Re:Square-Enix sells all of its Western game studios and the...
by johnnyanmac on Monday May 02, 2022 @11:04PM
(#31244008)
> but for every single good one I swear they make 3 utter shite too
That describes almost all AAA companies. I think Square takes more heat on this point because they are some of the few studios still investing heavily in the "AA" market. Outside of Avengers, most of the other projects people may point to aren't really the highest budget games to begin with. And those rough releases are something most other studios don't want to risk anymore.
> + their gacha games are not even that good considering the saturation on the gacha market and what quality games some other companies can make (see Genshin)
I mean, the entire market is trying to chase Genshin right now. It's a very arguable point that no mobile game released as of now is as good as Genshin, at least on a technical level.
I understand why. The attraction of mobile is running a relatively low budget (say, "A/AA" level) project and having it profit for a few years until they need to recycle the assets into a new project. A game like Genshin is the equivalent of trying to put GTA V on a phone. Which may be technically feasible now, in 2022, but it'd get you laughed out of a pitch in 2017 or so when Genshin started development
Remember, this would have been right before the Switch launched and had Breath of the Wild show what an ARM architecture was capable of rendering. Most other studios are too risk averse to consider such an endeavor. Console developers especially because they don't want to cannabalize their games with something that plays too closely to their $60 AAA blockbuster.
That describes almost all AAA companies. I think Square takes more heat on this point because they are some of the few studios still investing heavily in the "AA" market. Outside of Avengers, most of the other projects people may point to aren't really the highest budget games to begin with. And those rough releases are something most other studios don't want to risk anymore.
> + their gacha games are not even that good considering the saturation on the gacha market and what quality games some other companies can make (see Genshin)
I mean, the entire market is trying to chase Genshin right now. It's a very arguable point that no mobile game released as of now is as good as Genshin, at least on a technical level.
I understand why. The attraction of mobile is running a relatively low budget (say, "A/AA" level) project and having it profit for a few years until they need to recycle the assets into a new project. A game like Genshin is the equivalent of trying to put GTA V on a phone. Which may be technically feasible now, in 2022, but it'd get you laughed out of a pitch in 2017 or so when Genshin started development
Remember, this would have been right before the Switch launched and had Breath of the Wild show what an ARM architecture was capable of rendering. Most other studios are too risk averse to consider such an endeavor. Console developers especially because they don't want to cannabalize their games with something that plays too closely to their $60 AAA blockbuster.