EA: Dead Space needs 5 million to survive.

[QUOTE="Mario1331"]ok so your telling me hd games and their high budgets have nothing to do with developers bleeding money? or thats not just the only reasonVandalvideo

This right here is the answer. What I don't really get is how they can justify these budgets and actions to stock holders. If I owned stock in one of these companies I'd be more concerned about making money and less concerned about selling 5 million copies or being the next CoD.

[QUOTE="Mario1331"]ok so your telling me hd games and their high budgets have nothing to do with developers bleeding money? or thats not just the only reasonVandalvideo

PC is cheaper to develop on for a large number of reasons.

Also, using The Witcher 2 as an example is kind of pointless.

A) They had a much smaller team.

B) The game is carried by elements that are the cheapest to produce(story and visual output)

C) They are from Poland. Much lower salaries and cost of living.

D) They are from Poland. Much cheaper land and office expenses.

E) They are from Poland. Much lower tax rate.

F) They had a much smaller team. Does not require nearly the same size space.

G) They didn't care at all about trying to appeal to a broad audience. They just made the game they wanted to make for whatever market existed for that game.

They also had almost no care at all for the development time of the game. They took as long as they felt like taking.

It is apples to oranges.

Also, the HD generation IS to blame for the rising development costs. Exceptions may exist, but the simple fact is that most publishers feel compelled to push budgets higher and higher because that is what players demand. If you take more than 2 years to get a sequel out then you lose players. People only have an attention span to wait so long for the next entry in a series before they lose interest. So, developers feel the need to push 2 year cycles. Similarly, as better and better production values and techniques emerge, that new tech becomes expected, regardless of the cost involved. So, AAA-ultra budget games push the tech forward while the rest of the industry limps along behind them carrying the weight of budgets 2-3 times too large. And god forbid you wait too long to adopt the new tech, because then gamers lose interest because the game isn't as "good" as the other games that are out.

It is the reality of the industry, and has more to do with the audience than it does with the publishers. The publishers are just reacting to what the audience is demanding. And what they are demanding is bigger, more badass games with bloated budgets and overly homogenized content. There is room on the fringes, just not much. And that is the problem.

[QUOTE="sandbox3d"]

[QUOTE="mems_1224"] there are more than enough games this gen for any type of gamermems_1224

Man... keep fighting the good fight against games I guess? :?

If you cant clearly see the negative impact that this model has brought about then I don't know what to tell you. Yes, there are plenty of good games. That doesn't change the fact that things could be much better.

And I wouldn't say for every type of gamer either. We don't see as many pure genre games anymore because big budget houses don't want to risk appealing to a niche audience. Take a look at the stealth genre for example.

This right here is the answer. What I don't really get is how they can justify these budgets and actions to stock holders. If I owned stock in one of these companies I'd be more concerned about making money and less concerned about selling 5 million copies or being the next CoD.

ActicEdge

Because that is the only way to compete.

The games industry expanded, but in a very limited scope. The expansion that the market has seen is almost entirely of people who want cinematic action, multiplayer, and the like... The "core" market for other games(along the lines of the original Dead Space, the original Mass Effect, or BioShock) has not really expanded that much(it may have even softened). It is the same 1-3 million players that it was 6 years ago. However, all the things that the big budget cinematic action games have brought to the table are suddenly expected, even by those 1-3 million players. They want the better production values and better overall quality that came with the massive budget games to suddenly appear within their Mass Effect, Dead Space and BioShock games. And that just costs more. So, you are left with a market that hasn't expanded much suddenly needing to sustain a substantially more expensive product. It doesn't work. So, you now need to start drawing in design elements from the more mass market games in an attempt to draw in pieces of the expanded market. However, that just makes the core market angry. So, now you need to go even further down that path to make up for the players you alienated, and then that viscious cycle begins.

PC is cheaper to develop on for a large number of reasons. Also, using The Witcher 2 as an example is kind of pointless.A) They had a much smaller team. B) The game is carried by elements that are the cheapest to produce(story and visual output) C) They are from Poland. Much lower salaries and cost of living.D) They are from Poland. Much cheaper land and office expenses.E) They are from Poland. Much lower tax rate.F) They had a much smaller team. Does not require nearly the same size space G) They didn't care at all about trying to appeal to a broad audience. They just made the game they wanted to make for whatever market existed for that game.They also had almost no care at all for the development time of the game. They took as long as they felt like taking.KingsMessenger

Also, the HD generation IS to blame for the rising development costs. Exceptions may exist, but the simple fact is that most publishers feel compelled to push budgets higher and higher because that is what players demand. If you take more than 2 years to get a sequel out then you lose players. People only have an attention span to wait so long for the next entry in a series before they lose interest. So, developers feel the need to push 2 year cycles. Similarly, as better and better production values and techniques emerge, that new tech becomes expected, regardless of the cost involved. So, AAA-ultra budget games push the tech forward while the rest of the industry limps along behind them carrying the weight of budgets 2-3 times too large. And god forbid you wait too long to adopt the new tech, because then gamers lose interest because the game isn't as "good" as the other games that are out.

It is the reality of the industry, and has more to do with the audience than it does with the publishers. The publishers are just reacting to what the audience is demanding. And what they are demanding is bigger, more badass games with bloated budgets and overly homogenized content. There is room on the fringes, just not much. And that is the problem.

Because that is the only way to compete.KingsMessenger

Same thing happened with the UFC games. There were selling 2 million plus units and still losing money. Games cost more to make than people realize.FPSfan1985

That's totally different though because UFC is a licensed game. With the licensed games like UFC, madden, fifa, tiger woods, etc. Even if they just copy/past the same code over again, they still have to pay some degree of licensing fee. I'm sure the really big license fees run into the $10's of millions annually, and then on top of that they still have marketing costs. Those games are pushed purely on licensing and marketing. It should be very obvious by now, that the actual GAME DEVELOPMENT for these franchises year after year is not very much. At best they are just tweaking the same game over and over again (and half the time they even screw something up moving from year to year, like screwing up the rosters or the stats or breaking a certain mode in the game that worked fine the year before).

It's the same thing with licensed movie games. It wouldn't be surprising if some of them pay like $5 million to license the movie, and then spend $1 million or less making the game.:lol:

[QUOTE="KingsMessenger"]Because that is the only way to compete.Vandalvideo

It is getting harder and harder to do that tough. Even the PC is reaching a point where marginal costs are exceeding the market for those types of games. It isn't an expanding market. It is a stagnant market that has been stagnant for almost a decade now...

Also, stockholders are stupid. You can have the most stable profit margins on the planet, but as soon as any one of your competitors strikes gold in a way that you have not(Call of Duty... World of Warcraft...) all those stockholders are going to want is some of that pie. Doesn't matter what the market consequences or chances of achieving that happen to be, those stockholders want their pie and they want everyone else's pie as well.

The issue with that is that it is not a growth business. And a technology business that isn't a growth business is a dying business. The market for the type of games that you want simply is not growing. And thus, nobody wants to touch it. Production costs are going to rise no matter what happens. New technology always costs more, and even the "lower budget" games you talk about still need to follow the newest technology to compete. That means that even if they return to the $10 million budget games, costs are still going to rise eventually, but nothing has suggested that the market is expanding to meet that increasing cost... Then, god forbid a new console generation comes along. What happens then? New tech, new graphic fidelity expected, new costs... Market still hasn't expanded that much, so now you have a $20 million game built for a $10 million market... Like it or not, games need to appeal to a bigger market. That is just a fact. It will mean costs will continue to rise, but it is the only way that the industry can sustain itself... The issue is, even that has a limit, so publishers need to work on alternative means of monetization to generate revenue in other ways to help subsidize the increasing costs.

Thats all stockholders care about, and this is really the only healthy way for the growth of new IPs. Otherwise, new IPs will continue to get even more risky as time goes on and development costs sky rockets. And guess what happens then? Publishers will be even more avid about saying "no new ips!"Vandalvideo

If only that is what stockholders cared about...

In theory, you are right. Stockholders should just care about profits. However, the reality is that most stockholders are a bunch of weak-willed sissies that are greedy and fickle... They don't just want profits, they want more profits. They rarely understand the market or industry that they are investing in, and most of the time the thing that they want the most is for you to keep doing what you are doing right, but also do what everyone else is doing right. It never matters if those things are compatible or even feasible.

They want to eat their cake, and then they want to eat everyone else's cake. And then they want to get a contract saying that all future cake ever will be their to eat.

[QUOTE="Vandalvideo"][QUOTE="Mario1331"]ok so your telling me hd games and their high budgets have nothing to do with developers bleeding money? or thats not just the only reasonKingsMessenger

PC is cheaper to develop on for a large number of reasons.

Also, using The Witcher 2 as an example is kind of pointless.

A) They had a much smaller team.

B) The game is carried by elements that are the cheapest to produce(story and visual output)

C) They are from Poland. Much lower salaries and cost of living.

D) They are from Poland. Much cheaper land and office expenses.

E) They are from Poland. Much lower tax rate.

F) They had a much smaller team. Does not require nearly the same size space.

G) They didn't care at all about trying to appeal to a broad audience. They just made the game they wanted to make for whatever market existed for that game.

They also had almost no care at all for the development time of the game. They took as long as they felt like taking.

It is apples to oranges.

Also, the HD generation IS to blame for the rising development costs. Exceptions may exist, but the simple fact is that most publishers feel compelled to push budgets higher and higher because that is what players demand. If you take more than 2 years to get a sequel out then you lose players. People only have an attention span to wait so long for the next entry in a series before they lose interest. So, developers feel the need to push 2 year cycles. Similarly, as better and better production values and techniques emerge, that new tech becomes expected, regardless of the cost involved. So, AAA-ultra budget games push the tech forward while the rest of the industry limps along behind them carrying the weight of budgets 2-3 times too large. And god forbid you wait too long to adopt the new tech, because then gamers lose interest because the game isn't as "good" as the other games that are out.

It is the reality of the industry, and has more to do with the audience than it does with the publishers. The publishers are just reacting to what the audience is demanding. And what they are demanding is bigger, more badass games with bloated budgets and overly homogenized content. There is room on the fringes, just not much. And that is the problem.

i agree i agree with the other guy too idk much bout the witcher because the game is garbage too me, and thats the only thing GD1551 was bringing up. why?idk

It's a sad state when a mllion copies isn't successful anymore.

if this is a budget issue (which floors me) then it's just depressing that stuff like cinematics and qtes could be party responsible for this situation

what was the last ea game that sold 5 million?

[QUOTE="Vandalvideo"] Thats all stockholders care about, and this is really the only healthy way for the growth of new IPs. Otherwise, new IPs will continue to get even more risky as time goes on and development costs sky rockets. And guess what happens then? Publishers will be even more avid about saying "no new ips!"KingsMessenger

If only that is what stockholders cared about...

In theory, you are right. Stockholders should just care about profits. However, the reality is that most stockholders are a bunch of weak-willed sissies that are greedy and fickle... They don't just want profits, they want more profits. They rarely understand the market or industry that they are investing in, and most of the time the thing that they want the most is for you to keep doing what you are doing right, but also do what everyone else is doing right. It never matters if those things are compatible or even feasible.

They want to eat their cake, and then they want to eat everyone else's cake. And then they want to get a contract saying that all future cake ever will be their to eat.

what was the last ea game that sold 5 million?

shreshto