Slashdot Mirror
The High Cost of Gaming
MTV Games is reporting on the financial pinch next-gen gamers will feel now that the 360 is out. $60 games are drawing frustrations from both sides of the gaming industry. From the article: "Many developers and publishers say the reason for the price hike is simple: Next-gen games, because of graphics, coding, voice acting, cinema scenes and everything else gamers expect, cost more to make. 'As a studio we can certainly speak to the amount of man hours and increase in staffing for next-generation content,' said Cord Smith, the producer of February 2006 car-combat title 'Full Auto.' 'As a gamer, it seems like it costs a lot to enter this new generation.'"
I haven't payed $40.00 for a game since The Sims.
If I buy a game, I'm checking EBGames, eBay, Best Buy, Walmart, Amazon, wherever, and I'm finding the cheapest copy I can get. Most of the games I buy are older, simply because they're cheaper, great games, and I've never had the chance to play them.
Who's going to pay $60.00 for a game when there are plenty of excellent games you can grab for $5.00-$20.00?
Would I pay $30.00 or $40.00 for a new game I was anticipating? Sure, I guess so.
Any more than that, and more than $200.00 for the console, is just plain greedy.
They're blaming the cost of games on voice acting? That is the biggest load of crap ever becase that's like the once place they can hire good AND cheap actors to play the parts. However, instead of going that, developers are intent on paying big bucks to celebrities because they believe that it somhow legitimizes their game by having big name celebrities in the credits.
Billy West, a voice actor with the roles of Fry and Prof. Farnsworth from futurama to his credit, has an interesting article on The Onion - AV Club about how Hollywood pays people like Cameron Diaz 20 million for their voice in Shrek while overlooking the vetran voice actors in the industry. He makes a lot of good points about how good film actors don't make good voice actors and vice versa, since a voice actor has to learn to expression emotion without the use of his physical features, and how regular actors never really escape their own voice. He also has other interesting tibits about how voice actors typically help producers save money because they can do multiple different voices. I mean, would you guess that the same actor did the voices of Fry, Prof Farnsworth, Zapp Brannigan, and Zoidberg on Futurama?. Anyways, the point is that I don't buy the fact that the video game industry is all that interested in keeping prices low, because they could find cheaper means of production if they were truly interested in doing so.
What a load of carp. Right, so the technology is changing and we didn't realise it was going to cost more so we have to pass on the costs to you guys...sorry! Come on - technology is constantly evolving, the only difficulty is keeping your developers skills up to date. The technology gets better/shinier/more complicated (choose two) but costs overall do not go up, except for inflationary rises or where a major retooling is required (I can't think of anything of the top of my head - I was going to say something like a holographic display but we're already producing 3d!). This is just price gouging.
Fnord! Any sufficiently undocumented code is indistinguishable from magic.
One thing they waste far too much time on in many games is character models. I guess it makes for nice screenshots, but how often are you right up close to a character examining the detail on their boots?
This is at least true for FPSes. I guess RPGs and other more interactive games can use close-up detail. But thinking of UT2004, the character models have obviously been slaved over for many months, and are works of art; but the most you ever see is a couple of quick flashes as someone runs past. To be honest, the character models in the original Unreal Tournament (99?) were perfectly fine for an FPS.
The same mostly goes for weapon and power-up models. Gratuitous transparency and pretty textures is interesting for maybe the first 30 seconds, and then it could just be a yellow circle for all the player cares.
That's a big chunk of graphics they could simplify and spend much less time on. Further, it would save wasting lots of polygons on them.
The thing that really makes a big impression is the landscapes, and a lot of those are at least partially machine generated, so I guess they are probably a lot more efficient in terms of results for time spent.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke