Tempest

Not necessarily my favorites, but definitely the ones that have been the most important in my life - either because they defined my tastes, or because they just kept me sane.

Navok noted that if a game costs $100 million to make over five years, it has to beat what the company could have returned investing a similar amount in the stock market over the same period. “For the 5 years prior to Feb 2024, the stock market averaged a rate of return of 14.5%. Investing that $100m in the stock market would net you a return of $201m, so this is our ROI baseline,” he explained.

Besides production budgets, there are also marketing costs, platform fees, and other factors such as discounts to take into account.

If you're reading this and thinking "Then make cheaper games" oh boy, do I have a surprise for you.

So game companies have several ways to increase the ROI for their products: decrease costs, increase price, or increase audience size. As it is hard for single-player titles to signficiantly icnrease the number of players, Novak believes that publishers will continue to charge more for their games. The new $70 base price already seems too much for many customers, so companies try to come up with tricky monetization methods, including various deluxe editions priced at $100 or even higher.

Absolute imbeciles. We’re living in an era where customers have less and less purchasing power, where people can - and should - make more precise decisions when buying products, with wide availability of other options that aren’t AAAA titles, so what are execs thinking of? Charge more, obviously.

It is unrealistic to invest 150 millions in a game and expect a profit because you’re disconnected from your customer base. And you have the bare minimum of self awareness to consider that investing less and expecting less growth is an option, but choose instead to ignore it and push ahead with infinite growth. The development schedule of your average AAAA title is already almost as long as a console generation, there’s nothing that can be done if suits are staring at this wall and choosing to bash their head against it, rather than try alternative options.

This is the literal only reason these ghouls compare the economic expectations of the game industry with that of the stock market.

There is only one reason to do any of this and it's the marching song of capitalism: Grow or Die. The Myth and Belief of Infinite Growth. We can't just be content meeting needs and giving players what they want; we have to Grow and Make All The Money otherwise we die.

This is not suits bashing their heads against a wall and trying alternative options, this is a conscious decision made by people who know exactly what they're doing. There's no stupidity going on here. It's all pure unfiltered malice. Even if giving us everything we want and making the most player-friendly, time-respectful game imaginable was on the cards, if it didn't lead to Infinite Growth, they will do it once and then never do it again because it will have proven itself as a bad investment.

There is nothing to expect from anything that bears the so-called "triple A" moniker but this kind of shit. It's all corpo, all the way down.

I dunno if it is with FF14 yet, but... Whenever possible, whenever practical. Steal it, mod it, make it your own. If you can't literally do that all the time, you can at least make it an attitude, a way of thinking. The only good game is the game you have control over - the game must never have control of you (or your finances, which is effectively the same).

I know its a boomer take, but the concept of Video Game Guides peaked with textual GameFAQs.

Like, occasionally having a picture is nice to figure something out, but other than that Video Guides and the video game site Guide Spam has just been people re-inventing the wheel but worse each time.

The only "improvement" I want to see in video game guides is something even more basic that gamefaqs, like a spoiler free check list I can just use to make sure I haven't missed something.

Video game guides peaked with basic-ass text guides because not everyone has the attention span to sit through a video guide and not every video game guide NEEDS to be a video in the first place.

It's made worse with how completely corrupted with ads and promotional content and time-wasters the average "10-15 minute" video guide has become, you either want an impractical super-long-form guide that may as well be an LP, or you want to go back to the goddamn GameFAQs guide because at least you can CTRL+F, read it at your own pace, and it isn't bothering you with FUCKING ADS when you get to a specific part of it.

(Shoutouts to CyricZ for making the best GameFAQs guides ever; the ones on Yakuza/Like A Dragon games.)

It is SO annoying and impractical to watch a video guide - at least to me - that I genuinely think it is a worse experience in the 97% of cases where text is better suited to explain how to do X or Y. In the 3% of cases I want to see it in video action I am still losing out, because I most likely need help with a segment that is hard to explain in text, and there is no way that's longer than a few minutes.

But I still have to deal with annoying, unhelpful, overly long videos because the uploader cares more about subscriber count and ad revenue than putting out helpful content. And don't mention YT Shorts to TikTok to me; these things annoy me on principle, they're not designed to be helpful. (That might be the "boomer take" part...)