RetroGamingUK
Member
Get your studios out of California.
100%
The American game development industry is collapsing in front of our eyes.
Japan are at the helm of PlayStation again, time to start swapping out American studios for Japanese ones.
Get your studios out of California.
Mark Cerny "The hope is that this leads to a dramatic simplification in game development. For example, developers won't need to manually set up LODs, or worry about duplicating assets in multiple places on disk just to reduce load times."
Hasnt Sony made 5 times as much money during ps5 than all the other generations combined? This shit sounds fishy as hell.
This isn't true, the first game that bucks this trend was RE4, shifting the entire gameplay to a whole different framework. It did so again with RE: 7 and as you can see they are sequels on top of being "next-gen" and are also the most performant out of the entire series. It's clear that changes within sequels does matter, critically and sales wise. Unless your game's core identity is built around it like Street Fighter, sequels that deviate does not only win new players but expand the audience as well.I have to call out this bs out, because franky its disingenuous and selectively used against games based on who the publisher is. For the past 20 years, every sequel to a successful IP has followed the same formula. Thats the whole point of making a sequel; to give people more of what they loved from the first game and build on it. If the second game was to deviate too far from what made the first game loved by fans, then it wouldnt be a sequel, it would be a different game. Fromsoft games wouldnt be successul if Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 didnt follow the same formula of Demon Souls and Dark Souls 1. Uncharted wouldnt be a successful franchise if Uncharted 2 and 3 went in a completely different direction than Uncharted 1, and so on. Its been like this since the PS2. Before then you had more of a substantial change in game design because technology improved every generation, giving devs more memory and processing power to evolve gameplay mechanics.
The answer is less studios in places like California and more in places like Poland.
By the PS3 generation, teams of 20-30 people weren't enough any more. Half-Life 2 had an 80 man team and took 6 years, and things spiralled from there. These days Valve is considered "small" and I've seen people on these forums doubt their ability to produce an AAA title.Exactly
PS1: "Oh look, it's a shiny new product, so it's naturally expensive"
PS2: "This powerful machine lets us make bigger games, so naturally, they cost more"
PS3: "Everything needs to be in HD now, which is incredibly complicated and, you guessed it, expensive"
PS4: "These visuals are almost real. Crafting them demands immense resources, making games incredibly pricey"
PS5: "Even for existing franchises, the new generation demands double the budget for that next-gen polish. Of course, it's expensive"
Cyberpunk cost over $300 million for the initial release, despite the main studio being in Poland. Moving to a country with lower labour costs is a one time benefit that does nothing to combat the ever increasing manpower requirements of producing game content. (Crunch is also arguably a one time "benefit", since there are limited hours in the day employees can work).Yes but it wasn't the next gen that caused the prices to go up. It is the woke ideology of the cities these games are made in along with the woke ideology of the companies they work for.
I bet the price per employee has quadrupled over the last 10 years and you get half the work(remember no crunch, and employees tend to work 4x harder when they are made to work based on finishing a task vs a predetermined schedule). I bet the taxes and rent these people pay in California is atrocious. I bet you could still make a AAA game for PS4 prices on PS5 with smart use of AI and total remote work in a less affluent country that is 100% not woke.
Remember when they said crunch didn't speed game development up or make it cheaper? That's right, they never claimed that did they. Because it DOES speed it up, it does make it cheaper, and it provides a better product at the end of the day. The people who sacrifice for this is both us and also the company who will now spend double on game development. It isn't just crunch and woke, it is also inflation, but mostly crunch and woke. We talk about gamepass being unsustainable. So is this. Good thing for the industry AI is here because there are only so many 400m dollar games that can flop before we feel it.
AI to the rescueCyberpunk cost over $300 million for the initial release, despite the main studio being in Poland. Moving to a country with lower labour costs is a one time benefit that does nothing to combat the ever increasing manpower requirements of producing game content. (Crunch is also arguably a one time "benefit", since there are limited hours in the day employees can work).