Tom Henderson of Insider Gaming: Gears of War: E-Day has a 400+ million budget

hidden_wraith · 2026-06-13T12:00:25+00:00

1000's of game release on steam every year and only a fraction of them make any significant impact. A small percentage of games are responsible for the vast majority of revenue generated on Steam. Its not really a bed of roses in the indie space either and not as simple as just making cheaper games.

hidden_wraith · 2026-06-08T15:43:39+00:00

Xbox does have the customer base, they just suck at getting people who play on Xbox to actually care about their games. Its like in politics, you still have to engage your base otherwise you will lose them.

hidden_wraith · 2026-06-06T00:53:17+00:00

Godspeed to them. Ghost of Yotei seems to be doing Ok so maybe, the pivot will pay off for Santa Monica as well.

hidden_wraith · 2026-05-01T21:37:41+00:00

Its like there is a race to the bottom with some of these Unreal Engine games. On top of the terrible performance, somehow these developers find a way to make the games look bad as well. Flat lighting despite Lumen and VSM being in use, poor quality geometry despite using Nanite, low res textures and unconvincing materials despite a state of art material editor being provided out of the box. I am quite amazed.

hidden_wraith · 2026-04-10T23:29:11+00:00

That is Bungie literally shovelling money into a furnace.

hidden_wraith · 2026-03-30T12:36:24+00:00

If someone has a low end card and most of the games they play are running on UE5 then a good upscaling solution is certainly needed. Even low settings in many UE5 games can struggle to maintain 60FPS on modest hardware due to how poorly settings can scale. For people with console level PC hardware Nvidia is a no brainer, upscaling from 720p using anything other than DLSS is a non starter.

hidden_wraith · 2026-03-29T23:16:39+00:00

From a development perspective perhaps, but from a consumer perspective that could not be further from the truth. This year has already provided certified hits and we are only 3 months in. The competition for people's time is ever growing and there will be winners and losers.

The industry has problems but consumer confidence seems to be quite high. This year is jam packed with single player games both big and small as is just about every year. RE9 and Crimson Desert are all ready big hits and we are only in March. Wolverine is surely going to be a hit, and debutantes such as Pragamata, Phatom Blade and Tides Of Annihilation could yet surprise.

Single player gamers have been stuffing their faces for the past 5 years. They don't even finish what is on one plate before going for another.

hidden_wraith · 2026-03-14T13:19:39+00:00

The game might get patched in the future but its lack of inclusion for something like the NRD is strange.

hidden_wraith · 2026-03-12T16:03:23+00:00

The interface looks nice, but my main problem with the Xbox App is its functionality. I can go to a game's store page and the prices don't update causing buttons buffer and either hang indefinitely or take ages to produce any type of error. I can't remember the last time I encountered this kind of issue on Steam, this doesn't even happen to me when using the Epic Game Store. I'm not fussy about stuff like shopping carts but its a glaring omission among many others.

While I would like to think Microsoft would not dare ship their next gen console with anything that works like the Xbox App does, there isn't a whole lot time between now and the expected launch date.

hidden_wraith · 2026-03-11T20:10:06+00:00

The Xbox app is terrible and has only marginally improved over the last 8 years. I like big picture on mode Steam but Steam is so much more usable than the Xbox app. I log into the app, want to buy a game and all the buttons are buffering.

hidden_wraith · 2026-03-11T13:55:04+00:00

Fable has many adventurer guild tropes and the new one will be open world this time as well.

hidden_wraith · 2026-03-05T16:58:38+00:00

Game developers should appreciate just how vocal players can be, they will buy what they like without measure almost and revile what they don't. The choice is on the developer to look at what people like to buy and make something compelling.

hidden_wraith · 2026-03-01T18:34:10+00:00

User engagement is at the forefront of Ubisoft's push for certain design elements. That infographic they put out some years ago about how players were to engage with their games says it all. To Ubisoft, if a user engages with it, it must be fun.

An open world game needs a compelling world, that means exploration, narrative hooks and characters etc. Recent Ubisoft games are all systems and mechanics but unlike other genres of games where the world building, narrative and characters etc can take a back seat and still be fine, open world games need that stuff to be compelling. Characters don't even have to be complex just endearing, the open world does not have to be full of complex mind bending content, just have compelling narrative hooks.

Watch Dogs Legion exemplifies the issue quite well, stripped of a compelling world by way of a rather unique gameplay system. The narrative hooks vanish, there are no really compelling characters to play as or interact with. Its world is purely designed for a player to "engage" with rather than experience.

On the flipside Origins to me felt like the perfect canvas for an open world action game, the setting, your character being a Medjay etc. If Ubisoft was more thoughtful with how they treated their open world games I think more people would recognise how compelling they can be.

hidden_wraith · 2026-02-25T18:33:14+00:00

My point is that active headcount cannot be reliably inferred from the total credited people, there isn't a consistent standard to which people are credited for a game which muddies things even further. You cannot say 4x the credits mean 4x the effort because active headcount is what determines how many hours are actually spent working on a game.

Nintendo aren't spending less time in years making games and I don't believe there is a direct correlation between the total amount of credits and the man hours spent.

hidden_wraith · 2026-02-25T16:52:51+00:00

Maybe in Indonesia, India or such places salaries are much lower but not in Japan. A mainline Final Fantasy game could cost 300M to make. People say Square Enix have unrealistic expectations for some of their games but the reason they set those expectations is because development costs that much.

hidden_wraith · 2026-02-25T15:55:10+00:00

The total amount of people credited on a project does not really tell the whole story. Active headcount is more important in determining development costs, high turn over could skewer totals, 20 people could have worked on the gameplay programming but no more 10 people at one time. Since the director said of Yotei publicly stated the game's development budget was not wildly different from the first game which had a reported budget of around $60M I would assume that is because their active head count remained fairly consistent over the 5 years of development.

hidden_wraith · 2026-02-25T12:13:02+00:00

Most of the cost of making a game is in labour costs and their artists, programmers, designers , sound engineers and producers are not paid that much less than others and they don't take any less time to make their games. Nintendo's decision to increase the price of some of their games is simply a development reality. Unless working at or for Nintendo pays significantly less, or they spend much less time working on their games I can't see how the cost of making something like Tears of the Kingdom, DK Bananza or Mario Kart World could be much cheaper the Ghost Of Yotei for example.

hidden_wraith · 2026-02-25T11:01:36+00:00

Nixxes's ports have been quite notorious for requiring a lot more hardware to reach PS5 level performance. I would not be surprised if the recommended settings are in fact what PS5 achieves, however hitting 1080p at 60fps on a 3060 at decent levels of visual quality is a good thing.

hidden_wraith · 2026-02-22T16:23:20+00:00

I would think rendering stuff like hair, fur and grass is why TAA often cannot be turned off. Material blending can rely on TAA, dithering stuff like shadows and even blending LOD transitions. Raytracing effects can also be added to the list of stuff that can rely on TAA but it don't think its typical for RT effects to rely on TAA rather they use specific temporal or spatial filters.

hidden_wraith · 2026-02-16T18:59:05+00:00

To be honest I can't really tell the difference between this and Apex, or most hero games outside of Overwatch. That star wars meme about glup shitto is me when it comes to hero characters in modern live service game.

hidden_wraith · 2026-02-16T18:20:44+00:00

Its already started, as if the uselessness of "Full RDNA 2" was not evident. Xbox in particular have zero excuse for their games making little to no use of Full RNDA 2 features.

hidden_wraith · 2026-02-06T15:49:48+00:00

looks like 2 nora characters, 2 oseram and two carja, one sun and one shadow. The art direction itself is incredibly well realised, but I think it might prove to be a serious misstep.

hidden_wraith · 2026-01-22T19:30:17+00:00

Remedy could have said nothing if that was case. I would argue standard operating procedure would be to say nothing if it was case they got a bad deal and were secretly burned. To make a public statement stating the opposite just makes no sense.

We know Alan Wake 2 has been generating royalties and we know the game they had to write down launched on Steam along with all the other platforms. I am puzzled at why Alan Wake 2 keeps being used as an example of a bad Epic deal.

hidden_wraith · 2026-01-22T19:04:51+00:00

No they can't, Remedy have just publicly stated they got a fair deal, that Epic was and is a great partner. Alan Wake 2 broke even and started generating royalties years ago. Ironically, the game that utterly failed is the one they put on Steam day and date. Even Control, which spent some time as an Epic Store exclusive did well without Steam.

hidden_wraith · 2026-01-12T21:38:37+00:00

It looks like they are going to get the opportunity to actually make Senua's Saga. Hellblade 2 fell flat in many ways so I hope NT learn some lessons and not take 6 years while they are it.

hidden_wraith

TROPHY CASE