The video games industry needs to learn to not be afraid of letting games cook for a little longer. Silksong took a long time to come out, but what we eventually got was a good game made by a small team. Imagine if instead of the 500+ team members working on the next annual release of Assassins Creed, they peel off 50 artists, writers and programmers to create a new IP over the course of the next 5-7 years? Kind of like the original decision to do just that which got us… Assassin’s Creed for the original Xbox.
There has got to be a good balance between “Here is EA Sportsball 20XX, that will be $70 please.” where you get an underwhelming and uninspired annual release title with minor changes from the previous year, and Duke Nukem Forever or Cyberpunk 2077 that were trapped in decades-long development hell and released a sub-par, buggy product.
It’s not the $70 price tag that’s the issue, it’s “what am I getting for the extra $10 I am paying for this?”. If the answer is a more polished and refined product, I’m all for it - but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Silksong was primarily developed by 3 people. For comparison, Baldur’s Gate 3 was developed by around 300. There are probably more than 700 people making Battlefield 6.
Didn’t some AAA studios complain that Balder’s Gate is “only” 60€ and too high quality, so it sets unrealistic standards/expectations.
I doubt this’ll be well received, but I actually don’t think Silksong should be used to set price expectations. Hollow Knight made a shocking amount of money, massive sales were guaranteed, and the tiny dev team has enough money to pretty much vibe and make cool stuff forever.
Please don’t compare other indie game prices to this, when those games can’t guarantee their financial security, or massive sales number to turn a profit regardless of price.
Also, unrelated, but reading through the Bloomberg interview, and knowing what they charged for HK, 20$ is actually exactly what I assumed Silksong would cost well before it was announced, the shock for that kinda caught me off guard.
There’s just no way you could ever convince me that a 2d side scroller should ever be over $30.
100%. Terraria should be the standard. If you’re making a 2d side scroller it should hav as much content as terraria/promise to deliver on it later, or be $15 or less.
Arguably Team Cherry is much, much leaner/more efficient. They don’t have to pay starving managers and CEOs industry standard salaries so they can feed their families 😁
Once again the parasite class ruins things.
I feel like everyone knows the ownership class is ruining everything, but no one wants to do anything.
But that’s not true. I just hang out with people with more class consciousness, I guess. The average idiot probably blames the queers and the non-whites. “They had to raise the price of CoD because of all the money spent on sensitivity and diversity!” is probably something a dud sincerely believes.
Sometimes I wish real life was more like some video games, and I could just crouch behind those people, snap their neck, and dump the body in a bush with no consequences.
Huge gaming studios churning out reskinned versions of the same franchises that have been running for a decade+ with no real original content? $70+. Indie gaming studio putting out original content? $25.
Yes because something like cyber punk is obviously as much work as silk song.
CEO needs another yacht
Arizona Tea is thinking about raising the price of their tea from $1 to $1.29 for the first time in 30+ years, but the fourth Call of Duty game to come out this year needs a 15% price hike.
Let that sink in.
Damn, four in a year?
I think it’s sad tyre.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty
Latest release Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 October 25, 2024
EDIT : What in the name of fuck? So, COD1 was :
[made by] a new studio formed in 2002 originally consisting of 21 employees, many of whom were project lead developers of the successful Medal of Honor: Allied Assault released the same year. [COD 1 released 2003]
MOH:AA :
Development spanned from 2000 to late 2001
COD2 : Released 2005.
So basically, from 2000, they released 3 games within 2 years of each other. After COD2, EVERY SINGLE YEAR a new COD game was released without fail. Holy fuck.
They really might as well have put the annual franchise number on the fucking box. Forget CODBLOPS 7 , just call it COD 2026 (because they always put release year+1 on the fucking product label).
Sounds like the EA Sports model.
yaRrr the $70 games
Hollow Knight seems like mainstream game industry shit to me. Solid game, massive hype, lots of sales. And I wouldn’t even remember it in a couple months if not for other people.
It’s like how Shovel Knight is a really good platformer but then you play it and it’s… just a good platformer. An indie gem! But also, something you’ve played before.
You know what AAA companies didn’t do 20 years ago? Dwarf Fortress.
Shovel Knight is actually fantastic though. You have AAA industry vets failing to meet its standard. Hell, compare SK to Mighty No. 9. Even Megaman can’t make a megaman as good as that anymore. Plus it isn’t just Shovel Knight, it has the Plague Knight, Specter Knight, and King of Cards sequels which are all genuinely great retro platformers.
No argument about DF though, and I still need to pick that up now that it has an actual UI.
What games do you find memorable, out of curiosity? (It’s likely this is a ‘you’ thing; HK and SK are very memorable to a lot of people, and certainly weren’t cookie cutter industry shit. Just curious what does float your boat, though, if not them.)
Not him but:
Risk of rain (returns) Hades 1/2 Nebulous fleet command Star sector Homeworld 1, cataclysm (emergence), 2 Battletech (!!!) Spaz 1 (not 2!) Mechwarrior 2 Mechwarrior 5 mercs/clans Terraria FTL Steamworld games (all) Cortex command (interesting pile of shit) Kerbal Etc… So much.
More or less mainstream games: Helldivers2 (!!!) Xcom (ufo: enemy unknown) Xcom Xcom 2 Civilisation Etc…
With Games, like with all art, it’s impossible to point to 1 or two which are the best. I’ve read many books, watched many films, series, plays, listened to music and played a lot of games… i can’t just pick one or two which where “the best”. I can name a bunch which where great though.
Are they still nerfing the fun out of Helldivers 2 every patch?
In Markdown, you should add two spaces at the end of the line, to break it into the next line.
Tell me you never properly played Hollow Knight without telling me you never properly played Hollow Knight ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
High budget triple A vs indie. Lets not pretend these games are targeting the same audience. There’s always been a division between small games with small dev teams and small budgets and triple A (whatever that may mean). Once you see the line, you can’t really compare the two anymore. I agree that the lines are sometimes blurred (what even is indie? what is AA? what is AAA?) but I think its clear Silksong was never going to be marketed next to Monster Hunter. A fair(er) comparison would be Hades 2 and the price difference is non longer so extreme.
Or… you know… we can add Vampire Survivors to the mix…I don’t care about Hollow Knight or Terraria or Blasphemous. I am not interested in souls-likes, platformers, or metroidvanias.
How I feel since last few years.
I mean, frankly, I agree with you … but there are tons of other games in other genres of style and gameplay…that are also under $70 bucks, at or close to that $20 mark, that are pretty damn good.
They may not be as meteorically popular as Silksong…
But the point of the OP image is that… you do not in fact need a AAA production budget and AAA ‘graphics quality’ and MTX and FOMO and alo that garbage… to be able to have a successful game.
That you can in fact have a more modest yet also more focused approach, and create a break-out hit.
The point here is not ‘Silksong popular!’
The point is ‘Silksong proves that AAA development paradigms and business practices are ludicrously wasteful and not mandatory; there will always be other ways to be a successful game creator.’
OK, that’s a valid opinion and your personal taste. People should not judge that or think it weird, but it’s nothing special either…
Ok?
Is that not a relevant thing to say?
Not OP, so I don’t necessarily feel this way about skong, but have you ever had your feed filled with discussion of something that you just don’t care about? And then you go talk to your friends and they’re also talking about it? Then you talk to a relative and they’re asking you what all the fuss is about? All while you give 0 shits about it?
I’ve been there, and it’s easy to just get plain annoyed at the subject coming up, even if innocuously. It’s the real life equivalent of squidward tuning into boxing because it’s not about cardboard boxes, only to be greeted with 2 cardboard boxes going at it.
And if you’re somehow in doubt that skong has satuarated discussion everywhere
There’s a difference between what you’re saying, and intentionally visiting threads about a thing you supposedly care so little about that you have to announce it for everyone.
I would agree if we were in a Hollow Knight or metroidvania community, but as it appears to me this thread visited TheBat just as much as they visited this thread.
What could they have done to not see this thread? Keyword blocking won’t work, because skong is only referenced in the image, unfollowing / blocking the community has a huge blast radius because it’s the highly generic /c/memes. Etc.
At some point you just exhasperatedly blurt out that you don’t care as much as people are assuming you do. I agree that it’s annoying to hear that too, it’s a bit hipsterish, and it’s mostly unwarranted given the low stakes. But I sympathize with it.
I’m not saying I don’t sympathize, but when this happens to me I just downvote and move on.
Freedom of Speech depicts a scene of a 1942 Arlington town meeting in which Jim Edgerton, the lone dissenter to the town selectmen’s announced plans to build a new school, as the old one had burned down,[9] was accorded the floor as a matter of protocol.[10] Edgerton supported the rebuilding process but was concerned about the tax burden of the proposal, as his family farm had been ravaged by disease.[11] A memory of this scene struck Rockwell as an excellent fit for illustrating “freedom of speech”, and inspired him to use his Vermont neighbors as models for the entire Four Freedoms series.[12]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Speech_(painting)
For anyone curious about the source of OP’s image.
May I suggest Satisfactory or perhaps Plan B: Terraform?
But have you played Ori and the Blind Forest?
No
You should try it. If a jaw-dropping, tear-jerking masterpiece like that can’t pull you in then you are revenant and your soul has already left you.
You’re not alone. But we can’t deny that there is a market for them. And if you’re honest with us and yourself I’m sure you have an exception. Mine is Remnant. Loved From the Ashes and I put in a lot of time in the second one as well.
I agree, I think they’re overhyped, low budget kiddie games. Like if I got charged more than $30 for silksong, I’d feel ripped off.
EA releasing the same game each year for like $80
But the players have new haircuts!
What a dreadful take.
🤡🤡🤡
Don’t feed the ragebaiters/trolls LOL
(Good rage bait though, if intended as such :p)
We have thousands of games that cost even less. You should stop behaving like that Silksong’s price is somehow outstanding.
It’s not that the price in and of itself is outstanding, it’s that it’s one of if not the most anticipated game of the decade and they could easily have charged twice that and still sold millions of copies, but they chose not to. They doubtless would have made more money if they’d came in at a higher price point, but rather than putting profit above all else, they elected to make their game affordable.
Is it uncommon for people to make games for fun, not to get as much money as possible?
Why would they even need more money?
If nothing else, to sustain themselves. The more they profit off one game, the longer they can develop their next project without worrying.
Say one of them has an idea for an awesome 3D Soulslike, but they’d have to triple their team size to make it in a reasonable time frame. They could afford that with more money.
It’s not uncommon for people to make games for fun and to not get as much money as possible from them. It’s less common for companies and studios to not try to get as much money as possible from games, even less common for them to make games purely for fun.
Because generating fun doesn’t pay bills.
Its a really small company
Not wanting to make as much money as possible doesnt mean not wanting to make money at all
one of if not the most anticipated game of the decade
That’s one of, if not the biggest, exaggerations of the decade.
It was literally the most wishlisted game on Steam, beating out all of the AAA titles. And it’s been being hyped for 7 years. If that doesn’t make it one of the most anticipated games of the decade, I’m really not sure what metrics you’re looking for for that statistic.
Hyped for 7 years with basically no action or advertising from the devs, too. They didn’t need to stoke the hype at all.
Hm. Ok. These numbers are rather unexpected for me. It looks like you’re right.
It crashed all major gaming store fronts for several minutes. No other game this decade has done that, and theoretically it should get harder each day as systems scale to handle more traffic. The fact that it wasn’t just one store or half of them is incredible to me and shows how anticipated this game was.
Minutes? Damn near 2.5 hours for me on Steam, and I was seriously trying lol
Because it couldn’t be preordered. Surge capacity’s always lower than sustained.
It’s one of the very few games ive been anticipating.
Well, of course smaller studios can charge less for their product in order to make a profit. Their expenditures has to be a lot less, and hence they need to make less money to make a profit.
Large studios could make smaller games. Fund 10 games for the price of 1 big one. Expect at least one or two to be absolute gangbusters.
That might not quite be true. You can’t have 1000 people make Hollow Knight overnight. It’s like the old adage of 9 mothers making a baby in one month.
The closest thing would be to split the studio internally into 10 small teams, and have them each make a game over a long period of time; maybe that’s what you were implying.
Well, yeah, that’s how you do it. No reason to have one AAA sized team for ten small games.
I don’t think a flood of low effort games is the solution you think it is…
The latest Call of Duty game, Blacks Ops 6, is estimated to have a budget between $450,000,000 and $700,000,000. 1/10th of that budget ($45M to $70M) is still more than the entire development budget for The Witcher 3 at $35,000,000. The only thing they would likely need to cut back on is their marketing budget of $35,000,000.
You could probably make a hell of a lot of AAA games for the same price as GTA 6.
It’s what indie games already are. Following Sturgeon’s law, 90% of indie games are garbage. We venerate the 10% that aren’t.
This is an interesting point. With the decline in AAA game quality over the past… 5 (?) years, i wonder what percentage of them are garbage vs not. Because IMO, I’ve seen very very few that even twinkle, let alone shine, and i love blockbusters (though 2025 is shaping up wonderfully)
I have to assume that also, it’s a game that is definitely not for everyone, and the price reflects that. If I only got as far as I have in 5 hours and decided to give up, I’d have been sore about $40. As it is I’m going to spend a lot more time with it and I’m already happy with how much entertainment I’ve got for my money.
This is me too. I took a bit longer than expected to get back into the flow of HK (sequels amirite?), but once I did… I’m obsessed lol
I can’t understand these complaints, honestly. It’s not like games are some kind of vital necessity. What’s more, I’d say they are luxury goods. So, either you pay for them or just pirate them (or ignore them altogether). Complaining makes no sense.
Exactly. The alternative to most companies setting prices dictated by what they can get away with charging is some kind of state involvement in setting prices, or even in production - you can imagine that in a communist state, there might be a government-run game studio, for example, and it would put out games at a certain price point calculated to be acceptable to the government’s goals and ideals.
I think this could actually work just fine, and think it’d be a great way to solve the problem of copyright. But we also shouldn’t kid ourselves: the government isn’t going to take vast amounts of money it could allocate to healthcare, transport, etc and allocate it to non-essential entertainment like video games. Look at government expenditure on the arts nowadays. So there would be fewer video games coming out in that system, and fewer opportunities for a Hollow Knight to come out of it all.
Given the current administration, bold of you to assume that they would spend a penny more than the absolute, bare minimum on healthcare, transport, etc
Hopefully it’s obvious that when I talk about a communist state or other state initiating huge state-run enterprises like game studios, the current US adminstration is not of much interest.
Not to mention it’s a smaller game. And people will point to that it took 6 Years to make. It really shouldn’t have taken 6 years to make it. What were they doing, working one guy to death on it?
In my experience, most people who complain about the length of time it took to develop something like a game have no experience in relevant fields and don’t understand how long it really takes to do the bare minimum for even a 30 hour game experience, much less to make it a quality experience.
I could hammer out a “game” with dozens of hours of “content” in a week that perhaps a single digit number of people will buy before immediately requesting a refund. Making something good is what takes time. It involves a lot of steps of going back, seeing what works and what doesn’t, revising, and reiterating.
Breath of the Wild by comparison also took about 6 years to make with a team of 300 people. Silksong apparently was developed by a team of 3. While I doubt they were living the high life the entire 6 years, I also have doubts they were working each other like slaves. Therefore I believe they were likely working at a more normal pace for game development, and it simply takes that long to make a quality experience.
Well considering only 4 people work on the game, and one of them only does the music, probably, yeah.
Isn’t silksong an indie game not an AAA game developed by hundreds of people? The 20€ pricetag for few people team seems very fitting, nothing special.
I think the reason the corporations are mad is because the £20 game is better than their £100 game. If too many people realise that you can buy good games at lower prices they will stop buying piles of shit for £100.
