Do you think games need to be downgraded a bit in production cost?

[Nomanslander]

It feels like the game industry has picked up a lot of pointers from the film industry in the last 10 years. Over spending on their products in order to make AAA games full of polish in visuals and cinematics, and all we get is an under 8 hour game that just looks pretty. So much money goes into the finer artistic details only developers themselves will notice, the details that have little or hardly anything to do with gameplay. And it makes you wonder if it's worth it. As long as studios continue overspending each other I feel like we're going to continue seeing games made that are considered "safe." They'll continue to make sequel after sequel of known franchises, and God help us if they follow the new trend in movies by licensing products that have little or anything to do with the medium at hand (think of the movies like Battleship, or Candyland which will star Adam Sandler).

Now if you look at a game like Dark Souls for instance. One shallow observation some might make is how mediocre the graphics were. It was one of the first things I noticed. Or how few cut scenes and character animations there were, but the game itself had to be one of the most solid examples I've seen in a long...long...time.

Truth be it, I don't think studios would really want to spend as much money making these AAA games. But the trend right now is spending lots of money is the only way they're going to see the big returns, and I don't think it really needs to be that way.

Eventually I worry we might be heading for another crash when consumers grow dreary of seeing the same games being made over and over with different skins. It's going to be a question over cost, and if games in the next generation of consoles balloon to ridiculous prices with the resection that we're still in. The cost of games today and in the future is going to do the industry in.

This is also how I feel about the film industry as of yet. So what do you guys think?

 

[dimensional]

Trouble is lots of people only play games that have the sparkliest graphics which requires a lot of money I have friends who wont touch a Mario game because it looks like its for kids and they will never play a game thats a few years old because it looks really dated now (never got this really), and good luck getting them to play anything cel shaded.

I dont think there does need to be any downgrading, good gameplay and good graphics are not mutually exclusive but the trouble is peoples perceptions of good graphics equals good game.

Most people who only buy one or two games a year dont keep up with whats coming out they just see the games that are heavily marketed and as such have a huge budget and these need to have high production costs to actually get them to buy as they are buying purely on aesthetics alone its the old woah that looks cool thing then they will convince themselves that its awesome because thats what they have been told many many times by the advertising.

 

[OldDirtyCrusty]

The industrie could reduce costs with a smaller advertising budget. When i see the advert posters for MP3 at busstations or the tv spots i can only shake my head. A few seconds advertising in a cinema or tv eats so much money that could have been invested into the game itself. Who will spend his money based on an advert? I would`ve bought the game anyway, i was waiting for it. People with a slight interest in gaming are informed over the www and /or magazines and people who aren`t won`t go out and buy the game, upgrade their hardware or buy a console just because of advertising.

@dimensonal
You got a point there with the people who only buy 1-2 games a year but i´m still not sure if this is enough compared to the money spend on advertising.
The 1-2 game people who aren`t informed are usually the ones waiting for the yearly update of their favorite sportsgame or cod mp only players (NOT meant as an offense to those). I doubt a little that those people will buy the game based on the advertising, but since companies throw out these loads of money i could be dead wrong about it. Another thing is that sucessfull sales would mean that the advertising budget was worth it, so it goes on and on pushing the numbers higher until the next developer falls flat on his face and goes broke. The big publishers get a little hurting and grab the next developer for a new grind.

 

[Paladin2905]

I wholeheartedly agree. Production cost is what is going to sink games as a medium- its like an arms race. Always pushing the envelope on graphics has, in my opinion, been seriously to the detriment of other sides of game production like quality control and gameplay innovation. On top of that when you've got such cost being levied for production you naturally get tons of pay for DLC and DRM schemes in order for companies to protect their investments.
As a final note, I think the emphasis on expensive visuals really decreases the potential scope of any games we do see. When in the past a game could have many more potential environments and entities in it because they were all just small animations or drawings, now games are expected to have fully motion captured and voice acted creatures with amazing skyboxes etc.

Just a quick example would be the difference between Baldur's Gate and Dragon Age:Origins (the spiritual successor). BG had thousands of creatures and characters, dragon age had about 30-50(6 human models, ~6 creatures, ~4 darkspawn, ~2 spiders, ~6 demons, ~5 undead, some I'm probably forgetting). Each in DA:O was lovingly rendered, but the game lost so much in terms of scope this way; scope is something I think games have really lost as a result of this trend.

 

[AndrewF022]

I think if push comes to shove the development cycle will be downgraded yes, but I think you'll probably see more developers using pre-built engines (such as Unreal Tech, Source, ID Tech etc) rather than building new engines from the ground up.

Also, my guess (since I'm no industry guru or anything haha), they'd be cutting sound development and post-production costs before you cut your art asset costs.. less games with professionally composed soundtracks, and more studios going the CDProjeckt RED way or releasing their game, then just polishing it up after release, provided it sells well enough (as The Witcher titles clearly have).

Although whether they do this or not, who knows... all entertainment industries are highly volatile, she could crash again.

 

[nimbylive]

I think that we will see more games come out with smaller budgets. They will have to do this out of necessity. There are only a handful of companies that can weather years of expenses and production time and still survive. They are companies, now, that even with a successful game cannot keep their doors open because they ran out of money. Eventually, there should be more online distribution that can save a lot of money and allow the publishers to gain most of the profits. It is the companies that are willing to modify and adapt their model to current trends that will do well.

 

[SajuukKhar]

I think advertising budgets should shrink long before production/development costs

 

[BloatedGuppy]

No, it's not a problem.

As long as people understand that games with massive production budgets are not going to be wildly innovative, risk taking ventures, there's room for both conventional AAA titles and adventurous indies in the market. I'm not a graphics whore, so I'm comfortable playing either. Just because a game feels familiar doesn't mean it's not a good game. And just because a game looks like shredded ass doesn't mean it's not a good game.

There's never going to be one game that is all things to all people.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Not really. AAA games are cheap to produce, as massive entertainment products go. An average AAA game costs about $30 million to make, while an average blockbuster movie costs around $100 million. Videogames are roughly as big a part of pop culture as movies are now; there's absolutely no reason why those production costs should be considered too high. The only reason they are is because the publishers are too scared to do the equivalent of what the movie studios did when they introduced sell through pricing (as opposed to rental pricing, which would be $70+ per copy) on VHS tapes, and later made it the standard for DVDs.

Captcha: many happy returns

Yes captcha, the studios would happily be granted many returns on their investments if they would do this.

 

[ohnoitsabear]

From my understanding, graphics development isn't the biggest reason for the rising costs of AAA development (with a few notable exceptions). The biggest rising costs are in marketing and voice acting, both of which are much more common for games of this console generation than before.

Look at TOR as an example. It has one of the highest (if not the highest) costs to develop a game in gaming history, and this is primarily because they insisted on hiring talented voice actors to record tens of thousands of lines of dialogue.

 

[Hosker]

I agree. Smaller development cost for games may well lead to more risk-taking, and thus more innovation. I'd be more than willing to sacrifice great graphics for that.

 

[TehCookie]

I think they should keep their current budget and just spend it differently like make bigger worlds with better writing and tight gameplay. I see no point cutting the graphics or advertising budget if nothing else changes.

 

[Skratt]

Better graphics are the gaming equivalent of a nuclear arms race. Until we find a technology that allows for a plateau or at least a slowdown of 1-up, I think titles will be increasingly hard to produce. If we can find a graphics technology that allows for developers to choose the level of detail they want without having to re-learn a new engine every time, they can return game play to the front lines of the process.

I don't even know if a plateau is possible, but I do see graphics as the bulk of the AAA development costs.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well the dev - accountant relation needs improvement, the big boys are now stuck at the Hollywood model where accountants drop absurd amounts of money on a project and demand a blockbuster by date X in return... this just isn't how you do good things.
Shit is done when it's done, and it hasto be done as the creators imagine it should be, you can't just stuff it into a conveyor belt model and expect quality.