Would it be so bad if games didn’t have insane budgets? Most of my favorite games from the past decade are from small studios operating on pizza and hope.
You could give studios unlimited budgets and they’d still complain they don’t have enough time / money to get things right. The rhetoric is that “games are just so complex nowadays” and that justifies their 4/5/6 year development periods.
I’m not seeing the complexity that warrants that type of long development period. The visual fidelity on some games is impressive, but is it actually worth that 5 year dev time?
BG3 did have a pretty huge budget though. I would totally be fine if games took notes from BG3 but reduced scope a lot. Bioware used to make games similar to BG, but they stopped and now make garbage. The idea other studios can’t make similar games is wrong. They can’t make games this big usually though without publishers telling them they need to include microtransactions and other bullshit.
BioWare didn’t just make games similar to Baldur’s Gate, they created Baldur’s Gate.
Wasn’t that Black Isle? Or had they already evolved into their future downfall? It’s been a hot minute since I’ve last looked at BG credits.
Lower budgets would probably be better. High budgets mean high risk, developers and publishers try to minimize that risk and you get bland games that try to cater to too many tastes. Movies suffer from the same problem. They get budgets in the hundreds of millions and you wonder what they spent it all for.
High budgets are killing the film industry. In the case of gaming, it plays a factor, but greed is probably the main issue. Most big budget AAA games in the past made large amounts of money even if they didn’t have universal appeal. Because companies realised that they could make large amounts of money off loot boxes, microtransactions, cash shops and battle passes, they started trying to funnel players into games, mainly so that players would buy things. That’s one of the main reasons the AAA industry is getting worse: games need to appeal to as many as possible, while coming out as fast as possible, all so that players will buy the overpriced in-game items endlessly shoved in players’ faces.
I love me some good AAA games and want them to stick around. But I think it would be much better if they were a bit fewer and further between, and the big studios shift to more regular AA games, and give their devs chances to do some more oddball stuff with even lower budgets. More expiremntation and risky projects can only enrich the industry.
I can’t remember who it was. A famous actor, anyway. They were talking about what’s happened with movies. There’s nothing in the middle.
It’s either $100m+ or less than $3m. Either it gets a big producer and they pump so much money into it that it must be safe because it can’t lose money. Or is a small producer doing it for the love, but a small budget doesn’t go very far. The risky narratives done well would be funded somewhere between the two extremes but it’s just not how it’s done anymore.
In a strange way, to get more money in for the riskier productions, we need to get the money out of Hollywood. Can’t see it happening, myself.
You can’t? We just had a summer filled with high-budget flops, and now both the actors and the writers are on strike meaning that the studios won’t be able to recoup their losses any time soon. Add the reduced to non-existent theatre turnout in the first couple of years of the decade due to COVID and there’s been a hell of a lot of money “getting out of Hollywood.”
