(sorry if it’s the wrong place for this kind of discussion)
Yesterday The Riftbreaker raised its price 50% for base game and 65% for dlcs. I know Steam said all devs to adjust prices(in January), but this feel more of trend where once a game gets popular the price skyrocket.
As someone who waits a game go 75% or a stable 50% discount before buying it, if i didnt buy it by then sure i ain’t buying that now unless there is a massive discount (not even gonna talk about games that raise price to fake a bigger discount).
I dont want to sound cheap; I grew up with no condition to buy games and spent a lot of my internet in torrents in my youth, now i gladly pay for games but once a game raise its price i unwishlist it.
The price of games hasn’t gone up in decades. We’re only just starting to see games that cost $70 instead of $60.
The cost to develop games, on the other hand, has gone way, way, way up.
Think about it in “cost per megabyte”. Players have been getting more and more content - not playable hours, but content that needs to be created by a human - for the same amount of money. While developers have larger and larger staff, with more and more demands… For the same amount of money.
There’s a reason live-service and freemium games are becoming the monetization scheme of choice.
Cost of games needs to go up or we’ll just see more and more exploitative monetization.
Let me also add that $60 for 20 hours of entertainment is one of the best deals there is. And the best games give a lot more than 20 hours of gameplay. Books are about the only thing that comes close
The cost to develop has gone down, if anything. You don’t need powerful hardware. You don’t need expensive industry software. You don’t need proprietary devkits. You can create a perfectly good game on an old laptop with Blender, Krita, Aseprite, Unity, Unreal, Godot. You can target consoles on regular hardware and regular consoles.
Before, a handful of people could develop the most technically advanced game of the year. Today it’s common that hundreds of overworked people are involved in the development of a game.
Each person must have their own expensive equipment and salaries. Not to mention the cost of renting an office. The costs adds up quickly.
Smaller games made by one or two people are probably cheaper, but the cost of these games aren’t $70 like the big budget games.
Tell me you don’t make games without telling me you don’t make games.
You can make perfectly good games, yes. But good luck making anything AAA like that. The games you’re talking about are indie or niche. For example, they will have no mocap.
And even in those cases, there is a difference between “cost to start a studio” and “cost to develop a game”. The costs you’re talking about are the cost of getting started. Those are barrier to entry costs, not development costs. When we talk about development costs, we typically talk about everything after you have all the hardware and software you need. Studios already have those things so they barely factor into the ongoing development costs
Also you only don’t need proprietary dev kits if you have no intention of doing per-platform QA. Fine for indies. Not fine for AAA
Yes, the barrier to entry has gone down; the minimum cost to ship something, anything, is lower than ever…but only by comparison to the peak cost. Even small indie studios are spending as much as studios did when making $60 NES games
Sure, if you want to only talk about AAA games, yeah, the cost is going up. But in general, cost has gone down.
Unless you only one scrappy in the games made by three person dev team they really haven’t. The cost for making a game that was good in 2015 has gone down, sure. But it behooves you to show that game development in general, and yes that includes indie developers, has gone down.
A 10 person dev team in any major city is going to cost you between $500,000 and $1mill a year just to staff.
I’m not only talking about AAA. I’m pointing out some of the things you missed in your assessment.
Like I said, even indie studios today spend more to make their non-sprite, full featured games than studios did making NES games. And then those indie games sell for $20 or $30 instead of the full $60 price point. So the content-to-development cost ratio is still shit
That’s really not the bulk of development costs though: The real cost is in labour; as game dev teams have increased the labour costs will increase too. Delay in game? Costs go up.
It’s offset by the industry becoming bigger; back then a game selling 100k is a huge success, now it’s more like 10 million. At some point that’ll cap so that’s why the studios area increasing prices now. Oh and if the studio is public, they need to feed the
parasitesshareholders.I generally don’t buy big games of late so I’ve not had to put up with super expensive games, but it’s just something to keep in mind why prices are so.
If you’re paying a developer 80k per year, 5k per employee in hardware and licensing is nothing
From a purely financial perspective, yes. From a managerial capex vs opex perspective, no.
Regarding “cost per megabyte”…
I see your point, but for me it is more important the “entertainment per €/$” factor, and there you can’t beat indie games.
I’ve bought the whole Halo collection… that’s a metric ton of megabytes right there, but I’ve only installed it once and never again. In contrast, I’ve bought Loop Hero (about 200 MB) and haven’t been able to put it down since. That’s a lot more value for money, in my opinion.
That’s you :) I bought the halo collection and spent >200hrs playing it. I have >1600hrs in the Destiny franchise. Can’t just look at your own experience :)
Bro I paid $80 for Final Fantasy 3 (now 6) on SNES. From Toys R Us.
Yuuuuup. Price if games has been stagnant for too long
It’s not for the same amount of money, though. Video game sales also went up significantly over the years.
Doom 2 sold less than 2 million copies by 1999 (released in 1994) and made about 100 million. Doom Eternal sold 3 million copies first week and make over 450 million in revenue in just 9 months…
Per Cormack, Doom 2 development cost was $550,000. Doom 2016 dev cost was $90,000,000 (couldn’t find Doom Eternal’s but that should be close)
It’s not about how much one or the other has gone up. It’s about how much they’ve gone up in comparison to eachother
You see more and more exploitative monetization because people are dumb enough to buy into it. The AAA industry is fucked and is not worth investing a penny into, they wouldn’t raise the prices and avoid MTX, they would raise the prices and STILL attempt to fleece as many people as they can with neon skins or whatever bs.
“Businesses try to maximize profit. News at 11”
Like, I’m anticapitalist as hell, but c’mon. Your problem is with capitalism, not game dev
Your comment is talking about monetisation, which the devs have nothing to do with apart from implementing the features. So what even is this response? I dont understand your point now.
Well, I can say from personal experience, devs absolutely have a say in monetization if they’re not wholly owned by the publisher.
But my point is that I was speaking to the motivation businesses have to prefer one monetization scheme over another. Your comment was just “corporations evil, micro transactions bad”.
If the cost of games had kept up with inflation and development costs, micro transactions wouldn’t be nearly the beast it is today because there would have been a viable alternative, and customers would have more options, allowing them to “speak with their wallet” more effectively. But as it stands, it is very, very difficult for most developers to sustain themselves on single-burst, long-tail tail monetization