Currently, in terms of the traditional console-oriented industry, the entire game market is rapidly moving towards some major turning point. Xbox console exclusive games have been moved to other platforms, and there are constant rumors that they intend to withdraw from the console market. PlayStaiton also hinted that it will actively move exclusive games to the PC platform. Not only that, more and more game publishers have laid off employees recently.
For ordinary consumers, the reasons behind this phenomenon are still confusing. After all, many developers who announced layoffs actually did not have the problem of poor game sales, which means there are deeper factors behind it. One of the biggest problems may be that increasingly Expensive development costs.
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Although there may not be too significant breakthroughs from the last generation to this generation, game development costs continue to soar. For example, “Marvel’s Spider-Man 2” for PS5 has a budget of up to 300 million US dollars. Compared with 2018 Compared with the previous work, it has been improved by three times. It has also brought a lot of pressure within PlayStation. Even though “Marvel’s Spider-Man 2” has achieved amazing sales performance as usual, Sony’s revenue has reached a 10-year low. Game development budgets that continue to balloon like a balloon will eventually lead to another reform.
In a recent interview with The Verge, former PlayStation studio head Shawn Layden mentioned the topic of rising game development costs, admitting that the console exclusive strategy will become an “Achilles ankle” after reaching a certain level ( fatal weakness).
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“When game development budgets cross $200 million, exclusivity becomes your Achilles heel. It shortens the market. Especially in a world full of service-based games and free-to-play games. Another platform is another way to open a channel. way, so that more people have the opportunity to enter. In free games, as far as we know, 95% of players never spend a dime. The biggest focus of this business is transformation. You must strengthen your business by opening up channels Odds. “Battlefield 2” showed PlayStation the potential of being released on the PC platform at the same time. By broadening the channels, more players can enter the game. As for the stand-alone game, it will not have the same urgency. But it cost 250 million If you spend 10,000 US dollars to develop a game, you will also hope to sell it to as many players as possible, even if it only increases sales by 10%. If the global installed capacity of game consoles can be traced back to the PS period to the present, regardless of period, the number of consoles cannot exceed 2 50 million, it just won’t happen.”
While bringing a game to more platforms can indeed help the team recoup costs, the price is that it can also hurt the reputation of console-exclusive platforms. The most efficient approach in the end may be to reduce the development cost of the game. Shawn Layden hopes to see the return of more “double-A” games like the many specialty titles Sony used to release.
“I’m afraid we have accepted that AAA games must bring at least 80 hours of gameplay and more than 50GB in size, and if we can’t meet these standards, then we can’t do anything. I hope to see the return of AAA games, I I support them all. When I look back at the PS2 games, there was so much diversity. You had God of War and Assassin’s Creed coming out, but you also had LocoRoco, SingStar, and Dance Dance. and more. Entertainment opportunities run the gamut. For $7 to $12 million, why not just throw in the towel and see where it goes? Katamari OMG, you can’t make a game like this today because you There’s no way to explain what it is. But now that all the blocking involves hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets, the risk you can take becomes even lower. You end up just being a scholar and making sequels, and that’s it. .” He said
It is worth mentioning that in the heated discussions about the future of game console hardware, Nintendo is often mentioned by players. There are many different reasons behind it. The key point is that after the Wii console generation, it gave up the pursuit of competing with top hardware until This generation of Nintendo Switch console has also not seen any changes. Although players often complain that Switch hardware lags behind PlayStation and Xbox consoles, it also allows Nintendo to deliver extremely stable performance in games and launch popular games that can achieve great sales without having to bear expensive development costs.
