Topic: Budgets of AAA games are too expensive. What would you remove to get the cost down?

I can't stand most "celebrities". Even using an Ed Sheeran song in Pokémon Scarlet/Violet feels grossly out of place (and he's one of the less objectionable celebrities out in the wild these days). Keep that crap out of games, especially Japanese ones.

Orchestral scores can also make money through streaming/sales, so I don't see why that should be scaled back in most cases.

I dunno about celebrities, if the money spent on them is reasonable then isn't really just marketing like when a movie hires The Rock or Chris Pratt to be the lead as it's not for their acting chops but their star name on the poster. As an example to show the maths if Ed Sheeran (who is rubbish busker with a loop pedal btw) has 70+ million listeners on Spotify so if just 1% of those listeners buy the game that is 700k extra copies sold and in most cases that is enough to earn back the budget of the typical game plus the celeb fees.

It's certainly the case in film and television, that getting celebrities attached to your project tends to lead to a bigger budget. Casting no-names in big roles generally leaves you with less money to spend on other things, because the amount you have to start with goes down with it.

Video games aren't really there yet though, and there are bigger factors at play than just star power. It doesn't help that a large proportion of movie spinoffs games are basically shovelware.

Pointless story, fmv, etc. focus on the game.

Id remove pointless story, voice acting, loot boxes, online play, etc etc.

Except for Mario kart, which needs a story mode imho

Ads and mo-capping actors.

Let's call the push for great graphics what it is, a giant d*ck measuring contest by all the major publishers and devs. Since the PS4 we've hit the era of diminishing returns and really it gets harder and harder to be impressed with amazing graphics. You want your games to look good? A good art direction gets the job done

Also there's nothing wrong with smaller games, not every game needs to be a huge, expansive worlds to explore with literal Hollywood level stories and voice acting. Having something smaller scale is perfectly fine

Lastly, it seems this isn't as much of a problem as it was in the 7th gen, but not every game needs online multiplayer

1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10. 6 can stay in if the other five being cut makes the budget work.

Dialing it back on 1, 2 and 8 alone would do wonders. If I had to pick two more, probably 7 and 9.

Honestly, these companies that put out nothing but AAA or mostly AAA games need to learn to moderate their budgets. That's why I like Nintendo's approach; they have their massive budget games like Zelda, 3D Mario, Smash Bros. etc. but they also have plenty of AA games. Not having every single game you release being a AAA game helps make your actual AAA titles feel more special too.

Also, some companies release their AAA titles in a series on a yearly basis. I’m talking about Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed. Those games no longer feel special and only there for a product to consoom. Media gets it’s money and marching orders saying that the next AAA slop is great.

Really loath the AAA companies.

1. Online. I do like online games and have played them, but I actually prefer single player experiences that are entirely offline. It’s why I tend to replay older games from the late 1990s-early 2000s with no online functionality rather than most popular games today.

2. Celebrity voices and faces. Most of the time I don’t think it’s necessary at all and all it does is just to bring attention to a game and nothing else. In my opinion, it’s really pointless and a waste of money to pay to create a character with a certain celebrity’s likeness and stuff rather than making entirely original characters, which would absolutely cost less to do. Sure, it can be cool to see a famous and familiar face in a game you are enjoying, but for me, it is not necessary.

3. Length. I also have a preference for games that are shorter, like most older games, and I think there is a lack of shorter triple-A games nowadays, and a lot can sometimes be bloated and overstay their welcome. A length that is a good in between of short and long would fit I think.

4. Graphics. I actually think graphics aren’t entirely important with games, and it’s moreso the gameplay, since I think that even if a game has super realistic and beautiful graphics, it can’t save the game if it’s extremely terrible.

5. Graphical detail. Related to 4, I pretty much have a similar reasoning for this one; small details are nice, but they aren’t always necessary and can’t save a bad game.

@Pastellioli I heavily agree on item #2 (pulling in celebrity or 'well known' actors).

The quality of VA work in Baldurs Gate 3 genuinely blew me away, and not a single 'celebrity' A-Lister in sight.

Of course sometimes we can get really great performances, I always liked Lance Reddick in the Horizon series, but I agree that these should never come at a ginormous cost.

@CJD87 Yes, there are a lot of times where celebrity casting brings amazing performances, but I think it’s sometimes better for a game to cast actors and actresses that are not well known or not extremely famous cuz they are also capable of bringing absolutely awesome acting to the game that they are in.

It also seems extremely uncommon nowadays to have employees at a game studio do all the voice acting and performances in a game they are working on. The only studio I can think of that does that is Rare, and I find the voice acting in their games to be pretty good, mostly from the range their employees have with who they are voicing. In one of their older games, the voice cast only consisted of three people; the game director, alongside an animator and developer that worked at the studio, and it amazes me that all three had such an amazing range that allowed them to voice multiple different characters. I think stuff like that really proves that companies don’t have to always spend millions of dollars to afford celebrities to act and voice characters in games, since there are many smaller individuals (and even employees!) who can bring out stunning and impressive performances.

@skywake I'm sure different games have vastly different cost allocations. As
12kkslider5552000 pointed out, BOTW voicing is minimal. Apart from maybe a dozen movie events, it's mostly grunts, yelps and yells. That's a big difference: you don't need to localize those sounds.

Contrast with Hogwarts Legacy, where every single word of dialog is fully voiced. This includes all side quests and even the background chatter. For an RPG, that's a lot. You could play through the entire game with the subtitles off and never read a single word of dialog. The cost allocation would change dramatically then, because now you need to rerecord all the dialog for every language, including all the alternate dialogs (there are a lot of conversation choices) and in fake accents. On the other hand, the Hogwarts Legacy map and world is much smaller. Nintendo simply had different priorities on where to spend their money.

I think voice work does matter a lot. Ni No Kuni 2's story experience is vastly inferior to the first, IMHO, in part because there's almost no voice dialog.

I'm wondering if for AAA games, development cost is really an issue. Outside of Nintendo, games tend to be released for multiple consoles as well as PCs. Their target market is vast, but also needs a certain organizational heft to cover releases across so many markets. Marketing, distribution, localization, QA and cross platform technical issues (especially for PCs) could cost much more than Nintendo writing one game for one console.

Today, games get blockbuster movie budgets but make monster blockbuster movie profits. Hogwarts Legacy sold 12M and made $850M in 2 weeks. How often do you even see a blockbuster movie make $850M in 2 weeks? Of course, not all AAA games become blockbusters. But that's also true for the movie industry, and unlike Hollywood the gaming industry is not in decline. So I think you will continue to see big bucks chasing big games.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1344668/revenue-video-gam...

1, 2, and 8 are easy choices. Maybe 9 too. Can't decide on the last one. Maybe 5? I sure wouldn't notice or care if those parts were cut.

@SillyG In the last Tera Leak that came out, it was actually revealed that GF didn't want to have anymore songs in their games, interesting enough. It was also said that GF didn't want a card to come with their games, unlike Pokemon Legends: Arceus in Japan that came with a card via pre-purchase or something.