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Video games to up their prices, consumers rejoice

TemplarGR

Dumbfuck!
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If there's ever a crash, its not going to be all big and scary like the one Atari had, its going to be small like the end of the New Hollywood era, a few companies will close, others will realize their follies and move unto new prospects. The only reason why it'd be a bigger crash is if there are bigger problems than games being bad.

There ARE bigger problems than games being bad. There is a major global recession/depression, a pandemic (or scamdemic if you prefer, it doesn't matter the lockdown affects everything the same whether the threat is real or perceived), major strife in major markets (BLM protests for example), record inflation everywhere while salaries have been basically stagnant since the 1970s. It is not just that the games won't be any better next gen, yet they will require major hardware investment to play them (i mean look at the videos of upcoming games for the new xbox, and this is supposed to be the better console...), they are essentially current gen games.

A video game crash will be severe, exactly like in the 80s. Remember people, even in that crash not every game company closed and we didn't stop getting video games. People think that in the 80s crash, we stopped getting video games altogether, this is wrong, what happened was that major companies had a crash, that was it. And the same thing will happen now.
 

TemplarGR

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My impression was that it was stuff like motion capture and facial motion capture (and animation in general) that costs a shitton, not a few extra textures, a new shader or particle simulator.

You don't do motion capture and facial motion capture per video game. The vast majority of animation is re-usable between video games. Especially video games in the same franchise. Facial motion capture is mainly used for lip syncing, which again is reusable. Most devs need new facial animation/motion capture for a few characters tops per new game, mainly protagonists. They don't just go around motion capturing and facial animating every single NPC with a new human actor, stop being delusional people.

I think people who defend corporations here are either shills, or suffer from Stockholm syndrome. They are getting fucked in the ass by those companies and they defend them. The way you are making it, those companies should have been bankrupt by now, seeing how everything they do to make games in the 2010s is 100000000x times more expensive than in the 90s, yet games cost the same, amirite? How come then all the AAA companies have immense profits per year? Give me a break clowns.
 

Alienman

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Sony online store on PS4 already takes 70 euro here in Sweden. While in retail you can find new games for 50. We are in this weird place where digital products are more expensive than physical products.
 

Ol' Willy

Arcane
Zionist Agent Vatnik
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facial motion capture
That's why most of the modern games have worse facial animations than Bloodlines from 2004.
smug.png
 

mk0

Learned
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Jun 28, 2020
Messages
113
Yes, AAA games are more expensive to make today than they were in the past, more detail = more work, this should be pretty obvious if you compare the credits of old games to new games. If that isn't proof enough then by all means download Unreal Engine, Blender and all that other crap and proceed to writhe in agony over how useless you are as a single developer.

The only 'crash' I can see occurring is the further consolidation of the player base to an even fewer set of game titles, Fortnite and other streamer crap having a stranglehold on the market and leaving scraps for niche titles.
 

Glop_dweller

Prophet
Joined
Sep 29, 2007
Messages
1,164
$1 in 1987 == $2.26 in 2020's money.

So... consider these prices:

games.png
games2.png


games3.jpg


Yes... That means that buying a $59.95 game then was the same as paying $135.31 for a game now.
*And that 64k meant SYSTEM memory requirement. The entire game might have been less than the size of a typical MP3.

People here think games are easier? Sure, there are fantastic game engines available, but you still have to make all of the content, and worthwhile game mechanics, and record the audio. Games are often ~10 to 50 gigs each now, and the developer staff measures in the many dozens of employees.
 
Last edited:

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
1) Yes, we need better tools to make better textures, guess what Sherlock, those tools have gone DOWN in price per decade. It used to be you needed a whole mainframe for 3D work in the early 90s, now a 500$ laptop has far more power.

Sure but tools are not what make the development of these "AAA" games expensive, it is the workforce that uses these tools. The tools are a very minor expense - practically no consequence - compared to the wages of all the people involved in creating these games.

2) Textures can be more complex today, true, but again, the difference in workload is not that extreme as you make it out to be. I never said you can make Assassin Creed Odyssey with the same number of people you can make a tiny PS1-era game, by the way. But you don't need 100x the people either.

The difference in workload for making a state of the art game during the PS1 and today is *huge*. During the PS1 days you had less people working on the entire game than the most specialized art department (e.g. technical artists) in a modern "AAA" game. Check the credits of any of these games for the actual artists, designers, etc to see.

And given that most PS1-era games sold 100k-500k copies each, at best, and were considered a success, vs AC selling millions and tens of millions, and DLCs, i think it evens out....

What is considered a success or not to the people behind those games (be it their developers or publishers) is irrelevant to how much the games cost to be made and your argument in the post i replied to was about that cost, not how the people who paid that cost could interpret the games' success.

3) You whole argument is that modern engines are more advanced, they need more people to work on them, and they don't re-use assets. This is patently false.

Indeed it is patently false because that isn't my argument at all. My argument has nothing to do with modern engines or tools, it has purely to do with the number of people needed to create the level of visual quality you see in state of the art "AAA" games and how that number of people affects the development costs compared to the PS1 era since that is what you originally brought up in the comment i replied to.

Models are getting reused all the time, for example. Have you ever wondered why for example in the UT3 engine era, almost all the games per dev had the same bulky/beefy human models? Ever wondered why? What, they couldn't design slimmer human models in UT3? Firaxis did, they designed "thin man" in XCOM, for example... Why most models looked the same type of meatsack? Does the word "reusable" say anything to you?

Yes, a game does reuse a lot of assets in itself, however your original comment was not about reuse of assets in a game but about reuse of assets between projects - here is explicitly what you wrote: "but we are also re-using more stuff between projects, so it evens out".

They don't build all the assets from scratch per game, this is a myth you are peddling.

This is not a myth, it is a fact that the vast majority of assets used in games - especially when it comes to graphics where "AAA" developers are into a rat race for the best visuals - are recreated from scratch for each game because the time interval between games is large enough for those assets to appear "dated".

However...

In Assassin Creed, they reused the vast majority of assets. The Ezio trilogy reused a lot of models, textures, and animations, between the three games, and Altair's game, with minor alterations/improvements.

...even in the few cases where some assets are reused (but do not be confused, compared with the new assets, those assets are a very tiny minority) they are not reused as-is but instead go through modification and, just like making new assets from scratch, that modification takes time for the artists to do (time which costs money to the developer).

I am sorry, all you did was to say "modern engines more advanced, therefore they need more people".

No, that is your misinterpretation.

Credit screens are a sham. [...] They are meant to give the illusion, like in the film industry, that the product was expensive to make.

:roll:

EDIT: also

You don't do motion capture and facial motion capture per video game.

Yes you do. Many "AAA" developers even have their own motion capture rooms with fulltime actors working on their games.
 

Rahdulan

Omnibus
Patron
Joined
Oct 26, 2012
Messages
5,105
Now we just wait for season pass prices to hike up to $60. You know, so they can charge you the cost of two games for one.
 

mk0

Learned
Joined
Jun 28, 2020
Messages
113
2 year old game, multiple columns with faster text crawl.
 

Citizen

Guest
The worst console ever. The controller was the stupidest thing I ever saw. Back in high school when I started dating my wife, her younger brother challenged me to matches of Golden Eye and I literally could not manipulate the controller; I, who was the champion of my school's Quake LAN games. (Ironically, this seeming indulgence of the kid perhaps put me in better esteem with the rest of the family, though it led to a deserved lifelong contempt from him.) In short, no. I reared the kids on NES and SNES, the consoles of their parents, but then skipped straight from there to Switch, the Nintendo console of their peers.

Cheeky japs just asserted their dominance on small handed console gamers back in 96 by releasing an awkward, impractical, dick-shaped controller
 

Black_Willow

Arcane
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Borderline
don't fret guys, the prices will go down because digital delivery cut the middlemen of physical production, distribution and retail sale.
Yeah, when this "digital distribution" thing will finally kick in the average price of a game should go down about 30%!
Isn't it great that the technology servers the customer like that?
 

Citizen

Guest
Games already cost much higher than 60$ tho, it's the ""base game"" a.k.a one third of the content that is sold for 60 bux, and then you need to drop 60+ more for DLCs to get the complete game
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I mean, check the credits for The Last of Us Part II as an example of a recent "AAA" game (i guess there might a spoiler at the first minute or so, i didn't played the game nor listened to the video with audio so i don't know, skip to ~1:40 to be sure). By far the most roles were about the game's assets - artists, animators, level designers, voice actors, etc, even the outsourced work was primarily about assets. All these are people who needed to be paid over the entire game's development (outside the outsourcing, but those had a lot of cost as well, it isn't like they were free) and the more people means the higher the cost.

When you look at a game like TLOU2, about half the playtime is cutscenes, so it's got a disproportionately high requirement for unique animations that only play once (a specific character doing a specific thing during a specific cutscene, rather than a dozen attack animations that each play hundreds of times during gameplay). Lots of voice acting too, and I bet there's a director involved too to direct the actors like in a movie.

You wouldn't need half the animation budget for something like, say, Skyrim or Fallout 4 where there's barely any cutscenes and NPCs in dialogues use a handful of generic hand gestures that appear dozens of times throughout gameplay.

The main cost factor of modern AAA isn't graphical fidelity, but the attempt to make them like movies.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
An interesting part of the video game industry that is completely unlike the movie industry is how successful small budget titles can be. Steam's 2019 platinum list mainly had games that were either medium budget or very low budget.
It's possible that it would be more profitable to simply make multiple small and medium budget games than a single AAA title, and definitely less risky. There are publishers who are already doing this to some degree I suppose(Microsoft, THQ Nordic?), but I wonder if any publisher would attempt to do it at an even smaller scale.
How many small-budget games could have been funded with the cost it took to make Mass Effect: Andromeda for example? If even one of them became a breakout hit, it might have been far more profitable overall, but definitely less risky than putting all your eggs in one basket.

Is there an example of this happening that I've overlooked? Mobile games, maybe?
 

Deflowerer

Arcane
Joined
May 22, 2013
Messages
2,052
Paying 60 dollars (or euros in my case which is even more) for even a new computer game is absolutely insane imo. I usually just wait till a game is priced 10 euros or less, maybe if I really want the game then I'll pay 20 max.

Yes I have many games on my wishlist that have been there for years and years (fucking japs never lower their game's basic price, so even on sale it's still too expensive for me)

The 60 euros price includes VAT. As far as I know, in US the sales tax is not quoted as a price until the actual checkout, so it is about the same in the end.

As for video game industry crash TemplarGR keeps sperging about, lmao give me a break. If anything, the industry will only win from this double whammy of recession and corona virus induced social distancing requirements.
 

abija

Prophet
Joined
May 21, 2011
Messages
2,892
How many small-budget games could have been funded with the cost it took to make Mass Effect: Andromeda for example? If even one of them became a breakout hit, it might have been far more profitable overall, but definitely less risky than putting all your eggs in one basket.

How many good small-budget games could the team that did ME:A have done? My guess is 0...
 

jackofshadows

Magister
Joined
Oct 21, 2019
Messages
4,488
All this considered, I now only purchase games on GOG for quite some time because they still offer a service which surpasses pirate versions. You get access to updates (if you want), complete offline installations and access to your games, real backups, and not need to install third-party launchers. Games outside of GOG are, most of the time, easier to pirate and not having to deal with all the crap I mentioned above.
It's true for PC games, sure (more or less), but what about modern consoles? I'm not exactly familiar with pirating its games but AFAIK it's possible yet extremely tedious and isn't actually free. So, for instance, if someone dying to play TLOU2 he has almost no choice but to pay up whatever charged price or wait untill it became available via console's subscription service which could take a while. Jokes on him of course but you can't judge all video games like that. At least untill for many "normies" console exclusives will cease to be a huge part of "video games".
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
The 60 euros price includes VAT. As far as I know, in US the sales tax is not quoted as a price until the actual checkout, so it is about the same in the end.
There is no federal sales tax in USA. Americans can easily get around paying taxes just by switching their billing address to a state with no taxes and using steam giftcards.

Damn government thieves.
 

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