There have been a plenty of studios that have been closed this gen, and it has to do with rising development costs and the lack of sales for mid tier games. Epic Games released a new trailer called Samaritan which plenty of you guys must have dissected already.
The thing is, that trailer cost them a lot of time and money to do, almost four months and a team of 30 people. This is a lot and Epic president Tim Sweeney expects next-gen costs to double if studios go for enhanced visual fidelity instead of creating something less ambitious.
“If we extrapolate that into creating an entire game, we were worried that the cost would go up by a factor of three or four or even five in the next generation.And of course, we felt that was not acceptable,” he said. (Via Gamesindustry International.
He instead praised free-to-play games, and it kinda feels like he is pushing an agenda here but this is what he said, “Free to play gaming is becoming more and more inevitable. If a user has world-class, AAA free-to-play games to choose from side-by-side with $60 games that are available only on a disc in a retail store, free-to-play games are very likely to win.
“So we need to really be mindful of this trend and start building games that have monetization and are designed to be piracy-proof.”
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