CamHostage
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VR games are less costly to produce because they don’t have the scale of big AAA games.
a real half life 3 would be considerably more expensive to make
Well... I don't know about that, at least in this case. I think Alyx had a scale and scope pretty on par with what you would expect from a HL game with modern graphics. It was just as long as past games in the series and it probably involved a good deal more iteration because the ideas were new.
In most cases VR games are smaller and cheaper to make and there are clearly a lot of people willing to buy games like that. But there's a need for marquee titles that are bigger in scope to sell headsets too and a lot of people don't see it as worth it to make games like that.
Yes, absolutely nothing was cheap about developing Half-Life Alyx, it was AAA effort. I don't know how close this Half-Life Alyx budget calculation is right comes, but $40-$60 million is not unreasonable given what's on-screen and how the staffing adds up.)
Typical big VR projects were estimated in 2017 to be something like $5m, with big games like the PSVR key apps being more like $10m.
A little indie game where you're just shooting zombies or throwing items around in a factory would be much less, but any game production that cracks $1M in production costs needs to be careful (and/or smart about monetization) since there are limited numbers of products generating business in the millions in the VR space currently.
VR games are only less costly to make when they are lesser games.
It doesn't matter if you make a Rick & Morty game for VR or for console, it costs whatever it costs to make a Rick & Morty game. Nothing about VR makes a VR game cheaper to make, other than that customer standards are a little lower in the VR space as far as production value quality/quantity. Two games of the same story and visuals and actor costs might even be more expensive on VR, because you need special development kits to make it (Anybody in the office testing their build needs a VR headset, and now that everybody is working at home, essentially everybody on staff needs their own helmet to do their work.) And given that VR games for the most part aren't sold in stores makes it even harder to budget for, since it's not a product that's in front of users' eyes.
As with any game platform, you can make good money, if you keep your budgets in check. VR does however have the added complication of it being an accessory (or with Quest 2 a new and isolated platform, albeit a hot one at the moment.) If you're a platform manufacturer (like Valve or PlayStation) creating a loss-leader in order to forward your platform's install base, it may be worth spending $10s of millions on a game that will not recoup that cost. Just make sure you don't over-commit to those huge projects, you don't want your loss-leaders becomes a genuine loss.
insomniac games has multiple high quality VR projects. That’s similar to what I’m suggesting.
each major dev has some smaller group that is dedicated to experimenting with VR
Yeah, I get you, and I like that idea. Using Insomniac as an example, though, they made some great VR titles back when they were independent and searching for opportunities. Then they became a PlayStation studio, and settled down to business, and have made no VR games since. (And weirdly, neither of their VR games have been brought over to PSVR.)
There was a time where every major dev had smaller groups to explore things like handheld games or digital download games. (It's how we got great little titles like Killzone Liberation and Motorstorm RC.) But sadly, the business has flipped the other way, and now studios are sucking in smaller groups just to make one big project. Look at how many companies are wrapped up in developing Halo Infinite for 343, or how Rockstar used to make so many different games like Bully and Manhunt and Beaterator and Ping Pong, and now all those studios are making GTAO/RDRO content. Check the credits list for any given Ubisoft game. It's a sad turn away from the business model you're suggestion (and a business model I liked a lot, particularly since I loved portable games and got a lot of great stuff when AAA studios lent out their franchises to B-teams or partner developers,) but it's the way things seem to be going. PSVR would have to command a major portion of PlayStation revenue for them to flip the script on that method.
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