Lower budgets would probably be better. High budgets mean high risk, developers and publishers try to minimize that risk and you get bland games that try to cater to too many tastes. Movies suffer from the same problem. They get budgets in the hundreds of millions and you wonder what they spent it all for.
I canāt remember who it was. A famous actor, anyway. They were talking about whatās happened with movies. Thereās nothing in the middle.
Itās either $100m+ or less than $3m. Either it gets a big producer and they pump so much money into it that it must be safe because it canāt lose money. Or is a small producer doing it for the love, but a small budget doesnāt go very far. The risky narratives done well would be funded somewhere between the two extremes but itās just not how itās done anymore.
In a strange way, to get more money in for the riskier productions, we need to get the money out of Hollywood. Canāt see it happening, myself.
You canāt? We just had a summer filled with high-budget flops, and now both the actors and the writers are on strike meaning that the studios wonāt be able to recoup their losses any time soon. Add the reduced to non-existent theatre turnout in the first couple of years of the decade due to COVID and thereās been a hell of a lot of money āgetting out of Hollywood.ā
I disagree that a flop means lost revenue. This is an industry thatās so adept at hiding income to avoid paying taxes, actors, and every other studio worker that dodgy accounting is known as āHollywood Accountingā. Maybe weāre talking about different things. When I say Hollywood, I mean the movie industry as a whole.
Hollywood has failed to capture some income streams. From theatres, for example, as you say. But thereās still too much money to be made (and too much propaganda potential) for enough big money to leave that the problems of monopoly finance capital go away.
High budgets are killing the film industry. In the case of gaming, it plays a factor, but greed is probably the main issue. Most big budget AAA games in the past made large amounts of money even if they didnāt have universal appeal. Because companies realised that they could make large amounts of money off loot boxes, microtransactions, cash shops and battle passes, they started trying to funnel players into games, mainly so that players would buy things. Thatās one of the main reasons the AAA industry is getting worse: games need to appeal to as many as possible, while coming out as fast as possible, all so that players will buy the overpriced in-game items endlessly shoved in playersā faces.
I love me some good AAA games and want them to stick around. But I think it would be much better if they were a bit fewer and further between, and the big studios shift to more regular AA games, and give their devs chances to do some more oddball stuff with even lower budgets. More expiremntation and risky projects can only enrich the industry.
You never know what those experiments can lead too. There will be a lot of failures however someone is going to look at the failure and realize what needs to be need to be tweaked.
