I don’t think this is quite right. CoD titles do take a long time to develop. They‘re just rotating studios, so they can achieve a yearly release cadence (the last six entries in the series had five different studios working on them). Also, they are by no means getting cheaper. According to court documents development costs rose from $450 million to over $700 million from 2015 to 2020 alone.
Kyrgizion@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The fuck he talking about? Obviously it has worked before. How else can you explain yearly COD releases making billions in revenue?
That it’s a losing strategy in the long term was always obvious, but get this: whomever’s in charge only cares about the numbers of the following quarter. That the company will go under in 10 years is literally not his problem, that’s the next schmoe’s problem.
nyankas@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
ieatpwns@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Aren’t the cod games made by 3 different studios that take turns with their releases? Or did they stop doing that? I remember infinity ward, Treyarchand I can’t recall the 3rd
warm@kbin.earth 2 days ago
Sledgehammer Games. They never really kept the cycle, studios kept fucking up and others had to come in to help etc.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yearly CoD releases are taking longer to make and costing more to produce though; the most recent CoD we have numbers for, which was a number of years ago at this point, cost $700M to make, and that was the most expensive one at the time. They used to have two studios alternating releases every other year. Now there are three studios on a rotation with about a dozen support studios that all used to make other games, and now they just make CoD.
“Charging more” is where this gets ambiguous though. A game like Assassin’s Creed charges less these days than it used to, relative to how much content they put in the box. I’m long since checked out of Assassin’s Creed, but I think the average game could stand to be leaner and cost the same in the interest of coming out faster and for less money. That would be called shrinkflation in any other industry, which is the same as charging more.
warm@kbin.earth 2 days ago
You cannot convince me it cost $700M to make any of the recent CoD games. They are rehashes of each other. That has to include literally every dollar spent during the games development lifecycle across all studios and the publisher, right? Otherwise they are just pissing money away.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It is development spend + marketing spend + post-launch DLC spend. Even forking the same code base, you can see where the money goes. The campaigns are original each time, new map design requires time and money, etc. In the past 5 years, there has probably been a CoD game that cost $1B to make, as this data is from 2020.
warm@kbin.earth 2 days ago
If it includes marketing then yeah, it's mostly that. $700M is an absolutely absurd astronomical amount for what CoD is, on a purely development basis.