I think the divide with regards to budgets has strengthened as well. It seems games now are either AAA with loads of money dumped into them or indie/Kickstarter games with shoestring budgets.
There are plenty of games on Kickstarter that get massive, massive budgets, the problem is the people running them turn out to be basically scammers at worst, and financially incompetent at best. Look at Tim Schafer for instance. For his first kickstarter he asked for $400k and got $3.3 MILLION! And yet he still managed the project so poorly that he needed to do all sorts of tricks to make more money to finish the project. He broke the game into 2 parts, he released it on early access to try and make money there, getting involved with humble bundles, etc etc. He raised almost 10 FUCKING TIMES what he asked for and it was still a complete disaster. I can't even imagine what would have happened if they only just met their goal. Would the game have even come out at all? And the biggest joke of all? While this first project was floundering, TIm Schafer started ANOTHER fucking kickstarter for another game called Massive Chalice. You'd think he might try to at least wait until the first game is even completed before scamming people again. Lets not forget about the whole giant mess that was SpaceBase DF9. The short version is that this game was released via Steam Early access and was promised to get developed for a good long time. Then after half a year of no updates, suddenly they announce that they are going to go from Alpha 6 to the final 1.0 release, skipping over nearly everything that they promised to its backers. They literally just got sick of working on the game and decided to abandon it by phoning in the "final" release. What a fucking joke. You can read a Tim Schafer's response to the community here . It's hilarious and sad like watching a cringey trainwreck. Don't forget about Keiji Inafune, another dev who will go down in infamy as a kickstarter scammer. In his case he earned $3.8 Million when he only asked for $900k. After promising an amazing game and everyone believed it, he come up with a lazy phoned in unreal engine sidescroller that looked like a launch title for the PSX. And get this: IT STILL WASN"T ENOUGH MONEY. Because of how poorly managed it was, they had to create a second round of funding for the game. What an absolute joke. And if that wasn't enough now hes created 2 new kickstarters for his new game "Red Ash" and a crappy anime series to go with it. Just like Schafer, Inafune has no shame and sees no problem starting new projects while the old ones are left to flounder. /rant -doulomb
I really hate when people say this. Are you just trying to exaggerate? Or do you really think it looks like something from PS1? The problem is in writing you cannot tell. But some people say this about other things and actually mean it. If we really see a lot of these KickStarter high profile projects failing it'll certainly hurt anyone that actually could have succeeded that way. I'm certainly hoping Bloodstained is a success as I actually backed that one.
I'm not going to get hung up on semantics. The point is that the game doesn't look good. Its cheaply made and soulless and thats very sad. Just look at this comparison if you haven't seen it already: See what I mean? -doulomb
A lot of people (both in the industry and gamers) don't realize just how much money it costs to make a big game. Especially first-time devs have no idea what they've gotten themselves into, but as the above showed, even experienced developers don't quite know how much it will take to make the games they want to make.
Keiji Inafune and Tim Schafer are longtime industry veterans. Both of them should have known how to budget a game. There is simply no excuse. They are completely incompetent. -doulomb
I'm guessing they based their estimates on either A) getting outside funding (pretty likely), or B) legitimately not knowing how much money a publisher puts into a game/not knowing how Kickstarter works (they take a cut, and you have to pay taxes on that money, as well as payroll taxes (at least in the US))
All of the Souls games pretty much turn into grindfests though. And I say this as someone who beat both DS games. Yeah, they're cute and mildly challenging at first, but towards the end they're silly easy. Or if you play as a magic user they're silly easy 95% of the time.
Ever since the Atari there have been gems buried within a sea of mediocre dross. The NES, Master System, Gameboy, SNES, Mega Drive - they all had tons of horrible games. It's not really any different now than it was then. The shocking thing is the price has stayed the same, if not cheaper now than back in the good old days.
I think you're right. As much as people complain about DLC nickel-and-diming us, video games haven't really faced much inflation. We've had one price jump that I can remember, from $50-$60. I can't tell you how many times movies have faced higher prices, both in theater and on home media. We've never had our hobby be this inexpensive, at least in America in relation to the value of our dollar.
And games used to be all over the place in terms of pricing. A Super FX game could cost over $80 USD, whereas some SNES and Genesis games were more like $30. I don't think it was until the disc based systems took hold that games got a single unified pricing structure.
Gunpei Yokoi apparently also has 2 cents to throw in for this topic (from 1997, but man, he was on point with where games were heading back then and perfectly summed up how I generally feel about them): http://shmuplations.com/yokoi/
That's not exactly true, because there were still things like Greatest Hits releases that were cheaper than new games, usually $20.
I miss the ESPN NFL 2K games that sold for $20. Better than Madden (not too difficult, I know) and $30 cheaper. No wonder EA bought out the NFL rights from under 2K.
Depends of the age that you have. For me the new games are like the old from snes, megadrive. the new one you finish them once and it's done. With the old one you finish htem 1000000x and play again. The better graphic is not their advantage
