• CliffyB thinks Sony is 'playing us' and that the industry can't survive with used games.
    126 replies, posted
[QUOTE=carcarcargo;41031762]Dead Space 3 had a $300 million budget? What on earth did they spend that on because it certainly wasn't on the game itself.[/QUOTE] It didn't. But it did have to generate something like 300million to survive as a series. 5mega copies at $60. People have figured that it had a 300mega budget because of that. We can expect that that the whole budget might have been something like 100 without marketing. Throw in some marketing costs, cost which gets into retail and many other stuff and you get a more realistic number. [QUOTE=Van-man;41034446]Indie games are the perfect example of making more with less. It's basic money saving techniques.[/QUOTE] I'd say that most indie games incrue a loss actually. There's a number of games that are able to sustain their devs and a bunch of others that become huge breaktroughs and make massive cash. But the majority? Never heard, never talked about and never sold enough imho.
the argument is pretty much bullshit, and mainly the blame resides on a failed distribution model. movie rentals didn't hurt hollywood, game rentals/used game sales don't really hurt publishers, and the lost sales come from the absolutely ridiculous prices we have to pay for games. for movies, if you don't wanna buy the dvd/bluray copy of the movie, you can just go watch it in the movies and it'll probably cost you a fraction of that with the difference that you're paying to go see that movie once. you can't exactly rent a ticket to a movie theater. the reason there's so much piracy for digitally distributed games is because that $60 pricetag is really not worth it unless you're REALLY into the game (games with much lower asking prices have attained similar sales margins to AAA games anyway), and the reason retail copies don't sell that much is because what you're often paying for is for a boxed installation disk of a downloadable copy anyway, you have the exact same DRM and bullshit from the digitally distributed version only in a boxed copy you're probably paying more for. it's bullshit, and it needs changes, no more arbitrary restrictions on consumers, no more ridiculous 24/7 DRM, no more publishers fucking with paying customers. publishers are showing less and less care for the consumer and the consumer is showing retribution, that's all there is.
[QUOTE=Van-man;41034446]Indie games are the perfect example of making more with less. It's basic money saving techniques.[/QUOTE] Indie's work only in a specific bracket. Only so many Indie's can go on the market before it's saturated and no one wants a fancy little strategy game. AAA titles have a purpose, but the market in some ways is also oversaturated with them, when each one needs to push tens of millions in advertising just to get some decent sales figures.
[QUOTE=Juniez;41034404]so they save money by not making a new engine so they could sell the game so they could make the game and don't have to spend time and money training people to use new tools so they could save time and money not hand-animating and still get better results .. which saves money because they 1) use engines made by AAA companies (gasp) i.e. CDK 3 / UDK / Unity 2) pay for platform licences if required 3) definitely most certainly pay for standard software 4) have to hand animate (and it shows) 5) and don't have to pay for tools because it comes included in their AAA engine[/QUOTE] It would be sort of a stretch to say that the majority of indie devs use those AAA engines (with the exception of Unity) since they're tremendously expensive. If I remember correctly, CDK3 and UDK licenses reach up the mid six figure mark. Were you referring to mods though? Because I referred to games like Braid, Breach, and Fez. Time definitely plays a major role in the quality of media if you're an indie dev. If you had unlimited time, not only you have access to the vast amount of resources available, you're able collaborate with others at ease in comparison to the AAA game development market.
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