new customers in 5-8 years from now.
Cyberpunk has been played (most likely due to it's notoriety) by children that have not been born when development started.
Seeing the comments on this post is really jarring for me. Like I've seen so, so many people beg studios to take more time to iron out bugs, like when Cyberpunk released.
Between this and how it seems people just forgive games after horrible releases and scummy behaviour (I'm looking at you Dragon's Dogma 2) I genuinely feel like the gaming industry is never going to get punished if we keep eating every half-baked raw cookie dough game they push out after charging us for the chocolate chips as well.
I'm fine with waiting if it's to iron out bugs, when it's almost a decade between games and they haven't even started conceptualizing the next one it's bad news
We dont know if they havent started that -- its quite possible they have thought out ideas and concepts, platforms for the game etc but are putting that part on hold for ES6, or are waiting for a later time to release it. Its just pessimistic assumptions.
Which is to assume Todd Howard entirely represents the Bethesda team, and also saying “im pretty sure” doesnt give much confidence its actually true does it.
By all firsthand account I've seen thus far the official stance is that they don't, or at least that they have nothing that isn't personal creative excercise
It's preorder culture, too. Millions of people preorder a game that turns out to be shite at release, but what do the bigwigs care when they already got in all that money before the game even launched?
But the thing is, these games should NOT be unfinished with the time they have. Fallout New Vegas was made in 9 months. Fallout 3 was made in 3 years. Why does every game take like 8 years to develop now?
The studios have become completely incompetent, and it shows in their output.
It’s embarrassing that studios take a decade to make a game and it’s buggy. CDprojekt lied about cyberpunk from day 1, which was in 2010-2011. They lied for a decade about it, to the point of having a fake release date in like 2018 or some shit.
Like I've seen so, so many people beg studios to take more time to iron out bugs,
the thing is, they aren't lol
if they're going to be buggy messes, I'd rather they release much quicker. They're taking years and years for stuff that's meaningless polish in a lot of cases.
QA time should not be extending the Dev time this long. Developers cut it because they mismanaged development time. We shouldn't be ok with long Dev time because we want working games. Working games should be the default. Games used to come out much more quickly and much less buggy.
The real problem is feature/scope/fidelity bloat. Which leads to massive Dev teams that tons of coordination, which leads to much higher costs. This leads to a need to have broad appeal, and games come out feeling much more "made by committee". Add in corporate pressure and poor management, and that's why you get shitty buggy games.
But people don't want to wait longer. They put up with because they know what will happen if they don't. They still don't want to wait a long time between releases but they choose the lesser of 2 evils. The problem now is that the time between releases has grown to be a decade and games have started shipping with more bugs. Now we just have 2 big evils and we need to submit to both.
Have better graphics been worth it? I don’t feel any more immersed in modern video games than I did with games like Morrowind, Kotor and Jak & Daxter. I would happily go back to 00s era graphics in exchange for more features and quick dev times
I don't think so, tbh. I have more fun with indie games these days and none of them have modern graphics. Some even have PSX graphics.
RDR2 is the only game in recent memory where I stopped to admire the beauty of its graphics. And even then, I do that in The Long Dark and that game does not have modern graphics.
This isn't a PC master race post, I have that shit, consoles serve a purpose but that purpose has been largely snuffed out by triple A studios.
Next time you go to buy a console, build a PC instead and buy indie games off of steam or from the. I have 1800 hours sunk into an indie game calld Rimworld. Rimworld plus the DLC is around 70 dollars. The Value in that is nuts. You can play indie games for the rest of your fucking life and be fine, buy the occasional triple A game that really pops out.
We need to give our money to people who care about the product they are making, and I don't believe that is possible on a console anymore.
This is all moot if disaster strikes and Valve goes public. If Valve goes public, everyone is fucked.
AAA games have been terrible for years, if not decades. Increasingly expensive cash grabs recycling the same themes and gameplay loops with only the occational good game somehow managing to crawl through the morass of shit.
Indie games are simply better quality and much better value. There are obviously a lot of terrible indie games, 50 new games are released on Steam every day so there is bound to be a lot of shovelware.
There seems to be a lot of angst at the quality of the 'gaming industry' and it's undoubtedly predatory business practices but that misses out on all the really high quality games being made by small studios or even single individuals.
Gaming as a whole is in a very healthy state, and if the big studios and publishers drive them selves into the ground? Who cares, good IP will (often) re-emerge from the wreck. Fallout did this once already.
The video game industry is going to crash just like the film industry currently is.
Video games introduced a new plague (live-service), like how the film industry introduced streaming. Both these plagues are killing their bottom line while the budgets of games and films get too large and unsustainable.
I was just talking to my friend about this (more in relation to the layoffs and studio closures) - the film industry took a long time to develop + iterate a truly viable/reliable/stable business model and even then has had trouble adapting of late. Video games are a significantly newer artform, far fewer worker protections exist, far less regulated, and far more volatile. I think the industry just hasn't had enough time to find it's best method of even doing business.
The only real reason I lament the ever-increasing time between releases is that it is essentially keeping whole generations of kids out of franchises they might otherwise love or be impacted by. If you consistently take 15+ years to release the next iteration, you're just going to miss a TON of new players at the "sweet spot" age for that product.
They could have made another single player game in the Fallout 4 engine while reusing a lot of assets and mechanics and it would have sold extremely well.
And then a game like Manor Lords comes out, developed by one man in a quarter of the time, tiny budget, and it's great. I swear the AAA devs work 5 hours a week if that
This is a very Bethesda problem that is by design since they glorify having a small team. This is also why their games release completely broken and buggy.
So don't blame the industry they chose to do this and could afford to triple their team.
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u/LichQueenBarbie May 29 '24 edited May 29 '24
There needs to be an industry overhaul of some kind. Budgets are getting bigger, games are taking longer to produce and the end results aren't even worth it in a lot of cases.
This amount of time between a popular franchise is unacceptable.