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>Absolutely true - but because games are time consuming to make you have to anticipate what will make money in 2-6 years. Or, hear me out, you can choose to st

>Absolutely true - but because games are time consuming to make you have to anticipate what will make money in 2-6 years. Or, hear me out, you can choose to stop chasing fads that might get outdated in 2-6 years, and actually make something original or make something tried and tested that's low-risk on a small budget. Gamers are simple people with simple wishes, they just want to have some fun, some escapism for a few hours, and they'll give you money for it. Sony's Astro bot is a clone of Mario64 but it works. Chasing fads is the laziest thing you can do, because it's easy to present to management/investors.

AlexandrB 2y ago
Making something on a small budget often means smaller returns as well. A large game studio would rather make a couple of billion on a huge AAA game than spread themselves across a dozen projects which collectively won't make the same returns - even if each one is profitable. This is the same reason that movie studios love chasing a few massive blockbusters instead of investing in a bunch of smaller projects. At the end of the day some of this comes down to market incentives. A public company is expected to grow. For a gaming company this means either shipping more games or bigger games. If you ship more games, at some point you start cannibalizing your own sales (e.g. how many different shooters can you make that would have non-overlapping audiences?) so you go bigger. Notice this affliction doesn't affect some of the more successful private, indie studios. Supergiant Games has shipped a pretty long string of hits, but the level of production for each one is relatively constant - they're not aiming for "AAA" graphics or scale. > Chasing fads is the laziest thing you can do, because it's easy to present to management/investors. Totally true, but at the end of the day you have to convince someone to spend $200,000,000+ on development. You need something concrete to point at as a reason why you'll be successful.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  >Making something on a small budget often means smaller returns as well. Yeah but you also don't loose the farm if it fails, which let's be real, is the more likely statistical outcome than success , unless you were surrounded by Yes Men who told you how much gamers are gonna love Concord lol and you were dumb enough to believe it because you're a bean counter and not a gamer. What hurts more, loosing a million dollars of a hundred million? Game Studios need to learn to be more scrappy and do more small scope projects on tighter Budgets instead of betting the farm on one hit game.

AlexandrB 2y ago

Making something on a small budget often means smaller returns as well. A large game studio would rather make a couple of billion on a huge AAA game than spread themselves across a dozen projects which collectively won't make the same returns - even if each one is profitable. This is the same reason that movie studios love chasing a few massive blockbusters instead of investing in a bunch of smaller projects. At the end of the day some of this comes down to market incentives. A public company is expected to grow. For a gaming company this means either shipping more games or bigger games. If you ship more games, at some point you start cannibalizing your own sales (e.g. how many different shooters can you make that would have non-overlapping audiences?) so you go bigger. Notice this affliction doesn't affect some of the more successful private, indie studios. Supergiant Games has shipped a pretty long string of hits, but the level of production for each one is relatively constant - they're not aiming for "AAA" graphics or scale. > Chasing fads is the laziest thing you can do, because it's easy to present to management/investors. Totally true, but at the end of the day you have to convince someone to spend $200,000,000+ on development. You need something concrete to point at as a reason why you'll be successful.

Cumpiler69 2y ago
>Making something on a small budget often means smaller returns as well. Yeah but you also don't loose the farm if it fails, which let's be real, is the more likely statistical outcome than success , unless you were surrounded by Yes Men who told you how much gamers are gonna love Concord lol and you were dumb enough to believe it because you're a bean counter and not a gamer. What hurts more, loosing a million dollars of a hundred million? Game Studios need to learn to be more scrappy and do more small scope projects on tighter Budgets instead of betting the farm on one hit game.