this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Phil Spencer on what the hell is happening in the games industry (www.polygon.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (1 children)

While I agree with a lot about what he mentioned. The thing that always irks me when people talk about this is the cost. I understand that there are a lot of factors going into this that make it more expensive to make games. Like inflation, new technology, employee wages, and more actual work. All of these have gotten more expensive and that makes sense. But at the same time I'd say 60% of AAA games that have come out within the last 4 years have been anywhere from mediocre to hot garbage. You dump millions upon millions of dollars into games that nobody wants to play (with a few exceptions, of course) and act all surprised when you don't make $300 million back. You can't tell me you didn't know, at any point in development, that Halo Infinite wasn't going to sell like hot cakes. Nobody could be that oblivious. There was a good game somewhere in there. The "higher ups" decided to fuck everything up. And those "higher ups" include you, sir.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Also, spending money doesn't equal to spending money well. It seems like so many triple ("quadruple") A games spend the first half of their development throwing money into a furnace. I don't know if it's normal to start development from scratch multiple times, but it sure seems like it's becoming the norm now

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If Halo Infinite had come out in a games production culture like what existed in 2005, then we would today be getting hyped up about the next chapter in the Master Chief's story. Instead, Halo Infinite is a 6 year project with a bad name that somewhere deserved another year or two in the oven before release.

I'm not a fan of the massive amounts of crunch that appeared in Halo 2 and I'm not a fan of its story being truncated and the mess that made of Halo 3. But damn, at least we had something! Throw another year or two into the development of Halo 2, let the workers go home to their families once in a while, and you'd have had something amazing. Halo Infinite got another two years of development and came out passable.

I want the other two chapters of the Reclaimer saga we were promised. I want three games fighting the Didact, and an exploration of the ethical themes of the UEG following in the footsteps of the fascist-ass forerunners and what that means about humanity. And it should not have taken until 2021 to get that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Throw another year or two into the development of Halo 2, let the workers go home to their families once in a while, and you'd have had something amazing

So, that's gonna have some financial impact.

It sounds like Halo 2 was done in 10 months, which is pretty short. So, okay, say you add another 24 months. Gotta pay your operating costs of about 340% what you originally were going to pay.

That also means that it takes longer until the game can start being sold -- you're basically "paying interest" on any capital tied up until sales start. Say the cost of capital is 5% per year. Your first month is gonna cost another 15% finance overhead instead of under 5% because of the time value of money.

Now, I'm not saying that this is a bad thing to do. I think that it's generally the case that if you throw more dev time and money at a game, it gets better. But...that isn't free. I see people complaining about game prices, and what I'm asking is that if a game costs a couple times as much to make, are consumers willing to pay a couple times as much?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Bruh, the release of Halo 2 was a phenomenon. That series was shitting gold two decades ago. A few years later, Microsoft was selling 360s at a loss to make their money back on Halo and other games.

The restructuring of the engine meant that there was no playable build of Halo 2 for nearly a year, and assets and environments produced by art and design teams could not be prototyped, bottlenecking development.[16] Griesemer recalled that development was "moving backwards", and after E3 the team realized that much of what the team had worked on for the past two years would have to be scrapped.

So, Halo 2 actually spent 3 years in development, it's just that only 10 months of that was useful work. They could afford another year of development.