Consumers are stupid. They seldom want something new, more often than not they want something familiar with a few slights twists. Movie studio’s don’t do reboots because they’re lazy, they do it because people keep fucking going to see them.
A handful of people online complain every year about how “Sports Game Franchise '23 is just SGF '22 with some new player skins” and yet it still sells like hotcakes. If your goal is to make money, why wouldn’t you do that, there’s no financial incentive to spend more money on development.
I starting playing MMO’s with the Ultima Online beta, and was in a number of other betas over the years. Vanguard, The Chronicles of Spellborn, etc. The number of beta players who kept shouting “it needs race X from WoW” and “why aren’t there any druids like in WoW” was deafening. For decades, people talked about the next “WoW killer”, which meant “a game close enough to WoW for people to migrate but maybe with slightly better graphics”.
Do you know where the money gets spent when you come up with original ideas? Into the trash can. It’s literally paying people to write down ideas on paper or in code, iterating, and then throwing them out, over and over again.
AAA titles also spend a truckload on voice acting and mocap. You don’t need to mocap a round sheep monster. Sure, you could be incredibly stupid and pay Alan Tudyk to voice act the sheep, or pay Vin Diesal millions to say “I am Groot” 300 different ways, but no one should be ashamed for not doing so.
You confused cheap with profitable.
Consumers are stupid. They seldom want something new, more often than not they want something familiar with a few slights twists. Movie studio’s don’t do reboots because they’re lazy, they do it because people keep fucking going to see them.
A handful of people online complain every year about how “Sports Game Franchise '23 is just SGF '22 with some new player skins” and yet it still sells like hotcakes. If your goal is to make money, why wouldn’t you do that, there’s no financial incentive to spend more money on development.
I starting playing MMO’s with the Ultima Online beta, and was in a number of other betas over the years. Vanguard, The Chronicles of Spellborn, etc. The number of beta players who kept shouting “it needs race X from WoW” and “why aren’t there any druids like in WoW” was deafening. For decades, people talked about the next “WoW killer”, which meant “a game close enough to WoW for people to migrate but maybe with slightly better graphics”.
6 mil is very cheap, and this game was obviously a money based on popular game tropes and memes
That’s not a point though, valid or otherwise.
Do you know where the money gets spent when you come up with original ideas? Into the trash can. It’s literally paying people to write down ideas on paper or in code, iterating, and then throwing them out, over and over again.
AAA titles also spend a truckload on voice acting and mocap. You don’t need to mocap a round sheep monster. Sure, you could be incredibly stupid and pay Alan Tudyk to voice act the sheep, or pay Vin Diesal millions to say “I am Groot” 300 different ways, but no one should be ashamed for not doing so.
God thats boring