While Baldur’s Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.
While Baldur’s Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.
How does it cost millions of dollars to make a current AAA game, and they’re rarely worth it?
If you have 5,000 people on your payroll for a game what the hell are they doing? Every game should be fantastic.
I love indie and AA games. Smaller teams. More focus. More fun. Usually more quality content.
It’s an issue of time and scalability. Going from 100 employees to 200 employees wont make the game in half the time. And corporate accounting would rather have 2 mediocre games per year than 1 extremely good game every 2 years, even if it sold 4 times as well since revenue is analyzed within fiscal years and financing isn’t free. Capitalism sucks.
All the greatest games ever made were created in capitalistic economies so i cannot see how that is a determining factor. I don’t know what games your thinking of. Tetris?
I think you’re missing the point. They’re just saying the incentive structure of capitalism doesn’t necessarily encourage the best types of games. We see this with borked EA launches, predatory MTX, loot boxes, battle passes, etc
I think there is a difference between “capitalism” and “capitalism”.
I think a more nuanced argument is that better games come from companies that are not primarily driven by the quarterly revenue cycle of Wall Street, that is defined as “capitalism”.
I think it’s more of a hit-and-miss, and good corporate leadership is the kind that people forget it’s there when good games come out. I mean CDPR had a CEO both when Witcher 3 was the thing, and also when Cyberpunk 2077 was the thing that flopped. Obviously, people were more interested in the beancounters’ influence in the latter case.
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Counter point: Baldur’s Gate is selling well within capitalism because it satisfies what the customer wants, which capitalism rewards in an environment with lots of competition, and video games have lots of competition. As big publishers like Ubisoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard, and Take Two have scaled back their offerings of lots of different types of games, including the type of RPG that Larian makes, it’s no surprise that the likes of Larian are rewarded for making that type of game. It’s why companies like Embracer, Anna Purna, Devolver, and Paradox are going to be growing a ton over the next decade.
Without capitalism Tetris would have remained an obscure piece of shareware probably vaguely known outside of ex-soviet nations. It’s only the desire to monitise the IP that saw it on every platform under the sun and packaged with every Gameboy.
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Yeah, the creator didn’t profit at the time because of communism and their belief that his creation belonged to the state. If he had been in a capitalist country at the time he could have copyrighted his game asap and exploited it for profit himself.
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At the very least a smart creator in the US can go to a solicitor and make sure he isn’t being mugged off before they sign a deal, you didn’t have that that with the Soviet Government.
Yes lots of creators have been screwed by the people that worked for, notably in the comics field. But a lot of the time it’s because they signed a contract having no inkling how big the work would be.
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I know that’s probably rhetorical, but probably a similar problem to modern movies where (as described in the video
Why Modern Movies Suck - They're Too Expensive) they are going after spectacle (rather than story or other elements) and due to cost they must make a ‘safe’ product to stay profitable, where a bland but universally palatable product will sell more tickets/copies than a stellar niche thing.I’d also add that companies know they can usually ride the success of their own name/brand recognition. Even worse here with games because of pre-ordering, early-access as a product, and crowd-funding (which some wildly successful publishers still do–on top of unpaid self-promotion and all the other things–because people still think of them as indie).
Did you intend to link you the video you mentioned? Because I’d like to watch it.
I gave the title of it and I figured that would easily be found (title only because it was something I saw in not-logged-in YT recommendations, figured others may have seen it too).
But here it is since I’m making a comment now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FQgp_sLGjg
Thanks!
Usually they don’t. Something like Horizon Forbidden West credits almost 3500 people even though Guerilla Game has less than 500 employees, most of the rest is absolutely massive bloat from different outsourced teams and Sony departments - like the “Head of Opportunity Markets Business Operations Tim Stokes from Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.: Global Business Operations” was undoubtedly very important for the development of the game.
As for Baldurs Gate 3, Larian Studios currently has 450 employees in 6 different locations, so they are actually around the same size as Guerilla. I wouldn’t be surprised if the credits end up being well above a thousand people (D:OS2 has around 500 credits even though Larian back then had only 130 people).
games are art projects at the end of the day and there are often many non-art people (or just people without the right skills or vision) making executive decisions on direction, deadlines etc.