• queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
    62·
    2 days ago

    Yet with all that investment and labor, most of those games aren’t even as good as smaller games made for a fraction of the cost.

    We could just make 50 unique smaller games and it’d probably be better than making one bloated AAAA game.

    • Aria@lemmygrad.ml
      61·
      2 days ago

      My example was a modern B game. AAAA games like Cyberpunk have 4986 people in the credits. Code Vein is at the lower end of what modern audiences will tolerate. I picked it because it came out this week. The top review presented to me by Steam right now complains about: Technical competency, frame rate, and missing high end visual features. These aren’t things you can fix without man-years of engineering time. The review calls the game cheap several times. They also call it rushed. The person praises the story and the characters and the designs. Things that are actually cheap, but get locked in early and then take armies and years to be able to present to audiences to see if they resonate.

      A title that had everything it needed to succeed, but was buried under greed, rushed development, and technical incompetence. Final verdict: Do I feel cheated? YES. Do I recommend the game right now? NO. Do I recommend it at this price? ABSOLUTELY NOT.

      The user explicitly says they want the game to have cost more to make, and that lower budget games shouldn’t can’t justify full-price. “229 people found this review helpful”.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
        3·
        2 days ago

        So the numbers are even more absurd than I thought but that just emphasizes my point!

        We could stick with cheaper graphics and reusable assets while focusing on stories and designs. We can make 200 good games instead of making 1 AAAA game that’s published in a broken state. Customers will whine, but that’s all they ever do and your own example shows they don’t know what they’re talking about anyway. Focus on the art form, rather than the commodity form.

        • Aria@lemmygrad.ml
          72·
          2 days ago

          We could stick with cheaper graphics and reusable assets while focusing on stories and designs.

          I wish we could. But there isn’t evidence that anyone can make a living doing that. The handful of mega hits that people use as examples of successful cheap games isn’t that evidence, it’s just anecdotes.

          Instead my hope is that as AI can automate much of the work and raise the quality floor of the parts that aren’t unique, the parts we actually don’t care about but expect to be there, that it’ll start being possible to spend half a year, a year on something, and then earn the equivalent of half a year or a year’s salary in sales, and have also made something that is actually able to speak for itself, to show the unique part without the jank and missing features dictating the conversation.