When average, normal, peaceful people are labelled terrorists by your leaders.
You might just be led by terrorists!
There is no video game that will ever be worth that much. Period.Ok not "hate hate" and maybeeee it belongs MORE on the General Gaming Thread.
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GTA 6 Price: Many in the Video Game Industry 'Hope' for $80 if Not $100, Analyst Says - IGN
There is "hope" among some within the video game industry that Grand Theft Auto 6 will be priced between $80 and $100, one analyst has said.www.ign.com
But, it still should be also here!
There is no video game that will ever be worth that much. Period.
Properly multi-threaded Dwarf Fortress with Tolkien-esque 3d graphics, entirely finished.There is no video game that will ever be worth that much. Period.
AAA studios are already crashing, especially since it's dubious that there will be a next generation of consoles.I long for when video games, like movies crash as an industry and we don't see these absurd prices or absurd amount of money that goes into making them.
To be honest, we don't even need a next generation right now. Look at RDR2. That was from the PREVIOUS generation and is still utterly beautiful. Same goes for Ghost of Tsushima. One of the most visually stunning games I've ever played. Downright gorgeous. Amazing art. Previous generation.AAA studios are already crashing, especially since it's dubious that there will be a next generation of consoles.
Without the specific market role of games designed for consoles, and the ubiquity of being able to sell across the whole world through Steam, smaller developers who have actual creative vision, and will happily sell you a good game for 20-30$ that has nice stylistic rather than trying for realistic graphics, are steadily gaining ground.
The only (western) AAA game I can think of in the last ten years that was actually well-liked by gamers was Doom 2016.
There hasn't been anything interesting in shooters, or RTS, or RPGs, or 4X. Maybe Stellaris is a little newer than I remember? People liked that fairly well.
Point being, outside the niche markets of 'I'ma buy the latest shooter clone' or 'I'ma buy this year's installment of sports game franchise,' big-budget games made by established studios... Some are doing okay coasting along on inertia, but...
The lack of creative vision and integrity has sapped any enthusiasm or passion. The Halo franchise has wound down, Assassin's Creed has become a joke, Bethesda is most likely dying a strange death, though actually releasing a new Elder Scrolls game could put them back in the game, if it's good. (Skyrim is thirteen years old.)
When I think of games with both good gameplay and at least somewhat compelling narratives, I generally think of either things from before 2010, or Indie games like Hollow Knight, Battletech, Undertale. Games either done by small passion-project teams, solo, or literally off of a kickstarter budget.
Even if I'm just looking at gameplay, sans story, that gets you Slay The Spire, Against the Storm, Factorio, arguably things like Getting Over It or Kerbal Space Program, and other things that are definitely not coming from AAA studios.
There's a whole slew of interesting games from Japanese studios; I'm into the Souls and Souls-derivative games myself, but that's a different business culture and environment.
There's also Paradox's 'Grand Strategy' games, which Stellaris is the only non-niche one, largely for being more of a conventional 4X game instead of odd but historically interesting games trying to model historical politics, intrigue, and war. You could argue they're a AAA studio at this point, but they're not trying to make 'broad appeal' games in the same way, so they don't have the same issues.
Overall, the industry is in flux, much like the movie-making industry, but the barrier to entry for making video games is much, much lower.
Once all the AAA studios crash we will probably see a lot of stuff like this.I think there's a lot of really niche genres/concepts out there which have just enough games to keep those people satisfied. Amazing titles, not all of which I enjoy because of genre/setting differences, but I'll admit they're still good and well made.
The issue is that the industry as a whole looks at these successes, and goes.
"Huh...You know that's REAL neat...Now how can we inflate the budget, make the graphics blurry and then strip away all the stuff that people enjoyed?"
Good example? The new Empires of the Ants game. The OG game is an obscure top-down RTS with some pretty weird mechanics, but even to this day you'll find a few people crawling out of the cracks in the woodworks going "Damn that was a good game...I'd like another one of those!"
So what did Microids the publisher do? They did exactly what I said, they made it nothing like the original and it has barely any fucking players despite having some pretty nice Unreal5 Graphics...With blur, Because of course it does.
All they had to do was find some semi-competent artists to make up a bunch of 2d ant sprites with good style, or even PS2 level 3d models, rip off the OG game's mechanics WHICH ARE ALREADY MADE FOR YOU AND YOU OWN BY THE WAY, refine them a bit because it was jank, make it top down with a nice length sensible campaign, rip off the "Les Fourmis" books like the OG game did for missions and bam it'd make it's money back.
Would it make "FUCKTONS" of money? Hell no, but you put a low budget into it, so you should be happy it made a "DECENT" amount of money.
At this point I think there's no other excuse other than game companies embezzling funds. I'm sorry but there's just no fucking way any sensible businessman looks at a 400 million dollar game budget and says to himself "Yeah this slop will sell three times that much, easy"
Yeah, nah, that only happens when said businessman says to himself "Okay so I have a plan to slip 50 of those millions into my pockets over the 8 years of game dev time"
The gaming industry particularly pisses me off so much because it betrays everything about business 101, the target audience.Once all the AAA studios crash we will probably see a lot of stuff like this.
A Phoenix will raise from the ashes.
We are probably on the horizon of a new gaming golden age. Just gotta let this current monster fully die off first.
Yeah. Quite frankly a lot ofnthese studios deserve to go under, and will, because this business model is not sustainable.The gaming industry particularly pisses me off so much because it betrays everything about business 101, the target audience.
You look at some obscure title like Rule The Waves, all the puzzle pieces fit together.
1: The company making it loves IRL warships, how they worked, the actual technologies, doctrines and concepts surrounding them. Programming is as much actual coding competency as it is knowing what you actually WANT code to do. No ideas backing up that code and it won't actually be able to do anything because you literally haven't programmed anything into it lmao.
2: The company understood their budget, it has simple graphics, and a simple UI, it's all functional, just not pretty
3: The company knew their target audience, people like military stuff, people like ships. People like military ships.
And badda boom you get Rule the Waves, 1, 2 and now 3 which is released on steam (because they identified FUCKTONS more customers use steam!)
It's such a cute little story of a little company following the most basic of business rules and succeeding because of it.
But modern AAA devs? There's no passion in the devs, none of them probably fucking even play video games. None of them know what their budget should be aside from "The most available". None of them even know who they're SELLING THE GAME TO! They are after this mythical 'modern audience' who appears to be comprised of noncorporeal matter because I haven't seen a "Modern" in person yet.
It's so tipsy topsy that it almost gaslights you into thinking that's how businesses are supposed to operate, when they absolutely are not. The only other industry I can think of which is as belligerent is film/TV, and to be fair they're sort of connected.
Truth is it was never supposed to be sustainable. It's fed through ESG/DEI nonsense, which gets it's money from stupid investment nonsense, hedge funds, big business, who gets their money from the government in the form of free handouts. So beautifully the taxpayer pays to be fed slop. 9_6Yeah. Quite frankly a lot ofnthese studios deserve to go under, and will, because this business model is not sustainable.
I had spent a while wondering if I've just grown up too much to enjoy games. But once in a while a really good one comes around and reminds me that I do still enjoy gaming, just most games are shit.
That's the thing, technologically, graphics matter less now than ever. Back 10 or 20 years ago, what made AAA studios powerhouses was that they could throw money at making bleeding edge engines, to make the most out of bleeding edge hardware, and make games that looked clearly better than the older games and poorer competition, setting new standards for how games should look, sometimes also extending the technological supremacy to map size, item lists and so on. Even if the story slapped on that was meh, and often it was, they still had a lot of selling points.To be honest, we don't even need a next generation right now. Look at RDR2. That was from the PREVIOUS generation and is still utterly beautiful. Same goes for Ghost of Tsushima. One of the most visually stunning games I've ever played. Downright gorgeous. Amazing art. Previous generation.
New generations and more powerful hardware lately is just leading to additions of little details no one notices and less optimization. Like no one cares if the amount of polygons doubled if it doesn't make a visual difference. People aren't making prettier games (you could argue they're looking less visually impressive these days,) they're just not putting as much work into optimizing them to run on weaker hardware. New hardware doesn't mean better, prettier games anymore. It means lazier devs. Theyre still gonna charge you $70+, though.
Current consoles, you can make GREAT and beautiful games with what they're packing already.
Besides, graphics aren't everything. If they were, games like breath of the wild would have failed rather than come out as a masterpiece.
9_6The only things AAA has really left going for them are franchises and marketing, and they are actively burning public trust in those too.
Hollywood corrupt bullshit sank that boat, the game studios hit were mostly passengers on it.9_6
I'll never get over the fact that two "Literally free money printer, BRRRRRRRRRRR!" tier series have been burned at the stake in a decade.
Star fucking Wars from George Lucas. THE POWER OF MANYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
And Jurassic fucking Park from Steven Spielberg. "Oh actually the entire series secretly centered around a super smart woman scientist the whole time for three decades and we just never told you, tee hee!"
Might as well go crap on the Mona Lisa while you're at it. It's about as hurtful to media as a whole.
I mean I could understand something like Star Trek being ruined, that makes sense to me becaue that actually needs a decent amount of nuance to work well, as proven by DS9 being amazing.Hollywood corrupt bullshit sank that boat, the game studios hit were mostly passengers on it.
The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be... unnatural.I mean I could understand something like Star Trek being ruined, that makes sense to me becaue that actually needs a decent amount of nuance to work well, as proven by DS9 being amazing.
But STAR WARS!?
It's literally just WW2 films smashed with Eastern Mythology with space lasers. How hard can it be to make!? The dudes who made Andor did it just fine. Then for some ungodly reason we get SPACE WITCH LESBIAN MITOCHONDRIA JESUS-ETTE TWINS.
Adjust it for inflation, and its actually very cheap.There is no video game that will ever be worth that much. Period.
Where does Baulder's Gate 3 fit into this? Larian is a pretty big studio from an employee standpoint at this point and graphically the game is clearly not a low end title. BG3 was so well received by gamers that many of the AAA studios and their mouthpiece media went on rants about how it couldn't be considered the "new standard" for RPGs, which is hilarious as for decades that was what AAA studios were always trying to pull off: making a new standard.The only (western) AAA game I can think of in the last ten years that was actually well-liked by gamers was Doom 2016.
What happened is pretty simple: video game companies ended up being run by people who didn't understand and know video games. There was a reason for this, starting in the late 90s and early 00s as video games got really big there was multiple high profile game failures due to the gaming companies being run by "rockstar developers" (IE John Romero). With so much more money involved and the projects and companies getting bigger, these companies decided they needed to bring in people who were not just experts at programming and designing video games, but at running businesses. This led to the upper management of video game companies rapidly no longer being populated by video game programmers and designers who were there for the love of games and art, but business majors who were there to make money and run a business, and this was initially seen as a good thing, a check on developers who often ended up delaying releasing due to feature creep or not managing development time well.The gaming industry particularly pisses me off so much because it betrays everything about business 101, the target audience.