Yeah, that’s what it feels like to me too. Like we’re heading towards another gaming market crash because of how much it cost to make video games now among other things
Absolutely but video game themselves are costing like hundreds of millions of dollars now and that’s not viable either. Like wolverine cost like 300 million to make and they have to sell at least 5 million to break even. There’s a lot of problem with the gaming industry that just seems to keep getting worse.
Very little. Insomniac is a studio of 450 people in California. If we make the assumption that all their staff earns $120K a year and Wolverine took about 5 years to develop then that is already 270 million just in basic salaries.
1983 and strictly USA. Many similar systems, offering very similar games, and, often, of poor quality. Not just "bad", this was practically the dark ages after all, but barely functioning. An analyst for Goldman-Sachs stated demand was up 100%, but production was up 175%.
Massive surplus and falling consumer trust crashed the market in America. If there is another crash, it will be because (IMO) of anti-consumer practices. Primarily because of the average consumer being priced out because "line must always go up"
Edit; it tickles me that whenever I say something that's even the most softball phrasing of "late-stage capitalism/ corporation bad", there's always at least one downvote from corpo-simps.
The ET game for Atari is often cited as a perfect microcosm of what happened. They were so confident in the Atari that they ordered more copies of ET than there even were Ataris on the market, so they not only needed to sell every game, but also had to sell more consoles to do it. And idk if you're seen that game but killer app it is not. Even by Atari standards.
It's like the exact opposite reason there'd be a crash today, instead of producing too many games for people to possibly purchse, they're not letting people buy games at all, just a glorified rental with an indeterminate end date.
Of note, the super cheap and independent British home micro scene gave zero fucks and grew a ton during that time. Guess games being 20 quid at the highest end helped.
1983 I think. The market was just shovelware and people lost faith in the industry in the US. It wasn't until Nintendo reached America with the NES that it started growing again.
Atari, it’s why the nes had the whole “Nintendo seal of approval” thing, because Atari shovelware had been such an issue. It’s also why it initially sold itself as a toy via R.O.B. because retailers didn’t want to sell video games after the crash.
Late 1980s the market crashed and all the previous big players died or pivoted, Atari is the most famous. Atari owned the console market for decades but never again after the crash.
Nintendo was originally marketed as a way to control Rob the robot so investors didn't think of it as another video game console after the crash. (The plane was always to immediately pivot to regular games after release but a few nes release titles used the Rob Robot accessory)
Nintendo's success basically revived video games for most of the world (PC players still were doing fine, but home consoles had died) and in the 80's and early 90s most kids did not have access to a home PC as they were $500+ vs a $100 console. Ironic that now consoles are catching up to PCs in price when their big selling point early on was being cheap.
It was early 80s. Atari release low quality games, and they had poor licensing so that anyone/everyone could flood the market with cheaply made titles. Atari themselves made cheap versus polish. Atari's system were either underpowered, or overengineered. Nintendo and Sega took up the slack quickly and learned from those missteps.
As I understand it, Atari didn't own patents on a lot of the underlying technology in the 2600, including the game cartridges. A lot of the early technology was developed at universities and Atari was just using the technology.
This meant they had no quality control, anyone who could buy or make the cartridges, was allowed to buy, make and sell Atari 2600 games.
Then Atari also wasn't doing a great job making particularly worthwhile games on top of that.
Nintendo and Sega both had patents on their cartridges, meaning they got to pick who they sold to, which they limited to publishers who were actually making functional games (not necessarily good games, but they'd actually start correctly). Made a bigger effort to have high quality home games, and then marketed better to push better quality games.
I don't think we're anywhere near a crash, but definitely a major pivot/adjustment. I don't think spending 400 milly or a billy on a game is sustainable.
I don't think it actually needs to cost this much. It's a problem of their own making. Friendslop games sell a ton of copies, and while the cost and budget involved are a tiny fraction of course: AAA companies could dial back the photorealism and iterating the game 20x to maximize MTX inclusion, and accept reasonable income. Instead they only want to go for billion dollar moonshots that take 8 years to develop.
They shouldn't do that. Normies absolutely judge games based on looks, and if a game has the graphics that looks like it was top of the line in 2015, they aren't going to buy it. We can all say we're gameplay over graphics, but we are the minority. What they actually need to do is make the game fun. Following the formula for what has worked in the past or worked for other companies doesn't always translate to the game being fun.
Rise of the Tomb Raider released in 2015. TLOU Remastered for PS4 was 2014. When people think 2015, what's in their head is more like 2005-2008 era 360/PS3 games.
PS5 only passed 50% userbase for PSN in the past year. Tons of people are still playing on PS4.
I don't think you realize how little improvement we're getting on graphics for the exponential increase in development costs.
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u/Pleasant_Expert7329 15h ago edited 13h ago
Yeah, that’s what it feels like to me too. Like we’re heading towards another gaming market crash because of how much it cost to make video games now among other things