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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.
People from outside the industry have seen a profit opportunity and decided to invest. As investors, they think they’re smarter than everyone else, even the people they pay to do things for them. Since they have no attachment to games as a medium they’re wowed by flashy visuals, and since investors have the money you need to produce a game, you cater to their tastes if you want to get paid.
That, and I think graphics is the easiest part of a game to min/max. You can take any pile of garbage and hire a couple animators, 3D artists etc etc to make it look gorgeous, but it's difficult to find someone who can write a really good story every single year for a release