Re:The video game industry can't go on like this
by mr_crankypants on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @11:11AM
(#20516017)
Teams were so much smaller.
Ultima IV was about as big-budget as a video game got. Here are the credits for the DOS version: https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/ultima-iv-quest-of-the-av...
19 people, total, for the original development and production on the Apple II version, plus the PC, Atari and Amiga ports.
Re:The video game industry can't go on like this
by kbumsik on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @12:33PM
(#20516879)
> 19 people, total
Still it was much smaller. Witcher 3 dev team is about 250.
Re:The video game industry can't go on like this
by mr_crankypants on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @03:15PM
(#20518633)
According to https://www.gamespot.com/articles/this-is-how-much-the-witch..., 240 is just the number of in-house staff. The full count of people who worked on the project came to more like 1,500.
Re:The video game industry can't go on like this
by celticmusic on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @01:41PM
(#20517610)
what people miss is that the audience is far FAR larger than it used to be, so studios make up it up in volume. Game studios today make more than game studios 10 and 20 years ago.
Re:The video game industry can't go on like this
by trilila on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @10:57AM
(#20515894)
From what i gather, what most people find expensive are addons that you have to pay for, to be able to continuously play the game.
Re:The video game industry can't go on like this
by HNisCurated on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @11:33AM
(#20516260)
They did this to me. And I never went back to consoles or AAA producers.
Ultima IV had a street price of $50-55; in 1985. That's ~$130 in 2019. Teams were far far smaller then. Of course a "successful" game was also a far different standard; as within 4 years of release it had sold only 400,000 copies; despite being a pretty great game.
Whenever people talk about how expensive games are I feel very very old, because games (and the systems) used to actually be expensive.
The C64 was an amazing budget system, and was originally $595. That's like $1600 today. Yes it was a "computer" as well, but people balk at the price of $300 systems today and call $1000 computers too expensive.