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[-] VirgilMastercard@reddthat.com 35 points 1 week ago

He says that like big budget studios are barely scraping by. Piss off. AAA games are massively profitable. What he really means is that endless growth is the most important thing for investors/shareholders and that we should all just shut up and accept it.

They could get the regular £50 from me for the game, but their greed means they'll get £0. I'll just pirate it (if/when it releases on PC). And I'm sure there will be a lot of people with the same mindset.

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Some AAA games are massively profitable. If you want to see which ones weren't, look at the studios that got shut down or went through massive layoffs in the past few years. But if they're not selling that many copies at $60, the thought that seemingly never crosses their minds is to stop spending $200M on a single project that's make or break for the studio.

[-] LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 week ago

Shit the hi fi rush team got laid off. Success doesn’t guarantee shit.

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It's true, there are outliers like that. But if you're looking at shutdown studios or massive layoffs at random, it's going to generally be because the game they made lost money. In Hi-Fi Rush's case, to the best anyone can tell, it's because Satya Nadella changed the direction of Microsoft at a time when Tango Gameworks was starting a new project, which means there's the least sunk costs on a project that was going to be several years away from returning a profit.

[-] qarbone@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

They were probably on slightly profitable. Or, Money forbid, only breaking even.

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Back of the napkin math on a number of them says that a number of them probably took a bath on what was put into them. I get the cynicism, and in many cases you're right, but it's been a bad time for video games lately. An industry-wide number of how many billions of dollars video games make is almost entirely coming from only a handful of games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. Games like Star Wars Outlaws and Forspoken probably did lose a ton of money. Games like Concord, Avengers, and Suicide Squad lost so much money that it was impossible to not notice it, and they were each to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. There are a lot of games out there, and the dollars tend to flow to very few of them, relatively speaking. But I'd still argue the solution is to cut costs, not increase prices.

[-] LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Many, if not most, AAA games are actually somewhat risky investments for studios. I’m not sure where you’re getting this idea from.

Is corporate greed a huge problem? Yes. But also, when you’re investing $200mill+ over 5 years for a $60 product, you need to sell a fuck ton to make it work. Literally millions of copies. And there isn’t enough buying power right now in particular for everyone to make it.

this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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