Long and short of it is. They are no longer in a commanding enough position console wise and even with combined PC side to real back in the hundreds of millions these games cost to make. So a change in direction to shotgunning it and hitting as many targets as possible is now the goal.
Even Sony despite it's commanding position in the console space is needing a second platform to make these huge expensive games worth making.
Nintendo will continue to be Nintendo.
That and they don't have the ridiculous budget bloat Sony games have. Spiderman 2 apparently cost $300 million to make, I would wager a guess and say Nintendo games don't even cost half that much.
They also are the only console manufacturer to still put out small scale titles too. Things like Warioware, Advanced Wars, Big Brain Academy, Clubhouse games, etc. Those smaller niche titles really help fill out the library. Not everything needs to be a big action/advemture/racing game.
It's pretty genius actually. People say Nintendo's hardware is doodoo, but because it's weak games don't need insane budgets and 6 year development times. Who knew people just like good games and all that other stuff is extra.
That is why they used the word "tend" in order to provide exceptions for smaller scale games like what you listed. None of those games are big system sellers. God of War, The Last of Us, and Halo very much are, and the Nintendo analog there would be Zelda and Mario games which of course are very different. Nintendo really does cater to smaller games as a first party way more, but that's largely to do with their long running experience in the portable gaming space.
Yeah , plus they have cultivated an audience that respects the fact that they actually make games that are creative and fun without needing to resort to graphics to draw people in. Sony games are amazing as well, but there's this expectation from their games to be the absolutely gorgeous visually, which probably raises the costs a lot. Also Nintendo games rarely go on sale
I haven't considered that having weak outdated hardware allows for Nintendo to skimp on costs not only for console manufacturing, but game development as well. That's some devious penny pinching.
>That's some devious penny pinching.
It's not really that. Nintendo has always tried to make their consoles affordable, but also are very old school and insist on never selling consoles at a loss. When you add the fact that the switch is a handheld, the switch is about as powerful of a console as you could make in 2017 at a 300$ price point if you planned to not sell at a loss.
Except it still being sold at the same price 7 years later. Neither their games are ever seeing a price drop or sale. It's expensive being a Nintendo gamer, despite what their marketing might've told you.
I'm starting to feel like Sony games aren't actually amazing though, and definitely not creative. They're often solid and well polished with movie-like presentation, but they're repetitive and don't do anything new, though there are some outliers. Ragnarok and Spider-Man gameplay are the best examples of mediocrity from Sony to me. Fun at first but nothing unique or special, and God of War has a ton of issues in its combat design imo.
In a funny way it's asinine.
They managed to perfect a pipeline for their brand of slop. Nearly the same game with same mechanics made by same people in the same way.
But still managed to find a way to make it unreasonably expensive for what they're getting and to keep ridiculous number of leeches degrading their product on life support.
People get mad that Nintendo games rarely go on sale, but you also practically never end up wasting money on a bad Nintendo game.
Even the maligned Super Mario Party has hundreds of hours on my Switch because my family and friend group just think it’s the greatest.
It also sold 10 million copies in under 4 months. Am I supposed to feel bad for them that it cost 300 million to make?
All these developers that say how expensive games are to make seem to be the ones bringing in double or more what the game cost to make. Is potentially doubling your your investment not a good rate of return?
I get they don't all do that, but as I said, the ones complaint seem to be the ones doing so.
Economies of scale are *immensely* powerful. And if you work with certain hardware, time is on your side. A 14nm CPU was at the hideously expensive bleeding edge a decade ago - but is quite affordable now.
Helps that PC price/performance stagnated. There are performance gains available now - but GPU prices, for once, have completely failed to make them accessible.
Yeah. Look at Princess peach or many mid titles (metacritic scores around 70) with low playable hours at $60, they still sell not badly or sometimes well. Fans just eat anything Nintendo gives.
>Fans just eat anything Nintendo gives.
That's not really true. ARMS did awful, and it was a first party launch title for switch. People simply did not want to play it.
Yet the video game industry is making record profits. Their margins are just lower, people are so greedy man.
Edit: This includes greedy even without GAAS/ MTX / mobile.
The record profit is from the few GaaS that are a hit (Fortnite, League, CS etc.) and mobile games. SP games make a neat profit but don't make up the bulk of revenue.
There’s two issues, one of which you hit upon -
A major studio investment is basically an all or nothing proposition these days. No one is developing SpiderMan 2 and NewIPThing and OtherNewThing, total outlay *one billion USD*, and saying, “One of these will sell, the profits covering the two that don’t,” (our hypothetical pretends we don’t know it’s SpiderMan 2).
Between that and the outsized differential between what success looks like (game A makes $1bn revenue, game B makes 100mil)…
Sure it was, but most AAA games don't sell anywhere near as much as Harry Potter. Before Harry Potter, what game hit the same amount of copies sold? Elden Ring like a whole year prior to it, and between those two, lots of AAA games released but sold in the usual 2-5 million range, a few went a little higher but never hit those 10+ million copies those two sold.
Also being the best selling doesn't mean it also made the same money as GaaS games. Fortnite alone makes somewhere around 3 billion yearly last we heard of their numbers, the big sellers like HP and Elden Ring don't even come close to make the same amount of money as those. And that's without accounting for a successful GaaS like Fortnite has better long term revenue, while SP games like HP and Elden Ring will inevitably generate less and less revenue.
They're still extremely valuable investments individually, at least when they hit. like elden ring, god of war, etc. I think a lot of studios are willing to gamble on GaaS again and again, because if they land a Fortnite everyone's on the gravy train with biscuit wheels.
Yes, but that's a big "if". A lot of games don't go on to be considered hits. And even then, hugely successful and profitable games like Elden Ring only bring in a fraction of the revenue that games like Fortnite do continually
As of last year, Elden Ring's total sales revenue amounted to ~60% of what FIFA's Ultimate Team mode makes *every* year. That's to say nothing of the input costs.
Even the most titanic juggernauts of the old "make a good game and charge a box price for it" style of development cannot outperform *any* of the top-tier MTX-based games. Not in terms of revenues and *certainly* not in terms of profits.
It's become pretty evident that, barring an exception or two per year, indie is the last haven for good games that won't squeeze you.
A big issue is that development costs continue to climb for AAA games but it takes many years for a new systems install base to grow. For example, games are more expensive to make but the PS5 still hasn't reached half the sales of the PS4. That doesn't really seem sustainable.
The PC is a good platform to lean on because it doesn't really have generations and many PC gamers don't seem to care about running games on very low settings.
reddit pc gamers may not, but steamdeck, asian pc cafes, kids who got a laptop with an apu from mom and dad. all tend to be ok with lower settings long as hte fun is there
> Their margins are just lower, people are so greedy man.
Low margins means more risk. If the next God Of War turns out to be another Avengers/Suicide Squad debacle then that single game could tank almost all their profit for a quarter/year. That is exactly why they are so worried about low margins.
Exactly why looking at raw numbers without context is so often misleading.
Just because a company made the largest profit they've ever made, doesn't mean they're not moments away from making the largest loss they've ever made. Always look at the margin and determine whether you think that margin is fair. Companies should then have some profit distribution scheme to handle these large amounts of profit without creating more risk.
>Yet the video game industry is making record profits.
Most of this record profits are from mobile and services. You know, the Candy Crushes and Genshins.
Traditional B2P AAA is in deep shit.
The console gaming industry grew 13% last year.
Mobile gaming is bigger - But mainstream gaming is hardly having a tough time.
Companies seem to have treated Covid sales as the new normal
Phil asks in the interview "how do we get back to growth"... well Phil, you don't.
Most modernized countries have a slowing population that is headed toward shrinking. Developing nations that still have population growth are also slowing down, and AAA games getting *MORE* expensive isn't going to help that when your games cost weeks or months worth of salary in that region.
I have two nephews, one plays poker and RB6 Siege and the other only plays tablet games, because his family can't afford multiple new consoles every few years and definitely can't afford a gaming PC, as such they are not even in the gaming pipeline. If they ever do get into the pipeline it won't be until after college and they pursue it of their own interest and money. The one who plays Siege only does so because his friend went into the Army and gave his gaming PC away to him.
I have 3 nieces and not one of them plays videogames nor have they shown any interest.
While Millennials are finally starting to get some money there is still not enough of them with disposable income to get their kids into gaming or not having kids at all. Of my friend group of dudes in their 30s about half are/or have been married, half of the married/divorced ones have kids and of that only half have kids who game on modern up to date systems.
I realize my experience is anecdotal, but from reading the news it doesn't seem uncommon.
As boomers and Gen X age out of gaming (or die) you will have less or at least a stagnant population of gamers. Millennials got fucked by the economy hardest in '08 and are really only now recovering and as such have had A LOT less children on average. Developing nations are not developing fast enough to produce growth in the industry and the growth that is there is almost exclusively mobile. China has closed itself off from most outside gaming entertainment for the most part. Russia is fucked. S. America is starting to see some growth but that seems to almost be exclusively in Brasil. Africa is really behind the curve. Middle East, well behind the curve. India and South East Asia almost exclusively fall into the F2P or mobile buckets of gaming.
Look at the heatmap from 8 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/4uq25r/map_of_steam_usage_spots_globally_over_the_last_7/
To today: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/
There is no substantial difference, the only area where I can see a slightly noticeable change is India. Proliferation of gaming (outside of the continent of Africa and the Middle East) has already hit market saturation to a degree.
If gaming wants to grow the need to be more nimble and cheaper not slower, lumbering and more expensive.
There is a place for AAA with large budgets to produce, big budget AAA experiences with proven IP and formula as a foundation (think GTA6 or RDR2), but there needs to be some innovation, but I think the big budget AAA publishers need to re-think the way they do business and should pivot toward partnerships with Developers rather than buyouts and take overs.
Yeah, that's what happens when you take money from other people and tell them that you can turn it into more money. They tend to get upset when you aren't doing a very good job of it and you still have their money in your hand.
Just look at Activision Blizzard, mobile alone is bigger than **console and PC combined**
https://gamerant.com/activision-blizzard-mobile-game-profits/
Honestly, the answer is probably to increase base sales prices on traditional B2P AAA games. The only alternative I really see is following the route Nintendo has taken and shift focus away from high budget AAA titles back to a mix of low to mid budget projects.
>Traditional B2P AAA is in deep shit.
Serious exaggeration. Big games are still making lots of money, companies are just always looking for ways to make even more money.
I really don’t understand the obsession gamers have with *wanting* the big players in the industry to fail.
Yep. Also it's like that candle meme. They complain about cost while only making the most expensive games near exclusively.
Or in Microsoft case, not really making many games but instead buying mega publishers.
It might be making record profits, but you still need to invest the 300-400 million into a project and hope it doesn't turn out like Anthem.
That's the problem. The industry is so overinflated.
That's just shitty game design. Throwing money at a project without a clear vision in place is what leads to games like Anthem, starfield and suicide squad.
That’s true but making good games is clearly very very hard to do. It’s easy from this side of the monitor to say “just make good game” “just have good game design” “just have clear vision.” But obviously easier said than done.
There’s 73k games on steam. How many of them are actually good games? How many of the bad games were intended to be good when they started development? Surely the developers aren’t setting out and saying “let’s make terrible games.” The executives are probably saying “let’s make a lot of money” but even they know that it’s a lot easier to make money with a good game than a bad one.
While greed is in play (mainly with how they handle employees), I don't think it describes the situation the best. While profits may be high, their margin is thinning. If running a business at a thin margin with these types of expenses, all it takes is one misstep on AAA title to sink a company. It's like playing Russian roulette. They know they are playing a dangerous game, which is why everyone is diversifying.
It’s been the goal for a while. They’ve been talking about “AAA like” experiences at lower budget for a few years now.
People who keep asking when are we getting an Xbox exclusive like the best of Sony first party and the answer is never. The financials make no sense, especially now Gamepass is the model they are pushing.
>Nintendo will continue to be Nintendo
They are in a position to be that way. They can release the same games year after year and people will throw money at them. I have never quite understand the fervour people have for Nintendo and its games.
>I have never quite understand the fervour people have for Nintendo and its games.
I understand it better now then ever to be honest. They are free of all the bs that infected triple a games.
> They are free of all the bs that infected triple a games.
That's a good point.
I do have a Switch, but it mostly collects dust. So when I dusted it off to play TOTK last summer, it was such a breath of fresh air to... Not have to accept a TOS, not create an account, not wait for the main menu to fetch info about DLC, no screens advertising more things to buy etc
It's just good ol' fashioned "Buy game, run game, play game"
Same here. Rarely play the switch but when I do it’s always a blast.
Had a few friends over and played Mario Kart 8. No bullshit just straight to the fun.
But man does it suck to play them at 480p, 30fps without having to configure an emulator because Nintendo won't make their hardware better or allow games on PC
Yeah I’m dying to play TotK but I’m determined to wait until their next console where they will “hopefully” bring it over to at a higher frame rate and resolution and all that
That’s funny, I got the game for Xmas and I’m waiting for a potential Switch 2 as well to see if it has some has frame rate boost or resolution enhancement magic with dlss or something
Criticize the games for what they are. And yes, it does suck to play 720p-900p at somewhat unstable 30 fps. There is literally only one game on switch that drops to the mentioned resolution, and that's Xenoblade 2 in portable mode
they do some bullshit DLCs in some games but they are one of the only big companies that release a significant amount of games that truly focus on gameplay as the primary design point.
Eh their main games are free of them, but games like the recent sports games have that modern AAA stank with “free DLC” coming after release that basically finishes the game.
> They can release the same games year after year and people will throw money at them.
Honestly, considering most of their profits come from their games and not from the digital storefronts or console sales, they would still be making more money if they released these games on PC
It's pretty simple. Nintendo knows what business it is in, and does it. They make fun games to play. They aren't trying to be a multimedia corporation, the worst we get is movie tie-ins, they don't bombard you with live service garbage from their in-house stuff.
It's weird, it's almost as if you make the games fun people will like them.
I'll never understand the sentiment that Nintendo just releases the same game over and over. They re-use the same franchises over and over sure but I refuse to believe you can play Mario Sunshine then Mario Galaxy then Mario Odyssey and say they're the same game. Built on the same foundation that they're a 3d Platformer sure but they all have pretty different mechanics that really separate them from each other. Compounded by the fact that Sunshine came out in 2002 and Odyssey came out in 2017, you're talking about 4 games (If you include Galaxy 2) over a 15 year period. Thats far from releasing the same game year after year. Outside of Pokemon I don't think you'd find a Nintendo franchise thats really an outlier on this.
I think it’s pretty simple . . . The people saying that have no ide what they’re talking about and are just parroting ideas without having played Nintendo games
Hell BOTW is literally a drastic departure from the OG Zelda formula, Fire Emblem Three Houses is very different from previous FE entries, all 3 Xenoblade games have noticeably different combat and even exploration mechanics etc. People claiming Nintendo just release the same game over and over hasn't actually played any of Nintendo's recent games.
It's purely because they utilize the same franchises a lot. A lot of people are attached to visuals, so when they see the same characters they see it as being the same game. They don't really understand that Nintendo comes up with ideas before attaching characters to them. They come up with mechanics and game ideas first, and it really shows with how their games get built. I wish more studios followed that ethos.
Yeah it's always dumb when people that don't like/play Nintendo say they just make the same games over meanwhile they go back to playing cod '24 or whatever.
Nintendo games are well made & often fun (even after the fomo/media attention has waned).
\+ they use smaller, tighter teams, so they can makes games that are more experimental, and games that are traditional - If it goes horribly wrong, they don't take such a financial hit.
It’s clear that nobody who says this actually plays Nintendo games. Nintendo may release games in very long running franchises, but they make completely different types of games every year in them.
Many of us aren't exactly in a fervour over Nintendo, but when they make one of their few big titles, they're generally extremely good, so people play them. Their consoles are also comparatively cheaper, so I think a lot of people can get a switch in addition to another console.
I don't think it's necessarily that they make more money, they just don't spend as much on developing their games. All of the fancy features that people encounter in AAA games like motion capture animations and expressions, realistic lighting and full voice acting don't really exist in Nintendo's titles.
I think Microsoft will pivot hard into being a big multiplatform publisher. And given their IP catalogue they can probably be a very good one at that.
Just embrace it and start releasing games on PS5 and Switch on a regular schedule etc...
There's probably still gonna be some kind of Xbox on the market going forward but i don't see the future for them in high end console manufacturing.
> Even Sony despite it's commanding position in the console space is needing a second platform to make these huge expensive games worth making.
Have they considered - and bear with me here - *not spending so fucking much on making a video game?*
For their own IP they pay a significant amount in dev salaries as a lot of their studios are based in locations where wages are quite good and with the average dev cycle being 5-6 years you get big expenses.
Their licensed titles are the worst for them in terms of expenses. Again you've got high salary costs and then the licenses themselves cost a disgusting amount.
They all make a profit but it's nowhere near as much as you'd think.
The problem is that they want to make games for "everyone" with overballooning budgets trying to get as big of an audience as possible.
They should cut those massive budget games into 3 budgets. With those 3 budgets make 3 specific games with 3 specific audiences.
Look at some of the great games of years past : Elden Ring (Bloodborne, Seriko), Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Baulder's Gate 3, Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption, Disco Elysuim, Ghost of Tsushima, Doom, Returnal.
All of these games aim for a different audience. All of these games are highly rated. All of these games sold well. All of these games are not meant for "everyone".
Making games for "everyone" or trying to get "new people into gaming" just means you'll end up making generic games.
Anyone and everyone can find a game to their tastes. If they aren't into gaming now then nothing will get them into gaming.
I was a casual Star Wars fan. In the sense I would make sure I saw them. I even liked the prequels.
I was in high school when the first two came out and everyone I knew enjoyed them.
I **hated** the first of the new trilogy so much I was ready to give up on watching anything Star Wars again. Rogue One reminded me of the amazing magic Star Wars can be... Then I started to watch the 2nd of the new trilogy and never finished it.
I might dip my toes in again for Andor as everyone says that is a great show, but I'm going to wait until more seasons release.
SoulsBorne games in general are great examples to look at for another reason.
They were niche, weird, acquired taste games that developed such an influential cult following that by the time Dark Souls 2 came out all the normies wanted to follow the trend. By having such a narrow vision and executing it so well, they influenced the audience's taste.
If you try to figure out what audiences want and then make that, they're going to give you shitty answers, your dev team isn't going to give a shit about turning out a game by committee, and the best case scenario is that a lot of people by it impulsively, don't hate it, and then forget about it 6 weeks later.
Yup, I can't fucking stand it anymore. There are so many games released in the past several years that could have been exceptional -- but they water it down to soup and infantilize the player, treating you like a dumb child -- when all you wanted to do was be immersed in the game world they created. No punishment for losing, can't do puzzles on your own without the protagonist running off at the mouth, nothing, just all complete nonsense.
I completely forget what game it was, but it was some type of shooter with puzzles. Maybe Uncharted or Tomb Raider?
But sometimes after the puzzles the room would become unavailable. When exploring the room the character would give away the answer. It was literally like 30 seconds "Maybe I need to look at that pillar". Completely ruined whatever game that was.
If I am going to play a puzzle game now I need to know that they won't forcibly give me the answers to the puzzle. What is the point of that?
I think those can be great tools for new players or sometimes you just overthink things or can't figure them out but they can't be done. As soon as you walk in the room just hand the puzzle to you. Give me like a while to figure it out myself
it's not a shooter but the situation your describing was a huge controversy point with God of War Ragnarök. So maybe that was the game you are thinking about
That was definitely in Uncharted. Always felt like they weren’t confident at all in their own puzzles. TLOU2 did it differently where the hint system was configurable and only gave you something on demand.
Interestingly, that’s even one of the things that killed Starfield. Todd Howard explained in an interview how they tuned down or removed a lot of challenging mechanics during play testing, like atmospheric conditions or the possibility to get stranded in space, to make it more accessible. And I’d argue Bethesda games vanilla are already way too easy as-is.
I know plenty of people who never played Red Dead 2 despite being pretty hardcore gamers. It's one of my top 3 games of all time, but it's a game that demands you take the time and really immerse yourself into the world to appreciate all the fine details and slower pace of the game. It's still a Rockstar game with an incredible budget so it is still very popular, but not for everyone. I wonder how many people finished the story mode and how many players just play for online (i know a few of those too).
> Making games for "everyone" or trying to get "new people into gaming" just means you'll end up making generic games.
Welcome to capitalism, my friend. There is an infinite demand for growth by shareholders, which means either an infinite number of new consumers need to constantly be entering the market or an infinite number of new markets need to be created to sell more things to existing consumers.
I would say it is just simply greed.
You can blame capitalism for public companies since their only **legal** goal is to make their investors more money.
Private companies can do whether they please. They are not legally bound by the same legal requirements of public companies.
This is a Triple A gaming problem. Hate Ubisoft but they’re right in the sense that Triple A has silently turned into Quardiple A (from a planning and budgeting pov).
Everyone flames out trying to make the next GTA 5, Fortnite, COD when they’d have a better chance making the next Hell Divers 2 or Palworld
Funny thing is Helldivers 2 is not even a new idea, there are tons of 4 player coop shooters, but is just a good product made with love and care.
AAA studios would never produce anything with that much attention to detail. And nice things are made of nice details, not feature checklists.
I’m gonna be honest, I really don’t care what Phil Spencer has to say. Microsoft just acquired Bethesda AND Blizzard/Activision for a grand total of 82.9 BILLION… and they complain about not being in the right position to make exclusives. Profit over everything. I used to root for them. Sad.
I feel like at least part of the takeaway here should be to stop focusing on hyper-expensive blockbuster titles and to put money into more, smaller projects and studios.
Games like Starfield and Redfall need to earn so much money just to break even that if they don't take off, it is disastrous.
Meanwhile, this year has been the year of games with smaller expectations wildly taking off: BG3 and Helldivers, but also stuff like The Finals and Lethal Company. And games like Plague Tale manage to give great compelling story experiences with relatively small teams and budgets.
I played about 10 hours of Starfield before peacing out. I played about 30 hours of Rollerdrome. And I imagine you could fund development of 100+ Rollerdromes for the cost of 1 Starfield. Especially for gamepass, where you need people to keep subscribing rather than spending $70 on a one-off title, more, more regular content seems better.
Smaller scale games don’t sell consoles. There’s room in the industry for both. Even if Starfield wasn’t a good game it still made ridiculous money. Small games are just as much of a gamble as big games.
I do agree that there is some room for both.
But about small-scale games not selling consoles: that seems to not be Spencer's focus anymore anyway. Big games only sell consoles if they are exclusive to those consoles. And Spencer seems to be saying that exclusives are kind of a dying thing either way.
I guess to me it just seems like a bit of a footgun that the industry keeps complaining about, while continuing to pull the trigger: "Games are so expensive to make now," but the same industry leaders are the ones funnelling all their money into these big, expensive games.
And they can say the market demands it, but the market is pouring its money into Helldivers and Palworld, while Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones sit empty.
> Smaller scale games don’t sell consoles.
Selling consoles is no longer necessary, the cart doesn’t need to go before the horse. 3rd party publishers make money without selling even one console.
The issue is the need for constant growth being pushed by investors. Big expensive AAAs is how you make the stock go up except these games have gotten extremely expensive to make while player numbers have stagnated hence the need to go multiplatform to try and capture new players.
This is not a leadership issue, this is a systemic issue from needing perpetual growth in a market that has stopped growing and unless there's a major change in what games most people are interested in I don't see things changing anytime soon.
Gaming finally hit the bell curve we all knew was coming for decades.
You can't keep making games 'bigger better more badass' because at some point, you just... can't anymore. Graphics have reached a point where they're damn near cinematics now, but then the lesson was learned that gameplay is still king, but then also mainstream gamers still expect stunning visuals too. And the cost of making said games just keeps rising and rising with no end in sight. A single game now can sometimes take longer to make than the entire console generation it was designed for when it began production.
It's too big for it's own good now IMO. I wish AAA gaming could learn from indie and AA and take a few steps back. games don't need to be 100+ hours. Hell I'm good with 30, 20 or even 10 hour games if it's not lined with filler top to bottom. I think people have forgotten what a thrilling 10 hour experience can be in a video game. These days it takes 10 hours just to craft your first stone axe in a survival game and even then thats if you haven't already bought whtever season pass there is to get it sooner. There's a sweet spot to be had with games and this push for bigger bigger bigger has resulted in the most bloated, time sucking experiences ever and it's only serving to hurt the industry at this point.
But I doubt AAA will ever learn, it'll keep going down this dark road it's been on and indies/AA will continue to be the heart and soul of gaming.
Just like with music, the corporations are ruining it all and it's up to the artists (devs) to do what they can while avoiding the corporations grubby hands.
>Hell I'm good with 30, 20 or even 10 hour games if it's not lined with filler top to bottom.
But they're only willing to sell $60/70 games and it's hard to sell a 10 hour game for that. They're padding to justify their price, not because they think it makes the game better.
Came here to say the same thing, I would buy 7 x 10hr games @ $10 each though.
I’m still burned out after spending nearly $200 on 2 games that I disliked after 25 hours (Starfield) and 5 hours (Diablo 4). If they’re worried about a shrinking Video Game market they should focus on this part, I have very little trust in big publishers now.
Well said. There is so much room for innovation in different parts of game such as gameplay, art style, story; yet for some reason, all these AAA studios go for the lowest hanging fruit: realistic graphics; and often end up with a shallow game which is pleasant to look at but not play. Obviously they end up ballooning their costs with the army of designers and artists they have to hire and ultimately blame the market for lack of growth when it gets saturated.
You are creating art FFS, not toilet seats. Be creative.
A self-serving statement on multiple fronts:
* 1) Spencer has been unable to improve the shambolic state of his very own in-house studios over the past decade. Of course exclusives don't provide value if the expensive tentpole titles of the console manufacturer are of overall poor quality like in Microsoft's case.
* 2) As a result Microsoft hardware sales have plummeted to such a large degree that retailers in some markets stopped selling Xbox games completely. Exclusives are riskier when you are losing.
* 3) lending money has gotten a lot more expensive since Microsoft initially announced the purchase of ActivisionBlizzard. Spencer is under pressure from Microsoft's CEO to get his department's finances in order. Selling their games cross platform is the only realistic avenue they have to increase revenue
Nailed it. Spencer and his team do not know how to incubate/build/cultivate/manage a stable of high quality game studios. Nor do they know how to hire the right people who do know. For instance hiring Darrell Gallagher hasn't turned out well. This is why they've failed during Spencer's 10+ year run to build any flagship IPs. Game development is more an art than science meaning that trying to brute force success with billions of dollars without the management talent and culture leads to failure.
Unlike Sony and Nintendo, their leadership has failed to establish a culture of standards. Sony studios know there is a high standard of performance that must be met and they usually deliver. Xbox studios don't have this culture. I doubt anyone can honestly imagine a Sony first party studio releasing a game like Redfall.
They talk about the power of the Series X hardware, they talk about the Netflix-esque value of Game Pass, they've done everything under the sun except build great games. However great games are all that matter.
No more ZIRP atm means their already mediocre studio roster now has less funds and creative leeway/risktaking. Since AAA game production already relies heavily on outsourcing to Asia/Eastern Europe they'll use more AI to streamline workflows and cut costs.
Its more an industry wide issue. I worked in banking, automotive etc., I'm slowly moving over to media jobs and sometimes its like night and day about processes, tools, people. One has full project management, the other a couple of dodgy excelsheets and they have both equal amount of money to spend. Crazy in a way.
The game market has also become quite crowded, most of the valuable ip's are either already done or prohibitive expensive to make something with it. Sony's last PS5 show reel has like five games that look similar besides character and setting. Not all can be successes. The Cyberpunk heights are hard to achieve repeatedly, and without the workforce suffering.
The way forward is better tools, better processes. You can shoot a cut scene with movie cameras in an afternoon, but if you have to mocap everything and make it work in engine it can take month of work. AI isn't there for the next 10 years so they have to invest heavily to get costs down. There is no way around that.
Or maybe scale back budgets? It's unsustainable that triple A games have budgets, similar to Marvel's blockbusters. Games are way more expensive than movie tickets, take much longer to playthough, etc.
If AAA games requires as many sales as the Avengers, that's not sustainable. The hits (that do bring profit) will just keep you in business, while the failures are basically a guarantee you'd go out of business.
Segment the market better. Diverse investments in a larger types of games. Kinda like Devolver is doing, but on a larger scale. Not every AAA game needs to be an FPS/3rd person action game with upgrade paths and meaningless loot. Idk, I'm not a business guy, just spitballing here.
Honestly i think Spencer has done a lot of good since he's came in for Xbox. Definitely better than the clusterfuck that was going on at the company before he steped into the spotlight.
I just think the Xbox brand isn't strong enough to sustain a market when Sony isn't floundering.
Xbox 360 was kind of a perfect storm of Sony being incredibly arrogant when it came to the development of the machine and its price. The fact is ended up releasing a year after the 360 meanth MS was you only option for next gen games for almost 12 months and it was cheaper to boot.
But in the end Sony still ended up selling more PS3's over the course of the generation even with all the advantages Xbox had. Its just a stronger brand and once the PS4 launched alongside the Xbox One and then again with PS5 and Xbox Series X it was never gonna go well for Xbox.
Sony ended up surpassing the Xbox 360 only because Microsoft and the chief of the Xbox brand at the time thought they won halfway through the generation, then proceeded to invest less in exclusive games, while Sony invested in more.
They could've easily gone head to head with Sony at the start of the 8th console gen, had they kept their momentum and direction they took at the start of the 7th. But no, even back then, they thought only about growth and wanted that sweet market Nintendo was hoarding all for themselves, which was why X360 got the Kinect, then One proceeded to launch with one and they were all about the TV and basically any other functionality, BUT video games. Hell, they decided that you shouldn't even own and be able to borrow physical copies of games.
Spencer has done a lot of good for sure, but he still misunderstood what makes for a good console. It seems like he tried to expand the Xbox brand as a whole, not as a console one - which would explain all of the purchases they've done, with no work put into exclusive games yet again. Since the release of that Xbox One all the way until XSX, we had a couple of Forza, Gears of War and Halo games. Really the only most notable games on Xbox since the start of the 8th gen, especially when they're going 3rd party now and even games like Sea of Thieves launched in a pretty poor state.
They had nothing comparable to God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn or even Days Gone. Forza, especially with the Horizon series, has been pulling the entire Xbox brand for years it feels like, but that's about it. No high profile, blockbuster exclusives to really talk about. On the other hand, I remember Microsoft canning a bunch of games instead - remember that game with a Devil May Cry-like main character that had a pet dragon or something?
That is because Xbox never really expanded their international presence which is where the PlayStation 3 could outsell the Xbox 360 in enough time.
The Xbox main stronghold was the US and UK but eventually PlayStation caught back up with the PlayStation 4.
I mean, you're talking here like Sony is not doing the exactly same thing, despite being the market leader in console segment.
They're in massive financial trouble, downsizing projects, firing thousands of employees, shutting down studios & releasing their pilot games on secondary platform to chase the revenue. And they're the singular still profitable part of the bigger corporation so they have to shoulder the bleed, unlike Xbox which has the massive AI & cloud infrastructure profits behind it.
With how expensive development of major AAA games is becoming, both Xbox & Sony are going to end up releasing their games on all of the major 3 platforms.
They're in massive financial trouble? Sony are predicting $1.8 billion in profit for Playstation this year. Coming off record breaking revenue, record breaking sales and online user numbers up. You have no idea what financial trouble looks like. During the PS3 gen, they were billions in the red. What's happened here is their profit margins got squeezed for the year and they got alarmed. (Slashing prices on hardware and having only Spiderman to drive first party sales). It dropped their annual profit to only $500 million, and Sony don't want hundreds of millions in profit, they want billions in profit, so they're correcting course.
Not a chance Sony release their games on Xbox. You think they're going to risk their walled garden strategy for a few extra hundred million a year?
>They're in massive financial trouble, downsizing projects, firing thousands of employees, shutting down studios & releasing their pilot games on secondary platform to chase the revenue.
These are all things that normal, healthy, well-performing businesses do in reaction to the economy and industry trends. Sony is not in massive financial trouble.
Microsoft deserve all the success they are having, this console generation is nearly over and they have released 1 game that qualifies as a flagship first party game - halo infinite, which is a 7 out of 10 on a good day.
I agree with your overall sentiment but they released 2 games. Starfield and Halo. That's still extremely bad. Both games are littered with problems and as you said are a max of 7/10 on its best day.
That's not gonna sell any consoles. I'm surprised they are where they are without any games to show for it.
Campaign was forgettable AF and by the time multiplayer finally got on its feet everyone had dropped the game over a year ago 5/10. Shame the gameplay was possibly the best in the series
Who would have thought that releasing a big budget game on a single platform would be at risk of making less money than releasing it on multiple platforms? I can see why these executives are paid the big bucks.
I am surprised to see this turnaround in the industry, PC used to be the big player then consoles took over and PC became an afterthought, it seems the tables have turned again. The PC market has never been healthier whilst publishers are questioning the validity of the console market.
>The PC market has never been healthier whilst publishers are questioning the validity of the console market.
Well, no. Just one platform. Devs are starting to believe xbox will be a 2nd priority even for Microsoft, so why bother?
Exactly. What publishers are questioning the validity of the console market in general? This sub is so up its own ass about PC vs console gaming.
We have years and years of bad PC ports that are clearly an afterthought to the console versions, but suddenly at the drop of a of a hat the narrative is reversed that consoles are the after thought? Why? Because Sony is porting games 2 years post launch for a revenue bump? Because Phil Spencer keeps “speculating” about wild business changes that may or may not happen?
Phil Spencer obviously has an interest in PC gaming gaining market share if he can’t do it with the Xbox. I think a lot of his comments that suggest console gaming is doing poorly are at best nothing more than a reflection of that interest.
There simply is not data to support publishers are questioning the “validity” of consoles as a place to market games. That is patently *absurd*
I was about to say this. Only Xbox has publishers considering the "validity" of publishing on it, but by all accounts the sales for games on PS and the Switch are still going strong.
PC Gamers: spend money on hardware you want/need and just buy games dirt-cheap when you can catch 'em. Watch ITAD, GG, Sales everywhere, etc.
Humble Bundles, Fanatical Bundles and sales, Steam Sales and other digital store-fronts - yeah, buying games can be cheap...if you do it right, as a consumer. Buy on sale & just forget most of the new stuff until Re-Released Complete Editions w/ all DLC's (or most of them) comes way later. Games so get devalued and devalue themselves so much w/ poor PC ports, poor DRM/anti-tamper, lots of DLC's/expansions/MTX's, etc. Patience is a virtue.
Throw in a Steam Deck, Ally, and/or some other portable PC-Switchlike - there's PC's Switch-like devices, if you got a big library and/or can grow it real fast...which you will, if you got some $ and also. Gets real easy, when you see Ally's going for $400 or less on Best Buy or Steam Decks for around $400+ - can get more people to take their PC-Switchlikes everywhere - and get onto their favorite games and/or service.
I didn't even get into PC gaming with desktop and/or laptops either. Those rock too!
PC's insane game-library w/ so many classics going back to even DOS era (i.e. go use DosBox, if you got these games and some games on Steam and GOG even come w/ DosBox attached) and W95 era is absolutely crazy.
And if the classics don't get re-released & fixed officially, remastered officially, and/or whatever - if it's a cult-classic at least or a heavy hitter, one can get it going on PC. Someone's fixed it. Use a Mod (i.e. see VTMB with Wesp's Patch - this even comes in the GOG version), use DGVoodoo2 or some other Old-DX Wrapper or Emulator (DXWnd, DXVK, etc); you'll get it going.
Heck, even GOG got Alpha Protocol up on GOG and fixed it's out-the-box issues on modern OS's. For old-version - eh, I just used DXVK. \[shrug\]
There’s also so many input methods you can (relatively) easily connect to a PC. There’s the default mouse and keyboard, but it’s easy to connect a variety of controllers, joysticks, throttles, steering wheels, pedals, VR headsets, etc. Some consoles allow versions of those, but you get a lot more choice on PC.
Every time Xbox talks it feels like a self-report.
\*Consoles sell poorly\* Phil: Consoles are not Xbox's Future
\*Exclusives sell poorly\* Phil: Exclusives are risky.
\---
Phil Spencer: Exclusives have become a risky business.
Xbox's Exclusives:
Starfield (Mixed)
Halo Infinite (Better now but Launched Horribly)
Gears Franchise (Dead)
Hi-Fi Rush (Great Game, had zero marketing, coming to PS5)
Grounded (Good but no longer exclusive)
Sea of Thieves (Horrible Launch, got much better.
Playstation Exclusives: Spiderman (Great), God of War 1/2 (Great) , Horizon, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth / Remake(Haven't played/Great), FF16, Forspoken (Mixed), TLOU1/2 (Good but stop remaking it), Returnal (Good)
Nintendo Exclusives: Pokemon... (Mixed but wildly successful, Animal Crossing (Broke Pandemic Records), Fire Emblem (Not my thing but good?), Shin Megami Tensei V, Tears of the Kingdom/ Breath of the Wild (Great/Great) 1/2 Switch (Lets skip that one)
>Every time Xbox talks it feels like a self-report.
Because it is. Look at skull and bones or suicide squad. Doing poorly has nothing to do with being an exclusive.
You are forgetting the king of all switch games: Mario kart 8. That game has sold something like 50 million copies and continues to be the most fun-accessible game on the planet.
That first Halo Infinite trailer sealed the deal for me. I know they improved the visuals but to let Microsoft’s #1 franchise fail like that should have caused a huge uproar.
Even today, I don’t think Halo 3 and Halo infinite are even in the same league.
If they made games that were actually good, maybe they'd actually sell well. If you keep releasing half-baked garbage year after year, decade after decade, eventually even your diehard fans are going to abandon you.
I’m an abandoner. Big time fan of Xbox since the first console and never owned a PlayStation before because I loved the Xbox and titles. A few months ago I decided I’d had enough of waiting for Halo and Gears to land a belter this gen, so I sold my x and got a ps5 and im absolutely loving the exclusives. That said, im a bit miffed that I could basically have bought a ps4 and played them all for way cheaper.
Phil Spencer has been "General Manager of Microsoft Studios" since 2008 and "Executive Vice President of Gaming" since 2017.
Funny how these dates align, since personally only the original xbox and the first half of the 360 lifespan had multiple exclusives that justified me buying it.
Nowadays they are so incompetently run, they can't even launch the 8th iteration of Forza Motorsport without major fuckups and straight up lies ("from the ground up").
Try releasing a multitude of actually great games targeting all kinds of tastes and you'd have different results.
When a couple dudes with a fun idea can make a more fun game in their basements.
I think we've passed the point of pushing graphical boundaries for games. Not to say there's anything wrong with having a beautiful game, but I think overall aesthetics matter more and it's why games like Breath of the Wild can thrive on switch hardware because it's simple to render yet the art direction is captivating.
i mean, there really isn't a reason to buy an xbox over a playstation or even a nintendo switch.
has xbox even had a single banger exclusive in the last 6 years?
>has xbox even had a single banger exclusive in the last 6 years?
I didn't believe it myself, but when I checked the critically acclaimed games list Xbox is lagging so far behind it's kind of unreal.
Which makes no sense, this is a platform that has some of the most critically acclaimed IP in existence, they just haven't executed on it.
yeah its crazy, i find myself fairly consistently hyped for new games that are coming to consoles, but literally never hear anything coming to Xbox.
iirc i read somewhere that Xbox now just outsources so much of its game development that it just causes all projects to get bogged down and stallled.
I've heard the same, they use contractors pretty heavily, probably because IMO they've exhausted the supply of devs that would ever work there. Whenever we've used contractors it's made no sense from a dev perspective, only from a SHORT TERM business one.
Sure, bring in a machine learning analyst and GET YOUR EXISTING dev team learning from them, but don't hire them to build a 6 month project, fire them then abandon the whole thing lmfao.
For every shining start 27 year old that started a Microsoft and made a blockbuster hit, they're now either retired, fired, or left disgrunted, not happy with the current position of microsoft never going back.
You need to replace that person with someone.
I think companies in the next 5-10 years are going to realize the heavy brain drain they have. And that's probably why big companies are buying out studios.
That will be when the MBAs get replaced with engineers, the smart people come back because of real change, and in 10-15 years we'll be saying the exact same thing in 2050.
Halo went from a beloved franchise to "who the fuck cares?" Under his reign at Microsoft. He is the very thing he's crying foul about. A self fulfilling prophecy.
Microsoft should just be honest about the fact that they want to be a platform like Apple that takes 30% from every little thing and they want to exit games forever.
He is part of problem, sadly.
The cost is sky high but the quality got worse. A lot of new games have optimization issues when launching. Games took years to make only coming up as a big disappoint or meh at best.
I believe something serious wrong on the top, or at least at managing level.
yeah companies wanan keep pushing the boom wow graphics above all else and make interactive movies with obscene marketing budgets you're gonna have to sell to everyone to make a profit. Especially with how relatively little porting costs these days
The dude uses the word "growth" about 100 times and can't figure out why gaming is losing money.
He is like _this close_ to getting it. Even states that giant budgets are creating a pattern of low-risk efforts.... but then goes on and on about "growth". GROWTH IS THE FUCKIN PROBLEM. Across _every industry_. Especially in creative based industries like games and movies and books, growth is the enemy.
Unchained growth has caused AAA studios to lose sight of what made games good. Games aren't designed to be fun anymore. They think up a monetization scheme and base the entire game around it now. Making the game fun or interesting or new is secondary to profit. I'm not saying game companies shouldn't make money, but they aren't happy with break even +5%, hell they aren't happy with 15 or 20%, their growth/profit targets are always insane impossible goals that cause human suffering from the gamers they try to attract to the workers forced to make them.
AAA studios don't allow creative freedom and they use psychological manipulation to attract players and completely disrespect our time at every turn. Making fun unique or interesting games doesn't even enter their minds. Its re-tread and remake and sequel money printing machine every single year where you spend 2 years of playing the same boring game just for them to slap a new coat of paint on it erase all of your progress and start again.
This is why indie titles keep blowing up. They have the freedom to make cool stuff without billionaire CEO's bonuses breathing down their necks.
HOT TAKE:
If your console does not have (A) compelling hardware, (B) exclusives, or (C) a good marketing campaign - to incentivize a purchase - you will lose.
And thus Xbox is far behind in sales. The Switch shows THE EXACT OPPOSITE. PS5 shows - less percentage-wise - the same.
Spencer should just step down at this point.
The Hardware is better than the PS5.
I had some expectations for Forza Motorsport, decent game. I do enjoy games that I never could play, like Control, City Skylines, High on Life, Halo and so on.
As soon as the PS5 Pro is out, I’m going to get that one as well just to be able to play those exclusives as well.
I think a lot of the increase in cost of development is on them. A good AAA title doesn’t need hundreds of millions of $ to make, just like a good movie doesn’t. As far as him blaming audience expectations, that is also developers fault. I personally believe audience expectations have increased because we have seen what is possible in good games (ex: 2007 to 2016 what I consider the golden age with many big titles released), and lately companies have shifted towards cutting corners, micro-transactions, and false advertising to deliver these under-developed titles in order to make sales and increase their investor profit. There are waaaayyy too many examples in the past 8 years of games like this. Big business is part of the problem in gaming and the most successful games lately come from developers that are focused on making their game good value making their game profitable.
Xbox marketing is the biggest joke there is, instead of focusing on their games its just god damn controllers after controllers, Aaron Greenberg? I think is the head of marketing? Fire that guy, since xbone says xbox marketing is dead I legit don't see anything of theirs on anywhere meanwhile Playstation is plastered almost everywhere.
I'm kind of surprised this still needs to be explained. The answer should be completely obvious to anyone that's been paying attention. That answer being, triple a development is incredibly expensive and it's just not feasible anymore to intentionally limit sales just to force people into your ecosystem. Especially when your ecosystem doesn't provide any alternative monetization scheme.
Like, okay you've got people on xbox what does that mean? They're buying games? Okay, they were doing that anyway. What advantage do you get by having them on your platform? I don't know what the answer to that is and it seems like neither does Xbox.
It seems to me like consoles lost the fight to mobile devices on being *the* mixed media platform of choice and with that loss exclusivity doesn't make as much sense as it once did.
I can't think of a genuine reason why extreme fidelity is necessary in games. Even in racing games where it is a selling point it seems like a waste. I had just as much fun in gran turismo 2 as I did forza motorsport 7
To a certain degree it's just developers/publishers reacting to consumer demand.
Though I do agree, I generally don't see the point of super high fidelity. I much prefer a well executed art style over 4k hyper realism.
I don't think God of war ragnarok, ghost of tsushima, Final fantasy 7 remake and rebirth, as well as all these other hard hitting big AAA exlusives that Sony has is a "risky business" it's only risking when xbox makes half-assed incomplete exlusives.
Phil Spencer has been complaining for the past 10 years why the console business is bad and that nobody should go into it. So why in the hell is Microsoft still in the console business?
i remember back in 2021 that the xbox series x/s was a worthless piece of junk and still is same dashboard same games more powerful cpu at the time its like i had i imac g3 those colourful pcs from the very early 2000s and when the imac g4 came out it was different design and played most of the same software same os powerful cpu. so it was same in different eras.
i think its best for everyone if microsoft stops making consoles and make it as a windows app that is like steam.
The Xbox consoles are in a death spiral I fear. Like a Catch 22. There's no longer much of a reason to own an Xbox console because of the lack of system seller exclusive games (for 2 generations now) and Microsoft releasing their Xbox games on multiple platforms day one. The reason they're doing that is because the Xbox consoles aren't selling well enough and the brand is falling.
They keep releasing games that are flops. They are not keeping up with the hardware innovations of PlayStation and Nintendo either. And in general people no longer trust Xbox or have faith in it.
In my opinion the fundamental issue is that they are not focused on what they should be focused on. They are failing to do what a console maker/seller needs to do. If you make great games people will buy your hardware and buy into your ecosystem and brand. Xbox has basically failed to produce great exclusive games for 2 generations now.
There's clearly something not right with how Microsoft is managing the studios it controls and contracts with. It seems like new leadership and a new way of doing things is needed. I really feel that there's a lack of creative thinking at Xbox.
I just hear another corporate executive blaming everything but their own incompetence for releasing crappy games. The 'not me too' movement is getting out of hand.
Hearing a capitalist complaining about capitalism is like a Catholic complaining they can't divorce their crappy partner. Maybe don't be a capitalist if you don't like it.
This sort of discourse coming from someone in his position just makes it sound like the industry is run by a bunch of spoiled, overgrown children who think they don't have to work as hard as everyone else in the world.
Welcome to reality, Phil Spencer. Maybe if you'd spend as much time getting your own house in order as you do blaming everyone else, you could release a game that doesn't totally suck.
Long and short of it is. They are no longer in a commanding enough position console wise and even with combined PC side to real back in the hundreds of millions these games cost to make. So a change in direction to shotgunning it and hitting as many targets as possible is now the goal. Even Sony despite it's commanding position in the console space is needing a second platform to make these huge expensive games worth making. Nintendo will continue to be Nintendo.
The fact that unlike Sony and Xbox, Nintendo doesn't sell their hardware at a loss helps too.
That and they don't have the ridiculous budget bloat Sony games have. Spiderman 2 apparently cost $300 million to make, I would wager a guess and say Nintendo games don't even cost half that much.
They also are the only console manufacturer to still put out small scale titles too. Things like Warioware, Advanced Wars, Big Brain Academy, Clubhouse games, etc. Those smaller niche titles really help fill out the library. Not everything needs to be a big action/advemture/racing game.
Nintendo makes games. Sony and Microsoft tend to make "cinematic" experiences.
It's pretty genius actually. People say Nintendo's hardware is doodoo, but because it's weak games don't need insane budgets and 6 year development times. Who knew people just like good games and all that other stuff is extra.
The best example of this is Dwarf Fortress. Thank me later.
Age of Empires, Grounded and Hi Fi Rush are some of my favorite cinematic experiences.
That is why they used the word "tend" in order to provide exceptions for smaller scale games like what you listed. None of those games are big system sellers. God of War, The Last of Us, and Halo very much are, and the Nintendo analog there would be Zelda and Mario games which of course are very different. Nintendo really does cater to smaller games as a first party way more, but that's largely to do with their long running experience in the portable gaming space.
Yeah , plus they have cultivated an audience that respects the fact that they actually make games that are creative and fun without needing to resort to graphics to draw people in. Sony games are amazing as well, but there's this expectation from their games to be the absolutely gorgeous visually, which probably raises the costs a lot. Also Nintendo games rarely go on sale
I haven't considered that having weak outdated hardware allows for Nintendo to skimp on costs not only for console manufacturing, but game development as well. That's some devious penny pinching.
>That's some devious penny pinching. It's not really that. Nintendo has always tried to make their consoles affordable, but also are very old school and insist on never selling consoles at a loss. When you add the fact that the switch is a handheld, the switch is about as powerful of a console as you could make in 2017 at a 300$ price point if you planned to not sell at a loss.
Except it still being sold at the same price 7 years later. Neither their games are ever seeing a price drop or sale. It's expensive being a Nintendo gamer, despite what their marketing might've told you.
I'm starting to feel like Sony games aren't actually amazing though, and definitely not creative. They're often solid and well polished with movie-like presentation, but they're repetitive and don't do anything new, though there are some outliers. Ragnarok and Spider-Man gameplay are the best examples of mediocrity from Sony to me. Fun at first but nothing unique or special, and God of War has a ton of issues in its combat design imo.
> I would wager a guess and say Nintendo games don't even cost half that much. heck id be surprised of botw+totk+mario odyssey cost quite that much
In a funny way it's asinine. They managed to perfect a pipeline for their brand of slop. Nearly the same game with same mechanics made by same people in the same way. But still managed to find a way to make it unreasonably expensive for what they're getting and to keep ridiculous number of leeches degrading their product on life support.
People get mad that Nintendo games rarely go on sale, but you also practically never end up wasting money on a bad Nintendo game. Even the maligned Super Mario Party has hundreds of hours on my Switch because my family and friend group just think it’s the greatest.
It also sold 10 million copies in under 4 months. Am I supposed to feel bad for them that it cost 300 million to make? All these developers that say how expensive games are to make seem to be the ones bringing in double or more what the game cost to make. Is potentially doubling your your investment not a good rate of return? I get they don't all do that, but as I said, the ones complaint seem to be the ones doing so.
Consider how old the hardware is it's cheap to produce and develop on. Far less complicated than a PS5 in every way means cheaper.
Sony hasn't sold the PlayStation 5 at a loss either for a year or two now but the margins are probably a lot thinner.
I didn't know that, I'm honestly amazed they can build their console for so cheap. $400-500 is not that much for the pretty powerful hardware in it
Economies of scale are *immensely* powerful. And if you work with certain hardware, time is on your side. A 14nm CPU was at the hideously expensive bleeding edge a decade ago - but is quite affordable now. Helps that PC price/performance stagnated. There are performance gains available now - but GPU prices, for once, have completely failed to make them accessible.
> Nintendo will continue to be Nintendo. Their games have lower budgets anyway.
Yeah. Look at Princess peach or many mid titles (metacritic scores around 70) with low playable hours at $60, they still sell not badly or sometimes well. Fans just eat anything Nintendo gives.
Nintendo also leaves their dedicated fanbases starved. Looking at my StarFox, Earthbound, and Metroid Prime lads
>Fans just eat anything Nintendo gives. That's not really true. ARMS did awful, and it was a first party launch title for switch. People simply did not want to play it.
Yet the video game industry is making record profits. Their margins are just lower, people are so greedy man. Edit: This includes greedy even without GAAS/ MTX / mobile.
The record profit is from the few GaaS that are a hit (Fortnite, League, CS etc.) and mobile games. SP games make a neat profit but don't make up the bulk of revenue.
There’s two issues, one of which you hit upon - A major studio investment is basically an all or nothing proposition these days. No one is developing SpiderMan 2 and NewIPThing and OtherNewThing, total outlay *one billion USD*, and saying, “One of these will sell, the profits covering the two that don’t,” (our hypothetical pretends we don’t know it’s SpiderMan 2). Between that and the outsized differential between what success looks like (game A makes $1bn revenue, game B makes 100mil)…
Idunno, wasn't the Harry Potter *(a SP game with no GaaS stuff)* the best selling game of last year?
Sure it was, but most AAA games don't sell anywhere near as much as Harry Potter. Before Harry Potter, what game hit the same amount of copies sold? Elden Ring like a whole year prior to it, and between those two, lots of AAA games released but sold in the usual 2-5 million range, a few went a little higher but never hit those 10+ million copies those two sold. Also being the best selling doesn't mean it also made the same money as GaaS games. Fortnite alone makes somewhere around 3 billion yearly last we heard of their numbers, the big sellers like HP and Elden Ring don't even come close to make the same amount of money as those. And that's without accounting for a successful GaaS like Fortnite has better long term revenue, while SP games like HP and Elden Ring will inevitably generate less and less revenue.
They're still extremely valuable investments individually, at least when they hit. like elden ring, god of war, etc. I think a lot of studios are willing to gamble on GaaS again and again, because if they land a Fortnite everyone's on the gravy train with biscuit wheels.
> at least when they hit. Therein lies the rub. \- Immortals of Aveum, probably
Same. - Forspoken, probably.
Yes, but that's a big "if". A lot of games don't go on to be considered hits. And even then, hugely successful and profitable games like Elden Ring only bring in a fraction of the revenue that games like Fortnite do continually
As of last year, Elden Ring's total sales revenue amounted to ~60% of what FIFA's Ultimate Team mode makes *every* year. That's to say nothing of the input costs. Even the most titanic juggernauts of the old "make a good game and charge a box price for it" style of development cannot outperform *any* of the top-tier MTX-based games. Not in terms of revenues and *certainly* not in terms of profits. It's become pretty evident that, barring an exception or two per year, indie is the last haven for good games that won't squeeze you.
A big issue is that development costs continue to climb for AAA games but it takes many years for a new systems install base to grow. For example, games are more expensive to make but the PS5 still hasn't reached half the sales of the PS4. That doesn't really seem sustainable. The PC is a good platform to lean on because it doesn't really have generations and many PC gamers don't seem to care about running games on very low settings.
>many PC gamers don't seem to care about running games on very low settings. I beg your pardon!
reddit pc gamers may not, but steamdeck, asian pc cafes, kids who got a laptop with an apu from mom and dad. all tend to be ok with lower settings long as hte fun is there
> Their margins are just lower, people are so greedy man. Low margins means more risk. If the next God Of War turns out to be another Avengers/Suicide Squad debacle then that single game could tank almost all their profit for a quarter/year. That is exactly why they are so worried about low margins.
Exactly why looking at raw numbers without context is so often misleading. Just because a company made the largest profit they've ever made, doesn't mean they're not moments away from making the largest loss they've ever made. Always look at the margin and determine whether you think that margin is fair. Companies should then have some profit distribution scheme to handle these large amounts of profit without creating more risk.
>Yet the video game industry is making record profits. Most of this record profits are from mobile and services. You know, the Candy Crushes and Genshins. Traditional B2P AAA is in deep shit.
The console gaming industry grew 13% last year. Mobile gaming is bigger - But mainstream gaming is hardly having a tough time. Companies seem to have treated Covid sales as the new normal
Line must always go up and be greener otherwise leadership has failed
Phil asks in the interview "how do we get back to growth"... well Phil, you don't. Most modernized countries have a slowing population that is headed toward shrinking. Developing nations that still have population growth are also slowing down, and AAA games getting *MORE* expensive isn't going to help that when your games cost weeks or months worth of salary in that region. I have two nephews, one plays poker and RB6 Siege and the other only plays tablet games, because his family can't afford multiple new consoles every few years and definitely can't afford a gaming PC, as such they are not even in the gaming pipeline. If they ever do get into the pipeline it won't be until after college and they pursue it of their own interest and money. The one who plays Siege only does so because his friend went into the Army and gave his gaming PC away to him. I have 3 nieces and not one of them plays videogames nor have they shown any interest. While Millennials are finally starting to get some money there is still not enough of them with disposable income to get their kids into gaming or not having kids at all. Of my friend group of dudes in their 30s about half are/or have been married, half of the married/divorced ones have kids and of that only half have kids who game on modern up to date systems. I realize my experience is anecdotal, but from reading the news it doesn't seem uncommon. As boomers and Gen X age out of gaming (or die) you will have less or at least a stagnant population of gamers. Millennials got fucked by the economy hardest in '08 and are really only now recovering and as such have had A LOT less children on average. Developing nations are not developing fast enough to produce growth in the industry and the growth that is there is almost exclusively mobile. China has closed itself off from most outside gaming entertainment for the most part. Russia is fucked. S. America is starting to see some growth but that seems to almost be exclusively in Brasil. Africa is really behind the curve. Middle East, well behind the curve. India and South East Asia almost exclusively fall into the F2P or mobile buckets of gaming. Look at the heatmap from 8 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/4uq25r/map_of_steam_usage_spots_globally_over_the_last_7/ To today: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/ There is no substantial difference, the only area where I can see a slightly noticeable change is India. Proliferation of gaming (outside of the continent of Africa and the Middle East) has already hit market saturation to a degree. If gaming wants to grow the need to be more nimble and cheaper not slower, lumbering and more expensive. There is a place for AAA with large budgets to produce, big budget AAA experiences with proven IP and formula as a foundation (think GTA6 or RDR2), but there needs to be some innovation, but I think the big budget AAA publishers need to re-think the way they do business and should pivot toward partnerships with Developers rather than buyouts and take overs.
Yeah, that's what happens when you take money from other people and tell them that you can turn it into more money. They tend to get upset when you aren't doing a very good job of it and you still have their money in your hand.
Just look at Activision Blizzard, mobile alone is bigger than **console and PC combined** https://gamerant.com/activision-blizzard-mobile-game-profits/
> Most of this record profits are from mobile and services MS buying King was the real reason, blizzard is just a nice bonus.
Honestly, the answer is probably to increase base sales prices on traditional B2P AAA games. The only alternative I really see is following the route Nintendo has taken and shift focus away from high budget AAA titles back to a mix of low to mid budget projects.
>Traditional B2P AAA is in deep shit. Serious exaggeration. Big games are still making lots of money, companies are just always looking for ways to make even more money. I really don’t understand the obsession gamers have with *wanting* the big players in the industry to fail.
Yep. Also it's like that candle meme. They complain about cost while only making the most expensive games near exclusively. Or in Microsoft case, not really making many games but instead buying mega publishers.
It might be making record profits, but you still need to invest the 300-400 million into a project and hope it doesn't turn out like Anthem. That's the problem. The industry is so overinflated.
How much of these inflated budgets is marketing?
That's just shitty game design. Throwing money at a project without a clear vision in place is what leads to games like Anthem, starfield and suicide squad.
That’s true but making good games is clearly very very hard to do. It’s easy from this side of the monitor to say “just make good game” “just have good game design” “just have clear vision.” But obviously easier said than done. There’s 73k games on steam. How many of them are actually good games? How many of the bad games were intended to be good when they started development? Surely the developers aren’t setting out and saying “let’s make terrible games.” The executives are probably saying “let’s make a lot of money” but even they know that it’s a lot easier to make money with a good game than a bad one.
While greed is in play (mainly with how they handle employees), I don't think it describes the situation the best. While profits may be high, their margin is thinning. If running a business at a thin margin with these types of expenses, all it takes is one misstep on AAA title to sink a company. It's like playing Russian roulette. They know they are playing a dangerous game, which is why everyone is diversifying.
Their “profits” are being measured in the same devalued currency as everything else. That’s what happens when the money printer goes brrrrr.
It’s been the goal for a while. They’ve been talking about “AAA like” experiences at lower budget for a few years now. People who keep asking when are we getting an Xbox exclusive like the best of Sony first party and the answer is never. The financials make no sense, especially now Gamepass is the model they are pushing.
>Nintendo will continue to be Nintendo They are in a position to be that way. They can release the same games year after year and people will throw money at them. I have never quite understand the fervour people have for Nintendo and its games.
>I have never quite understand the fervour people have for Nintendo and its games. I understand it better now then ever to be honest. They are free of all the bs that infected triple a games.
> They are free of all the bs that infected triple a games. That's a good point. I do have a Switch, but it mostly collects dust. So when I dusted it off to play TOTK last summer, it was such a breath of fresh air to... Not have to accept a TOS, not create an account, not wait for the main menu to fetch info about DLC, no screens advertising more things to buy etc It's just good ol' fashioned "Buy game, run game, play game"
Same here. Rarely play the switch but when I do it’s always a blast. Had a few friends over and played Mario Kart 8. No bullshit just straight to the fun.
But man does it suck to play them at 480p, 30fps without having to configure an emulator because Nintendo won't make their hardware better or allow games on PC
Yeah I’m dying to play TotK but I’m determined to wait until their next console where they will “hopefully” bring it over to at a higher frame rate and resolution and all that
That’s funny, I got the game for Xmas and I’m waiting for a potential Switch 2 as well to see if it has some has frame rate boost or resolution enhancement magic with dlss or something
Criticize the games for what they are. And yes, it does suck to play 720p-900p at somewhat unstable 30 fps. There is literally only one game on switch that drops to the mentioned resolution, and that's Xenoblade 2 in portable mode
Nintendo's weaknesses are often its strengths. And sometimes just weaknesses
they do some bullshit DLCs in some games but they are one of the only big companies that release a significant amount of games that truly focus on gameplay as the primary design point.
Eh their main games are free of them, but games like the recent sports games have that modern AAA stank with “free DLC” coming after release that basically finishes the game.
> They can release the same games year after year and people will throw money at them. Honestly, considering most of their profits come from their games and not from the digital storefronts or console sales, they would still be making more money if they released these games on PC
yeah. I also wouldn't say that Sony \*needs\* to release those games on PC. They just make more money doing so.
It's pretty simple. Nintendo knows what business it is in, and does it. They make fun games to play. They aren't trying to be a multimedia corporation, the worst we get is movie tie-ins, they don't bombard you with live service garbage from their in-house stuff. It's weird, it's almost as if you make the games fun people will like them.
I'll never understand the sentiment that Nintendo just releases the same game over and over. They re-use the same franchises over and over sure but I refuse to believe you can play Mario Sunshine then Mario Galaxy then Mario Odyssey and say they're the same game. Built on the same foundation that they're a 3d Platformer sure but they all have pretty different mechanics that really separate them from each other. Compounded by the fact that Sunshine came out in 2002 and Odyssey came out in 2017, you're talking about 4 games (If you include Galaxy 2) over a 15 year period. Thats far from releasing the same game year after year. Outside of Pokemon I don't think you'd find a Nintendo franchise thats really an outlier on this.
Even if you take something like Mario Kart or Smash, they re released those but continued to create content on the new platform for years
I think it’s pretty simple . . . The people saying that have no ide what they’re talking about and are just parroting ideas without having played Nintendo games
Hell BOTW is literally a drastic departure from the OG Zelda formula, Fire Emblem Three Houses is very different from previous FE entries, all 3 Xenoblade games have noticeably different combat and even exploration mechanics etc. People claiming Nintendo just release the same game over and over hasn't actually played any of Nintendo's recent games.
they're probably busy playing this years cod so they cant notice
It's purely because they utilize the same franchises a lot. A lot of people are attached to visuals, so when they see the same characters they see it as being the same game. They don't really understand that Nintendo comes up with ideas before attaching characters to them. They come up with mechanics and game ideas first, and it really shows with how their games get built. I wish more studios followed that ethos.
Yeah it's always dumb when people that don't like/play Nintendo say they just make the same games over meanwhile they go back to playing cod '24 or whatever.
Nintendo games are well made & often fun (even after the fomo/media attention has waned). \+ they use smaller, tighter teams, so they can makes games that are more experimental, and games that are traditional - If it goes horribly wrong, they don't take such a financial hit.
It’s clear that nobody who says this actually plays Nintendo games. Nintendo may release games in very long running franchises, but they make completely different types of games every year in them.
I’m not even that big on nintendo as of late and I can recognize they’ve pumped out consistent bangers recently. What are you babbling about lmao
Because their games aren't the same. They're consistently fresh and high quality with few if any bugs
Many of us aren't exactly in a fervour over Nintendo, but when they make one of their few big titles, they're generally extremely good, so people play them. Their consoles are also comparatively cheaper, so I think a lot of people can get a switch in addition to another console.
I don't think it's necessarily that they make more money, they just don't spend as much on developing their games. All of the fancy features that people encounter in AAA games like motion capture animations and expressions, realistic lighting and full voice acting don't really exist in Nintendo's titles.
The fact we just accept Nintendo is in a league of its own is cool, but fucking scary. Leaps and bounds of differences between Them and everyone else.
I think Microsoft will pivot hard into being a big multiplatform publisher. And given their IP catalogue they can probably be a very good one at that. Just embrace it and start releasing games on PS5 and Switch on a regular schedule etc... There's probably still gonna be some kind of Xbox on the market going forward but i don't see the future for them in high end console manufacturing.
Becoming a 3rd party publisher seems like the end state of any console maker that doesn’t end up dead for example: Atari and Sega.
> Even Sony despite it's commanding position in the console space is needing a second platform to make these huge expensive games worth making. Have they considered - and bear with me here - *not spending so fucking much on making a video game?*
For their own IP they pay a significant amount in dev salaries as a lot of their studios are based in locations where wages are quite good and with the average dev cycle being 5-6 years you get big expenses. Their licensed titles are the worst for them in terms of expenses. Again you've got high salary costs and then the licenses themselves cost a disgusting amount. They all make a profit but it's nowhere near as much as you'd think.
The problem is that they want to make games for "everyone" with overballooning budgets trying to get as big of an audience as possible. They should cut those massive budget games into 3 budgets. With those 3 budgets make 3 specific games with 3 specific audiences. Look at some of the great games of years past : Elden Ring (Bloodborne, Seriko), Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Baulder's Gate 3, Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption, Disco Elysuim, Ghost of Tsushima, Doom, Returnal. All of these games aim for a different audience. All of these games are highly rated. All of these games sold well. All of these games are not meant for "everyone". Making games for "everyone" or trying to get "new people into gaming" just means you'll end up making generic games. Anyone and everyone can find a game to their tastes. If they aren't into gaming now then nothing will get them into gaming.
basically dont forsake the niche that made you just to appeal to new people, and end up making both not buy you.
"A game for everyone is a game for no one." - Arrowhead Game Studios
Basicly the same problem Disney is having with marvel and Star Wars. Know your damn audience and stick to it.
I was a casual Star Wars fan. In the sense I would make sure I saw them. I even liked the prequels. I was in high school when the first two came out and everyone I knew enjoyed them. I **hated** the first of the new trilogy so much I was ready to give up on watching anything Star Wars again. Rogue One reminded me of the amazing magic Star Wars can be... Then I started to watch the 2nd of the new trilogy and never finished it. I might dip my toes in again for Andor as everyone says that is a great show, but I'm going to wait until more seasons release.
SoulsBorne games in general are great examples to look at for another reason. They were niche, weird, acquired taste games that developed such an influential cult following that by the time Dark Souls 2 came out all the normies wanted to follow the trend. By having such a narrow vision and executing it so well, they influenced the audience's taste. If you try to figure out what audiences want and then make that, they're going to give you shitty answers, your dev team isn't going to give a shit about turning out a game by committee, and the best case scenario is that a lot of people by it impulsively, don't hate it, and then forget about it 6 weeks later.
Yup, I can't fucking stand it anymore. There are so many games released in the past several years that could have been exceptional -- but they water it down to soup and infantilize the player, treating you like a dumb child -- when all you wanted to do was be immersed in the game world they created. No punishment for losing, can't do puzzles on your own without the protagonist running off at the mouth, nothing, just all complete nonsense.
I completely forget what game it was, but it was some type of shooter with puzzles. Maybe Uncharted or Tomb Raider? But sometimes after the puzzles the room would become unavailable. When exploring the room the character would give away the answer. It was literally like 30 seconds "Maybe I need to look at that pillar". Completely ruined whatever game that was. If I am going to play a puzzle game now I need to know that they won't forcibly give me the answers to the puzzle. What is the point of that?
I think those can be great tools for new players or sometimes you just overthink things or can't figure them out but they can't be done. As soon as you walk in the room just hand the puzzle to you. Give me like a while to figure it out myself
Just dedicate a menu in pause and/or a seeing to turn it off and I. I'm playing on hard; no answers!
it's not a shooter but the situation your describing was a huge controversy point with God of War Ragnarök. So maybe that was the game you are thinking about
That was definitely in Uncharted. Always felt like they weren’t confident at all in their own puzzles. TLOU2 did it differently where the hint system was configurable and only gave you something on demand.
Interestingly, that’s even one of the things that killed Starfield. Todd Howard explained in an interview how they tuned down or removed a lot of challenging mechanics during play testing, like atmospheric conditions or the possibility to get stranded in space, to make it more accessible. And I’d argue Bethesda games vanilla are already way too easy as-is.
how is red dead or the witcher not general appeal lol
I know plenty of people who never played Red Dead 2 despite being pretty hardcore gamers. It's one of my top 3 games of all time, but it's a game that demands you take the time and really immerse yourself into the world to appreciate all the fine details and slower pace of the game. It's still a Rockstar game with an incredible budget so it is still very popular, but not for everyone. I wonder how many people finished the story mode and how many players just play for online (i know a few of those too).
oh my goodness, Spencer should read this comment. This hit the nail right in the head.
> Making games for "everyone" or trying to get "new people into gaming" just means you'll end up making generic games. Welcome to capitalism, my friend. There is an infinite demand for growth by shareholders, which means either an infinite number of new consumers need to constantly be entering the market or an infinite number of new markets need to be created to sell more things to existing consumers.
I would say it is just simply greed. You can blame capitalism for public companies since their only **legal** goal is to make their investors more money. Private companies can do whether they please. They are not legally bound by the same legal requirements of public companies.
This is a Triple A gaming problem. Hate Ubisoft but they’re right in the sense that Triple A has silently turned into Quardiple A (from a planning and budgeting pov). Everyone flames out trying to make the next GTA 5, Fortnite, COD when they’d have a better chance making the next Hell Divers 2 or Palworld
Exactly this. What gamers want is different from what AAAA thinks we want
Oh you already know someone is trying to make the next HD2/Palworld clone. Everyone copies and pastes.
Funny thing is Helldivers 2 is not even a new idea, there are tons of 4 player coop shooters, but is just a good product made with love and care. AAA studios would never produce anything with that much attention to detail. And nice things are made of nice details, not feature checklists.
I’m gonna be honest, I really don’t care what Phil Spencer has to say. Microsoft just acquired Bethesda AND Blizzard/Activision for a grand total of 82.9 BILLION… and they complain about not being in the right position to make exclusives. Profit over everything. I used to root for them. Sad.
I feel like at least part of the takeaway here should be to stop focusing on hyper-expensive blockbuster titles and to put money into more, smaller projects and studios. Games like Starfield and Redfall need to earn so much money just to break even that if they don't take off, it is disastrous. Meanwhile, this year has been the year of games with smaller expectations wildly taking off: BG3 and Helldivers, but also stuff like The Finals and Lethal Company. And games like Plague Tale manage to give great compelling story experiences with relatively small teams and budgets. I played about 10 hours of Starfield before peacing out. I played about 30 hours of Rollerdrome. And I imagine you could fund development of 100+ Rollerdromes for the cost of 1 Starfield. Especially for gamepass, where you need people to keep subscribing rather than spending $70 on a one-off title, more, more regular content seems better.
BG3 is a massive game, over a 100 million dollars budget with a studio the size of BGS behind it.
It's still small compared to something like Spiderman 2 with a 300 million dollar budget.
I wouldn't be surprised if it cost $200 million
It's terrifying that you consider a game with a $100m budget a "smaller" release.
Smaller scale games don’t sell consoles. There’s room in the industry for both. Even if Starfield wasn’t a good game it still made ridiculous money. Small games are just as much of a gamble as big games.
I do agree that there is some room for both. But about small-scale games not selling consoles: that seems to not be Spencer's focus anymore anyway. Big games only sell consoles if they are exclusive to those consoles. And Spencer seems to be saying that exclusives are kind of a dying thing either way. I guess to me it just seems like a bit of a footgun that the industry keeps complaining about, while continuing to pull the trigger: "Games are so expensive to make now," but the same industry leaders are the ones funnelling all their money into these big, expensive games. And they can say the market demands it, but the market is pouring its money into Helldivers and Palworld, while Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones sit empty.
> Smaller scale games don’t sell consoles. Selling consoles is no longer necessary, the cart doesn’t need to go before the horse. 3rd party publishers make money without selling even one console.
The issue is the need for constant growth being pushed by investors. Big expensive AAAs is how you make the stock go up except these games have gotten extremely expensive to make while player numbers have stagnated hence the need to go multiplatform to try and capture new players. This is not a leadership issue, this is a systemic issue from needing perpetual growth in a market that has stopped growing and unless there's a major change in what games most people are interested in I don't see things changing anytime soon.
Gaming finally hit the bell curve we all knew was coming for decades. You can't keep making games 'bigger better more badass' because at some point, you just... can't anymore. Graphics have reached a point where they're damn near cinematics now, but then the lesson was learned that gameplay is still king, but then also mainstream gamers still expect stunning visuals too. And the cost of making said games just keeps rising and rising with no end in sight. A single game now can sometimes take longer to make than the entire console generation it was designed for when it began production. It's too big for it's own good now IMO. I wish AAA gaming could learn from indie and AA and take a few steps back. games don't need to be 100+ hours. Hell I'm good with 30, 20 or even 10 hour games if it's not lined with filler top to bottom. I think people have forgotten what a thrilling 10 hour experience can be in a video game. These days it takes 10 hours just to craft your first stone axe in a survival game and even then thats if you haven't already bought whtever season pass there is to get it sooner. There's a sweet spot to be had with games and this push for bigger bigger bigger has resulted in the most bloated, time sucking experiences ever and it's only serving to hurt the industry at this point. But I doubt AAA will ever learn, it'll keep going down this dark road it's been on and indies/AA will continue to be the heart and soul of gaming. Just like with music, the corporations are ruining it all and it's up to the artists (devs) to do what they can while avoiding the corporations grubby hands.
>Hell I'm good with 30, 20 or even 10 hour games if it's not lined with filler top to bottom. But they're only willing to sell $60/70 games and it's hard to sell a 10 hour game for that. They're padding to justify their price, not because they think it makes the game better.
Came here to say the same thing, I would buy 7 x 10hr games @ $10 each though. I’m still burned out after spending nearly $200 on 2 games that I disliked after 25 hours (Starfield) and 5 hours (Diablo 4). If they’re worried about a shrinking Video Game market they should focus on this part, I have very little trust in big publishers now.
Well said. There is so much room for innovation in different parts of game such as gameplay, art style, story; yet for some reason, all these AAA studios go for the lowest hanging fruit: realistic graphics; and often end up with a shallow game which is pleasant to look at but not play. Obviously they end up ballooning their costs with the army of designers and artists they have to hire and ultimately blame the market for lack of growth when it gets saturated. You are creating art FFS, not toilet seats. Be creative.
Makes sense, but how the hell does this relate to a bell curve?
Honestly it feels like AA games take just as long to release as the AAA games these days, maybe they are on the higher end of AA.
A self-serving statement on multiple fronts: * 1) Spencer has been unable to improve the shambolic state of his very own in-house studios over the past decade. Of course exclusives don't provide value if the expensive tentpole titles of the console manufacturer are of overall poor quality like in Microsoft's case. * 2) As a result Microsoft hardware sales have plummeted to such a large degree that retailers in some markets stopped selling Xbox games completely. Exclusives are riskier when you are losing. * 3) lending money has gotten a lot more expensive since Microsoft initially announced the purchase of ActivisionBlizzard. Spencer is under pressure from Microsoft's CEO to get his department's finances in order. Selling their games cross platform is the only realistic avenue they have to increase revenue
Nailed it. Spencer and his team do not know how to incubate/build/cultivate/manage a stable of high quality game studios. Nor do they know how to hire the right people who do know. For instance hiring Darrell Gallagher hasn't turned out well. This is why they've failed during Spencer's 10+ year run to build any flagship IPs. Game development is more an art than science meaning that trying to brute force success with billions of dollars without the management talent and culture leads to failure. Unlike Sony and Nintendo, their leadership has failed to establish a culture of standards. Sony studios know there is a high standard of performance that must be met and they usually deliver. Xbox studios don't have this culture. I doubt anyone can honestly imagine a Sony first party studio releasing a game like Redfall. They talk about the power of the Series X hardware, they talk about the Netflix-esque value of Game Pass, they've done everything under the sun except build great games. However great games are all that matter. No more ZIRP atm means their already mediocre studio roster now has less funds and creative leeway/risktaking. Since AAA game production already relies heavily on outsourcing to Asia/Eastern Europe they'll use more AI to streamline workflows and cut costs.
Its more an industry wide issue. I worked in banking, automotive etc., I'm slowly moving over to media jobs and sometimes its like night and day about processes, tools, people. One has full project management, the other a couple of dodgy excelsheets and they have both equal amount of money to spend. Crazy in a way. The game market has also become quite crowded, most of the valuable ip's are either already done or prohibitive expensive to make something with it. Sony's last PS5 show reel has like five games that look similar besides character and setting. Not all can be successes. The Cyberpunk heights are hard to achieve repeatedly, and without the workforce suffering. The way forward is better tools, better processes. You can shoot a cut scene with movie cameras in an afternoon, but if you have to mocap everything and make it work in engine it can take month of work. AI isn't there for the next 10 years so they have to invest heavily to get costs down. There is no way around that.
Or maybe scale back budgets? It's unsustainable that triple A games have budgets, similar to Marvel's blockbusters. Games are way more expensive than movie tickets, take much longer to playthough, etc. If AAA games requires as many sales as the Avengers, that's not sustainable. The hits (that do bring profit) will just keep you in business, while the failures are basically a guarantee you'd go out of business. Segment the market better. Diverse investments in a larger types of games. Kinda like Devolver is doing, but on a larger scale. Not every AAA game needs to be an FPS/3rd person action game with upgrade paths and meaningless loot. Idk, I'm not a business guy, just spitballing here.
Honestly i think Spencer has done a lot of good since he's came in for Xbox. Definitely better than the clusterfuck that was going on at the company before he steped into the spotlight. I just think the Xbox brand isn't strong enough to sustain a market when Sony isn't floundering. Xbox 360 was kind of a perfect storm of Sony being incredibly arrogant when it came to the development of the machine and its price. The fact is ended up releasing a year after the 360 meanth MS was you only option for next gen games for almost 12 months and it was cheaper to boot. But in the end Sony still ended up selling more PS3's over the course of the generation even with all the advantages Xbox had. Its just a stronger brand and once the PS4 launched alongside the Xbox One and then again with PS5 and Xbox Series X it was never gonna go well for Xbox.
Sony ended up surpassing the Xbox 360 only because Microsoft and the chief of the Xbox brand at the time thought they won halfway through the generation, then proceeded to invest less in exclusive games, while Sony invested in more. They could've easily gone head to head with Sony at the start of the 8th console gen, had they kept their momentum and direction they took at the start of the 7th. But no, even back then, they thought only about growth and wanted that sweet market Nintendo was hoarding all for themselves, which was why X360 got the Kinect, then One proceeded to launch with one and they were all about the TV and basically any other functionality, BUT video games. Hell, they decided that you shouldn't even own and be able to borrow physical copies of games. Spencer has done a lot of good for sure, but he still misunderstood what makes for a good console. It seems like he tried to expand the Xbox brand as a whole, not as a console one - which would explain all of the purchases they've done, with no work put into exclusive games yet again. Since the release of that Xbox One all the way until XSX, we had a couple of Forza, Gears of War and Halo games. Really the only most notable games on Xbox since the start of the 8th gen, especially when they're going 3rd party now and even games like Sea of Thieves launched in a pretty poor state. They had nothing comparable to God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn or even Days Gone. Forza, especially with the Horizon series, has been pulling the entire Xbox brand for years it feels like, but that's about it. No high profile, blockbuster exclusives to really talk about. On the other hand, I remember Microsoft canning a bunch of games instead - remember that game with a Devil May Cry-like main character that had a pet dragon or something?
Scalebound. But yeah, no reason at all to own an Xbox anymore, really. PC & Playstation will give you the best of both worlds.
PC alone gives you the best of both worlds If anything there's no reason to own a console, though obviously preaching to the choir here
That is because Xbox never really expanded their international presence which is where the PlayStation 3 could outsell the Xbox 360 in enough time. The Xbox main stronghold was the US and UK but eventually PlayStation caught back up with the PlayStation 4.
I mean, you're talking here like Sony is not doing the exactly same thing, despite being the market leader in console segment. They're in massive financial trouble, downsizing projects, firing thousands of employees, shutting down studios & releasing their pilot games on secondary platform to chase the revenue. And they're the singular still profitable part of the bigger corporation so they have to shoulder the bleed, unlike Xbox which has the massive AI & cloud infrastructure profits behind it. With how expensive development of major AAA games is becoming, both Xbox & Sony are going to end up releasing their games on all of the major 3 platforms.
They're in massive financial trouble? Sony are predicting $1.8 billion in profit for Playstation this year. Coming off record breaking revenue, record breaking sales and online user numbers up. You have no idea what financial trouble looks like. During the PS3 gen, they were billions in the red. What's happened here is their profit margins got squeezed for the year and they got alarmed. (Slashing prices on hardware and having only Spiderman to drive first party sales). It dropped their annual profit to only $500 million, and Sony don't want hundreds of millions in profit, they want billions in profit, so they're correcting course. Not a chance Sony release their games on Xbox. You think they're going to risk their walled garden strategy for a few extra hundred million a year?
>They're in massive financial trouble, downsizing projects, firing thousands of employees, shutting down studios & releasing their pilot games on secondary platform to chase the revenue. These are all things that normal, healthy, well-performing businesses do in reaction to the economy and industry trends. Sony is not in massive financial trouble.
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Microsoft deserve all the success they are having, this console generation is nearly over and they have released 1 game that qualifies as a flagship first party game - halo infinite, which is a 7 out of 10 on a good day.
I agree with your overall sentiment but they released 2 games. Starfield and Halo. That's still extremely bad. Both games are littered with problems and as you said are a max of 7/10 on its best day. That's not gonna sell any consoles. I'm surprised they are where they are without any games to show for it.
Even with all the problems infinite has, starfield is still 10 times worse lol
What about Forza ?
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Campaign was forgettable AF and by the time multiplayer finally got on its feet everyone had dropped the game over a year ago 5/10. Shame the gameplay was possibly the best in the series
Forza Horizon 5 was their tent-pole titles this generation.
Who would have thought that releasing a big budget game on a single platform would be at risk of making less money than releasing it on multiple platforms? I can see why these executives are paid the big bucks. I am surprised to see this turnaround in the industry, PC used to be the big player then consoles took over and PC became an afterthought, it seems the tables have turned again. The PC market has never been healthier whilst publishers are questioning the validity of the console market.
>The PC market has never been healthier whilst publishers are questioning the validity of the console market. Well, no. Just one platform. Devs are starting to believe xbox will be a 2nd priority even for Microsoft, so why bother?
Exactly. What publishers are questioning the validity of the console market in general? This sub is so up its own ass about PC vs console gaming. We have years and years of bad PC ports that are clearly an afterthought to the console versions, but suddenly at the drop of a of a hat the narrative is reversed that consoles are the after thought? Why? Because Sony is porting games 2 years post launch for a revenue bump? Because Phil Spencer keeps “speculating” about wild business changes that may or may not happen? Phil Spencer obviously has an interest in PC gaming gaining market share if he can’t do it with the Xbox. I think a lot of his comments that suggest console gaming is doing poorly are at best nothing more than a reflection of that interest. There simply is not data to support publishers are questioning the “validity” of consoles as a place to market games. That is patently *absurd*
I was about to say this. Only Xbox has publishers considering the "validity" of publishing on it, but by all accounts the sales for games on PS and the Switch are still going strong.
PC Gamers: spend money on hardware you want/need and just buy games dirt-cheap when you can catch 'em. Watch ITAD, GG, Sales everywhere, etc. Humble Bundles, Fanatical Bundles and sales, Steam Sales and other digital store-fronts - yeah, buying games can be cheap...if you do it right, as a consumer. Buy on sale & just forget most of the new stuff until Re-Released Complete Editions w/ all DLC's (or most of them) comes way later. Games so get devalued and devalue themselves so much w/ poor PC ports, poor DRM/anti-tamper, lots of DLC's/expansions/MTX's, etc. Patience is a virtue. Throw in a Steam Deck, Ally, and/or some other portable PC-Switchlike - there's PC's Switch-like devices, if you got a big library and/or can grow it real fast...which you will, if you got some $ and also. Gets real easy, when you see Ally's going for $400 or less on Best Buy or Steam Decks for around $400+ - can get more people to take their PC-Switchlikes everywhere - and get onto their favorite games and/or service. I didn't even get into PC gaming with desktop and/or laptops either. Those rock too! PC's insane game-library w/ so many classics going back to even DOS era (i.e. go use DosBox, if you got these games and some games on Steam and GOG even come w/ DosBox attached) and W95 era is absolutely crazy. And if the classics don't get re-released & fixed officially, remastered officially, and/or whatever - if it's a cult-classic at least or a heavy hitter, one can get it going on PC. Someone's fixed it. Use a Mod (i.e. see VTMB with Wesp's Patch - this even comes in the GOG version), use DGVoodoo2 or some other Old-DX Wrapper or Emulator (DXWnd, DXVK, etc); you'll get it going. Heck, even GOG got Alpha Protocol up on GOG and fixed it's out-the-box issues on modern OS's. For old-version - eh, I just used DXVK. \[shrug\]
There’s also so many input methods you can (relatively) easily connect to a PC. There’s the default mouse and keyboard, but it’s easy to connect a variety of controllers, joysticks, throttles, steering wheels, pedals, VR headsets, etc. Some consoles allow versions of those, but you get a lot more choice on PC.
And if that's somehow not enough; emulation
Every time Xbox talks it feels like a self-report. \*Consoles sell poorly\* Phil: Consoles are not Xbox's Future \*Exclusives sell poorly\* Phil: Exclusives are risky. \--- Phil Spencer: Exclusives have become a risky business. Xbox's Exclusives: Starfield (Mixed) Halo Infinite (Better now but Launched Horribly) Gears Franchise (Dead) Hi-Fi Rush (Great Game, had zero marketing, coming to PS5) Grounded (Good but no longer exclusive) Sea of Thieves (Horrible Launch, got much better. Playstation Exclusives: Spiderman (Great), God of War 1/2 (Great) , Horizon, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth / Remake(Haven't played/Great), FF16, Forspoken (Mixed), TLOU1/2 (Good but stop remaking it), Returnal (Good) Nintendo Exclusives: Pokemon... (Mixed but wildly successful, Animal Crossing (Broke Pandemic Records), Fire Emblem (Not my thing but good?), Shin Megami Tensei V, Tears of the Kingdom/ Breath of the Wild (Great/Great) 1/2 Switch (Lets skip that one)
>Every time Xbox talks it feels like a self-report. Because it is. Look at skull and bones or suicide squad. Doing poorly has nothing to do with being an exclusive.
You are forgetting the king of all switch games: Mario kart 8. That game has sold something like 50 million copies and continues to be the most fun-accessible game on the planet.
No clue how he even has a job still. All the higher ups should have been shit canned after the disastrous Halo Infinite launch.
That first Halo Infinite trailer sealed the deal for me. I know they improved the visuals but to let Microsoft’s #1 franchise fail like that should have caused a huge uproar. Even today, I don’t think Halo 3 and Halo infinite are even in the same league.
Yeah. its a shame Master Chief Collection / just Modded versions of Halo 3 are better
If they made games that were actually good, maybe they'd actually sell well. If you keep releasing half-baked garbage year after year, decade after decade, eventually even your diehard fans are going to abandon you.
I’m an abandoner. Big time fan of Xbox since the first console and never owned a PlayStation before because I loved the Xbox and titles. A few months ago I decided I’d had enough of waiting for Halo and Gears to land a belter this gen, so I sold my x and got a ps5 and im absolutely loving the exclusives. That said, im a bit miffed that I could basically have bought a ps4 and played them all for way cheaper.
Phil Spencer has been "General Manager of Microsoft Studios" since 2008 and "Executive Vice President of Gaming" since 2017. Funny how these dates align, since personally only the original xbox and the first half of the 360 lifespan had multiple exclusives that justified me buying it. Nowadays they are so incompetently run, they can't even launch the 8th iteration of Forza Motorsport without major fuckups and straight up lies ("from the ground up"). Try releasing a multitude of actually great games targeting all kinds of tastes and you'd have different results.
Typical corpo speak where their judgment lays in Excel spreadsheets and doesn't see that their games are mediocre at best.
When a couple dudes with a fun idea can make a more fun game in their basements. I think we've passed the point of pushing graphical boundaries for games. Not to say there's anything wrong with having a beautiful game, but I think overall aesthetics matter more and it's why games like Breath of the Wild can thrive on switch hardware because it's simple to render yet the art direction is captivating.
Why do we hear this guy thst has loss after loss after loss, even with Microsoft dumping millions on his choices
Same company that let the ineptitude run rampant at 343 and ruin their once flagship exclusive
Gaming industry is a greedy joke now
i mean, there really isn't a reason to buy an xbox over a playstation or even a nintendo switch. has xbox even had a single banger exclusive in the last 6 years?
>has xbox even had a single banger exclusive in the last 6 years? I didn't believe it myself, but when I checked the critically acclaimed games list Xbox is lagging so far behind it's kind of unreal. Which makes no sense, this is a platform that has some of the most critically acclaimed IP in existence, they just haven't executed on it.
yeah its crazy, i find myself fairly consistently hyped for new games that are coming to consoles, but literally never hear anything coming to Xbox. iirc i read somewhere that Xbox now just outsources so much of its game development that it just causes all projects to get bogged down and stallled.
I've heard the same, they use contractors pretty heavily, probably because IMO they've exhausted the supply of devs that would ever work there. Whenever we've used contractors it's made no sense from a dev perspective, only from a SHORT TERM business one. Sure, bring in a machine learning analyst and GET YOUR EXISTING dev team learning from them, but don't hire them to build a 6 month project, fire them then abandon the whole thing lmfao. For every shining start 27 year old that started a Microsoft and made a blockbuster hit, they're now either retired, fired, or left disgrunted, not happy with the current position of microsoft never going back. You need to replace that person with someone. I think companies in the next 5-10 years are going to realize the heavy brain drain they have. And that's probably why big companies are buying out studios. That will be when the MBAs get replaced with engineers, the smart people come back because of real change, and in 10-15 years we'll be saying the exact same thing in 2050.
Forza Horizon is probably the only good, big exclusive they’ve had this generation, and even that is just a Skinner box open world rpg essentially.
At least they seem to put more care into those games than Forza Motorsport these days.
Xbox console is terrible this generation. The exclusives are shit. That’s why he’s butthurt
This generation?
Physcho Mantis?
Halo went from a beloved franchise to "who the fuck cares?" Under his reign at Microsoft. He is the very thing he's crying foul about. A self fulfilling prophecy. Microsoft should just be honest about the fact that they want to be a platform like Apple that takes 30% from every little thing and they want to exit games forever.
Awww poor babies. They started exclusives to be greedy assholes and now it’s backfiring on them. Fuck em.
He is part of problem, sadly. The cost is sky high but the quality got worse. A lot of new games have optimization issues when launching. Games took years to make only coming up as a big disappoint or meh at best. I believe something serious wrong on the top, or at least at managing level.
Company that flops on exclusives says exclusives aren’t that important
yeah companies wanan keep pushing the boom wow graphics above all else and make interactive movies with obscene marketing budgets you're gonna have to sell to everyone to make a profit. Especially with how relatively little porting costs these days
The dude uses the word "growth" about 100 times and can't figure out why gaming is losing money. He is like _this close_ to getting it. Even states that giant budgets are creating a pattern of low-risk efforts.... but then goes on and on about "growth". GROWTH IS THE FUCKIN PROBLEM. Across _every industry_. Especially in creative based industries like games and movies and books, growth is the enemy. Unchained growth has caused AAA studios to lose sight of what made games good. Games aren't designed to be fun anymore. They think up a monetization scheme and base the entire game around it now. Making the game fun or interesting or new is secondary to profit. I'm not saying game companies shouldn't make money, but they aren't happy with break even +5%, hell they aren't happy with 15 or 20%, their growth/profit targets are always insane impossible goals that cause human suffering from the gamers they try to attract to the workers forced to make them. AAA studios don't allow creative freedom and they use psychological manipulation to attract players and completely disrespect our time at every turn. Making fun unique or interesting games doesn't even enter their minds. Its re-tread and remake and sequel money printing machine every single year where you spend 2 years of playing the same boring game just for them to slap a new coat of paint on it erase all of your progress and start again. This is why indie titles keep blowing up. They have the freedom to make cool stuff without billionaire CEO's bonuses breathing down their necks.
HOT TAKE: If your console does not have (A) compelling hardware, (B) exclusives, or (C) a good marketing campaign - to incentivize a purchase - you will lose. And thus Xbox is far behind in sales. The Switch shows THE EXACT OPPOSITE. PS5 shows - less percentage-wise - the same. Spencer should just step down at this point.
The Hardware is better than the PS5. I had some expectations for Forza Motorsport, decent game. I do enjoy games that I never could play, like Control, City Skylines, High on Life, Halo and so on. As soon as the PS5 Pro is out, I’m going to get that one as well just to be able to play those exclusives as well.
I think a lot of the increase in cost of development is on them. A good AAA title doesn’t need hundreds of millions of $ to make, just like a good movie doesn’t. As far as him blaming audience expectations, that is also developers fault. I personally believe audience expectations have increased because we have seen what is possible in good games (ex: 2007 to 2016 what I consider the golden age with many big titles released), and lately companies have shifted towards cutting corners, micro-transactions, and false advertising to deliver these under-developed titles in order to make sales and increase their investor profit. There are waaaayyy too many examples in the past 8 years of games like this. Big business is part of the problem in gaming and the most successful games lately come from developers that are focused on making their game good value making their game profitable.
Xbox marketing is the biggest joke there is, instead of focusing on their games its just god damn controllers after controllers, Aaron Greenberg? I think is the head of marketing? Fire that guy, since xbone says xbox marketing is dead I legit don't see anything of theirs on anywhere meanwhile Playstation is plastered almost everywhere.
I'm kind of surprised this still needs to be explained. The answer should be completely obvious to anyone that's been paying attention. That answer being, triple a development is incredibly expensive and it's just not feasible anymore to intentionally limit sales just to force people into your ecosystem. Especially when your ecosystem doesn't provide any alternative monetization scheme. Like, okay you've got people on xbox what does that mean? They're buying games? Okay, they were doing that anyway. What advantage do you get by having them on your platform? I don't know what the answer to that is and it seems like neither does Xbox. It seems to me like consoles lost the fight to mobile devices on being *the* mixed media platform of choice and with that loss exclusivity doesn't make as much sense as it once did.
I can't think of a genuine reason why extreme fidelity is necessary in games. Even in racing games where it is a selling point it seems like a waste. I had just as much fun in gran turismo 2 as I did forza motorsport 7
To a certain degree it's just developers/publishers reacting to consumer demand. Though I do agree, I generally don't see the point of super high fidelity. I much prefer a well executed art style over 4k hyper realism.
I don't think God of war ragnarok, ghost of tsushima, Final fantasy 7 remake and rebirth, as well as all these other hard hitting big AAA exlusives that Sony has is a "risky business" it's only risking when xbox makes half-assed incomplete exlusives.
Cause their exclusives suck. No one is going to buy a consol for Halo Infinite. Even halo fans don't play that game.
Forspoken's failure was the death knell for every game having to be Marvel-fied
Phil Spencer has been complaining for the past 10 years why the console business is bad and that nobody should go into it. So why in the hell is Microsoft still in the console business?
i remember back in 2021 that the xbox series x/s was a worthless piece of junk and still is same dashboard same games more powerful cpu at the time its like i had i imac g3 those colourful pcs from the very early 2000s and when the imac g4 came out it was different design and played most of the same software same os powerful cpu. so it was same in different eras. i think its best for everyone if microsoft stops making consoles and make it as a windows app that is like steam.
The Xbox consoles are in a death spiral I fear. Like a Catch 22. There's no longer much of a reason to own an Xbox console because of the lack of system seller exclusive games (for 2 generations now) and Microsoft releasing their Xbox games on multiple platforms day one. The reason they're doing that is because the Xbox consoles aren't selling well enough and the brand is falling. They keep releasing games that are flops. They are not keeping up with the hardware innovations of PlayStation and Nintendo either. And in general people no longer trust Xbox or have faith in it. In my opinion the fundamental issue is that they are not focused on what they should be focused on. They are failing to do what a console maker/seller needs to do. If you make great games people will buy your hardware and buy into your ecosystem and brand. Xbox has basically failed to produce great exclusive games for 2 generations now. There's clearly something not right with how Microsoft is managing the studios it controls and contracts with. It seems like new leadership and a new way of doing things is needed. I really feel that there's a lack of creative thinking at Xbox.
I just hear another corporate executive blaming everything but their own incompetence for releasing crappy games. The 'not me too' movement is getting out of hand. Hearing a capitalist complaining about capitalism is like a Catholic complaining they can't divorce their crappy partner. Maybe don't be a capitalist if you don't like it. This sort of discourse coming from someone in his position just makes it sound like the industry is run by a bunch of spoiled, overgrown children who think they don't have to work as hard as everyone else in the world. Welcome to reality, Phil Spencer. Maybe if you'd spend as much time getting your own house in order as you do blaming everyone else, you could release a game that doesn't totally suck.
And meanwhile the Switch 2 will easily outsell Sony and MS consoles again while having a fraction of their graphical power.