cikame

On the subject of Game Pass i've seen that Shawn Layden quote bouncing around again suggesting in order to cover costs for a $120 million game on a subscription service you'd need 500 million subscribers, at the time in 2021 Sony had 34 million subs and there's only 250 million console owners in the world so it's actually impossible.

That was 3 years ago and it feels like an even worse idea now, budgets are higher requiring an even higher number of subs, maybe the sharp rise of mtx offsets it, but there's also free to play games that people are playing for years instead of paying for subscriptions, if what Layden said is true it couldn't ever be a feasible idea.

On the consumer side it works as a "cheaper" option for people who need it but on the business side it relies entirely on MS and Sony throwing money at companies to put their games on the services and that's not smart. It reminds me of Epic throwing money at studios for store exclusives which after 5 years translated to over $300 million in losses, people still prefer Steam and on the consoles not enough people exist who want subscription services.

Their approach... if there really is a plan anywhere in all of this, does not promote art, it's purely a money making industry that demands more and more.

The expected AAA games are too big and expensive so the logical thing to do would be to aim lower, make cheaper less ambitious games not that lowering graphical fidelity makes them any less ambitious, but you can't tell investors "we're taking a new approach, we're putting less budget in so our games will be smaller and look worse than the competition, we might also be able to hire more people to make even more games!!", that's a hard banner to rally behind.

The easy money option is to copy trends, make a Fortnite clone with simple graphics so it runs on every device, no single player so it's cheaper, save the budget for live service bs if it's popular enough, if not shut it down and try again because investors are only interested in explosive returns on investment. That option was more popular before we got live service oversaturation and every new release started failing, so AAA doesn't know what the f*** to do now and is just kind of doing a bit of everything, merging live service into places where it doesn't belong, taking the occasional stab at a gold generator, and pretending to care in between by giving a studio a chance at an honest game before shutting them down.

I have no idea what the new plan is, the honest games are fewer and fewer, whoever's got their gold generator is just sitting on it unwilling to take a chance on anything else, the trends that were chased are many years old now... everything's a bit of a dry fart really.

Edit: I had a video in my watch later list that covers some of what i said, but also brings up the intriguing practice of delivering millions of dollars of bonuses to executives based on how much mtx they sell, so if making lots of money for the company wasn't incentive enough to make garbage games they also benefit personally over the rest of the studio, i wonder if someone like Phil Spencer has a similar contract.

I remember when making good games was how studios were able to keep going for a long time, now it doesn't seem to matter if you make a good game or not you'll be fired and shut down anyway, what is this industry.

I've forgotten pretty much everything about that Disney Hercules game on PS1 except the satisfying sack slicing animation.

I still believe that Black Mesa is the greatest remake we've seen so far... maybe the first Resident Evil remake is number one but i'm a bigger fan of Half Life so i'm biased, but it's a big achievement for me because i'm extremely critical of remakes.

I think the main reason narratively why Black Mesa is so successful is because there's not much in the way of story and characters in the original Half Life, the story is told through a few interactions with NPC's and the environment and that's kind of it, but what it did have is recreated and amplified here with utmost respect and care. Storytelling in environmental details has been increased especially in Xen but the complex is not without its own new additions, but non of it gets in the way of the original experience, it's a bit like a remaster/remake in that sense and i think it being on the Source engine is another reason why despite being remade from the ground up it still feels familiar/nostalgic to Half Life fans, remakes aren't usually made on 16 year old engines (i'm counting 2020 as its "release").

As i said i'm hyper critical of remakes, despite most of the story and dialogue being pretty much the same the characters in the RE4 remake are not what i identify as being those characters, not that they did a bad job or anything though i do think some came out worse, Black Mesa completely side steps that issue by not really having to worry about it and there isn't anything that would prevent me recommending it to people over the original, they recreate the whimsy of encountering the various scientists and guards perfectly and the changes they made to levels enhances the narrative.

One last thing about playing remakes instead of the original, i care a lot about gaming technology, when i'm watching a film i don't think too much about how advanced the CGI is or advances in cameras and filming technology, but for me a game is a portal into the time when it was made, what's the state of the lip sync, does it have physics, bump mapping, what are the shadows like, the animations, what engine is it on, are the cutscenes pre rendered and what do they look like, it all tells a story of the game's development at the time it was made and contributes to the experience, yes i'm the guy that watches Digital Foundry's retrospectives. Maybe that's not at all important to the average Joe but if someone was playing Half Life for the first time they might then play Half Life 2, so to play Black Mesa instead they'd be missing out on the gigantic technical advancements in gaming technology between the first and second game, you can just look up pictures i guess but it's not the same as immersing yourself in it for hours, they were both industry defining games when they came out and while you can't go back in time and witness it first hand the next best thing would be to play them as they were.

I'd like to hear other people's thoughts on that, i think video games are art, and you wouldn't go out of your way to view a remake of the Mona Lisa over the original.

I have a PC :D, i'm glad the game turned out good i'm kinda desperate for things to look forward to.

But for now, back to PS1 games.

Exactly, they've got this massively successful thing and have taking advantage of a lack of ethics so far, if they admit to the flaws and commit to change they'll still have a really popular and successful thing AND have better press... so just do it.

Gerstmann brings this up every week and it's true, i think the only thing to add would be the failure rate of publishers trying to push out a live service game only to find there's already too many.

Ubisoft, WB, EA and Square have all had spectacular failures chasing the easy money in recent years, the market was swamped immediately and it seems people are content to carry on playing what's already popular, we saw Sony back away from the idea allowing Naughty Dog to give up on their attempt and i'm sure they're not the only ones. There will be more attempts and some will succeed, but if you don't have the right stuff to pull people away from games they've sunk thousands of hours into your time would be better spent making a regular game.

Need some more info such as at the very least what their goals are, and my hope would be support for pad players without alienating their core audience, if that's possible.

@sethmode: There is A LOT happening right now regarding all issues of representation in games, currently the conversation is mostly focused on race and sexual orientation, criticism of beautiful/sexy female depictions and weaker female character traits was a huge focus of Gamergate 1.0 and groups like Feminist Frequency.

The "uglification" (sorry, that's just what it's called) of female characters in western developed games over the last decade is often used as evidence, how much stock you want to put into that is up to you, there's also guidance from the platform holders themselves but whether these are hard rules depends on if MS will agree to host games like Stellar Blade in the future, we'll see.

@bigsocrates I wonder if it's worth having a discussion sometime about sexual liberation/appreciation vs sexual objectification, it probably comes down to how deep a character is, i think most people are fine with Bayonetta for being empowered so it probably should be judged on a case by case basis, i also don't hold developers up to a standard of creating something so complex absolutely perfectly, cutting some story content could be the difference between basic sexy content or something with meaning. Again i want everyone to be able to make anything they want, and if it deserves criticism it should come afterward and not by rules preventing you from even trying.

And if we have that conversation, we should also talk about why an 18 rated video game can't have sexy characters in it when Nicki Minaj is allowed to gyrate on tv in front of your children while singing about genitals.