Square Enix Appears To Have Ended Working Relationship With Sweet Baby Inc.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Game development has mostly gotten too expensive due to bloat... Mostly on the management side and then the costs get further added on by paying these consultants... Like sweet baby was trying to get the developers of Black Myth: Wukong to pay them around 7 million, who knows how much they were asking for Square to pay before they were replaced or how much their new one is asking...

But basically, they're overpaying for people to limit the creative freedom of designers, developers and writers... Which is why the investor money sounds like a good idea, but it also comes with it's own requirements which further drags the game down...

[lolnotacat]

Game development has mostly gotten too expensive due to bloat... Mostly on the management side and then the costs get further added on by paying these consultants... Like sweet baby was trying to get the developers of Black Myth: Wukong to pay them around 7 million, who knows how much they were asking for Square to pay before they were replaced or how much their new one is asking...

But basically, they're overpaying for people to limit the creative freedom of designers, developers and writers... Which is why the investor money sounds like a good idea, but it also comes with it's own requirements which further drags the game down...

You're half right. It's due to bloat, but consultants really don't cost that much in the scheme of things. Yes, $7m isn't cheap, but in a $100m+ project, well let's just say that $7m isn't going to be enough to change some fundamental issues with most games, particularly because the developers probably would've added something similar to what was recommended by said consultants anyways (like I mentioned earlier in the thread).

What really impacts the cost in a lot of companies is tech debt and structure.

First I'll give an example I'm very familiar with and I have a feeling impacts FFXIV directly. I work in a company that owns a couple games that are creeping up on a decade now. The development time to update anything that impacts core functions of the game is comparatively astronomical because so many of those functions are so old with a decade of band-aid solutions for other issues slapped ontop of them. We did a mid-size rework on just some of those system in the game 4-5 years ago, and it cost nearly as much as developing an entirely new game. I can't even imagine what the costs are for XIV because of all the spaghetti code, 2.0 rework, and ridiculous amount of band-aid fixes the game almost undoubtedly has.

For structure I'll let Tim Cain explain it. Whatever your opinion is regarding him, I've seen similar things at my own workplace.

There are other things which impact cost, such as adding more developers doesn't increase development speed linearly, but will increase development costs exponentially (because of all the extra support for adding more people). But I think people forget about tech debt and bad structure, which are both almost inevitable.

[Catwho]

How does this pertain to XIV exactly? The real issue to me is Koji Fox's dishonest successor.

Nobody had a problem with her for the half of Shadowbringers and all of Endwalker that she did. But suddenly Dawntrail comes along and It's All her Fault.

[lolnotacat]

Nobody had a problem with her for the half of Shadowbringers and all of Endwalker that she did. But suddenly Dawntrail comes along and It's All her Fault.

There were issues before, but they were mostly looked over because people overall enjoyed the story. One I can think of off the top of my head is making the Pixies gender neutral, where in JP, they'll use gendered language.

That's why I think there's an issue. Nobody would care if Kate were in charge and the story was still liked by the majority of players. But now that DT's story is just so bad, people are gonna focus on everything and latch onto perceived causes, whether they're the actual cause or not.

[Dorito_Burrito]

It wont make a difference cause SE has their own brand of SBI.

I'm sure soon we will have even more raids, solo duties and dungeons you can just go afk in and have auto walk on for even more winning by doing nothing. (|Please look forward to it.|)

??????????

[Rueby]

Just in case you are actually serious the TLDR is a group that wants to "burn the games industry to the ground"


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT1BD8bP9-E

Reminds me of that meme where this girl was saying that she hated videogames because they appeal to the ~male fantasy~

[lolnotacat]

Reminds me of that meme where this girl was saying that she hated videogames because they appeal to the ~male fantasy~

[dies_irae]

??????????

SE has their own internal "ethics (DEI) department" that got really famous for censoring Tifa in FF7 Remake/Rebirth but also characters from Dragon Quest and Summons from other FF games got hit with the censor stick in their remasters.
After backlash they removed the existence of this departs on their homepage but it is quite obvious that it is still there doing "their thing" when you look at whats happening with DQ3 Remake.
They are probably glad Toriyama is dead so they can finally "fix" his art.

[Fourbestintoner]

They started *fixing* his designs way before he died, monsters don't care about these kind of things.

[Divinemights]

SE has their own internal "ethics (DEI) department" that got really famous for censoring Tifa in FF7 Remake/Rebirth but also characters from Dragon Quest and Summons from other FF games got hit with the censor stick in their remasters.
After backlash they removed the existence of this departs on their homepage but it is quite obvious that it is still there doing "their thing" when you look at whats happening with DQ3 Remake.
They are probably glad Toriyama is dead so they can finally "fix" his art.

I don't think that is DEI because that censorship only applied to English Version to avoid problem
If I remember correctly, Japanese version don't have that sensorship