Originally posted by uid313
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Humble Indie Bundle V Generates Five Million USD
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Originally posted by directhex View PostPiracy of proprietary software is just as reprehensible as GPL violation.
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Originally posted by directhex View PostDo you even have a clue what a real amateurish game means?
Hint: award-winning lower-budget games are not amateurish. Badly made games of *any* budget are amateurish.
And Psychonauts had a budget of $13 million in 2005 dollars, which is quite comfortably into AAA territory, certainly for Majesco who originally funded it.
If you still don't get it - I'll tell you again but in other words - yes AAA is a subjective term just like beauty since there's no hardcoded properties defining it. I played the first several bundles and all games where either downright amateurish or average games. The games that the bundle ships now are better but to me they don't compare to Modern Warfare 3 class of games, hence they're, as I said, "average" and amateurish, not AAA
And don't give me 2005 or so games for obvious reasons. What was 7 years ago AAA, now is obviously not AAA any longer since the standards for AAA rise as time goes by.Last edited by mark45; 15 June 2012, 09:18 AM.
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Originally posted by mark45 View PostWhere did I say budget? So who's the moron here?
A budget issue.
Publishers decide how much money to spend on a game's development and marketing, and the ones that get the lion's share are "AAA" titles.
It's not a measure of whether a game is any good or not, only the budget spent by the publisher.
Take a recent example - Homefront was an AAA title for THQ. They spent millions on it. Millions. It rated 70% from Metacritic, because it wasn't very good.
The film version of the term is "Blockbuster" - it doesn't mean it's good, it means it's expensive. Take the Transformers movies as an example - they're shit, but they're expensive. They're "blockbusters" - and in game terms, they're AAA.
Let's quote a developer who gets to play with AAA budgets in excess of $20m, Alex Hutchinson from Ubisoft Montreal:
"We think about [this push] as kind of cancerous growth," .... "I think that will leave the AAA blockbusters as nothing more than the last of the dinosaurs."... "In my mind, video games need to have the goal of educating people, entertaining people, or at least being artistic," ... "If you're not pushing any of these things...then I think we're in for a rough patch."
Grand Theft Auto 4 isn't 1,000 times better than World of Goo, despite having 1,000 times more money spent on it.
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Originally posted by mark45 View PostQuality rings a bell? Hello? I didn't play Left 4 Dead because it had a big budget, but because it's sophisticated and cool, that's what AAA games mean. I haven't seen such games on Humble Bundle.Last edited by t.s.; 15 June 2012, 11:10 AM.
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Originally posted by t.s. View PostThen state what you mean by AAA title. As far as I read your posting, it is like @directhex interpreted. And I agree with @directhex. The quality of one games doesn't always depend on how much money you put to produce that game.
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Originally posted by mark45 View PostQuality rings a bell?
Daikatana had an AAA budget.
Hello? I didn't play Left 4 Dead because it had a big budget, but because it's sophisticated and cool, that's what AAA games mean.
Try reading an industry rag like MCV. It has adverts in it, not for end customers, but for retailers - i.e. "buy this game from your distributor, you'll sell loads of it". Every "AAA" game comes with a tagline for the marketing budget, since that's what defines an AAA game.
Left 4 dead had a marketing budget of 10 million dollars. L4D2 was $25m for marketing. Not a penny of that went onto the game, that's money for adverts. That's what makes a game AAA.
I haven't seen such games on Humble Bundle.
2) A vaguely modern AAA game costs tens of millions of dollars to develop and the same again to market. The best selling HIB ever raised 5 million, which is split first between charity/developer/tip split, then again between developers. If you assume that 100% of HIB revenue went to the 8 game developers, then each got $600,000. That's a decent chunk of change for an indie, but it's a rounding error for something like GTA4 with its $100m budget.
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