Part of me wants to argue that the games industry has a long-standing history of under-compensating workers, which makes being within the top 25% not particularly impressive, but instead I’m just going to admit that you caught me ragging on EA with an easy jab.
They did lay off a shed load of workers earlier this year mere days after announcing record profits though. Still, they’re not quite the miserable black hole that they were in the ‘EA Widows’ era when they were forcing unpaid overtime on a straight up illegal level.
EAs CEO makes $20MM. They have 13k employees. That’s an $1100 raise, give or take, if you take every penny from the CEO. For the vast majority of their employees, that is less than a 1% raise.
So no, it won’t get you both, in any meaningful sense.
Edit: And yes, if you are not productive, you get paid less. That’s the whole point. If you are not 100x productive, you don’t deserve to get 100x the wages of a regular employee too.
If I follow your search terms, the first Google result is this. If the data were to be trusted, then most of the employees are absolutely paid much less than the “top positions”.
If you are taking the CEO’s income literally (without considering their assets), then you are hopeless.
And a guy sitting in their office biting nails all day is somehow much more valuable than the people developing the product. Sure, if you would believe in that.
Let’s say you score a 20$ ticket to a 3.5 hour game. That comes to $5.7 per hour of entertainment. Meanwhile, this game at $70 means you only need to put in 12.5 hours of playtime to get the equivalent, and after you can continue to play as much as you want unlike the in-person ticketed experience.
Statistics of players being updated and new character models being added. Nothing that couldn’t be done in an update. Honestly most sports games should literally just be games as a service already.
40? I remember when they were 20. Hell, I remember when you could get slightly older titles for 10. I used to go to Egghead and buy slightly older games with my allowance.
Optical discs are dirt cheap. This old answer from Quora says physical media (disc, case, artwork, inserts, etc) accounted for $2-$5 of the cost of a game.
Yes, if you’re selling millions of units. But if you’re buying just one, $2-$5 probably isn’t going to matter to you. Not many people would buy a game at $68 they wouldn’t buy at $70.
If you add all the season passes you’re paying the same or even more with further microtransactions
Games in general now have a longer shelf life
AAA games in my country have been 69,99€ since the PS3 launch and now they’re asking 79,99€. It’s true development costs have ballooned, but I just don’t think that’s a good price/time ratio and rarely do I buy games over 15€. I really don’t mind waiting a couple years.
You can buy musical instruments for that price software or hardware synthesisers, for example.
But that’s exactly the point, I’d rather pay double, triple, quadruple for something I know I’ll use for hundreds of hours (a monitor, a new keyboard, a Steam Deck) than 80€ for a game that will last me 12 to 30 hours (I only play offline story-based games).
Even if I considered game X, there are decades worth of games availabe for under 10€ that I would rather get now or buy a Humble Bundle while waiting for a sale.
The issue becomes of all publishers start to follow Nintendo’s model and not dropping the prices much.
TofK could be the best game ever made (and I don’t think it’s too far fetched given how good it is) and I still wouldn’t justify anything bigger than 50€, 60€ being generous.
I dunno. Baldurs Gate 3 has a truly unbelievable amount of content in it. $70 for it is almost unfair when you consider how far $70 gets you in almost any other hobby.
Someone told me something similar about Tears of the Kingdom and my answer is the same: BG3 could be the greatest game ever made with content from here to eternity, but 70$ is still too much for a game. Specially considering who ends up benefitting the most from the sales.
That makes zero sense. Explain why BG3 is not worth $70. Give me real data showing that. How much should it cost considering how many people worked on it and how much was spent developing it?
It takes 75 - 100 hours to beat the game, and that’s just one play through and that one play through can take even longer depending on play style. This is the kind of game people can get several hundred or thousands of hours out of. Show me any other hobby where you can spend $70 one time and get hundreds of hours of enjoyment.
Hell, even if you sped through the game as fast as possible and spent 50 hours (made up number, not sure what a speedy play through takes), that’s still a LOT of time for the money spent. Take an uber out to a movie with friends, then go to a restaurant, then uber back home and you’ll have bought at least two copies of BG3, yet you got a few hours of entertainment.
There are next to no other forms of entertainment that give give you that many hours for your money.
I have devoted that amount of hours or even more to some games and still think the 40-50€ that costed me each one of them when I bought them is too much.
Entertainment shouldn’t be that expensive. Period.
I don’t agree. Development costs money and I’m willing to pay for it. I usually compare it to other daily things, such as nice restaurant visits or such. Things costs money.
Just because I’m curious, what would you feel to be a fair price for one of those games?
Except most of the revenues from the sales of the games don’t go to those who actually develop the games. We all know gamedevs aren’t paid enough and sometimes do a lot of crunch, specially in big studios. We can’t ignore that fact.
Imo I could excuse a maximum of 50€ (or dollars in this particular case), and the ideal would be something between 30 and 40.
Depends on the studio of course, but I bet in the general case they wouldn’t be payed more if the price was lowered. It’d be fun to investigate the margins but I don’t care enough to do so.
The games I play the most are actually from reputable studios and/or indie devs whom I don’t mind supporting. Except football manager, but I don’t buy new revisions and have clocked enough hours to feel ok with the price.
Fifa isn’t gone, only the FIFA in-game branding is gone. It’s just called FC24 instead of FIFA 24.
And most of the world that plays FIFA isn’t going to play an American football game. American football is completely different and not relatable to pretty much anyone except those from USA (or maybe Canada, dunno).
They know that people are going to pay for it. For exactly the same reason I haven’t bought a Formula 1 game in a few years. Every year it’s just not quite worth the 60-70 euro’s for me. I’m not even that mad about the 70 euro price tag if I get something nice for it in return, everything has gotten more expensive and games have been 60 euro since forever, but last year’s game with some small changes is not going to cut it for that price.
EA sucks. They suck, EA fucking sucks and can I say it again? Fuck EA. Price gouging for shitty products. What they did to battlefront 2? Lootbox pay to win bullshit. The AI in EAs F1 is so abysmal, 2022 was such a colossal disappointment and they are saying 80 bucks USD is a sale price for F1 2023. Naw fam fuck EA and their entire product line. I’ll only buy on steam sale at 70% discount on principal
Oh totally. Over 2000 hours in it. I love it but it could have been so much better. Imagine balanced teams (like Nintendo does with Mario cart) instead of total domination by one side which is western philosophy encapsulated. Imagine showing server population so we can join what’s bumping instead of showing no data for fear of investment analysis hurting stock price. Imagine if they supported the community at fucking all.
I love BF2 but so much wasted potential it’s just depressing
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