Why Are Games So Expensive To Develop? - Luke Reacts
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 13 июн 2024
- 👉🏼 LINKS: linktr.ee/lukestephens 👈🏼
--
Luke Stephens is a Content-Creator and Streamer that co-streams on RUclips and Twitch. This channel has Live Stream clips and highlights in addition to the streams themselves. Check out Luke's main channel & other content by going to: linktr.ee/lukestephens !!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
╔═╦╗╔╦╗╔═╦═╦╦╦╦╗╔═╗
║╚╣║║║╚╣╚╣╔╣╔╣║╚╣═╣
╠╗║╚╝║║╠╗║╚╣║║║║║═╣
╚═╩══╩═╩═╩═╩╝╚╩═╩═╝
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe and I'll be your bestest friend!
#gaming #LukeStephens #ps5 #xbox 
Развлечения
I think that the future of gaming is with the smaller AA games, where the development costs aren't astronomically high as they are with the big AAA games.
And because those smaller teams don't have to chase those bigger sales numbers by catering their games for everyone, they can just focus on making their game for their fans alone.
And it's because of that why I rarely buy big AAA games anymore, even from the sales, because generally I don't find games particularly fun when they're trying to please everyone.
Ive reached an age where i dont need to buy a game on launch.
Iam quite happy to wait 6 months and buy it at a more reasonable price!
And if game prices go up again, i will buy less games period.
I still have alot of games in my backlog!!
Definitely, i pretty much stopped buying games when they killed the steam regional pricing last November and barely made a notch on my backlog, i could keep it up for years
61 years old and I'm in the exact same boat regarding games. I have several sitting waiting to be played at some point in my life and truth be told I'm happy enough watching others playthrough games here on YT.
LOL the ripe old age of 25... wait OMG pls dont tell me you are older than 25 to have learned this?
6 months? I'll wait 6 years. I went to Dying Light 1 (that's like 2013) after sampling DL2 on the free weekend. I had it in my library, was on sale for like 10 bucks a while ago. Modern games are such a mess and it takes a long time for them to iron out, if they even do.
Last Epoch is rocking so hard now and it's a small dev team and a 30 dollar game. It's setting a new standard for ARPG.
People are nuts buying AAA games on release.
They usually fix the terrible launch bugs by then as well.
As someone who works in film and games, i can say, generally speaking, there is ALOT of bloat, and just excess that does not need to be there, which in turns means longer dev cycles, and more money. Here's how inefficient things are. I interviewed for a really large game studio (wont say which) we went through 3 rounds of interviews, then they figured since im also qualified to do materials, i should interview with that department, so i did 2 more interviews before i was getting ready to do my 6th which then after i would do a FINAL interview...i told them im out of this clown car.
If it takes a studio 6 interviews to decide if they should hire you, that's not a studio that knows how to make decisions..again, this was a AAA studio with hundreds of employees and multiple branches.
On top of this, there's just a lot of middle manning. You have coordinators, managers and supervisors, then they have senior coordinators, managers and supervisors who all report to some director...its all become like the movie Office Space, where the guy gets asked about his TPS reports 6 times lol
Just bloat and inefficiency
If the studio was considering having you do work for more than 1 department the amount of interviews sounds fair.
Why should a company hire you based off one or two charismatic appeals?
These arent small time projects where they can invest massive amounts of time into a person who walks away before even trying.
Its like what happened to GOT.
Why trust someone with any part of a multi year contract if they cant stick through a few interviews.
Oy vey it makes a lot of sense why both movies and games have gone this way. I can only imagine a bunch of “managers” twiddling their thumbs. It actually reminds me of how Ffxiv was made originally you had a bunch of departments with poor communication making a game and when Yoshida had taken over he had to rework most everything about development to fix 1.0 and work on getting 2.0 ready. Outside Covid they have been really consistent with content tho some say it’s too formulaic
They should hire someone based off a positive interview or two because it's a sensible decision? They're never going to know EXACTLY what someone will bring to the table until they give them a chance. Interviews can gauge past work history, basic skills and education, and general personality quirks. No matter how many you conduct that's about the only info you'll learn.
Why should they conduct another 4+ interviews that will only give them the same info, and no real insight into the person's work ethic or true personality?
In the time they take to conduct that many interviews they could have hired someone on a probationary period and gotten value from their efforts, or sacked them for a better candidate... or they could conduct a load of interviews and end up in the same position, weeks or months later.
You think more interviews for the showrunner of GoT would have them admit they were planning to bail ASAP and ruin the conclusion? Unlikely. It's not really fair to hold a single development position to the same level as head showrunner either. HBO could have simply looked at their (lack of) work history and determined it was a questionable hire... 5 more interviews would not have made it any more obvious.
@@BrandonDenny-we1rw what does 4 more charismatic appeals do, I can imagine the interviews was just a loop 😂 asking the same questions. Maybe they'd save some money if they didn't put this much bloat onto their hiring manager
@@MxrkJJ depends entirely on the amount of the responsibility.
If I was hiring someone to manage a large portion of anything Id want to make sure they had patience to deal with bs.
If you dont, you dont.
Ghost of Tsushima was a brand new IP created from scratch & took only $60 million to create & sold 10 million copies. It was beautiful in every aspect whether it's the gameplay, the graphics, fidelity, performance, character designs, artstyle, score etc.
Spiderman 2 is SEQUEL with some reused assets & map is almost same as it's prequel. It took $300 million+ to create & sold 10 million copies.
Make it make sense. How did Ghost a brand new game take just 60 million dollars but Spiderman 2 a sequel took more than 300 million. This is absurd. And Spiderman 2 is not even as good as its predecessor Spiderman 2018. It has lazy writing & questionable character designs & side missions.
I agree with your sentiment and agree that Ghost is far, far better than Spiderman 2. However, games like Spiderman get overly bloated budgets BECAUSE they are sequels to ridiculously popular franchises. Think of games like GoT as investing in a risky venture, think of Spiderman as investing oil or something. Sony and companies like Ubisoft will continue to pour money into inflated franchises like Spidey, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, etc until people (the masses) finally wake up and realize that these companies have gotten complacement with mediocrity.
I’m willing to bet Ghost 2 is gonna be like 200$ million give or take to be made 💀
Part of that budget probably also has to do with marketing as well. If you have a big IP like Spiderman, then yeah, it would make sense to pump a tremendous amount of money to market it to the general masses compared to something unknown like Ghost of Tsushima.
Any game company that says games are to expensive to produce needs to be called out. They need to put up or shut up. Let them be transparent and open their books. Let see how much they are spending on their executives, on golden parachutes, on stock buy backs, on marketing, on outside “consultancy” firms. These companies lie all the time and they just expect us to take them at their word…because they said.
A large portions of these budgets guaranteed dont go towards actual game development
Not to mention annual bonus payout to their ceo and senior staff lol
The still cost millions,on top of hiring employees.if u had the options to take big bonuses u would,shut up or put up lol
Just look at the Insomniac leaks good lord. $300 million just to develop and didn't even look significantly different from the 1st game.
Facts, majority of a games budget doesn’t actually go into game development.
As a Game Designer/Dev that recently got very interested on the topic (meaning I did my own "historical" research), I'm not too sure of your approach to calculation here.
You are comparing bananas to apples. TW3 is around 250 people for the dev team, GTA 5 is around 1 000 people.
80 Million is still the average price of ONLY dev cost (during the production phase only) for 3-4 years of dev time and a team peaking at around 300 people (not counting external studios/help, marketing, etc..).
This is important because you usually spend time on pre production with a smaller team and will ramp up things later during Full Production. On average we are still at around 3-4 years of Production time for most games.
You can have an estimate yourself if you, for example, take as a basis a dev cost for 1 people to be around 6k Dollars, per month, for the company (salary and everything the company has to pay for, for that particular employee). If you are building a New IP, it's even more costly due to Pre-Production and/or Concept phase time.
Furthermore, Rockstar is really not comparable to anything as they will mostly have unrelatable budgets. No one in the industry have the budget that they do, nor the time, or even such man power. To match such man power, Studios usually pay external Studios to help during the Production phase.
The real issue is that making people pay more than 70 Dollars for a game is hard to pull off depending on the game. Elasticity in price is limited.
This is why prices have not changed much for 20+ years when you compare prices back then and the inflation.
This is also why there are other ways used to make people pay more (3 Days early access, cosmetics, etc..) as development cost have increased by more than 10x during the last 20-30 years but prices have not really evolved.
What the article doesn't say also is that Publishers usually knows that not all of their games will have a return on investment so the goal for them is to have enough games that pay for the entire portfolio - this is why Ubisoft still ship indie sized games that will obviously not generate a large amount of money. And games like the AC Franchise that is paying for mostly everything. Their role as Publishers/Investors is to manage risks.
Add to all of this the fact that on Steam only there is an average of 10K+ new released games every single month AND consider all of those live service games (Fortnite, LoL, etc..) that are keeping the attention, investment and money from SO many players, and you also see that the competition is hard for any game release nowadays.
This explains also why so many studios tried so hard to have a Live Service Game going, because the potential benefit is insane, to the point that it can pay for all of your other projects.
TLDR : Games back then were made in around 18 months and sold at around the same price as today if you compare with inflation. Nowadays you can have teams sizes up to 1 000 people (on average 300 peak) to pay for 3-4 years of Production only and on average. Investors KNOWS you can't make the prices evolve too much for a buy to play game. Therefore they need to sell around 10 Millions for a AAA Game in order to make a return (and maybe profit) on investment. Since this is risky, we saw the appearance of other kinds of transactions, like cosmetics, battle passes, early access edition, etc..
But we probably won't really see an increase for the "raw" price for games in general.
Side note : In regards to other costs, if you have your game physically in store this is a cut of around 50% for each copy sold. If you are on Steam, this is a 30% cut.
Games won't make as much money as you think they do unless they sell a ton, which is not that often. A ton meaning, around or more than 10 Millions copies.
Oh, and it should also be noted that this amount should be right around launch, using a Data from a game that as sold for 10+ years for example won't make sense.
Which makes cases like CDPR trying to have games sell well during a long period of time (kinda like a live service game) interesting.
A plague tale requiem had a 25M $ budget and was a great narrative game with AAA level visuals. Companies just need to adjust to lower budgets and optimise things around it, because it's more than possible.
Metro Exodus cost 9 million
@@Alexander-zt9kzit was 50 mil not 9 mil and it made 144 mil in revenue
Nobody asked developers to make games that huge. That's what publishers constant keep advertising, look, bigger better and 4K graphics. The latter one only matters for consoles since PC games have had that option for a decade now. Nobody however constantly asked for open world, live service multiplayer, dogshit lootbox infested games. That's just what the industry wants to sell us even though there only a limited amount any single gamer could possible buy and play.
The sad thing is that smaller, more concise (and thus cheaper to develop) games, even from AA studios, are generally better and of higher and more consistent quality regardless of budget than bloated and huge games that are more expensive both for developers and consumers.
A Plague Tale Innocence is a much better game than Assassin's Creed Odyssey, despite releasing a year sooner from a smaller studio with a budget of 10 mil compared to 500 mil.
Imagine instead of one Odyssey we got 50 Plague Tales (obviously an oversimplification).
@@noamias4897 yeah, even though they are totally different games I get your point, and I'd also have many more games with smaller scope but personality than huge, bloated generic games
Damn, we’re a long way from being in middle school playing GTA IV, Assassin’s Creed II, Mass Effect 2, and The Witcher 2 😪
It's too expensive guys but we have money for Sweet Baby lol XD
yeah im sure the 20 bucks they charge per hour for a total of around 500 bucks depending on the game is a very significant chunck of the 300milion budget,but hey...math is hard for neo natzis
@@deenman23 yeah because being a lead writer on huge AAA projects only nets you $20 per hour apparently. Dude your argument won't get better with an insult that doesnt even make any effin sense.
Working for Sweet Baby is apparently only slightly better than the service industry XD
@@deenman23lmao maniac just making up numbers
@@FlameOfRoyeca if you think 20 bucks an hour is bad you are demented,its industry standard for consulting in gaming
@deenman23 didnt effin read what i said. Sweet Baby minions arent just consulting you effin dolt. They do most of the writing and even have lead writing credits. These arent employees paid for hours. They are contractors. Aint gonna believe those numbers that came out of your a$$
I feel another very big reason why the gaming industry is tanking so much especially triple A titles is kind of the same thats happening with disney movies recently in the last couple of years and that is not having a clear vision from the get go or letting executives change way to much that it affects other aspects or even core components of the game causing delays which will just increase the cost and make the game feel incomplete or lower quality. We just saw with suicide squad and skull & bones that time does not fix the issue either, the core problem from both of these games is the fact that there wasn't even a clear idea for what the game was even meant to be, directors and managers propose one thing, executives have a check list of things they want and at the end of it all we end up with a frankestein of both visions clobbered into an overpriced mess of a game that has a triple A budget but no soul.
Another big thing is the reputation for A LOT of these companies has dropped a shit ton in the last couple years, where once some of these studios used to pump out nice quality medium sized games and earned respect through the customer, now they suffer from the atroucious bad quality and lack luster games of the last couple of years. Once customers lose trust they won't buy your game day 1, they will doubt and be skeptical which is never good for a company.
That's definitely all a thing.
You're being mild when you say "atrocious bad quality and lack luster games", have killed their reputation. They have blamed and insulted fans for their failures, lied, inserted way too much ideology, and continue to engage in predatory microtransactions. For me at least, I want the companies to fall. I want Activision Blizzard to have to break up, Microsoft to sell off. I want the whole AAA space to crumble. It's like a metastasized cancer.
A whole essay , just not to say that women in game dev are not the issue
@@J.B.1982same, Im over it, no franchise has been save. They ruined god of war, spiderman, horizon , mass effect, last of us, im done
@@SWOTHDRA Its not about being man or women it about experience the devs have 🙄
I actually think it’s outside of all the things you mentioned. The big economy affects this stuff way more than the other way around. I think that the fact that money is harder to get now that the interest rates are going up. It makes a lot of projects that used to be viable no longer viable. The possibilities of what you can do with loans is just less now because the money is harder to get. That means that studios are only going to be doing things that they think are safe. But that is no guarantee anymore as We have seen with suicide squad people only have so much time available for these live services and if everyone is doing that there isn’t going to be enough room in the pond for that many fish
Games like SS or Forspoken had massive budgets but they were fundamentally flawed from the outset. Funding wasn’t the problem it was the idea and intention. Throwing MORE money at those games wouldn’t make them better. Listen to the players rather than shareholders and you’ll get more sales.
Honestly, it might be cheaper to make a Netflix series of a well known video game IP than it is to make the sequel at this point.
"if you're paying them that much why isn;t the finished product of any quality?"
Because the premise of the game sucked. Because the writing was bad. Because the game design was stale.
na i blame DEI cuz assmongold said so
This is why games should start with a solid concept and fundamentals for their games. It is like when I draw and I don't have a solid understanding of shape, form, color, and such and I just blindly start rendering and manipulating the drawing until it looks okay without understanding the subject I'm working on. If I have, I would have saved myself a ton of time and the drawing would turn out much cleaner and accurate to what I wanted to convey. It is one reason I love the development of Splatoon. It started with a simple and solid concept and gameplay and worked everything out from there.
@@Drstrange3000 The problem is, that is all subjective. Every piece of art medium from games to movies is made on the gamble that subjectively the content will work with a mass audience. Solid concepts and fundamentals make sense up until it is repetitive and stale to audiences which takes about a year or more and during that time there are dozens upon dozens of pieces of content being made, and then you have to reinvent the wheel again to see if what you think is good is actually good for a mass audience. Saying something sucked or was bad is the same as saying "just do better" with no substantive solution or discussion.
@@TheCandyGamingChannel Art and profit motive just don't mix at all. Even indie devs fall into the profit motive trap and just put out 24/7 market trend garbage. Would say people just need to stop caring so much about money, but the majority of people can't/won't. Just gotta wait for another economic boom where people play loose with their money and the projects they invest into. People are just going to make safe trash games until then.
That or ai makes game development so cheap pretty much anyone can do it.
What is interesting is that neither fun nor quality have risen with the cost. So one has to ask oneself: Where does the money go? And the answer is always scope end ambition. But neither make a game. It is always the game concept. Have good ideas become more expensive? If that was the case all expensive games would have good ideas. Not the case.
Spiderman 2 costed 300 million because they tried adding in a live service into the single player game. Millions was lost because of that.
This is what ppl fail to see, the Disney insanity of doing several rounds of reshoot and remake movies 2 to 4 times is also going around games, they lack focus, they wander too much, leadership sucks, higher ups keep changing the deal to chase the current trend, teams are so big members barely know each other, projects only take shape the last few years.
Remember Anthem ? nobody knew what the game looked like were doing until someone put together a vertical slice less than 2 years before release.
Tbh that live service was probably a prototype for that canceled online spiderman game
It's really like Luke completely forgot that.
@@FlagellantSaltmost do when they talk about things they know nothing about.
That was for the Great Web live service that got canned. They tried to do too much and hop on a trend, and got rushed by Sony
Because they have 9 year dev cycles and nothing to show for it. Plus they want to make all of the money not 2x or 3x cost.
The rush to 4k was silly. 1440p would have been a better goal for bvoth pc and console.
4k should be an extra enhancement to older games where the PC or console has power to spare beyond getting the game to run, it doesn't have to be the standard we chase.
That doesn't excuse poor optimization though
@@noamias4897 Especially on a card like the 4090 which is pulling 450W to 615W. We just aren't there yet where a gamer can build a sensible $1500 gaming PC that gives you 4k 60fps without becoming a space heater. When that does happen and developers are delivering the optimized goods perhaps we can get back to ps2/360 era of gaming. When games were good, in variety and aplenty. That's if live service and $easons doesn't muck things uo.
Most games run at sub-1440p, what are you talking about ?
@@metacube9913no. That wrong. That’s a lie. That only applies to lower budget indie games.
@@balloonb0y677 Spiderman 2 60fps mode is 1440p~1260p
They don't need $100M in marketing, for one. Just put out a teaser video, a gameplay video or two, and a final launch trailer, a page on their website, and some posts on your social media. I don't see how that costs more than $5M. That's all that's needed. No one is affected by ads these days for games. We all go to YT, Discord, Reddit etc to research and discuss them (nevermind ads in general which I think are also a waste of money these days). All of YT and Reddit will talk about those videos and posts. Imho, they don't need to push graphical fidelity either. Gameplay and performance is far more important.
Konami was right. They started new sports and fitness gym business and were successful. Game industry is facing fiercer competition than ever before.
What gets me angry is that developers get paid less than many Frivolous RUclips critics and Game journalists and twitch streamers.
Being a personality pays more than actually producing things of value, sadly.
I said this in the live chat & I'll repeat this here again
I think the real issue is the pricing of games. Not every AAA game is worth 70 bucks. Games like Skull & Bones, Redfall, Forspoken, SSKTJL are not the same as GOWR, Elden Ring, GTAVI etc. Idk why every AAA publisher thinks they deserve 70 bucks just cuz they made a AAA game. No you have to earn that price tag with the quality & value you provide.
Also in this economy & inflation, people are more willing to buy games that are priced somewhere between 30-50 dollars. Not everyone is willing to pay 70 bucks day one. Many people also wait for the game to go on sale & then buy the game or wait for it to drop on subscription services. I think Helldivers 2 & Palworld selling millions of copy recently is a good enough example that consumers are more open to buying games priced at 30-40 dollars even if they are not the best game ever. But people are reluctant to buy a mid game like Skull & Bones & SSKTJL priced at 70 bucks.
AAA industry needs to move away from the 70 dollar price tag. Reduce the price to 40-50 bucks & chances are you will sell way more copies & easily break even & earn a margin. Stay adamant on 70 bucks you will most likely incur a loss since most people wouldn't even consider buying your product at that price unless it's GTAVI or GOWR or Elden Ring level of game.
AAA industry also needs to reduce the budget & scope of their games to manage the costs. Smaller budget games take less dev time & money & also allow the devs to experiment & take risks. If your game has a massive budget of 300 million dollars, you often don't take risks & innovate.. That leads to a very boring predictable game with lot of bloated side missions & that's why AAA studios are struggling to sell those 300 million dollar games at 70 bucks. People want new experiences. They want innovation & devs trying new mechanics.
Also lot of budget is being pissed away in motion capture cutscenes. Modern games have excessive cutscenes with hyperrealistic graphics that pop up after every 5 minutes of gameplay. That's what inflating the budget as well, those cutscenes take a lot of money to create but they're really not essential to the gameplay & core mechanics of the game and can be removed from the game. Maybe they should tone down the amount & length of cutscenes per game. Also lot of budget being taken by marketing when it's the positive word of mouth by people & reviewers that actually sells the games. Wasting millions of dollars on marketing really doesn't help imo if the game itself is trash. You can only deceive people temporarily with marketing. Also hiring outside "consultants" like Sweet Baby Inc that take millions of dollars from the studio just to make their product & writing even worse lol. These consultant groups are also impacting these Studios' sales numbers since many gamers are beginning to notice it & actively boycotting anything related to them. Overall, they are a net negative. Associating with these groups is not worth it they are not contributing as much as they are taking away from you. They take money from you, they make your writing & game worse, they make your sales dwindle. AAA studios should read the writing on the wall if they wanna succeed.
Then don't expect big open-world AAA games to get made then. $30-50 is simply too little money to justify the return. Especially when a publisher can make a MTX for a fraction of the cost with far better return.
Companies are not charities at the end of the day.
"There's gonna be a game drought"
I am glad Helldivers exists then.
Even that’s is overrated imo.
Just go back replay old game
The constant need for bigger and better with ballooning budgets is completely unsustainable. I don't want a game crash. But we need one in a big way for anything to change. There needs to be a shift in priorities, not just for developers but consumers too. It's happening in games. It's happening with the movie industry. If its not a blockbuster, its doomed to fail immensely.
Theres no crash coming when Fortnite and Gta online, and Valves casino named CSGO are literal billion dollar industries alone.
In the movie industry that's more of a problem for the big studios who refuse to do it any other way. A24 is on it's way to become a big studio, but they did show there was a market for smaller and other types of films so long as you don't try to outspend each other. It won't get Barbie or Oppenheimer box office returns. But something like Poor Things or Everything Everywhere all at Once doesn't need to on a 35 and 25 million dollar budget.
I can't imagine how bad it must feel for the people who have lost their jobs these past 12 months alone. But when you look at the guy who quit Bethesda to make his own game and he can do it because unreal 5 is so easy to work with. We will lose talent who needs to feed their families that will now get some other form of tech job that isn't creative. But in 5 years I think we will start to hear more stories about devs that lost their jobs didn't know what to do, and enough of them banded together realizing that they could make things they otherwise would never have gotten to do under the companies they worked for.
Becoming studios that will be spoken of in the same breath as the current most popular studios. That's not to say everything will be a success story. We won't know about it, there will be those that try and fail. At the same time I believe this time we are in. If it truly needed to happen it's the best time it could have happened considering it's now easier for devs to make games that you wouldn't know was made by a handful of people. Compared to the indie boom when games like Braid and Super Meat Boy came out great games, but you can see how one or two people could do those games. There will be those that rises from the ashes giving us something new, or something old that has been ignored and once brought back will capture an audience.
@@Bacbi That's kind of my point. Game studios need to budfet and prioritize differently. There are game studios that have done the same thing with their games, but its far from the norm, outside of indy games.
@@dmwelchdw Capcom is weirdly the best company to model after.
They pump out loads of small to mid budget games then finance one large game and even if the large game doesnt succeed it never had to
Interesting that we have so many business experts in the comments section
for the same reason movies are so expensive, budgets are massively inflated for moronic reasons.
developing games has never been EASIER, but most of the AAA industry is intoxicated with microtransaction money to the point of being completely incompetent.
if lootboxes and similar anti consumer practices were banned tomorrow these companies would collapse immediately.
Games went to shit when the first crop of "college educated game devs" started working in the industry. Devs of old were Mathematics, Philosophy and literature majors and PhDs. Modern devs are "they/them" with a "gaming science" diploma and a this or that social issues agenda they want to use the game they work on as a soapbox to yell from.
Don't forget that companies, aside from paying a team it's salary, they also have infrastructure that needs to be payed and that includes the building, eletricity, servers, computers etc etc
Meanwhile a game like Control was only 30M and Alan Wake 2 was 50M to make. Plus, one would think with things like UE 5 that automate a lot of the dev time/cost, I don't get how they can"t make a game that isn't in line with costs a few years before.
that's what the lay offs are for, companies are simply downsizing their companies to cut costs so they can make lower cost games again.
@@hovsep56 downsizing is normal especial for companies that are over-hired...
BUT charging games with more micro-transaction, hiring celebrities for voice acting, putting ads in video games, are just ways to make the problem much worse
And both were commercial failures, what's your point?
@@metacube9913 What are you talking about? Alan Wake 2 is Remedys fastest selling game. And Control has generated 107 M USD in revenue?
@@ashesfrombones again, that's what the lay offs are for so they don't have to do that.
to create smaller scale games.
i think i can speak for many of us when i say that we don't necessarily need every new game to be ten times bigger than the previous one. Bethesda didn't have to make a game the size of Starfield, we don't need it.
but is it true tho ? Which game is so much better and bigger in the last two years compared to games that came out in 2010s? Like what tops Witcher 3 , Bloodborne, GoW 2018 , Ghost of Tsushima, Red Dead Redemption 2 ? Maybe Elden Ring? Baldurs Gate 3 , but that's it.
How can did they create an engine + GoW in less than 4 years, and they needed 6 years to make GoW Ragnarok ? I'm still waiting for a justification that makes sense . I'm starting to believe that everyone starts shifting towards Gotcha Live Service games , and they slowly switching recourses to those projects .
Imagine GTA6 flops and the damage it would do. Game development is going insane
financially? or socially?
@@brunoutechkaheeros1182I think he means financially but I dont see that coming
How could it flop? Maybe Expectations but like Cyberpunk it wouldnt be a flop financially
@@moondiegordr I do mean financially because a product costing a billion dollars is an insane gamble. That being said I think GTA6 would be successful even if it was a buggy and broken mess. It was more of a thought experiment I had will watching the video.
@havocm2011 But GTA5 sold 190 million RDR2 was 500million and made a Billion in one week end. But Maxpayne3 had a budget of 100 million and did not sell well enough.
I doubt it'll be a financial flop. But I also doubt it will do as well as Rockstar is used to. Virtual Florida (not 80's Miami) is an unappealing location for a game. It is basically RUclips:The Video-Game.
Starting to think they only keep pushing graphics so they can justify upping the price and making you need to buy a new console every couple years. Plenty of older gamer were better than what we have now with far less of a budget.
The Nintendo Switch made the chase for graphics seem even more ridiculous. I'm having more fun gaming on my Switch than PC. I'm no longer just wowed by photorealistic graphics.
@@Drstrange3000 Nah the Switch is notably underpowered even fir Nintendos own games, Tears of The Kingdom is held back significantly by the console’s inability to run it at a consistent frame-rate and the visuals made almost no evolution because they couldn’t go any further with the switch. Plus it is basically useless for playing anything other than Nintendo made games. Of which only a handful have come out that would really make owning the console worth it. Still better than PS5 and XBOX combined tho. Sad state in gaming
@@reservoirfrogs2177 It definitely needs an upgrade at this point, for sure. I am still really enjoying it despite that which surprised me. I'm really excited for their next console!
One other major problem is games have to compete not only with new releases, but my entire library.
Why should I buy the new game when all my older existing games are still so epic
Alan Wake 2, Plague Tale, and Remnant 2 surprise me by their mid-tier budget and high quality.
I hope that the workers that have been laid off end up building AA studios that create IPs or spiritual successors to certain projects but with the added benefit of job safety and a non-toxic work culture.
Those games are only so high quality because they are running on UE5 technology. Tech like nanite removes the process of making LODs and much more.
Now we have a game called hellblade 2 using UE5 that is a AAA game. It looks nuts. The texture resolution is insane, the geometry is insane, and the lighting is insane
We need to go back to the golden era of the early 2000s where a relatively small team could produce a contemporary and replayable but short game in a couple of years without breaking the bank.
Then we need to get used to playing games with PlayStation 2 graphics.
@@MrVexedviper yeah, people don't get it that this level of graphical fidelity as in modern games takes a lot of resources
As you can see, this is why it's getting harder. People expect games to be groundbreaking. Back in 2016 or 2019, the things being produced today would have been considered revolutionary. Now, people have this messed up perception that game technology and graphics must always improve every year. Trying to satisfy these expectations costs millions, or even billions in some cases. As a former developer for a large company and now working for a small indie company, modern consumers are relentless. Honestly, life is much better as an indie game developer. No one expects you to create groundbreaking tech every single year.The worst part is that consumers expect improvement while still paying the default price of $60 or $70.Imagine if Apple still charged $500 for a modern iPhone; they would be unprofitable. We are reaching that point where games have become ridiculously expensive to produce, and our options are either charging more or monetization through some form. Essentially, we are forced to pick our poison, so the company can survive without layoffs.
What we get from consumers: YOU ARE EVIL STEALING COOPERATE ASSHOLES.
YOU SOLD 1 MILLION COPIES YOU PROFITED.
(Trust me if we are doing severe layoffs we most probably did not profit enough to survive for the next quarter without layoffs ) yes we may profited in the short term. Let’s say 100 million over the game cost, now deduct that 100 million into future game cost and salaries, employee insurance and taxes. Also share of the IP % towards the owner which in the range of 25-35%. Our contractors and lease owners for studios.
We are left with barely any profit to actually called it sustainable because a game takes year to develop and there is always unexpected cost or development problem that eats up even more $$$.
In other words, if you are aspiring person who wants get into the game industry. Right now it’s a horrible time for both you and the consumer.
Yeah prices have to go up. I find it so funny that gamers will brag about how they always buy everything on sale and then wonder why we aren’t getting any games.
I agree with everything u said, this is why i try to support AA games when i can cause they make what AAA used to be with decent visuals(Evil West, Plauge Tale, etc) id rather pay $50 to a game with smaller scope and smaller team than $70 for a semi live service game. Now ill buy $70 games if they are a great product like God of War but never for Suicide Squad or the like
This isn't quite true though. Wages have stagnated for decades. Workers are not making that much more than they did a decade or two ago. When adjusted for inflation they'd be making about the same if not less.
When adjusted for inflation, we're making a whole lot less right now.
The Avatar game for the ultimate edition is going for $150+ in NZ when last I looked, whereas helldivers is going for $70. You know where I spent my money.
Thank you for enlightening us about this hot topic. Cheers
It’s the people who are defining the scope that are at fault. It’s the exact same in movies. Let’s throw money at it, make it bigger, make it longer and charge more and the profits will be higher. But that’s not how it works.
There are countless of examples of new ideas or indie games blowing up and making tons of money. The common factor between them is passion and ingenuity. Big publishers don’t care about that.
The companies who decide to make these “AAA” games have been swimming in profits for years, if this is their scope then it’s on them to fund it. They aren’t happy with 2X or 3X returns and want 10+X return and with that comes more risk.
I rly feel for the billion dollar industry after watching this video, I am curious if there is a resection though.
I get why people want to make games better and have gaming evolve but there are so many times where I’ve asked myself, “why don’t game companies go back to making games how they used to?” I get that people want the best graphics and gameplay and want better and better, but games back in the day were so amazing for the time and I know it’d be odd to go back to making games that are smaller in scale and having them not have as impressive graphics but companies would be able to push games out faster and cheaper if they regressed back to what games used to be
I agree. I think gaming studios should revisit the basics. Most might find it sad, but it took me looking at the PlayDate concept and Nintendo to understand how important the basic building blocks are to game design. I've seen developers do a LOT with limited hardware. In fact, I think trying to make everything open world MMORPG lite limits the potential for creativity. I miss the more focused game design of the GameCube and PS2 era. Modern games like Hi Fi Rush and Sifu are more of what I want these days.
Played Plague Tale recently, it had everything I expect in a AAA game, only it had cost 10 million dollars to make. The second was much better and it cost 25million. I mean that's the future of AAA games.
I honestly feel like Skyrim was a catalyst for games constantly trying to one up each other in terms of scope and size. They've traded in vision and creating well-realised experiences for bloated budgets and over-stuffed soulless worlds.
Another question I have. How many today would actually finish a game the size of skyrim, RDR or the witcher 3?
I was saying this to myself the other day. It was really novel and great at the time and I enjoyed a lot of parts of Zelda BotW due to some of that inspiration but I have so much fatigue with any game that touts how large it is. It is no longer novel and more often than not, it makes a game worse, not better. Worse pacing, shallower content, and so on. I want more Hi Fi Rushes and Sifu's.
The production budget doesn’t really matter, what matters is whether they can finance the production through ongoing revenue streams or loans and whether they make a game so good they‘ll make enough of a profit to finance their business going forward
The bit about selling enough games seems to be the problem though for many studios
As the budgets to make games has scaled up, the quality has not scaled up as well. I would say that the quality in many AAA games has declined. Despite having more money to play with when developing the “bigger and better” games.
6:21 great info/insight thanks Luke! 😊
I bet we could see more games like the FF7 remake/rebirth where its the same engine, same tools, and the 2nd/3rd game takes less development time to get out the door thanks to retaining staff and not having to train new staff on those tools. Game companies can help themselves by learning new methods of producing the game like CDPR did with the Phantom Liberty expansion where they changed their development style to flow and be more adaptive. Oh and more games like Miles Morales, that again uses the same engine and team and can be released much quicker then the main line game and is good at 15-20 hours.
the biggest thing they're all going to do to reduce cost is leave the simple tasks to ai
"I need a texture for a blue sheet of metal with paint flaking off in the corners"
hit randomize a few times and there ya go, they didn't have to pay an artist to do it.
Hell if they could get voice acting good enough they would probably leave the bulk of that up to ai as well. They'll definitely use it for random npc's you hardly interact with.
The funny thing is I never heard of immortal of aveum until you mentioned it a few months ago
Why do these AAA games cost so much yet suck so bad? Where does the money go
Marketing
Finally a video I can play with the screen off
I would just like to point out that some AAA games end up becoming large brands to that also generate profit like toys, licensing, ect which also may add cost and revenue.
Meanwhile at Nintendo of Japan: (playing the song KC and the Sunshine band - Celebration)
As someone who only got a ps5 this Christmas I don't feel the need to ever buy a game full price. I have a such a massive amount of backlog I can get cheap or second hand on marketplace. The biggest reason though is as you said 'not trusting the quality of the game at release' and as someone who doesn't make enough money to take a gamble on a game and then wait for a patch 3 months later I'm more than happy to have a little FOMO for a good time in the future
I wish more companies would just lower the scope. You can have a successful IP with just a dedicated fan base that will be successful title after title.
I think of games like the Danganronpa series and the Yakuza games before they got really really popular.
Additionally there needs to be a clear vision from start to finish. You can't keep cramming battle passes in each game and expect people to shell out on top of $70 right now. That's just too high of an asking price.
I just have to say that the stim checks compared to the corporate payout is basically zero. The affect it had on the economy was 99 percent businesses being saved. Prices going up .03 percent and then businesses raising prices 20 percent or more for greed and calling inflation. But then it trickles down into felt inflation to the rest of the business and then the cycle is in full effect.
20:00 so true! Crazy how RDR2 is the still better looking than most next gen games. I appreciate that new games like DD2 and Elden Ring look beautiful but in a very video gamey way, but I did like the uncanny valley of RDR2
The reality is these budgets and timelines are OUTRAGEOUS. Theres NO LEGITIMATE REASON IT SHOULD TAKE 5, 6, or 7 YEARS to complete a game!!! I mean there is some SERIOUS LACK OF TIME MANAGEMENT IF IT TAKES THAT LONG!!
The only long-term solution is allowing developers to work from home (in less expensive cities), so the studios can, at least, minimize the costs of salaries. It is not like have development has to take place in an office, after all.
This just makes me more worried that A.I. is going to be implemented heavily into making games, as A.I. can probably generate a RDR2-sized map with full detail in about 10.2 seconds.
"Hey, A.I., give me a space-themed open world with a viking twist".
* 10 seconds later, BAM, there it is. *
Then the developers just need to make some final tweaks and half-way program the mechanics (likely leaving the other half to A.I.), and BOOM, new complex open world AAA game produced for cheap in ONE YEAR.
That's very scary for actual living, breathing creators. Art will no longer have soul.
Champions of Otherworld magic a tcg uses an AI artist who manually touches the work up and they pay him 90k a year for around 10 hours of work.
Why take 5 years making something wasting 5 years of developer life when you could do it in a fraction of the time
I feel like people who actually want games like this never tried to create before and don't care at all about art or anything like that. It turns the art aspect of gaming to just a product to mindlessly consume. Gaming is a combination of visual and interactive art, music, acting, and literature. It also promotes problem solving and creativity as well as socializing in multiplayer games. Great games also have a solid understanding of game design and solid fundamentals of making satisfying gameplay. You can't just generate a big open environment and start with a huge scale and hope to make a cohesive game out of it. The best thing AI would be used for is getting ideas. NPC AI behavior and scripting would be a completely different beast to just making NPC's into chatbots like with Trico in The Last Guardian. I would love to see more of that.
One big reason why big studios are don’t make better quality of games is communication. Games are getting bigger which require bigger dev teams. So when you see games like balders gate 3 doing so well make sense. The dev team is a lot smaller which allows for better communication which leads to better execution. When your a activison where you have 300 devs it is a lot harder to communicate among other divisions. When you have 300 people your gonna but heads a lot and your vision isn’t going to line up compared to a smaller team. So the fact that activison can even make a cod game every year is pretty impressive.
Baldur's Gate 3 had 400 developers work on it.... It started with a smaller team but increased in size as other aspects of the game required more help. I love BG3 and loved Larian since Divinity Original Sin 2. I don't think they are bound by shareholders like other studios which allows them more freedom. They also seem to retain their talent as well.
I get the feeling that it’s experiencing the same issues that corporate film budgets experience: a ton of unnecessary bloat.
haha don't forget the companies that gotta give their ceo a multimillion dollar bonus every year smh
Video games didn't go down on price whenever we moved from having to distribute physical disks and fund physical locations to sell games to now everything digital online so if the price wont go down when the industry changes then I wont ever agree with the price increase.
In all of these, I'm glad asian developers are stepping up. They are the ones who makes quality games that is worth the money at the moment
If anyone can estimate What is the monthly on going cost for live service games ??
The problems of the gaming industry are varied, yes.
But the question here is:
Do we as costumers have to care or fix it?
I do not think we have to care nor fix it.
I'd be highly interested in what an actual budget break down looks like and how much money is burned in what areas. Surely with all these new tools being created production time on these games should have gone down significantly right?
Small Game dev here nope, the tools are more expensive and ridiculously more technical in some cases.
The only thing that got easier is the basic design and modeling parts. However in terms of back end shit it got much harder.
no it's even more, standards increase and thus dev time increases.
@@hovsep56 would have never guessed with how abysmal game releases are.
@@Cdogttv because they is no way they can get their money back with just 70 dollars.
They tried to cut cost by rushing the devs which din't work out.
So now that's why they now lay off employees and downsize the company and make smaller scale games so they don't have to sell 6 million copies just to finnaly see a profit.
AAA games are just becoming unprofitable, even if it's a good game there is still a high chance they won't see a profit at all for many years
Basically there is need for the game development to allow for the technology to catch up and made development of games cheaper and also easier for the customer base to buy adequate gaming platforms to run such games. It is rather clearly an issue of technological race of doing most visually spectacular game that drives the crisis (in the industry specifically, the wider economic factors are obviously in play too).
The real reason is executive pay, from software puts banger after banger at a rate that any other dev would dream of, the reason is the company is run by people who know the product. American capitalism has evolved into executives using companies like piggy banks and then leaving the company with a golden parachute after doing tons of damage for short term gains.
If these executives forfeited their salaries, it would be a drop in the ocean compared to the outrageous budgetary costs of these games. But their decisions, on the other hand, are what is tanking these game budgets
This whole video could have been summed up with one sentence.
Inflation is increasing much harder than our income.
Therefor things are becoming much more expensive for us.
In the past for a triple A game I would buy for 30€ but I was earning 2000€ as a starter. Now as a starter you are making around 2500€ but those triple A games cost 70€.
Do you see the problem?!
These companies also need to figure out another space that could use the “video game software”
Like flight sim for flying. AC’s discovery mode for schools. The simulation stuff would obviously be pretty tuff with the physics but the buttons and layout of cockpit are the same. AC discover mode is a pretty obvious one. The hardest thing is making the building and atmosphere. The history has already been written
I’m thinking how Microsoft/ Xbox used to have a contract with the US military for controllers. Yes basically Xbox controllers(but beefy)
I kinda wanted to play that new star wars game but when i saw the price point for an all digital collectors edition it was a big hell nah from me.
u really wanna play that ? its by ubisoft if i can remind you
@pierrickoger1148 I did say kinda. Was gonna wait until it was out either way to see if it was actually worth it. Unlike a lot of folks I don't jump on the hate train until it is confirmed bad.
Is there anyway to see exact budget break downs for these games. I don’t understand how these games have 100s of millions in budget and barely turn a profit. But then you have Zeekers a former Roblox dev, make lethal company solo and generate over 100mil in revenue.
Some game company have there financial document public because they are publically traded company.
Like Take Two
Take a look at the Insomniac leaks.
4:00 When I look up GTA 4 and GTA 5 I get 100 million, and 137 million. The 137 million doesn't include marketing. With Marketing GTA 5 costs over 250 million, but he said to skip that. I have no idea of the 100 mil for GTA 4 includes marketing.
In My Country Im A 3D Modeler And My Salary Is 180 Dollar A Month 😶 I play games when they are free on epics or on very high discounts.
Haven't we heard about many AAA games having more spent on Marketing budgets than the development budget?
Only few companies I trust to get games at full price cause they’re quality is 99% of the time perfect and games are polished for the amount of cost that goes in. That’s naughty dog, Santa Monica, rockstar, and capcom especially with the resident evil games. I think if more game companies cares about that instead of releasing games half busted more people would be willing to buy them at full price. Unless it’s those companies or I hear otherwise within a games first week of its release how it’s performing I’ll just wait
What I have been seeing is a return to what killed the gaming industry before. A focus on quantity over quality. Sadly, the quality is not matching the price point for most people.
Steam helped add to that problem with 14000 games released in just the last year.
They could've saved alot of production cost by not using sbi/bridge services it would make it cheaper faster and probably better
Also if they become unionised, wages will rise more frequently, games will take longer (while being paid more) because of the push to end crunch, so as a result of that, all that will only add to the cost of development. This is only going to get worse.
I think there is no excuse for AAA developers.
Helldivers is a fully fleshed out game and it cost half the price. If I was a betting man I’d assume they’ve made a huge profit, even with a long development cycle.
AAA developers piss there money up the wall. Skull and Bones is a perfect example.
I still ain’t going to be pay $70. I’ll wait for a discount.
Graphics should have stopped last gen, and this current gen should have been a gameplay/mechanics, and world density. Small but deep worlds.
The sad thing is that smaller, more concise (and thus cheaper to develop) games, even from AA studios, are generally better and of higher and more consistent quality regardless of budget than bloated and huge games that are more expensive, yet less worth the time, money and effort of both developers and consumers.
A Plague Tale Innocence is a much better game than Assassin's Creed Odyssey, despite releasing a year sooner from a smaller studio with a budget of 10 mil compared to 500 mil.
Imagine instead of one Odyssey we got 50 Plague Tales (obviously an oversimplification).
Literally nobody has demanded, let alone asked for, AC games to be as big and bloated as they are. Devs don't get to choose to make the super expensive, bloated games of inconsistent and dubious quality and then say "poor us, we NEED to incentivize players to spend more or we can't buy food". Either make smaller, cheaper games like Mirage (that still turn a profit) or make gigantic games of dubious quality and own up to your shitty monetization.
I don't even mind the monetization in AC games, but I can't stand when devs both choose to make the expensive game and then blame the monetization on the game being too expensive, especially when it by sales alone make a profit.
Devs aren't owed an excuse for implementing toxic monetization because they spent too much money on a game that was too ambitious, and this too bad to make a profit
witcher 3 is not a fair comparison, they are based in Poland and I remember some of my Iranian colleagues said at the time their monthly pay was around 600$ or so.
so there was a huge amount of crunch and labor involved
and they are located outside pricy countries like the US.
It's not a fair or really accurate comparison but I feel like he still did a very good job laying everything out to naive or otherwise just casual individuals that don't understand or haven't fully thought through the ins and outs of development
Double A is the way to go , all the game of a triple or "lol quad A" for a fraction of the budget.
Thes executives getting paid tens of millions of dollars need a salary cut
98% salary cut
Adjusted for inflation, that $60 game in 2000 is $110 today. A $70 game is actually far below what that indicator would demand, but players are attached to the $60 emotional pricepoint. That being said, if the big companies can charge more for trash, they would.
How did inflation impact the development costs? Do devs still get paid the same rate and wages as before? Maybe 15% more? They still get their money's worth from since 2000.
@glasgowblackchigowski6117 but the lack of price adjustment for inflation means they're revenue is significantly less than it "should" be relative to assets used on the product.
Bro NES games where 60€... Its not just a random number built to grow with inflation.. 60 has always been and should always be the top price for a game
@mullaoslo SMB3 also only cost 800k in dev cost. And sold 17million copies at a 50 dollar price point.
The revenue difference on that is insane compared to now.
Games weren't 60 dollars in 2000. They were 50, and they raised to 60 dollars in 2005. Checking inflation costs it doesn't matter. Because video games make profit based on units. Gaming has grown so much since 2005. Last year, the best-selling game sold 22 million in one year. The reason is that most people aren't buying new consoles. People aren't buying games because they are garbage. They could make profits on these games, but only good games make profit. The issue is that publishers need to look at long-term value, not short-term. After a certain amount of sales it's just pure profit and it might take two years due to being poor launch. They will make money back, just not right away for all games.
70 bucks price tag wouldn't be terrible if they actually made something of quality and what gamers wanted. If you get served crap like Starfield, Skull and bones etc. no, you don't deserve that big a price tag. Every new game out there compete over my wallet and time, of which is not endless.
They are paying no where near 100k on average in Europe. Perhaps in the UK, but even there that would be for the senior devs
Not even senior devs.
My friend is a junior dev and he’s on about 22k per year.
why are they so expensive? because they make them that way. the witcher 3 was 50 mil to make. theres no way it jumps from that to like 500 mil plus and theirs just no reason.
Yeah, even Alan Wake 2 now, one of the most technically advanced games, was 50M to make!
@@nossy232323and metro exodus about 50 mil to develop and it made about 144 mil in two months.
It was made in Poland where wages are far lower. So you are basically advocating for more outsourcing then.
@@lycanwarrior2137 Most big games are made in different countries.
@@lycanwarrior2137 well, US isn't all California too, there are cheap states to live in, it's just the managers who like it expensive and then complain that gamers won't pay for their luxury life.
I think that games will get more expensive to make and prices will go up until a certain point where there’s a crash in the market and developers will have to find ways to make the production of games cheaper and then games might drop £10 or so.
This sounds like a rocket fuel to mass to thrust issue. Need more fuel for more fuel. It's diminishing returns.
I miss older games because they were good, fun and to the point and not needlessly long, whereas a number of modern games are mediocre, long and boring.
I agree with you that budgets are too big and have got out of control and is not sustainable. The same on price, if people cannot afford or do not want to spend bag loads of money on a game and wait for a deal on it makes it more unsustainable.
Your analysis is always very good - like your videos.
I have a lot of friends at EA here in Vancouver is litterally a 5 min driver fr me and they are all contract workers
Most are paid under 20 dollars an hour
Are they interns cuz if not wow thats low
@@inshal6420 no and that what sucks
When i played spiderman 2 i was amazed by all the detailes that really didnt add anything to gameplay... So its not just overstending, its also spending money on shit that does not matter in a game... Similar to last of us 2... The physics for Ellies bag moved realistic and everything on it moved realistic... That is wasyed programing time that does not add to the gameplay.
If Witcher 3 cost 81mil in 2015 considering inflation it would cost only 108 mil today. However Cybeprunk cost 400mil so i guess that math doesn't add up lol
Montreal is actually one of the cheaper places to operate a game dev studio.
9:58 Definitely, cost of living for these workers would be crazy so even higher budget needed 🤯🤑
It's like how wealth creates wealth, cost creates cost.
The looser budgets get, the more they spend on irrelevant nonsense, consultants, and triple-thinking everything.
Effectively they make a game five times over, then ship a tenth of it.