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It’s because these companies keep driving up production costs on their own. Their next game has to top their last. At what point do we say that graphics are good enough? Who needs these insane amount of details? Why does a game absolutely need to be 100+GB in size? Is Bloodborne not visually appealing enough? What about God of War (2018)?
Can we not find a “good enough” acceptable baseline and just work with that? This infinite growth is annoying as both a developer and a player. Like okay, ooooh, you can render each individual hair on someone’s head and they each have their own physics. Congratulations. How’s the story for the game? Ah, broken to the point of unplayable, but you pinky swear a patch is coming.
i want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and i’m not kidding
Fuck yeah. Give me passion projects made by people having a great time any day of the week.
was this quote originally by Jim Sterling or someone else?
thank
This infinite growth is annoying as both a developer and a player.
wait until you find out what the world economy is built on…
I still play Dishonored every year. Those are not realistic graphics in the slightest, but it still holds up pretty well. Why? Style. I would 100% take a “lower” graphics game with style than a 100GB game with exquisitely modeled sandwiches.
Stylistic games also age better than realistic games in my opinion. Look at other 2012 games like Mass Effect, Far Cry 3, and Borderlands. Mass Effect and Far Cry went more realistic, and I think they suffered a bit for it in the long run.
Not saying Dishonored didn’t age tho. It does have that 2012 feel, lol.
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Borderlands even looks great on potato settings, , graphics are nice and all but being able to tell what I’m looking at is more important and sometimes that said gets lost in the highest graphics range.
No offense but 100gb really isn’t that big in the year 2023… I keep seeing people complain about this and I just don’t get it. 5-7 years ago? Sure. That was unusual. Now? Nah.
I mean 4k HDR Remux files are often upwards of 80gb, and that’s just a 2-3 hour movie. Games can have hundreds of hours of content and also have high quality textures/HDR/HQ Audio/etc. Is it really that surprising that a bunch of games are 100+ gigs?
Let’s say you buy an Xbox Series S. At the current going rate of games, you can fit four, maybe five games on the thing, assuming you don’t play older or indie titles. You can buy an external USB hard drive, sure, but you can’t play games off it. You’d have to awkwardly shuffle games around any time you wanted to play something else. Wanna expand it with storage that can actually be played off of? You need to pay the same cost as the console for proprietary storage.
It’s different on PC and PS5 since you can upgrade storage relatively easily but even then, a 1TB NVMe disk can hold a maximum of 10 games at today’s storage requirements. Want something bigger? Get ready to shell out some serious cash.
Storage has not kept up with file size. And to be fair, 4k HDR Remux files are just as bad. You can’t tell me the average person can even tell the difference from a 1080p WebRip (a fraction of the size) and one of them. Not unless you’ve got the high end hardware to make use of it, and I highly doubt the average person is shelling out the $5000+ required for that to be a thing.
Are you questioning whether a typical person can tell the difference between 1080p SDR and 4k HDR? If so, yes. Anyone can tell.
Also it does not cost $5,000 to watch 4k HDR.
Nothing you said makes sense.
I hereby announce that I don’t have enough money, and I want more.
I’m sorry, we don’t acknowledge that query. It sounded like you said: “what’s wrong with the world”. Would you like lifelong, wistful depression or the psychopathy required for C-suite?
I’m already 50% of the time on my ship to the seven seas. Do they want me permanently at sea? Same goes with the media companies like Disney+, Netflix and Amazon. They push it any further, I’m pushing off to seas for good.
They *literally, figured out how to beat piracy. The unbeatable problem. And then they had to go and blow it with their greed.
Meh. Capcom games just became $0 for me, because I’ll swear an oath before you to pirate every one of their games, from here on out.
Inflation is a fact of life. Is a price that raises ever all it takes for you to decide to pirate? Did you do so when games increased from $50 to $60?
Nope. I only pirate when media companies can’t stop gorging themselves on billions of dollars in profit and shovelling shares and dollar bills down their greedy little throats.
It’s not that I don’t have the money, I’ve just had enough. When you had one of two streaming services and a Spotify and good prices on steam and whatnot, that worked.
Today we have preorders that eclipse 100 dollars, my streaming service bills are more than the cable bills they were supposed to be replacing, and now it’s just more more more. We want more more more
🖕
I say big budget games are too large in scope. Too much going on, too ambitious, too much emphasis on certain aspects that I feel developers value more than consumers. Not every game needs to be the biggest baddest game of the year blah blah blah.
Yeah. Every time someone comes up with “games are too cheap” I always point to the fact that the vast majority of AAA games have insane amount of bloat. If AAA devs were struggling to make a profit then a clear way to cut costs would be to streamline the product. If leveling is not vital, cut it. If randomized loot is not necessary, cut it. If horse balls shrinking/expanding with the weather is not necessary, cut it.
There are always ways to cut corners in a AAA games and if the cost was an issue they’d do it. But the fact that they don’t shows how little the actually struggle. So far Bethesda is the only company that is clearly cutting the corners of their AAA products.
So far Bethesda is the only company that is clearly cutting the corners of their AAA products.
Starfield is the sloppiest Bethasda game ever, cutting corners to save cost is not how I would describe its development at all.
I agree with what you are saying though. Spending 40% of the budget on voice acting and cinematographic dialog is extremely wasteful. As long as the gameplay is good and graphics are pretty gamers will like the product.
Is it really the sloppiest though?
I’d say its about on par with their past games. It’s clearly their game engine, modified to do space stuff.
If you come at it with the mindset that not every game has to get bigger and more expansive and have more and more realism/mechanics that don’t serve the core gameplay, it achieves it’s goal.
Not saying its game of the year material or anything, but if I was doing an employee review, I’d give it a meets expectations grade.
Starfield is by far their cleanest release. It’s honestly the first game I have played from them that hasn’t crashed in 100+ hours.
There are aspects I wish had received a bit more attention, sure. But to date, Skyrim and Fallout 4 both have stability mods that are basically requirements to reduce crashing.
And I’m saying this as somebody with near 2k hours in Skyrim. So I definitely enjoy that game.
I played Morrowind, Oblivion & Skyrim at release. Compared to Starfield they were far more polished to me. Yes crashes & the odd broken quest happened, but overall they were playable, people without an internet connection could buy the games in a shop & then finish them. Also Oblivion had the best graphics for an open world rpg when it came out, while also running pretty well on the shit tier GPUs of the time. In my mind, Starfield is not pretty on ultra, runs like shit on decent hardware even at relatively low settings and the list of broken things is endless.
I’m honestly not experiencing the same. I’m running on ultra with an RTX 3080 and rarely even see a stutter and the only consistent bug I see is just comical. When I sprint for a bit and enter a door, my companion will be sprinting into a wall for a bit.
I actually do find Starfield to be a pretty game, as well. They have learned better lighting strategies from previous games and the trees look much much better. I wish the facial and running animations were better, but that’s not so bad as to be too skewer the game.
As far as Oblivion having the best graphics of it’s time, sure. But 2006 basically every game that was going for good graphics achieved the best at release. That was a pivotal period for graphics in games.
Honestly, I’d rather have stellar voice acting and okay graphics (not good, just not bad enough to turn it off after it makes me dizzy) than the other way around. Graphics lose their appeal after a short while in-game.
Imagine if people could buy a background music only -subtitle dialog- edition of Baldur’s Gate 3 for €40. How would the sale distribution go? I think this is a rather interesting thought experiment, I would personally opt to buy the cheaper version for sure, even though I do know the voice acting in BG3 is a landmark in gaming.
I would definitely buy that. I usually keep my game volumes on low and click through the dialogue because I already read the subtitle, why wait around to finish having the line delivered verbally? (Interestingly enough I’ve never ever thought “hurry up, speak faster” in an in real life conversation, this impatience only exists in video games.) Because of the value of voice acting, but for me personally voice acting is just not a priority.
For real, I think it’s rather telling that there are people who exclusively play some triple a games for the mini games.
It’s also interesting seeing indie take larger and larger chunks from the triple a market. Remember when harvest moon and simcity were big corporate endeavors, now it’s indie titles like city skylines and stardew Valley.
I would like to see some smaller projects from triple a studios targeting genres other than open world action-rpg.
studios targeting genres other than open world action-rpg.
With the corporate culture that’s developed in the industry I don’t think anyone should want that. Indie has the small project space covered & they make far better games than EA or Activision ever could in those genres. Corporate sellouts cannot beat passion, but they can make games so large in scope that small studios just cannot compete with that.
Interestingly enough, if the games industry had kept the $60 price point that they fixed back ~2005 up with inflation, games would be costing around $95 today.
Capcom’s CEO salary is too high
I just double checked and I think I will continue my trend of but buying Capcom games. The few IPs I may have been interested in I can definitely live without.
It’s true, game prices today are the same as they have been for the past 40 years for AAA titles.
I can’t think of an industry which hasn’t had a price raise in decades.
Gaming had managed to get by on this thanks to increasing market volume as gaming became more mainstream in addition to extra revenue streams like micro transactions. But it’s hitting saturation now and won’t keep counteracting inflation forever
I’d gladly agree to pay more in exchange for a legally binding agreement that higher prices mean video games free of predatory monetization and reasonable pay and job security for the people making the games. But we both know that they have no intention of doing the right thing, no matter how high the box price. They’re already raking in record profits while laying off huge chunks of their workforce and giving the c-suite ever-increasing annual bonuses.
They’ve perpetuated the lie that microtransactions were a necessity and the $60 price was unsustainable for such a long time that people actually believe it. Now they want to increase the box price while keeping the predatory monetization, having their cake and eating it too.
Yes, but the market has grown significantly and the cost of production and distribution is very low, lower than the age of cartridges. The development is the only cost.
Lots of industries have had relative price drops over that time. Mainly electronics. An mp3 player used to be $200 minimum.
Prices definitely increased, over the last 20 years new AAA games price increased from 45-50 EUR to 70 EUR.
With inflation taken into account that would probably mean flat prices.
With the increase in the numbers of players, the spread of DLCs and micro transactions, I suspect revenue increased even with inflation taken into account.
Could it be the cost of creating game is rising faster than inflation? Or game studio just got more greedy?
When was the last time wages kept up with inflation? Games are entertainment. Money won’t be spent on entertainment when push comes to shove.
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What you said, but in video form https://youtu.be/VhWGQCzAtl8?si=Gj9AaniT3U46KlGF. And that came out 5 years ago. Even if we only kept up with inflation from when that video came out until now, videogames should cost $73
Game budgets are too big.
Honestly this is it.
AAA gaming does not equal good gaming, just bolted, expensive gaming.
Breaking news: Company wants more money.
I see what he’s saying, but the market says no.
Honestly, more product categories should do the same, imagine if Apple released a new phone for an extra $100, but everyone just said no.
They would focus on keeping the costs down and whinge about it like game manufacturers do right now, and it would be glorious
Yeah, it is interesting that with the exception of GPUs, PC parts like SSDs, hard drives, CPUs, and so on actually have felt like they haven’t increased in price in comparison to phones. If anything prices have dropped and capacities increased and speeds gotten faster for SSDs for example. Same with televisions and monitors where stuff like resolution and hz has seen improvements while being cheaper than in the past.
I literally sold the consoles I had and all my games with it because games became shittier each year.
Imagine having to pay 80+ dollars/euros for a game that isnt even the “finished” product.
I’d rather just save my money and spend it on things where I don’t get absolutely railed as a consumer.
At this point every game company would have to produce super solid, super polished games for like 4 years before they’d get my trust back.
Wanna know which game I last broke my “no pre-orders” rule for?
No Man’s Sky. The game that was a tech demo for the first year or so after release. It’s become a hell of a game since then, but it taught me a valuable lesson and I haven’t bought a game since then.
It’s kinda the natural progression of late stage hypercapitalism though. Used to be that you spent all your money up front, then your sales recouped your investment and hopefully generated you a profit. Once game companies figured out OTA patches they realized that they can push a lot of QA back until after release and use pre-orders and day 1 sales to fund it. Then with DLC they realized that they can sell the untested skeleton of a game up front and use presales and early sales to fund development. The natural progression seems to be the Star Citizen model, where you get huge chunks of your sales up front and use that to determine what you’ll develop and when (if ever) you’ll release it
Capcom has absolute authority to price its games however they see fit.
If they make choices that put them out of business, that’s on them.
He’s right. Free is a pretty low price for a game.
They can always charge 999999999999999999999999,- € for games. Keep the following rules in mind:
- Demand always exceeds supply to an absurd degree.
- Price elasticity doesn’t exist.
- The average willingness to pay for games is way above the 8,40 €, approaching infinity, contrary to the European displacement study on page 170 paragraph 4.
- 100 % of game pirates will buy games if they can’t pirate games, therefore DRM good.
Fuck around find out basic economic rules.
