(10-05-2013, 03:31 PM)Naunet Wrote:(10-04-2013, 08:04 PM)Elissa Wrote: But experience does imply price
Honestly? For this reason alone I am 100% fine with the voice acting. I don't give a rat's patootie how many fancy stars a video game hired to voice their characters' lines, because that kind of expenditure is a symptom of a serious problem plaguing the game industry: treating video games, a niche market, as though they were Hollywood blockbusters.
Spending millions upon millions upon millions on voice acting (or super fancy CGI, or whatever) is one of the reasons a game can sell over a million copies and still be considered a "failure". It is the cancer of the industry.
Now if only Squee had taken the money they saved on voice acting and spent it on developing actually interesting game mechanics. :/
Voice acting is expensive to the average person and for small indie localization companies - but it's in the tens of thousands range usually (especially since most games are not fully voiced), not the millions range. Here's an example of rates - scroll down to video games. This game has what, a couple of minutes of dialogue for each character, at most?
The price of voice acting is small potatoes compared to script localization and even smaller potatoes next to actually developing a game of FFXIV's magnitude. A single interesting game mechanic, depending on complexity, can cost more than the cost of voicing several characters.
Graphics are much more expensive. Trust me, the figures don't even begin to compare. Art assets are always much more expensive (and numerous!) than audio assets.
@Tobias: I know, right? It's still one of my favorite things on the internet.
