https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Final_Fantasy_XV

I don't think you have to be big to innovative or boundary pushing.

Doesn't look groundbreaking at all, "actual gameplay"-wise.

There are a LOT of awesome nifty stuff going on with the engine IN REAL TIME, which my programmer side stares in awe, but that usually isn't enough to sell a game...

I'll be satisfied with 5 more years of games similar to the ones we've got now. I don't need anything revolutionary, just evolutionary. I don't really need innovation in this regard. Just slowly figure out how to use console hardware slightly better, and I'm cool.

With preorders and first month sales, Bungie pulled in 550 million. This number also doesn't include the money Sony put in for their special content.

The rumored cost of production for the game is 500 million.

So at bare minimum, Bungie made 50 million and has budget for their live team to cover 2 years. Xbox's installed user base is something like 76 million. Playstation is something around 25-48 million. At $60 dollars a game, a 500 million AAA title needs 8.4 million buyers. That's only about 7% of the overall installed base. A 7% take rate for a game by a well known developer with a string of successes is not out of the question.

By comparison Gears of War sold 6.4 million over its total run. COD MW 4's total sales are 9.4 M.

Bungie is competing with the big dogs, at the top of the market for the highest quality games. This is always going to be a tight market with lots of volatility. It's easy to mismanage yourself out of business like Silicon Knights. In light of that, the long term deal with Activision is a smart move to secure funding ahead of time, so even if Destiny 1 was a flop, the studio still had a source of funding to make a sun singer rez move for Destiny 2.

From an industry perspective there is lots of room for games, from F2P and low cost independent runs to these AAA titles. The barriers to games development drop every year as standard tools and assets become more common place. Look at how many companies provide licensed physics models, graphics engines and art stock. It used to be you had to develop all of that yourself, now even Google is working on a free engine. The market also supports different modes, from stuff on phones and tablets to our more complicated AAA titles. The market is very diverse, with lots of options. Heck, look at 343 making Halo tablet apps as backup to the main titles. If Bungie had a phone game that let you assign your guardians to strikes in an RTS style format, while you played your ghost and managed support tasks from above, how many of you would buy that as well? If it gave you loot in game?

I also haven't really enjoyed a Final Fantasy game since VIII. Lots of people I know loved IX and X, but those games didn't do it for me. My favorite is still VI. I enjoy this article:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-disappointing-reasons-final-fantasy-losing-all-its-fans/

They had the same problem with Tomb Raider and one of the Hitman games. Reviewed well, sold well (in the millions, at least), but weren't making GOTY gamgbusters, so they were considered failures.

It's an almost industry-wide problem at this point, at least in the "AAA" space, and I'd say it's terrible for the industry. Big budget games need to sell an extraordinary number of copies just to cover their costs, let alone be seen as a success, which typically leads to one of two things -

• The game is homogenised, designed by committee and built to apeal to the most focus groups at once leading to a jack of all trades game that does everything but doesn't do any one thing well enough to really resonate with anyone
  
• Or the game is riddled with microtransactions to try and make up for "poor" sales.

if you're really lucky you get both.

Then you get smaller or indie teams who know their audience, know what they can expect to sell and make a game that caters to that audience and does it well. They won't ship 10 million units, sure, but they don't need to. A great "double-A" example is Demon's Souls. They knew their audience wouldn't be huge and released a smaller run of a game built by a smaller team to appeal to a niche audience. 3 games (and a remake) later, the franchise is doing extremely well.

Meanwhile triple-A development is bloated by extraneous multiplayer modes (because you need multiplayer to appeal to the CoD fans), needlessly powerful graphics engines that take 6 years to develop (and will be replaced in 2), celebrity cameos and licensed music, while enormous dev teams stuff in so much nebulous "content" in the form of collectibles and shallow sidequests just to pad out wishy-washy games to create the illusion of "value for money".

I love videogames as a hobby. I hate videogames as an industry.

Final Fantasy XV has to sell 10 million units to be considered a success. (source) Let that sink in. The only FF game to do those kind of numbers is FF7.

The only reliable numbers we have for Destiny are what was revealed in the lawsuit: 6.3 million (source) Even with numbers like that, we can't get significant content (despite buying it for year one) and we are instead treated to microtransactions.

I'm pretty sure we are already in, or will be in soon, a world where the most innovative, boundary pushing games will either be so expensive they can't be made, or they will be too big to fail. Forget VR and 4K gaming. They've got to figure out how to keep pushing games forward while actually being able to pay people…

This is going to be bad for the industry, and the wall may be closer than people think.

...But feel you on this overall note here.

It's a related feeling with movies, too. They can make huge swaths of money and considered a failure before the opening weekend is over. It's an industry now that needs a franchise with a perfected routine and heaps of licensed auxiliaries to be successful. We'll see infinite Star Wars sequels but a movie like the first Star Wars was in its timeframe will probably not happen in this current climate. Maybe on TV, but chances on the screen seem slim to me right now.

Similarly, I look now mostly to smaller games that innovate on different levels than graphics and complexity, and am instead surprised when a big game comes along that captivates me (it still happens, just not as often). Hell, I don't even think voice acting should be a standard for games, and I think making the graphics a reality-engine for every type of experience misses so many opportunities for great art. With graphics that suggest and stimulate instead, the player gets to build the world in his head, making it better than anything an engine could do. The more realistic the graphics, the harder it is to imagine it as something more, and the more easily distracting the flaws are (dead eyes in Ass-ass-in games for example). I don't need a fancy remake of FFVII because Cloud's voice and looks were perfect in my head. His Mako-infused eyes were full of passion and confusion in my memory, because I contributed to the experience as much as the work did.

It's sort of like putting circles in your painting that are cropped off by the edge of the canvas. The effect is, mentally, your brain completes the circle, extending the image into new dimensions that it couldn't be on its own.

...I think I switched topics, didn't I? Anyway, I thought sharing some level of agreement with Cody Miller was worthy of note. :)