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Designers of last year’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 used the processing power of the PlayStation 5 so Peter Parker’s outfits would be rendered with realistic textures and skyscraper windows could reflect rays of sunlight.
That level of detail did not come cheap.
Insomniac Games, which is owned by Sony, spent about $300 million to develop Spider-Man 2, according to leaked documents, more than triple the budget of the first game in the series, which was released five years earlier. Chasing Hollywood realism requires Hollywood budgets, and even though Spider-Man 2 sold more than 11 million copies, several members of Insomniac lost their jobs when Sony announced 900 layoffs in February.
Cinematic games are getting so expensive and time-consuming to make that the video game industry has started to acknowledge that investing in graphics is providing diminished financial returns.
It was clear this year, however, that the live service strategy carries its own risks. Warner Bros. Discovery took a $200 million loss on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, according to Bloomberg. Sony closed the studio behind Concord, its attempt to compete with team-based shooters like Overwatch and Apex Legends, one month after the game released to a minuscule player base.
“We have a market that has been in growth mode for decades,” Ball said. “Now we are in a mature market where instead of making bets on growth, companies need to try and steal shares from each other.”
Ismail is worried that major studios are in a tight spot where traditional games have become too expensive but live service games have become too risky. He pointed to recent games that had both jaw-dropping realism — Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (individual pebbles of gravel cast shadows) and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II (rays of sunlight flicker through the trees) — and lackluster sales.
To be fair, I don't think all of the blame can be laid on execs. Game directors and Art directors are often the source of the issue.
I've seen execs come to a studio and say: "Make something AAA, a single player game with unique gameplay and a great 10 hour story, and get it done in a couple of years. Don't worry about the bottom line, we want a showcase experience."
Then the directors come back with: "Okay, showcase you say? How about a AAAA 20v20 open world multiplayer shooter (nobody is doing that!), SaaS (to keep'em coming back), with ultra realistic graphics (it'll be epically fun that way), a $100million budget (we'll outsource to save money), MTX so we can make tons of money (we get profit sharing right?), and we do it in 3 years (for work-life balance)?"
Devs are just sitting there shaking their heads and thinking... "Here we go again..."
I 100% believe most of these unrealistic expectations come from the execs. Decisions like these aren't made by art directors. They come from on high. Art directors and game directors aren't the ones making the monied decisions.
I've seen it first hand. Repeated statements by the corp execs asking for one thing, studio directors trying to push something else.
I mean, I've also seen execs ask for ridiculous shit as well, I'm just saying sometimes it really does come from the studios themselves.