Video games to up their prices, consumers rejoice

[JarlFrank]

There are publishers who are already doing this to some degree I suppose(Microsoft, THQ Nordic?)

Devolver Digital is specialized on cool indie titles. Most of them are good. https://www.devolverdigital.com/
Games in their portfolio include Hotline Miami, Enter the Gungeon, My Friend Pedro, Reigns, Broforce, Ronin, etc.

Then there's New Blood Interactive which is both a dev and a publisher (I think). They're behind Dusk, Gloomwood, Amid Evil, Maximum Action. They focus on low to mid budget boomer shooters that look and play like they're 20 years old.

Both these publishers know their niche and especially Devolver knows how to spot games that fit their portfolio and grabs them. Considering the relatively small budget of the games they publish, but the high popularity of their top sellers (stuff like Enter the Gungeon and Hotline Miami) they're making big bank with their business model.

 

[Delterius]

The implication that it simply costs more to develop games now is interesting considering rapid advances in technology and maturation of development tools.
e.g., Final Fantasy 7's development cost is still one of the highest.

I'm not going to claim this is an exhaustive list, but Wikipedia does have a sourced list of highest development costs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

Only 2 were made in the past 5 years. One of which is Mass Effect: Andromeda, btw.

lmfao la noire was more expensive than world of warcraft

 

[Zlaja]

Who buys video games for $70?

Beta testers.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

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...

Probably more than a couple. Surely you don't think everyone in the hundreds of people who worked on it are untalented?

 

[Bad Sector]

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.

Well, Skyrim was an anomaly with its 100 people team that was considered *very* small for a AAA title even in 2011 (let alone nowadays) while Fallout 4 was heavily criticized about its supposed subpar visuals, animations, (bad) lip sync, etc. Not that it seemed to affect their sales much, if at all, though - so perhaps it is every other big dev that falls on the graphics rat race trap :-P.

But...

The main cost factor of modern AAA isn't graphical fidelity, but the attempt to make them like movies.

...most "AAA" games really want to have all those cinematics, animations, etc. Though it also is graphical fidelity, after all whenever developers try to cut some corners due to their small team size and budget while wanting to maintain some visual detail, you get results like all ELEX women sharing the same face :-P.

TBH personally i wouldn't mind games having visual fidelity around what you'd see in Half-Life 2 (for smaller linear games) or Fallout 3 / New Vegas (for large seamless world games), except perhaps slightly larger textures (0) as i think anything beyond that is giving diminishing returns while bloats the development costs which in turn forces developers to cater their games' design for reaching wider audiences so they recoup those costs. But i think i'm overall in the minority as i've seen people claiming that even Mass Effect 1 looks too dated for them.

(0=just to avoid a potential misunderstanding, at HL2 level of detail, there is little additional effort to create larger textures - if anything, often the textures are already larger and scaled down - however this becomes less and less true when going further back in time)

 

[rusty_shackleford]

ut i think i'm overall in the minority as i've seen people claiming that even Mass Effect 1 looks too dated for them.

It's the lighting. Most lights don't cast shadows.

 

[J1M]

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?

The answer to this is basically no. The AAA studios are always chasing the next GTA5, forgetting that GTA1 was a much lower budget product that kicked off the cash cow.

 

[commie]

Don't mind paying more for games I'm interested in -- if I have doubts about a particular game, I'll wait for a discount.

But I have little to no interest in most AAA titles out there. If anything, I hope this will allow smaller devs to set more reasonable prices for their games and get better chances of survival.

For example, I wouldn't mind if Underrail would cost $18 instead of $15, or Dungeon Rats would cost $12 instead of $9 if that means the developers will be able to afford a few more months of development on their next projects and deliver much better games.

Nice effort to try and justify a price increase for Der Sturmbannfuhrer, ZZ.....

 

[FreshCorpse]

Talk of a gaming "crash" is overdone and is ignorant of how crashes happen. The 2008 financial derivatives market could crash because A owed B owed C etc and when C asked B for money, B asked A. When A couldn't pay, A went bust then B when bust then C went bust. Western pension funds will probably crash because governments owe citizens payments into their retirement but there are no funds from which to draw on for this - social security schemes just transfer money from current taxpayers to current beneficiaries and anything that reduces taxpayers (like coronavirus) will create a crash as governments go bust.

In order to have a crash you need to have interconnected (aka systemic) debt.

The 1980s American gaming crash that everyone alludes to as prior art for a new crash features retailer returns to publishers as a key element. Retailers could not sell product and so returned it for a full refund to publishers (lots of stuff sold in shops still works this way today). This ability to return shit you can't sell is the stand-in for debt that caused publishers to blow up: retailers returned millions of dollars of unsold product, and when the publishers went bust and could no longer honour refunds the retailers just started marking the games down and selling them heavily discounted. Suddenly every shop was full of $3-4 games and no one could sell computer games at a profit.

As the majority of games are sold online now this type of "sales on consignment" doesn't happen so there's no debt and there can't be a big crash like in the 80s.

Don't expect a big, orgasmic explosion among AAA publishers/developers in the event that big games stop selling well. You'll just see more studios shutter than usual as games don't sell well enough to warrant sequels or over. A bit like how Bioware is probably going to disappear (partly shutdown, partly rolled into something else inside EA) in the next 6-12 months.

Another newsflash for some of the "just you wait, it will all come crashing down!" boneheads in this thread: the coronavirus is a huge fucking boon for computer game makers. Sales are up something like 50% year on year and there are effectively no marginal costs for digital distribution so everyone just got a bumper return on investment and there is no danger of anyone going to the wall in the short term.

 

[abija]

Probably more than a couple. Surely you don't think everyone in the hundreds of people who worked on it are untalented?

I think most of them were grunt level workers or worse (talentless hacks that play well the corporate game).

 

[DalekFlay]

The answer to this is basically no. The AAA studios are always chasing the next GTA5, forgetting that GTA1 was a much lower budget product that kicked off the cash cow.

Well... GTA3 kicked off the cash cow aspect, but yes. They should be making new IPs at lower budgets to avoid risk while testing concepts. Make something smaller that's a big hit with people, then make a AAA follow-up. Outer Worlds is maybe a good example of this currently, assuming MS make a bigger sequel which I'm guessing they will.

 

[JarlFrank]

The main cost factor of modern AAA isn't graphical fidelity, but the attempt to make them like movies.

...most "AAA" games really want to have all those cinematics, animations, etc.

Yeah and that's the issue with AAA and why I don't pay full price for them, they feel more like movies than games, with cinematic cutscenes instead of every dialogue being an interactive list of options to pick. Cinematicness comes to the detriment of player involvement/interactivity, and the result is games that barely feel like games, making them a bad investment for me (because when I fire up a game, I actually want to play a game, not watch a movie).

Notable exceptions of AAA games I enjoyed were Dishonored 2 and Prey, but both of those focused more on gameplay than delivering a cinematic story experience. Their sales were somewhat disappointing, but that was mostly due to terrible performance when they were released.

Thing is, if you wanna do something that isn't a cinematic cutscene-fest, you can produce it for a lot cheaper than your average AAA. And there's a market for games that are actually games - Skyrim and Fallout 4 are proof of that, as much as Fallout 4 was criticized it still sold like hotcakes, not to mention Skyrim. In the end, none of the millions of players who bought them cared about awkward animations.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

The answer to this is basically no. The AAA studios are always chasing the next GTA5, forgetting that GTA1 was a much lower budget product that kicked off the cash cow.

Well... GTA3 kicked off the cash cow aspect, but yes. They should be making new IPs at lower budgets to avoid risk while testing concepts. Make something smaller that's a big hit with people, then make a AAA follow-up. Outer Worlds is maybe a good example of this currently, assuming MS make a bigger sequel which I'm guessing they will.

That's not how you do it. Let indies test new concepts on their own dime, then look at the top 10 best-selling indie games and make an AAA clone of the most interesting one out of the bunch.

Then invest $100kk into the marketing and stress the 'innovative' aspects, and don't forget to pull the 'no one has done it before' card.

 

[DalekFlay]

Yeah and that's the issue with AAA and why I don't pay full price for them, they feel more like movies than games, with cinematic cutscenes instead of every dialogue being an interactive list of options to pick. Cinematicness comes to the detriment of player involvement/interactivity, and the result is games that barely feel like games, making them a bad investment for me (because when I fire up a game, I actually want to play a game, not watch a movie).

Notable exceptions of AAA games I enjoyed were Dishonored 2 and Prey, but both of those focused more on gameplay than delivering a cinematic story experience. Their sales were somewhat disappointing, but that was mostly due to terrible performance when they were released.

Video games should embrace interactive storytelling but too many developers want to be movie directors instead. I can enjoy cinematic games when done very well, like say the newer Tomb Raiders, but overall it's so disappointing to see games focus on shit other mediums can do better, instead of shit no other medium can do.

 

[Daemongar]

$1 in 1987 == $2.26 in 2020's money.

So... consider these prices:

Time out. I was there. This is bullshit. Yes, the retail price of that game was $39.95, but there was a lot more flexibility in pricing. They went through lots of distribution channels, so I was more likely to buy my games through Ahoy! magazine where I would get prices like you see below. Yes, below Ultima IV was $39.95, but it included a full map, the manuals were FANTASTIC, included an ankh, and altogether it was a work of art. Also Origin offered phone support for folks who were stuck and also had a BBS for clues, I think. Yes. Really. Same with Pools of Radiance.

Now, vendors sell for a consistent price. I could go to target and pay $40 for Ultima, but Babbages may have it $5 cheaper, or I could buy it from the vendor below for $10 cheaper. Now? You pay $70 for a game. There. Are. No. Other. Channels.

*also - check out that price for Elite. What, was that like $0.01 for each hour played? Damn.

 

[Glop_dweller]

But what are you trying to prove?—that it was better?...then we agree.

That vendors would undercut their competition, or have sales? When has that never happened?
That games had media and printing costs to bump the price up?

Games cost that much because that's what people will pay; it's no coincidence that games cost about $50, shoes cost $75, and suits cost $100.

The real shocker is electronics; compare the price of hard drives over the years. Twenty years ago, $240 might have bought a 6 gb drive, now it buys you a 6 tb drive. It's the relative price people will pay—even though the money is worth half as much.

 

[gurugeorge]

It doesn't matter what the nominal price is, all the companies will practice market segmentation on Steam or other digital outlets once they've recouped their costs, so the game will be affordable to anyone on discount now and then.

I only worry about whether the game is worth even its discount price, and very few are.

 

[Black_Willow]

Ultima IV was $39.95, but it included a full map, the manuals were FANTASTIC, included an ankh, and altogether it was a work of art. Also Origin offered phone support for folks who were stuck and also had a BBS for clues, I think. Yes. Really. Same with Pools of Radiance.

Yeah, how much did it cost to manufacture, package and store all this stuff, $10, 15$ ( and I mean 1988 dollars)?

This is some "collector edition" level stuff and would cost ~ $100 today.
Also, let's not forget that the volume of sales was tiny compared to nowadays, when everyone and their grandma plays games.

 

[Gerrard]

Already here

 

[Kem0sabe]

All this does is make gamepass an extremely attractive service. Paying 80 euros for a day 1 release of a AAA console game will become untenable for the average consumer, as people have said, money is worth less now than before, job security is also becoming non existent.

The vast majority of people defending the price increase on reddit are kids or young adult who live in their parents houses and are supported by them, they have no conception of the cost of living and the only reason they seem able to produce to justify the new game price point is ”inflation”

 

[FreshCorpse]

All this does is make gamepass an extremely attractive service. Paying 80 euros for a day 1 release of a AAA console game will become untenable for the average consumer, as people have said, money is worth less now than before, job security is also becoming non existent.

The vast majority of people defending the price increase on reddit are kids or young adult who live in their parents houses and are supported by them, they have no conception of the cost of living and the only reason they seem able to produce to justify the new game price point is ”inflation”

I suspect gamepass isn't going to have such a low price forever...like Netflix, they will hike it once they've acquired a lot of customers.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Gamepass is for schmucks, just like facebook or any "convenient" fad. The prices will soon explode and they will steal and control your data. It is well known that Microsoft cancels accounts for imaginary reasons, and many people lost access of their library for no reason at all. one day you will wake up and realize that your digital balls are inside a giant vice, but then it will be too late.

 

[Glop_dweller]

The vast majority of people defending the price increase on reddit are kids or young adult who live in their parents houses and are supported by them, they have no conception of the cost of living and the only reason they seem able to produce to justify the new game price point is ”inflation”

The vast majority... don't understand inflation.

 

[Jaedar]

The answer to this is basically no. The AAA studios are always chasing the next GTA5, forgetting that GTA1 was a much lower budget product that kicked off the cash cow.

Well... GTA3 kicked off the cash cow aspect, but yes. They should be making new IPs at lower budgets to avoid risk while testing concepts. Make something smaller that's a big hit with people, then make a AAA follow-up. Outer Worlds is maybe a good example of this currently, assuming MS make a bigger sequel which I'm guessing they will.

That's not how you do it. Let indies test new concepts on their own dime, then look at the top 10 best-selling indie games and make an AAA clone of the most interesting one out of the bunch.

Then invest $100kk into the marketing and stress the 'innovative' aspects, and don't forget to pull the 'no one has done it before' card.

And then you'll still get beaten to the market by a dozen other clones, find the marketplace is really crowded, and fail to make much money.

 

[DalekFlay]

And then you'll still get beaten to the market by a dozen other clones, find the marketplace is really crowded, and fail to make much money.

Landfills are flooded with failed DOTA and WoW clones by desperate corporations, but they do seem to be having more success with battle royal games like Apex Legends and Call of Duty Whatever.