I'm not sure how much bioshock really cost (the studio has denied the 200Million rumour) and I think the market is very saturated. I do agree with you that 'big' business seem out of touch with how to produce 'good' games efficiently and spend way too much (its not so much the raw dollars but the efficiency of those dollars; there seems to be an attitude that if you throw enough money it will be good game). However good games do sell well (perhaps just not well enough for eample tomb raider (which I personally did not think was that good but they sold a lot of units with very high reviews) to cover extremely high cost.
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I really liked DKS - easily the game I enjoyed the most that year but I am less warm about DC (imho the rts portion is very poor and not very much fun). I will not prejudge D:OS (and a host of other games that will become available in 2014 - too many to play). I have high hopes for several games but it is premature for me to comment on any of them till I play them. For me personally 2013 was a bit of a let down (esp in rpg arena) but I did enjoy bioshock far more than I expected; still I think dishonored was probably my favorite (and perhaps that should not surprise me as the developer was arkane studio (developer of Arx Fatalis)) but I would not call it game of year because it was fairly short.
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So yea like you I have high hopes for D:OS but I cannot say it will be the best of 2014 and I cannot even say it will be fun to play (but I hope it is fun smile ) and I have concern that Square E and EA are going to drive good studios out of business (due to their own ineffective usage of dollars)
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Hum. That was a pretty good article you linked. Probably should have read it prior to posting frown



Originally Posted by henryv
Larian staff do read the forums especially for feedbacks from my experience during the dragon commander Beta.

I think it is not due to the risk, but on the management level (http://www.cracked.com/article_20727_5-reasons-video-game-industry-about-to-crash.html). Management from big gaming industries are more business oriented than being a gamer. I believe that swen is more of a gamer than a business man.

To be fair, it only took Larian $10M+ to make (one of swen's blog said Divinity: Dragon Knight Saga cost them 6M+ euros and they reached break even on its development cost, so 10m should suffice for original sin) as compared with AAA titles (bioshock infinite with $200m budget *100m development cost, 100m marketing*). Look at the remakes of first person shooter games, the game play is somewhat similar in each sequel, the story line is somewhat recycled but still sold well due to its brand recognition although the User ratings are very very low.

You should read Swen's blog. You will learn a lot from it from a game developer's perspective.

Last edited by meme; 16/12/13 04:40 PM.