Virtuos has helped bring a number of games both past and present to Switch over the past few years. The company’s efforts include Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, Dark Souls: Remastered, Starlink: Battle for Atlas, and The Outer Worlds. With new consoles arriving later in 2020, Virtuos’ porting efforts will expand.
A new studio based in Liverpool called Starlight Games is developing a futuristic sports title and is headed by the co-creator of WipEout.
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?
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.
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'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.
Greed from everyone involved including game reviewers, which are the greedy little goblins that help the lords screw over the gaming landscape.
Seven months after its infamous launch, the Van Gogh Museum is restocking its popular Pokémon collaboration items -- and selling out fast.
Virtuos is no small team, with over 1500 in their staff right now. Good to see Switch porting devs planning to keep them coming into next gen. By the time the full potential of these new consoles are realized in practice, Switch 2 should be here or not far off anyway.
It will be interesting to see how this works out, even if only for the tech aspect of it.
The switch couldn't handle the "options" menu of a ps5 game
Although a nice thought, the Series X and PS5 will be operating on a level far, far beyond what the Switch can handle even with down porting. You all around here sat there patting the team on the back that managed to get Witcher 3 on the Switch, and that game was already several years old and basically had to be ported at the equivalent of low settings on PC.
The more advanced you get, the tougher it gets to downport in a competent fashion. Eventually you have to start cutting so many corners that even if you can have the claim to fame of getting the game running, it will be so vastly inferior to its counterparts that only someone truly desperate for a mobile iteration would spend their time on it.
If you need an example of how rough porting a game newer than Witcher 3 can get, just look at Bethesda's efforts in bringing their more recent games to Switch. Do they run okay? Sure. Look alright? If you aren't too picky, I suppose. Would someone with the option willingly take the Switch version over any other version? Generally that's a firm no. As the power gap continues to widen, even Bethesda is eventually going to give up, and Nintendo will either need to get back into playing the power game or give up on major third party support altogether.
That is great news. Put the games on all platforms. Tone them down to run on each platform as good as possible and that is best for all gamers and Nintendo has done such a great job with the Switch it deserves to keep getting 3rd party support. That is best for the industry and gamers.
Brutal. The disparities are about to get 10x wider than they already are.