Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

Don't you love when your hobby goes mainstream.

RIP Sean Connery!

It is solo because youre alone, the only PC. Mules arent considered solo but using trusts is solo. It's just another magic the game has.

Found these really neat 3D printed figures from ps1 games but the guy is charging super high prices. Something resin figures go for :(. Is 3d printing and hand painting a lot of work?

It's just cuz people call multiboxing solo which is easier than just using trusts, maybe we should call it 1 character with trusts but the word solo has no business describing 1 person controlling multiple characters.

Best solos are clearly with a tank, a dd mule and a bard mule, all with 5 trusts each in an alliance of 18.

memes eh?

Sausage memes incoming.

i'd argue gaming was already mainstream back when they released super nintendos or game boys, maybe the first playstation and you didn't have a microtransaction like mechanics back then.
that stuff is the direct result of replacing decission making positions that previously where occupied by ppl who make games (or any product) with a passion with ppl who went to buisness school and enter the stock market. the focus changes from actually making a good product for the consumer to upselling, squeezing as much money out of the company in as little time as possible for the investors.

manager positions switch frequently and if you only stay a couple of years with the company your buisness decissions also become short term focused. once ***hits the fan they already jumped ship and sail with a different company.

i just wonder who are the main customers for microtransactions. kids of parents that are so out of touch with what their children do that they just hand out their credit card so they shut up or adults who can't let go of their child hood hobby, trying to compensate the sparse spare time with pay2win?

Think about it. Video game price remains largely unchanged for decades. But development cost skyrocked.

There's 99.1% inflation rate since 1990. AAA games in 1997 like FF7 needed 45 million budget to make. Now it cost anywhere between 140m to 250m+.

Worse yet, there are way more games in the market compare with 1990s. With over 850 titles release on steam each month, there are more developers sharing the pie.

Oh, and nevermind the fact that the marketing cost of an AAA project is frequently 100% of development cost these days.

Without microtransactions, most of the AAA games we see today probably wouldn't even exist. I'd say microtransactions saved gaming industry even.


Once I've read that only 1 out of 10 projects (prototype included) are profitable. And 1 out of 3 released project sells enough copies to cover the development cost. I don't think video game is some kind of magical money making machine except very few titles.

Back 10-15 years ago a successful AAA game sold a few hundred thousand copies at best, now a successful game sells many millions. The profits they make now dwarves the hollywood movie industry. They do not need micro-transactions, at all. They just tell you these stories because it's all about a constant increase in profits to boost share prices (which is all the CEO of these companies really care about now).

If Blizzard make a billion dollars this year, they can't be happy with that and make 900 million next year. Next year they need to make a billion and one to continue increasing the share price. If they make 10 billion the year after due to a game going viral, guess what...now they gotta make 10 billion and one the year after that. The better a company does the more predatory they have to become after that and the more vicious they have to be with cutting staff and cutting costs to keep profits up. It's not an option, they have to do this or the CEO will get fired. This is also why the CEOs get paid as much as they do, a reward for constantly pushing up the share prices.

They added a cash shop to WoW and loot boxes to Overwatch, none of these things resulted in a bigger dev team, faster or bigger updates. It all goes to the profits, none of these things help the players. They just keep adding more and more things to buy and you end up spending more and more for no gain.

Actually, they have the financial incentive now to make the game worse to sell you the solution in micro-transactions (more grindy, more annoying, harder to level up etc).

If you keep making excuses for this awful industry they will keep on doing bag things, taking more money from you, giving you less for your money, and in the end the entire bubble will pop anyway. Blizzard went to trash because people kept making excuses for them and they kept trying to make more and more and more money.

The video game industry is like a friend with a drug addiction, they will tell you all the stories in the world why they need you to give them more and more money but in the end all you're doing is hurting them anyway.

The thing that worries me is Square Enix are jumping right down that same rabbit hole Blizzard are in right now.

ofc the AAA game industry is trying to justify the retail price increase but you should question their arguments.

almost every AAA game out there that turns out to be a success will be turned into a franchise. take the latest AAA game iteration of a franchise of your choise and look back to its first iteration and usually you'll find that a lot of its core features and mechanics were already there, they just get tweaked or enhanced a bit for each new iteration, maybe they add new ones, sometimes they carry them over 1 to 1. assets can also be reused or tweaked a bit, they don't always have to start over from sctach but every iteration can make similar or even more revenue than the previous one.

there are much better, more powerfull and faster tools that help reduce man hours needed to get the job done. for example 3D sculpting tools like zbrush, substance painter for texture work, photo bashing techniques and AI like Nvidias GuaGAN for concept art, even complete engines like unreal or unity while back in the day you probably had to write your own.

or just think of all the filler content to artificialy inflate the play hours. look at bethesdas oblivion or skyrim, 90% of the dungeons look the same, its procedural generated copy and paste job.

With the 3D printing it is developing the software / patterns that's the hard part. Then there is the amortization, or how many pieces is that development cost split among.

The printing itself is cheap but consumes time. Probably less time than painting. As to how much time hand painting takes? Depends on level of detailing.

I mean you're wrong, but ok.

Trusts are magic, not other players, ergo: soloing.

Also: nobody can do dynaD solo, takes 3 people to enter.

Huh? What are you talking about? AAA games frequently sells less these days because there are more game developers making games these days. More choices in the market means players are less likely to buy a new game when it's out.

Example: star ocean 3 in 2003 sold 533k copies in Japan 1st year after release, star ocean 5 sold 113k in Japan within the same timeframe.

Star craft 1 sold 11m copies in 1998, star craft 2 sold 6m.

FF8 sold 9.65m worldwide all versions combined, ff15 sold 8.9m and FF13 sold 7.7m.

Shenmue 1 sold 257k first week after release in Japan and Shenmue 3 sold 17k within the same timeframe...

And the list goes on. There are plenty of examples of long awaited sequels underperform for various reasons, deus ex, dishonored all had poor sells recently. There are exceptions like Witchers series, but I'm seeing games like the witchers being the exception, not a rule.


Your article says "revenue", not profit. I thought revenue does not include expenses?

Like I said, on average, out of every 10 game projects in the industry, only 3 would become the final releases product and 1 would ended up profitable. Simplified math: if you spend $100 on a prototype and $3000 to finish a project, you'd spend $700 on 7 unsuccessful prototypes and $9000 on 3 finished games. That 1 profitable game needs to make $9700 total to break even.

So any game that seems "profitable" on paper, in reality it doesn't make nearly as much money as people thinks.


In past 10-15 years I've seen WAY more studios shut down or bankrupted than they "become Blizzard". Those mid size studios still survived mostly relied on mobile platform and microtransactions to stay alive. And those big studios that don't rely on microtransactions, such as Ubisoft Montreal etc, got a ton of money from the government lol.

Truth to be told, without microtransactions you probably won't see many games even appear in the market. Game development as an investment is way too risky with very little return in general, and nobody would be interested in losing money to make games. If these CEOs don't make money then they simply won't make them, it's that simple.

To be fair: 8 is an infinitely better game than those two combined.

It isn't that simple. Since AAA games these days has very high requirement when it comes to realism in animations, there's tons of works involved creating a character, which is more than sculpting and what not.

Creating a low poly FF7 character in 1997 isn't necessary slower than creating last of us 2 characters with all the facial rigs done.


Elder scrolls2 and diablos 1 had procedural generated dungeons way back. It's not a new technology.


Photoshop technique was developed because AAA game needs to look real. The man hours of concept art required largely remained unchanged to my knowledge. It's not like game projects in the 90s hired dozens of concept artists and now reduced to 2 because of photobash.

No idea what GuaGAN was until I clicked the link...looks like something fun to play with for inspiration but I doubt it's revolutionary in the pipeline.


Yes true, but AAA game engines these days also had way higher realism requirement than 90s, which wasn't the case in 90s.

I mean, Tim Sweeney wrote 90% of code in unreal engine 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Engine

Many games in the 90s had like 1 single programmer doing the work of an entire game lol. So it's not like a 90s game required so many programmer on a project.

In general, its way more expensive to develop an AAA game these days, and it requires many more man hours than before.

random thoughts has been invaded :(

It's like it has a P&R undertone feeling to it

Unless I'm missing something, random thoughts has given rise to conversations in the past. Even the great Rooks, master of this space and lord of all who traverse this dark corner of the internet, has offered thoughts on the rising costs of video games debate that appears here from time to time.

diabolos was never carried by exploring its lvl design, the series is 100% carried by rng loot grind. for games like oblivion and skyrim exploration is a core part of the experience.
procedural generation works for stuff like generating loot but i haven't seen a single instance where procedural lvl design would come anywhere close to hand crafted lvl design, it doesn't work well. they only use it for that purpose so they can rave about 50+ hours content that would otherwise just be 10 hours.

if i'm not mistaken they just scan the faces if they use real actors.
personly i don't like when they hire famous hollywould actors or license popular pop songs when they've worked successfully with talented composures for decades in the past, just drives production costs up with little to no benefits.


besides costs for staff the cost for office space also makes a larger chunk of total development costs and game devlopment is most likely one of those industries where home office works quite well, thats another position where costs will rather go down than up.

software is not tangible, just because you measure sales within a year for comparisons sake doesn't mean they are sold out once the year has passed. sure the majority of sales happen early on but once finished you don't have any costs to produce more and once the inital costs are covered every sale is pure profit.

if you have a somewhat successfull game there will also be ports to several other consoles/PC and lets not forget the remastered version 3 years later and the reimagined versions every console generation. some remasters do barely more than run the old textures thru AI upscaling and call it a day.

They can create a new thread about it if they wanted to lol. Though not sure what else it should be talked about since the conversation is pretty much over.


I love how you make it sound like it's just 1 click and its magically done XDDD.


This applies to old games and new games alike. Doesn't make newer games more profitable than older games.

Even if 1 of your game is very profitable, your next game may not be. Every sale from a successful game just reduces the chance of the studio going bankrupt after the next project.



Well yes....you kinda have to, to reduce the chance of becoming the next studio that go bankrupt.



Before the pandemic only a few positions or indie teams heavily rely on WFH. Post pandemic studios are forced to work from home and from what I've heard from a producer that I know of, doesn't seem to work THAT well in terms of efficiency.

You can Google development costs of today's AAA project v.s 2000 era, pretty sure newer projects cost a lot more.

What


The difference between P+R and RT is the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it.

I believe this is what I was remembering.