Current Generation Games Analysis Technical Discussion [2023] [XBSX|S, PS5, PC]

[Davros]

I think the point is it does make a profit and it keeps selling for years because it doesn't look dated. Now with games being digital they don't disappear from sale anymore like physical media used to, plus you can get a remaster out with much less work just add some modern niceties no need to redo all the textures and the models

I imagine the issue is maybe related to you being on Ryzen?

Already had that fix


ps: Crysis is 75% off at Gog (£3.99) If you don't own it you should buy it.
*Warning : Requires 1.5gb of ram

 

[JPT]

They can easily expense as general R&D with the perspective that they are just incorporating that work into commercial products as soon as possible.

Then you need something expense it against, GTA6 sure, but who else got the warchest to expense against and are willing to gamble that what ever tech that gets developed will be relevant in the future?

I think the point is it does make a profit and it keeps selling for years because it doesnt look dated

You are assuming that it makes profit.... Latest greatest bleeding edge tech does not garanti sales or profit.

 

[Davros]

That was pushback against shifty assuming it doesnt make a profit.
ps: nothing guarantees sales or profit

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That was pushback against shifty assuming it doesnt make a profit.

Uncharted was $200 M development. What would a bleeding edge flagship PC title that's way beyond console capabilities going to cost? How many units do you need to sell? I kinda think that if there was a clear untapped market here, someone would be tapping it. eg. High-end VR. Why are VR titles always small? Why isn't Sony putting out $200 M AAA VR titles? The economies aren't there.

In the luxury goods space, where you sell to a tiny audience, you charge insane prices. As high-end PC games won't sell at $200+ a go, that's not an option. The price is effectively capped so you are dependent on a certain volume of sales to hit a development budget. In fact, I expect there's a lovely graph that execs can point to that shows the real-world required sales numbers to hit a development budget!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

They can easily expense as general R&D with the perspective that they are just incorporating that work into commercial products as soon as possible.

Or you spend the money on mainstream titles that actually make a healthy profit rather than just being tax write-offs.

The long-term argument is you can develop a superior tech to differentiate future products. Kinda like EA having its own in-house engine it can tailor and refine and make its studios use to rationalise the cost...

 

[Deleted member 11852]

They can easily expense as general R&D with the perspective that they are just incorporating that work into commercial products as soon as possible.

You talk about expense like it's move provided by magical R&D fairies! Whatever is invested in R&D, needs to be recovered (and preferably vastly exceeded with a good return on that R&D investment) through commercialisation of the technology. R&D is only worth what it can be turned into profit through products sales or licensing.

 

[t0mb3rt]

Uncharted was $200 M development. What would a bleeding edge flagship PC title that's way beyond console capabilities going to cost? How many units do you need to sell? I kinda think that if there was a clear untapped market here, someone would be tapping it. eg. High-end VR. Why are VR titles always small? Why isn't Sony putting out $200 M AAA VR titles? The economies aren't there.

In the luxury goods space, where you sell to a tiny audience, you charge insane prices. As high-end PC games won't sell at $200+ a go, that's not an option. The price is effectively capped so you are dependent on a certain volume of sales to hit a development budget. In fact, I expect there's a lovely graph that execs can point to that shows the real-world required sales numbers to hit a development budget!

Star Citizen is at something like $700 Million in funding so far with, according to the developers, all of that going towards development.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Star Citizen is at something like $700 Million in funding so far with, according to the developers, all of that going towards development.

Point being? Star Citizen is an outlier that's funded by people constantly paying for its development - no R&D sunk costs or shareholders to explain to why a publisher is spending $100s millions on 'R&D' for a title that'll sell 3-4 million if you're lucky.

Edit: Business model insight...

Another slide puts the problem more starkly: “...is 3x the investment in [Spider-Man 2] evident to anyone who plays the game?”

You can't just throw money at a creation. You need to have expectations of ROI, and the cost scaling for higher end is a matter of diminishing returns. The cost of a truly next-gen only top-end PC title will inevitably outstrip any income it can generate, or subsequent use of the engine where each title will be similarly costly for a niche audience.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

You can't just throw money at a creation. You need to have expectations of ROI, and the cost scaling for higher end is a matter of diminishing returns. The cost of a truly next-gen only top-end PC title will inevitably outstrip any income it can generate, or subsequent use of the engine where each title will be similarly costly for a niche audience.

You can't for non-GAAS games, but you can for GAAS games if they are successful.

So, for example, the budget of a good MMO constantly increases. A good F2P game(Warframe, PoE, World of X, etc.) constantly increases in budget. Star Citizen is basically using a sort of F2P model without the free part.

Some titles will invest in engine tech, world building, additional story lines, gameplay expansions, etc. Star Citizen in the past was like 80% tech, 20% world building, gameplay and other stuff. Currently more has shifted to world building, storyline, gameplay, etc. as they finally appear to seriously be working on SQ42 stuff.

I think when Sony were still considering heavily investing in GAAS, it was amenable to the idea of ballooning budgets but now that they're pulling back from that idea, they are imposing lower headcount and revised budget limits on their internal studios.

Regards,
SB

 

[Shifty Geezer]

90% (99.9%?) of GaaS titles pander to the masses by targeting the mid end and scaling down graciously. A high end only GaaS title would still have to be operated at crazy prices to get a decent ROI from the small install-base of hardware capable of playing it, just as a standard game would need a crazy high ticket price.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

90% (99.9%?) of GaaS titles pander to the masses by targeting the mid end and scaling down graciously. A high end only GaaS title would still have to be operated at crazy prices to get a decent ROI from the small install-base of hardware capable of playing it, just as a standard game would need a crazy high ticket price.

Some GAAS titles pander to the masses (MMO's, for example, albeit not all of them). Here you definitely want as many people as possible to be able to play your game. Often this is indicated by a monthly subscription fee.

Some GAAS titles (notably F2P titles, again, albeit not all of them) pander to a small minority of people with deep pockets (whales who will dump thousands of USD into the game each month). Making the game playable to the more people just increases your chances of getting a Whale to spend large amounts of money, especially if it's competitive. These games are often marked by numerous microtransactions with more predatory ones offering an in game advantage in competitive game modes (like World of Tanks or PvP F2P MMOs).

Of course, there are exceptions to both and they can overlap (F2P MMO's, for example go after the whales instead of the steady monthly payments).

Star Citizen does something interesting, their method of luring in the Whales is to offer an unrivaled graphical experience combined with multiplayer. That's a double whammy of getting people that think that investing in the best CPU and GPU ever year or even every 6 months is just pocket change to then drop huge sums of money (which is still pocket change to most of them) on in game items (in this case ships). The multiplayer aspect gives them an additional opportunity to show off their conspicuous wealth. If PvP ever takes off that's another avenue for attracting the competitive whales.

PoE and Warframe lure in smaller whales by allowing them to show off their wealth (or to pretend like they have wealth by showing off) via cosmetics combined with compelling gameplay. The compelling gameplay is key to attracting a large enough user base so that not only are there more potential whales but more potential people for the whales to show off to.

In other words, a GAAS type of game can go after high tech as long as they have a strategy to get those Whales interested enough that they continue to dump large sums of money into the game.

I wouldn't even care to venture to guess at what proportion of GAAS titles cater to the masses (goal is to get money from all or most players) and what proportion cater to the Whales (goal is to get large sums of money from a fraction/minority of the players).

For consoles, obviously, anything you make is going to run on the target console. So here, you can spend a lot on expensive graphical fidelity, tech and assets without worrying about whether that would limit your appeal to the masses. I think that was where Sony wanted to go and why they were OK with studios doubling or tripling their development budgets. The likely thinking was that when the tech deployed in those games were then leveraged in a GAAS title, they would recoup those costs +more.

Regards,
SB

 

[Shifty Geezer]

For consoles, obviously, anything you make is going to run on the target console. So here, you can spend a lot on expensive graphical fidelity, tech and assets without worrying about whether that would limit your appeal to the masses. I think that was where Sony wanted to go and why they were OK with studios doubling or tripling their development budgets. The likely thinking was that when the tech deployed in those games were then leveraged in a GAAS title, they would recoup those costs +more.

I think you're talking at tangents here. The current line of discussion (that I'm involved in anyhow!) is creating games that target just the high-end PC to max it out. I'm saying the reason no game does that is it's not economical viable; you'll never have a large enough audience to justify it, whether selling outright or operating on a monthly subscription.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I think you're talking at tangents here. The current line of discussion (that I'm involved in anyhow!) is creating games that target just the high-end PC to max it out. I'm saying the reason no game does that is it's not economical viable; you'll never have a large enough audience to justify it, whether selling outright or operating on a monthly subscription.

I'm not sure I fully understand, there's no reason to target just the high end, everything is scalable so even if you fully target the high end you can still scale down to lower machines and even consoles.

Obviously there's a cost associated with targeting anything high-end, but the point is that your addressable market isn't only the high end. Scaling things down is a small fraction of the cost of targeting high in the first place.

Regards,
SB

 

[dobwal]

You talk about expense like it's move provided by magical R&D fairies! Whatever is invested in R&D, needs to be recovered (and preferably vastly exceeded with a good return on that R&D investment) through commercialisation of the technology. R&D is only worth what it can be turned into profit through products sales or licensing.

You act like R&D on new tech is only relevant to the titles in which it initially appears. This isn’t anything new.

Unreal 3 practically began life with Gears, a game limited to one console that had a user base of 10 million. Cyberpunk 2077’s Red Engine 4 was released to a single line of RT enabled GPUs who arch was only two years old. The practicality of such move aren’t dictated by how large the userbase is at the release of a new technology/engine but rather how many titles take advantage of such technology over its lifetime. UE3 benefited from being a tool available to third parties while Red Engine 4 short life is result of CD Projekt’s rather anemic release schedule.

This why I argued that such forward looking approach would limited to the favored devs of large pubs. Large pubs have the resources and favored devs have the track history to make such an approach viable. MS’s The Coalition doesn’t have to worry about the current number of Series at release if its custom version of UE5 makes it into a ton of first party MS titles. You are trading earlier investment for more mature more performant tech that your later titles can utilize.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I'm not sure I fully understand, there's no reason to target just the high end, everything is scalable so even if you fully target the high end you can still scale down to lower machines and even consoles.

The intention is a game that doesn't scale gracefully and needs to be rewritten if it's to play on consoles.

I'm not asking for a game that looks unrecognizably different, just.. tangibly superior.. not simply cleaner and smoother. Obviously tech has converged, and due to the nature of having very similar tech and architectures across the board.. things aren't going to be radically different.. But I definitely believe that a game targeting high end PC, with all it's GPU grunt, memory capacity, and CPU power.. could be tangibly superior to a scaled down console version to run well across lower end hardware.
...
PC has massive amounts of memory, PC has massive amounts of CPU and GPU grunt. Give more objects physics, more animations, more geometry, more variety, more particles, more deformation. I dunno... do something with it that isn't just scale factoring up something that doesn't make much of a difference past a certain point.

In what way? As I say, assets are already created at perfect quality and scaled down for all platforms. What else are you asking the devs to do? If they do something the consoles literally can't, then you have a devil of job porting - effectively have to rewrite the game.

I think that's a trap people get themselves into believing because they're so used to the status quo.. which is to design for consoles, then add some flourishes on top for PC, because that's the cheap way to "take advantage" of more powerful hardware.. instead of actually designing a game for it.

 

[trinibwoy]

The intention is a game that doesn't scale gracefully and needs to be rewritten if it's to play on consoles.

I don’t think anyone is saying that. The intention is a game that scales down from high to low instead of scaling up from low to high.

While that would be great I don’t know if it’s feasible. It’s far too easy to end up trapped doing something expensive that simply doesn’t scale down and then you’re screwed on the consoles. Very few pubs/devs if any would take that risk.

 

[Karamazov]

if a game like CP77 with path tracing and last gen assets has a hard time running well on a high end PC without heavy use of DLSSs i don't know how one could expect so much greater details and physics than consoles while also using next gen lighting and effects etc... and running much better.

 

[troyan]

if a game like CP77 with path tracing and last gen assets has a hard time running well on a high end PC without heavy use of DLSSs i don't know how one could expect so much greater details and physics than consoles while also using next gen lighting and effects etc... and running much better.

What?! Cyberpunk runs fantastic for Pathtracing. Which game has "much greater" details? There are hundreds of individuell objects with physic on screen in Cyberpunk.

 

[Globalisateur]

if a game like CP77 with path tracing and last gen assets has a hard time running well on a high end PC without heavy use of DLSSs i don't know how one could expect so much greater details and physics than consoles while also using next gen lighting and effects etc... and running much better.

Best way to be disappointed is to expect a cheap $400-$500 console to run better than a 4080/4090 with full RT and DLSS would. It's a thing I am seeing a lot in forums about consoles, notably about the upcoming PS5 Pro.

 

[Karamazov]

What?! Cyberpunk runs fantastic for Pathtracing. Which game has "much greater" details? There are hundreds of individuell objects with physic on screen in Cyberpunk.

fantastic at native res and no DLSS frame gen ? what so many details ? NPC still are the same assets wise as last gen, they just walk by like zombies, car AI is practically non existent, long range LoD is still bad. Yeah it's a good looking game, great even with PT, but still show its last gen roots for overall scenery details and physics, and that's what is asked here over consoles i read, a whole lot other league in details and physics while having to run with PT/RT and at very least 60fps.
When you see the cost of good lighting on PC, asking for even more at the same time may be too much even for current high end hardware.