60 réponses à ce sujet

[Cyonan]

Gatt9 wrote...
Actually, it's a very good argument.

A key piece of information not being assessed here is that a title like Mass Effect, especially ME3, has a vast amount of wasted money spent during it's production.

-For each trade show, significant portions of the team are pulled off the main project and redirected to making trailers. To show press people, not customers. Nevermind the expense of renting an area at the show, and shipping people and equipment to it. Which could all be replaced simply by not going to a pointless tradeshow, and just showing press people the actual game in their office.

-Most of those trade shows also involve lavish after parties, to impress press people. Contrast that to the people who actually matter, the 140 million console owners and the much larger PC base, and it becomes obvious how much of a waste it is.

-Additionally, there's the oft-reported perks like "Spend a day learning to race a ferari!" and "Here's a helicopter ride to the hotel!" for press people.

(All of which is just to get them to proclaim the game the greatest thing ever on release day, so people will buy the game before they find out it's a disaster)

-Then there's the massive amount of money wasted of forced multiplayer in ME3. I highly doubt anyone bought the game for multiplayer.

-TV spots, like anyone buys a game because of a commercial these days.

There's a fantastic amount of money being wasted on AAA games, the goal of which is just to trick people into buying something before they can read reviews. The Industry would be in much better shape if they actually did what Minecraft did and tried making a good game, instead of wasting all of that money on a mediocre game and trying to trick people into buying it. It's really impressive when you think about it, if they took just half of that wasted money (and time), and put it into development, they wouldn't have to worry about bad reviews tanking the game!.

As noted, if you think MP was a waste you should check out those forums and how active they are compared to the other ME3 ones. They made a ton of money off of the MP store and it was quite successful.

Also, the original argument was that companies can build cheap games and sell in the 10s of millions of copies, because Minecraft did it. My point was that AAA games can't really be made on the budget of the average indie title if you want some of the things that make them AAA games, and that Minecraft is an extremely special case that can't even be planned for. Nobody can plan for YouTube going nuts over your game and all that free advertising for it.

What you're trying to argue against is a point that I didn't make, which is that there is no room to cut out unneeded costs in a AAA budget.

There can be room to cut out things on the budget, but if you want an indie type game then you should play an indie game. They both have their pros and cons, and one of the cons of AAA games is that no matter which way you look at it, it's not gonna be cheap to make one.

[Dragoonlordz]

Don't really care about console game price hike, or the raising of the India PC versions to be more inline with USA. But I am curious if they plan to increase the cost of PC versions in UK and Europe which I have heard nothing about them doing. It's not the end of the world if they do as I don't buy many games outside of bundle deals and high % sales/discounts anyways.

Modifié par Dragoonlordz, 14 juillet 2013 - 10:12 .

[Gatt9]

Cyonan wrote...

Gatt9 wrote...
Actually, it's a very good argument.

A key piece of information not being assessed here is that a title like Mass Effect, especially ME3, has a vast amount of wasted money spent during it's production.

-For each trade show, significant portions of the team are pulled off the main project and redirected to making trailers. To show press people, not customers. Nevermind the expense of renting an area at the show, and shipping people and equipment to it. Which could all be replaced simply by not going to a pointless tradeshow, and just showing press people the actual game in their office.

-Most of those trade shows also involve lavish after parties, to impress press people. Contrast that to the people who actually matter, the 140 million console owners and the much larger PC base, and it becomes obvious how much of a waste it is.

-Additionally, there's the oft-reported perks like "Spend a day learning to race a ferari!" and "Here's a helicopter ride to the hotel!" for press people.

(All of which is just to get them to proclaim the game the greatest thing ever on release day, so people will buy the game before they find out it's a disaster)

-Then there's the massive amount of money wasted of forced multiplayer in ME3. I highly doubt anyone bought the game for multiplayer.

-TV spots, like anyone buys a game because of a commercial these days.

There's a fantastic amount of money being wasted on AAA games, the goal of which is just to trick people into buying something before they can read reviews. The Industry would be in much better shape if they actually did what Minecraft did and tried making a good game, instead of wasting all of that money on a mediocre game and trying to trick people into buying it. It's really impressive when you think about it, if they took just half of that wasted money (and time), and put it into development, they wouldn't have to worry about bad reviews tanking the game!.

As noted, if you think MP was a waste you should check out those forums and how active they are compared to the other ME3 ones. They made a ton of money off of the MP store and it was quite successful.

Also, the original argument was that companies can build cheap games and sell in the 10s of millions of copies, because Minecraft did it. My point was that AAA games can't really be made on the budget of the average indie title if you want some of the things that make them AAA games, and that Minecraft is an extremely special case that can't even be planned for. Nobody can plan for YouTube going nuts over your game and all that free advertising for it.

What you're trying to argue against is a point that I didn't make, which is that there is no room to cut out unneeded costs in a AAA budget.

There can be room to cut out things on the budget, but if you want an indie type game then you should play an indie game. They both have their pros and cons, and one of the cons of AAA games is that no matter which way you look at it, it's not gonna be cheap to make one.

The two points are intrinsically tied together though,  you can't argue that AAA games can't be made the way Minecraft has been without talking about the way AAA games are made,  and the budgets of AAA games are extremely bloated with unnecessary costs.  For it to be possible for us to definitively say that the Minecraft model doesn't work,  we first need to excise all of the chaff out of the bloated AAA budgets and find out what the real costs of development are.  Since we know the Publisher alone adds 25% to the budget per Brian Fargo,  it's entirely possible if we cut out the rest of the wasteful spending the budgets could drop 50% or more.  At that point,  what is and isn't possible becomes very different.

As far as ME3 goes,  I have a very hard time believing it was either popular or successful.  I really find it hard to believe there's that many people interested in Horde mode for a rather bland shooter.  Activity in a forum doesn't translate to popularity or success,  5 people can make a forum look active.  That doesn't mean the population at large is regularly playing Horde mode in an unimpressive shooter instead of playing any one of a number of quality shooters.

[Splinter Cell 108]

Gatt9 wrote...

As far as ME3 goes,  I have a very hard time believing it was either popular or successful.  I really find it hard to believe there's that many people interested in Horde mode for a rather bland shooter.  Activity in a forum doesn't translate to popularity or success,  5 people can make a forum look active.  That doesn't mean the population at large is regularly playing Horde mode in an unimpressive shooter instead of playing any one of a number of quality shooters.

You know what's ironic about that. Whenever people talked about the negative things about ME3, all of the sudden the forums were the minority, now since the forum has a lot of positive activity with regards to MP, now its a majority and the exemplar of success. 

[kobayashi-maru]

I think the gaming industry is going the way Hollywood did, making products that cost huge sums of money, yet for most part fail to deliver an overall decent outcome. HW used to concentrate on the blockbusters throwing money at marketing to make weak films successful. Eventually the studios started to lose vast sums of money as more and more films bombed, some went bankrupt others got bought out. In the end the winners became the smaller studios who made decent movies on a low budget. Lionsgate are a great example of it, concentrating on low budget that end up making huge sums at box office. Even the studio behind the awful Twilight franchise knew that even though the movies made huge grosses they didn't need Ironman style effects budgets thrown in - in fact only reason the final 2 were higher was because of cast salaries by that point.

Gaming companies need to learn same lesson. Resident Evil and Dead Space where never AAA blockbusters as they have narrower genre appeal than COD, making them more like action games only dilutes the actual genre appeal. This causes huge problem as action game fans are mostly not interested in game anyway and those fans of the franchise get turned off by the changes, so games fail. You just need to read the Capcom statements on RE6 to understand there expectations where too optimistic and marketing budget OTT.

[Wulfram]

As I understand it, it's very important to make a lot of pre-orders and early sales to get retailers to buy copies of your game.  Which I guess means you can't really wait for word of mouth to get around that your game is actually really good - you need to ramp up the hype beforehand.  Thus, big marketing budget.

Modifié par Wulfram, 15 juillet 2013 - 07:08 .

[vometia]

Wulfram wrote...

As I understand it, it's very important to make a lot of pre-orders and early sales to get retailers to buy copies of your game.  Which I guess means you can't really wait for word of mouth to get around that your game is actually really good - you need to ramp up the hype beforehand.  Thus, big marketing budget.

I think I'm done with advance orders now: been stung too many times with games that have capitalised on the success of predecessors but were obviously rushed to market.  They may still snag me occasionally if it's a very, very good collector's edition, but even there I've been burnt with some overpriced crap, so in general I think I'll sit back and let other people test the water, however big the marketing budget is.  I suspect an increasing number of people will be doing the same thing.

[Bleachrude]

Gatt9 is your typical gamer that doesn't get how much games cost to make...

And no, it's not just AAA titles at all...

How much do you think it would cost to add a SINGLE character to an existing 2d hand-drawn fighting game?

10k maybe, 50K perhaps?

Try 150k and this is considered dirt cheap by those in the know (Srth of Street fighter fame)


Skullgirls - cost for 1 character WITH breakdown (developer was really open about what it cost)

[Gotholhorakh]

I can't be the only person who has opened Origin and lol'd, literally lol'd at the money they want for things.

I think the people who price things up at EA - especially their "awesome deals" have been in an unventilated room with open tins of paint or something.