High end graphics are killing the games industry

[Mamoulian War]

Few words of Chris Roberts on making more money with lower sales numbers...

 

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-04-22-chris-roberts-how-incredible-community-transforms-development

 

"You'll still have these big blockbusters, and that's going to be the domain of EA, Activision and Ubisoft," Roberts said. "What I do think what has happened is that the middle ground that used to exist, and the publishers used to fund, like my games or an RTS, would sell a million or two million units. On the Activision and EA scale of things they're not getting out of bed unless they think it's five million units, and they really want ten million or more. They probably lose money selling two million units. Whereas if I sell two million units I'm making a lot of money, for two reasons. I don't have the same overhead and costs, and also I capture a lot more of the dollars. On our stuff right now, we capture 96 percent of the dollars; that goes straight to us."

"In the old model as a developer I would have captured 20 cents on the dollar," Roberts said. "Ultimately that means I can make the same game for a fifth of the revenue, a fifth of the sales, and I can be more profitable, and I can exist on lower unit sales. I think that's good for gamers, because crowdfunding and digital distribution are enabling more nichey stuff to be viable. It's also allowing gamers to have their voice heard, and have their influence earlier in the process. You don't really have your input into how Call of Duty's being made."

 

 

And one out of topic quote of him, but it made me smile when thinking about all the PC evangelists

 

The PC is not the only possible platform for Star Citizen; Roberts' reaction to the PS4 is positive. "It's a nice piece of hardware, but I think it's going to be hard for them to go much less than $400 without taking a massive loss on it," he said. "The good news is that it's essentially a PC, so that means PC owners will get much better ports of console games. I'm not a PC elitist by any means; if I could be on the PS4, and they were open, and I could do the updating and all the sort of stuff we're trying to do on Star Citizen, then I would definitely consider putting it on PS4, because it's essentially a PC with a friendlier operating system."

Edited April 26, 2013 by Mamoulian War

[Hassat Hunter]

The PC evangelists win if all consoles turn into PC's though XD

 

"NEW PS4 VIDEO-CARD RACE BETWEEN ATI AND NVIDIA"

[greylord]

The Xbox and Xbox 360 basically are PC's.  Always were.

 

the PS3 isn't quite, but it ran linux and you can break it to run like a PC with linux.

 

Not that I would with mine, but it can be done supposedly.

[HoonDing]

What's considered 'high-end graphics' nowadays? 90% of AAAAAAAAAA games nowadays are console ports and come with mediocre at best graphics by default.

[AwesomeOcelot]

The Xbox and Xbox 360 basically are PC's.  Always were.

 

the PS3 isn't quite, but it ran linux and you can break it to run like a PC with linux.

 

Not that I would with mine, but it can be done supposedly.

That's not what people mean by "like a PC". The Xbox 360 wasn't basically a PC especially since Apple switched to Intel (Mac wasn't always included under "PC"), the 360 had a PowerPC CPU and 512MB of shared RAM, which you would not find in new PCs at that time especially gaming ones. Linux is famous for running on every piece of hardware.

 

The Xbox was more like a PC, it had a 733Mhz Pentium 3, Nvidia GPU similar to the Geforce 3, a HDD in every console, Windows NT OS similar to XP, apart from the memory which was low compared to gaming PCs. The PS4 and next Xbox are even more like PC, they have AMD CPU and GPU that'll be in PCs, 8GB RAM that's common for PC (although PS4 will use GDDR5). When people say a console is like a PC they're talking about x86 architecture, a GPU in a family found in PCs with DirectX or OpenGL support (which was the case with the PS3), and an amount of memory found in contemporary gaming PCs. All 3 are the case with the PS4 and next Xbox, the only thing that's missing is HDD as default.

[Zoraptor]

Hmmm found another related article that blames the publishers for some of the bankruptcies

And a bit more on some Squenidos problems wrt Thief. Not surprising that SE is in problems- or requiring such large sales numbers- if they're doing things like spending months making press demos that are incompatible with the base game. Everyone knows that it happens (eg the infamous 'Radiant AI' demo for Oblivion that simply could not happen in the finished game) but the length of time and resources taken...

[alanschu]

Yeah, making sure that your demo work aligns somewhat with the project goals is pretty paramount IMO.  Especially for a bigger studio that feels those types of press demos are necessary in their marketing campaign.

[Zoraptor]

On a related note, Gearbox and Sega are getting sued over the A: CM gameplay video/ demo fiasco. I normally don't like litigiousness of this nature very much (the attempt to sue over the ME3 ending was cringe inducing) but I'm a lot less down on it in this case. It's understandable when gameplay changes over the course of a game's development but this was pretty on the nose and clearly- from a non legal/ layman perspective- intended to give a misleading impression rather than just to accentuate the positive/ eliminate the negative/ latch on to the affirmative and not mess with Mr Inbetween as you'd expect from any advertising.

 

And if it will stop resources being- in an end consumer sense- wasted on peripheral manipulations and Thief like diversions it may even have a direct benefit.

[LordCrash]

Oh yes, I will destroy my new graphics card as soon as possible....

 

Stupid topic, sorry....