w00tage said:
This sounds perfectly logical, if it weren't for all of the other game studios that do exactly this as a matter of course. Creating a female character and having them share the animations n'stuff is absolutely commonplace and it's BS that they said "waaahh we don't have enough money".
Other games manage because having high quality animation isn't particularly
important. In Skyrim, all human characters use the same animations across the board and they generally look fairly bad. Stabbings where you never actually touched them with the knife or sword are common. Acting, such that it is, is
incredibly wooden - a fact that has generated more than one meme. To this day there are people working for free to modify those art assets that Bethesda had
years to work on.
By contrast, if you want a female playable character in
that universe, you can't get away with just swapping the models. Clipping errors and graphical glitches would be fantastically common not to mention the simple fact that in any cut scene, having the female character do
exactly what the male character does would be off putting and more importantly calls into question why you'd want the female character in the first place.
Now, that is
obviously a readily solved problem. After all, they have artists of all stripes. But time and resources are limited and bear in mind what Ubisoft wants is to make a profit and importantly have that profit delivered within a certain window during the fiscal year. Ultimately that means they are going to spend money to purchase time and even with a large budget you can surely understand you'll have a finite amount of time to spend. Thus, when budgeting the time, what
benefit is there to spending a huge chunk of that time budget adding a playable female when that time could be spent doing literally
anything else (some of which could offer additional revenue streams)?
That of course leads to your next point.
w00tage said:
News flash to game developers, if players WANT something,
Players, which I will substitute for consumers, do not know what they want. If you ask them they simply say "that thing I liked but more so". To famously misquote Ford, if he gave the consumers what they wanted we'd just have a faster horse. That's just a blanket statement of course and not particularly directed at your comment. It's just a general observation.
w00tage said:
and you want the player's MONEY, you GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT.
When players buy millions of copies of the next game they will have demonstrated the fundamental flaw of this line of reasoning. People are going to buy this game. Lots and lots of copies. They will also buy the DLC - millions of downloads worth easily. This thus proves that people will buy something
even if it isn't
exactly what they want. Unless, of course, they somehow don't sell millions of copies and somehow consumers manage to consistently assert that they refused to make the purchase because of the gender thing. Then they might manage to make a point.
w00tage said:
That is the secret to making money versus losing money, Ubisoft.
Ubisoft has consistently made money on the franchise in spite of everything from DRM that made Assassin's Creed 2 all but unplayable on PC to having one of the more disgusting DLC strategies out there. They thus seem to understand perfectly well how to grind money from their audience.
w00tage said:
Trying to cheap out =/= making money, it == saving money. But you kind of have to prioritize making it in the first place, know what I'm saying?
Saving money
is making money.
Consider the following easy scenario. Say I have a game that cost 30 million dollars to make and 50 million dollars to market. This game sells 10 million copies and I receive 30 dollars per copy. I have brought in 300 million in revenue but I spent 80 million to get that revenue. Thus my profit is 220 million dollars.
Now, say I take that same 30 million dollar game and that same 50 million dollar marketing budget and I decide I want to add a female playable character and have determined (based on what it took to make the male character) that it would cost about 6 million dollars that I will spend on writing and recording new dialog, custom animations for the female characters and lots of re-animation of existing scenes not to mention models and 2d art. My game now cost a total of 86m million dollars to make and thus in order to receive the same profit, I need to make 306 million dollars. The question becomes (in this case), do I
think that this change will increase sales by at least 200,000 copies? Because if it does not increase sales, I have effectively reduced my net profit.
That is a big part of why things get cut. At some point a studio tries to figure out how important some feature or item might be and if it is determined that it isn't cost effective, it gets cut.
There is, of course, a different way to approach this problem - just make the player character female from the start. That would still require more work than using a male character (especially an established male character) but it would allow more resources to be directed to the natural end of having a good game built around a good character. Of course, the problem here is that there is a fairly well documented problem that games with female leads tend to not sell well. That may, of course, just be because most of those games weren't particularly good but regardless it's been cited as true by more than one industry leader.
