The fact that you never heard of Prey, Wolfenstein 2 and The Evil Within 2 tells you how dire the situation is.
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Amy Hennig: People ask for linear Story-Based Games but aren’t necessarily buying them
- Thread starter Soulymist
- Start date
The fact that you never heard of Prey, Wolfenstein 2 and The Evil Within 2 tells you how dire the situation is.
I think the key is to be smarter and reign in the budgets. There are devs are making great single player linear story driven games with smaller budgets. I mean a game is $60 - calculate how much you want to make/ forecast what you would like to sell - then set a budget based on this? Maybe I am missing something obvious here.
They're few and far between, the era of AA gaming is really on life support.
There are games that could get away with charging more than 60. Single player only games, especially linear ones, aren't those games. Not if you want to keep a big sales volume.
The problem with rising the price is that people are already waiting for sales. And if those sales don't come, that won't suddenly mean people will buy the game.
There's obviously a few exeptions, but those games already don't get discounted often (Nintendo, GTA, COD, Fifa ect.)
Yeah but obviously companies aren't willing to take the risk, USA has it easy other countries change the price of their games accordingly and the result isn't pretty
Amy Hennig is just spewing the same doomsday scenario every other gaming outlet has done so every time a game is cancelled.
It's becoming utterly tiring to see a defense of publishers all the time and justify morally wrongful practices and say it is to recoup costs. No, loot box is not a necessary evil. It's wrong.
Publishers are in it for profit. Publishers keeps generating even more profit. Publishers are notoriously bad at handling projects and sinks far more money than what is needed to make a game. They need to handle themselves, we don't have to suffer to their schemes just to play games.
Amy seems like she took an L for life. I know the Star Wars snafu must have hurt, but you don't have to become a mouthpiece for publishers and keep on circulating the same fallacious arguments to justify monetization. It wouldn't even have helped the Star Wars game !
It's becoming utterly tiring to see a defense of publishers all the time and justify morally wrongful practices and say it is to recoup costs. No, loot box is not a necessary evil. It's wrong.
Publishers are in it for profit. Publishers keeps generating even more profit. Publishers are notoriously bad at handling projects and sinks far more money than what is needed to make a game. They need to handle themselves, we don't have to suffer to their schemes just to play games.
Amy seems like she took an L for life. I know the Star Wars snafu must have hurt, but you don't have to become a mouthpiece for publishers and keep on circulating the same fallacious arguments to justify monetization. It wouldn't even have helped the Star Wars game !
I guess I did the same, but I dunno, they feel linear to me. The story only goes in one direction with little room for interpretation. In P5 for example you can change what you do on the day-to-day schedule, but the game still has deadlines for everything and events that won't change no matter what. Likewise in Automata, there is nothing you can do in game which will have any effect on story or endings.
I guess we just gotta kinda really limit ourselves to the most finite interpretation.
That brings up an issue mentioned by Nirolak in the "Lessons from 2017" thread: a lot of big companies would rather blow up the budget to make sure their game in some way sets a standard to consumers that prevents competition from entering the market.
I would argue they were on life support but have had a resurgence as of late.
Wolfenstein and TEW are definitely linear. Prey is not open world, so it's at least half linear.
Devs want to have a living, how evil they are! They should just deliver on bigger and better looking games without asking for more!
So that's 3 games in total. That's not a lot for a sample, and for people claiming that those games do not sell.
I see what you're saying, but I think expectations are the key point here: we all expect different things at different costs. Our expectation of what a 30 dollar game must provide is different than a 60 dollar game, for sure: knowing that, there's an opportunity to play in that space that is being passed on for "greener" pastures: in other words, these companies are saying they don't want to make 60 dollar SP games, and that's understandable, but the SP market might survive in the A or AA space if the price is right.
If nobody wants to make smaller games, and just bite off huge chunks in hopes of making vast amounts of cash, nobody is telling them not to get rid of their golden geese here, but instead of investing big in a dangerous AAA SP game, make 3 or 4 smaller games using their already-there technology with smaller teams, and see if they can't find a break out success with good ideas rather than throwing huge amounts of cash at it and hoping it sticks.
Or they can just keep trying to push their luck in AAA SP space and see what happens, but my *guess* would be if you could figure out how to produce these games cheaper, control their costs, have smaller team sizes, and ask for less, then they can produce more in that span, and hope for a breakout success of one or more games rather than betting the farm on something big that underperforms in a huge way. It's just bet hedging.
Eventually being open-world, or having MP won't even be a silver bullet anymore. Then what do we do? Might be a good idea to try and figure out how to reliably have controlled-cost versions of these projects without just continually raising the bar to the point where you can't save yourself down the road, and I personally think the AA space should be explored for that.
But that's just like, my opinion.
I understand what Amy is saying but if anything, watching gameplay videos on youtube has led to me buying MORE single player games than I already do. I'll watch the opening into, maybe 30 minutes of gameplay and sometimes, the game gets me. Most recently was Hellblade. I watched the first 45 minutes or so and purchased it that night and started playing the next day and completing it a few days later.
Prey is absolutely not, Evil Within 2 I would call wide-linear.
Maybe Bethesda just has a really shit reputation. I didn't buy any of those games until sales and tech analysis specifically because I've been bitten by Bethesda in the past. (Playing Bethesda titles on PS3 = Ouch.)
There is an aspect to this that is the consumer's responsibility and it's the most naiive to assume otherwise.
Consumers need to check their entitlement and understand how budgets are handled and stop expecting the best thing ever while also expecting that best thing ever to dip to $20 or go up on YouTube within a month of release.
Yeah, pubs do dumb money-grubbing shit, and I call them out on it a lot - but don't dismiss all of this as a simple defense because she's mad a game she was working on got canned.
What are some examples of linear SP games in 2017 that sold a few million copies?
I can only think of Uncharted TLL and Mario Odyssey.
Yeah.
Not completely linear, but still story-based single player games.
Still though, those were fantastic games, and with a bit more of a push I think they could have done better. Both Prey and TEW had next to no push right up too release.
Bethesda are struggling most.
They're partially to blame for this as well, they should have eased into price increases over the years.
The fact of the matter though in the mid 90's the average price of a game was about $55, that average has moved very little. Games should be $89.99 right now in the US just based upon inflation, that doesn't even account for how much more costly it is to make games now. The reality is publishers and developers are getting screwed financially by sticking to this $59.99 standard, the only way they know how to recoup some additional earnings without raising prices and causing a huge problem is by implementing transactions in their games.
If things keep going the way they are a lot of companies are just going to shut down or move into something else, it's becoming financially unsustainable and if nothing changes will result in a crash.
Why does the 60$ price point need to be fixed? In Germany, most games have a luanch price point of 70€ nowadays and e.g. if you want to have the complete Fire Emblem Fates game, you needed to pay 90€ as well (for a single cartidge). You need to market it properly of course. I wouldn't have bought a game from Mrs. platformers-are-outdated, anyway, I require full focus on gameplay, not videogame stories.
Because it doesn't seem short-sighted to you to chalk up lack of sales to people watching it on youtube ? I'm sure it's responsible to say that everyone just go on and watch it on youtube to call it a day. A sensible, data-driven argument and not a handy generalization that everyone can use to justify an audience not buying.
It turned profitable quicker than devs expected, some months ago.
So just like Uncharted but a bit shorter?
So the problem is unnecesarily high budgets and greedy publishers. Not people watching games on YouTube and Twitch.
What she's saying makes a lot of sense to me. Like you can invest $100m in a single player game that might decent amount of profit... or you could invest the same money in a multiplayer title that could hit the jackpot and become ludicrously profitable.
If I think about the story based games (or let's say "experience based games") that I liked, almost none of them have super high production values. Life Is Strange, The Walking Dead, Abzu, Journey, Pony Island, The Stanley Parable, Katawa Shoujo... all mid or low budget games, and all manage to tell much better stories than a random Uncharted or Resident Evil. Yes, there are exceptions like The Last Of Us, but in general I think story based games simply need to keep an eye on the budget and pick a price accordingly.
People don't want to pay full price for a game that's over in a few hours and they won't replay (because no one replays games)? Fine, let's sell at half price. It's the reason why streaming is so popular, why buy a DVD/BR for 10-20€ and litter your house with plastic crap when you can just stream the movie once? Collectors will buy the disc, everyone else is fine with streaming.
Think about writing better stories instead of rendering every hair on Nathan Drake's ass.
People don't want to pay full price for a game that's over in a few hours and they won't replay (because no one replays games)? Fine, let's sell at half price. It's the reason why streaming is so popular, why buy a DVD/BR for 10-20€ and litter your house with plastic crap when you can just stream the movie once? Collectors will buy the disc, everyone else is fine with streaming.
Think about writing better stories instead of rendering every hair on Nathan Drake's ass.
Well a lot of them are 'buying' them months later when they are for sale for around $20 bucks.
Compared to the days of Acclaim, Midway, Neversoft, Iguana Entertainment, Sierra, Infogrames, CORE, Crave etc.
It's still greatly on life support.
If I recall, Resident Evil 7 was a pretty successful single player game last year. Relatively linear too.
So your suggestion for saving single player games is to RAISE the price?
Ok.
Well (I'm almost sure I'm mistaken when I say this but here it goes anyway), games should be in the first place an interactive and fun experience to the player, meaning it should promised something that we as costumers are not going to have by only watching the game.
If linear single player games are failing at sales is because they're not providing that singular experience that separates the gaming one from the other entertaining industries.
If linear single player games are failing at sales is because they're not providing that singular experience that separates the gaming one from the other entertaining industries.
It didn't sell anywhere near what Capcom had predicted for it.
I dunno. I'm having a hard time believing that games that are either single player, story driven, linear or all 3 are having a hard time selling.
Look at Xenoblade 2, Yakuza 0, Nier Automata, FFXV, Persona 5, Mario Odyssey, BotW.
Look at Xenoblade 2, Yakuza 0, Nier Automata, FFXV, Persona 5, Mario Odyssey, BotW.
But who can ? Paladins ? Lawbreakers ? It's not how the market works, lol
Sure, however I meant this generation which started out primarily small indie games and Triple AAA. The Double AA game has been making a comeback in relation to that start.
I was talking to you in my post. You did bring up consumer entitlement.
Capcom expected 4 million on day one, it's sold 4 million LTD...
A lot of different possible reasons for this: Genre switch, VR push, lackluster (to some) demo. Just might not be the perfect example.
It's not $60 this gen in North America with the falling Canadian dollar, and NA also includes Mexico and the Caribbean too.
Yes, I know with sales at launch you can get games for $60 or slightly cheaper in Canada still.
Anyway games are more expensive in other markets. Look at Japan, companies can charge a premium based on name alone like FFXV at launch which was about 9000y with tax at launch. And that is the price without the season pass too. Yes I know the price eventually sunk to the bottom of the ocean but still the point stands.
NieR still "only" did a bit over 2m units shipped and evidently did not cost as much as games like your Uncharteds and Battlefields. The 5m+ sales bracket is what you want for the games this conversation is about. 2m units sold at $60 (which isn't even what NieR got to factoring in sales) is nowhere close to successful on the types of budgets Amy is citing ($100m range). It is certainly possible to be succeful with "smaller" titles like NieR, Ni-Oh or Persona 5, but the biggest of big tent pole games for the biggest publishers cannot be moving only 2m units and genuinely do demand gargantuan investment and thus also demand gargantuan return.
So? Making games are risk regardless of your genre. Might as well take a risk with a bigger pay off.
This is a very sad reality for me. Especially because Arkane Studios is putting out the best FPS in many years, and they just don't sell.
Maybe for Japanese games, but they appeal to such a small niche in the market it hardly amounts to anything notable. Western AA's need to come back for there to be any real impact, that is what made the AA market thrive.
Ok, now that is becoming ridiculous. Publishers are devs, now ? Please don't equate people passionate enough to create a game with a company that profits from their labours and treats them horribly.