Power Cords Contributor Evan Reedy does a quick run down of the upcoming Bethesda game, Dishonored, and explains just why you should be excited about it.
Video games -- particularly AAA video games -- have become too expensive to make. The intel from every fly on the wall in every investor's room is there is an increasing level of caution about spending hundreds of millions just to release a single video game. And you can't blame them. Many AAA game budgets mean that you can print hundreds of millions in revenue, and not even turn a profit. If you are an investor, quite frankly, there are many easier ways to make a buck. AAA games have always been expensive to make though, but when did we go from expensive, to too expensive? A decade ago, AAA games were still expensive to make, but fears of "sustainability" didn't keep every CEO up at night. Consumer expectations and demands no doubt play a role in this, but more and more games are also revealing obvious signs of resource mismanagement, evident by development teams and budgets spiraling out of control with sometimes nothing substantial to show for it.
It’s a question that I’ve pondered myself too. How are these developers spending this much money? Also, like the article stated, I cannot tell where it’s even going. Perfect example was used with Starfield and Spiderman 2.
They claim they have to increase prices due to development costs exploding. Okay? Well, I’m finding myself spending less and less money on games than before due to the quality actually going down. With a few recent exceptions games are getting worse.
I thought these newer consoles and game engines are easier-therefore-cheaper to make games than previous ones. What has happened? Was it over hiring after the pandemic, like other tech companies?
Costs quite a bit to maintain a team of 700+ employees. Which is what it takes to create something with state of the art fidelity and scope. Just imagine how many 3D artists you'd need to create the plethora of 3D objects in a AAA game. There's so much stuff and each asset takes time and effort.
That's atleast one of the things that didn't get easier. Also coding all the systems and creating all the character models with animations and everything. Animations alone is a huge thing because games are expected to be so detailed.
Back in the day a God of War type game was a 12 hour adventure with small levels, now it has to be this 40+ hours of stuff. Obviously it didn't have to be this way of AAA publishers hadn't convinced themselves that it's an arms race. Games probably didn't need to be this bloated and they probably didn't need to be cutting edge in fidelity.
Starfield’s animation and character models look like they are from Oblivion, a game that came out about 20 years ago. I cannot tell the difference between Spider-Man 2 and the first one at first glance. It’s been a joke in some YouTube channels.
Seven hundred people for 1 game? Make 7 games with 100 people instead. I think recent games have proven that it’s okay to have AA games, such as Hell Divers 2.
I guess I’m a bit jaded with the industry and where things are headed. Solutions seem obvious and easy, but maybe they aren’t.
@franwex
I'm not talking about Starfield.
And I'm not advocating for these behemoth productions. I think shorter development time and smaller teams would lead to better and more varied games. I want that, even if that means that we have to scale things down quite a bit.
Take something like The Last of Us 2. The amount of custom content is ridiculous if you break it down. It's no wonder they have huge teams of animators and modellers. And just to make things worse, each animated detail requires coding as well.
Just to add to animation work. It can take up to a week to make detailed walking animations. A lot of these tend to vary between character types. And then you need to do every other type of animation as well which is a task that scales quickly depending on how detailed the game is. And that's just a small aspect of AAA development. Each level might require several level designers who only do blockouts. Enviroment artists that setdress and lighting artists that work solely on lighting. Level needs scripting and testing. Each of these tasks takes a long ass time if the game is striving for realism.
Personally I prefer working on games where one level designer can do all aspects. But that's almost exclusively in indie and minor productions. It gets bloated fast.
Then there's Doki Doki Literature Club which took one person to make along with a character designer and background designer and it's absolutely brilliant.
Simply because they want you to believe it’s so expensive to develop a game that they must turn into other practices like releasing games unfinished, micro transactions and in the long run adopt the gaas model in all games..
I think game budgets are falsely inflated for tax purposes.
Just look at Godzilla Minus One. It cost less that 15 million.
If they include CEO salary and bonuses on every game and the CEO takes a 20 million dollar bonus every year for the 4 years of dev time, that's 80 million the company can claim went to "making" the game.
Yep and clogged with a bunch of corporate bs that has nothing to do with making good video games. Like diversity coordinators gender specialists. Like most jobs you have 20-30% of the workforce doing 80% of the work
I honestly think this is where a large portion of the budget goes, a significant portion to the CEO, then another large portion to the "Consultancy" group they hire. The rest can be explained by too much ambition in scope for their game, or being too inefficient with their resources available, then you have whatever is left for meaningful development.
Who is upvoting this shit? They are counting a CEOs $20 million dollars 4 times for tax purposes? You have zero comprehension of how taxes work.
Spiderman 2 is so weird because the budget is insane yet I don't see it when playing
Yeah it's decent, refined gameplay, graphics and the like from the first game but it's very short, there's apparently a lot cut from it thanks to the insight from the Insomniac leak and the story was just not that good compared to the first so where the hell did all that money go to.
Even fixes to suits, bugs to wrinkle out and a New Game Plus mode took months to come out
Put it this way, the New Game Plus took as long to come out as the first games very first story DLC
I don't see it either, you have a good portion of the game already made if you reuse as much as you can for the first game, and based on the developer interviews, there was a lot of stuff they didn't implement. They also hired that one, currently infamous consultancy group, despite all this, I can't see how they spent more than twice as much money making the sequel.
There's so much more at play now compared to 20 or 30 years ago.
Yes tools have matured they are easier than ever to use we are no longer limited and more universal however gamers demand more.
Making a game like banjo Kazooie vs GTA vi and as amazing as banjo was in its day its quite dated an unacceptable for a game released today to look and run like that.
Games now have complex weather systems that take months to program by all accounts GTA vi will feature a hurricane system unlike anything we've ever seen building that takes so much work months and months.
In addition development teams are now huge and that's where a lot of the costs stem from the manpower requirement of modern games can be in the hundreds and given the length of time they spend making these games add up to so much more to produce.
Art is also a huge are where pixel art gave way to working with polygons and varying levels of detail based on camera location we are now in the realm of HD assets where any slight imperfections stand out like a sore thing vs the PS2 era where artwork could be murky and it was fine this takes time.
Tldr the scope of modern games has gone nuts gamers demand everything be phenomenal and crafting this takes a long time by far bigger studios.
We can still rely on indies to makes smaller scope reasonably priced games like RoboCop rouge city but AAA studios seem reluctant to re scope from masterpieces to just fun games
In case of Spiderman license costs were also a big chunk. And then there is the marketing, that exploded over time and is mostly higher than actual development costs.
All lies and top industries owns by elite and lying to shareholders that these are the expensive and getting expensive.
I believe that it is due to this unsustainable rise in production costs that more and more companies are looking to AI tools to help ‘lower’ costs.
The use of AI is all about greed, even for companies that are sustainable, they would use AI because it saves them money.
@Nooderus
It is if they don't care about the employees who made them all those money in the first place. Replace them with AI just so the higher ups can get a bigger bonus.
I don't believe we'll get better or more complete games, the savings will just get pocketed by the wrong people, I wish it wouldn't, but I don't have a lot of faith in these bigger companies.
I genuinely believe it's mismanagement. Why are we seeing an influx of one person or games with a team no bigger than 10 create whole games with little to no budget? Unreal Engine 5 and I'm sure many other engines have plugins that have streamlined to many things you would have had to create and code back in the day.
For instance, before the cull, there were 3000 Devs working on COD alone. I'm a COD player but let's be real, there's been no innovation since 2019s MW. What exactly are those Devs doing? Even more so when so much of the new games are using recycled content
I also think higher up leads may simply demand more based on the IP they are working on. This could explain why COD costs so much to develop.
I've stated this in many other articles, but corporate greed, mismanagement and bloat and failing to understand the target audience and misaligned sales expectations as a result are the big reasons for these failures.
You'll see it in the way devs and publishers speak, every sequel needs to be "three times the size" of its predecessor, with hundreds of employees and over-indulgence. Wasted resources on the illusion of scale and scope. Misguided notions that if your budget balloons to three times that of the previous game you'll make three times the sales.
Compare the natural progression of games like Assassin's Creed 1 to 2 or Batman Arkham Asylum to City or Witcher 2 to Witcher 3 or God of War remake to Ragnarok and countless others. How is it that From Software continues to release successful games? Why don't we hear these excuses from Larian? These were games made by developers with a vision, passion and desire to improve their game in meaningful ways.
Then look at Suicide Squad Kill the Franchise and how it bloats well beyond its expected completion date and alienates its audience and middle fingers its purchasing power by wrapping a single player game in GAAS. Look at Starfield compared to Skyrim. Why couldn't Starfield have 5-10 carefully developed worlds with well written stories and focus? Why did it need all this bloat and excess that adds nothing to the quality of the game? How can No Man's Sky succeed where Starfield fails? Look at Mass Effect Andromeda compared to Mass Effect 3. Years of development and millions in cost to produce that mediocre fodder.
The narrative they want you to believe is that game budgets of triple A games are unsustainable, but it's typical corporate rubbish where they create the problem and then charge you more and dilute the quality of their games in favour of monetisation to solve it.
Indeed, here's a good example, Assassin's Creed 1 had a budget of 10 million dollars. Very reasonable. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag had a budget of 100 million dollars, within the same console generation! Even though BF was released on more systems, its still such a massive leap in production costs.
So you ask why they're making their games so big, well the reason is actually because of micro-trash-actions. Even single player games are featured with in-game stores packed with cosmetics, equipment upgrades, resources upgrades, or whatever other rubbish. The reason why games are so bloated and long, artificially extending the length of the game is because they know that the longer a person plays a game (which they refer to as "player engagement"), the more likely they are to eventually head into the micro-trash-action store and purchase something.
That is their goal, so they force the developers to make massive game maps, pack it boring filler, and then intentionally slow down your progress through experience points, skill points, and high level enemies that are over powered until you waste hours of your life grinding away to finally progress.
A person on reddit made a decent post about AC: Origins encouraging people towards spending more money.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pc...
I've lost interest in these types of games, because the publisher has intentionally gone out of their way to make their game boring in order to try and make more money out of me. NOPE!
@Chocoburger That's exactly right, nail hit on head. But this phenomenon doesn't just apply to the gaming industry. Hollywood is just as guilty of self destructive behaviour, if you look at the massive fall of Disney in both Star Wars and Marvel.
Even their success stories are questionable. Deadpool 1 had a tiny budget of $58 million but was a massive success with a box office of $780 million. The corporate greed machine then says "more!" and the budget grows to $110 million, but what does the box office do? It doesn't suddenly double, because the audience certainly didn't double for this kind of movie. The box office is more or less the same. Is Deadpool 2 twice as good as the first? Arguably not, its just as good, or maybe a bit better. It's production values are certainly higher. I wonder what the budget of Deadpool x Wolverine will be.
Joker had a budget of $50 to $70 million, and was the greatest R rated success in history, and now its sequel has a budget of $200 million!!! Do they think the box office is going to quadruple?? Are movies unsustainable now?
My argument is that obviously we want bigger and better, but that doesn't mean an insane escalation in costs beyond what the product is reasonably expected to sell. There needs to be reasonable progression. That's the problem. Marvel took years and a number of movies to craft the success of Avengers. Compare that to what DC did from Man of Steel...
Back to games, you are exactly correct. They drown development resources and costs into building these monetisation models into the game, but you can't just tack them onto the game, you have to design reasons for them to exist and motivations for players to use them, which means bloat and excess and time wasting mechanics and in-game currencies and padding and all sorts of crap instead of a focused single player experience.
Greed from everyone involved including game reviewers, which are the greedy little goblins that help the lords screw over the gaming landscape.
David Pierce, better known as Chesko in the Skyrim modding community, is now a Senior Designer at Bethesda Game Studios currently working on the upcoming TES 6.
Microsoft is laying off hundreds of employees at Xbox, with 1900 jobs cut across Activision Blizzard, Xbox Game Studios, and ZeniMax Media.
This actually pissed me off. I keep thinking of how Microsoft's PR was claiming that they had gotten the support form several workers unions... Everyone should have seen this coming. Also, people have a baby about Sony laying off 50 people. Those same people will now explain why laying off thousands of people is a good thing.
@Eonjay
Also what's scary is this is on top of the 10 000 layoffs Microsoft announced in January 2023 as well as the additional layoffs they had in June 2023. The instability is palpable!
@Eonjay
Sure, let me help you out, bud. MS is a company. A companies sole purpose is to make $ in exchange for providing a service or goods. MS recently made a huge purchase. In that, they have to A: recoup the outgoing $ they just spent and B: Get rid of overlapping positions. Thats life. Sure it sucks and you hate to see it happen but move along and find another job
@Vengeance
Obviously the separations are a result of the acquisitions but I personally think this is being accelerated by AI.
@InUrFoxHole
What you described is not the purpose of a company, but rather a corporation. The point I was making is that Microsoft was saying this purchase would benefit all involved. People were claiming that the purchase is what the workers needed to create a better work environment. This was all BS.
@Eonjay
Microsoft has created a better workspace by making them work somewhere else. /s
@TiredGamer
A corporation is a specific type of company. And within that you can actually have a non-profit corporation. What makes for profit corporations (and specifically traded for profit corps) unique is that they are companies who exist primarily to maximize the returns for investors. So when InUrFoxHole says this is characteristic of 'companies'.. I am just saying that his statement isn't technically accurate. It doesn't apply to ALL companies in other words.
@Eonjay
I hear ya man. But if you're MS you can't just blurt out... we're gonna make cuts. Again I know it's scrappy and I side with the workers but they had to know this was gonna happen. I can't remember the last purchase where 100% of the workers stayed.
Adults understand this is how acquisitions work. If n4g wasn't mostly children, and worse, fanboy children they'd understand this. When companies acquire another company thousands of jobs often get cut. Adults understand this. Microsoft even talked about creating a large team that could be used throughout the gaming division back when they acquired Bethesda. A team like that eliminates multiple positions from a new company. The people who lost their job will receive 6 months compensation and will most likely be in a new job 3 months in pocketing 3 months or more of pay. Learn how the world works kids. It is crashing down around you.
the woe of day-1 subscription service, for every studio they own they have to either get a proportional number of new subscribers, increase the subscription fee, or just outright cutting jobs to offset additional hiring costs. At least with delayed library like PS Plus you can get release window profit from early buyers.
@Optimus If you think this cost cutting won't trickle down and affect the games they produce ( you know, the stuff you allegedly play as a NON-SHAREHOLDER ) then you are an idiot.
***Are you a gamer or shareholder ***
Ignorance of the industry will only lead us to where they want us, not where we want.
@optimus well I mean it’s simple enough.. additional studios means additional salaries to be paid, but because of day 1 gamepass the game purchases are severely impacted. You need to fill that gap in the normal product cycle somehow..
People always have the option to not support Microsoft.
I didn't buy Starfield even though I was excited for it. I don't buy game pass even though it has games on it I want to play.
People do get to decide where the industry goes, that's why there aren't loot boxes in single player games and kinect got kicked to the curb.
***that's why there aren't loot boxes in single player games and kinect got kicked to the curb. ***
But there are SP games with loot boxes...
Counter argument is that the textbook reason for acquisition is economies of scale. You can make more money by reducing overhead in redundant PR, HR, Legal, etc...
Will be interesting if we get visibility into what types of roles were impacted, that will be more telling I think. I'm not surprised there's post merger layoffs though...
And now we're starting to get that visibility. Physical Xbox games appear to be on the chopping block... This is a big deal if true
https://twitter.com/JezCord...
Physical games in general is going the way of the dodo. Im seeing less and less physical media in stores where they sold movies and music... games was next. Why have a division whose job it is to make something on a disc when discs are going away? PC havent had discs for over a decade... consoles and handhelds are heading the same direction and will take people with them, kicking and screaming, regardless.
I cant really recall when the last time i inserted a disc into any of my systems. I swapped out the lasers in my saturn, dreamcast, and gamecube for ODE. I have a modded og xbox with tons of games ripped to it, same with a PS2 modded with a hdd also with games ripped to it. I use the PS Portal to play 4/5 games and my steam deck to play PS1/NES/SNES/N64/NeoGeo/Genesi s/TG16 as well as Xcloud. Im practically all digital now anyway. Convenience is a hell of a drug, maybe even more addicting than collecting shelf candy was.
PS3 is prob the only one I still use discs for but that will change soon enough.
@darth
Even if that so, why start shifting away from physical in the middle of a console generation?
Beyond the actual impact to those that DO buy physical and happen to have an XSX, bigger deal is the perceived retail presence of the brand compared to it's competition. Xbox would be taking the L in every retail outlet in every country. Kinda a big deal if this is really happening. Obviously we don't know anything concrete yet though
@dumahim... because, by the time the next one starts, people will already be acclimated to it. Sony was already doing their part little by little with the current trend of collector editions not including discs even though they may include steelbook cases. This is their way of saying it is inclusive to those with and without the optical drive on their PS5.
By making them disc neutral will make it easier for people to accept the inevitable change over to no more discs and they will be happy with all the other stuff those editions do come with as a trade off. It starts with the CE but then it will progress into the standard games as well. Getting cases with just a DL code instead of a disc. We already know Nintendo switch games like that.
@crazyCoconuts
Looking at stores in my own area, Xbox doesn't even have a section anywhere near as big as Nintendo or Playstation, it's almost non-existant. I wouldn't be surprised if they had been planning this for a while because that would explain the lack of presence in stores.
@darthv72
I cannot think of any Nintendo Switch case I've picked up that didn't have a physical disc/cartridge in it, that must be an incredibly small number of games, then again, I'm only buying their first party games and exclusives because I can't buy them anywhere else.
Gotta help pay that $375 million in compensation to Bobby Kotick when he left in late December somehow /s
Time sure flies it’s 2027 already?
.
Edit: I guess in Microsoft eyes it’s better to cut them down in batches than 100,000+ on 2027 🤦🏿
...but they ARE profitable. They also don't need X amount of overlapping employees. This is pretty standard stuff with mergers. The employees who are doing the same jobs as others already in the company are the first to go. I had it happen to myself several years ago. I went and got another job.
Chances are these people will be fine and who knows... they may form a new company and get right back to making games, or cleaning toilets, or filing HR paperwork. It all depends on the job they performed before being laid off. Not all of those affected were game developers, many of which just worked for the company doing non developing stuff... keep that in mind.
Activision/Blizzard has 13,000 employees, Bethesda has approx 2300. So 15,300 total... They laid off 1,900. That's almost 12.5% of the total workforce of both Activision and Zenimax/Bethesda combined. More than 1 out of every 10 heads got cut...
^^its over 22,000 employees across the totality of MS/ABK/ZB and losing another 1900 will still leave them with over 20k. And like I said, not all of them are game devs but other overlapping employees. It sux when it happens (I know personally) but it is what it is.
That's still nearly 1 out of every 10 heads (8.6%)... that isn't a small number. It's such a large number, that it is unlikely that they're all just janitors and office workers like you seem to be trying to imply.
The abuse goes on both ends. The answer is that Microsoft offers some tools but tradeoff is that whatever tools are available will reduce need for human labor. This deals with many lives so it’s based on the metric as well as implementation of those metrics, watching those who implement it, to portray an accurate ratio of labor and productivity.
I don’t like corporate greed but being on the workbench I have seen slackers too for whom I just want to work harder and self-initiate.
I know. It's like having the number one selling console by a large margin and laying off people. "Clutching my pearls"
What does profitability have to do with any of this? Out of all the layoffs happening recently. This was the one that was most expected. Layoffs almost always happen after a big acquisition. It's not because of finances. It's because there's a lot of overlap in the job positions.
I was hoping it wouldn't be too bad because they want to keep Activision Blizzard as a separate entity.
But I guess when it's a 70 billion dollar acquisition. There's inevitably going to be a lot more overlap than normal.
Sucks for those that were affected. Hope they land on their feet quickly.
How many years do you think it would take to pay off 70 billion with the salaries of the people who lost their jobs?
And let's not even bring up the fact that Microsoft was getting all these games anyways, so these people lost their jobs for essentially no reason.
@Einhander1972
The layoffs were gonna happen regardless. Have you seen industry news lately? Everyone is having layoffs. They Would it have been as bad as this? Who knows. But they were against unionization while Microsoft supports it and it turns out, None of the Union workers were affected. So I'm gonna say it would have been just as bad if not worse.
Activision Blizzard was on a downwards spiral. In the next few years we'll see if MS can turn it around for them.
Blizzard president Mike Ybarra and Blizzard’s chief designer Allen Adham also departing, according a new report of Tom Warren.
It’s entirely possible. Remember Nokia?
This raises the total Xbox layoffs since ACTI announcement to 11,900.
“Move along, nothing to see here”
@zaanan Nokia is exactly a case where MS spent a substantial amount on an acquisition and then proceeded to pull the plug.
Nah Mike Ybarra only just said in November they would have to drag him out to make him leave, he's in for the long haul...... now 3 months later he has left its fishy
Have to make that 70-80 Billion Dollars worth of acquisitions back. Why so surprised? The writing was always on the wall for everybody to read. Wonder how much of the restructuring is geared towards their third party publishing plans?
Take this with a grain of salt; according to Jez Corden Microsoft has also shut down departments dedicated to bringing Xbox games to physical retail ... which if you've seen the digital-only Xbox console leaks ... well, you can get an idea of where Microsoft is going here.
Things are changing across the board for physical media... Its been declining for movies and music, games were next.
its absolutely horrific for those1900 people.
the 3 trillion dollar company "has to" fire so many people, and for what?. for a "sustainable cost structure"
thats almost 10% of their staff lol
There is no justification for it. They have the money to afford literally anything in the world.
To cancel Blizzard's game six years in development is the twist of the knife when everyone's already down.
For smaller companies that are running with tight costs, layoffs are one thing. What Microsoft did today is a complete other and benefits the big wigs at the expense of everyone else.
Good on Mike Ybarra for leaving. Phil Spencer should follow his example and look at everything that's happened to the developers impacted by his decisions.
Deep sixing an acquisition's game deep into development is the most MS move ever.
They Fable Legends'd themselves again.
They're the WB-cancelling-finished-movies of the gaming industry.
"To cancel Blizzard's game six years in development is the twist of the knife when everyone's already down."
I'm really surprised by that. Spencer doesn't usually cancel anything already in development. Even Redfall, even though the devs wanted them to cancel it. But then again, Redfall. Maybe that game's failure made them change their mind. With it being 6 years deep in dev though it doesn't make sense to cancel it. Pretty stupid decision.
That's what happens when you buy a company that's in the same business as you. There's a lot of people doing the same job, so they're going to save money by getting rid of people that aren't needed anymore.
@dumahim Ive heard that before and worked in a job where they merged with another company let go of their newly acquired staff and expected me to take on a whole host of extra work but I was already at 110 percent capacity and not the only one the outcome was morale dropped to an all time low and good staff left in droves.
I make you right Taco. What this hammers to me is that sustainability issues are due to weak hardware sales and weak gamespass concurrent subs. Something has to give. I definitely see them pivoting to becoming a 3rd party publisher.
The results of industry consolidation, the only people that benefit are CEO's and shareholders... gamers and the workforce gets ****ed
I can see way more cuts in the short term too as parts of what where competing publishers in the industry merge, and lets not forget the introduction of AI, MS is set to be a big pusher of that.
Yeah this is terrible. MS has the money and resources to support that staff. None of these large companies need to do any of these layoffs.
People said this was going to happen after they acquire them but not this many. Makes you think that Sony is doing a better job with not acquiring but just partnering up with studios and funding the games.
Oh it was happening with Sony too... Bungie, Media Molecule, insomniac... all of them lost people after being acquired by Sony. And it will happen again because its inevitable when you bring on another company that has people like you do. No need for multiples of the same job.
Huh? Sony has not only laid off plenty of employees, they've also shut down 1 or 2 of the new studios they just bought.
