It's totally opposite. Price of making a pile of turd that now takes 10y on average has skyrocketed.
Gaming industry is become same as Hollywood just a money laundering scheme.
Because there is no logic in all this crap costing so much when it looks and plays inferior to older games. Where's the money Lebowski? I doubt it all went on Kotaku 10/10 GOTY of all times review they give to every game that comes out lol
Competent people with medium studio and proper efficient management could make AAAAAAAAA+ game that would blow these freaks out of the water in 3-5y top and that's without crunch.
Obviously the "efficiency" they were chasing is not really efficient if they lose money. It's just the thinking process and justification for it when they are making decisions.
Firing 50 veteran writers last year was incredibly stupid for Bioware, especially now that we see how much Veilguard is lacking in writing compared to old school Bioware. According to the EA manager Gary McKay, they did it because they wanted a "lean" team in order to "focus". So the excuse is always efficiency. When most tech stocks were slipping, those tech companies that were laying off workers hired after Covid managed to even gain value, so "cutting cost" became a mandate from shareholders. Whether it really makes sense or not long-term is not their concern.
This is a very typical case of a successful company started by technical people, taken over by "business" types with MBAs, and then run into the ground slowly as they suck the blood out and apply make-up for the stock market instead. Same sort of thing that's happening at Boeing for example.
