I’m not sure I necessarily agree on (all) the forecasts. I think the smart AAAs (aka almost all of them) are going to find ways to cut costs. You can see EA trying to do that by implementing Frostbite across all their games. Additionally, Ubisoft uses procedural generation quite a bit in their development (they used it for AC Unity I know, to build the city blocks, and anyone who’s seen the video for Beyond Good and Evil 2 knows they have to be using there (though I don’t recall Ancel’s statements in that video)).
Along similar lines to that second point, an increase in proceduralism can cut costs. My mind immediately goes to procedural textures, which I know nothing about, but seems to have the potential to help with this content creation problem.
(after reading the actual article, he apparently addresses this. Good on him)
Is he really predicting 1 TB games in 2020? That’s pretty ridiculous.
Some other things I see from reading the article:
He’s including free-to-play games with regular games. That seems like a mistake to me, mainly because such games are designed differently. This is just my opinion, I have no strong logical point to back it up.
He claims we’re close to market saturation, and that “we reached 50% of people are gamers long ago.” Well, not really. Not really at all, actually, unless by “gamers” you’re referring to mobile games. And that’s once again an issue like my previous paragraph, of conflating totally different types of game developments as one.
As “proof” let’s consider the sales of the breakout “hardcore” game of 2017, PUBG (and regardless of whether or not one thinks it’s “easy” or “based on luck,” a first person shooter designed around competition between 100 people is absolutely a “hardcore” game). We’ll go with this (the most recent data I saw at a glance) which says the game has sold 30 million. Let me first stop and say wow, that’s an incredible number.
Anyway, taking a look at this (it’s a question on Quora, but the answers link to legitimate sources including the UN) gives us a few estimates on how many people live in developed countries. I’ll ignore the fact that the market for games will get larger as underdeveloped countries get developed, and focus on the UN data which claimed in 2010 that 1 billion people live in developed countries.
30 million. 1 billion. 3%. Where in the world is he getting 50% from anyway? He doesn’t source that claim, which brings the validity of that and other claims into question, but I found this which looks weak in some areas. As one example, for any landline answers they specifically asked to speak to the youngest person in the house, which seems incredibly sketchy to me. This understandably skews their data towards the younger people, which according to their results has larger percentages of people who play games. The 18-29 age group is 67%, 30-49 = 58%, 50-64 = 40%, and 66+ = 40% (how in the world did they come up with those group sizes?).
Along similar lines, the video games with the highest budgets are also “hardcore” games like GTA V, Destiny, TOR, DICE games, COD games, etc. The “hardcore” market is nowhere near saturated. That’s a completely ridiculous assumption.
He makes a good point about marketing costs increasing when trying to promote outside of your core audience. However, a few things like the decreasing “stigma” of games (which is still going on for hardcore games) mean that the core audience is necessarily expanding, so that’s a mixed bag.
One of the most concerning things is where he gets his data on game costs, which I don’t see anywhere. I hope he’s not using VGCharts, which is well known for being inaccurate. If I don’t know where his costs are from, can I believe him?
Along those same lines, I see in his first plot has a 360 million dollar game from 2014. The problem is, there are no 360 million dollar games. He’s probably talking about Destiny, which we all know was rumored to have a 500 million dollar budget. However, if you look at the Wikipedia page for Destiny, there are comments from both devs and publishers saying that it was nowhere near 500. In fact, the 500 includes multiple things unrelated to the cost of the game itself which could be spread out over the entire IP. According the actual contract for the game (I didn’t read through it, I’m trusting WIkipedia which links it) the cost was 140.
The most expensive game listed in this guy’s data is completely wrong. Why should I believe him?
On game sizes. This is also a very questionable claim, given what we know about things like compression and high res textures–additional “byte” size that is already part of game development but was typically in times past curtailed at the cost of performance. In more recent times these things have instead been pushed to the forefront to allow for higher-quality performance at the cost of game size. One thing that immediately comes to mind is audio compression–the audio itself (and the work to make it) is unchanged, but with less compression the size goes up.
Let’s take a look at a few AAA series over time.
AC Black Flag - 29 GB
AC Unity - 41 GB
AC Syndicate - 40 GB
AC Origins - 43 GB
As one can see, the install size seems to be leveling off.
COD Advanced Warfare - 45 GB
COD Black Ops 3 - 45 GB
COD Infinite Warfare ~ 54 GB
COD WW2 - 45 GB
So once again, there’s none of this crazy escalation as implied by his data. The only company I can think of making these truly crazy larger and larger sized games is Microsoft, and I have no idea what’s going on with them.
Another thing is his trendlines, which clearly do not represent the data properly in a few cases (the main one being bytes). A linear regression is obviously not accurate there, so I have no idea why he’s using one.
I could go on but I’m getting tired of writing this. Basically, this guy doesn’t source his data, his data’s wrong in some cases, and the conclusions are based off of simplistic statistical analysis. After going through it more deeply I’m less confident (aka not confident at all) in his statements.