Fire Emblem: Awakening Breaks Franchise Sales Records

[WhiteTigerShiro]

It's kind of a cause and effect deal. The reason games have such bloated advertising costs is because development costs are so damn high that they can't afford to NOT tell people about the game. They need millions of people to rush out and buy the game. Compare that to a game like Fire Emblem that's probably a drop in the bucket to develop, and it's apples and oranges. 180,000 is a big deal when it doesn't cost a lot to develop the game, meanwhile when it costs into the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a game, then yeah, suddenly even selling as low as one million units is a critical failure.

But do games need to have such high development costs? Ubisoft have got seven different development teams working on the new Assassins Creed. Do we need to spend that much money on making games? It's not as if you have to spend upwards of $60 million just to make an FPS- plenty of shooters last gen were made for much much less.

Yeah, and games were made for much less the generation before that. Each generation increases the cost of development, that's never changed. As for whether or not games NEED those high costs, I couldn't tell ya. Get a job with a development team and see what kinds of things they spend the money on.

Though I can tell you that it takes a lot more effort to render a room realistically than it does to just slap 6 panels together to form a cube that made-up most rooms in the early days of 3D graphics, and effort = money. Where you could easily have just one or two guys working on level design back in the days of Quake and have a massive game, these days you have to have an entire team of people who all specialize in one thing or another; and it still takes them longer to get less content created just because of the time it takes to create even the smallest of rooms with the amount of detail in today's games.

I don't think so. I think the vast success of the Wii, and the rise of casual gaming in general, has shown that most gamers don't give a damn about graphics. In fact, every single console generation by the SNES has been won by the console with the least impressive specs, not the most. It's just a vocal minority who believe that polygons are the be all and end all when defining a game's worth. A vocal minority which is in danger of pushing the industry into bankruptcy. The more we can get games like Fire Emblem to do well, the better off we'll all be as gamers.

The success of the Wii just means that there's a market for more casual players. Ask anyone within the primary gaming community and they'll all tell you one common gripe with the Wii: Not enough games. Sure the few that are good are great, but for every Wii title that sold well, 3 or 4 sold just as well, if not better, on the 360 and PS3. Heck, the last time there was any hype for the Wii is when the Project Dreamfall games were finally being released, and that was last year. Meanwhile in just the past few months you could easily rattle-off nearly a dozen high-profile games for the other two systems.

The console that "wins" has little to do with it's specs, but is more about the game line-up. The PS-X? It had to compete with the Saturn and the N64, neither of which had impressive libraries. The PS2 won against the X-Box which eventually got a lot of good games, but took too long to spin-up (PS2 already had dominance and a lot more exclusives), and the Game Cube which only had a few really noteworthy titles. Then we get to this generation, sure by pure system sales you could argue that the Wii is the "winner", but take a poll of which system people spent the most time playing and see what results we come-up with.

As for that "vocal minority", it's called voting with your dollars. If it was just a vocal minority who wanted the best graphics possible then that's where the money would be, but people are buying Triple-A titles in droves despite game content going down in place of more graphical fidelity. There are countless games people could buy to get more game for their buck, and it's not that people aren't aware of these games, it's just that they look at them, see the graphics, and then brush them off as not worth their time. It's the same reason guys will usually try and talk to the pretty girl before the plain one. You can get on that soapbox and preach about the shallowness of judging something (or one) by its looks all you want, but at the end of the day it's what sells.