Naughty Dogs plan was never to make “Factions, but in TLOU 2". They were considerably more ambitious than that before Bungie was ever involved. Bungie was brought in as a reality check of someone who knows what getting in over your head with live service design looks like, and ND failed that reality check.

You’ve got the directionality here entirely backwards. Sony did not bring Bungie in to try to turn it into Destiny, Naughty Dog was doing that all on their own (which I’m sure is what Sony wanted from them), and Bungie was brought in to make sure Naughty Dog wasn’t unknowingly making an Anthem since they have no…

They’re not really accusations as much as observations, but for backgrounds sake, sure. I have a 4 year degree in game design, and I’m a working software engineer. It’s always possible there is some kind of absurd resource bottlenecking occurring, but if that’s the case it’s still a staggering failure of leadership,…

You’re right, I should qualify: the most creatively bankrupt leads in a position of this amount of resources and prestige. Better? No other company, even company’s frequently derided for being consistently derivative like Ubisoft, has as poor of a grasp on the fundamentals of good systems design as Bethesda. And that…

I disagree with that premise entirely. There is very, very little “ambitious” about Starfield.

That feels like wishcasting on systems that, in different hands with different design goals and a different understanding of incentives, reward structures, and compelling player choice, could be good. I’ve felt plenty of…

What you’re feeling is a simple lack of competency at the top. Todd Howard and his cabal of leads are some of the most creatively bankrupt people currently working. There a ton of incredibly talented people at Bethesda, but they’re largely among the rank and file. The people leading big picture systems design just do…

Well, we’ve got the lore to backup the preoccupation now, at least.
This was a cute reflection. Best of luck finding the ‘home’ in wherever you’re at.
Maybe one day you’ll even feel comfortable enough in it to give other parts of these games some screen time. 😉

Please for the love of god go back and read my initial post, read the guy who responded, my response, and then when your thick skull jumped in, and then come back to me. For fucks sake.

“If you ignore all of Nintendo and Sega, who completely dominated the home console market during this time period, then $60-$70 games weren’t common when you said they were”
lol okay bud, I think we’re done here. The entire point was that $60-$70 was not at all unheard of prior to the 360 generation which was the…

No problemo:

I don’t think you understand just how expensive game development costs have gotten, if you think the price of even the biggest games in the 90s is even on the same order of magnitude of current blockbusters. Shenmue was famous for being ludicrously, impossible-to-recoup overbudget at a total cost of ~$50M. Modern mega-…

Did you respond to the wrong guy? I think maybe you did.

There’s our boy! I’m coming around on it; we’re this far down, commit to the bit. Every single image from any of these games better feature that virtual mug front and center.

Well, 2 things, 1) just because a game doesn’t sell a ton doesn’t make a it a bad game. There have been countless exceptional games that for various reasons just struggled to find an audience when they came out. 2) yes! We want studios to make ‘bad games’, because if they never make bad games, it means they’ve stopped…

Nope! Sega Genesis games also cost $60-$70 regularly. Pretty much every system except the PS1, which typically sold for $50. That was more exception than rule though. Home console games since the late 80s went for $60 very, very regularly.

Idk that I’d call it routine. That’s a pretty huge success for most games. And games were absolutely selling in a million copies by the 90s, when production costs were still a tiny fraction of what they are today. There’s a lot of complexities to teasing out exactly how everything has scaled out, but it is still true…

I explained to you how it works, and you just went “no it doesnt, nuh uh, capitalism!” okay, bud.

Yeah, I agree with a lot of that. “Distribution costs have dropped to next to nothing” is still true, but I was never making the claim that that somehow means publishers are pocketing the difference. It’s a very different world than 1995, in many many ways.

Correct, because games have become such expensive risks, many publishers would much rather extract as much money as they can out of known hits to defray the costs of any of the games that don’t hit, which is what those revenue streams are.