Not so much defense, more like "uhh, yeah, things cost money, inflation exists, welcome to the real world", and I can't disagree honestly. People gotta use an inflation calculator on old games.
This meme does have real "too late, I drew you as the soy cuck and myself as the chad!" energy.
They no longer have to make and ship cartridges to distribute them. They just let you download said game. The margins are insanely large. Add in they not longer subsidize consoles and release a new one every few years... yea. also the technology isn't improving that much as we have reached a pretty big limit on screen size etc. No more big innovation to make graphics look perfect- it is just art style now and most of the games reuse what works.
The hardware margins are insanely large, but how can you calculate the software costs? Software engineers aint cheap. I’m not defending I’m just understanding that its not free to sell video games. I’m not buying an 80$ game.
80$ likely pays for around an hour of one engineers time, if that
I swear I’m not trying to justify this but youre not making a great argument, i can understand 1 million man-hours: building the game engine for a new console, building an expansive video game, polishing it, debugging and playtesting, marketing. I can see it. Nintendo doesnt release unfinished video games.
They do. Looked it up for the discussions around this topic. Odyssey was around 50-100mil budget. The Switch Zeldas were apparently 100-150mil. Miyamoto once said, they'd need to sell at least 2mil copies to even make it out the red (x60-70$) with BotW. And that money needs to be spent before a single copy gets sold. Generally, we're talking $15'000 a month per developer on your staff + marketing + admin etc.
Two million sales are still at indie range nowadays, AAA games get multiple times more than that, AC Odyssey sold 14 million and it wasn't that big of a hit.
Odyssey sold 14 million and it wasn't that big of a hit.
Super Mario Odyssey 29 million
That doesn't make sense, which one is it? My point was, that by his statement, we can estimate what the general ballpark of development cost was for those games, despite Nintendo being very secretive about their development cost in general. Didn't try to say anything about successfulness
we can estimate what the general ballpark of development cost was for those games, despite Nintendo being very secretive about their development cost in general.
It is nowhere near the profit they make, my man, they made 1.7 BILLIONS from Super Mario Odyssey alone, that's 10x what Cyberpunk 2077 cost to develop; there's a reason they have been having record profits for years now.
I think you're a bit lost... I'm not entirely sure why you brought AC Odyssey into this discussion in the first place, when I was clearly talking about Super Mario Odyssey (didn't think I need to specify that in a discussion about Switch games) nor is anyone talking about profits. This is literally just about how much development costs and how much development cost rose. I know how much money the Switch games made... I didn't even mention the word profits once.
Unity, development engines specific to the consoles etc. They no longer have to build from the ground up when a handful of companies rent out their well built engines that make development way cheaper. Less employees needed. Way less expensive employees needed.
You know what, I always thought Nintendo owned their own game engine.
I know developers can make cross-platform games with certain game engines. But I'm pretty naive, so I assumed for some reason that the console owners didn't, since they knew more about the hardware.
Of course, it started that way. But better tools have come out.
I am sure Nintendo makes their own, as do the other consoles because they get to license them out. But for most AAA game development? usually not anymore.
Companies like Epic don't rent out their engines for free. They're trading a higher up-front cost and risk that they can't get the engine built properly for a percentage of their revenue. The more successful the game is, the less they save by licencing an engine. To the point where a lot of big AAA releases lose money overall (which is why they make their own engines still).
When you compare the size of Nintendo's team of roughly 7 thousand employees to other company's that argument evaporates quite quickly. In what world does a software engineer make $80 USD an hour?
That’s about $160k a year. Not familiar with the Japanese dev market, but in the US, Entry level engineers are generally pulling in $100k($50 an hour).
Not make, costs. There are other costs per employee than salary. Taxes, insurance, equipment etc. And $80 / hr is ~160k per year. Which isn't insanely high for a SE in US at least. $80 probably doesn't get close to paying for an hour of an engineer's time tbh
Thats a fairly standard base rate for 5-7 year experience software engineer in a non-outsourced position. Count insurance, management, HR, bonus/stock and the number is higher
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u/Avnesya 23h ago edited 22h ago
Is there actually "people" unironically defending em at this point?
Legit asking
edit : typo