I feel the vast majority of that “cost” goes right into an execs pocket while the pay for those actually doing the work haven’t raised much.

I feel like most AAA games could save a lot of money by not fluffing up the game to be a hundred hours of tedious crap.

75% of my Switch library is indie games that cost $20-30. I miss those middle-shelf games from the early 2000s that maybe weren’t super polished but tried something new and could sink a couple hours into, and the indie scene fills that niche. Not every game needs to be a spectacle. Hell, more often then not the…

I’m not shocked. Ever sat through the end credits of a AAA game? Takes almost as long to get through them as the game itself, and this is for a long game. All those people have to get paid, and sometimes it’s not even a complete list.

I get your point and I’m on the same boat. Now if we go to say IGN’s facebook comments we can see that almost every single one values spectacle and big setpieces over anything else. Just see their comment section for best games of all time and the like.

There seems to be a growing perception that every AAA game must be a forever-game with 60+ hours of busy-work over a highly replayable game.

Thing is, those marketing budgets are necessary. Not for you and me but dor the kinds of people who only play AAA games and don't read any type of gaming news site with regularity. And believe it or not, those kinds of folks are the majority of the gaming space

I do wonder how much a issue is with management with poor planning, two examples I think of are Anthem and Cyberpunk 2077, Anthem was in "development" for six or seven years but actual productive development was less than 2 years

Ad the thing is it doesn’t need to be this way. The last AAA game I played a ton of was AC: Valhalla and I didn’t finish it. With tools like unreal engine 5, game development should be getting cheaper, not more expensive.

Yeah, those marketing budgets are fucking ridiculous.

As someone who does not play Pokemon games, shouldn’t people criticize Nintendo if a sequel has more bugs or is less polished than they expected?

We get it, you’re a Nintendo fan boy to the point where you’d accept a polished turd from them in return for 70 dollars.

Amazing how people feel entitled to products that work properly and contain the content that was promised.

Yes. Is “make sure the game is actually playable before you release” really such an unreasonable expectation?

Yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if “45 minutes of footage” would’ve been edited down to like 15-20 minutes or so if it had made the final film.

Avengers: Infinity War almost started with a 45-minute invasion of Xandar showing Thanos retrieving the Power Stone, according to the characters’ creator, Jim Starlin. It probably would have been epic, but Marvel apparently ultimately scrapped footage for the ambitious prologue to save money and keep the movie under…

No offense to Jim Starlin but if they included a sequence with Thanos attacking Xandar I can’t imagine it would’ve been anywhere near 45 minutes. It just doesn’t make sense. Why dedicate so much time to Thanos killing a bunch of dudes we don’t care about (and John C. Reilly)? Why spend so much more time on that…

Avengers: Infinity War almost started with a 45-minute invasion of Xandar showing Thanos retrieving the Power Stone, according to the characters’ creator, Jim Starlin. It probably would have been epic, but Marvel apparently ultimately scrapped footage for the ambitious prologue to save money and keep the movie …

Y’know when I started this I thought it was gonna be something about how Pokemon Home couldn’t track all these variations or whatever but it seems to come down to the fact that two Pokemon games developed by third-parties use a simplified calculation for the spots. So couldn’t future games just... use the old…

Talks about billions of variations, only shows one LOL