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”
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.
I mean, inflation exists. That said, they just use dlc and other microtransactions to recoup costs (plus in some ways production is cheaper, just not overall).
I like to remind people that they’re taking advantage of a thing called consumer surplus. In short, any given person will spend X amount of dollars for a product, be it $60, $30 half off, or $120 collectors edition, etc. Hell, “free” gets the most heads, hence how mobile market works.
Flat $60 (or the shift to $80) will inevitably cut off anyone unwilling to pay that price, which at a certain point is bad for business and why you get sales. Plus, most sales are digital now, so it’s not like there’s a per unit overhead. Keeping a dynamic pricing structure is simply better in spite of inflation, which obviously this former boss apparently doesn’t get.
Video game budgets are still lower than film budgets and ticket prices for movies haven’t steadily climbed, arent anywhere near $60 a pop, nor have there been all these freaks coming out of the woodworks to say movie tickets should cost more.
That’s the thing, a lot of investors almost don’t like the idea that video games are low budget. They want to be able to double their funding and quadruple their success, like with a lot of growth properties.
At the time, 12 years ago, maybe that was the most expensive video game ever made. Like Avatar, it too has been eclipsed by so many others. A Call of Duty game now costs about $700M to make. A Sony blockbuster costs $200M-$300M; Concord may have been $400M.
I don’t know how universal it is, but movie tickets here have at least tripled since I was a kid, 20 odd years ago.
Meanwhile, me and 4 friends pooled our pocket money together to buy a video game that we could barely afford. Brand new video games are the same price now.
I’m not saying “they should increase their price”, but it is wild how somehow they haven’t in decades
they haven’t increased because the cost of production has drastically dropped. cartridges were expensive as hell to make; the hardware was like half to cost of the game. disks were cheaper but you still had all the extras like bespoke formats, copy protection and manuals. with digital distribution, the production cost is zero. even when you buy a physical release, you get an empty box with an off-the-shelf bluray.
Must be nice living somewhere where cinema prices did not climb. I can assure you its been different where I live.
You got to look at it relatively, a movie never cost even close to $60, so why would it end up there. It cost something like less than $10 but now the average is around $16. Games were maybe $60 and now could be $80, so it is actually a very comparable increase.
Edit: to be fully clear, I don’t think there should be a comparable increase between those two things. Buying a video game and going to watch a movie are two very different things to do. Just pointing out that movie tickets did in fact get more expensive. There’s also the “creative accounting” often being done in the film industry, I don’t think that’s a thing in the gaming industry. So many differences.
One factor they don’t seem to consider is that they are competing for a finite resource: consumer attention.
There has never been so much content to consume: not only games, movies, series, music, books, podcasts, and even old games.
New games have to compete with and stand above all that content to justify the price.
As others have said, purchase power is down, people subscribe to more services (net, mobile, streaming music and video), all that bites into the available budget to buy games.
Bottom line: it’s getting hard to justify spending that amount on a game you don’t have time to play.
Yeah it’s hilarious to me they wanna charge more and don’t expect to sell less. Ppl would go from being iffy about indie games to checking them out more if 4 at base price cost what a AAA one does
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