Fucking why? These dudes always cite the cost of making games increasing as a reason for this nonsense but they never talk about the many many factors working in their favor already.
First, most people are probably not buying physical games very much if at all anymore. And because of that people don’t really buy games used anymore either since used games in general are much rarer. So more people are buying games directly from company storefronts. These same storefronts that also make games stay more expensive for longer periods of time. Not only that but there are literally more people playing and buying games now than have ever done so in the past (at least up until very recently)
All of these factors should be increasing Sony’s profit margins. If anything games should be getting cheaper. Not more expensive.
And I don’t buy that a ps5 game is significantly more expensive to make than a ps4 game. There’s barely a difference between each system’s capabilities in terms of graphical detail in the assets a team needs to produce. Most of the benefits of ps5 come in the way of higher resolutions and higher frame rates. I have yet to see a game release on ps5 that couldn’t have also been ported to ps4 with lower resolutions and frame rates.
Even the games they said needed the ps5’s speed were eventually ported to PC and run on the Steam Deck just fine. (Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart for example)
These statements aren’t anything more than a company executive trying to gaslight people into accepting unacceptable pricing strategies.
Don’t forget the game development is increasingly shoving the hardware burden onto the consumer by using poorly made tools to streamline development with garbage optimization which is why a gaming rig now has to be powerful enough to simulate a gaming rig from 10 years ago down to the atomic level but the graphics haven’t gotten appreciably better.
While thats definitely true for many games it’s less relevant for console makers and its hardly true universally; definitely not true for the insomniac games I mentioned.
Plenty of games are coming out that are optimized very well. Unfortunately, UE5 has gotten way too popular and devs often don’t seem to really know how to optimize games developed on the engine. Kinda the downfall of having an engine that appeals so much to artists but not so much to engineers. I think the only remotely well optimized game I can think of that was made in UE5 is Hellblade 2. And even as impressive as that game is from a technical standpoint (nothing can fix how boring it is) I still have stuttering problems with it. Though my rapidly aging R5 2600 is not helping things there.
But there are still impressive PC games out there. Recently Doom The Dark Ages, indiana Jones, and Kingdom Come Deliverence 2 come to mind as games that are impressively well optimized on PC. Especially KCD2, that game feels like black magic to me.
I think this is less of an issue of cost cutting by devs and publishers, though it’s definitely a factor, and moreso just devs not being as knowledgeable about optimizing games as they used to be.
Can’t say I agree with you there. The handful of games I get around to in a given year that are pushing the state of the art still run well at high settings on my machine built four years ago. The number of games pushing that threshold are so few that I might get a longer life out of my machine than usual.
The title should read “Playstation US boss is mad that spending a ton of money making games look slightly closer to real life didn’t make people want to spend more to play them”
I think even if they did, we’d still have arrived at exactly where we are right now. They sold more copies of games because, after inflation, the games became cheaper and more accessible for the average consumer. Now that prices are rising again, that average consumer is getting priced out, and they’re not making up for that volume in the higher price. $70 seems to be what the highest tier of production value can get away with in 2025 if they’re maximizing sales, GTA and Mario Kart notwithstanding, as they’re outliers.
He’s not wrong since games pricing hasn’t kept up with inflation. If it had we’d be buying $120 games. The problem is wages also haven’t kept up with inflation either. If gaming companies had increased the prices they’d have fucked themselves.
Gaming is one of the cheapest hobbies and forms of entertainment there is. The price I have paid per hour for playing my favorite games is miniscule compared to something like seeing a movie.
I could also point out: If the main sales race was for the gold-plated base copy of a game, instead of nickel and dining people who only have nickels and dimes, then it’s possible we would have a gaming world entirely focused on churning out AAAA singleplayer experiences, back to putting out trilogies of obscure gaming experiences.
This is not blaming gamers for not accepting higher prices for incomplete games; publishers moved where the money was, and I don’t blame them. I blame the rest of OTHER industries for not updating their wages so the world is livable and people have extra for entertainment.
Costs have ballooned, but on the production side, not the distribution side. Perhaps the reduced costs on the distribution side are partially responsible for prices remaining so stable in the face of inflation.
Yes, companies have made very bad decisions in what aspects of production to focus on in the last decade. They’re pouring more and more into ever decreasing rates of return on visual fidelity.
You can’t seriously think something like Cyberpunk or God of War or even Half Life 2 costs less than Super Mario World because they sell more digitally.
In a roundabout way, I guess, due to where they land on the supply-demand curve, but I’m not sure why we’re talking about Super Mario World. Game prices weren’t really standardized in any sort of way until they moved to discs, where the “floor” price for any given game was minuscule, and as we moved to digital distribution in the next few decades, this is the period where prices remained fairly stable, as they rose far slower than inflation.
Cartridges to discs were definitely a massive savings… and happened basically one and a half times (Sega to the CD and Sony from nothing to the Playstation)
Digital… is complicated. It definitely benefits the platform holder and lowers production costs for the major publishers (and makes indie games viable) but it also fundamentally changes marketing. Because people generally don’t browse the PSN Store to find new games. They only get recommendations from influencers. Whereas plenty of us have fond memories of standing in a Best Buy or Circuit City and picking what game looked good on the shelves.
But yes. I agree that not every single generation should have led to a price jump. But I can definitely see an argument for most of them to have raised the price of “AAA” games with tiered pricing beyond that. Because it really is a problem and not just for the major publishers. Indie games basically need to launch at an effective price of 10-20 bucks on PC to stand a chance and… that is great money for the small dev teams but not so much for a medium sized C/B tier game.
So in your world every review is only ever done by an “influencer?” Cause that would make a massive swath of the public “influencers” when generally those guys get paid.
You DO realize the entire point of a review is to influence others, right? Like, just because someone isn’t getting paid (also, the vast majority of the reviews people actually read/watch are either paid content or attempts at building a userbase) doesn’t mean they aren’t an influencer.
And yeah. While I would very much not say “a massive swath of the public” are influencers… a LOT of people online are influencers. Just like anyone who goes to the gym or plays b-ball in their driveway are actually athletes. They just aren’t professionals.
Yeah I just don’t consider things like Steam Reviews or things of the sort to make someone be considered an influencer. They sure as shit aren’t being paid, an if they are, than im owed a substantial amount of money.
The point of the reviews I read are ones that summarize, explain, and detail what an actual game is. The more neutral toned the better.
I would not consider simple reviews by your every day person to be someone I would EVER call an influencer, and if you tried, they would just be confused.
You don’t consider reviews influencers because you are a sane person with two functioning neurons to rub together and have not sucumbed to this social media brainrot that tried to fit everything into socia media labels that social media addicts can understand without having to think.
Cant even rely on reviews anymore… I forget what game it was, but there was a game had a massive pay to win scheme in the game… that was only added on launch day, so the reviewers copies didnt have it… So they gave glowing reviews on the gameplay, without the game having the pay to win store and all the gameplay nerfs that encourage using it.
People don’t browse the PSN store, because it’s crap. I mean, the steam store is pretty bad, but I still manage to just browse and bookmark some games there to get back to later.
I mean the discovery queue is pretty much on point except for the blockbusters they insert “because they are popular”. I don’t care whats popular, i care about what i like, roguelike indies and metroidvanias for example.
The huge win in digital for them was killing the resell market.
No used games means no competition from previous owners. Prices can stay at $60/70/80 forever without any user market forcing prices down.
Every media vendor wants digital only to cut production costs, but it's really to own the market. Consoles did exactly that for decades. The shift to subscriptipns for not only online at all but also to "dont own games, just give us a monthly part of your invome forever" was them pushing this advantage to its maximum conclusion.
Only now, with falling sales and falling interest due to "quick media" like tiktok/instagram/etc, is microsoft giving up on its console moat and sharing all games across devices. Only a loss of relevance as an entertainment medium is forcing them to open the market up again.
People vastly overestimate the impact of reselling on games… and that actually includes the platform holders themselves.
20 years ago? Yeah, Blockbuster was a scourge and there were even some magazine articles about noticeable dips in profit when a popular movie came out (because parents would bring kids to the rental store) and so forth. And Gamestop became a big enough player that they allegedly contributed to the death of the PSP Go
These days? Gamestop is all but dead even though most major studio releases still have physical copies. Because the game itself is increasingly a loss leader with the idea being that people will buy DLCs or even sequels. Project 10 Dollars WORKED except now it is Project 30-90 Dollar Season Pass. And… at that point, it makes a lot of sense to just sell the base game for 20 bucks or even give it away “for free” as an IGC.
And a good point of reference is Nintendo. If they were only interested in shelf space they would do what PC games have done for closer to decades than not: just put a piece of paper in a box. Instead, they have the asinine “game card” system which avoids the cost of cartridges while still allowing for resell. And… you can all but guarantee that Nintendo ain’t doing things for the consumer. Hell, back when they were arguably THE leaders in console gaming, Microsoft basically began their death spiral by trying to do largely the same thing for the XBOX One (which also included things like software to support watch parties of shows with friends). If game reselling was such a massive blight on their revenue they would never have tried that.
The quality of games did not improve, in fact game quality and diversity has deteriorated. The quantity of content has dropped off as well. Graphics fidelity and production costs have skyrocketed though.
Graphics are so superficial when it comes to games anyhow, why would anyone pay more for a pretty waste of time?
Edit: i am talking about AAA games here, obv there has been an extreme proliferation of indie titles
Diversity and quality are both going to be difficult to measure objectively, and I’d argue both are still in better supply today. Quantity is far easier to prove objectively. Not only are there just far more games out there, but try some like for like comparisons of some of your favorite long-running franchises on How Long to Beat. Assassin’s Creed II was 20-25 hours; Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is 35-64. Halo 2 was 9-12; Halo Infinite is 11-20. Baldur’s Gate 3 is close to as long as its two predecessors combined. Call of Duty is three games in one now.
The value of a game’s Quantity is directly proportionate to its Quality though, starfield and its 1000s of repetitive planets are the perfect example of this. Would any halo fan rather play 20 hours of infinite or 20 hours of halo 2…?
Yes there have been outliers of increased quality and quantity over the last decade, but in the full priced AAA space nowadays, that is the exception not the rule.
Quantity is directly proportionate to quality though
I’d disagree with that premise. It’s not like they’re making just as much game in the same amount of time. Games are taking way longer to make these days than they used to. As I’m 70+ hours into Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and nowhere near done, they could have made about 2/3 as much game as they made, and it still would have been phenomenal and worth the price. The same goes for Baldur’s Gate 3, not to say that I’m unhappy about how much of it I have.
I don’t think the high quality games are outliers. We just have so many more games coming out these days that it becomes more and more likely that we get some bangers in that volume. EA or Ubisoft may be putting out fewer games because of how long they take to make, but they’ve got more competition than they did 20 years ago.
As the end user why should i pay sympathetically for the extended dev time of a product that hasnt tangibly improved for my uses?
Yes the price ceiling of $70 does not do justice to games like KCD 2, but all that matters for the end user is perceived value. If the perceived value of any game isnt going up, then it is difficult to charge consumers an increased amount.
KCD 2 and Elden Ring are great examples of RPGs with content that fans perceive as a great value, but only AFTER playing.
Maybe KCD 3 or Elden Ring 2 can push their perceived value beyond $70, but the simple fact is that the majority of AAA games DO NOT offer an amount or quality of content that gamers would consider to be worth $70, especially with the tiering off of content with various editions, passes and DLC.
It is just subjective that you and i disagree about the amount of games that cross the value threshold of $70, but the evidence of a $0 cost increase for full priced games over the past decade or so definitely seems like evidence towards my perspective.
I wish i could pay more money for higher quality games with more content, but the advertising for these products happens within a competitive and reciprocal market, and that market has a mean perceived product value of $70.
KCD 2 and Elden Ring have essentially wasted dev time/cost creating bonus content, although the perceived value towards their brands it has created, plus the positive IP mind share, will pay off for them down the road with units sold i am sure.
As the end user why should i pay sympathetically for the extended dev time of a product that hasnt tangibly improved for my uses?
That’s not the point I was making. The price you’re paying is the same, but they’re delivering more for the same price, which you argued they were not. Then you said that quality dipped when they made more, which I argued it did not, and the reason for that is because they’re spending more time making it, so they don’t have to sacrifice quality to build more game, because they can give it as much attention as they’ve always given it but for longer.
Yes both very subjective. Accessibility and streamlining gameplay has seemed to be the focus. Developing unique, novel but also enjoyable new gameplay experiences? (the reason i believe most people game) That more or less ended with the Wii, Ps3 and 360 era of consoles.
I will, respectfully, still disagree with that assertion. Just because Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, and the like are on their umpteenth entry, does not mean that no more unique and novel games are being made.
I would argue that AAA full priced gaming space is not where that innovation has been happening in recent years, it has mostly been with lower priced indies.
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