Oh come on, are you actually trying to pull this card? ? Horrible work conditions are a standard in gamedev.
As for development costs - Witcher 3 was an absolute financial success, meaning that its sale figures were good enough even from the perspective of USA companies. Lower development costs just mean that it was even more profitable for CDPR, but it's in no way the reason why it was successful.
Horrible work conditions are not "standard" on the level CDPR has them; they'd literally be illegal in the first world. And they can't make their games without those conditions; consider that, even with these bottom of the barrel labor costs, Witcher 3 still costed nearly $90 million to make. Thus, it is not a remotely sustainable model and doesn't solve the underlying issue of single-player games dying.
There is nothing special about CDPR (actually they look pretty good compared to American companies in this regard).
You're just blatantly lying at this point. CDPR would have absolutely no one working for them if they were based in any developed country, and Poland is rapidly approaching that level.
EA, the devil of the industry, pays its developers $90-100k on average with great benefits.
Nice argument you have there. I guess I'll just answer in the same way as you did: "No it doesn't".
Just off the top of my head, here's a game trailer that I accidentally stumbled upon
an hour ago while browsing VK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBBWudCldxM
Obviously it's not a masterpiece, but it is being done by one guy in his spare time.
O N E.
And there are hundreds of projects like this being done.
And the vast majority of them are either total crap or never get made. They're no replacement for dedicated studios with hundreds of millions in resources.
Once again, you operate on the basis of information that's been outdated for almost a decade. There is absolutely no need whatsoever to spend "tens of millions of dollars" to make a game that looks good enough.
ATOM RPG (again, just one of dozens of examples off the top of my head) was created for a budget of $33K (that's thirty three
thousand dollars).
And it looks like crap. I don't want games to be either online-only MMOs or perpetually locked in the level of the 90s (even though I still play games from that time).
I don't give a flying frak about "the vast majority of people". I care about great games being made.
The vast majority of people disagree with you about what constitutes a "good game." One of them is me. Thus, why I consider this an issue, and you may not. Which is fine for, you I guess, but other people actually like modern AAA single player games.
Yes, I said the same ("Sure, there probably wouldn't be any AAA ultra realistic graphics games anymore,...").
Point is the only high-quality thing here are the graphics and voice acting. The actual gameplay is on par with what we had 10 years ago (sometimes worse, depends on microtransactions). There is nothing wrong with liking high fidelity graphics, but you can make serviceable looking yet fun small game in your free time. Thats why I am not worried about games being profitable (don't take it as a support for piracy though, I do buy my games).
It's not just graphics and voice acting, though both of those are a big issue (particularly the latter). It's also just presentation/polish in general as well as depth of mechanics. When all of this is considered I don't see how an indie dev could ever make something like, say, Fallout New Vegas.
Yes, thats why I said "some". I agree there is too much scamming there. Though too many people will throw money on promises. You could say publishers were scamming people for a long time already with unfinished products, preorders and now GAAS.
I don't consider any of the above scams. You get what you pay for and there's tons of information available on what you're buying. Crowd funding, on the other hand, is a complete crapshoot. They can take your money, give you
nothing in return, and there's nothing you can do about it. Additionally, there's no real oversight and no real incentive for them to do what they say. Even actually good indie games like Minecraft fell into this trap (prior to becoming, well, not indie, thanks to Microsoft). That game was alpha funded; this is better than crowdfunding because you actually have to show the customer something first, then they pay you, and you promise to give them more later. But when the developer got his millions he stopped bothering to develop the game, there is a chart someone compiled that showed he spent over 50% of 2011 on vacation. The final product was also nothing like what was promised, showing how easy it is to scam people with such a funding scheme in even the most high-profile scenario.
Could you elaborate on that? How would a bunch of friends be unable to work on game in their free time? Heck, what would push small developers out of the market? People buy indies now, the same people will buy them in future. The market for those games may be small but it is there.
"Hobbyists" will not crank out games to the same extent that full studios will: these are, after all, thousands of man hours worth of work, even if the tools themselves advance to the point where they cost nothing. A consistent stream of good games, even indie ones, are only viable if the devs can do it full time and are compensated for their work.
The problem with that? Well, there are two. One, indie developers are in the same boat as AAA developers: if they're not making a multiplayer game riddled with microtransactions (cf. Star Citizen), then they're effectively losing money when opportunity cost is considered.
Two, the elephant in the room, digital piracy. Entire companies have folded because of it. While the exact figure varies, PC indie games without significant DRM tend to have around a 90% piracy rate. World of Goo had that. Some games, such as Heavy Hogur, can get a 98% piracy rate.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90/
http://m.slashdot.org/story/139522
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JakubKasztalski/20171027/308436/So_5245_of_People_Playing_my_Indie_Game_Have_Pirated_it.php
http://forums.indiegamer.com/threads/confirmed-98-piracy-ratio.23669/
https://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/03/22/indie-developer-sells-300000-copies-game-finds-1-million-pirated-copies/
Even 'casual' games get 92%+ rates:
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/108301/Casual_Games_and_Piracy_The_Truth.php
...and games that cost literally 1 cent to purchase get 25% rates.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/100576-Who-Would-Pirate-the-One-Cent-Humble-Indie-Bundle
This means only the most insanely successful games can survive in spite of said piracy, essentially off of donations. How do you get around piracy (beyond actually enforcing penalties on everyone which no one is going to bother to do)? Make the game always-online. This has consistently been found to be the absolute best way of proofing it. Online games like League of Legends and World of Warcraft are a far larger percentage of the gaming market these days than ever before, and there is no significant piracy of MMOs and similar games because the server data is kept secret. You literally have to physically steal the hard drive from a company server and even then your pirate server is going to be out of date and really crappy.
A good example of this trend in action is China. People in China are primarily PC gamers, and play all types of games. In fact, China is
the biggest gaming market in the entire world, having surpassed the U.S. two years ago. But the only games that Chinese studios make are multiplayer always-online ones (F2P FPSes, MMOs, freemium mobile games, etc.). I'm serious, check;
it's every single one. Why? Because it's essentially impossible for any other types of games to make money. There is no mass output of single player passion projects in China, even though Chinese gamers DO like to play single player games (we know, because Western and Japanese games are pirated or bootlegged en masse on there), and even though China itself is the world's largest producer of programmers (and second largest producer of software developers). Instead, the whole sub-market is just dead.
This shift is happening right now, and it worries me. We can't close this box. In 20 years, single player AAA games may very well be extinct, and single player game output in general declined significantly outside of mods for decades-old games and engines. I don't see any way to reverse this.
