I cancelled my $80 Collector's Edition preorder after the leaks hit. Took one look at what Naughty Dog did with that story, and I wanted no part of it.
I'll be curious to see who Sony fires as a result of all this. Naughty Dog's management being incompetent is pretty open knowledge at this point.
You are not alone in that feeling. I'm not sure I've seen a positive comment about the spoilers yet. On my side, I've got no personal investment in this. I've never played the first game, had no intention to ever play it and never had any interest in the sequel. My interest is merely from the scandal of it all with someone willing to put themselves in hot water by releasing it and how much the fans seem to be rejecting the game from the leaks.
I do think it also shows some of the big issues in the business of Gaming. I think about how many years in a row after an E3, people would often comment on how so many games look the same. It's still an issue that pops up today with post-apocalyptic worlds or generic fantasy rpg number nine. For a long time, it was always about first-person shooters and how they all seemed to blend together. That problem still exists but it doesn't seem as pronounced as it used to be perhaps because of Fortnite and Overwatch changing up some of that aesthetic. In any case, all these similar products have often caused many gamers to complain about developers not taking risks or trying new things. Having taken some time to understand just what it is that people are upset about from the leaks, a part of me appreciates that a developer was willing to take some risks with a property and story particularly a costly big-budget "AAA" type game. That said, I totally get why people are put off by the plot being revealed.
From my understanding and to put it in movie terms, it feels like this is an Aliens to Alien 3 situation. Has there ever been a case where that strategy has worked? EDIT: Dang it! I thought I was going to be the first to use the Alien 3 comparison but I took too long typing this all. Also thought referencing Alien 3 might be seen as a spoiler for people as I think it would be easy to correlate what that could mean as a reference. Taking a risk and having it fail, which seems to be where this outcome may be leading, could result in other companies using it as proof to keep playing it safe and churning out the same content. But that's why it is called a risk.
Going back to the budget part of it, that is another issue that this whole thing highlights. As Sony and Microsoft keep trying to push more and more powerful consoles from the PS3/360 to PS4/XB1 to PS5/SEX, so many third parties are killing themselves in trying to keep up in this graphics arm race. We haven’t posted much in the
Games Industry Death Watch thread but so many developers were shuttered in the past decade from trying to put out a big HD game that flopped in sales and thus never recouped the cost of development. These long development times have also resulted in a lot of developers slowing down the output in the number of games they’ve released in this decade compared to the past decade. It has resulted in companies basically putting all their eggs in one basket with no back-up plan (aside from porting stuff from their back catalogue in between and hoping to create a bit more cashflow from that).
I think about film studios. There have been times that a movie went way over budget and had a huge troubled development. Sometimes, the studio was able to survive the release of the movie because box office sales were high enough and sometimes studios shuttered when they flopped. However, one advantage that movie studios have or had to survive even when films flopped that were expensive but not outrageously so like a Waterworld or Heaven’s Gate is that they also had other films to release during the year that could be profitable and make up for a loss from a different film. Usually a film studio shutting down was from putting out multiple stinkers in a row so that the losses piled up faster with nothing to offset them. If a game developer has multiple games releasing in the year then it may be that they can overcome some losses if they want to take a risk on some titles but when they put years and years into one title and it has to sell enough to cover costs of development and provide income for the next development cycle then I don’t see how taking any risks can be justified when it comes to the reception of the product.
From 2007 – 2020, we’ve seen Wii dominate as market leader then PS4 and now Switch has taken off. Two of those consoles were weaker in graphics than their competition. (The Nintendo ones obviously.) Graphics are nice but they clearly aren’t the deciding factor for a lot of people. With a larger userbase like Wii and Switch is getting, developers have the potential to sell a large amount of product and they can do so without trying to be on the cutting edge of graphical prowess. With how the industry has gone in the past 15 years, Iwata’s decision that Nintendo was not going to try and pursue a graphics arm race with the competition is looking more and more like one of the best business decisions the company ever made. By cutting down on development time from trying to push a new standard gaming graphics, developers could start lowering the costs sunk into games which could allow them to take more risks and maybe even churn out a few other crowd pleasers in the same generation to help mitigate some risk.
Topic: Meanwhile, Over At The Other Developers... (Read 18446 times)
