Board 8 > 3/4 upcoming FF15 DLCs cancelled. Wow, SquEnix. Just...wow.

(+) Yeah! (+)

iiicon posted...

Sega is a good company to bring up. They don't really operate at the same level as Square (FF and Tomb Raider are series that move 8M+ when everything goes right), but between their acquisitions of Atlus and numerous PC strategy developers, plus the increased visibility of some of their Japanese series like Yakuza and VC, they do a lot of cool stuff.

Yeah I wasn't sure if they counted as AAA but if not they're right on the borderline - you have strategy games, platformers, party games, tactics games, some shooters, Yakuza, beat 'em ups...there's a ton of variety there, possibly more than Squeenix, if not competitive at a budget level.
---

Sega pls give AAA Yakuza
---

Sega is honestly my favorite developer/publisher of this generation. They're operating in such a way that guarantees both sustainability and quality games, and I think the rest of the industry needs to start taking notes.

I really don't think the insane ballooning game budgets we've been seeing with the last two consoles will last more than another full generation - developers are going to need to be able to work comfortably on a lower level or they're going to crash hard at some point.
---

You can't reduce your top series' budget, it will be seen as a major sign of weakness.

Those big budgets show you can compete on the global stage. Even if it's no longer the right way to do things.

After their recent successes I could totally see Capcom going big again.
---

Yeah I definitely recognize that, but we're already at a point where AAA games are costing more to make than movies. GTAV cost $265 million - to put it in perspective, that would put it at the #7 most expensive film of all time if it was a movie. This kind of growth just flat out isn't sustainable with the kind of money games make at retail (hence all the efforts to bleed extra money through dlc, expansions, micro-transactions etc)

What I'm getting at is developers are going to have to slow their roll or they're going to be forced to by an actual gaming crash. There are other ways we could go, like games being bumped from $60 to like $90 or something, but I see those kinds of scenarios as much less likely.
---

I'm going out on a limb here and saying that the $265 million figure you found includes marketing costs. I'm sure that it took $100 million or more to make, but there's absolutely no way that it cost $265 million on its own.
---

KCF0107 posted...

I'm going out on a limb here and saying that the $265 million figure you found includes marketing costs. I'm sure that it took $100 million or more to make, but there's absolutely no way that it cost $265 million on its own.

You'd be correct! It was $137 million to make plus $128 million in marketing. There's definitely another lesson to be learned there, but I'm not sure today's publishers are ready to learn it.

For a fun point of contrast, popular Game of the Generation candidate The Witcher 3 cost $46 million to make plus $35 million in marketing. But their situation is a bit unique thanks to actual backing from the Polish government.
---

also wages in Poland are significantly lower than many other countries with large game companies.
---

First, complaining about games beingbopen world is basically like complaining about films being in colour.

More importantly, this really sucks. The plan they had looked like it was actually going to transform FFXV into the game it had potential to be. I was excited for this.

Square as a company is in an absolute shambles except for a few medium sized projects. They have loads of talent and have produced some really good games. But they have just been utterly mismanaged. The last FF to have no problems in production was XI. Tomb Raider 2013 breaking sales records and selling 10 million copies was somehow a failure. Their AAA Japanese games take a decade. They lost Hitman, cancelled this, the Avengers game is nowhere to be seen. Still managed to put out The Quiet Man though.
---

Lightning Strikes posted...

First, complaining about games beingbopen world is basically like complaining about films being in colour.

Uh.

What.
---

yeah that's not a very good comparison

like i get the sentiment: most aaa games are gonna push a games as service model and most likely be an open world game, it's just the way the market is at that scale. but gaming is so much more than the 1 or 2 aaa games each publisher puts out every year. we're not getting 10-12 movies in colour every year.

as far as well-produced final fantasy games from square, we're probably gonna see the next expansion for ff14 next week!
---

iiicon posted...

also wages in Poland are significantly lower than many other countries with large game companies.

They also highly underpay their devs for overtime (but so does R* so the comparison might cancel out)
---

Xiahou Shake posted...

There are other ways we could go, like games being bumped from $60 to like $90 or something, but I see those kinds of scenarios as much less likely.

This has happened already. $85 is standard and some even have microtransactions to get more.
---

foolm0r0n posted...

Xiahou Shake posted...

There are other ways we could go, like games being bumped from $60 to like $90 or something, but I see those kinds of scenarios as much less likely.

This has happened already. $85 is standard and some even have microtransactions to get more.

It happened under the guise of season passes and dlc, it didn't happen in earnest. Publishers are doing everything they can to "basically" charge $85 for a game when honestly they need to just actually charge $85 for it and cut all this other bullshit. There would probably be enormous push-back to it of course, which is kind of silly when you think about it. So many folks get upset about this era of nickel-and-diming we live in, and yet the whole reason things are the way they are is because the MSRP of games is totally out of alignment with what goes in to them.
---

iiicon posted...

as far as well-produced final fantasy games from square, we're probably gonna see the next expansion for ff14 next week!

Oh shit guess Id better push through the quests to at least get to Heavensward by then

But Im so close to the vanilla endgame in 11 and want to push through the current Comrades instead of playing the standalone...
---

Yeah but the core of it is gamers love to complain but they're still gonna buy your shit. Everyone who complains about season passes still buy it. But if the game was actually $85, they wouldn't.

So the industry is in this weird place where they WANT gamers to complain as loudly and incessantly as possible, vent all their rage, and then end up buying all the shit anyways when they calm down because they feel like they made their difference already. So many controversies nowadays seem deliberately manufactured for that strategy. There's plenty of games that you can buy straight up with no gimmicks, but gamers genuinely prefer the outrage cycle. So that's what the entertainment companies sell.
---

^ I can't prove that wrong!

I really don't want that to be the case just because it strikes me as remarkably unhealthy for pretty much everyone involved, but there's no way to prove that any alternatives would work without someone taking the risk - and nobody is going to. It sucks even more because without some kind of alternative, the intensity of the whole cycle is only going to grow as games become exponentially more expensive. My gut feeling is you end up hitting some kind of wall there as well, but the internet has done its best to prove that the human collective's tolerance for salt and toxicity is nigh-infinite, so maybe I'm wrong.
---

JonThePenguin posted...

Oh shit guess Id better push through the quests to at least get to Heavensward by then

if the last two expansions are anything to go by - announced at Fanfest, launched in the summer - you have until about June to play through two expansions. it's doable! if you're in ARR 2.0+ territory you're in probably the slowest part of the game, so it can only go up from there.
---

iiicon posted...

as far as well-produced final fantasy games from square, we're probably gonna see the next expansion for ff14 next week!

14 is an incredible success story, but it's also pretty clear that they've been stuck in a rut creatively for this current expansion. They've been on the same gameplay loop at least since 3.0. Their big new thing for 4.0 took forever to release and was pretty negatively received.

But the plot is still going strong. In terms of the narrative experience and what you expect out of a FF game, it's probably the best they've done since X.
---

iiicon posted...

JonThePenguin posted...

Oh shit guess Id better push through the quests to at least get to Heavensward by then

if the last two expansions are anything to go by - announced at Fanfest, launched in the summer - you have until about June to play through two expansions. it's doable! if you're in ARR 2.0+ territory you're in probably the slowest part of the game, so it can only go up from there.

Thats pretty much exactly where I am but Ive been ignoring the MSQ in favor of powering up my soon-to-be-useless relic weapon (working on Atma tier right now). And like I said, playing 11 at the same time, which makes for some fun MMO whiplash.
---

I should clarify my point: "open world" is just a generic feature that huge swathes of games can claim to have, and does not make any real difference to the quality of the game. So I was using the broadest possible example.
---

foolm0r0n posted...

Xiahou Shake posted...

There are other ways we could go, like games being bumped from $60 to like $90 or something, but I see those kinds of scenarios as much less likely.

This has happened already. $85 is standard and some even have microtransactions to get more.

Do season passes sell that well? I figured they had maybe a 20% sell through rate at best.
---

Mac Arrowny posted...

Do season passes sell that well? I figured they had maybe a 20% sell through rate at best.

Literally no idea tbh. Probably certain ones sell much more than others.
---