You follow your own moral compass. My feelings are, if I was short on money, I’ve got a backlog and a stream of games being thrown at me for free (legally) such that I’d never have to pirate and never be bored. I’m willing to pay more for a good product, and I so thoroughly enjoyed Borderlands 1-3 that I bought the deluxe edition of 4 that was a no-go for you; they’re one of the few AAA devs keeping LAN alive, and that is worth me throwing me money at them to tell them they’re doing it right, on top of just making a very fun game. The companies whose games you’re pirating are the ones that need the attention the least, but every game you could be instead funneling time and money into benefits so much more from each individual sale. Plus, the reason we’ve got so much anti-consumer bullshit in games now is because piracy was a boogeyman for the industry for a long time, so I’d rather not give them any additional data points to make things even worse when we’ve already got an entire era of video game history that disappears when their servers go offline. That’s how I see it anyway.
The times I don’t feel gross about pirating, personally, are when the pirated version is supposedly the better version of the game (like emulating an old console game instead of playing a compromised PC port) or when the game is delisted and no longer available through ordinary channels, like Battlefield 2. You do what feels right to you. Pirating Nintendo games is an option to me, but they bother me as a consumer in all sorts of ways, and I instead spend that time and money on games like The Thaumaturge rather than playing through Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo will be just fine without my sale. The team behind The Thaumaturge may or may not have made enough money to make a second game. If Nintendo was a less shitty company, I’d be buying and playing Metroid Prime 4. Maybe I’ll end up discovering and enjoying something else during that time that needs my dollar more instead.
If something isn’t respecting your values, I’m of the opinion that you make a stronger statement by not even pirating those games. If you’re spending time playing them, you’re also not spending time and money playing some game that was meticulously made to respect your values. You’re fine playing indie games, but you’d play more of them if you gave up playing these AAA games that you decided to pirate. You talk to your friends and on forums about the games you play, which will at some point convince someone else to buy and play them, too. If you want them to hurt, so that they change, don’t even give them the time of day.
I usually hear of marketing spend matching development cost, so it’s probably closer to 50/50. The documents that these figures came from didn’t itemize them, but it’s notable that 2020 is when current gen consoles came out, and more fidelity usually correlates to more time and money to make the assets.
It is development spend + marketing spend + post-launch DLC spend. Even forking the same code base, you can see where the money goes. The campaigns are original each time, new map design requires time and money, etc. In the past 5 years, there has probably been a CoD game that cost $1B to make, as this data is from 2020.
Yearly CoD releases are taking longer to make and costing more to produce though; the most recent CoD we have numbers for, which was a number of years ago at this point, cost $700M to make, and that was the most expensive one at the time. They used to have two studios alternating releases every other year. Now there are three studios on a rotation with about a dozen support studios that all used to make other games, and now they just make CoD.
“Charging more” is where this gets ambiguous though. A game like Assassin’s Creed charges less these days than it used to, relative to how much content they put in the box. I’m long since checked out of Assassin’s Creed, but I think the average game could stand to be leaner and cost the same in the interest of coming out faster and for less money to produce. That would be called shrinkflation in any other industry, which is the same as charging more.
That’s one of my favorite games of all time. Thematically, the first time you see this scene, it does a lot for the presentation and story. Gameplay wise, I think it’s pretty weak.
Sounds like how a lot of us use streaming television these days, too. The price hikes change the dynamic, for sure. And I also liked Avowed more than Expedition 33.
The plan was to become the Netflix of video games, which they’re about 85-90% short of, so a price increase isn’t going to help that, and they know it.