Personally I would not call Immortals of Aveum an AAA game. 😅
And I mean, that’s maybe where the problems lie. This game is all jank and all generics, with no specific thing to present except “OMG LOOK AT OUR GRAPHICS!!!”. Which are also pretty unoptimized, so you end up with:
- Only a tiny tiny fraction of players can even play it.
- Then, the game is utterly generic. Despite how it might look to someone not knowing about it, DOOM 2016 and Eternal are quite unique games and have a very well-designed gameplay flow that even differs divisively between the two.
- The writing is horrible and would make even an MCU movie/series writer question their decisions in life.
- The magic is still just guns with replaced graphics. They didn’t lean into the very premise of the game at all. And all they had to do is play Lichdom Battlemage from 2014 to get some ideas and that game already struggled with the concept. But at least it pulled it off.
Can’t really say I’m surprised the game flopped hard. But unlike the dev I would call the underlying idea solid, just not anything about the execution.
Why does a game cost that much to make? I’m not saying every game should be an indie, but given what indies can accomplish it’s a little ridiculous to spend $125 million.
If I had to guess, texture quality and graphical fidelity is really high, plus this was one of the first games to run in UE5. A mix of extreme amounts of manhours invested into graphics coupled with slow progress due to having to get used to everything.
And rampant corruption at EA, I bet. 40 million marketing my ass, the game barely had any marketing!
You’re right about all that.
Marketing and payroll are always the two biggest, and yes they can get to those numbers easily at AAA scale. AAA games are as big of productions as big budget movies these days. Hundreds of people involved. Graphics of that level are also extremely expensive and time consuming. Everything has to be motion captured, and the fidelity just takes a long time. Every single piece of trash on the ground has to have a full PBR material stack.
With graphics it’s kind of an exponential thing. The closer you get to absolute realism the more time it takes exponentially. That’s why so many indies are embracing retro graphics these days. It lets you spend a lot more time on the gameplay and content. AAAs are expected to look this good as a baseline, and that already pigeon holes a lot of design choices with the deadlines they’re working with. A truly innovative game that looks AAA quality would take more years to make than these studios are willing to devote to them.
And finally there’s the marketing. Mainstream casual gamers, which are who these companies are usually targeting, is the most expensive group to market to by a long shot. They can really only be reached by huge marketing campaigns on TV, social media, and physical signage. Those types of campaigns can easily get into the millions. They’re also probably spending a large amount on having influencers play the game on stream. The big guys I’m sure cost hundreds of thousands, though I have no idea the actual numbers.
Also Unreal Engine has 24/7 support from the engineers at epic through Unreal Development Network which costs quite a bit of money.
Wait, didn’t EA had their in-house engine Frostbite? They botched Mass Effect Andromeda because they moved from UE to frostbite (not the only reason) .
Yeah and for a while it was mandated to be used for ~everything IIRC but after years of struggling to retain programmers and designers they finally relented on that mandate.
Well you see managers need to be paid more than everyone else and theirs lots of managers. Plus headcount is in the hundreds to pump out all the features and art assets within a few years
Trying to act like it flopped because it’s single player… What a joke.
I think BG3 showed conclusively that no one will ever play single player games no matter how great they are. /s
but that was like 6 whole months ago. the market is totally different now. /s
I get what you’re saying
but FPS specifically are mostly played competitively, so a single player game in THAT specific genre in 2023 sounds like a very bad idea.Every
othergenrethan FPSneeds more games where you’re allowed to only play single player and use tons of mods if you want to without risking being locked out of playing, though.Fallout New Vegas, Baldurs Gate 3, Skyrim, The Outer Worlds and the older Bioware games are where it’s at for my favorite genre, to name a few examples.
Edit: crossed out mistaken assumption
I’m not sure that’s really true that you’re saying about single player FPS games being mostly competitive or that it’s a bad idea. See: Doom, Metro, Ghostwire, Dying Light, System Shock, people seem stoked for Space Marine, etc.
Fair enough, I’ll retract that part heh
Props to you for using strikethrough instead of deleting in your edit so the context still makes sense. I think you bring up an interesting point about competitive fps games. I imagine companies structure their development similar to games-as-a-service because they are essentially two flavors of the same thing, right? I had never really considered whether the growth of the competitive scene was part of the drive towards GaaS and away from tight single player experiences.
I think underlying all of this is that publishers want a guaranteed profit margin. That doesn’t exist in art, of course, but they still want it. And if that means choosing what they think is a safe bet, they’ll choose it. I think Bungie made GaaS look way easier than it actually is, and maybe the competitive scene contributed to that too. “Look at all the money these hero shooters are making, let’s get a piece of that pie.” Formulas just never quite work out that simply in real life.
Yep, nobody enjoyed playing through Half Life 1/2, or FEAR or Deus Ex, or the early Medal of Honor or Call of Duty campaigns, or the Doom series or Battlefield Bad Company or the Wolfenstein Series.
Just because most modern popular FPSs are basically cartoony tf2/overwatch clones/derivatives and there are a lot of highly competitive multiplayer FPSs filled with screaming, racist misosynist babies and manbabies alike doesnt mean theres no market for a single player FPS.
It means that making a single player FPS game these days is apparently too hard for modern game devs to figure out how to do.
This game was the most AA shit I’ve ever seen. In the PS2 days it would have got a 7.5 average from most reviewers then it would have had a not-insignificant number of people pick it up.
They are delusional for thinking a UE5 asset flip is a AAA game.
Wait for the “Body Cam” games to flood the market with their UE5 asset flips. Its all shit.
I would love an AAA single player shooter. If it is done well and fun. So no chance EA could do it
Someone stole $40 million of EA’s money and didn’t advertise another horrible cashgrab?
“I’m not even mad, I’m… impressed!”
EA is a truly awful idea. I’m curious if their sports games are the only thing keeping them in business.
Well that, The Sims and the Star Wars license…
I play a lot of single player shooters. One thing they all have in common is that I know they exist, which I’m thinking could potentially be part of the problem with this one. Based on reactions in this thread it seems like a lot of people are in the same position I’m in, where the first they hear of the game is when it’s being pronounced a flop. I’m getting big The Producers vibes.
Unlike many people in this thread, I actually have heard of the game. The makers of a podcast I follow loved it, and had the head of the studio on their show for a pretty frank interview, too. When I learned that there was a free demo, I decided I would give the game a try some time.
And in light of the overwhelming negativity in this thread, I did so last night. And what can I say? I spent an hour and change going through the prologue, the training and the first battle sequence, and I really enjoyed it. Movement and
shootingslinging magic are great fun, with a diversity of spells available pretty much from the get-go. Just shoot, or throw a massive armor-breaking spell at a wave of enemies, or use a lash to pull a remote enemy close and whack them. I wouldn’t have know what to expect from the ‘CoD with magic’ premise but it’s really enjoyable so far.The voice acting is very good, and while the facial animations are a bit uncanny valley, I am enjoying the snarky dialogues and matching facial expressions. Gina Torres has presence, and the rest of the cast so far blends in fine.
I will definitely spend some more time with the demo, and if it doesn’t annoy me too much, I might just buy this. And that seems to be the feedback the devs got from many people - once players actually get their hands on it, they actually enjoy it. According ton the studio head, sales have picked up towards Christmas, and they’ve been getting a lot of conversions from the free demo.
I think the problem is just that, the game is… okay, not bad or good, just okay, unremarkable and forgettable.
If you want good sales you need to do something innovative and interesting, or something cliché but really well done.
Taking a look at Doom 2016 (also a single player shooter) we can see the core gameplay: Shoot demons, Pick up ammo, Shoot more demons. But it’s crafted so masterfully that you spend dozens or hundreds of hours doing just that.
Now with this game that I actually forgot the name mid comment, It’s… well you get the ideia.
If you want good sales you need to do something innovative and interesting, or something cliché but really well done.
Or a recognisable brand. Starfield got panned and still sold oodles.
Taking a look at Doom 2016 (also a single player shooter)
Case in point. Doom has a lot riding on its name and legacy, and many people will buy it just because of that.
The development cost was around $85 million, and I think EA kicked in $40 million for marketing and distribution.
Apparently, $40 million doesn’t buy you much in today’s market, because I’ve literally never heard of this game until now.
I saw one YouTuber that I follow play it. It looked kinda interesting from his video, but he also has the same criticisms.
It was actually quite fun! I rented it off Gamefly and enjoyed it for about 30-40 hours. It’s basically an action-adventure shooter like Metroid. It’s a decent game, not groundbreaking, but definitely doesn’t deserve the hate people give it.
but definitely doesn’t deserve the hate people give it.
I don’t think it’s getting hate. I think it’s getting indifference because no one knows what it is.
Nah, I’ve seen hate. But mostly from people who hate Wesdon-Like quip writting and, well, women-haters who can’t handle the characters being ugly (and they are ugly, admittedly), so I just dismissed the hate.
It has Denuvo, and runs like crap even on $1500 hardware.
I don’t know what kind of sales they expected when they don’t test it on lower spec PCs.
We should expect more of that with the upcoming UE5 titles. The devs that have devoted to releasing those seem to have very hard time optimising - they’ll likely expect us all to just own 4090s and still run their game with DLSS ultra performance or other fake frames.
STALKER 2 will have the janky soul we expect from the series, but this mostly, mostly due to engine choice and apparent attempts to visually impress the player. Or the investors.
Probably spent it all on cable TV ads, where their audience ain’t at.
Or just blow and hookers.
“I’m telling you, the cocaine and hooker market is ripe for a AAA single player FPS game.”
I tried the demo, it has a lot of problems outside of it being a AAA single player shooter. The “magic” system is just reskinned guns, the story is nonsensical at times, and the movement is stiff and slow. It’s like they never play tested the game and just said it was done one day. That’s not even mentioning the almost ten minute walk around the city at the beginning doing nothing but following what I will assume is a non critical character to the plot.
I remember Half-Life 2 opening with a walk around a city, and it was so memorable to me. I guess in part because it was reliant on its own atmosphere, and still let the player be an interactive part of it rather than bound to a tight track.
They cleaned a lot of that up, at least on the console version I played. And that character ends up being quite critical to the plot. You also revisit that city later in the game, so that intro serves to establish the setting and starts the plot.
My God they cleaned it up?! I can’t imagine it being a longer intro. The fact that you revisit the city later is just disappointing, that city was terrible in it’s design.
I had to look up a video to realise this wasn’t the “I guess that’s something I do now” game.
Looks like a confusing mess of a game tbh. When a game’s failure is blamed on it being released close to fucking Starfield, you know it never had much going for it.
It was flawed from the start, clearly people that love COD and magic aren’t that big of an intersection, also like people said already the magic acted more like guns and they had a pretty dumb system of calling it by their colors.
Still looked fun though, but I would never pay the asking price for it.
If you don’t have a vision, don’t try to turn money into more money by making a game. Everyone loses. Dumping money on assets doesn’t make your trope copy/paste any better than the other million cheap Chinese clones on an app store.
I think EA makes games like this to reinforce THEIR notion that single player games are dead so they can use that as leverage to make more “games as a service”. If they made things people actually wanted to play, they’d find that single player (yes even shooter) games are still just as popular as they ever were and poorly thought out, poorly executed, and poorly marketed games still suck.
Case in point. Baldurs gate 3.
Single player (with optional co op multiplayer) but massively successful.
Not to beat a dead horse. Its just the first example that came to mind.
A huge amount of very successful indie games are single-player and even other AAA games.
They talk about the genre being dead but they forget that most games dont charge you to play them anymore. They make money through in game purchases selling cosmetics and battle pasees.
These game genres could be described as dead by the same criteria if they cost actual money.
Its just the first example that came to mind.
Uh, in this case it’s a single-player, shooter, from a brand new IP. I’m probably just commenting just to argue but I don’t think Baldur’s Gate 3 is a good comparison at all.
I think you might be, haha.
But in the i terest of a fairer comparison, i had a quick google and found this game “atomic heart,” a generally well received game with high ratings and the following from Steam Revenue calculator
“We estimate that Atomic Heart made $55,756,625.68in gross revenue since its release. Out of this, the developer had an estimated net revenue of $16,448,204.58.”
New ip, single-player, shooter.
Comparatively, immortals lost money and tbey apparently laid of 45% of the staff who made it to avoid losses.
The thing that we all keep missing about this is even though EA sucks because it is an example of late stage capitalism hollowing out everything for profit, doesn’t actually mean the idiots with MBAs from Harvard or whatever running the company are actually making intelligent choices about profit.
The system of capitalism actually perpetuates itself better when things periodically catastrophically fail from wild incompetence from leadership since it keeps worker power from organizing, wipes out competitors that aren’t also massive corporations that can be easily colluded with, and provides a perfect backdrop for the rich to say “sorrrrrry it all broke again, guess we are the only ones that can fix it, so we will maybe take this chance to buy up more of the economy :) “.
So yes in a very real way I think EA functions to devalue the labor of game developers, keep competition of smaller game development studios categorically unable to create products like EA, and serve as a vessel to ritualistically dissect smaller game companies so that companies like EA have an infinite, desperate workforce and consumers have no better choice for video games. Just because these processes are twisted and rationalized under a story about the ruthless, noble pursuit of profit doesn’t make them have any real connection with efficiency or profit.
That is the thing about ideologies, whether they have any connection to reality or not is actually not very important at all to the truly successful ones that permeate the way societies think about themselves.
Additionally, anything that can help massive corporations strip mining the gaming industry claim the gaming industry is sliding into a tough period where it’s hard to make games that turn enough of a profit to steadily employ game developers, is EXTREMELY useful to them right now because as far as they are concerned this whole AI thing is an opportunity to deal a permanent blow to the quality of life and general leverage workers have in the game development industry. Thank god the movie industry saw it coming a mile off, but video game culture is too full of toxic conservative little boys screaming at each other to understand what is about to happen (and is already happening). It breaks my heart, but what is happening right now will likely deal a blow to the vibrancy of video games as an art form that will reverberate for decades because once a worker exits the game development industry because they can’t find a job it doesn’t matter how passionate they were about video games, how creative or unique their ideas were, they sure as hell aren’t coming back once they get that comparatively cushy programming job at a healthcare company and they are likely burnt out to such a degree that it borders on a clinical diagnosis.
When a company like this catastrophically fails and Baldur’s Gate 3 or Palworld do gangbusters, that signals to others who also want to make money what they should be making in order to make money. Where the money does go, like a Larian or a Pocket Pair, now has profit to spend on growing their studios and making more of what actually works. They end up hiring the talent that was let go. Not all of them; this is less efficient than if the first studio that imploded had instead made something that the market actually wanted, but this is not a situation so dire that the industry will feel it for decades like you say. New studios form all the time from mismanaged large companies that lay people off after making bad bets.
Look, you are describing a perfectly rational theory for how events could play out in a theoretical universe, but you are just stependously, horrifically wrong if you think this story corresponds to reality in a meaningful way.
The truth is these companies have so much power (money) behind them that they don’t just keel over and die when they fail, they annihilate entire industries, catastrophically derail promising career trajectories for countless workers, structurally give themselves an impenetrable advantage with regulatory capture and most importantly utterly dominate the material reality of being a worker in that industry, even if the worker doesn’t work at the company.
Look at Uber, remember years ago when Uber keeled over and died once it became apparent that Uber wasn’t profitable unless drivers are exploited to an extreme degree? Then all those workers went and worked for other ride sharing companies that ran more effective businesses and treated their employees more humanely (in retrospect the by now well documented extremely sexist and toxic culture of upper management at Uber alone doomed it from the start)… The market solved the problem by rewarding rideshare companies with better technology and business models than Uber. I remember in California, Uber could have blocked legislation that was going to improve the lives of rideshare/gig workers immensely but they realized that the consequences of drivers and riders seeing Uber openly shit on their face and spend massive amounts of money to keep drivers from getting a tiny, measly amount more money and control over their work environment would spell utter disaster so they refrained. The wisdom of the market!
Wait… the exact, precise opposite of all that happened while Uber ran for years at a massive loss as a venture capital superweapon ripping millions upon millions of dollars into a gaping black hole and completely devastating the taxi industry without providing a truly humane or long term viable alternative for most workers or cities?
sigh do you really not understand what is happening right in front of you?
No, this is the reality. The likes of Activision, EA, Ubisoft, and Take Two rule the industry by market cap, but that’s because their games notably sell to the type of person who only buys a few video games per year at most. If they utterly dominated the material reality of the industry, how on earth could Baldur’s Gate 3 or Palworld even happen? How could Hades or No Man’s Sky, made by former EA devs, happen? Your view of reality is quite overly pessimistic. How can you even measure some of the claims you’re making?
How can you even measure some of the claims you’re making?
I don’t know, my ideas are so wild and I am pulling them totally out of thin air. It isn’t like there is a massive amount of scholarly work on this topic, a pre-existing history of legal cases pertaining to these issues that have caused society defining laws to be passed in most major countries and many political movements that explicitly attempt to define and critique these processes at our fingertips on the internet waiting to educate and inform us.
And you know, the funny thing is I really for once was feeling a little optimistic about this kind of material existing for me to read and educate myself with but I guess in this case my pessimism was well founded.
You slipped in an edit while I was responding, and I think the gist of it is that you and I fundamentally don’t agree, especially not the hyperbolic flourish you used. I think you’ll continue to see plenty of great games come out in the next decades, because people still want to buy games and other people still want to make them.
If you are only concerned about this from the perspective of having enough good games to keep you personally occupied and not a step further to the experience of human beings working in the industry (beyond the narrow range of game companies you directly buy from) that makes the art you love, then yes you and I fundamentally disagree and I would never want to be misconstrued as making the kind of argument you are making.
Also thank you for complimenting my flourish :)
That’s why AAA+ is failing and indie games are getting better than ever. It’s insane how good the tools and engines have gotten. Making games had become much more accessible than ever.
Making games had become much more accessible than ever.
Making music has become MASSIVELY more accessible than ever, but you know what? It’s just a hobby now, capitalism has destroyed making and recording music as a livelihood unless you manage to get a handful unicorn jobs.
Just because it is easy for a company to enter a market doesn’t mean that structural, toxic issues with that market magically are nullified as problems. Gamers as a category seem to have a REALLY hard time wrapping their head around this.
No, AAA+ blockbuster games are dead. The 150 million budget is insane. Spending that much on a game, you end up having to minimize the risks and having to cater to the widest audience possible.
If you split that budget into maybe 2 larger and a few smaller games, you don’t put all your eggs in the same basket. You can take more risk, experiment with new mechanics and ideas. You can target different types of players. You can give a chance to smaller, lesser known writers who might have potential.
Part of it is that modern games are getting too expensive to make, especially with all the assets to the fidelity given by current technology.
Games are getting too expensive to make because they’re adding extra shit that no one cares about, not because of the cost it takes to make a decent game. Too many admin managers in charge at companies and not enough artists or engineers at the management level.
It’s only expensive to make if studios decide to make them incredibly expensive. There are plenty of high quality indie games made by a single person.
The problem here is they went all in on “THE BEST GRAPHICS EVAR!!!” And it flopped because of the lack of story and gameplay. The lesson here is to not make it incredibly expensive to develop by focusing all efforts on graphics, and instead focus on gameplay and story and people will tolerate much less flashy visuals.
I doubt it, this kind of logic is the same as “medical costs are insane because modern medical tech is expensive.”
It completely ignores the entire economy all functioning under advanced technology to create and produce advanced goods more cheaply with the technology that costs money. It’s also mismanagement in the same way the movie and TV industry has seen, they don’t want to hire writers cause they don’t want to pay them, so instead they just spend hundreds of millions on reshoots because having a writer being paid 60k on staff 24/7 was too costly apparently and some suit got a promotion for “saving” that money.
Someone made a better version of “the day before” with a few grand in purchased assets and a couple months using UE5. If you were creating your own resources instead of buying them and you had an actual vision then you absolutely can make a game for less than hundreds of millions that will return that money back to you. How much did pal world take in? How much is helldivers 2 currently making? What were their production costs?
Just because some inept studio run by corporate bean counters can only churn out tech demos for millions of bucks doesn’t mean that’s the actual standard for cost and production of gaming.
