The State of Gaming is already Grim imo and AAA Budgets have exploded btw

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5919972&forum_id=2#50242246)

RAM costs are through the roof

Mostly because chinese AI firms are giving huge contracts to the companies making the graphics cards and RAM, so much that the AMD CEO just said that they were a "data center-first and AI-focused computing company"

You can't buy a prebuilt with a 5070ti or 9070xt for under $2000 now - both formerly considered upper mid tier cards - hell you could find prebuilts of these for like $1200-1400 not that long ago

I went to Microcenter today - they had a couple prebuilts with 5080 and 5090s of them that cost $7000-9000

PS5 and Xbox, which are both 6 years old, are more expensive now than years ago - a PS5 Pro costs $1000 now

And these high costs are here to stay, not going away, and might even get worse still

Gaming is now a hobby of the idle rich, not for kids anymore

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5919972&forum_id=2#50241998)

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5919972&forum_id=2#50242026)

time to play all those old games in the backlog

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5919972&forum_id=2#50242260)

Just play AAAA games if anything like GTA, and Japanese games. No one calls Death Stranding 2 or FF7R or Zelda OOT Remake AAA. AAA implicitly means Western imo.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5919972&forum_id=2#50242495)

I will concede the point that the combined 3 games are long as fuck. A lot have said that it's technically impossible to do FF7 justice as an AAA game in the span of One Game. I mean... not really. If FFX can be done then FF7 can be done. They'd just need faster Pacing, shorter cutscenes, and less epic boss fights.

The real reason it needs to be Three Games is beecause it's better than doing FF18-20 and having like 2 out of 3 flop, and for that combined effort to be more than 3 FF7 games. It's also a better way to recoup the investment. They know the audience consists of like 2,000,000k Losers who will buy day 1 full price, and that it doesn't really have a Long Tail in terms of sales. So hit them up 3 times instead of 1. Milking the Same Losers over and over again is a better strategy than trying to expand the audience (which FF16 tried and failed to do).

But it kind of will have a Long Tail because the 3 combined games can be sold in the future for like $12.99 and that's a ton of value. Some of the Losers who bought parts 1-3 separately will inevitably buy the Combined Pack for No Reason other than that they enjoy buying the Same Game.

one of the youtube slop artists who I get recommended explained the whole situation in a video some time ago...

gamers fall into two camps: autistic and ADHD.

1. autists want everything to be The Same. These are the pokemon players and a lot of the JRPG players. maybe some of the open world checklist players too. You know the contingent of the JRPG fandom that really really likes Grinding and doesn't want anything to be challenging? There was an infamous Loser a few years ago who Grinded to level 99 in the first Mako Reactor. This was considered an historic undertkaing.

2. ADHD are people like me with higher testosterone who just want gaming itself to be a Reprieve from boredom. Like FF7R doing random shit is interesting since at least they're trying something. Like if it turns out to be dumb in the end, it just makes it less Replayable. but while it lasts, it's more interesting (opposite of OOT Remake, which I'd rather give as a gift to some zoomer hoping to teach them culture than actually play myself).

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5919972&forum_id=2#50242735)

Kind of like what they did with DQ11: https://cdn.80.lv/api/upload/meta/14668/images/5fcd1928b2c64/contain_1200x630.jpg

...except the Classic Mode would be 2D, with better graphics - basically the graphics that we have in the remake but from Further Away. Voice Acted I guess. But with Text on the screen like an old JRPG, possibly with the character's Portrait showing. And then fully Turn-Based Combat. This would make approximately 75,000k westerners happy. But if they still include the Padding, they'd hate it.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5919972&forum_id=2#50242753)

There is one actual Remake split into 3 Games, the last of which releases this Winter.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=5919972&forum_id=2#50242776)