I think Hollywood is currently seeing the end result of the kind of trend games like TLOUPII are sitting on. Ballooning budgets, longer cycles, higher expectations; there absolutely has to be a tipping point. With that said, I don't think it manifests itself like it does in Hollywood, where we end up with an endless stream of utterly forgettable sanitised USD$300m "spectacle" blockbusters like "Dial of Destiny" every year. Hollywood only has one or two revenue streams for its products, so it has to make them safer, more appealing, and hope to sell to the masses. Video games have lots of revenue streams: retail, digital, GaaS, MTX, F2P, Loot boxes, etc. I think games like Destiny 2 and Halo Infinite are a good example of what the trend of "bigger budgets, longer cycles, higher expectations" produces in video games - endless "10 Year" treadmills that look and sound great but are utterly forgettable trash that players are expected to invest a decade into to soak up the risk. I think Sony's GaaS push shows they know they can't sustain the kind of risk games of this kind of increasing scale have in them without a safety net. TLOUPII itself was successful, sure, but it sold about half of what its predecessor did. For a USD$220m tent pole with that kind of hype on a platform as big as the PS4, that must have been a little scary for the bean counters. It all worked out ok, but they were probably expecting to at least equal its predecessor, especially after the sales of Uncharted 4. These kinds of budgets are all well and good when everything goes your way, but that's not how you keep a company alive as long as Sony has. At these numbers, one big misfire is enough to wobble the whole house of cards. I imagine we'll see GaaS safety nets - titles expected to have enormous longterm return on investments - spring up more and more as budgets continue to balloon.
