Would be interesting to see the stats for revenue by game, price by volume. If someone charges 300 for a game that no one bought. Then it shouldn’t count, hypothetically.
Because youre overinflated executive and managerial budgets dont justify the fucking price when games like Hollow Knight, Jump Ship, and Stardew Valley are 10x better.
i almost never buy games on steam itself anymore…Even on the steam sales. The sales are a poor imitation of the great values that they were 10+ years ago, and quite frankly…the quality of games coming out isnt what it was 10+ years ago, either.
I subscribe to Humble Monthly and, eventually, get almost every game I’ve ever wanted.
I don’t even do humble monthly anymore. They’ve had periods of months and months where I don’t get anything I want to play or some obscure game that isn’t interesting. Its cheaper just to get the monthly bundle when I do see a game I want. Humble monthly was more than worth it maybe 10 years back.
As much as it’s great to shit on triple A games, this is quite bad for the industry as a whole. Devs cannot price their game above $15 without being held to an absurdly high standard, which makes budgeting for game development extremely difficult for smaller studios. If we want the AA scene to expand and give us more great games as we’ve seen in the past few years, that’ll need to change.
If you asked me to name a major gameplay innovation in the last 5 years, I literally couldn’t. Clair Obscur won a fuck load of awards for doing basically what Final Fantasy did 15 years ago, but not completely losing the plot. Hollow Knight blew everyone’s mind for making a decent Metroidvania game. Balatro made a game where you make a series of combos that people have been making for over 200 years. You don’t need fancy gimmicks anymore to be considered good, you just need to be good. Major publishers waste their time because they don’t know how to put “be good” on a spreadsheet.
Want to know why indie games are priced at $10 to $15? Becaue AAA has been putting everything they’ve made in the last decade on Steam and it’s all going for $20 - $25.
Indies can’t launch at that price point anymore because they’re competing with AAA games from 10 years ago that have been discounted to death.
The Steam winter sale is the best example of this, where most people will buy RDR2 for $19 instead of the new mega hit indie that’s $20. So indies have been lowering their price to actually get sales. That’s why team cherry priced Silk Song at $20.
Basically, AAA is now just competing with the bottom part of the market they spent that last decade flooding.
They’re complaining about people actually choosing where to spend their money wisely because that means they might actually have to make a good product if they want to sell a game for $70.
Thanks! 🙂 Appreciate you confirming that. We actually changed the price of our latest game to $10 (from $20) because we launched last December and got buried by AAA selling for $15.
Almost every dev team we talked to this year felt the same about the $20 price. That is, it’s much better to go out at $15 or $10 as a LOT of people see indie games at that price as better than modern AAA. (All while still holding out for classic AAA that go on sale for $20.)
And that being said, I’m totally cool with losing a sale to MGSV or Witcher 3 😁 Just wish the $20 space wasn’t getting so crowded. It’s making it rough for the smaller teams to compete at that price too now.
Honestly, if an indie game is promising, I’ll gladly pay full price. Pacific Drive, The Forest, and Inscryption (small sale) were all games that I picked up because of interesting trailers, premises, and very positive reviews :)
Terraria has always been $10. Stardew Valley: $15. Undertale: $10. Braid was $15 when it launched, and even then, people were bitching about the price. So, the price tag has always been in that range since the first indie game launched.
I think you’re ignoring the incredible amount of oversaturation in the industry. Games are everywhere. I could throw a thousand sticks into the wilderness and it would smack into a thousand different game studios, all working for years on their big hit that (in their eyes) would make them millions of dollars.
But, people don’t have time to even play their own Steam backlog. On average, people buy more games than they even have time to play, and that’s not even counting the sheer amount of movies, music, TV shows, YouTube videos, whatever that is competing for people’s time. If they are playing video games, then they are not watching or listening to other media.
It’s not just the gaming industry. The entire creative industry is propped up on the backing of a 98% failure rate, or sometimes even a 99.99% failure rate. The lucky few get to spout off their survivorship biases, under the bones of former companies and individuals, crunched under the weight of oversaturation.
My dude, I’m very familiar with the 14% of videogame players new game devs are vying for. And every one of the games you mentioned launched at that price because they were developed by a single dev (two at most) who could profit off of the $10 - $15 dollar space that was below the smaller studios putting out games like Shadow Complex, or Mercenary Kings, or Shank 1+2 for $20.
Now all of those spaces are being crushed together. Mostly due to economic factors. Thats where the biggest problem really lies, in the fact that people just have less money to spend on all that entertainment. Just pointing out that it’s competitive at all is obvious my dude, but the direction its going in is one in where there’s less anything being made (including games) because not as many people have money to spend on anything but necessities.
That’s why AAA is now scavenging at the bottom of the totem pole, and pricing their older games at $10 or less on sale, it’s because the few people that have money find that price point appealing. So it’s now one that not just the people who made Terraria, Braid, etc compete in. The money those devs made previously in that space is now up for grabs to AAA companies that never had anything to sell at that price before.
Theres a very tried and true formula for any business, including making games, and in the last 2 years it has completely broken apart. Mostly due to the Embracer group merger failing, combined with AI, combined with economic uncertainty, combined with AAA companies stabbing indie creators in the back (Subnautica, Disco Elysium). Your game doesn’t have to be a massive hit to be successful, it just needs to have a big enough audience to be profitable. But that audience has shrunk over the years as economies have tightened, and the companies getting squeezed have been invading markets they never had a presence in before.
So it’s just desperate times more than anything. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make a living off of making games. I know dozens of small teams funded by government grants making small games you’ve never heard of to help kids in hospitals learn about their cancer. Or teach kids in underprivileged schools about resource scarcity. Making games as a business goes far beyond entertainment and the hopes of narcissists. It’s an artistic medium like any other, and as such benefits society by making the toughest parts of it more accessible.
There’s plenty of ways to run a company doing just that - and just because the world economy is in free fall doesn’t mean the entire business of making games is something for the lucky few. It’s just for anyone that wants to learn how to run a game company. Which isn’t easy, but extends far beyond the simplistic view you are portraying.
I don’t know about the main point that you are making, meaning that it’s the economy’s fault.
I only have a few data points to compare, but anecdotally me and my friends have plenty of budget to buy games, but not enough time to play them as the poster above says. I have such a huge backlog of nice games that I don’t care to buy a game at release time, I can wait for a discount. If it is something exceptionally good that I want to play now, i will do it, but mostly on the ~20 euro range
So I will agree with the poster above. Make something exceptionally good, otherwise it compares with my backlog.
Piracy is free. If you’re charging 70usd for a game, then I’d rather just spend the time and pirate it. If it’s 10 bucks, Im just lazy to do a Google search and pay you for it.
Oh fuuuuuck the DRM. I purchased CIV5 for my phone and it requires an active internet connection or it boots you out. I only play on an airplane. So I ended up downloading the pirated version so I can play the game I purchased.
Almost all of the “Top 10 most replayable games” I have are Indie games, especially in the last 10 years.
They’re games like Factorio or Project Zomboid which I keep getting back to a year or two after I last played so much of it that I got fed up.
Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero, worse so for games which seem open-world but are in fact linear.
Mind you, some older AAA jewels in that style (such as Oblivion) do get me to come back eventually, but it takes something like 5+ or more as I basically have to forget most of the story before it’s interesting to play such a game again.
If Price matched “Hours of Fun”, almost all of the AAA stuff would be way cheaper whilst many Indie games would be far more expensive.
Capitalism isn’t fixing anything here. In fact, it’s showing that the companies mindlessly following market inflation to keep profits up are doing worse.
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