From what I see, it’s a bit like Skyrim in space and, to be fair, Skyrim is a really good game, but it’s been 12 years. Bethesda has to relearn how to make other games.
I’m just amazed that, 6 months later, they haven’t fixed any of the skill related bugs, but “fixed” the visual effects of rejuvenation ~4 times (it’s listed that many times in the changelogs, anyway). That’s bad even for Bethesda standards
“One of the reasons for [microtransaction hell] is the rising cost of games’ development.”
NO!
Budgets… follow… revenue. Never the other way around. How much a publisher wants to spend on a game is a direct reflection of how much they expect to make. Games can go over budget. Games can under-perform. But these systems were not strapped on in desperation, due to some intrinsic rising cost in making… a game.
It has never been cheaper or easier to make a game. The video is explicitly about that, and it still fucks up this fundamental relationship. Companies keep pumping in more money because they expect more money. The brazen exploitation of sticking real-money fees into a fucking console game has let them expect a king’s ransom. Ban that and the budgets will dip right the fuck back down. Probably just by releasing games with only a year of development. Did you not include all the crazy stuff you wanted? Yeah, that’s art. Unused ideas go in the next game.
Even if you want high realism: build your fucking tools. “Procedural generation” doesn’t mean randomness, it means rules do work for you. Why are cloth and paint and dirt still enormous hand-twiddled images? What is that Quake engine bullshit? Generating wood grain as-you-need-it was in the first Alone In The Dark, with literally dozens of polygons onscreen. Your game should not have a 20 GB lump of wasted human effort, just to make players go “yep, that’s wood.”
Artists should be defining a style and picking examples. Yeah yeah yeah, “AI” promises that, but I’ve been banging this drum for over twenty years. You don’t need a neural network to stick freckles on a face texture at 4K instead of 128x128. We have achieved dot technology at arbitrary resolution. You can ship the tools that generate these images and make the user run them at whatever resolution they want. It might even be faster than sucking data off an overstuffed hard drive.
And where you really need handmade detail, maybe do it in vectors instead? Like it was cute, back in the 90s, when Half-Life’s black-and-yellow diagonal warning stripes were pixelated on a $2000 Windows PC, but Perfect Dark’s were crisp on a $200 N64, because the clever lads at Rare figured out you could just rotate the goddamn texture. But if you’re still halving texel size by quadrupling texture size then you’re doing something wrong. It’s ballooning your budget and pissing off players and dragging out schedules and you’ve had all the time in the world to do anything about it.
this stuff really pisses me off,
i remember recently watching a video about tekken8.
the devs aparently made an announcement that boils down to “we need to monetize the shit out of this game now to make our monney back”
and the streamer just went “yeah thats reasonable”
they have the sales figures for tekken 7, and tekken 7 was an online game, so they know their active userbase.
(and they also now charge 70 bucks)
so they have at least a vague idea of how much monney they’ll make.
how can you screw up your budget that bad unless you senslessly dump money at your release.
yeah cutting edge graphics are neat,
but thats incredibly expensive.
and imo not that nececary for a great experience.
maybe a game that needs to nickle and dime its playerbase shouldnt be made in the first place?
Appealing to the widest audience possible for the largest gross profits, rather than appealing to specific audiences with a smaller budget, is part of the issue with modern gaming.
I feel like the natural progression is to roll back to the 2000s when every company was shotgunning batshit crazy concepts for games left and right… I miss those days
This is a false argument. They ARE profitable when they bother to try and make a good one. It’s when they fill it full of mtx and drag every aspect of the game except the enjoyment out for as long as possible to try and convince you to buy shit to make it actually enjoyable after you’ve already paid full price. They don’t get create poor games and then complain they’re not profitable enough - bad products aren’t profitable because they are bad products.
True. There would also be even more layoffs in this industry if they threw out years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars at the finish line because they decided not to release a game that didn’t turn out to be as good as they’d hoped.
That’s just another symptom of chasing perceived profits. If they were dedicated to releasing good products they’d understand retaining good talent that has experience working together is an important part of it.
Obviously that’s a pipe dream because they’re all vultures circling over a games publisher, picking off what they can until they can feast on its corpse, but still.
I was being facetious. If your development timeline is 7 years, you have no idea how it’s going to turn out at the end, but they all set out to make a good product, especially when it takes that much time and money to make. Guardians of the Galaxy was supposedly a very good game that bombed horribly, for instance. There’s a lot of risk when your game is that expensive to make, because there are only so many customers out there, and they’re already playing other big expensive games. Even Sony is finding that their marquis titles aren’t bringing in as many customers as they expected anymore, so they can’t keep spending more on games and expect them to be profitable.
That’s also partly because Microsoft is buying customers with gamepass, it’s unprofitable in the long run, but they just need to do it long enough to kill off competitors. Exactly what Netflix did basically.
Youve been able to start to see the ripples forming a few years ago. Devs aren’t making as much from the deal of being on it vs private sales as well.
What do you mean? It’s already profitable for them. I’m far more concerned with Nintendo’s online subscription than Microsoft’s. Nintendo’s already crossed the line, and Microsoft still stands to make more money by offering games for sale on Steam than to make them only available via a subscription that isn’t doing well with regards to acquiring more customers.
It’s not profitable. They say they spend over 1billion dollars a year, but you read some of the deals and they are $200 million for one game… they also say they make $230 million a month. So if they only make 2.7 billion and spend more than a billion a year with some games costing $200 million….
How is it profitable? It’s being supported by Microsoft itself so they can bleed money to crush competition. They are being intentionally vague and not releasing intimation as it would show they are doing very illegal things.
Lots of this stuff came to light during the merger and is available online to view now.
So if they only make 2.7 billion and spend more than a billion a year with some games costing $200 million….
How is it profitable?
$2,700,000,000 -$1,000,000,000 = $1,700,000,000
If the rest of their expenditures are less than $1.7B, then it’s profitable for the year. Since we’ve already accounted for the line item where they’re licensing products for their service that they don’t own, I’d be surprised if they had $1.7B worth of other operating expenses left to pay for, unless you can share a source stating otherwise. But what I see is this stating that it is profitable.
They are being intentionally vague and not releasing intimation as it would show they are doing very illegal things.
The burden of proof is on you if you think they’re doing something illegal. It’s not difficult at all to believe that they’re doing everything by the book, have a profitable service, and also found a plateau in how many customers are interested in using such a subscription.
Dude… they spend over 1 billion, but they also have 6 games that cost 1.2billion (200 million a piece). Their costs are far more than 1 billion and probably exceeds the 2.7…. Use some critical thinking here.
You have Phil Spencer saying they are profitable by telling your their sales, but only they spend more than 1 billion, they could also spend more than 10 billion, but they omit that specific information. Why? Because it would show the lie….
Critical thinking: $200M game budgets are not “per year”. They’re 5+ year development timelines. Microsoft’s output was only a few games. Starfield had a $200M budget over the course of 5 years. Forza wouldn’t surprise me if it had about that for its own budget, even though it reuses a lot of legacy code and assets to get there for cheaper than building it from scratch. But that’s not $200M per year for those games. How much do you think Hi-Fi Rush cost? We’re talking 8 figures for that one, not 9, and that’s over the course of 4 years.
they could also spend more than 10 billion, but they omit that specific information. Why? Because it would show the lie….
They could omit all kinds of things that they didn’t do from their financial reports, sure. Why didn’t they say that they spent $10B? Perhaps because they didn’t spend $10B…
Your link, which I have seen before, refers to how much games are estimated to cost to come to Game Pass, some of which happened and some of which they turned down because they were too expensive. They famously low-balled the impact BG3 would have on the industry and how much it would take to secure that game for Game Pass…if they were interested in doing so.
Why are you talking about game budgets? Microsoft is paying completely finished games 100-300 million dollars to be on games pass. If they are doing that, do you seriously think that they aren’t spending more than 2.7 billion putting games in the service…? It’s obviously far far more than 1 billion dude….
Game pass isn’t profitable, or Microsoft would tell you the full financials to prove how good it is. So why haven’t they…?
In the link that you provided, which I have seen before, you can see that they turned down games for hundreds of millions of dollars but estimated that that’s what they would cost to get on Game Pass when they launch. Have you noticed that games often leave Game Pass as well? That’s because they have to keep paying those people for those games, and they don’t see any value in continuing to do so. If they were spending 10x on licensing what they reported to investors, that would have come out in these leaks, especially since the licensees would be able to do some back of the napkin math when they can see what was spent to license their competitors. But that didn’t happen. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there’s no conspiracy here. Microsoft just has a profitable service.
Games leave gamepass since when it comes to renewal they don’t want to since streaming cannablizes sales and leads to lower revenue (already said this) so it’s not Microsoft deciding it’s not profitable, it’s the game wanting control back.
Investors don’t care, Microsoft itself is profitable, the gaming division can bleed money and they won’t care, since the parent company will just give them the difference another way.
Not actually pricing, estimates, but if they were estimating that much, they were liking willing to pay close to it, even half these numbers and it doesn’t look good. Just this collection of games that a drop in the bucket of total games, would cost 1.5 billion dollars. That’s over half their revenue, without even accounting for any operating costs or anything, or the rest of the library.
So, no it is not profitable and it’s hilarious that you’re defending Microsoft for claiming this, why isn’t anyone else other than Microsoft saying the same thing? In fact lots are claiming the opposite since this leak came out and they started looking at the numbers and taking directly to devs involved. Devs hate it
In fact lots are claiming the opposite since this leak came out and they started looking at the numbers and taking directly to devs involved.
Then please link that instead of their estimates, because if they were lying, publishers calling out bad math is exactly what I’d expect to happen. What I see on this list though are a bunch of costs that can be spread out over several years, not paid out all at the same time. Jedi Survivor, Suicide Squad, and Mortal Kombat account for $800M of this list, and none of them came to Game Pass, meaning Microsoft did not opt to spend that money.
Games leave gamepass since when it comes to renewal they don’t want to since streaming cannablizes sales and leads to lower revenue (already said this) so it’s not Microsoft deciding it’s not profitable, it’s the game wanting control back.
You are misplacing cause and effect. It’s more expensive for Microsoft to get someone else’s game on Game Pass right at launch than it is after launch, because if it’s a game people are already excited for, it will eat sales, as opposed to something like Descenders where most people never even heard of it, so it would serve as a form of marketing. In that case, Microsoft and the other company are essentially making a bet with regards to how much the game would make if it’s not on Game Pass, and Microsoft pays them a guaranteed sum up front, which reduces risk but also reduces reward. When a game leaves Game Pass, it’s not because they saw their sales tanking and wanted to “take back control”. It’s that Microsoft isn’t offering them enough to make up for the sales they’d expect to otherwise make for the next leasing period. Microsoft doesn’t offer them as much for the next period, because they don’t expect that keeping that game on the service keeps more people subscribed.
If you can produce that link that demonstrates what you’re claiming, I’ll read it, but otherwise, this sure looks like you’d rather believe in some boogeyman conspiracy theory than a simple truth.
Jedi Survivor, Suicide Squad, and Mortal Kombat account for $800M of this list, and none of them came to Game Pass, meaning Microsoft did not opt to spend that money.
Or… no amount of money was enough to make those games cannablize their sales, why do you think it’s only Microsoft making decisions…?
What truth? That Spencer says it profitable, but won’t provide the information to prove it…? Yet all the leaks and information point the opposite direction…? You want the truth, don’t listen to Spencer and read between the lines lmfao. The last person you should be listening to on this, is the one at the top of it.
Provide anything other than Spencer claiming it, I bet while you attempt to find that you’ll find the mountain that’s behind you.
It’s when they fill it full of mtx and drag every aspect of the game except the enjoyment out for as long as possible to try and convince you to buy shit to make it actually enjoyable after you’ve already paid full price.
You can only throw away hundreds of millions of dollars on Avengers and Suicide Squad so many times before they decide to come up with something people are willing to pay for.
Right. What does AAA even mean? Meta spent billions on their Horizons Metaverse, but countless Indie Metaverses are way higher rated some made by just one person. Clearly AAA does not mean the size of the team or the budget.
Well…there really are Internets as there is not just one as there are pockets in countries closed to others. I would not get too hung up on the name as there really are many many Metavaveres already established and many more are coming. I have one myself that is a highly detailed Theme Park Metaverse.
A single Metaverse is the death of the Metaverse as centralization kills innovation and drives corruption/exploitation. We need many Metaverses or we will end up with just one corporate one. Good news is that is not how the Metaverse is developing despite some corps spending Billions to the one and only.
It will all make more sense when there is greater standard and linking between Metaverses as right now they are all islands onto themselves. That will change in time.
The entire god-damn point of “the metaverse,” in the book every tech-bro dingus stole it from, was that it encompassed ALL online media. There can only be one or zero. It was everything. It was the entire global internet, as embodied VR.
Which is obviously ridiculous. But apparently not obvious enough, as these dinguses missed that Snow Crash is a satire of 1980s cyberpunk.
Not sure what your excuse is for missing the equally obvious absurdity of championing competing walled gardens as a shift against centralization. What a shame there’s no giant global network that nobody owns, to demonstrate how something can be singular without being a monopoly.
When people name call, it means they are emotional. Probably worth inspecting why.
You are taking a fictional book and taking it as the modern definition of the Metaverse and that is just not the case. The name may have started in a book, but it really has taken on a life of its own and there has not been a second contender for the name.
Who said anything about competing walled gardens? Some are walled. Some are open source. Some you pay to access. Some are feee. You just seem angry and yelling at the clouds.
I’m describing how demonstrably-fucked-up people like Mark Zuckerberg have stomped all meaning out of an interesting concept, to the point the word means whateverthefuck the speaker wants. I’ve seen conversations - interviews - published articles, where people slap the label on some lofty goal, as if that’s gotta be what everyone else means, when they promise they’re gonna do one. In their mouths it somehow means everything from full-dive brain-jack Ghost In The Shell shit to… Second Life.
And the brain-jack shit is somehow closer to what the word’s supposed to mean.
Who said anything about competing walled gardens?
You.
It’s why you’re worried about a monopoly.
The fact you think you’ve also got some metaverse in a jar, free-range and vegan, doesn’t change that.
I am just one indie developer making a Metaverse app. Hardly a walled garden outside of charging a fee to access as it does not build itself. I rather live in world with a 1,000 linked Metaverses all made by small teams of passionate people than one mega Metaverse that a corporation owns and we all have to bow too. Thankfully the latter seems to be what is unfolding. I urge you to support the indies if you value the future.
Okay, for any observers less stubbornly wrong: “latter” means the last thing mentioned. This guy who cannot take the slightest criticism meant “former.”
Or else is equally wrong about “unfolding.” I’d ask, but fuck me, apparently.
Why would I believe anything andreesen Horowitz says about anything, let alone gaming? These people believed that NFTs were the future of gaming. Grifter bellends.
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