this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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[–] RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 67 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] BombOmOm@lemmy.world 27 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 17 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] BroBot9000@lemmy.world 52 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Wanna save money? Cut the pay for executives!

It’s an immediate bump in profits and zero impact on the games quality.

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] Tinks@lemmy.world 30 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] stardust@lemmy.ca 30 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 4 points 2 months ago

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.

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[–] Jumi@lemmy.world 25 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Does he see the shit big publishers have been pumping out for years?

[–] Sabata11792@ani.social 3 points 2 months ago

You would have to pay me to play half the AAA slop that comes out.

[–] Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 25 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] magnetichuman@fedia.io 24 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] ALilOff@lemmy.world 23 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] Peruvian_Skies@sh.itjust.works 22 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] boletus@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Publishers are kinda useless tbh.

[–] themoken@startrek.website 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Daxtron2@startrek.website 5 points 2 months ago

They provide upfront funding and marketing to projects that otherwise wouldn't be viable

[–] stringere@sh.itjust.works 18 points 2 months ago

Have they tried cutting down on avocado toast?

[–] AgentGrimstone@lemmy.world 18 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'd be okay if we downgrade back to 2010 graphics. How much would that save ya?

[–] JakJak98@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

The 2010 style graphics would also be cheaper today, as you could get away with less optimisations and tweaks.

[–] jaggedrobotpubes@lemmy.world 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 26 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They already sell you games that they can remotely disable after you've purchased them, so I'd call that past anything reasonable.

[–] WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not all games are like that. BG3 is an example of a game that isn’t like that.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

Very true, but in general, it's a thing that already happens far too often.

[–] rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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 🤞

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[–] Xanis@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] SoJB@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Person with objective personal financial interest in raising prices says raising prices is necessary

Let’s not pretend this capitalist trash take is a valid point. Yes, games cost more to make now.

Did games also sell over 22 million copies back then? And that’s just Steam BG3 sales, not including literally every other platform.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

22M copies sounds like a very high estimate, and there are lower estimates out there, including those in line with the math you can run against their infographics and achievement data where they may have only sold under half of that.

[–] Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The sticker price of games is what it is. Micro transactions, subscription models, DLC, and such have all been flawed attempts at remedying this. If they increase the sticker price of games they'll be subjecting themselves to more critical consumers, more risk averse buyers, and less movable players.

The question they have to ask is, do they feel safe rolling those dice, if their survival might otherwise depend on decreasing a game budget?

[–] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

How are they not rolling in the dough by now? So much of the market has rolled over to digital, which means no secondary market.

Before you could pay $50 for a game, play it and sell it later for 10-$25 (depending on how quick you are), effectively making the price 25-$40.

[–] Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago

The destruction of ownership rights has been profitable, but there isn't an amount labeled "enough"

[–] FireTower@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago (7 children)

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.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 33 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] dom@lemmy.ca 32 points 2 months ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 21 points 2 months ago

They sell more copies.

Fuck off with this zero-dimensional analysis.

[–] filister@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

To be honest, I have only bought one or two games at full price. Most of the games I buy are having deep discounts.

[–] SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 months ago

Ummm, yeah, me too... Discounts...🏴‍☠️🦜

[–] tal@lemmy.today 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

While I generally agree, I think that there are some other ways that one could make games:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

[–] Sethayy@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 months ago

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.

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[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago (7 children)

The mention of GTA 6, out in 2025, reminds me of Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick's comments from an earnings call last year that industry prices are "very, very low" versus the number of hours of playtime games offer and player perception of their value.

I'd generally agree with that, but perhaps with an asterisk on player perception of their value. I'd much rather have a 20 hour Ubisoft open world game than an 80 hour one filled with mandatory padding, but there is definitely a contingent of their customers that want there to be that padding, because they equate hours with value. The length of games has gone up a lot in the past 20 years (often to their detriment, I'd argue), and the price has moved but only barely. The games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring that are 100 hours long without feeling like they're padded with busy work and checklists in order to finish them? Those games feel like I made off like a bandit at $60. Then you've got Hi-Fi Rush, a quality game I'd have happily paid $60 for, that you can finish in 10-15 hours, and Microsoft only charged $30 for it next to a flop like Redfall or another one of those padded games like Starfield for $70 each.

Also worth noting that lots of people like to throw out how much bigger the gaming audience is compared to back in the day as the reason why prices shouldn't increase, but while that's true, most of the oxygen in the room is still sucked up by only a handful of winners, and those are the games like Star Wars Outlaws selling you an ultimate edition for $150 with a season pass, because they know you'll pay it.

The average AAA game should probably find ways to develop the game leaner and faster while still finding that value for people. I think that's the nut Judas spent 10 years trying to crack, so we'll see how they did next year.

[–] RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Gaming prices should not be increasing. They should be decreasing. Supply is literally infinite thanks to digital distribution and gaming makes so much profit its like, more than the entire music and movie industries combined. The number of people that buy games now is huge, there is no justifiable reason for prices to go up other than corporate greed.

Back in the day, games were $80-$100 USD. But they didn't have a lot of the advancements that the gaming industry has today. Aside from the number of people buying games being smaller back then, the cost of manufacturing game cartridges and physical copies was a lot higher than today. Digital distribution was not realistically an option for the PC platform, and was literally not an option for consoles. Game development tools were non-existent. Most game development studios had to program their own game engines, or license one from someone that did. A lot of work was done manually, by human hand for quite some time. Compare that with today, where game engines are plentiful and very user-friendly, and other tools come with many automated or assisted features that would previously had to have been done by hand. I mean, game engines had a period where a good user interface was unheard of.

Then you look at other issues. Game studios are too big these days. 500 people is too many people working on a project. Bigger ships are slower to turn, lean out the teams to like less than half of that number. Development cycles are too long. Games used to be developed in a year or two, three at the absolute most. Games didn't used to be as big, but you know what? They don't need to. A 10 hour game that is paced well with a good story is infinitely better than an 80 hour game where you wander around a 95% empty world experiencing a disjointed barely existent story. Marketing costs are overinflated. There is no reason so much money should be spent on marketing a game. Games don't need some random pop song in the trailer to get people to buy it, have the composer/sond designer write the trailer music like in the old days, since that was part of their job.

And as you mention, most of the time there are few hits that sell big. This was always true, and will always be true forever. Games don't really compete with each other except for one resource: the customer's time. And people have a finite amount of time. Until people begin to have more free time, and infinite time, it doesnt matter how many games are made, they will still always compete for the customer's time. It is an immutable fact of the gaming industry.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Switching to cheaper media and then digital distribution has reduced costs for distribution, but that's been eaten entirely and then some by the other problem you call out, which is how much larger the team is and how long the game takes to develop. In order for prices to decrease, that second problem needs to be solved. And sure enough, games made by smaller teams with fewer bells and whistles are cheaper, and there are plenty of those. I've played plenty of great ones just this year. By comparison to how many person months go into something like Baldur's Gate 3 compared to something like Conscript, it's amazing and perhaps even absurd that it only costs me three times as much as Conscript.

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[–] SomeGuy69@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

So sandbox games become almost free and big blockbuster games with 5 million lines of dialogue and AAA graphics cost 3k?

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