Hey, look, I want the same things you do, but we have to at least acknowledge the reality of the situation. Video game execs don't just twirl their mustaches and sit on millions and billions of dollars that could be invested to make more money for their shareholders - whom they are beholden to serve. Static money does nothing. You are letting your emotions cloud your judgement on this subject. Their greed isn't manifesting from sitting on piles of cash. Their greed (in the case of Square-Enix) manifests in cutting costs to the point of compromising the quality of their products. I don't hate them for wanting to make money. That's their job, after all. I hate the way they have gone about it: insisting on short-term profits at the expense of long-term value and viability. In short, they have become risk-averse. (And they view an expensive remake of an older game to be a risk, even though it is the most sensible course for them to take - as you say.)
I don't know what you mean by "BS projected numbers" and my link providing no proof. Sure, what a reporter or website is told by the company may not be true, but if the reporter investigates further and discovers a large discrepancy between the reported number and the truth, that makes the company look rather bad. The gaming press, whatever biases they may have, has come a long way since the video-game magazines of the 90's. They don't just report. They follow up, and maintain pressure on companies and entities that may not be inclined to be completely honest with them or the public. To take your argument at face value, the video game companies have complete control over the information being made available (or not) to the public, and so we cannot trust anything we read. That may have been true at one time, but no longer. A single article may not be 100% accurate in what it reports, but if you read a whole bunch of different articles from different sources that reach a similar conclusion, on balance it becomes hard to acknowledge the story as false.
Following is a story about development budgets for modern-day video games that supports my earlier argument. You can declare it complete bunk if you want, just know that you put yourself on more unstable footing by doing so. Reporters don't much care for making up numbers - lest the truth come back to bite them and destroy their credibility. A link follows the story just to confirm the source.
The average development budget for a multiplatform next-gen video game is currently around $18-$28 million, according to new data. A study by entertainment analyst group M2 Research also puts development costs for single-platform projects at an averge of $10 million. The figures themselves may not be too surprising, with high-profile games often breaking the $40 million barrier (think Modern Warfare 2, Gran Turismo 5, Mass Effect 2, Final Fantasy XIII, etc.). These figures have caused some concern within the game development community, as the pressure caused can be quite “frightening” as developers try to satisfy publisher investment and finish a game on schedule, under budget. “I think that’s one thing that the press, to a certain extent, is forgetting,” Krome CEO Robert Walsh told Develop.
“They’re saying sales have increased over ten percent since last year or whatever; I mean, dev costs have probably doubled or tripled in the console transition.” Combine such lofty figures, the current economic climate and actual retail sales, and you get a recipe for disaster should consumer demand fail to equal or exceed the initial investment.Sometimes it works, obviously: look no further than Modern Warfare 2 as an example. The game surpassed $550 million in sales its first five days at retail and has done much more since it's November 2009 release - making sure the publisher is recouping each and every development cent. Of course this is not the story with most video games; we have to think this is just another reason to stop pirating games, it's an expensive business we work.
http://www.planetxbox360.com/article_9268/Game_Development_Budget_Somewhere_Around_25_MillionHere are some more links to budget news over recent years:
http://digitalbattle.com/2010/02/20/top-10-most-expensive-video-game-budgets-ever/http://www.industrygamers.com/news/red-dead-redemption-needs-to-sell-4-million-copies-to-break-even-says-analyst/http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Most_expensive_video_games(Note: Searching multiple sources, Final Fantasy VII had a production budget of between $28 - $45 million, plus $100 million for advertising. Even at the low end of the spectrum that is a huge number, and in today's dollars it would be even higher. This was the old Squaresoft going for broke on something that really pushed the limits of what was possible at the time.)
Bottom line, games are expensive to make - and becoming more so. Don't make the fallacious argument that an old game can be remade cheaply because all the assets are already there. Those assets are fifteen-years-old. (speaking of Final Fantasy VII) You could save money on pre-production since the story is already well established, but everything else would have to be done again. Static 2-D environments would have to be changed to fully 3-D. Characters would have to be completely remodeled to approach the quality seen in FF XIII. The midi music tracks would have to be rerecorded to modern norms. Characters would have to be voiced. And then you would need a game engine to handle all of this new stuff. If you can use the FF XIII engine, no problem. If you have to create another one, there's more money and time added to the process. Yeah, Square-Enix can afford to take the risk, and I want them to, but $40 million is not chump change even for them. (If this remade Final Fantasy VII cost only $40 million to produce, I would be shocked.) And then you have to consider marketing, which can easily triple the overall budget to nine figures. The result is a game that has to sell millions of copies just to break even, and that is not something to be taken lightly by even the largest of companies. Personally, I believe a remade FF VII - if done right - could sell up to 7 million copies; a huge winner. If it
isn't done right and sells under a million, you have a problem.
We should probably wrap this up, since we're getting rather off-topic. I'll let someone else have the last word.
