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[vaibhavpisal]

They are trying to do this in face of new generation.

They definitely underestimated how much work will be needed for Switch 2 games, going by empty open world in MKW.

There is no way their budgets wont overshoot if they want to have quality.

 

[Trilobit]

They are trying to do this in face of new generation.

They definitely underestimated how much work will be needed for Switch 2 games, going by empty open world in MKW.

There is no way their budgets wont overshoot if they want to have quality.

I hope they go with a smaller, but tighter open world in the next Zelda. BotW and TotK were a bit too big for their own good. I want there to be more to discover and less mindless long running. I feel like less is more if they have trouble filling big worlds with interesting things.

 

[Moses85]

So OoT Remake in December 2025?

 

[Baemono]

Does anyone actually hate Nintendo?

The « real » Nintendo fans do yes

 

[Zeusexy]

And yet, they increase the price of games. Not very consistent, dear Furukawa.

 

[vaibhavpisal]

I hope they go with a smaller, but tighter open world in the next Zelda. BotW and TotK were a bit too big for their own good. I want there to be more to discover and less mindless long running. I feel like less is more if they have trouble filling big worlds with interesting things.

Am playing TOTK currently. Pretty early but feels like they improved stuff to discover over BOTW.

Hopefully they improve further. Agree world is quiet big.

 

[correojon]

Animations and set pieces are expensive and difficult to produce. Zelda ignores a lot of stuff most AA/AAA games have for generations. They've also recycled the whole map, added little island in the sky, and made a dark underground. I would understand if the game had a bunch of different biomes like Elden Ring, but everything looks extremely samey, so it taking this long to develop can only mean no talent (which is obviously not the case), not much resources given for the project, or a small team of devs trying to develop a game that is simply too ambitious. There's no shot that a game like TW3 takes under 4 years to develop, and a recycled ToTK takes ~6y, with visuals that are generation behind TW3, a game that came out a generation before ToTK.

TotK's physics system is orders of magnitude more complex than any cutscenes or biomes in any AAA Game. Not only that, but it's done in such a scale and with such level of polish that other devs were gushing about It online with the things you could do and how well the system behaved, and all of that running on a toaster. ER is amazing, but in comparison It wasn't doing anything new, just bigger and it botched It a bit with the arbitrary height barriers where even double jumping wouldn't save you. Not to speak of other games where just trying ro ride your horse up a hill in the wrong angle would send It to orbit the planet.

If you know anything about game development, or just programming, it is pretty clear why TotK took as much time as it did and even then it's still a miracle that It worked.

 

[Disco Dave]

Six more games in the BotW engine and map

Each game will be nickel and dimed variably priced between £80 - £90.

 

[MayauMiao]

Does anyone actually hate Nintendo?

Not just Nintendo but also on Playstation, Xbox and PC.

Diversity in hating.

 

[yurinka]

I think this is what they may do:

• More ports/remasters/remakes of old games
• More DLC, particularly standalone DLC
• More "sequels"/spinoffs like TotK while they mostly rehash a previous game
• Shorter games
• More digital only games
• More rehash of models, textures, animations or sounds from previous games
• Even less new IPs if that is possible
• Use of AI to speed up processes of all kinds
• Shorter times for bugfixing and polish

TotK's physics system

TotK's physics system is orders of magnitude more complex than any cutscenes or biomes in any AAA Game. Not only that, but it's done in such a scale and with such level of polish that other devs were gushing about It online with the things you could do and how well the system behaved, and all of that running on a toaster. ER is amazing, but in comparison It wasn't doing anything new, just bigger and it botched It a bit with the arbitrary height barriers where even double jumping wouldn't save you. Not to speak of other games where just trying ro ride your horse up a hill in the wrong angle would send It to orbit the planet.

If you know anything about game development, or just programming, it is pretty clear why TotK took as much time as it did and even then it's still a miracle that It worked.

I'm a programmer with 20 years of working experience in gaming.

The BotW and TotK physics don't have anything special. It's the 25 years old Havok Physics engine middleware (nowadays owned by Microsoft), has been used by hundreds or thousands of games of most platforms.

 

[Buggy Loop]

Nintendo games will cost 100$ in 2 years then...

Yeah but if the $70 and $80 games are GAAS / AI slop from the rest of the industry, it'll be worth the price tag

 

[Ar¢tos]

Yeah but if the $70 and $80 games are GAAS / AI slop from the rest of the industry, it'll be worth the price tag

Nintendo has been remaking the same games over and over for the past 30 years, that's definitely not worth 100$ for me.

 

[MSduderino]

TotK physics don't have anything special.

I'm a programmer with 20 years of working experience in gaming.

nah, dude.

 

[correojon]

I think this is what they may do:

• More ports/remasters/remakes of old games
• More DLC, particularly standalone DLC
• More "sequels"/spinoffs like TotK while they mostly rehash a previous game
• Shorter games
• More digital only games
• More rehash of models, textures, animations or sounds from previous games
• Even less new IPs if that is possible
• Use of AI to speed up processes of all kinds
• Shorter times for bugfixing and polish

I'm a programmer with 20 years of working experience in gaming.

The BotW and TotK physics don't have anything special. It's the 25 years old Havok Physics engine middleware (nowadays owned by Microsoft), has been used by hundreds or thousands of games of most platforms.

The Havok developers themselves stated how impressed they were with what Nintendo was able to achieve with their engine in Breath of the Wild and that was child's play compared to TotK, so it might be a bit special.

 

[GigaBowser]

I'm a programmer with 20 years of working experience in gaming.

The BotW and TotK physics don't have anything special. It's the 25 years old Havok Physics engine middleware (nowadays owned by Microsoft), has been used by hundreds or thousands of games of most platforms.

Game dev blown away by Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom says it "shouldn't be possible on the Switch"

"Nintendo's out here making people look like fools on hardware that's literally tenfold what the Switch is"

www.gamesradar.com

Game Developers Share the Most Mind-Blowing, Inspiring Elements of Tears of the Kingdom - IGN

IGN spoke with five game developers — ranging from indie devs working on their first solo projects to devs with decades of AAA experience — about the most mind-blowing parts of Tears of the Kingdom, and if a universally-loved game like this is inspiring, deflating… Or a little bit of both.

www.ign.com

Developers Agree That Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom Is A Miracle - SVG

Fans and devs agree that "Tears of the Kingdom" is a truly extraordinary achievement that boggles the mind.

www.svg.com

 

[_Ex_]

To me this sounds like use of AI for streamlining development aspects, and making shorter games in general. I'm A-OK with shorter games (quality over quantity), but not shorter games at $80.

"Nintendo would never use AI." Oh really.

 

[SneakersSO]

Sounds nice, but let's wait and see exactly what that actually means.

Bigger teams? Smaller games? Shared development? The dreaded AI?

More focused teams that utilize outsource houses for large swathes of asset generation is the answer here. Having a 200 man team working on a single game is too unwieldy, and has made the entire business model of games development basically untenable.

 

[memoryman3]

More focused teams that utilize outsource houses for large swathes of asset generation is the answer here. Having a 200 man team working on a single game is too unwieldy, and has made the entire business model of games development basically untenable.

Could that work for more ambitious titles that are driven by animation and gameplay systems? Even Nintendo, lauded for their leaner development, had 300 developers working on the 25GB Mario Kart World.

 

[yurinka]

Game dev blown away by Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom says it "shouldn't be possible on the Switch"

"Nintendo's out here making people look like fools on hardware that's literally tenfold what the Switch is"

www.gamesradar.com

Game Developers Share the Most Mind-Blowing, Inspiring Elements of Tears of the Kingdom - IGN

IGN spoke with five game developers — ranging from indie devs working on their first solo projects to devs with decades of AAA experience — about the most mind-blowing parts of Tears of the Kingdom, and if a universally-loved game like this is inspiring, deflating… Or a little bit of both.

www.ign.com

Developers Agree That Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom Is A Miracle - SVG

Fans and devs agree that "Tears of the Kingdom" is a truly extraordinary achievement that boggles the mind.

www.svg.com

The guy of these tweets (and journos quoting it) have no idea what they are talking about. These are simple physics that don't have anything special compared to what we have been seeing in many decades.

BotW and ToTK physics are simple rigid body physics, similar to the ones that started to appear in the PS1 generation and started to be popular in PS2 generation.

There's absolutely no problem to use it in open world games because doesn't almost need computation or memory compared to doing it without physics with the amount of stuff loaded in memory at any moment.

It's more complex but basically this is the idea: a physics object has a certain speed/acceleration in direction and rotation, which are things that affect them, like gravity or friction from the wind, floor or other objects.

Simple example: the typical wooden box you throw or pull and gets rotating and colliding downstars or with walls and the floor until stops.

To complicate it a bit, you can attach/link multiple physics objects together defining a distance between them and a certain roughness/elasticity (can't remember the proper English word now): meaning moving one object will move the attached one, being pulled trying to keep the mentioned distance between them according to that roughness/elasticity, while both attached objects get also affected by the physics and collisions mentioned before.

By making multiple of these connections in let's say a rope, a chain or piece of cloth if you it's moved realistically being affected by the character's movements, wind, gravity, etc. Example: Helldivers 2's capes (capes with physics look epic when applying wind to them) or as a better and older example, notice that when Kratos is moving and stops his animation ends, but the 'skirt' waves moved by the inertia and then goes back (this is a PSP game but also did it in PS2):


Adjusting that 'roughness/elasticity' value is how you make a piece of cloth moving more or less, or let's say a female boob jiggle more or less when they applied physics there.

It goes a bit more complex but this is what physics in games do. The physics engine and code basically is the same -maybe a bit more optimized- that many years go, what means a game to seem to have 'better physics' is choosing better the value applied for these accelerations, speeds, 'elasticity', friction of the different physical objects or simply to include many more physics objects as an example for different clothing pieces, to make more detailed hair animation, etc.

Separate from this, not included in the game's physics there are things (they are in the normal game specific code instead) like the object state, as it could be in these Zeldas to be 'frozen', 'burning', etc. and change to other state when achieving certain conditions like being touched by other object in that state at the moment of after certain time, etc. Some people mistakenly assume these states and the interaciton between them are part of the physics, but arent.

More modern physics stuff include more complex things such as complex fuids or wind simulation, or in some cases even also stuff releated to (stuff including in a separate lighting stuff that doesn't affect moment) real time global illumination.

The Havok developers themselves stated how impressed they were with what Nintendo was able to achieve with their engine in Breath of the Wild and that was child's play compared to TotK, so it might be a bit special.

Source? I highly doubt it's the case because it only does basic stuff that has being used during decades in way less capable machines.

 

[Guardian Monkey]

Source? I highly doubt it's the case because it only does basic stuff that has being used during decades in way less capable machines.

I do not disagree, from a modular middleware perspective, everything in it has been done one way or another. But an open world non linear game on the hardware and power constraints of the Switch. I believe its the sum of all parts in action that make it impressive.

 

[correojon]

The guy of these tweets (and journos quoting it) have no idea what they are talking about. These are simple physics that don't have anything special compared to what we have been seeing in many decades.

BotW and ToTK physics are simple rigid body physics, similar to the ones that started to appear in the PS1 generation and started to be popular in PS2 generation.

There's absolutely no problem to use it in open world games because doesn't almost need computation or memory compared to doing it without physics with the amount of stuff loaded in memory at any moment.

It's more complex but basically this is the idea: a physics object has a certain speed/acceleration in direction and rotation, which are things that affect them, like gravity or friction from the wind, floor or other objects.

Simple example: the typical wooden box you throw or pull and gets rotating and colliding downstars or with walls and the floor until stops.

To complicate it a bit, you can attach/link multiple physics objects together defining a distance between them and a certain roughness/elasticity (can't remember the proper English word now): meaning moving one object will move the attached one, being pulled trying to keep the mentioned distance between them according to that roughness/elasticity, while both attached objects get also affected by the physics and collisions mentioned before.

By making multiple of these connections in let's say a rope, a chain or piece of cloth if you it's moved realistically being affected by the character's movements, wind, gravity, etc. Example: Helldivers 2's capes (capes with physics look epic when applying wind to them) or as a better and older example, notice that when Kratos is moving and stops his animation ends, but the 'skirt' waves moved by the inertia and then goes back (this is a PSP game but also did it in PS2):


Adjusting that 'roughness/elasticity' value is how you make a piece of cloth moving more or less, or let's say a female boob jiggle more or less when they applied physics there.

It goes a bit more complex but this is what physics in games do. The physics engine and code basically is the same -maybe a bit more optimized- that many years go, what means a game to seem to have 'better physics' is choosing better the value applied for these accelerations, speeds, 'elasticity', friction of the different physical objects or simply to include many more physics objects as an example for different clothing pieces, to make more detailed hair animation, etc.

Separate from this, not included in the game's physics there are things (they are in the normal game specific code instead) like the object state, as it could be in these Zeldas to be 'frozen', 'burning', etc. and change to other state when achieving certain conditions like being touched by other object in that state at the moment of after certain time, etc. Some people mistakenly assume these states and the interaciton between them are part of the physics, but arent.

More modern physics stuff include more complex things such as complex fuids or wind simulation, or in some cases even also stuff releated to (stuff including in a separate lighting stuff that doesn't affect moment) real time global illumination.

Source? I highly doubt it's the case because it only does basic stuff that has being used during decades in way less capable machines.

This post reads like someone with very little experience in actual development, even though you say you've been working as a dev for 20 years. You explain the most basic theory as if it were directly applicable in practice, as if having a complex, working physics engine was achieved by flipping a flag in Havok to "awesome engine ON = true". Guess the Bethesda devs don't know about this setting or something.

In the following GDC talk about BotW some Nintendo devs explain several aspects of the game's development, including how they developed a kind of "secondary physics engine" on top of Havok to get the game ot behave the way they wanted, this may be another hint that maybe the engine is at least a bit special (this is what the Havok devs also spoke about, saying how they were surprised that the BotW team got their engine to behave in ways they didn't think were possible, I haven't being able to find the quote but I stand by it):


BTW, the game also won the Best Technology and Innovation Awards at Game Developers Choice Awards, an award given by other developers who clearly don't know that this is nothing special either.

This is impressive by itself, but getting it to work almost flawlessly in a huge open world (this is not just a memory constraint but also affects the floating point calculation error accumulation) on the Switch hardware is black magic.

 

[Fabieter]

Have you visited the forum Neogaf lately? Like, since the Switch 2 console and game pricing was announced?

I hate high price tags. I like Nintendo.

 

[nnytk]

I'd love to see some Bowser's Fury style games, 10-15hrs of singleplayer fun sounds perfect to me.

Or maybe standalone roguelike Splatoon spin-off for 40 bucks, would be great stuff.

I hope Nintendo keeps the expected level of quality in their games, no matter how they're made or how much they cost. Keep the magic intact pls.

 

[existensmaximum]

I hate high price tags. I like Nintendo.

Me too! But you can't have missed all the blatant hate for Nintendo and the Switch lately.

 

[Kataploom]

Nintendo haters right now… : How i can turn this as something really bad?…

Disclaimer: The following text is based on a fictional narrative, if it looks alike reality, it's just a mere coincidence.

Spoiler

Nintendo as always stuck in the past, everyone else moved to nice 4K graphics and AI and they're still in their aged development mentality, and nintendrones will applaud that because their corporate lords can't be wrong, they'll put a lot of games but all of them are for 5yo or their fanboys that eat all the shit Nintendo throws to them

 

[kpopSuperstar]

what do they mean by invest on their employees?

They are talking about building internal teams, making them bigger. They are trying to adapt to newer and more expensive development. They mean they will put down the cash to make sure that big games will have manpower, like support studios and stuff like that.

 

[lh032]

They are talking about building internal teams, making them bigger. They are trying to adapt to newer and more expensive development. They mean they will put down the cash to make sure that big games will have manpower, like support studios and stuff like that.

so means higher dev cost? i dont see what so special about this

 

[yogaflame]

More efficiency, better development tools, better training, and AI support.

 

[MSduderino]

so means higher dev cost? i dont see what so special about this

well, the timing might have something to do with layoffs hitting the industry. They are trying to signal they won't do that.

 

[MoreJRPG]

So they're going to sell people a 4 hour Kirby game for $70 instead of an 8 hour Kirby game. Got it, sounds like something they can get away with knowing their player base.

 

[kpopSuperstar]

so means higher dev cost? i dont see what so special about this

Nothing special, just normal growth.

 

[Kataploom]

Never understood how the fuck the likes of Zelda take a whole generation to develop. Game looks ancient, has no mo cap, barely any dialogue, no expensive set pieces, etc. It's as simpleton as it gets, and it takes em 5+ years? The fuck is that.

If you played both Switch Zelda, you'd clearly see it. Design and implementation can take a lot of time for their stuff, it's not like they're just doing what everyone else is doing in terms of gameplay. Also their assets are pretty up to par with the rest, of you've done 3D modeling and procedural texturing for modern games at any decent level you'd know that

 

[SILKYSMOOTH30FPS]

If you played both Switch Zelda, you'd clearly see it. Design and implementation can take a lot of time for their stuff, it's not like they're just doing what everyone else is doing in terms of gameplay. Also their assets are pretty up to par with the rest, of you've done 3D modeling and procedural texturing for modern games at any decent level you'd know that

Played BOTW for around 30h and ToTK for around 10h. Not seeing anything what you've said. Copy pasted shrines, barely any enemies variety, and empty fields to climb is all i saw in BoTW. Better in ToTK, but not by much.

 

[KungFucius]

You'd think after dropping the 3DS and focusing on one console they would produce way more content. But HD town is hard so Zelda ToTK took 6 fucking years to make.

Did it take 6 years to make or did it take 6 years to sort out the new game systems and then make? Something got in the way of putting this out faster. They showed it 4 years before release.

Nintendo spends more time on perfecting gameplay than they do on the bloated HD development. Very few of their games are copy pasta. And even in the case of TotK where so much was already working from BotW, it took forever. That is just how they do it, isn't it? Hasn't every fucking game they made that was 3D taken forever? Every goddamn Zelda game has taken years longer than fans and even they expected.

 

[Kataploom]

Played BOTW for around 30h and ToTK for around 10h. Not seeing anything what you've said. Copy pasted shrines, barely any enemies variety, and empty fields to climb is all i saw in BoTW. Better in ToTK, but not by much.

30 BOTW and not getting impressed with the game? 10 with TOTK only (it takes like 4 to get out of intro)?

Enemies variety has always been a problem with BOTW and TOTK, they're not perfect, but saying they don't have great animations or set pieces and that money want evidently spend on assets quality, wow... I play mainly on PC and do game dev to a decent level in both graphics and programming and can't stop being impressed by how complex most of the stuff there are, including graphics not only for the limitations they had, even on their own.

Not everything has to be hyper realistic, or pursue Hollywood style of storytelling, maybe you're just too used to that and expect everything else to follow, idk, but claiming BOTW and TOTK don't justify their development time after playing them for hours is weird, and I say this as someone who don't like them um reusing BOTW map in TOTK.

 

[KungFucius]

Played BOTW for around 30h and ToTK for around 10h. Not seeing anything what you've said. Copy pasted shrines, barely any enemies variety, and empty fields to climb is all i saw in BoTW. Better in ToTK, but not by much.

There are 2 possibilities here. 1 is that it was all copy pasta and they sat on it for 4 or so years. The second is that the building and vehicle mechanics and the new puzzles that utilized them took several years to perfect to the point where most enjoyed it.

 

[SILKYSMOOTH30FPS]

30 BOTW and not getting impressed with the game? 10 with TOTK only (it takes like 4 to get out of intro)?

Enemies variety has always been a problem with BOTW and TOTK, they're not perfect, but saying they don't have great animations or set pieces and that money want evidently spend on assets quality, wow... I play mainly on PC and do game dev to a decent level in both graphics and programming and can't stop being impressed by how complex most of the stuff there are, including graphics not only for the limitations they had, even on their own.

Not everything has to be hyper realistic, or pursue Hollywood style of storytelling, maybe you're just too used to that and expect everything else to follow, idk, but claiming BOTW and TOTK don't justify their development time after playing them for hours is weird, and I say this as someone who don't like them um reusing BOTW map in TOTK.

Nothing has impressed me in either games. What i did like and respect BoTW for is that they weren't handholding you, which is a must for open world games to me.

 

[Axelon]

That's fine and all, but I just beat Ganon yesterday on Zelda BotW and I started it in 2017. I'm good.

 

[tomato shrub]

That's what they said before making Tears of the Kingdom and look how that turned out. Six years for an expansion pack-style sequel.

 

[yurinka]

This post reads like someone with very little experience in actual development, even though you say you've been working as a dev for 20 years. You explain the most basic theory as if it were directly applicable in practice, as if having a complex, working physics engine was achieved by flipping a flag in Havok to "awesome engine ON = true". Guess the Bethesda devs don't know about this setting or something.

In the following GDC talk about BotW some Nintendo devs explain several aspects of the game's development, including how they developed a kind of "secondary physics engine" on top of Havok to get the game ot behave the way they wanted, this may be another hint that maybe the engine is at least a bit special (this is what the Havok devs also spoke about, saying how they were surprised that the BotW team got their engine to behave in ways they didn't think were possible, I haven't being able to find the quote but I stand by it):

Nothing in this talk proves me wrong or is incompatible with what I said. In fact, it reinforces that I was right.

The part I mentioned that wasn't in the physics engine and was the state management of objects (frozen, burning, etc) is a pretty simple code as he says, but they mentioned it there as 'chemistry engine' even if as he mentions it's just a state calculator instead of a real or accurate chemistry engine.

But doesn't have anything related to chemistry, it's just to handle the few simple rules to decide when each object changes their state as I said.

Maybe that's the other 'engine' you mentioned.

BTW, the game also won the Best Technology and Innovation Awards at Game Developers Choice Awards, an award given by other developers who clearly don't know that this is nothing special either.

This is impressive by itself, but getting it to work almost flawlessly in a huge open world (this is not just a memory constraint but also affects the floating point calculation error accumulation) on the Switch hardware is black magic.

I agree BotW was an impressive technical achievement and the award was well deserved, but because for including such a big open world with great visuals running well in the toaster that Switch is. Not for using Havok physics.

 

[ProtoByte]

If Nintendo is worried about costs even with their sales paired with how their games are technologically, it should indicate to anyone with common sense that technology is not why game dev times and costs have spiked.

 

[WhiteWaterM00se]

Exactly!

I'm surprised we don't see two things.

1.) HD remakes of GameCube, Wii, and 3ds.

2.) Nintendo develop their own HD2D for NES, SNES, GBA, etc.

 

[Danjin44]

1.) HD remakes of GameCube, Wii, and 3ds.

We do see that with Bravely Default HD remaster.

 

[WhiteWaterM00se]

We do see that with Bravely Default HD remaster.

Sorry, i was referring to first party titles.

And, to add to it, because i wasn't clear. They should be annualized. This is paramount. It would be lower cost, and could fill in release gaps. Having maybe 2 a year would be good. Or 3 with one being a HD2D remake or the older titles.

 

[Danjin44]

Sorry, i was referring to first party titles.

Even with first party we did get Another Code which was DS game.

I do want to see Kid Icarus Uprising on Switch 2.

 

[March Climber]

If you played both Switch Zelda, you'd clearly see it. Design and implementation can take a lot of time for their stuff, it's not like they're just doing what everyone else is doing in terms of gameplay. Also their assets are pretty up to par with the rest, of you've done 3D modeling and procedural texturing for modern games at any decent level you'd know that

The sad truth is that it's a lot easier to convince and show someone that a movie took a ton of effort to shoot, than it is to convince someone that the current level of the modern game they're playing took hundreds of hours of manpower.

 

[WhiteWaterM00se]

Even with first party we did get Another Code which was DS game.

I do want to see Kid Icarus Uprising on Switch 2.

Yes, they have such a big catalog that they could pull remakes, collections, and trilogies and have plenty of time and not have to worry about running out for over 20 years.

 

[WhiteWaterM00se]

The sad truth is that it's a lot easier to convince and show someone that a movie took a ton of effort to shoot, than it is to convince someone that the current level of the modern game they're playing took hundreds of hours of manpower.

Gaming in many respects has become "not fun". Not ALL, but many are wannabe movie directors playing out their fantasizes in a game setting. Due to bloated budgets of gaming, i understand about having to be sequels.

But, you know why mobile is so successful…first because many or f2p. With gotcha mechanics. Which i am not a fan of, but i get it. But the barrier to entry on most popular games on mobile is it is easier to understand and get into and get started.

Console gaming should embrace lowering the barrier to entry. Maybe with more "arcade" style games. It would be easy. DK Arcade, more NFL Blitz (without the nfl), another Cruisin, pinball, whatever. Variety and have them be pick up and play easy.

This is what made Wii Sports so successful, Guitar Hero, PvZ, Words With Friends, Angry Birds, Super Mario Bros, etc. Pick up and play.

Gaming has mostly forgotten this.

 

[Majukun]

It's a nice approach but I'm intrigued by what it means in practice. What are the investments that will improve efficiency?

Keeping a higher number of developers long term could be one.
The videogame.i dusty is heavenly relying on cycles.
You do lots of hiring when a project goes full swing, but after the project is done you let go a huge part of the team and just hire again when a new project gets to full development.

This is money savvy but also makes you lose a lot of acquired experience and the efficiency that comes from it or even just from team members already knowing each other.

Shortening the dev cycle while also overlapping them better (so that people can jump from project to project without dead time in the middle) could make projects more efficient.

A lot comes down to good management at all levels

 

[March Climber]

Console gaming should embrace lowering the barrier to entry. Maybe with more "arcade" style games. It would be easy. DK Arcade, more NFL Blitz (without the nfl), another Cruisin, pinball, whatever. Variety and have them be pick up and play easy.

This is what made Wii Sports so successful, Guitar Hero, PvZ, Words With Friends, Angry Birds, Super Mario Bros, etc. Pick up and play.

Gaming has mostly forgotten this.

The good indies and AA are currently doing this and barely anyone here is paying attention (unless said dev/game gets enough clout to be noticed)

They keep giving people exactly what they keep asking for, but since their game isn't 'well known brand by well known publisher' it either gets ignored, criticized to an extreme degree, or finds itself a small fanbase.

Gaming didn't forget, gamers forgot.

Gamers forgot what it was like to simply browse a blockbuster, or grab a demo disc, and try out a random game they thought looked fun. Now? It's clout. Big Publisher X has to make it or publish it for them to notice.

Nintendo potentially doubling down on smaller experiences doesn't excite me like others here because I was already playing other good smaller experiences. People now just care because it's Nintendo spotlighting it again.

The whole 'not fun' thing has been a prevalent personal issue that people keep brazenly assigning to the industry as a whole.