My Review of Sonic Frontiers
Looking at the videos of Sonic Frontiers, maybe it&#x27;s just the impression that I got, but the movement across levels feels at least visually on rails, somewhat QTE centric in a sense, but I have to agree that it flows nicely.<p>However, this was also interesting:<p>&gt; They estimate Sonic Forces to take about 4 hours. My first playthrough was three hours long. At a $40 game, that was an absolutely awful value for the money.<p>I&#x27;ve always wondered how that fares against other forms of entertainment, time-wise. I&#x27;m sure that many forms of entertainment cost more than approx. 13 USD an hour and people wouldn&#x27;t bat an eye at them.<p>And yet, making a video game can be a huge ordeal that involves programmers, game and level designers, visual and audio artists of all sorts, marketing, management and everything else you&#x27;d find in many orgs out there. It&#x27;s a software project that has pretty great complexity and for whatever reason, oftentimes tight deadlines and overworking.<p>It feels to me that games can only be as affordable as they are in the first place due to economies of scale and being able to sell as many digital copies as needed to as many people as are interested. If you have an employee whose labor costs around 100k USD per year, a single copy of a game that&#x27;s 13 USD buys you less than an hour of their work.<p>On an unrelated note, I wonder whatever happened to Sonic Colors: Ultimate. Some people were really happy to see it be developed with the Godot engine, but apparently there were lots of issues with bugs and whatnot upon release.