Mentioned it in one of the other threads about this but it bears repeating:
BG3 did not come out of nowhere. It wasn’t a case of Wizards of the Coast giving money to a random studio and getting a masterpiece out.
Baldurs Gate 3, as a product, was officially in development since approximately 2019. It released into early access on Steam in 2020 and 1.0 in 2023. It received repeated injections of cash through things like fricking google stadia over that period.
But also? Baldurs Gate 3 didn’t begin development in 2019. Larian had been pestering/pitching the Wizards since freaking 2014 when they were still working on the kickstarted Divinity Original Sin 1. And Larian, as a studio, had been making CRPGs since 2002’s Divine Divinity.
BG3 was agame with 3 years of active development and 21 years of experience and expertise.
When studios get shuttered because they aren’t immediately profitable? You inherently have people who decide “I am done with this shit” and either were successful enough to enter early retirement or transition to related industries. You lose the experience that makes a “three year game” possible. Sometimes that is a high profile creative lead. But more often that is the people who don’t get to go on stage at the keighleys but who are interpreting said creative leads and actually making the mechanics and story beats we all love.
Fuck EA. They are a horrible company that has mismanaged so many IPs and engaged in decades of worker abuse. But understand that we are also likely losing hundreds, if not thousands, of experienced game developers which will make future games from other studios worse.
And before people say “fuck that, I like indie games”: Clair Obscur is the poster child of that and for very good reason. Maybe do some research as to who those core 30 people are (hint: They mostly were head hunted from Ubi et al) and where their money came from. And then think about what happens when there aren’t major studios to head hunt from.
Larian also had to sell 30% of their company to Tencent to raise more money during development after they already raised money on Kickstarter. If it was a case of WotC just giving money they probably wouldn‘t have had to do that. Good games take time but also a lot of money. Let‘s hope they‘re not selling more of their company any time soon because they could end up being the one being pointed at.
One thing I love about the original rogue legacy is that it has shoutouts to the dev’s previous games. None of them look great but it makes it clear that even this game that feels like their first isn’t, it’s the product of years of smaller games. RL1 is a great game, and it gave them the skills and money to do RL2 which was a masterpiece.
I love indie games, but they aren’t popping up with noobs designing a masterpiece on a shoestring budget except in very rare instances and that involves the budget not accounting for their time.
Also I miss the era of flash games, especially as it proved a good way for everyday people to learn these skills as a hobby and the best could move to professionalize.
How many times do the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 need to explain the basics of how to make a popular game and we all treat it like deep wisdom?
Not that there’s anything wrong with what they’re saying. I just feel like it only sounds like deep wisdom because the industry is so fucking broken.
How many times do the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 need to explain the basics of how to make a popular game and we all treat it like deep wisdom?
I mean, I grew up basically raised by PBS and even saturday morning cartoons and thought that it would be basic, fundamental knowledge in the world today that reason and knowledge are power, that con-men will tell you what you want to hear, and not to believe people who say they’re “the best” and instead look at empirical evidence of all claims.
I thought “wow the future is going to be amazing, we have all these programs that are telling us kids how to live, how to navigate a complex world, we will have a future of starships and science and wonders!”
Now I’m here every day talking to the team I manage when they share obviously AI-generated “news articles” about scientists discovering mermaid cities and trying to get permission to spread their essential oil pyramid scheme through the company.
As a species, we are far, far stupider than we want to admit. As individuals, sure we each have great potential, but when you get more than one person in any kind of situation, the intelligence levels drop to the lowest common-denominator, and the more people, the lower that level drops.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with what they’re saying. I just feel like it only sounds like deep wisdom because the industry is so fucking broken.”
-Competent soldiers commenting on the Art of War.
Truth. A big chunk of that book is explaining to nobels that war is expensive, and maybe you just shouldn’t.
I believe Sven Vincke just likes to dunk on them. Can’t really blame him for it either. I’d do the same.
thats exactly why, if it wasn’t broken no one would be saying anything.
its like a bunch of people running a marathon and a few take the bridge across while most others jump into the river because its moving faster
Gonna have to do it forever until businesses figure out that half of what makes a game good is that it needs to be a literal passion/art project, and not just a checklist of shit that needs to get done.
The fuck he talking about? Obviously it has worked before. How else can you explain yearly COD releases making billions in revenue?
That it’s a losing strategy in the long term was always obvious, but get this: whomever’s in charge only cares about the numbers of the following quarter. That the company will go under in 10 years is literally not his problem, that’s the next schmoe’s problem.
Yearly CoD releases are taking longer to make and costing more to produce though; the most recent CoD we have numbers for, which was a number of years ago at this point, cost $700M to make, and that was the most expensive one at the time. They used to have two studios alternating releases every other year. Now there are three studios on a rotation with about a dozen support studios that all used to make other games, and now they just make CoD.
“Charging more” is where this gets ambiguous though. A game like Assassin’s Creed charges less these days than it used to, relative to how much content they put in the box. I’m long since checked out of Assassin’s Creed, but I think the average game could stand to be leaner and cost the same in the interest of coming out faster and for less money to produce. That would be called shrinkflation in any other industry, which is the same as charging more.
You cannot convince me it cost $700M to make any of the recent CoD games. They are rehashes of each other. That has to include literally every dollar spent during the games development lifecycle across all studios and the publisher, right? Otherwise they are just pissing money away.
It is development spend + marketing spend + post-launch DLC spend. Even forking the same code base, you can see where the money goes. The campaigns are original each time, new map design requires time and money, etc. In the past 5 years, there has probably been a CoD game that cost $1B to make, as this data is from 2020.
If it includes marketing then yeah, it’s mostly that. $700M is an absolutely absurd astronomical amount for what CoD is, on a purely development basis.
I usually hear of marketing spend matching development cost, so it’s probably closer to 50/50. The documents that these figures came from didn’t itemize them, but it’s notable that 2020 is when current gen consoles came out, and more fidelity usually correlates to more time and money to make the assets.
I don’t think this is quite right. CoD titles do take a long time to develop. They‘re just rotating studios, so they can achieve a yearly release cadence (the last six entries in the series had five different studios working on them). Also, they are by no means getting cheaper. According to court documents development costs rose from $450 million to over $700 million from 2015 to 2020 alone.
Aren’t the cod games made by 3 different studios that take turns with their releases? Or did they stop doing that? I remember infinity ward, Treyarchand I can’t recall the 3rd
Sledgehammer Games. They never really kept the cycle, they kept fucking up and others had to come in to help etc. There’s got to be disatrous management at the studios.
It’s weird to me that game devs don’t experiment with alternative organizational structures more often, kind of like Motion Twin; or how they’re only just beginning to unionize in some places. The “capital” in game development is a little bit computer hardware, but otherwise the vast majority of value in a game design studio is the human beings and their talent and skills.
I cannot think of any other industry where the workers are more essential, and management more superfluous and replaceable.
A lot of the value is in the IP or existing assets/engine/codebase.
If you are starting a new IP then fuck it you may as well go with an alternative structure over a giant corp.
Capitalism doesn’t really see building a well treated highly compensated team of exceptional high skill workers as consistently generating more money for them.
For this to work you need a few people at the helm who actually give a shit about long term results. Capital wants bigger numbers with each earnings report which doesn’t always happen with gaming.
I for one have no comprehension as to how blizzard has maintained it’s following, but it’s a great example for how even the best companies can turn to shit by shareholder/board member directions. The money got too big with WoW.
Works for Motion Twin.
Relies on proper leadership that isn’t following current MBA principals.
It’s too easy to go for a cash grab. Broadcom is a great example.
deleted by creator
Yeah, but have you considered the fact that this gives Saudi Arabia &/or Jared Kushner “anti-cheat” level access to millions & millions of PCs in the USA?
That is reason enough to never buy another EA game.
Ahead of the curve, never bought one :3
It’s been about 11 years. Dragon Age: Inquisition was the last one for me.
Tobias Funke “But it just might work this time!”
Imagine the games they could have made using that money. Potentially would make said company even bigger than EA. The budget allows for 25x GTA VI
Is this what experts generally refer to as the “Fucking Around” phase?
they gotta make that 55b back now
But Larian themselves released a buggy mess even with early access for 3 years? Why did they rush it out?
Fuck EA and AAA in general, but like practice what you preach Swen. You aren’t the small studio you think you are anymore, you have nearly 500 employees.
Seems kinda stupid to say right after EA just made $55 billion doing exactly that.
