Carlos wrote:The industry is almost as blind as the Tories are.
Hogwarts Legacy, a full price game with a strong licence attached to it (that’s also a really good game) sells 24m copies in a year. It has no microtransactions at all and a lot of repeatability with the different house and friendship choices.
Suicide Squad drops hard despite having a decent game underneath all the online pass nonsense...
Both of these examples were published by Warner and, despite the sales/reception differences, their approach now appears to be a greater focus on the Suicide Squad-style of "live" games.
Why? Profit. To some of these giant publishers, selling millions of copies of a stand-alone game isn't enough for them. The pressure - from management, shareholders and investors - is to make more more money and "live" games are a potential way of doing this. Most will be a miserable failure against expectations but, if one is a hit, the cash can come rolling in. The target product is a live game that has millions of players paying millions of pounds on an ongoing basis... the Fortnite effect. But, of course, there can only be maybe a few such games at any one time as, naturally, people only have so much time and money. But large publishers will keep trying because they feel that just selling a stand alone game isn't worth it. And, yes, this sucks.
Live games don't have to be bad. They often are, though, especially in terms of ripoff pricing. I've played a live game for the past four-to-five years and love it; albeit it has stopped me playing most other games during that period and this is an example of where the "AAA" market is going. Fewer games, increased pricing, less variety and risk.
We are in a cycle of "AAA" games becoming increasingly expensive to make and, as tech power and expectations go up, this is likely to continue. AI will be utilised to help reduce development costs but, of course, this is likely to have zero impact on costs for the consumer.
Tl;dr the "AAA" gaming sector is either going to hugely implode or it will become even more expensive and sh1t.