"What happened? Money, mostly. Most aspects of big-budget game creation has gotten more and more expensive over the past decade. Part of this is due to inflation, but the larger culprit is the publishers themselves, who have driven an ever-escalating arms race of technology and scale. These big games are bloated, immensely complicated machines now, built by hundreds of people in collaborative design efforts among multiple studios across continents. This scale creep means that fewer of these games can be economically produced, and each one has higher pressure on it to succeed, which in turn ratchets up marketing budgets to absurd amounts. In 2015, publishers spent over half a billion dollars on television advertising alone, and there's no way that number's gotten smaller since."
"So year after year, when fall rolls around, there's something unsettling about it in the videogame world. It's increasingly sparse and loud, a reminder year after year that the industry is as large but also as troubled as it's ever been, at least since the console market crashed in the '80s. And when Friday rolls around, and you buy one of the three big titles—or don't—it's worth remembering that the system that produces those games isn't going to be sustainable forever. Eventually, something is going to have to give. It'll be interesting to see what that something is.:
More here...
https://www.wired.com/story/gaming-fall-season-doldrums/
Makes me question the push for more powerful consoles if such few Pubs will be willing to put much costs/effort into making so few high end games... $500+ for mostly 4k indie games, huh?
"So year after year, when fall rolls around, there's something unsettling about it in the videogame world. It's increasingly sparse and loud, a reminder year after year that the industry is as large but also as troubled as it's ever been, at least since the console market crashed in the '80s. And when Friday rolls around, and you buy one of the three big titles—or don't—it's worth remembering that the system that produces those games isn't going to be sustainable forever. Eventually, something is going to have to give. It'll be interesting to see what that something is.:
More here...
https://www.wired.com/story/gaming-fall-season-doldrums/
Makes me question the push for more powerful consoles if such few Pubs will be willing to put much costs/effort into making so few high end games... $500+ for mostly 4k indie games, huh?