High-detailed art is expensive, building systems that are easy to expand in the future, without major bugs, is difficult, and balancing the various elements of gameplay to make a fun experience is a skill that takes lots of experience to develop. All of these things cost time and money.
AAA budgets are mostly wasted, though. There's a few major elements to it:
Meetings. So many fucking meetings. Getting things designed, examined, redesigned, discussed in committee, approved, estimated, re-approved, and then assigned for development takes weeks. Then implementation might start, if the leadership's priorities don't change before that point.
Speaking of leadership's priorities, so much wasted work because a feature that's 3/4 done is no longer the most important thing to build. Better scrap it or leave it to rot in a branch forever, because by the time you return to it everything around it has changed so you need to rewrite it anyway.
Marketing, HR, way more QA people than are necessary, and just hundreds of people who make things slower with no material benefit to the quality of the product, but they're happy to take salaries while they do it.
And plenty more besides, before even factoring in any of the modern culture war crap.
The flipside, indie games, is shit as well because the skills needed to make the game are very different from the ones needed to get people to play it. I said marketing is a waste above, and that's mostly because marketing departments waste shittons of money on counterproductive crap, but marketing is still necessary to get any income whatsoever. Also, the indie space is 99% populated by people who think it's easy to make a fun game.
The good news is, distributed patronage is possible. It's most advanced in the comics space, and it's use in the games space is mostly related to porn games right now. However, if gamers are willing to go back to a subscription model, but subscribe to an independent developer instead of a corporate GaaS account, they can bypass the corrupt institutions and lay a foundation for a better industry. I'm betting my life's savings on it right now as I work on my own project with that ambition.
I'm a veteran of the old Heroes of the Storm dev team, and I've hated to see that game abandoned by Blizzard. So I decided to make a better version of it that avoids the technical and design pitfalls that Heroes fell into.
It's early days yet, definitely not presentable for a few months. But we'll see how I and my friends do with it.
High-detailed art is expensive, building systems that are easy to expand in the future, without major bugs, is difficult, and balancing the various elements of gameplay to make a fun experience is a skill that takes lots of experience to develop. All of these things cost time and money.
AAA budgets are mostly wasted, though. There's a few major elements to it:
And plenty more besides, before even factoring in any of the modern culture war crap.
The flipside, indie games, is shit as well because the skills needed to make the game are very different from the ones needed to get people to play it. I said marketing is a waste above, and that's mostly because marketing departments waste shittons of money on counterproductive crap, but marketing is still necessary to get any income whatsoever. Also, the indie space is 99% populated by people who think it's easy to make a fun game.
The good news is, distributed patronage is possible. It's most advanced in the comics space, and it's use in the games space is mostly related to porn games right now. However, if gamers are willing to go back to a subscription model, but subscribe to an independent developer instead of a corporate GaaS account, they can bypass the corrupt institutions and lay a foundation for a better industry. I'm betting my life's savings on it right now as I work on my own project with that ambition.
I'm a veteran of the old Heroes of the Storm dev team, and I've hated to see that game abandoned by Blizzard. So I decided to make a better version of it that avoids the technical and design pitfalls that Heroes fell into.
It's early days yet, definitely not presentable for a few months. But we'll see how I and my friends do with it.