Why would I believe anything andreesen Horowitz says about anything, let alone gaming? These people believed that NFTs were the future of gaming. Grifter bellends.
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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That would be the reasonable and rational conclusion, but capitalism is neither reasonable nor rational.
You can only throw away hundreds of millions of dollars on Avengers and Suicide Squad so many times before they decide to come up with something people are willing to pay for.
That's crazy talk, we need to make AAAA and AAAAA games, Microsoft is ready to have all their developers spend three years on a single perfect game!
Each copy will be $7000
Skull and Bones is already a AAAA according to Ubisoft, so we're already part of the way there.
An AAAA game that's only 65GB? and it gets 7/10.
Now I know my mistake the A's have nothing to do with quality 🤦🏽♂️
I have enjoyed many more indie games the past few years than I have AAA, the As relate to quality, they just mean it's less likely to be quality
Star Citizen isn't being touted as a AAAA+ game, though it's certainly been selling in game stuff like one.
This is a false argument. They ARE profitable when they bother to try and make a good one. It's when they fill it full of mtx and drag every aspect of the game except the enjoyment out for as long as possible to try and convince you to buy shit to make it actually enjoyable after you've already paid full price. They don't get create poor games and then complain they're not profitable enough - bad products aren't profitable because they are bad products.
Even if every $200M game was good, you're still competing against the other $200M games out there, and that's very risky.
I suspect there wouldn't be as many releases if they were only releasing good ones.
True. There would also be even more layoffs in this industry if they threw out years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars at the finish line because they decided not to release a game that didn't turn out to be as good as they'd hoped.
That's just another symptom of chasing perceived profits. If they were dedicated to releasing good products they'd understand retaining good talent that has experience working together is an important part of it.
Obviously that's a pipe dream because they're all vultures circling over a games publisher, picking off what they can until they can feast on its corpse, but still.
I was being facetious. If your development timeline is 7 years, you have no idea how it's going to turn out at the end, but they all set out to make a good product, especially when it takes that much time and money to make. Guardians of the Galaxy was supposedly a very good game that bombed horribly, for instance. There's a lot of risk when your game is that expensive to make, because there are only so many customers out there, and they're already playing other big expensive games. Even Sony is finding that their marquis titles aren't bringing in as many customers as they expected anymore, so they can't keep spending more on games and expect them to be profitable.
That’s also partly because Microsoft is buying customers with gamepass, it’s unprofitable in the long run, but they just need to do it long enough to kill off competitors. Exactly what Netflix did basically.
Youve been able to start to see the ripples forming a few years ago. Devs aren’t making as much from the deal of being on it vs private sales as well.
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I feel like the natural progression is to roll back to the 2000s when every company was shotgunning batshit crazy concepts for games left and right… I miss those days
The history does indeed move in a spiral. We will see some of the old logic mixed with new concepts, as we do in every field of our life
Starfield is an empty AAA game. And they LIED about updates.
Posted profits tho.
Yeah, it seems like these days many AAA games are just an empty harness for housing a microtransaction powered money engine.
I'm just amazed that, 6 months later, they haven't fixed any of the skill related bugs, but "fixed" the visual effects of rejuvenation ~4 times (it's listed that many times in the changelogs, anyway). That's bad even for Bethesda standards
I personally like Starfield.
From what I see, it's a bit like Skyrim in space and, to be fair, Skyrim is a really good game, but it's been 12 years. Bethesda has to relearn how to make other games.
More like Fallout 4 in space, minus any interesting places to explore, worse characters, story and base building.
The last people I need telling me the obvious is A16Z
Appealing to the widest audience possible for the largest gross profits, rather than appealing to specific audiences with a smaller budget, is part of the issue with modern gaming.
Yeah only the massive dudes are struggling cause they'll never figure it out. They just chase the dragon.
Oh wow, big words coming from fucking Andreessen Horowitz Games
this stuff really pisses me off,
i remember recently watching a video about tekken8.
the devs aparently made an announcement that boils down to "we need to monetize the shit out of this game now to make our monney back"
and the streamer just went "yeah thats reasonable"
they have the sales figures for tekken 7,
and tekken 7 was an online game, so they know their active userbase.
(and they also now charge 70 bucks)
so they have at least a vague idea of how much monney they'll make.
how can you screw up your budget that bad unless you senslessly dump money at your release.
yeah cutting edge graphics are neat,
but thats incredibly expensive.
and imo not that nececary for a great experience.
maybe a game that needs to nickle and dime its playerbase shouldnt be made in the first place?
"One of the reasons for [microtransaction hell] is the rising cost of games' development."
NO!
Budgets... follow... revenue. Never the other way around. How much a publisher wants to spend on a game is a direct reflection of how much they expect to make. Games can go over budget. Games can under-perform. But these systems were not strapped on in desperation, due to some intrinsic rising cost in making... a game.
It has never been cheaper or easier to make a game. The video is explicitly about that, and it still fucks up this fundamental relationship. Companies keep pumping in more money because they expect more money. The brazen exploitation of sticking real-money fees into a fucking console game has let them expect a king's ransom. Ban that and the budgets will dip right the fuck back down. Probably just by releasing games with only a year of development. Did you not include all the crazy stuff you wanted? Yeah, that's art. Unused ideas go in the next game.
Even if you want high realism: build your fucking tools. "Procedural generation" doesn't mean randomness, it means rules do work for you. Why are cloth and paint and dirt still enormous hand-twiddled images? What is that Quake engine bullshit? Generating wood grain as-you-need-it was in the first Alone In The Dark, with literally dozens of polygons onscreen. Your game should not have a 20 GB lump of wasted human effort, just to make players go "yep, that's wood."
Artists should be defining a style and picking examples. Yeah yeah yeah, "AI" promises that, but I've been banging this drum for over twenty years. You don't need a neural network to stick freckles on a face texture at 4K instead of 128x128. We have achieved dot technology at arbitrary resolution. You can ship the tools that generate these images and make the user run them at whatever resolution they want. It might even be faster than sucking data off an overstuffed hard drive.
And where you really need handmade detail, maybe do it in vectors instead? Like it was cute, back in the 90s, when Half-Life's black-and-yellow diagonal warning stripes were pixelated on a $2000 Windows PC, but Perfect Dark's were crisp on a $200 N64, because the clever lads at Rare figured out you could just rotate the goddamn texture. But if you're still halving texel size by quadrupling texture size then you're doing something wrong. It's ballooning your budget and pissing off players and dragging out schedules and you've had all the time in the world to do anything about it.
Love the energy
What a shit take lol
AAA does not describe the size of the game, but the size of the brand and publisher.
I believe that’s the problem, AAA studios can put out shit games, the game content should dictate that.
My eyes are getting sore from all these studios popping up claiming they are making AAA games, maybe put something out first mate.
Right. What does AAA even mean? Meta spent billions on their Horizons Metaverse, but countless Indie Metaverses are way higher rated some made by just one person. Clearly AAA does not mean the size of the team or the budget.
If you have to pluralize "metaverse," then the concept does not exist.
It's like saying "the internets."
Well…there really are Internets as there is not just one as there are pockets in countries closed to others. I would not get too hung up on the name as there really are many many Metavaveres already established and many more are coming. I have one myself that is a highly detailed Theme Park Metaverse.
A single Metaverse is the death of the Metaverse as centralization kills innovation and drives corruption/exploitation. We need many Metaverses or we will end up with just one corporate one. Good news is that is not how the Metaverse is developing despite some corps spending Billions to the one and only.
It will all make more sense when there is greater standard and linking between Metaverses as right now they are all islands onto themselves. That will change in time.
The entire god-damn point of "the metaverse," in the book every tech-bro dingus stole it from, was that it encompassed ALL online media. There can only be one or zero. It was everything. It was the entire global internet, as embodied VR.
Which is obviously ridiculous. But apparently not obvious enough, as these dinguses missed that Snow Crash is a satire of 1980s cyberpunk.
Not sure what your excuse is for missing the equally obvious absurdity of championing competing walled gardens as a shift against centralization. What a shame there's no giant global network that nobody owns, to demonstrate how something can be singular without being a monopoly.
"I have my own internet at home." Ridiculous.
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AAA describes budget.
They can make up whatever stories they want; that is the only constant.
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