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[Esppiral]

Most of the budget is wasted in many things that are bit the development of the game...

 

[darth.shrimp]

Because...

 

[Darkness_Arises]

What is Festivus? Is it a new PC way to wish Christmas, what was wrong with Happy Holidays?

 

[ManaByte]

What is a Festivus?

 

[Makoto-Yuki]

money.

got it

 

[Polygonal_Sprite]

AAA companies are just way too big imo. Look at Ubisoft, 20K employees and all they are able to put out is slop. Expensive slop, which they have to fill with MTX because 70$ seems to not be enough.

Meanwhile way smaller studios like From or Larian put out way, way better games.

And Activision bankrolled ER which probably cost around $100 million all in.

 

[Bumblebeetuna]

Shocked to see it was about money /s

 

[Alebrije]

The "problem" for developers is the same that other enterteiment industries have , on you reach the top of the growing curve you need tons of money to get the costumers attention since there are hundreds of options around.

Marketing budgets must be huge compared to 80,90s games. AAA games also have more risks so developers don't move from thier core IPs and new ideas are discarted.

Finally since games are about fun 500.millions budget does not guarantee you success if your Game has Bad gameplay, lore, writting, etc...You can easily be surpassed by a fun indie Game like Balatro.

 

[Trilobit]

It cost all this money to develop a game and then they still take a big risk by infusing their games with politics and adhering to lobbying groups who couldn't care less about video games. If it's all done to please investors why do one studio after another have to close down - wouldn't basically all of the development cost be covered by said investors..?

I was thinking the same thing. I have a problem seeing the logic of studios without ND's level of backing that decide to go to war with their fans and shame them. If it's such a cutthroat business where one bad game can tank a whole studio I'd expect them to try to be more concerned about their main audience.

 

[Tiago Rodrigues]

By 2004, the cost of AAA games like Jak 3 had soared to $45-50 million

Jak 3 costed 50M back in 2004?

And we complain when a game costs over 100M in 2024?

No wonder publishers like Sony are looking for talent in countries like China. Didn't Black Myth: Wukong cost exactly that number 20 years later?

 

[nial]

Sure there is a place for AAA but not every game needs to be that. I personally do invest in a lot of indie games as of late and I do get a lot of use out of my switch. But the last AAA game I truly enjoyed was Doom Eternal or maybe the latest Mario. But Indie games bring me a lot of that old gaming joy. Helldivers 2, Killing Floor, Dead Cells, Icarus, etc have all been my games to play as of late.

>indie games
>helldivers 2

 

[YCoCg]

I miss the Andy Gavin & Jason Rubin era of Naughty Dog.

 

[Stevonidas]

I think more and more publishers are going to go the "stylized visuals" route in coming years, given the success of F2P titles like Fortnite, Overwatch, Marvel Rivals, etc. which are pleasant to look at and also allow for excellent performance.

Time has shown Nintendo was smart not to play the hardware wars with Sony and Microsoft. The Switch is the most profitable console ever, and you can believe big corporate publishers are taking notice.