There was a time where spending beyond $1mil on a single game was extremely unusual. Warcraft 1 was made when Blizzard was like 20 people, maybe 15 of them actually worked on the game, scope was sane so it took them a year or so. Today those 15 people would be at least $200k each benefits included in a sane job market (they're in Irvine so maybe not), run that for a year you're looking at a $3mil budget. Sell a game at $40 to make $30 after store cut you only need 100k sales to break even.
This is just literally the approach that indie and AA game developers are taking now, keep scope small, make something fun with a bit of soul, offer a lot of value for the price, and be comfortable if the game isn't a huge success, hey at least it's not a Concord level bomb.
It's still way smaller, honestly.
The old developers got paid actual money but also had equity and some measure of profit sharing (which is a thing you can do with a team of 20 people and not fucking 3,000) and most importantly it was an opportunity. Todd Howard was just a regular games designer, Hidetaka Miyazaki started at age 30 with 0 experience and became president of FromSoft in 10 years, Randy Pitchford was making Half Life Mods, and so on. There was
tons of upwards potential and most of the old devs made piles of money. There was an absolute pipeline of doing good work and being extremely rewarded for it. Also - the developers were treated like human being and actually got to develop skills and exist in the company. So if a company was in between projects - they didn't fire the entire staff to save costs - they trained and retrained them as needed in the downtime.
The baseline salary is higher, but with inflation the purchasing power is way down and those developers see 0 of the money from a successful product
and the second they aren't useful they're discarded like literal garbage. Big developers don't pay big salaries - Blizzard has a
lot of jobs that pay less than a Starbucks Barista and somehow have less dignity too, for example. Also contractors don't get benefits, are hourly, and don't get paid days off. Making $140,000 a year is neat until you're spending 4+ months every year not working.
I actually think that Xbox and MS were genuinely trying to give lots of studios the big chanse. But the studios were so rotten to the core and here we are now.
Pisses me off that Double Fine has done jack since Psychonauts 2, well they announced an Xbox Live Arcade level game. I want Brutal Legend 2 ffs.
Perfect Dark is hilarious to me. The studio sounds like they deserve it.
Tango was done dirty though.
I hope Fable getd the axe too.
I think the key issue with Sony/Microsoft's acquisition model is that when you pay huge piles of money to a studio - a lot of that money gets given to the core people that make a studio tick who instantly want to retire or do something else and it just falls apart near instantly. The Product Owner for a video game is apparently a massive fucking deal because you look at several formerly successful games and there's almost always a key departure before it all goes to shit (such as Jade Raymond at Assassin's Creed, Kaplan at Overwatch, even Darrah at Dragon Age, and so on). They 100% need to identify and retain these people in an acquisition.
By that standard - Tango didn't get done dirty. The "Shinji Makami studio" floundered really hard once Shinji got a pile of cash from being acquired and "stepped back" after Evil Within. Hi Fi Rush was neat but you can't really build a franchise around a game that uses so much expensive licensed music and really should not have taken ~7 years to make and create. They were just a floundering revolving door that closed out their last project and very likely didn't have anything else in the works.
