These days they are managing to publish some good stuff. But two things: 1. I’m waiting on player reviews. 2. If I never hear about the game - you failed to make sure the market was aware.
Just in general, how DO single purchase games make money unless they are huge hits? Lets say they make about 50$ per copy sold (Steam, Xbox and PS take their 30% of course). If the game cost 125 M to make this would mean they need to sell 2,5 Million copies at full price to break even.
2.5 million people just isn't a big hit when you're spending 40 million on ads.
It's huge for an indie, but that's because they're not spending big bucks on development and advertising, and are mostly inherently targeting smaller audiences.
“we made a mid game and released it at a bad time, we couldn’t possibly be the reason it failed, clearly the world just doesn’t want single player shooters!”
trying to make a AAA single-player shooter in today’s market was a truly awful idea, especially since it was a new IP that was also trying to leverage Unreal Engine 5. What ended up launching was a bloated, repetitive campaign that was far too long.
See, it’s the last part of that quote that’s the problem. Not the concept of a AAA sp fps.
Depends on if the game has almost no bugs, and EA lets the studio have full creative direction. Also if it is good. Like “It Takes Two,” and “A Way Out.”
Last first person I played through was “Trepang².” Currently playing through a third person called “Quantum Break.”
If it has EA as only the publisher, I might buy it later on sale. But if it's first-party within EA, nah. Take-Two is actually the same for me these days. I won't touch Blizzard-Activision anymore either (which is sad because I bought Warcraft and Starcraft when they came out originally and would play over modem with my buddies).
Well Immortals has a demo and -60% off on steam currently. And if you want to add to your library dead island might still be free, with 9 items free in the steam points shop.
I’m going to chime in on the “never even heard of this game” train.
And based on that, I’ll “tinfoil hat” a bit: the game doesn’t seem to have any kind of mtx (it does have a deluxe edition items which apparently offer boosts) - so the publisher didn’t push the game as hard as it does with it’s live service games -> very few even have heard of this game.
… trying to make a AAA single-player shooter in today’s market was a truly awful idea, especially since it was a new IP that was also trying to leverage Unreal Engine 5. What ended up launching was a bloated, repetitive campaign that was far too long."
…so, they even admit it themselves that it’s pretty meh? And then it’s framed like single-player games just don’t sell… what?
Yep, never heard of it until just now. A quick trip to youtube for gameplay vids makes the first 15 minutes look pretty good though. The gameplay would totally get repetitive fast, and the vid I watched didn’t get into the skill trees. If the level up mechanics give you more spells to choose from, rather than just increasing the numbers for the 3 spells you start with, I think the game has potential. Right now, it seems like something I would like to try first and maybe buy a physical copy that can’t be disabled when some corporate licensing deal falls apart (and make backups of the installer).
Kinda sounds like fairly decent mid-price AA-release the way you put it.
HowLongToBeat puts it around 15h (howlongtobeat.com/game/118227) - for a modern title that isn’t even overly long, so got to wonder how does it manage to be “bloated, repetitive campaign that was far too long” as the dev (?) in the article was quoted saying…
Yeah, the headline is stupid. If they made a good AAA game that was only as long as it needed to be, it’d sell. The issue is all the AAA publishers think games need to take as much time to play as possible, which sucks so much.
AAA gaming is mostly dead to me for many years now because they don’t know how to make good games. They just know how to convince people to buy the crap they make. Theres a few that I’ll still play, like anything FromSoft makes (that’s available on PC), but not much.
The issue is all the AAA publishers think games need to take as much time to play as possible, which sucks so much.
the thing is, they’re somewhat right too. So many times at the steam forums, people ask “how long” a releasing game is going to be, and overall prefer length. To a degree I do understand that people want content for the 60-80 €/$/£. Personally I’d like quality over quantity, but it gets a bit wishywashy depending on genre and what is expected of it.
If we’re using the “A”'s as a metric of sorts, I kinda feel like “AA” -range is pretty much where it is at. Generally not overly flashy, designed by a committee or exhaustively long.
I generally prefer indie games. Their budget is usually so small they have to pick one thing to do and to do it well, rather than AAA that wants to do everything and does it all poorly and not well integrated. AA is definitely better about it usually, and will have good enough production quality for the masses though.
A magic FPS sounds great. I want more of them. I didn't completely hate the demo. But there were three spells for the part I played and none of them felt good. And all the reviews implied there really wasn't much more.
Spending all that money on a mediocre game is the bad idea. And spending 40 million on marketing and having no one know what your game is is just kind of funny.
Imagine if the Heretic series dropped in 2024 instead of the 90s? I feel like people would go crazy for that game with a modern engine and level design.
First time I’m hearing of this game. I think big publishers are going to realize soon that while the gaming market is big, the attention span of gamers is narrow. They just don’t have it in them to buy 4 or 5 big games a year when every game seems to be a live service, battlepass infused time sink.
It has better reviews than Jedi Survivor on Steam. I think the problem is that they didn’t market it whatsoever. Gamers have to know about games in order to buy them.
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