Even the most terrible AAA games sell millions of copies these days. They more than make their money back with each one, the margins are slimmer but the volume is magnitudes higher than ever. Cry me a river.
This exact thought (volume) occurred to me when I saw the headline. They like to say that the price of games hasn’t increased in line with inflation, but I’d be interested to know how big the market was in the 80s, 90s, 2000s and today. I’d bet the market is orders of magnitude bigger today.
I’d be curious comparing these prices to median income or median disposable income. I’m guessing it tracks those numbers much closer than inflation, which wages haven’t kept pace with.
And the profitability has skyrocketed. The videogame industry is now one of the largest insudtries on the planet. A big driver has been normalisation of after-purchase items. Console players now pay to unlock their collar to the internet (ps+ and XBlive). Microtransactions add to this, and now battlepasses want $10+ every 50-90 days. Lootboxes normalizing near-gambling with overwatches success was a huge bar-lift in profitability expectations for shareholders.
Special editions are also hitting $90 and higher, plus those other expenditures. Ask “the gamers tm” and they’ll tell you you have to buy a special edition for $120 or you’re not a real fan anyway. Starfield has a $300 version. The Digital Premium doesn’t even come with the GAME! It’s another $35 after you already gave Microsoft $70.
Additionally, the work to make a new game has decreased. Assets are able to be salvaged from one engine to the next reducing the amount of work to make a game in UE6 after it was on UE5. the workforce has matured and can be taught as a class so there’s not nearly as many “self taught” making half a game. Roller Coaster Tycoon was made almost entirely by one dude. Obviously re-using assets is smart. But then to say you “built the game from the ground up” is false. Elden Ring was even praised for it
Marketing budgets have fuckin EXPLODED. A “Rule of Thumb” for indie devs is to spend HALF your budget on just marketing. Destiny allegedly spent 2.5× what they spent on development, for marketing. Publishing studios didn’t used to spend this much. “For every dollar on the game, spend another .25 to .50 on marketing”
Buying power has gone DOWN since ps1. You think I’m joking but federal minimum wage in the US is still 7.25. In 1994 (launch of ps1). It was 4.25 - adjusted for inflation thats $8.43. Meaning if you made minimum wage then, you’d be making more than minimum wage now, effectively. People are fucking broke and game companies want MORE money for games.
In 1994 when you bought a PS1 game you got THE WHOLE GAME. That was it. There was no merch drop pip-boy for the special edition. There was no Day-One patch. There was no “pay to get multiplayer”. There was no in-game shop to buy skins for the characters. All these features were intentionally cut to resell to consumers post-launch.
Games cost less to make now, but budgets went up. Buying power is down. Please stop defending corporate bullshit excuses about wanting more money, forever.
It was a specific example to show how AAA games reuse assets, not mtx. A low hanging fruit of that could be like…any sports game.
A similar example of good reuse could be EA and a specific Female Character Mesh they’ve had for awhile and they just keep reusing her. The photo example I found searching was Falck from BF 2042. Her hitbox and mesh is in Battlefront 2, as a First Order officer; and in Battlefield 5.
I dont outright hate reuse of things here and there - it saves money and time.
This drives me crazy every time I see it so I’m glad to see others recognizing this. Yes game production has gone up, but the market has massively increased. Your costs are fixed; doesn’t matter if you sell 10,000 copies or 10,000,000. More people are gaming than ever so when I see all these attempts to squeeze more money from consumers to address rising costs I have no sympathy for the publisher.
When the creator of Stardew Valley can charge $14 for his awesome game, and put it on multiple platforms and release updates for jo extra cost, and not charge subscription fees, and everyone can mod it and be happy, and the creator has made multimillions by now … Other companies need to take note.
From someone who worked at a company who wasted tons of money and had too many parties, excess staff and ceos who made excessive salaries, if these gaming companies are charging too much they need to look internally instead of asking their customers to fuel their greed.
He said “because of ballooning development costs”. Stardew valley is famously a one man labor of love, the opposite of ballooning development costs.
$14 pr sold copy is ridiculously high in this context, because development costs is only for one dude.
You’re comparing this guys runaway success with a company with several development teams, office spaces, marketing teams, accountants, probably janitors, security, etc, etc.
I’m not saying he is in the right, just pointing out that it is apples to oranges.
You’re comparing this guys runaway success with a company with several development teams, office spaces, marketing teams, accountants, probably janitors, security, etc, etc.
That’s sorta the point tho, isn’t it. Not saying Capcom should be one guy in a bedroom, but maybe there’s alot of bloat not related to actual game development that could be streamlined/cut. Esp. When it comes to executives.
I agree with this. I find myself regularly missing the middle of the road games with lower development costs because those are the games that often dares to try new things.
Last one I remember like that was Ubisoft’s “Grow Home” which was utterly charming and had me hooked from beginning to end. Didn’t need to be big. Didn’t need amazing graphics. Just needed a little idea that (pardon the pun) grew to become a really engaging game.
More games like that please! Maybe the development costs didn’t have to balloon that much.
These “development costs” are creating beta-level games and you don’t even just pay $60 for a game anyway.
Street Fighter 6 is $60. Street Fighter 6’s TMNT content alone (not including the base game) is $100. They have more than made up for any development costs with the ridiculous amount of “DLC” and MTX.
Actually this maybe should have been named Counter-Strike 3. 1 was the original based on HL1, 2 is the Source version, and this should be 3. CS:GO is a variant of Source version with different gaming modes. I wonder if a GO version of this new CS will appear.
No peaking, iron sites, head turn, geometry grappling. CS is very much nostalgia mechanics. They started the competitive shooter genre, and they’re still here.
I love it. I do wish they had opened up mods and community servers before launch but the core game plays and looks so good. Most of the missing modes were never core to the game, hopefully they add some of them back after reworking them later (DZ?). It runs even better than GO did on Linux too.
Unfortunately considering how many of these gamers are willing to pay extra $30€ just to get 1 week earlier access to a game, I'm afraid you are wrong in this regard and we're going to see prices go up even more. Piracy is also dying, either because of groups disbanding or getting sued, or because of DRM getting better and more widespread, and once that is gone it's going to let publishers jack the price even higher up.
I'm pretty much resigned to just play indie and AA games at this point, there's no way I'm paying 60 or more for these broken, bloated and often overpriced products. There are few exceptions but even they will be driven to higher prices eventually.
I pretty much exclusively buy AA at this point, with the rare AAA nintendo 1st party title that I'm happy to pay $60 for. Most AAA games though just aren't worth it. Some of those games coming out you couldn't pay me to play.
There are so many tbh, really depends on what type of games you're interested in. I've really enjoyed remnant 1 and 2, owlcat pathfinder games, VRising, Riftbreaker, Timberborn, Against the Storm for example. All made by good dedicated studios that deserve your money more than EA, bioware, actiblizz or other corpos like that. Of the older titles, FTL, Into the Breach, Stardew Valley, Hollow Knight, Factorio, Project Zomboid etc are classics - polished games made with love that put pretty much every AAA title to shame in comparison.
Would anything drastic need to be done to a map to just load it up in CS2? I would assume the file format is at least the same and they’re built using Hammer.
CS2 feels like a downgrade from CSGO in a lot of ways, but CSGO at launch and CSGO at end of life were two completely different games, the same is probably true for CS2. Long term support is what keeps games going.
Or… maybe development costs have just gotten stupidly high? There are a lot of great indie games for a few bucks that pack a heck of a lot more fun and experimentation than a lot of the cookie cutters garbage coming out of a lot of big studios lately. I’m honestly sick of every facet of my life trying to bleed me dry of any spare cent I get.
I just recently played Hrot, and it has been one of my favorite shooters to come out as of late. A game made by a Czech dude in a custom engine that he wrote for $16.00. I’ll play four separate games like that before I spend $70.00 for many competing AAA games out there. Not that high budget games shouldn’t have a place, but sometimes less can be more.
The president of Capcom can lick the wrinkles out of my sweat steamed scrotum if he thinks I’m buying another Capcom game after this.
Yeah, games cost more to make than they did on the SNES.
But theres also an absolutely massively bigger customer base buying more games than ever before. So if your big name games are failing to bring in big numbers, that sounds like you and your fellow executives need to step down and let someone who knows what customers actually want run the company. But I bet that thought never crossed his fuckin mind.
Just to add to what you mentioned, Capcoms Street Fighter 6 in my region on steam is $100 AUD, assuming you don’t want the deluxe or ultimate editions (Not that the store page bothers to explain the differences}. On top of that you can buy the Year 1 character pass for $45 which adds 4 characters. The ultimate pass for $75 which adds the previously mentioned characters and some cosmetics for those 4 characters. The soundtrack for $50 holy shit that’s an expensive soundtrack.
And on top of all that you can buy the games in game currency, fighter coins. Which are used to unlock costumes and characters including classic costumes. Wanna buy a character? You’ll never be able to buy just the right amount of coins, coz fuck you give us money.
It’s bad enough these people want to raise prices whilst making record breaking profits, but they monetize their games in so many different and often scummy ways on top of the purchase price.
I want to say thats an example of out of touch executives.
But we both know predatory practices like that wouldnt have gotten this far if there wasnt a plethora of short sighted idiots out there, with more money than sense, refusing to do without their instant gratification and, as a result, not only throwing literally mountains of money at predatory companies, but actively complaining online about how they wish they could get even more financially exploited.
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Aktywne