Maybe it didn’t do as well as they’d hoped, but back of the napkin guesstimates sure make it hard to believe DD2 wasn’t profitable.

Multiple sources disputing:

https://80.lv/articles/multiple-sources-dispute-concord-s-usd400-million-budget/

They’re typically some of my favorite stories. And after everyone stopped trying to chase GTA, we don’t get all that many crime stories anymore either.

But that’s not the cycle chronicled in this article. These are old games released onto subscription services in their original versions, more or less, give or take some resolution.

Best Nintendo can offer you is renting them in perpetuity with no enhancements.

I don’t think that’s what’s happening here, unless you’re expanding your definition to be that you’re renting this legacy library with a subscription.

I don’t think I have anything new to add to answer your questions that I haven’t already said, so I think we can agree to disagree.

It’s worth noting too that trash mobs aren’t limited to random encounters. Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 are littered with trash mobs, and none of them are random except for maybe traversing between towns.

Random encounters tend to be trash mobs, and I hate trash mobs. I know even in the late 90s, there were some prehistoric internet memes about FF7, and having just played it recently, I remember why. There were so many of them. You’d easily forget where you were going and what you were doing because you’d be interrupted by random encounter trash mobs every couple of seconds. They weren’t too hard, so you didn’t have to think very much to get through them, which made them uninteresting, and they also, like you said, just kind of screwed with the flow of the game. So generally, I don’t like them.

The average person has absolutely no idea how much it costs to make a game, so any report that comes out for any game is enlightening. When Skullgirls developers tell people that it’ll cost $150k to make a single new character, and when other fighting game developers weighed in and said, “actually, that’s insanely cheap,” it level sets expectations for what a customer can actually expect out of a producer. The largest productions of their day during the era of the original Xbox and PS2 didn’t even typically come in at $50M per game. There are a lot of reasons why it can’t be exactly that anymore, but ballooning budgets are why the industry is in this spot where it’s wholly unsustainable, because if you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars and you didn’t make one of the most successful games in the history of the medium, it won’t be making its money back.

Iterating on a trend is smart business. Iterating on a trend over the course of 6 to 8 years is not, not only because it makes the game more expensive to make and raises the floor for success, but also because the audience for that trend has likely moved on. If Concord truly cost $400M to make, it adds one more data point for people to understand how much a game can cost, and maybe, just maybe, it will make more companies focus on building a game that they know they can afford to make rather than being all or nothing on one of the riskiest projects in history. That will keep people employed rather than rapid expansion from investment into a bubble and hundreds of layoffs when the project goes south.

why would I do what you suggest? So that games journalism can continue to beat a dead horse?

Because the truth is worth knowing, and it sucks that this stuff is obfuscated the way it is compared to something like the movie industry. If true, I’d call it constructive reporting if the message becomes clear that this is an example of what’s ravaging the industry; trend chasing with absurd amounts of money designed to extract some mythical amount of money from people rather than building good products on sane budgets that keep people employed. But the point is moot if you not only don’t agree but also aren’t in a position to refute it.

If you were in such a role that you could correct anything in the story, I’d encourage you to reach out to a journalist and do so.

They also outsourced a ton to make CG cut-scenes and such, which can rack up a bill very quickly. ProbablyMonsters was an incubator, not a parent company, as I understand it. I too am skeptical of there only being one source in Colin Moriarty, but I trust Jordan Middler to vet the story, even if he isn’t corroborating it, and as others have mentioned, the credits are literally over an hour long, which is evidence that supports the high costs.

It was free in an open beta, and hardly anyone took the opportunity to play it then. Chances are they burn through more money than they make by making it free to play. I’d happily pay $40 if that same game had split-screen, private servers, and LAN deathmatch, but no one makes that kind of game anymore.

Hold Start and press A when continuing to continue from the current level.

I could take one look at those models and animations and tell you it wasn’t cheap. Then probably a lot of money went into those CG cut-scenes that were intended to be rolled out weekly.

I played it on Xbox and then PC even back in the day, and I’d 100% believe that it’s poorly optimized; they patched it a few months after launch to remove a lot of extraneous, unseen detail on the map that was hurting performance. It’s still surprising if you can’t run a 10 year old game well on a modest modern PC.

You claimed it got attention for reasons other than being a game many people just plain enjoyed despite critical evidence to the contrary, you strangely expected them to go back and change non-trivial things in a non-live-service game that had no beta tests or public demos, backed up your opinion with numbers that completely ignored real world context and did not support your points, and then somehow took that to mean that criticism isn’t allowed?

Surely you’ve upgraded your PC in the last ten years since the game came out, right? I’d recommend checking it out on a sale or something sometime.

Player counts are a strange metric to use to try to support any sort of argument like this. Bayonetta is currently on a 70% off sale, and Hi-Fi Rush isn’t on sale at all.

i said i believed it could have been even better if they paid attention to criticisms that put off the people who didn’t enjoy it.

What would you have them do? Change large swaths of a game after it’s already been released and people really enjoyed it? Again, the game was shadow dropped. Most of these decisions were set in stone by the time anyone ever played it, and if you’re going to iterate on feedback, you do it in the sequel.

also just looking at the percentages on the global steam achievements and most people do not even see the ending for a 9 hour game. The achievement for beating it on normal difficulty is …16%.

Most games have an astonishingly low completion rate. Hi-Fi Rush separates its achievements by difficulty. I have the achievement for beating the game on hard mode (which 9.1% of people have) but not on normal. So the actual completion rate for Hi-Fi Rush is somewhere between 16.6% and 31.5%, which is very normal. Your own example of Bayonetta has an achievement for beating the game on any difficulty, and it’s only 19.7%; according to How Long to Beat, the games are a very similar length.

I think you need to better understand the sample set and context of the data you’re reading and also understand that not every game is a live service. Thankfully, not every game is a live service. With any luck, we’ll see far fewer of them, and then expectations like yours can begin to disappear.