I think a game should be priced accordingly with its quality, breadth & depth
So… BG3 should be $60 and other games these days should be like $30 or less? I can get behind that. That’s obviously not what he meant though.
Maybe stop inflating the cost of games development by letting them get stuck in development hell, hiring external consultancy firms that add literally zero value to the game, massively overinflating markering budgets, and hiring way too many developers to work on a project? That’s a good start.
This guy is a real dingaling. Especially calling Star Wars Outlaws a “blockbuster” game that isn’t priced correctly? My guy, that game should be free according to its quality and depth.
hiring way too many developers to work on a project
Most development companies also destroy their own built up experience after every game. Instead of using the experts (the people who have been making games for you for years) to create your next game, instead they lay those people off and hire new people.
Even better was with Kerbal Space Program 2. They didn’t even allow the KSP2 devs to talk to the KSP1 devs, despite them all still being employed at the same company. The people perfectly positioned to make the next game were not allowed to touch it or even talk to the people touching it. This culminated with a disaster of a release and the community roundly rejecting KSP2 as it is significantly worse than the first. It didn’t have to be this way.
Going along those lines, treat your people better. Retention is always important, but every role in game creation is inherently a skilled artistic job
You can swap out one cashier or factory worker for another, and after an adjustment period, your revenue won’t change much. You can’t swap out one programmer for another - that’s like changing the artist halfway through building a sculpture
You will not get the initial vision, and you need someone far more skilled to make something good out mid way through
If you treat people better, then how’re you going to be able to get your 5th yacht and your 3rd private jet?
That’s mostly how it works for me. BG3, Elden Ring? Full price, and maybe more than one platform. Almost anything else? I’m waiting for 50%+ off.
Wanna save money? Cut the pay for executives!
It’s an immediate bump in profits and zero impact on the games quality.
Plus if the executive then leaves maybe the next one won’t tell you to just clone whatever success has happened recently to minimize risk.
Maybe stop making games that cost so much and pushing open worlds and realism. Indies and Nintendo games shows that games don’t have to keep pushing such over the top graphics and huge open worlds. Just like how not all movies need a Marvel budget of special effects and CGI.
Nintendo is an interesting example to use, as their games famously don’t decrease in value and honestly often sell for more than original over time.
Nintendo has a few things going for it that other developers don’t, like its relatively long and consistent history and the fact it has sort of transcended video gaming to become a general pop culture icon. It also consistently releases bangers and the occasional flops are usually “creative but flawed” rather than just outright broken or boring. It doesn’t chase market trends to the same degree as its competitors, which gives its games a more timeless appeal. All those factors add up to give Nintendo games more long-term value, either as collector’s items or simply as fun video games.
And maybe stop making games only for profits
In my opinion it depends on the game. Games as good as BG3, with no micro-transaction crap and a bit of updates for bugs and some patches? I would pay more for it and gladly. BG3 feels easily worth $120 to me.
The problem is, other studios will see BG3 able to charge that, then go try doing it themselves, riddle it full of micro-transactions, release it half baked, and then gaslight us by telling us we’re being unrealistic with our expectations.
Does he see the shit big publishers have been pumping out for years?
You would have to pay me to play half the AAA slop that comes out.
How is this title allowed to be so misleading?
If anyone reads the article, the guy is arguing for honesty and transparency with video game prices as opposed to the multi-tiered and/or subscription based schemes that are used currently.
"‘I don’t love the artificiality of pricing structures post-retail,’ Douse wrote. ‘Use the inflated base price to upsell a subscription, and use vague content promises to inflate ultimate editions to make the base price look better. It all seems a bit dangerous and disconnected from the community.’
Douse believes games should be priced based on their ‘quality, breadth, and depth’, instead of simply being fitted to established pricing structures."
He’s saying the base price should be higher because there should only be one price.
I’m almost never willing to pay current AAA game prices for a game that it’s possible I’ll be bored with after a few hours. I’d much rather spend the same amount on 3 or 4 well-reviewed indie games as the chances are I’ll get at least one game amongst them that I’ll enjoy investing my time into.
So you still haven’t played bg3 huh?
Bg3 is not the game to argue didnt live up to its cost, thats for sure.
Not speaking of BG3, I feel nowadays there are too many cooks in the kitchen with big budget games.
With little research I did BG3 has about 450, but compared to COD which has about 3,000 people working on it. I can’t even grasp how to organize that many people to work on a single idea, and for COD I think it shows they don’t either.
Wrong premises lead to wrong conclusions. Games are expensive because publishers that add absolutely no value to the product take a big cut of the revenue. The solution is not to raise prices and continue feeding the parasites, it’s to cut costs. Otherwise, the price increase will simply lead to less people buying the products and even lower profits.
Publishers are kinda useless tbh.
I think there are some exceptions. Like Kitfox publishing Dwarf Fortress. Taking weird little indies and giving them an art / usability budget to become more accessible and, in turn, make the OG devs a bunch of money. Nobody loses.
As much as I hate Epic, they gave Remedy a lot of money through the publishing deal like likely made Alan Wake 2 possible.
They provide upfront funding and marketing to projects that otherwise wouldn’t be viable
Have they tried cutting down on avocado toast?
I’d be okay if we downgrade back to 2010 graphics. How much would that save ya?
BLUF: Agreed. Games don’t need realism to be fun. They need fun to be fun.
Aside from obvious genres like simulators, horror, or other niche games, graphics don’t, and shouldn’t be, the main focus of a game.
It could just be plain fun. I’d prefer games with a bunch of sandbox niche mechanics than seeing a tree in 4k upscale. Like Noita or Terraria.
Or a deep story. The original Talos Principle was alright on its graphics at the time, but it prioritized the story and puzzles. It was a fundamental game that shaped many of the philosophies I hold still today.
Graphics can be important, but I’d also prefer stylized over realistic any day. That’s why some of the older games still hold up today, graphically.
Wind Waker, the old 3d mario games, Bioshock, Oblivion (terrain, not people lol)
All had really really solid art. And it still looks good. Because it didn’t try to push the limits on making the game look real.
Back when Modern Warfare 2 released on the 360, I saw little dust clouds, and thought that it was the greatest game for realism ever at the time. The graphics were so good. Going back? Dogwater.
The 2010 style graphics would also be cheaper today, as you could get away with less optimisations and tweaks.
Video games are like the one thing that doesn’t cost too much. He’s right.
But it’s gonna stay like it is, or get hardcore capitalismed and balloon way past anything reasonable.
They already sell you games that they can remotely disable after you’ve purchased them, so I’d call that past anything reasonable.
Not all games are like that. BG3 is an example of a game that isn’t like that.
Very true, but in general, it’s a thing that already happens far too often.
Looking forward to paying more for the “base” game, and then a bit more for season passes cos why not, and then maybe they could make the season pass not include all the DLC so I can pay more for that too, and maybe they can fill the “base” game with adverts for the DLC, and maybe they can release the “base” game as a shitty buggy mess 🤞
Read the article. The publisher wants higher base costs so that we can get rid of deceptive pricing like subscriptions, micro transactions, and multi-tiered pricing on release.
In that sort of comparison, I also would choose higher base costs. Noones complaining that BG3 was 60$ are they? They follow this structure of one time purchase and most would argue it was worth it.
i can’t read
No worries seems like everyone else had the same problem too!
The high base level costs aren’t due purely to development, I’d wager. How many admin staff, redundant management, petty meetings, and exorbitant costs go to overhead that could be solved with a 20 minute meeting and less triple expressos for the executive team?
Moreover, chances are we could find several issues with the flow of work around the development of the game itself. Poorly optimized communication, for the win.
I worked on a DS game back in the day, turns out the marketing budget was twice that of dev + art.
So every company is getting it wrong, including the one who made one of the highest selling games recently?
Most people here are reacting to the title. The article lays out a different idea, far more nuanced and reasonable.
Apparently we are done giving Larian the benefit of the doubt.
Not sure why heavily leaning to one side or another is so popular nowadays.
Anyway, I don’t know how individual companies do what. I don’t work for them. I don’t have insider knowledge. I do know how companies are typically structured and the traps nearly every company experiences as they grow, both in revenue and often consequently in manpower.
I’m not going to dive into it. This is a pretty easy topic to find on many search engines and Youtube where they’ll probably go more in-depth than I can with a limited attention span and two thumbs.
I have not seen a single post in this thread that implied the poster read the article and understood what the publishing director was trying say.
The post title is ridiculously misleading.
The fact so much of the games industry has latch to $60 as ‘the price’ for decades is shocking. It’s an unsustainable practice and will increasingly make companies lean more on post launch predatory practices.
That is a good point.
On the flip side, they’re not largely selling something that has any physical finiteness to it anymore, and the sales volumes have increased drastically, resulting in significantly higher profits despite a smaller inflation adjusted unit cost.The cost of a good decreasing as an industry matures feels right. Jello cost 23¢ a box in 1940. Adjusted for inflation it should cost $5.17 a box now, but it’s only $1.59.
When there’s 2 games to buy, they can be justifiably more expensive than when there’s a massive surplus.
The games are different, but it’s not like consumers can’t find a different one they’ll also enjoy if the first one they look at is too expensive.Inflation has made $60 less valuable, but they’re not selling to the same market that they were 30 years ago either.
It’s hard to use inflation to justify raising prices or adding exploitative features when you’re already seeing higher inflation adjusted profits due to a larger more accessible market, lower risk due to reduced publishing overhead, and more options for consumers, which would be expected to bring prices down.Games also sell at a much higher volume than they did back then.
Wages have also not kept up with inflation, which is why games at over 100$ would be out of reach as a casual hobby for most.
I agree with the sentiment on wages keeping up but I think ultimately the price isn’t as important as the value. I’ve bought a games for $60 that I’ve got 2k+ hrs in. That’s about 3 cents an hour, which I like to compare to a $15 dollar movie ticket that’s ~2-3 hrs of entertainment ($5-7.5 hr)
Obviously not everyone, myself included, gets that much out of each game. But if some games costed $140 but did give 2k hrs of gameplay (7 cents per hr) I wouldnt be bothered. To be clear I don’t think disposable AAA should jack up prices, but if the price reflects the value offered I see no issue.
On the volume thing I think we’ll probably start to plateau in the next 30 years w/ % of the total world pop consuming games, and inflation will continue. I only wish to point out that the eternal $60 price tag is something that probably should end in our lifetimes.
Your calculations are severely flawed. First of all not everyone has 2000hrs. to invest in games. Plus I am buying mostly single player games, and the only way to invest more time is if they have quality mods that are worth playing. Usually the main story of the games is 10-20 hours long. The rest are grind generic quests that are not fun. So 150$ divided by 15 is 10$ per hour, which as you can see is above the cinema price.
It’s easier than ever for anyone to publish games. Not the old days anymore when a few publishers controlled the market of who could and couldn’t sell and would get promoted or not. More competion is going to drive down prices. Being able to charge high prices is more a luxury that would have been possible back in the past when consoles ruled supreme as opposed now with barrier to entry having gotten so low.
Arguing the rich deserve more money is crazy man
That is patently not what I was arguing. If they don’t raise the price past $60 they’ll just be incentivized to get it through predatory micro transactions.
And by arguing a business practice is unsustainable I’m not saying that entire industry pays employees in an equitable way.
They sell more copies.
Fuck off with this zero-dimensional analysis.
To be honest, I have only bought one or two games at full price. Most of the games I buy are having deep discounts.
Ummm, yeah, me too… Discounts…🏴☠️🦜
Ah yes the easy dev environment of the 1990s, too bad none of our game dev tooling, experts on the subject, cross platform porting difficulty, and physical delivery costs have all stayed EXACTLY the same.
While I generally agree, I think that there are some other ways that one could make games:
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One is to just do games incrementally. Like, you buy a game, it doesn’t have a whole lot of content then buy DLC. That’s not necessarily a terrible way for things to work – it maybe means that games having trouble get cut off earlier, don’t do a Star Citizen. But it means that it’s harder to do a lot of engine development for the first release. Paradox’s games tend to look like this – they just keep putting out hundreds of dollars in expansion content for games, as long as players keep buying it. It also de-risks the game for the publisher – they don’t have so much riding on any one release. I think that that works better for some genres than others.
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Another is live service games. I think that there are certain niches that that works for, but that that has drawbacks and on the whole, too many studios are already fighting for too few live service game players.
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Another is just to scale down the ambition of games. I mean, maybe people don’t want really-high-production-cost games. There are good games out there that some guy made on his lonesome. Maybe people don’t want video cutscenes and such. Balatro’s a pretty good game, IMHO, and it didn’t have a huge budget.
I do think, though, that there are always going to be at least some high-budget games out there. There’s just some stuff that you can’t do as well otherwise. If you want to create a big, open-world game with a lot of human labor involved in production, it’s just going to have a lot of content, going to be expensive to make that content. Even if we figure out how to automate some of that work, do it more-cheaply, there’ll be something new that requires human labor.
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Eh, apples to oranges.
A 60$ game today is so unlike a 60$ two or three decades ago.
No physical medium. Much larger market and (potential at least) sales volume.
Proliferation of game engines; games don’t need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ each time, or write machine code anymore.
On top of that, there’s many other revenue streams. Not that I think this model is ‘fair and good’, but look at the mobile market, where a sale cost of $0 is king.
Something to be said about ‘lower cost incentivizing bad practices’ (as the article discusses), and yeah, some games could raise their price. But it’s far fron 1-1, as ‘sales volume’ trumps ‘sale price’ in importance.
