Designers of last year’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 used the processing power of the PlayStation 5 so Peter Parker’s outfits would be rendered with realistic textures and skyscraper windows could reflect rays of sunlight.
That level of detail did not come cheap.
Insomniac Games, which is owned by Sony, spent about $300 million to develop Spider-Man 2, according to leaked documents, more than triple the budget of the first game in the series, which was released five years earlier. Chasing Hollywood realism requires Hollywood budgets, and even though Spider-Man 2 sold more than 11 million copies, several members of Insomniac lost their jobs when Sony announced 900 layoffs in February.
Cinematic games are getting so expensive and time-consuming to make that the video game industry has started to acknowledge that investing in graphics is providing diminished financial returns.
It was clear this year, however, that the live service strategy carries its own risks. Warner Bros. Discovery took a $200 million loss on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, according to Bloomberg. Sony closed the studio behind Concord, its attempt to compete with team-based shooters like Overwatch and Apex Legends, one month after the game released to a minuscule player base.
“We have a market that has been in growth mode for decades,” Ball said. “Now we are in a mature market where instead of making bets on growth, companies need to try and steal shares from each other.”
Ismail is worried that major studios are in a tight spot where traditional games have become too expensive but live service games have become too risky. He pointed to recent games that had both jaw-dropping realism — Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (individual pebbles of gravel cast shadows) and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II (rays of sunlight flicker through the trees) — and lackluster sales.
You’re missing my point and arguing against a strawman here. All I’m arguing is that the things AAA studios focus on (like hyper-realism) are not the things that make a game fun, and AAA studios sound be putting fun as the focus.
I’m not arguing against a strawman, but against someone who might want to look into this topic a bit more closely. Balatro sold two million copies less than Star Wars Outlaws. People obviously want flashy spectacle more than tight mechanics - it’s just that even those higher sales figures weren’t enough to compensate for the bloated development budgets. That’s the real lesson. The old method of spending more and more money to make more and more money isn’t quite working anymore - not that people don’t want pretty graphics anymore (because they still do want those more than basic Indie art).
Yeah you’re still not even contradicting what I’m saying, you just think you are. You’re arguing against positions I don’t hold lmao.