'I hope Microsoft doesn't screw Gears of War up' - Cliff Bleszinski Interview

Dailynch · 2016-04-28T06:00:58Z

Cliff Bleszinski is a real man, who made a real game, about a real war, with real guns. Understanding how all video games should be made, the man who is not ...

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3h ago

CrashMania3h ago

Yikes, it never ends.

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lelo2play2h ago(Edited 2h ago)

Square should ask Sony for more money...

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gleepot1h ago

Sad but true. It's the consequence of a shift in player habits, massive overhead, and out of control budgets across the industry.

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XiNatsuDragnel3h ago

Unfortunate man

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blackblades3h ago(Edited 3h ago)

What did NA and EU did anyways? Just translate or something? I would say it might help them get back to there roots but DK.

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Hofstaderman2h ago(Edited 2h ago)

Actually, you are correct they play a hand in localization especially in Europe with the many languages. That and marketing.

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EternalTitan33m ago

They ate up salary.

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Workshyskiver2h ago

Industry is in the gutters.

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Battlestar232h ago

They should of never of made those exclusive deals with Sony. If SE made FFXVI/FFVIIRemake/Rebirth available on PS/PC/Xbox/Switch Day 1 they would of sold 20/30 million copies of each game and would mostly likely would not of lead to layoffs.

Exclusive games to any platform is not only anti gamer but they are toxic to the gaming industry. All games made by Sony and other companies should be made multi platform.

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CantThinkOfAUsername2h ago(Edited 2h ago)

20-30 million. Right. SE must be sleeping on Japanese CoD right here.

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P_Bomb2h ago

Absolutely absurd estimate.

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neutralgamer19921h ago

Battle

lol are you serious? Let’s see

First game is on PC and so will the rest

Switch can’t run FF remakes

Xbox again I ask are you serious? Xbox game sales accounts for such little piece of the pie in overall gaming that there are publishers doubting if they could recover their development and porting costs for Xbox versions

The real issue here is square enix just can’t stop releasing 1-2 really bad AAA games on year basis

Babylon's Fall
Left alive
Marvel avengers
For spoken

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JEECE1h ago

Lol I love how the "Publishers can sell tons of copies of JRPGs on Xbox" myth won't die. The failure of exclusive JRPGs on 360 (by far the most popular Xbox) couldn't kill it. The low Xbox sales of FF games that launched on Xbox and PlayStation at the same time couldn't kill it. The fact that Gamepass has the few players on Xbox who actually play JRPGs conditioned to expect them for free can't kill it.

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RNTody1h ago(Edited 1h ago)

Are you insane? Final Fantasy has historically not really sold close to those numbers, those are God of War and Spider-Man numbers dude. Final Fantasy 15 sold 5 million at launch, on both PS4 and Xbox One and had the benefit of releasing three years into the console lifecycle with no cross gen releases slowing the adoption rates. It sold a lifetime of ten million copies. Yet, 80% of sales were on PS4 and only 20% on Xbox One.

Are you going to seriously sit there and tell us the Game Pass crowd are going to double the sales of these games?

Put your mind onto the real problems. It isn't exclusivity. It's out of control budgets, over estimated and unrealistic sales expectations, bloated game development and poor management.

The budgets for Final Fantasy 16 and Remake and Rebirth far exceed Final Fantasy 15, exponentially so, yet did the audience grow exponentially? No.

Don't make this about something it's not, and don't fall for the crap from publishers that triple A games are unsustainable. The next stop on the station is games need to be more expensive and we need more monetisation methods like adverts in games. The problem is with publishers, not us.

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2h ago

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DOMination-2h ago

To put it into perspective, take a studio like Black Box who went through a spell of churning out half decent Need for Speed games annually.

Need for Speed: Underground - 15 million+
Need for Speed: Underground 2 - 11 million+
Need for Speed: Most Wanted - 17.8 million
Need for Speed: Carbon - 15.6 million
Need for Speed: ProStreet - 10.9 million
Need for Speed: Undercover - 8.9 million

This was the norm for the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era.

A Need for Speed game now requires more employees, considerably more time than one year to develop and absolutely a whole load more capital to fund development, let alone the extra costs of developing Frostbite and adapting it to a racing game (if that's still a thing). And at the end of it, it will likely never sell anywhere near even the worst game in that list above.

In that same era, Rockstar Games (albeit, various Rockstar studios) released GTA3, GTA VC, GTA SA, State of Emergency, Manhunt, The Warriors, Red Dead Revolver, three Midnight Club games and Bully. We're lucky if we even see a single game from them this generation.

In summary, committing to making a big AAA game now is barely worth it. Unless you are lucky enough to be sat on a mega IP like CoD or GTA, it's a huge gamble. Games simply take too long, require too many employees and cost too much. Unless AI or Unreal Engine can fix this and QUICK, the industry is going to be reduced to mobile-like experiences.

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RNTody2h ago

The gaming industry needs to learn just like Hollywood. You cannot sustain "more, more, more" indefinitely if your sales are not increasing in line with your costs. But no, every sequel needs to be three times the size of its predecessor, have twice as many staff, have monetisation systems and 100 hours of padded content and six year development cycles. But are these sequels ever twice as good?

Godzilla Minus One, on a poultry budget of $15 million, blew anything Disney has done out of the water since 2021 in terms of visual effects and created the best monster movie I've seen in my life.

Asobo made A Plague Tale Requiem for $25 million and its visuals, writing and quality rival games with ten times its budget.

Am I against big production values? No, God of War, The Last of Us, and so on justify their budgets and sell ridiculously well. But I am against unrealistic excess. If a game sells two million copies, tripling its budget isn't going to get you six million copies.

Square Enix is facing the reality that Final Fantasy sales are in decline and have been since FF15, yet they seem to be ramping up their development costs exponentially. It's hard to find facts but word seems to be FF15 had a budget of $50 to $100 million and FF16 had a budget of like $250 million plus. Same goes for FF7 remakes.

Yet other factors affected their market potential, like years of cross-gen releases slowing the PS5 adoption rate.

These lay offs will keep happening until publishers make their costs sustainable and stop trying to make it seem like triple A development is impossible or that we need more monetisation and higher priced games to account for their hubris.

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Petebloodyonion1h ago

Talk about a sound explanation instead of it didn't sell well because it releases at the same time as X game or it's because it's only digital.

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TiredGamer2h ago

It's the implosion I keep talking about. Expectations and reality in the industry are no longer aligned. This will continue until some sort of market equilibrium is reached.

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Hofstaderman2h ago(Edited 2h ago)

Agreed, this cannot continue and something has got to give. I miss the old days where development costs and time were managable and SquareSoft released hit after hit. Vagrant Story, Xenogears, Final Fantasy 7 to 9 released ONE year apart and all of them were critically acclaimed.

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AlfonsoAlonsos1h ago

🚨🚨 Never forget - Hofstaderman is a convicted sex offender / pedophile - and N4G refuses to ban him 🚨🚨

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Exvalos1h ago

The facts are the time and money needed to make games has gone through the roof and we as gamers just aren't buying enough. These games are costing 100 of millions to make and even games rated highly are doing good to get 3 or 4 million in sales. Something has to give.

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P_Bomb1h ago

Raising prices has failed. Seeing games go from $89 CAD to $94 in some cases. I’m just not buying those games.

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neutralgamer19921h ago

We all can see the days of square enix being 3rd party are coming to an end which is really sad because they have so many valuable IP’s only if they manage them properly.

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kaos891h ago(Edited 59m ago)

Layoffs = Bidenomics, folks!

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Reaper22_58m ago

Like I said before, it's not just Microsoft laying people off. It's happening throughout the industry.

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-Foxtrot58m ago(Edited 54m ago)

Are we sure, and I mean super sure, fanboyism aside and the like that maybe Final Fantasy XVI and especially VII Rebirths sales weren’t at least a tad disappointing for them?

We keep fighting about it but if freaking VII, Square Enix’s Golden boy and it’s hype of us begging for a remake for almost 15-20 years didn’t set the world on fire like Square Enix wanted then what else can they give us product wise at this point high expectations and all.

I’m not saying it would have stopped this and everything would have fixed its self if they launched on more platforms since the industry seems like it’s imploding within itself at the minute but it could have given them a little leg room.

Maybe it’s time to admit, regarding your feelings on the games, and this has NO impact on the quality of the games, that XVI could have felt more FF like being more that a simplistic hack and slash game and VII’s remake should have just been a single, less ambitious game just telling the original story over reimagining it?

Even Kingdom Hearts III felt shallow, look at how convoluted it’s become and they are still doing that with all the Missing Link / Union X shit before Kingdom Hearts IV even comes out.

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EternalTitan34m ago

Looks like after the disaster of 16 they are shaking up.

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ROCKY2827m ago

this is beginning to look like 83 crash :(

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