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[RetroGamingUK]

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.

 

[CitizenKratos]

Wasn't saving devs development cost a PS5 design goal? Like the SSD was talked about this as saving dev work.

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."

 

[OuterLimits]

Hasnt Sony made 5 times as much money during ps5 than all the other generations combined? This shit sounds fishy as hell.

Not fishy at all. Sony lost massive amounts of cash during much of the PS3 generation. Plus Sony makes a ton of cash now because PS+ is needed for online which didn't exist from PS1-PS3.

 

[Ev1L AuRoN]

Well, Clair Obscure exists, so I'm sure they can make games cheaper if they really want to. If not, scale down the production, make some AA games, as long as the game is good, that's all that matters, plus if you can make it a 60 dollars, they will sell.

 

[genesisblock]

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.

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.

Others of note whose games change up in sequels and still receives a better reception: MGSV and God of War. Note that they changed the formula so much it's essentially a different game in the franchise and gamers loved it. Now that we are in the PS5 period with the biggest jump of all the console power — and we're barely seeing anything noteworthy of it. In fact, all the technically and impressive games ironically fall into the indie realm: Still wakes the deep, The Plague Tale Series, Hellblade and now Kingdom Come. All smaller in budget compared to Sony's first party offerings. It truly is a joke of a generation that we haven't seen developers in Sony's AAA party releasing an actual game they wowed us like Uncharted or The Order: 1886. With one exception that is Ratchet & Clank that is finally achieving that CG look it's been trying to promote from the PS2 days.

 

[Fake]

GTFO of California.

 

[OuterLimits]

The answer is less studios in places like California and more in places like Poland.

Move Naughty Dog to rural Alabama. Hell, Sony could make extra cash by doing a documentary about Druckmann and gang enjoying their new location.

 

[Dafegamer]

I wish he would come back, PlayStation was thriving under him

Edit: I meant First Party Games releases

 

[FireFly]

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"

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.

I don't really understand the puzzlement in this thread about the rising costs. When you're employing several hundred people over several years, that's going to be seen in the balance sheet.

 

[Xyphie]

In the case of the Spiderman games it's more like 3-4x per the Insomniac leaks.

Spiderman 1: $89M
Miles Morales: $156M
Spiderman 2: $315M
Spiderman 3: $385M

Wild negative learning rates from what's basically the same assets recycled 4 times.

 

[Pop]

Yeah really hurting Playstation bottom dollar. Triple A budgets are the problem. Spending is out of control

 

[Shmunter]

Doubled the size of my epenis. This is BS

 

[Zacfoldor]

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.

 

[SEGAvangelist]

Like... you could just make the same kinds of games that now run better.

 

[Fake]

Sony fanboys are not quite different from Xbox fanboys when the subject is delusion. I mean, imagine believe in this bullshit after Spider-Man 2. Its wild what this game cost and the end result not even near.

 

[SenkiDala]

"For very little improvement", that's for sure. I've owned a PS5 since day one during 4 years and for some reasons I had to sell it and since then I play on a base PS4... And I don't miss the PS5 that much. I wanna play some games that don't exist on PS4 like Death Stranding 2, Silent Hill 2, soon Silent Hill ƒ, and for sure I will kinda soon, but for now honestly... Well right now I'm playing the first "Judgement" game, and it looks awesome.

The gap between PS4 and 5 is really tiny. The big thing and the only one that I miss are the fast loadings, but that's it.

Well in some ways that's good, for 100$ for a used PS4, you can play hundreds bangers for dirt cheap and not missing that much with the "new" gen.

 

[FireFly]

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.

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).

 

[Shmunter]

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).

AI to the rescue