Non-RPG General News - Are AAA games really failing?

Heh, stretch the analogy to the limit in order to prove me wrong. But I did say, "It's not that different from the movie business", rather than "it's identical to the movie business". Whatever. Have a good one.

Hey man. Sorry if I came on too strong. I truly believe that the movie and video game markets are are very different businesses even though they are both in the entertainment industry. Got triggered by a comment in the Wiki article on AAA games I linked to earlier. Was just trying to explain the basis for my belief -- wasn't trying to prove you wrong. Sorry I came across as the latter rather than the former.

No biggie, Best Regards.

__
 
It's also odd that a game like PoE released a *beautiful* hardcover strategy guide so early and now all of the information in the guide is incorrect.

Yes, I will keep mentioning this every time PoE is brought up. I want a nice and ACCURATE strategy guide if a strategy guide is offered. :p

I hear ya, I bought that guide too. It looks pretty on the shelf though and it's in mint condition since there's no reason to ever open in.:biggrin:
 
Hey man. Sorry if I came on too strong.

rofl you didnt whatsoever , he is just having his monthly identity crisis

rshae said:
Heh, stretch the analogy to the limit in order to prove me wrong.

err yeah.. thats TOTALLY what he meant ….brilliant…
maybe by the time youre 50 you'll evacuate the basement ?
 
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rofl you didnt whatsoever , he is just having his monthly identity crisis

err yeah.. thats TOTALLY what he meant ….brilliant…
maybe by the time youre 50 you'll evacuate the basement ?

Thank you luj1. That helped.

But its also true that I somehow have this thing; and I really don't mean to have it; that sometimes ppl think I'm trying to put them down when I'm totally not. And it probably shouldn't matter to me; but it does because I've felt put down so many times, and don't want to do that to anyone else. And truth be known, you're probably the same which is probably the basis for your kind words for me.

So thanks; indeed, many thanks to you luj1.

And an outstretched hand of friendship and respect to rjshae.

For what its worth.

__
 
I have a feeling that not many around here will be willing to listen or agree, but let's give it a shot anyway ;)

I think the main problem is that for some reason people have started to see $50 as a huge investment for a new game. This is of course the result of the endless sales on Steam and similar platforms. But consider this; A new game in 1990 also cost around $50. Inflation dictates that the cost should be considerably higher now. Salaries for game devs have followed the inflation, and so has marketing. Personally I think $50 for 25 hours of good entertainment is very reasonable, and $10 is ridiculously cheap.

Yeah, sometimes games are released in a buggy state. That was also the case in 1990... but possibly, because patching is so much easier now, it happens more often these days. I don't know, perhaps we have our rose tinted glasses on when thinking back. Or we were more willing to work around the bugs (let's call it quirks) back then?

Take PoE as an example, which was mentioned earlier. Yes, they keep patching it - because they can. But holding out on playing it is, in my opinion, ridiculous. I played it more than a year back and didn't have any problems. It was AT LEAST as stable and bug free as any 1990 CRPG I remember playing.

I'm also hard pressed to remember any game from back then with as much and as detailed (and expensive to develop) content that we see in some of the big AAA games these days. But people always expect that these days.

So combined:
- People have become extremely cheap, and will wait until a game is $20 before buying
- They expect tons of polished and complicated content
- They complain more about bugs. And with the Internet it's easy to be extremely vocal..

Not hard to understand why AAA is having a hard time.

In my opinion we're busy killing off our own hobby with our unrealistic expectations...

The math is simple; it cost X amount of $$$ to develop a big AAA game, meaning that we have to sell Y amounts of full-priced copies to break even. Y is a very high number...
If we don't break even, then eventually the business model doesn't make any sense, and AAA will be a thing of the past. Some might be OK with that, but I'll be sad the day I cannot play games like Witcher 3 anymore.
 
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I have a feeling that not many around here will be willing to listen or agree, but let's give it a shot anyway ;)

I think the main problem is that for some reason people have started to see $50 as a huge investment for a new game. This is of course the result of the endless sales on Steam and similar platforms. But consider this; A new game in 1990 also cost around $50. Inflation dictates that the cost should be considerably higher now. Salaries for game devs have followed the inflation, and so has marketing. Personally I think $50 for 25 hours of good entertainment is very reasonable, and $10 is ridiculously cheap.

Yeah, sometimes games are released in a buggy state. That was also the case in 1990… but possibly, because patching is so much easier now, it happens more often these days. I don't know, perhaps we have our rose tinted glasses on when thinking back. Or we were more willing to work around the bugs (let's call it quirks) back then?

Take PoE as an example, which was mentioned earlier. Yes, they keep patching it - because they can. But holding out on playing it is, in my opinion, ridiculous. I played it more than a year back and didn't have any problems. It was AT LEAST as stable and bug free as any 1990 CRPG I remember playing.

I'm also hard pressed to remember any game from back then with as much and as detailed (and expensive to develop) content that we see in some of the big AAA games these days. But people always expect that these days.

So combined:
- People have become extremely cheap, and will wait until a game is $20 before buying
- They expect tons of polished and complicated content
- They complain more about bugs. And with the Internet it's easy to be extremely vocal..


Not hard to understand why AAA is having a hard time.

In my opinion we're busy killing off our own hobby with our unrealistic expectations…

The math is simple; it cost X amount of $$$ to develop a big AAA game, meaning that we have to sell Y amounts of full-priced copies to break even. Y is a very high number…
If we don't break even, then eventually the business model doesn't make any sense, and AAA will be a thing of the past. Some might be OK with that, but I'll be sad the day I cannot play games like Witcher 3 anymore.

I see where you are coming from but I disagree on the whole.

Back in the day we didn't have much choice so we were willing to pay the price publishers wanted and play unfinished or buggy games. But why should we be willing to do any of those now? There is huge competition in the gaming sector so we should get cheaper and better games. Is that not the natural evolution of things with increased competition?
 
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Back in the day we didn't have much choice so we were willing to pay the price publishers wanted and play unfinished or buggy games. But why should we be willing to do any of those now? There is huge competition in the gaming sector so we should get cheaper and better games. Is that not the natural evolution of things with increased competition?

But that's exactly what I think is happening right now. They are (much) cheaper to get a hold of these days, and - bugs aside - games have become extremely advanced beasts.

I'm arguing that the price war have perhaps gone overboard. It's easy to say that devs should "just" become better and find a way to develop their games faster and cheaper. But if pretty much every single studio in the world is struggling to do that and are struggling to survive, then perhaps we have to accept it's not possible to achieve?

Personally I'm playing Dishonored 2 right now. It's a great game in my opinion, and I'm happy to have paid $50 for it. I'm very sad to hear it's still not selling enough, because I cannot see how the guys at Arkane could have done better. I just hope it's good enough for them, so we'll see more games from that talented studio in the future.
 
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Personally I'm playing Dishonored 2 right now. It's a great game in my opinion, and I'm happy to have paid $50 for it. I'm very sad to hear it's still not selling enough, because I cannot see how the guys at Arkane could have done better. I just hope it's good enough for them, so we'll see more games from that talented studio in the future.

I assume you're living in a country with relatively low inflation and a stable currency? Where I come from (and I suspect many developing countries), our tanking economy has made AAA $50 games very expensive in local monetary terms. For me, effectively, the game is now an $80+ game (in terms of purchasing parity etc), and I simply don't want to pay that unless it is *exactly* what I'm looking for and will give me a great many hours of entertainment. Of course, non-1st world markets may not matter to AAA studios, but I would think that any lost sales are bad for business. For me, $30 is decent price for an 'average' good quality game, with good production values. For a game like Witcher 3, which I have invested 100's of hours in if you add DLC, I was prepared to pay $50 - but that is, imho, an exceptional game and I had loved both its predecessors. And it was still cheaper for me because our currency was healthier at that time. On a related note about affordability - I have really benefited from KS, because I was able to pledge at a low level and get access to the full game at way below the final retail cost.
 
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I think games are ultra cheap when comparing to the hours of entertainment you can play.

Cinema costs $10 for a ticket for two hours....

I played dungeon rats for over 30 hours for less, and that's an indie game.

I have hundreds of hours on crusader kings and eu4.

That kind of entertainment is unparalleled.

The main reason I don't pay full price for games is not bugs but because I have too many games to play.

I bought civ 6 and only played for two hours for now because I wanted to replay expeditions before the sequel comes out.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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But that's exactly what I think is happening right now. They are (much) cheaper to get a hold of these days, and - bugs aside - games have become extremely advanced beasts.

I'm arguing that the price war have perhaps gone overboard. It's easy to say that devs should "just" become better and find a way to develop their games faster and cheaper. But if pretty much every single studio in the world is struggling to do that and are struggling to survive, then perhaps we have to accept it's not possible to achieve?

Personally I'm playing Dishonored 2 right now. It's a great game in my opinion, and I'm happy to have paid $50 for it. I'm very sad to hear it's still not selling enough, because I cannot see how the guys at Arkane could have done better. I just hope it's good enough for them, so we'll see more games from that talented studio in the future.

This may be an insensitive thing to say but may be some theses games companies should go out of business or do something else? I am interested in Dishonored 2 and I am sure its great game but I will not pay $50 for it simply because I have too many good games in my backlog. So the point is my buying decision is not based on the quality of the game but on how much free time I can allocate to games. I think we have over supply of good games and that is a problem.
 
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Technically, AAA means bug-free release, but why let a little problem of word definition get in the way of a marketing campaign...
 
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I think we have over supply of good games and that is a problem.

That is a good point, and also true. It's the same for me.. not enough time for the backlog.

On the other comment - if a game company really cannot develop games, and fail project after project... then yes, it might be a necessary and good thing that they go out of business.
But it's a problem when even well-produced and well-reviewed games that are developed without significant delays still cannot break even. And that is happening to more of the top games than you might think...
 
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It's also odd that a game like PoE released a *beautiful* hardcover strategy guide so early and now all of the information in the guide is incorrect.

Yes, I will keep mentioning this every time PoE is brought up. I want a nice and ACCURATE strategy guide if a strategy guide is offered. :p

Probably the best Fluent post ever! How do I give it +5 instead of +1?
 
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I assume you're living in a country with relatively low inflation and a stable currency? Where I come from (and I suspect many developing countries), our tanking economy has made AAA $50 games very expensive in local monetary terms. For me, effectively, the game is now an $80+ game (in terms of purchasing parity etc), and I simply don't want to pay that unless it is *exactly* what I'm looking for and will give me a great many hours of entertainment.

Yes, I'm lucky enough to live in such a country.

I don't know where you're from, but I actually thought that retail prices were adjusted in different territories to take exactly this problem into account. If games retail at $50 in your country that seems not to be the case.

$30 is still worth going for - IF you're willing to buy a digital copy. For physical products, especially on consoles, there is a large fixed overhead on each sold unit, so it quickly becomes less interesting for the developer to sell at a discounted price.

Selling AAA games at $10 is almost a fan service. Yes, the dev is still making SOME money... but unless the product is already in the black it's not really making a difference. You would have to ship millions of units at that price point to make a significant difference...

Bottom line is that currently all(?) AAA devs are extremely reliant on a significant amount of people being willing to buy their game at full price.
 
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That is a good point, and also true. It's the same for me.. not enough time for the backlog.

On the other comment - if a game company really cannot develop games, and fail project after project… then yes, it might be a necessary and good thing that they go out of business.
But it's a problem when even well-produced and well-reviewed games that are developed without significant delays still cannot break even. And that is happening to more of the top games than you might think…

One solution is to make shorter games so we all have spare times to play them!

Jokes aside, there is a saying where I am from that too much of anything thing (even if its good) can be bad and I think game industry is at this stage!
 
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Create 5 different accounts and call them lackblogger 1 - 5 and and like his post? ;p

Lol, I dread what I would have been like if I'd followed my dad's advice and not cared about such things as morals so much ;) :D

OnkaCLid.png
 
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Jokes aside, there is a saying where I am from that too much of anything thing (even if its good) can be bad and I think game industry is at this stage!

I disagree with this point. I think the problem is there's too much crap being sold as product so that too many people are having bad experiences and then ignoring the genuine product out of a general desire to make a stand against the crap.

There's always been a good number of decent games released each year and a good number of failures, but in ye olden days I don't think people were asked to pony up the cash before the game was even in production, let alone on the shelf.

You also never used to get first day purchasing to the same extent you do today. You used to have to go to the shop to buy a game, which one didn't do every day, maybe once a week, maybe once a month, then browse the new games on the shelf, possibly with some basic knowledge garnered from magazines but mostly from the information on the box.

A modern gamer gets 6 months of hype, hyped into pre-ordering, hyped into expectations, is downloading it at midnight then foruming about how it's too buggy and how the end-boss is shit the following evening.

Completely different culture.
 
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One solution is to make shorter games so we all have spare times to play them!

Jokes aside…

Ha ha, for me that's actually not always a joke ;)

I loved Witcher 3 - but if all games were that length… the thought alone makes me tired. Short and sweet is definitely the way for me these days! ;)
 
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This may be an insensitive thing to say but may be some theses games companies should go out of business or do something else?

That's what happened in the 80s video game crash, consoles and games saturation caused a market contraction where studios closed down and companies simply left the game industry because they couldn't sell enough games to recoup investment.

And it already started again. Disney, Microsoft and Sony practically left the game industry by closing down most of their affiliated studios in 2015-2016 (Disney left it entirely, Microsoft/Sony kept a few). There was a few independents that downsized/closed this year (Crytek being the largest, but not the only one). And it's not just AAA console/PC games. The mobile market is affected, King closed down studios this year and the MMORPG market is now full of crowdfunded indies in development (and Amazon not knowing what to do with its money).
 
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