This is like when the music industry said CD’s should cost 40 to 50 dollars instead of 12 dollars. There was only one good song on most CD’s. Look where CD’s are now. I don’t see how they can justify 80 dollars a game when they don’t even make a physical copy anymore. It’s now just an SD card with a key on it. They’re still downloading the game itself from the internet.
I agree with you about CDs but I’m not sure I understand your point about physical copies. If they’re still buying and shipping a physical SD card, from a production perspective, I’m pretty sure that’s the same cost regardless of whether it’s a key or a full game. And considering that digital copies of games tend to be the same price as physical ones anyways, I think the physical aspect is pretty negligible and doesn’t factor into the price in any real way.
Well, if i have the entire game on the physical device and it doesn’t come with arbitrary DRM stuff, i can still enjoy it in 20 years on the old console even if all the servers are shut down.
I recently saw that used Gameboy Advance SPs go for the same price like when they were new. Old Gameboy games also go for similar prices like when they were launched. Because no matter where or when. As long as the console and the cartridge themselves are working and there is electricity, the games can be enjoyed.
That is a gigantic difference from a consumer perspective, no matter what the physical production costs are.
BACK IN MY DAY! The original Nintendo games cost just about 70 to 80 adjusted to today’s inflation. But at least you got a cool instruction booklet you could read on the car ride home, the full bug-free game (most bugs were fun if you found some anyway), and you actually owned the game with no strings attached. You could actually trade the games with your friends. If they started packing goodies with the games like that again on top of owning the game outright without some kind of shady DRM or license agreement, then yes, 80 dollars could probably be justified. That’s where I was going with physical copies.
“In terms of actual price of $70 or $80, for really great games, I think it will still be a steal in terms of the amount of entertainment that the top games, top quality games bring to people compared to other form of entertainment.”
I actually don’t entirely disagree, problem is that I’ve yet to play a game that was actually good enough to be worth $70-80.
Even the highest rated games of all time have flaws that every video game has. The tech simply isn’t advanced enough yet to justify the cost, not until we have games that are designed so well that you can do practically anything in them that you could do in real life. That means we have to move past things like invisible walls, awkward conversations with NPCs that don’t flow like a real conversation would, buildings that can’t be entered, short walls that can’t be climbed over, etc. (e: I’ve been around since the 3rd gen of consoles, and I can’t believe that we still don’t have the kind of games that I’ve been dreaming of since childhood.)
Furthermore, if your game has microtransactions, you can shut the fuck up. They generate so much income, that Free to Play is a sustainable business model. I am of the opinion that any game that has loot box mechanics, gambling, etc. should always be free.
I would say something like elden ring might be worth that price point given the breadth of the experience. Thing is, Elden ring is actually kinda too big. I like it, but a run through is like a multi week commitment, and I definitely don’t want that to be the norm, especially for fromsoft.
Yeah. I think there’s a problem with the modern development cycle that a fuckton of the budget goes into marketing and marketable assets (i.e. all them graphics that look great in the trailers but nobody’s computer can actually handle, and then the rest of the team’s on the hook to make a game on a shoestring that can actually use all of that content - The only way you can possibly accomplish that with a fraction of a fraction of the budget is if it’s super simplistic and repetitive gameplay that’s stretched over 40+ hours like a peasant on a torture rack.
Think about how many games you’ve played over the last decade, and how many of them were still fun to play after the first five hours, either because the primary gameplay loops were satisfying enough to keep you engaged, or because the game was keeping it fresh with new mechanics that didn’t bungle clumsily atop one another like a raspberry and beef trifle. Making great games is difficult and expensive, and most studios would rather put out something with a guaranteed return than anything that’s fun to play.
There is an argument to be made that Expedition 33 was essentially created by a studio with 30 people (though once you add everyone that worked on it the credits do balloon to over 400) with a rather small budget, and meanwhile companies like Rockstar, Sony and Activision have thousands working for years and spending hundreds of millions creating games like GTA 6, CoD and Concord, so naturally they should be a lot more expensive to buy too.
They just shouldn’t be surprised if people don’t buy all the $500 Waguy steak on offer and are perfectly happy with way cheaper options.
Nobody rightfully complains when Lamborghini sells their luxury car for hundreds of thousands. Gamers have been conditioned for far too long that indie games cost less than 60 and everything else costs 60. This was the fault of the industry to be sure, but it’s clear the barrier is being broken by necessity and expensive-to-make games are going to climb the price ladder and prices for games overall will stratify like many other markets.
Interestingly, that’s all Shuhei is saying here. Pay for the games you think are worth it. Games still provide a significant amount of value for their cost, even at higher price points. This is obviously true as we’ve had a decade of base game $60 and ultimate edition $90-100 with people purchasing ultimate editions and such.
Are you suggesting that AAA games are such premium, high quality products they should only be experienced by a few wealthy individuals who can afford the budget to buy them? Because that is what your analogy suggests.
That is what my analogy suggests and I suppose how you define wealthy matters, but that’s not strictly what I mean. I just mean prices are starting to striate.
AAA game devs are spending more on games every year and then suddenly finding out their market isn’t as wide as they hoped. High upfront cost + low demand sounds like a luxury product then, no? In the before times, they would release for $60 and squeeze hard for money. They can still do that, but now - since the price dam has broken - they can release for $80-100 and get more cash per super fan and then drop price aggressively to catch others who balked at the initial price.
I’ll be clear that the problem is the AAA industry spending too much on games when they don’t need to.
Over 400 seems a bit high to me but the size vs cost argument remains. Those external voice actors, animators, QA testers etc were all paid. Kepler Interactive even gave them money to have known actors for VA (they probably aren’t cheap).
So that’s very probably a several million budget (rumored to be between 5 and 25 mil according to non reliable source, thanks to Kepler and the early Gamepass contract).
Ok that’s not a 500 million budget, rather a 50 mil one (to be very large), but it’s definitely not a 500k budget.
And yet they sell it 45$.
Anyway, it just prove that you can build a Waguy steak alternative for cheaper while keeping the taste and without abusing your workforce.
There’s also the argument whether games really need that high of a budget. It feels like there’s little correlation between the budget of a game, and its success (or quality).
Sony could’ve invested in five or ten more Helldivers 2 scaled games, instead of wasting it all on the Concord flop.
I would be so excited if more games were made in an n64 or ps1 style. Maybe I’m just huffing nostalgia, but I still enjoy some of those classics. Games don’t have to have amazing graphics or be massive to be fun.
Considering the at least 200+ hours I invested in give or take ten* games throughout my childhood / adolescence / young adult past, then even €100 would’ve been a steal.
I’ve always thought games were expensive until studying game development in college. From programming to 3D modeling, and boy can I confirm that it takes a lot of work to do well. The developers and artists that do it well, and ethically, deserve to be fairly compensated as such, provided no one becomes disproportionately rich.
*Age of Empires 2, MU Online, Unreal Tournament 1999/2004, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1/2/3, Battlefield 1942, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, R.O.S.E. Online, Counter-Strike 1.6, Counter-Strike: Source, Battlefield 2, Insurgency.
The developers and artists absolutely need to be fairly compensated for the highly skilled work they’re doing. The question is, does a good game require 1500-2500 of them? That’s where you need to sell 9 million copies of an $80 game to break even. Particularly in an era where online sales mean you no longer need a distribution partner who will produce hundreds of thousands of discs at a time, and who has existing partnerships with big box retailers, so much of that publishing budget, relationships and supply chain are no longer needed. Even with the standard 30% cut that digital storefronts take, a team of 30 people can spend five years developing a game for $15-20 million, including marketing and localization, sell 500K copies at $50 and break even. This type of scaling back is what’s needed to keep the industry profitable and sustainable. I’m not saying there’s no place for huge budget games, but they don’t need to be the norm that bankrupts developers from one bad release.
this would make sense if the game developers were being paid properly to begin with, rather than the leeches that are the c-suite taking more than they should
That is how inflation works… when costs go up prices go up.
Yeah, your computer probably should cost a lot more in “today dollars” but because performance of components gets more efficient over time, you can likely get a better computer for less money.
It’s the same reason you have a computer more powerful than multiple thousands of dollar super computers. The technology has improved enough you don’t have to pay as much.
Do you think prices should just be locked in place for eternity at $60?
You can’t just scale game prices linearly with inflation, sure costs of development have increased, not just because of inflation but also because games are much more complex now. But the gaming market has grown a lot and games are infinitely reproducible so that hugely increases profits.
I don’t know how much we should pay for games, but just comparing it to inflation is useless
We are already are, look at season passes, dlc etc, 90+ is the de facto price of a lot of AAA games. They’ll claim going even higher is to support developers or whatever when laying people off en masse and posting even larger quarterly results, it’s pure avarice.
They also tend to sell more copies vs decades ago, which is partly why the $70cad game was so normal for so long IMO.
If the customers still buy it in the end, the publisher was right. We will see over time. Maybe there will be a drop in sales but then GTA6 comes along and no one can resist, opening the path for other games.
Someone on lemmy recently put this into perspective for me. Even like 1% of the population of the USA is 3 million people. If you increase the cost of a product and don’t care about long-term sales, the immediate gain in profit can outweigh the loss of total customers down the line.
I still think cutting off customers and burning good will isn’t a good business model, but I’m not stupid wealthy, so what do I know.
According to Nintendo my legitimate backed up software is causing them to loose money. At this point even if the legal way is wrong, then why not go full sail.
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Aktywne