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I like the pricing scheme of mojangs Minecraft. It was a weird early access kinda thing, i guess? It kind of worked like this : Early birds / early adopeters got the game for 5 euros Players that bought the game later got it for 10 euros when it was allready very popular your had to py 15 euros to be able to play the game all your friends were playing then it cost 20 or 25 Euros when it became mainstream and you had to buy it just to not get disconnected from your friends . And all the time you allways could have run a copy of minecrafts java server and java client for free, you were just playing on your own or on Hacker invested inofficial servers. The only advantage buying the game brought was that , you could play on servers where Hackers would actually loose their game licence if they were found out. The pricing and sales model was brilliant. I'm also pretty sure, that mojang converted sooooo many non-payed Game-clients to payed game clients.
There's just no way that downloading screen shots or video from screens used other than the game could possibly fly, that would be a MASSIVE breach of privacy. For example, we're quickly heading into Tax season in the US in a couple of months. I often have my tax information on my 3rd screen open all the time so I can work on it periodically while I play games or do other things on my 1st and 2nd screens, because concentrating on taxes for too long is borderline insane. Nobody! And I mean NOBODY should be able to see that information. And if I ever did find out that any software that I use was downloading that data, I would immediately discontinue use and probably ask my lawyer some questions. Absolutely ridiculous.
Hello another European Privacy investigation! Those people must be hiring heavily. I wish we in the US had someone who would investigate and stop this kind of crap.
Yeah, good luck trying to convince the EU that it's not a breach in any privacy laws over here. There is a reason why Apple is struggling to maintain a miniscule presence over here.
@@ingrudmessenger1193 No luck needed, there's a big difference between a government allowing themselves to do it and a foreign company trying to do it without permission. They'll play the "do as I say, not as I do" card and fine the company for trying it.
@CollinGerberding i am not defending anyone. The board of directors is guilty as *Ron Jiccitello*! The board members are the ones that take decisions or at least approve them! As far as I know Unity's board of directors are still there and intact. Firing Riccitello was just a damage control. The evil is still there laying x)
I still think people made a bigger fuss out of that than was necessary. Imagine mass complaining about an issue that largely affected free to play games, and otherwise games making millions.
The value some companies put or remove from their games is staggering: Baldur's Gate 3 - 60 EUR and you received the Deluxe Edition (Soundtrack, digital art and ingame goodies) for free. No DLC preplaned, all extra content released for free in regular patches. Three months after launch they added basically a brand new epilogue with extra dialogue and cut scenes. Starfield - 70 EUR only for the basic edition, Soundtrack costs an extra 10 and then there is DLC preplaned packed with the Premium edition for another 35 EUR. In the first 3 months after launch mostly bugfixes were released and no new content. A total of 115 EUR for the complete package, which makes it almost twice the price of a regular game. You can clearly see from the marketing how each company values their product/game and how do they plan to support it. I will not pass judgement, everyone can make up their mind what they want to play.
This is borderline dishonest. Bg3 was shipped with an unfinished garbage ending. The last act was a bug riddled mess. If you finished certain quests in a certain order without knowing you would brick your game. It wasn't some brand new epilogue. It was them finishing their game.
Yes BG3 was in early access for years and still launched completely broken. Starfield was a complete, finished, and stable game which I preferred quite a bit. This comparison is childish at best.
@@TheRationalist. Did that as a AA company in about 2mos of post launch support. It's also dishonest to not give credit where credit is due. CDPR took nearly 5 years to complete their game, Starfield will probably take 10. Studios with higher accreditation are falling flat where indies aren't.
Remember; when they cry costs, what they mean is, the demand of shareholders and execs are greater. Also remember, manufacturing for games is gone, that accounted for roughly 30% of costs. They're lying .
While I agree, in principle, to me it seems LC succeeded based on the dev's drive and getting the right combo of loop/trolling for streamers, down. They have been developing this type of game for many years before LC. Steam does have a great recommendation system, when it is working right. I occasionally get "off-brand" games recommended to me in categories such as RTS, roguelike, or match-3. But I think that is more likely the wrong categories being used.
The streamers that covers this game has to have been a big part of LC's success. When you have 3 to 8 streamers running together in a game like LC with all the slapstick comedy horror at once, those then take other streamers they know on an outing too, the commercial reach of those are invaluable for an indie dev. With just the stream highlights videos on TH-cam they've got a great reach too. I'm certain I've seen 20+ different content creators on TH-cam that have more than one highlights videos up, everyone having loads of fun and bringing in other's viewers to join in the fun.
The comments before this are talking about the word-of-mouth marketing ploy. But the fact is, that alone isn't enough to explain its popularity. Contrary to popular belief, having influencers stream something isn't enough to reach THAT level of popularity. The Steam storefront however, marketing a low cost-game with a high review score, and a lot of reviews shown for it, is already enough to reach out to a lot more people than influencers can. To claim influencers are behind it, is like saying the audience watching a big and flashy presentation in a real life marketplace, would be everyone in the marketplace. Unless it's a really small town and marketplace, then it's just not how it goes. Not to mention how many of them would even need to buy the item(s) presented in that flashy presentation in this hypothetical marketplace as well, and not just watch the presentation without buying anything. While influencers can have a limited viral spread, what reaches a FAR larger consumer base is Steam itself.
Honestly I’m all for anything that brings us closer to the triple A industry crash. The faster it comes the faster it can be rebuilt, hopefully for the better.
May not happen. They e done well inculcating addicts not gamers. Clearly the wallets have not closed to the levels required to make these greed monsters wake up. Given how awful gaming is now they’ll just move to mobile where nothing but addicts roam.
@@MrTomemacThat might be true, but only for a limited amount of games. Destiny players have (finally) caused a big fuss at bungie, the latest expansion sold poorly enough for Sony to threaten Bungie with a takeover if the next one doesn't do better. Over at Creative Assembly, people have pushed back to their bullshit, and forced their hand. Also remember the famous EA battlefront situation. People can push back. It's the companies who see their customers as addicts, and that's just not true. However, it *is* true that normies tolerate way too much abuse from shitty devs, but it's been proven time and time again: pushback to such bullfuckery might be rare and sporadic, but it does happen in time. Always. And when it does, then at least for a little while, the company is forced to cave to the pressure and endure the financial losses. And in the meantime, competitors can thrive.
@@anonymouseovermouse1960 those events give me hope, but I still think gamers forgive and forget too easily. CDPR pissed away 10 years of goodwill when they released Cyberbug. All it takes for them to regain their spot as one of "the good boi studios" is 3 years of bending over backwards and now you cant bring up Cyberbug's horrible release without being hit with a "yes, but..." Can you see how easy it is to cheese gamers out of their wallet and goodwill if we dont start getting angrier at greedy studios?
I love the optimism, but not likely to end up much better on a rebuild. Most (emphasis on MOST) AAA studios are awful and have always been awful. Most of the biggest and greatest names in gaming in the old days were small enough to have been considered indie studios by today's standards. Even Blizzard, pre-Activision, was quite small compared to today's companies. Pandering to shareholders causes most companies to end up like this in the end. It just takes longer for some companies than others.
@@aximili113 Most people who work at large companies like that do so just for a paycheck, not because of passion, especially when they have little to no control over what they work on at a company. Do people working at a local McDonalds have passion for it? Maybe a couple, but the vast majority are just there to get paid. And that's ok, but let's not think most of the CoD devs give a crap.
Video games are getting more expensive although overall quality is stagnant and in some cases worse. Companies no longer have the overhead of making disk copies and cases. Keeping that in mind it's obvious that the price hike is born from pure greed.
What are you talking about? There are so many creative indie games being launched every month. There is no scarcity of games, but I can understand if you tunnel vision only on 4 companies.
You might say it is, but the harsh reality is that prices overall (NOT just in the gaming sector) have been climbing for quite a few years. I'm not saying I'm happy, but I can guess why it's finally happening, even though it looks very ugly upfront. The market is set up in a way that profits must go up, and growth must happen. The triple A industry has first achieved this by broadening their reach to a massive market (you might call it 'mainstream'), then by changing their business models (recurrent user spending, whaling and live services), and I guess now they are just gonna crank that initial price tag as well. I'm afraid this stuff won't get better, unless the market straight up collapses after all, and restarts. Heck, indie games are getting very much more expensive too - a few years ago, I'm sure people would have REALLY questioned 30 or even 40 bucks as a price tag for indies, but just look at Cyberfunk.
@@DotDusk I am fully on board with you. But this was not the comment to fight on this lol. They specifically were calling out corporations with large overhead being problematic. Indies very clearly were left out of "the issue."
I've heard people theorize that this might just be the board of directors deciding it's time to cash out and then lighting the company on fire as they leave.
But things dont come for free. If your beef, vegetable, real estate, car, medicine is increasing in price. they really have a right to up their price. you can choose to un-use their products if you are not happy.
Companies make more money selling your data to advertisers than they do selling your game. Banning the sale of user data would solve this problem and protect consumers but that wont happen.
@@koschmx No, im quite fond of my spam filter. What OP is implying is that businesses prioritize the sale of user metadata in their business model over the sale of the game itself. Selling user information lets them double dip sales but exposes users to predatory marketing from third parties who may not be as peotective of their data as the original source.
In Australia AAA prices have blown out to between $110 - $130. I'm just not paying those prices, especially when you look at the dredge that is being released.
Hey now, Dredge was an actual good game. XD And yeah I'm the same in NZ. Those are games that I wait years to play, if ever, because I just can't afford that.
In New Zealand games were $100/each in 2010 almost without exception. That's $140 in today's money. A new game on steam usually costs less than that. Inflation means numbers go up, games companies need to charge more because real world costs also go up
@T3RR4212 did you not watch the video, games can cost the same or less even with higher development costs because the market its so massive now video game are the biggest money wise entertainment industry
13:47 To answer this question, if paying $70 for BG3 got me more BG3 (a sequel or expansion faster) I'd pay it with a smile on my face. If my money is going into some executive's pocket, hell no. And my faith in how it would be used depends on the studio. When CDPR requested I purchase their games through GOG so they get a better cut, I did so. Wouldn't have done the same for an EA/Bethesda title.
I spent my entire games budget for the rest of the year on BG3. A $60 game is $100 for me in NZ. I *do not buy* AAA games unless I'm absolutely certain I'm going to get value out of them, it's just way too much money. I know BG3 isn't AAA but it's a similar price point for me and scrolling through my Steam library I literally can't find *anything* else in that range that I didn't buy at something like half price years after release.
@@johnpalin7065 This round of firings seems more recent, while Riccitiello was fired a while ago unless it is the same event and it's a report of firing from a few weeks ago.
@@Rine.4656 So the Weta thing he's focussing on was indeed the most recent, and was about 265 people. The 'over 1000 people' figure comes from adding up the various RIFs (incl. Weta) that have happened over the past year or so, and that includes Riccitiello in October.
It's great how these big companies eat up smaller ones in an attempt to "expand", then the people in charge make terrible decisions and the regular employees suffer.
Hey Activision.. Just an idea. Why don't you invest in making decent games that people actually want to play and buy instead of messing with people's privacy? You know? Just a thought.... P.S: reaction at 12:30.. Priceless 😂
It really is unrealistic to expect dragon's dogma 2 to sell 45m copies at a 70$ price point. You're taking an already niche game and expecting people to buy it at that full price, the reality is the people who want to buy it will get it day 1 at that price, the other 90% of the people considering it will let it sit on their wish list until it ends up in a developer's sale. It will likely hit 45m but only after 2-5 year. 🙄
I definitely agree. It's a hell of a good game (or at least the first one was), but it's absolutely a niche property. I'll be surprised if it hits those kinda numbers with the same rate as something like Baldurs Gate, or COD or something. I HOPE it hits those numbers, because I'd love to see it get the popularity it deserves, but...
45 million? That's GTA and Skyrim numbers. Not even MHW hit this number and that took the world by storm. This is so far outside of an unrealistic expectation I don't have words to describe it. This is crazy talk. Not even after 20 years will it hit this.
Well they made the anime show for a reason - to guage how big of an audience there is in order to determine the sequel's budget and predicted sales. So they think they know what their doing... Funny enough, theyre now doing it again with Onimusha. So i guess we can expected a new onimusha in the coming years. And once again, theyll determine budget and sales predictions based on the anime's viewership. Capcom is such a bizarre company
@@phillystevesteak6982 Yeah but see that's where this whole sales projection garbage fails to realise that players decide on that, not management. I could see a world where -- oh look we get a new Jak and Daxter, Onimusha, or maybe hack and slash again Otogi: Myth of Demons ^^ and so on w/o worry about what modern audiences need.
If I understand correctly, they don’t expect dragons dogma 2 to sell 45m copies they expect to achieve that across all their console games ie resident evil street fighter monhun and dragons dogma.
How the hell are regulations gonna help? "According to paragraph 3A, you must be ecstatic to be working on this project. I saw a frown, you're off the project." Sure, you could regulate P2W elements, but you can't regulate personal inspiration and dedication, which is what we're lacking in the industry now.
@@FuckGoogle502 regulations step in when an industry fails to regulate itself effectively. when people start calling for government intervention the market has schism'd
@@FuckGoogle502 my guy inspiration isn’t the issue here. Capitalism and the fact that everything needs to be infinitely profitable is the issue. Proper regulations with actual checks and balances can improve the industry. Its a bandage correction since the issue is systemic but its something rather than do nothing and watch thousands of people lose their jobs and have their lives ruined.
@@PhantomHalfeveryone keeps saying that capitalism is the problem, maybe the problem is just human behavior and trying to to attribute our flaws to a non sentient system that you can criticize without providing a solution won’t help
@@capadociaash8003 My guy please read history. Please read books that go against your personal views and you will see that its not human nature for 99% of humanity to suffer for the benefit of 1%.
What I have been saying ever since companies decided to go to 70 dollar games and I don't think it's discussed nearly enough is that in Europe we didn't get a 10 euro increase (which would be more than 10 dollars). We got a 20 euro increase. We went from 60 euro games to 80 euro games. I think it's much harder to rationalize a 33% increase in price versus a 16% one.
It's a great showing of how the price:quality balance impacts games sales and me personally. Baulder's Gate 3 is the first full price AAA game that I've bought since elden ring, and I did pay that extra $10 since I got the deluxe edition. It was absolutely worth the price, and similarly lethal company is as well, it's only $10 and if you have friends to play it with it can be a great time. It's rough, basic, but the gameplay is fun and it's cheap so the price:quality balance is totally there. This kind of thing is also why I have almost exclusively bought indie and low-mid price point games for a while now, it's incredibly hard to get that balance right when you're asking a full AAA price, but it's so much more achievable at lower price points.
Well at least in the case of Weta Digital all the staff got rehired after control was handed back to Peter Jackson. And he gets to keep the billion dollars they paid him, so that's nice for him.
In the 1990's selling 200 000 copies of a full complete game was considered big sales and an absolute success. Today, a standard AAA sells in the millions and it's not feature complete since there's several tiers sold, ranging from standard to ultimate "empty your wallet" edition and it's not even a complete release because there's several dlcs, skins, surprise mechanics, consumables, etc being sold on top of the millions of copies sold. So sure, productions costs a lot more, but they're already nickle and diming the userbase and makes a much higher profit margin compared to back in the day.
I spent all night last night learning the Godot engine. I was able to make a really good floating capsule character controller. Makes me really glad I gave up on unity.
I’ve been doing that for decades now. Wait a bit and the price always drops sometimes considerable. Same thing concerning purchasing movies. Get it when it is released for purchase it’s a well rip off. Wait a bit and the price drops considerably.
somehow the notion of "i get the big bucks because i make the big calls and if it goes south, it's my responsibility" got lost and became more like "i get the big bucks therefore i cannot be fired even if i made the wrong call".
Unity CEO is the one responsible for that pricing DISASTER back in September……I mean charging developers per download is just such an asinine way of thinking, I’m shocked John Riccitiello wasn’t fired sooner. He devalued the entire company by hundreds of millions of $$$.
He also bought Weta Digital from Peter Jackson for $1 billion, then completely ballsed up running it, and gave control back to Jackson, who still gets to keep the money. The guy isn't exactly a business genius.
No game is worth $70 to me. On principal, I refuse to pay it. I'll wait for used copies to show up at GameStop, wait for a digital sale, or buy a game on G2A at a lower price. $70 doesn't get you a full game. It gets you the entry level game. You want the full game? Pay upwards of $100 for the Ultimate Deluxe Super Special Pre Order Bonus Content Edition. You want me to pay $70? Release your games in full at that price, without requiring months of patching to polish the thing, and stop selling skins and useless tat for $15 to $20 a pop. This industry is making record profits year over year. It is more successful than the film and television industry. They don't need to raise the base price to $70, they want to. And I refuse to engage.
Filing a patent doesn't necessarily mean the company was interested in the tech. It just means an engineer had an idea and wanted the $5k bonus, and an attorney in the IP department wanted another tally mark in the box that makes their department look good. It only has to be loosely related to the core product.
For the cost debacle, my friend introduced me to a good rule of thumb- if the amount of hours you have in the game when you get bored with it is more than the dollar amount you spent on it, it was worth the price. It's not perfect, but it's handy.
I do a similar thing but I base it on movie lengths. If I think I could play a game without getting bored for longer than I could attend movies if I spent that same money on movie tickets (no premium seating, etc.) then I'll take a chance on the game. If I end up playing longer than that I call it an acceptable deal.
It's terrible. What about short games? Some games are designed as time sinks, paying 70$ for Starfield would never get close to value to so many games that I could put way less time in. It also favors big RPGs and online games over logic games and pretty much any linear campaign
@doommaker4000 replay value! is the game fun enough you'd want to play it again? is it overpriced for a 1.5 hour experience? this isn't a foolproof rule, it's a rule of thumb my friend told me so I wouldn't have an OCD panic attack over buying house flipper.
I hate how all these companies fell entitled to my data, like why should i give it to you and for what reason. If they told me: "Oh, to give you better ads and deals", i'd say: "GTFO, i don't give my parents acces to what is on my phone or laptop and you expect me to give it to you, that's the reason why i use VPS and adblockers".
The 70 bucks is just greed from most companies. How many of the companies that say they just have to charge that extra 10 rake in 100s of millions from live service/microtransactions
Many players haven't been paying $60 a game for a very long time. It's $60 + $10 season pass every 6 months + $15 DLC expansion every year + $10-$100 on digital currency + $2.50 to open loot crates + more.
@@PanduPoluan That's not what happened. "WetaFX" was what Unity renamed Weta Digital to, and when Jackson reacquired it, he didn't change the name back, at least not yet. So now it is still called WetaFX. But here in the local film industry in Wellington, New Zealand everyone still just calls it the same thing we always did: "digi"
Spying on peoples monitors is so awful. You're gonna make all those Overwatch devs look at so much Overwatch porn. You're gonna trigger those poor devs PTSD when they see fanart of McCree Bursting out from under their cubicle without pants on at high noon.
Important thing to hit on regarding the price of games at $70, this isn't 4 years ago, we've seen 26% inflation in the past 2-3 years in America alone. I'm a lot less concerned with this than I am homes having gone from $180k for a nice 3 br 2 ba to $350k in the same timespan as games having gone from $60 to $70.
Seriously. Games were going for $60 back in the early 2000s on the original xbox. I hate inflation as much as the next guy but I would also never agree with this dude’s statement that expecting game price increases is a ridiculous statement. Then everyone wonders why studios have moved from single point pricing to these gaming-as-a-service model. Also just showing the example of the game being made by 1 guy and being sold on steam for $10 isn’t a great example - I bet the guy who made that game dedicated 100% of his life to making that game, which is fine when you’re an entrepreneur, but it would be considered really unethical to expect that out of your employees.
I'm interested in Dragon's Dogma 2. I'm not spending $70 on it. I'm interested in Balder's Gate 3. I'm not spending $70 on it. I don't suffer from the Fear of Missing Out. I can wait, years if need be.
Honestly i said this at the actman's video about the day before: we as Gamers should be the ones calling a game a triple a game, not because of the devs track record(that changes like the turning of a leaf*looking at you two bioware and volition*) or the size of the company but how good the damn game is! Think about it: lethal company is a triple a game by that metric, so is subnautica and so is baldurs gate 3! Because we get to tell our fellow games that yes baldurs gate 3 Is triple a but not for example mw3!
It's not a quality rating. It refers to production capabilities. That's why there's no such thing as a AAA indie game. Other than that, you're basically talking about review scores.
@@Cretaal honestly it should be, since a very large ammount of people consider triple a as really good but that is often dissapointing. Thus having the gamers say if it is or is not a triple a game is much better...
@@stijnVDA1994 Yes... because there's alot of funds and production that goes into a AAA product, which is why people conflate it as a quality grade. Lots of B movies out there that go harder than cinematic blockbusters, but they're still B films because they're low budget, and indie movies because they're indie. AAA and AA are, likewise, 2 tiers of commercial budget production. It ain't beef.
@@Cretaal no there is no beef, but honestly a shamefull ammount of triple a games that just aren't good and get basicly shown how it's done by both dubble a and even indie games thus i feel like there should be a transition to what the a rating means, praising indie or even dubble a games by instead giving them a triple a rating. For example satisfactory could be considered dubble or triple a for actually doing a good job, and on the other side cod new mw3 gets the indie rank because it's so bad... thus the nomenclature would get some actual weight since budget in painfully little actually triple a budget games are as good as like baldurs gate 3.. Thus praising good triple a game, and praising a good dubble a or indie by giving them the title triple a game, and thus only by majority vote companies can get praise for their work..
@@stijnVDA1994 It wouldn't work to call MW3 an indie game because indie stands for independent. It would also be a pretty big slap in the face of indie game studios and small AA studios and ruin them to an extent. When independent talent hits the limelight of the mainstream, they get bought out and absorbed into corporate industries who exploit the product all the same. It makes sense, but also doesn't make sense to change the phrasing since its only AAA, AA, and indie, but no B, C, or other game studio categories. It makes sense to rebrand AA and AAA since those were pretty much marketing gimmick terms from the 90's to imply high production quality, which dropped off massively after the online-only gaming trend that came with the 360/PS3 era and got worse after phone game mechanics made their way in due to profit margins, things like lootboxes and rampant microtransactions. I think the others should fall in line with indie games and be named in abbreviation to what they are. We'd just need to find the words, but that's a hard ask with AA and AAA already baked into the lexicon.
I can see interesting use cases for second-screen interfacing like Activision is suggesting. Say a streamer plays a randoom map. The interface means that his audience can then automatically get that seed added to their game in a rather passive fashion if they want to experience the same world as their streamer. Or automatically send out a server invite to everyone watching in an appropriate MP game if the servers can support those kind of crowds. But we all know it's just gonna be ads and reminders that it's been X days since you played this game that you owned: why are you watching when you could play?
Which is missing the fact that quite often watching and playing are very different things. I was watching some Once Human gameplay literally this morning thinking "this game looks amazing, and I'd be terrible at it." Especially since I mostly end up playing games alone since my friends and family are too busy I'd just be constantly dying. But I'd watch someone with actual skill at that type of game and people they can regularly play with streaming it. One of my most commonly watched streamers plays almost exclusively horror games most of which I'm too much of a wimp to actually interact with - at a certain point rather than keep progressing I'll just quit. When I'm playing games I usually want strategy, simulation, or turn based things that won't stress me out too much, but the things I like to *watch* is a much, much bigger list.
People are actually fed up of these big companies and there greedy practises to get more & more money out of u while providing a pathetic gaming experience. Thats why more and more people are looking for passionate indie games.
One of the best gaming news channels. I love how quickly you guys get stories pit, nothing bothers me more than seeing someone post news 2 or 3 days after the fact and they are behind on what's actually happening. Subscribed! Keep up the great work 👍
For sure. At the same time a lot of stories change over months, so i prefer reporting on what we know now and then getting updates as new info comes in. To each their own, but I like to follow stories as they go.
NO game is worth $70 to me. They're worth about $20-$30 to me, because I'm not well-to-do. And that is why I wait for sales. I'll probably never pay full price for a game again. At least I'm not digging my "black sails" back out and "sailing the high seas" again. Though, I don't see anything wrong with it. All I'm saying is, they should be happy getting my $20-$30 instead of getting nothing.
Then your not their market. Games like BG3 is very expensive to make. if they would sell it for 20-30. They will be out of business. Most people saying a game isen't worth this or that just want the games for free. How many times have I heard this, while they have no problem using $15-20 on tobacco, $40 on alcohol and so on(each week).. For most its priority. I've been there myself. If you can't afford it wait for it to be sold cheaper. I do often. And Why do you think the world centers around you? " they should be happy getting my $20-$30 instead of getting nothing.". Should the rest of us pay 70, and you 20? tsk... And if they go down to 30.. They have to sell a ton more. And thats not guaranteed.
@@genrabbit9995 One more thing you said was "Most people saying a game 'isen't' worth this or that just want the games for free". Make no fucking mistake. If I want a game for free, I can get it for free. You know nothing.
@@hatchetman3662 I said most, not you. I'm one off them(I buy 99.5% when its on sale or on Fanatical or Humblebundle. BG3 ended up in the .5%, Starfield came with the graphic card when I bought that one). But nothing is free in this world. So if you don't like the price wait for it to be on sale. It will happen sometime in the futurer
I definitely think the price point of games increasing has affected the profits of AAA companies... more and more people are choosing to wait to buy a game on sale or even just in GamePass/PS Plus because they can't afford as many premium priced games... honestly, overall I feel like the increase has actually been GOOD for the consumers in an industry as messed up as the video games industry
From an economics perspective, what the AAA companies have essentially done is extend the initial profit under the supply/demand curve to milk those that were willing to pay more for their game while simultaneously choosing a "sale" price at which they can reasonably expect to make as many sales as they want after the first price cut based on a more informed decision of initial sales figures
They will be bought by someone that will kick the executives that collaborated with the downfall and will rehire all the engineers that abandoned the "rejected by EA" ship.
Most games are not worth $70 at time of release because they are typically shipped broken in some way. Not worth paying more until they actually fix it
That said, S/O to the Lethal Company dev! Been a big fan of their other work (It Steals) before this, so it's wonderful to see a team who genuinely loves this stuff get such a big success.
I skip on Dragons Dogma 2 for 2 reasons. It's pricetag...adn the feeling theres gonna be MTX hidden in it as there is a premium currency involved in the digital deluxe edition.... And also it's apparently always online and has Denuvo so add those two.
Can anyone comment on the legality of the US blocking sales of 4090s? I mean, the state finds it inconvenient that China gets resources in AI but why should Nvidia, a private company care? Why should nvidia lose business because the us state finds it annoying in a free market economy?
Why shouldn't they be allowed to sell F22, F35, Himars and the like to Russia and China aswell and everyone else aswell? They are made by a private company, so why should they care? Why should they lose business because the us state finds it annoying in a free market economy?
What is the average price point the market has for games? I am not paying three quarters of a hundred bucks for a game, especially the way so many of them turn out to be dog puke. I still have problems spending 50$
Game prices need to drop the reason sales are falling is rising costs the average consumer cannot afford to pay $70-100 a game. Nearly every $70 game has lost money
Yes. $70 for a *good* game like Dragon's Dogma *could be* is sure. Yes the dev costs overhead is getting higher of time. Of course. However, you best be damned not putting in bull@*#& micro's and we all know the chances of no MTX in AAA's now is snow ball's chances in hell.
After the whole Unity runtime thing got rolled back, when it was attempted as they were busy bleeding money, it was clear the next thing was mass layoffs, and restructuring, so I've been expecting all this.
Every Unity dev should switch to O3DE and better themselves and the community. It's open source, in the Linux foundation and it has the capabilities of blowing the doors off of Unity. I've been working with it for 2 years in my project after I converted it entirely from Unity and I've never been happier. I haven't released or even talked about my project out in the open yet but I can promise you, my project already helped another game release fully and quite successful because I offered them a solution with a tool that I made. A tool I plan to fully release to the community once it is ready.
Looking at what the Lethal company dev had previously done shows he was pretty dialed in to the horror/comedy aspect. It isn't some random success. He's been honing this skill for awhile.
I would totally pay $70 for baldurs gate right now after playing it and after seeing them deliver huge patches every week; fix bugs and improve the game I would happily pay $80, but when I first got the game I had no idea it was that good, I would not have paid 70$ for it back then. I have no problem paying more for a good game but its often a gamble when buying these games you dont really know if its gonna live up to the hype or be a buggy mess.
8:05 Roku was doing the same thing. I was watching a video on "how to survive the ring" and a popup accrued where it showed me I could buy or rent the movie directly from Roku. Spying on people is a opt out feature now a days apparently and I sold my tv and got a non internet connected sharp.
"Game development costs have gone up a hundred times since Super Mario..." Seriously, I was once on a chat with a person who stated that games were more profitable than film. I told him flat out. That will not be the case if it costs the same amount of money to make a game. Fast forward around twenty years, games cost just as much as films cost to make, and lo and behold, the CEOs of videogame companies are whining that they need more money. I feel like a prophet.
It's a sign of troubling times when so many companies hire or keep CEO's who's ideas are literally so incompetently horrible that they cost hundreds to thousands of jobs.
Dragon's Dogma 2 looks amazing and something I'd really like to play, on steam in Canada it's $ 94.99.... no. Maybe in a few years on deep deep sale then possibly, $95 Is absolutely unacceptable. They will not make those sales numbers of 45 million. Many People like myself simply cannot justify nearly 100$ for a video game. I've just been playing and enjoying cheaper indy games and while I feel awful for all the capcom employees who are about to be downsized, That is an unacceptable price and an unreasonable goal. I'm sick of corporate greed destroying the things I love for (as Bellular says) the line to go up.
So when I take a 15min break and play a round or two of (insert game here), the publisher of that game should be allowed to have access to company sensitive information on my other screens? Are they on crack or meth over there? I mean sure, in the US personal privacy is at best a joke that google and facbook exacs tell eath other around a campfire, but shit like this ain't gonna fly in most places.
While greedy, anti-consumer decision makers should get called out and shamed, the last thing we need is Unity dying because then Epic's UE will become the only game in town and we all know what happens to a company's products when they have no competition.
If Dragon's Dogma has simple, skins-only DLCs at most that are not advertised in-game (even Borderlands 2 goes too far with it's main menu ads), there's no always-online requirement and pawn system is not turned into another monetization scheme, then assuming game isn't also padded for length like DD1 (you think all that running interrupted by boring encounters with annoying but worthless enemies on the roads serves any purpose?) then i guess $70 can be acceptable. But of course also make sure it runs well on all kinds of machines day one.
I think a rebrand is in Unity's future. In an attempt to distance from the past, market more aggressive pricing, and integrate the technologies they've aquired, Unity will probably rename the company and the engine. Not only do they have to compete with the "instant AAA" (sarcasm) game engine Unreal, but Unity has to compete with Godot and a whole ecosystem of open source tools, too. It's a really tough spot to be in, but maybe leaning into a hyper fast prototyping engine that offers a codeless process can be what sets them apart. (Of course they'd still let you code, but I mean they'd have a codeless event system on top of scripting & coding).
If Godot utilizes their increasing popularity well, I think Unity (or whatever they would potentially rebrand to) is over unless the have something that sets them apart
Here in South Africa, I bought, at launch, Final Fantasy 7 in 1997 (a $50 game) for R400. Metal Gear Solid 4 ($60) in 2008 for R700. Today, a $70 game is R1,379. CEOs have been collecting increases billions in profits while developers' struggle for rights and we're supposed to believe that production costs have increased? SF6 is a $70 game that is charging about $50 for alternative costumes. Development costs my @$$!
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I like the pricing scheme of mojangs Minecraft. It was a weird early access kinda thing, i guess? It kind of worked like this :
Early birds / early adopeters got the game for 5 euros
Players that bought the game later got it for 10 euros
when it was allready very popular your had to py 15 euros to be able to play the game all your friends were playing
then it cost 20 or 25 Euros when it became mainstream and you had to buy it just to not get disconnected from your friends .
And all the time you allways could have run a copy of minecrafts java server and java client for free, you were just playing on your own or on Hacker invested inofficial servers.
The only advantage buying the game brought was that , you could play on servers where Hackers would actually loose their game licence if they were found out.
The pricing and sales model was brilliant. I'm also pretty sure, that mojang converted sooooo many non-payed Game-clients to payed game clients.
There's just no way that downloading screen shots or video from screens used other than the game could possibly fly, that would be a MASSIVE breach of privacy. For example, we're quickly heading into Tax season in the US in a couple of months. I often have my tax information on my 3rd screen open all the time so I can work on it periodically while I play games or do other things on my 1st and 2nd screens, because concentrating on taxes for too long is borderline insane. Nobody! And I mean NOBODY should be able to see that information. And if I ever did find out that any software that I use was downloading that data, I would immediately discontinue use and probably ask my lawyer some questions. Absolutely ridiculous.
Hello another European Privacy investigation! Those people must be hiring heavily. I wish we in the US had someone who would investigate and stop this kind of crap.
@@bobbenson6825 but then these massive corporations would pay politicians to get rid of them. US politicians are for sale after all.
Yeah, good luck trying to convince the EU that it's not a breach in any privacy laws over here. There is a reason why Apple is struggling to maintain a miniscule presence over here.
In Germany there was a tool doing that for law inforcement considered unconstittutional, so.... good luck with that.
@@ingrudmessenger1193 No luck needed, there's a big difference between a government allowing themselves to do it and a foreign company trying to do it without permission. They'll play the "do as I say, not as I do" card and fine the company for trying it.
Activision patenting spyware and trying to disguise it as anything else is wild
Activition Patenting Spyware, *While Being outsold by an indie game*, sometime the universe has wonderful little bits of ironic justice
Funny how they never fire the people responsible for the oops that was a bad idea
It would solve a lot of companies problems if they would just fire the management every time they make bad choices
this was the idea the whole time tho...
He was fired from EA. Unity is somehow worse than EA.
The people responsible for the firing are not gonna fire themselves
you can't fire investors.
They'll fire the line worker but never the management who thought it was a good idea to piss off your userbase.
They did fire him tho?
@@pomey13 do you seriously think that all these bad decisions come from one man!
@CollinGerberding i am not defending anyone. The board of directors is guilty as *Ron Jiccitello*! The board members are the ones that take decisions or at least approve them! As far as I know Unity's board of directors are still there and intact. Firing Riccitello was just a damage control. The evil is still there laying x)
I don't think Unity will ever recover from that runtime fee scheme, financially or otherwise. Everything else is just icing on the cake.
A lot of these problems were likely already well underway and the runtime fee was a misguided attempt to make more money to patch those holes.
I still think people made a bigger fuss out of that than was necessary. Imagine mass complaining about an issue that largely affected free to play games, and otherwise games making millions.
@@sacb0y just because something awful is aimed at people you think deserve it doesn't mean its not awful.
@@sacb0ygrow a sack boy
@@sacb0ywhat they were proposing was flagrantly illegal, it doesn't matter if you think it was deserved or not
The value some companies put or remove from their games is staggering:
Baldur's Gate 3 - 60 EUR and you received the Deluxe Edition (Soundtrack, digital art and ingame goodies) for free. No DLC preplaned, all extra content released for free in regular patches. Three months after launch they added basically a brand new epilogue with extra dialogue and cut scenes.
Starfield - 70 EUR only for the basic edition, Soundtrack costs an extra 10 and then there is DLC preplaned packed with the Premium edition for another 35 EUR. In the first 3 months after launch mostly bugfixes were released and no new content. A total of 115 EUR for the complete package, which makes it almost twice the price of a regular game.
You can clearly see from the marketing how each company values their product/game and how do they plan to support it. I will not pass judgement, everyone can make up their mind what they want to play.
It's 85 euro where i live💀 but i agree with you
It's the same with wow. 89.99 for the highest edition. That's insane and I still need to pay for subscription!
This is borderline dishonest. Bg3 was shipped with an unfinished garbage ending. The last act was a bug riddled mess. If you finished certain quests in a certain order without knowing you would brick your game. It wasn't some brand new epilogue. It was them finishing their game.
Yes BG3 was in early access for years and still launched completely broken. Starfield was a complete, finished, and stable game which I preferred quite a bit. This comparison is childish at best.
@@TheRationalist. Did that as a AA company in about 2mos of post launch support. It's also dishonest to not give credit where credit is due. CDPR took nearly 5 years to complete their game, Starfield will probably take 10. Studios with higher accreditation are falling flat where indies aren't.
Remember; when they cry costs, what they mean is, the demand of shareholders and execs are greater. Also remember, manufacturing for games is gone, that accounted for roughly 30% of costs. They're lying .
Lethal Company shows how valuable steam and it's recommendation system is. Imagine how many copies would have sold on the epic store.
While I agree, in principle, to me it seems LC succeeded based on the dev's drive and getting the right combo of loop/trolling for streamers, down. They have been developing this type of game for many years before LC.
Steam does have a great recommendation system, when it is working right. I occasionally get "off-brand" games recommended to me in categories such as RTS, roguelike, or match-3. But I think that is more likely the wrong categories being used.
It would have been given out for free on Epic
The streamers that covers this game has to have been a big part of LC's success.
When you have 3 to 8 streamers running together in a game like LC with all the slapstick comedy horror at once, those then take other streamers they know on an outing too, the commercial reach of those are invaluable for an indie dev.
With just the stream highlights videos on TH-cam they've got a great reach too.
I'm certain I've seen 20+ different content creators on TH-cam that have more than one highlights videos up, everyone having loads of fun and bringing in other's viewers to join in the fun.
@@gm42069 Claimed by thousands, played by dozens
The comments before this are talking about the word-of-mouth marketing ploy. But the fact is, that alone isn't enough to explain its popularity. Contrary to popular belief, having influencers stream something isn't enough to reach THAT level of popularity.
The Steam storefront however, marketing a low cost-game with a high review score, and a lot of reviews shown for it, is already enough to reach out to a lot more people than influencers can.
To claim influencers are behind it, is like saying the audience watching a big and flashy presentation in a real life marketplace, would be everyone in the marketplace. Unless it's a really small town and marketplace, then it's just not how it goes. Not to mention how many of them would even need to buy the item(s) presented in that flashy presentation in this hypothetical marketplace as well, and not just watch the presentation without buying anything.
While influencers can have a limited viral spread, what reaches a FAR larger consumer base is Steam itself.
Honestly I’m all for anything that brings us closer to the triple A industry crash. The faster it comes the faster it can be rebuilt, hopefully for the better.
May not happen. They e done well inculcating addicts not gamers. Clearly the wallets have not closed to the levels required to make these greed monsters wake up. Given how awful gaming is now they’ll just move to mobile where nothing but addicts roam.
@@MrTomemacThat might be true, but only for a limited amount of games. Destiny players have (finally) caused a big fuss at bungie, the latest expansion sold poorly enough for Sony to threaten Bungie with a takeover if the next one doesn't do better. Over at Creative Assembly, people have pushed back to their bullshit, and forced their hand. Also remember the famous EA battlefront situation.
People can push back. It's the companies who see their customers as addicts, and that's just not true. However, it *is* true that normies tolerate way too much abuse from shitty devs, but it's been proven time and time again: pushback to such bullfuckery might be rare and sporadic, but it does happen in time. Always. And when it does, then at least for a little while, the company is forced to cave to the pressure and endure the financial losses.
And in the meantime, competitors can thrive.
You have one problem… the market value is skyrocketing
Its not just line go up, its a wall
@@anonymouseovermouse1960 those events give me hope, but I still think gamers forgive and forget too easily.
CDPR pissed away 10 years of goodwill when they released Cyberbug. All it takes for them to regain their spot as one of "the good boi studios" is 3 years of bending over backwards and now you cant bring up Cyberbug's horrible release without being hit with a "yes, but..."
Can you see how easy it is to cheese gamers out of their wallet and goodwill if we dont start getting angrier at greedy studios?
I love the optimism, but not likely to end up much better on a rebuild. Most (emphasis on MOST) AAA studios are awful and have always been awful. Most of the biggest and greatest names in gaming in the old days were small enough to have been considered indie studios by today's standards. Even Blizzard, pre-Activision, was quite small compared to today's companies. Pandering to shareholders causes most companies to end up like this in the end. It just takes longer for some companies than others.
A game made by a one man team outselling CoD tells you everything you need to know about the video game industry.
I guarantee the amount of love, thought and effort put in by this single man would top what every dev/leader/producer put into CoD summed by a lot
@@iskabin hopefully it is not that they didn't put passion and love into it. But they weren't allowed to do it.
@@iskabin Yep.
@@aximili113 Most people who work at large companies like that do so just for a paycheck, not because of passion, especially when they have little to no control over what they work on at a company.
Do people working at a local McDonalds have passion for it? Maybe a couple, but the vast majority are just there to get paid.
And that's ok, but let's not think most of the CoD devs give a crap.
@@Mediadosthey want addicts not gamers. The AAA higher ups are vile greed monsters.
Video games are getting more expensive although overall quality is stagnant and in some cases worse. Companies no longer have the overhead of making disk copies and cases. Keeping that in mind it's obvious that the price hike is born from pure greed.
What are you talking about? There are so many creative indie games being launched every month. There is no scarcity of games, but I can understand if you tunnel vision only on 4 companies.
@@DotDusk I'm not talking about indie studios Mr. Nit pick. They aren't the ones raising their prices to 70 dollars are they?
@C-Duk you are the one making blatantly wrong generalizations. In my 20 years of gaming, I never had so many options at reasonable prices.
You might say it is, but the harsh reality is that prices overall (NOT just in the gaming sector) have been climbing for quite a few years. I'm not saying I'm happy, but I can guess why it's finally happening, even though it looks very ugly upfront. The market is set up in a way that profits must go up, and growth must happen. The triple A industry has first achieved this by broadening their reach to a massive market (you might call it 'mainstream'), then by changing their business models (recurrent user spending, whaling and live services), and I guess now they are just gonna crank that initial price tag as well. I'm afraid this stuff won't get better, unless the market straight up collapses after all, and restarts.
Heck, indie games are getting very much more expensive too - a few years ago, I'm sure people would have REALLY questioned 30 or even 40 bucks as a price tag for indies, but just look at Cyberfunk.
@@DotDusk I am fully on board with you. But this was not the comment to fight on this lol.
They specifically were calling out corporations with large overhead being problematic. Indies very clearly were left out of "the issue."
This is where unfettered greed gets you, people. The gutter.
I've heard people theorize that this might just be the board of directors deciding it's time to cash out and then lighting the company on fire as they leave.
They over-extended, this is nothing more than a correction.
I wonder how much the existence of Godot has impacted them. Godot has basically quadrupled in popularity, but it's still a small community.
But things dont come for free. If your beef, vegetable, real estate, car, medicine is increasing in price. they really have a right to up their price. you can choose to un-use their products if you are not happy.
@@choysum >> But things dont come for free.
Godot comes for free.
when a company says "Optional sharing" we all know it ain't optional, they WILL force it
If only game companies would put as much effort into creating great games as they would in creating systems to spy on your pc.
Companies make more money selling your data to advertisers than they do selling your game. Banning the sale of user data would solve this problem and protect consumers but that wont happen.
@@koschmx No, im quite fond of my spam filter. What OP is implying is that businesses prioritize the sale of user metadata in their business model over the sale of the game itself. Selling user information lets them double dip sales but exposes users to predatory marketing from third parties who may not be as peotective of their data as the original source.
In Australia AAA prices have blown out to between $110 - $130. I'm just not paying those prices, especially when you look at the dredge that is being released.
Hey now, Dredge was an actual good game. XD And yeah I'm the same in NZ. Those are games that I wait years to play, if ever, because I just can't afford that.
In New Zealand games were $100/each in 2010 almost without exception. That's $140 in today's money. A new game on steam usually costs less than that. Inflation means numbers go up, games companies need to charge more because real world costs also go up
@T3RR4212 did you not watch the video, games can cost the same or less even with higher development costs because the market its so massive now video game are the biggest money wise entertainment industry
13:47 To answer this question, if paying $70 for BG3 got me more BG3 (a sequel or expansion faster) I'd pay it with a smile on my face. If my money is going into some executive's pocket, hell no. And my faith in how it would be used depends on the studio. When CDPR requested I purchase their games through GOG so they get a better cut, I did so. Wouldn't have done the same for an EA/Bethesda title.
I spent my entire games budget for the rest of the year on BG3. A $60 game is $100 for me in NZ. I *do not buy* AAA games unless I'm absolutely certain I'm going to get value out of them, it's just way too much money. I know BG3 isn't AAA but it's a similar price point for me and scrolling through my Steam library I literally can't find *anything* else in that range that I didn't buy at something like half price years after release.
1000 people fired.....I wonder if any of those were on Unity's Board of Directors.
Of course not. Since when do corporations actually get rid of the source of their problems?
Oh I'm sure.
Yes the CEO John Riccitiello got fired
@@johnpalin7065 This round of firings seems more recent, while Riccitiello was fired a while ago unless it is the same event and it's a report of firing from a few weeks ago.
@@Rine.4656 So the Weta thing he's focussing on was indeed the most recent, and was about 265 people. The 'over 1000 people' figure comes from adding up the various RIFs (incl. Weta) that have happened over the past year or so, and that includes Riccitiello in October.
I'll gladly say that Activision can fluff off with this adware campaign leave my other screens the hell alone.
It's great how these big companies eat up smaller ones in an attempt to "expand", then the people in charge make terrible decisions and the regular employees suffer.
Hey Activision.. Just an idea. Why don't you invest in making decent games that people actually want to play and buy instead of messing with people's privacy? You know? Just a thought....
P.S: reaction at 12:30.. Priceless 😂
It really is unrealistic to expect dragon's dogma 2 to sell 45m copies at a 70$ price point. You're taking an already niche game and expecting people to buy it at that full price, the reality is the people who want to buy it will get it day 1 at that price, the other 90% of the people considering it will let it sit on their wish list until it ends up in a developer's sale. It will likely hit 45m but only after 2-5 year. 🙄
I definitely agree. It's a hell of a good game (or at least the first one was), but it's absolutely a niche property. I'll be surprised if it hits those kinda numbers with the same rate as something like Baldurs Gate, or COD or something. I HOPE it hits those numbers, because I'd love to see it get the popularity it deserves, but...
45 million? That's GTA and Skyrim numbers. Not even MHW hit this number and that took the world by storm. This is so far outside of an unrealistic expectation I don't have words to describe it. This is crazy talk. Not even after 20 years will it hit this.
Well they made the anime show for a reason - to guage how big of an audience there is in order to determine the sequel's budget and predicted sales. So they think they know what their doing...
Funny enough, theyre now doing it again with Onimusha. So i guess we can expected a new onimusha in the coming years. And once again, theyll determine budget and sales predictions based on the anime's viewership.
Capcom is such a bizarre company
@@phillystevesteak6982 Yeah but see that's where this whole sales projection garbage fails to realise that players decide on that, not management. I could see a world where -- oh look we get a new Jak and Daxter, Onimusha, or maybe hack and slash again Otogi: Myth of Demons ^^ and so on w/o worry about what modern audiences need.
If I understand correctly, they don’t expect dragons dogma 2 to sell 45m copies they expect to achieve that across all their console games ie resident evil street fighter monhun and dragons dogma.
This industry is in dire need of regulations since the industry isn’t even remotely close to considering self moderation.
How the hell are regulations gonna help? "According to paragraph 3A, you must be ecstatic to be working on this project. I saw a frown, you're off the project." Sure, you could regulate P2W elements, but you can't regulate personal inspiration and dedication, which is what we're lacking in the industry now.
@@FuckGoogle502 regulations step in when an industry fails to regulate itself effectively. when people start calling for government intervention the market has schism'd
@@FuckGoogle502 my guy inspiration isn’t the issue here. Capitalism and the fact that everything needs to be infinitely profitable is the issue. Proper regulations with actual checks and balances can improve the industry. Its a bandage correction since the issue is systemic but its something rather than do nothing and watch thousands of people lose their jobs and have their lives ruined.
@@PhantomHalfeveryone keeps saying that capitalism is the problem, maybe the problem is just human behavior and trying to to attribute our flaws to a non sentient system that you can criticize without providing a solution won’t help
@@capadociaash8003 My guy please read history. Please read books that go against your personal views and you will see that its not human nature for 99% of humanity to suffer for the benefit of 1%.
Activisions Idea of looking at the second screen will never be possible in the EU XD
Wish it weren't possible in the US. We need more GDPR and less Patriot Act
What I have been saying ever since companies decided to go to 70 dollar games and I don't think it's discussed nearly enough is that in Europe we didn't get a 10 euro increase (which would be more than 10 dollars). We got a 20 euro increase. We went from 60 euro games to 80 euro games. I think it's much harder to rationalize a 33% increase in price versus a 16% one.
Well if you account for all the government fees and regulations and tax over taxes it should be about right. Politicians need their money you know.
It's a great showing of how the price:quality balance impacts games sales and me personally. Baulder's Gate 3 is the first full price AAA game that I've bought since elden ring, and I did pay that extra $10 since I got the deluxe edition. It was absolutely worth the price, and similarly lethal company is as well, it's only $10 and if you have friends to play it with it can be a great time. It's rough, basic, but the gameplay is fun and it's cheap so the price:quality balance is totally there.
This kind of thing is also why I have almost exclusively bought indie and low-mid price point games for a while now, it's incredibly hard to get that balance right when you're asking a full AAA price, but it's so much more achievable at lower price points.
It's always fun when management makes a stupid decision that dumps the company's stocks and all the employees get to pay for it.
Well at least in the case of Weta Digital all the staff got rehired after control was handed back to Peter Jackson. And he gets to keep the billion dollars they paid him, so that's nice for him.
In the 1990's selling 200 000 copies of a full complete game was considered big sales and an absolute success. Today, a standard AAA sells in the millions and it's not feature complete since there's several tiers sold, ranging from standard to ultimate "empty your wallet" edition and it's not even a complete release because there's several dlcs, skins, surprise mechanics, consumables, etc being sold on top of the millions of copies sold. So sure, productions costs a lot more, but they're already nickle and diming the userbase and makes a much higher profit margin compared to back in the day.
On pricing, I'd pay $200 for Baldur's Gate 3 and wouldn't feel cheated... I could be given $200 with Starfield and I'd somehow feel cheated.
Man, to have your company bought up, only to immediately get deboned like a fish for your tech. Corpos sure are great!
Who knew that burning bridges with your customers has consequences
R&D costs for TVs have gone up since the 80s, but the Cost of TVs has Dropped since the 80s!
I spent all night last night learning the Godot engine. I was able to make a really good floating capsule character controller. Makes me really glad I gave up on unity.
Games are a luxury not a necessity. It’s a want not a need. That should be kept in mind for both the consumer as well as the creator.
Yes, but it is freedom of the creator to set whatever price they like. if you dont like it dont use it.
I’ve been doing that for decades now. Wait a bit and the price always drops sometimes considerable. Same thing concerning purchasing movies. Get it when it is released for purchase it’s a well rip off. Wait a bit and the price drops considerably.
piracy enters the chat
Was a matter of time. For the number of employees they had, their engine never felt like it was growing as fast as the other engines
somehow the notion of "i get the big bucks because i make the big calls and if it goes south, it's my responsibility" got lost and became more like "i get the big bucks therefore i cannot be fired even if i made the wrong call".
I love Dragons Dogma, but there's no way that it's going to sell 45 mill wtf
Unity CEO is the one responsible for that pricing DISASTER back in September……I mean charging developers per download is just such an asinine way of thinking, I’m shocked John Riccitiello wasn’t fired sooner. He devalued the entire company by hundreds of millions of $$$.
The CEO does what the board say. John wasn't acting alone, he was a fall guy.
He also bought Weta Digital from Peter Jackson for $1 billion, then completely ballsed up running it, and gave control back to Jackson, who still gets to keep the money. The guy isn't exactly a business genius.
Riccitello cashed out. He doesn't care. He just going to become the ceo fall guy for another company and cash out. Rinse and repeat.
No game is worth $70 to me. On principal, I refuse to pay it. I'll wait for used copies to show up at GameStop, wait for a digital sale, or buy a game on G2A at a lower price.
$70 doesn't get you a full game. It gets you the entry level game. You want the full game? Pay upwards of $100 for the Ultimate Deluxe Super Special Pre Order Bonus Content Edition.
You want me to pay $70? Release your games in full at that price, without requiring months of patching to polish the thing, and stop selling skins and useless tat for $15 to $20 a pop.
This industry is making record profits year over year. It is more successful than the film and television industry. They don't need to raise the base price to $70, they want to. And I refuse to engage.
Hard pass on that spyware
How are you STILL not including chapters and timestamps? I mean really…
Are development costs really going up?
Or is it executive salaries that are?
I'll pick up DD2 when it's patched and discounted to an acceptable price. No way i'm paying 70-90 EUR for a game on release.
Filing a patent doesn't necessarily mean the company was interested in the tech. It just means an engineer had an idea and wanted the $5k bonus, and an attorney in the IP department wanted another tally mark in the box that makes their department look good. It only has to be loosely related to the core product.
i think baldurs gate was 70 dollars with the deluxe version
For the cost debacle, my friend introduced me to a good rule of thumb- if the amount of hours you have in the game when you get bored with it is more than the dollar amount you spent on it, it was worth the price. It's not perfect, but it's handy.
Minecraft and Terraria have some insane value to cost ratios going on.
@@Cybermaul I paid about $30 for Don't Starve and have 1,333.5 hours in it. Good investment.
I do a similar thing but I base it on movie lengths. If I think I could play a game without getting bored for longer than I could attend movies if I spent that same money on movie tickets (no premium seating, etc.) then I'll take a chance on the game. If I end up playing longer than that I call it an acceptable deal.
It's terrible. What about short games? Some games are designed as time sinks, paying 70$ for Starfield would never get close to value to so many games that I could put way less time in. It also favors big RPGs and online games over logic games and pretty much any linear campaign
@doommaker4000 replay value! is the game fun enough you'd want to play it again? is it overpriced for a 1.5 hour experience? this isn't a foolproof rule, it's a rule of thumb my friend told me so I wouldn't have an OCD panic attack over buying house flipper.
I hate how all these companies fell entitled to my data, like why should i give it to you and for what reason.
If they told me: "Oh, to give you better ads and deals", i'd say: "GTFO, i don't give my parents acces to what is on my phone or laptop and you expect me to give it to you, that's the reason why i use VPS and adblockers".
Weta was such an incredible VFX house . Dam tragedy
Was? They still exist, all the staff got rehired.
The 70 bucks is just greed from most companies. How many of the companies that say they just have to charge that extra 10 rake in 100s of millions from live service/microtransactions
Many players haven't been paying $60 a game for a very long time. It's $60 + $10 season pass every 6 months + $15 DLC expansion every year + $10-$100 on digital currency + $2.50 to open loot crates + more.
I'm so mad about Weta. I love their work.
Nothing bad happened to them though, long term. Peter Jackson is back in charge and he rehired all the staff.
What folded was Weta Digital, that is, the pipeline tech maker. WetaFX, the imagineers, still belong to Jackson and is still alive and well.
@@PanduPoluan That's not what happened. "WetaFX" was what Unity renamed Weta Digital to, and when Jackson reacquired it, he didn't change the name back, at least not yet. So now it is still called WetaFX. But here in the local film industry in Wellington, New Zealand everyone still just calls it the same thing we always did: "digi"
Spying on peoples monitors is so awful. You're gonna make all those Overwatch devs look at so much Overwatch porn.
You're gonna trigger those poor devs PTSD when they see fanart of McCree Bursting out from under their cubicle without pants on at high noon.
really enjoying these Indy developers and single player games beating the Triple AAA Multiplayer games. Keep it going peeps!
Important thing to hit on regarding the price of games at $70, this isn't 4 years ago, we've seen 26% inflation in the past 2-3 years in America alone.
I'm a lot less concerned with this than I am homes having gone from $180k for a nice 3 br 2 ba to $350k in the same timespan as games having gone from $60 to $70.
Seriously. Games were going for $60 back in the early 2000s on the original xbox. I hate inflation as much as the next guy but I would also never agree with this dude’s statement that expecting game price increases is a ridiculous statement. Then everyone wonders why studios have moved from single point pricing to these gaming-as-a-service model.
Also just showing the example of the game being made by 1 guy and being sold on steam for $10 isn’t a great example - I bet the guy who made that game dedicated 100% of his life to making that game, which is fine when you’re an entrepreneur, but it would be considered really unethical to expect that out of your employees.
Just another big thing to add to the absolute landslide of reasons I never will associate with Activision/Blizzard and other AAA publishers anymore.
I'm interested in Dragon's Dogma 2. I'm not spending $70 on it.
I'm interested in Balder's Gate 3. I'm not spending $70 on it.
I don't suffer from the Fear of Missing Out. I can wait, years if need be.
I worked on Avatar for James Cameron and with Weta in New Zealand for Peter Jackson. Peter Jackson was awesome.
I'm not trusting Activision with the color of my toilet mat, let alone my second screen
Honestly i said this at the actman's video about the day before: we as Gamers should be the ones calling a game a triple a game, not because of the devs track record(that changes like the turning of a leaf*looking at you two bioware and volition*) or the size of the company but how good the damn game is! Think about it: lethal company is a triple a game by that metric, so is subnautica and so is baldurs gate 3! Because we get to tell our fellow games that yes baldurs gate 3 Is triple a but not for example mw3!
It's not a quality rating. It refers to production capabilities. That's why there's no such thing as a AAA indie game.
Other than that, you're basically talking about review scores.
@@Cretaal honestly it should be, since a very large ammount of people consider triple a as really good but that is often dissapointing. Thus having the gamers say if it is or is not a triple a game is much better...
@@stijnVDA1994 Yes... because there's alot of funds and production that goes into a AAA product, which is why people conflate it as a quality grade. Lots of B movies out there that go harder than cinematic blockbusters, but they're still B films because they're low budget, and indie movies because they're indie. AAA and AA are, likewise, 2 tiers of commercial budget production. It ain't beef.
@@Cretaal no there is no beef, but honestly a shamefull ammount of triple a games that just aren't good and get basicly shown how it's done by both dubble a and even indie games thus i feel like there should be a transition to what the a rating means, praising indie or even dubble a games by instead giving them a triple a rating. For example satisfactory could be considered dubble or triple a for actually doing a good job, and on the other side cod new mw3 gets the indie rank because it's so bad... thus the nomenclature would get some actual weight since budget in painfully little actually triple a budget games are as good as like baldurs gate 3..
Thus praising good triple a game, and praising a good dubble a or indie by giving them the title triple a game, and thus only by majority vote companies can get praise for their work..
@@stijnVDA1994 It wouldn't work to call MW3 an indie game because indie stands for independent. It would also be a pretty big slap in the face of indie game studios and small AA studios and ruin them to an extent. When independent talent hits the limelight of the mainstream, they get bought out and absorbed into corporate industries who exploit the product all the same.
It makes sense, but also doesn't make sense to change the phrasing since its only AAA, AA, and indie, but no B, C, or other game studio categories. It makes sense to rebrand AA and AAA since those were pretty much marketing gimmick terms from the 90's to imply high production quality, which dropped off massively after the online-only gaming trend that came with the 360/PS3 era and got worse after phone game mechanics made their way in due to profit margins, things like lootboxes and rampant microtransactions.
I think the others should fall in line with indie games and be named in abbreviation to what they are. We'd just need to find the words, but that's a hard ask with AA and AAA already baked into the lexicon.
Development costs have gone up. Wages havent, and most development studios are massively overbloated.
I can see interesting use cases for second-screen interfacing like Activision is suggesting. Say a streamer plays a randoom map. The interface means that his audience can then automatically get that seed added to their game in a rather passive fashion if they want to experience the same world as their streamer. Or automatically send out a server invite to everyone watching in an appropriate MP game if the servers can support those kind of crowds. But we all know it's just gonna be ads and reminders that it's been X days since you played this game that you owned: why are you watching when you could play?
Which is missing the fact that quite often watching and playing are very different things. I was watching some Once Human gameplay literally this morning thinking "this game looks amazing, and I'd be terrible at it." Especially since I mostly end up playing games alone since my friends and family are too busy I'd just be constantly dying. But I'd watch someone with actual skill at that type of game and people they can regularly play with streaming it. One of my most commonly watched streamers plays almost exclusively horror games most of which I'm too much of a wimp to actually interact with - at a certain point rather than keep progressing I'll just quit. When I'm playing games I usually want strategy, simulation, or turn based things that won't stress me out too much, but the things I like to *watch* is a much, much bigger list.
People are actually fed up of these big companies and there greedy practises to get more & more money out of u while providing a pathetic gaming experience. Thats why more and more people are looking for passionate indie games.
One of the best gaming news channels. I love how quickly you guys get stories pit, nothing bothers me more than seeing someone post news 2 or 3 days after the fact and they are behind on what's actually happening. Subscribed! Keep up the great work 👍
Couldn't you argue that people are waiting to get all the facts straight?
For sure. At the same time a lot of stories change over months, so i prefer reporting on what we know now and then getting updates as new info comes in. To each their own, but I like to follow stories as they go.
@@killamilla240 Fair point.
The Lethal Company kid is set for life, 21yo furry making millions and beating out CoD? His future is bright.
man.. Nvidia on 4070 and i am still rocking my gtx 960
I'll never pay full price for a game that's asking 70€ for the base shell.
Same. No matter the game, I'll never pay $70. Tears of the Kingdom launched at $70 and I just waited a few months to grab it at $50 on sale.
NO game is worth $70 to me. They're worth about $20-$30 to me, because I'm not well-to-do. And that is why I wait for sales. I'll probably never pay full price for a game again. At least I'm not digging my "black sails" back out and "sailing the high seas" again. Though, I don't see anything wrong with it. All I'm saying is, they should be happy getting my $20-$30 instead of getting nothing.
@corvus8638 I feel like a lot of other people could mirror your story. All work and no play...
Then your not their market. Games like BG3 is very expensive to make. if they would sell it for 20-30. They will be out of business. Most people saying a game isen't worth this or that just want the games for free. How many times have I heard this, while they have no problem using $15-20 on tobacco, $40 on alcohol and so on(each week).. For most its priority. I've been there myself. If you can't afford it wait for it to be sold cheaper. I do often.
And Why do you think the world centers around you? " they should be happy getting my $20-$30 instead of getting nothing.". Should the rest of us pay 70, and you 20? tsk... And if they go down to 30.. They have to sell a ton more. And thats not guaranteed.
@@genrabbit9995 One more thing you said was "Most people saying a game 'isen't' worth this or that just want the games for free".
Make no fucking mistake. If I want a game for free, I can get it for free. You know nothing.
@@hatchetman3662 I said most, not you. I'm one off them(I buy 99.5% when its on sale or on Fanatical or Humblebundle. BG3 ended up in the .5%, Starfield came with the graphic card when I bought that one). But nothing is free in this world. So if you don't like the price wait for it to be on sale. It will happen sometime in the futurer
I definitely think the price point of games increasing has affected the profits of AAA companies... more and more people are choosing to wait to buy a game on sale or even just in GamePass/PS Plus because they can't afford as many premium priced games... honestly, overall I feel like the increase has actually been GOOD for the consumers in an industry as messed up as the video games industry
From an economics perspective, what the AAA companies have essentially done is extend the initial profit under the supply/demand curve to milk those that were willing to pay more for their game while simultaneously choosing a "sale" price at which they can reasonably expect to make as many sales as they want after the first price cut based on a more informed decision of initial sales figures
Unity leadership is gonna need a new identity at this point.
They will be bought by someone that will kick the executives that collaborated with the downfall and will rehire all the engineers that abandoned the "rejected by EA" ship.
Dragon's Dogma 2 might be the greatest game in existence. But I'll be damned if I'm gona spend 70$ on that. Hell no.
Most games are not worth $70 at time of release because they are typically shipped broken in some way. Not worth paying more until they actually fix it
That said, S/O to the Lethal Company dev! Been a big fan of their other work (It Steals) before this, so it's wonderful to see a team who genuinely loves this stuff get such a big success.
I skip on Dragons Dogma 2 for 2 reasons. It's pricetag...adn the feeling theres gonna be MTX hidden in it as there is a premium currency involved in the digital deluxe edition....
And also it's apparently always online and has Denuvo so add those two.
The only thing weirder and creepier than Activision using your second screen to sell you product is the thought that ANYONE still uses Twitch…
"You have to pay ten more dollars if you want it" How about I pay 70 less, matey.
Weta Digital and Weta Studios are different things.
Can anyone comment on the legality of the US blocking sales of 4090s? I mean, the state finds it inconvenient that China gets resources in AI but why should Nvidia, a private company care? Why should nvidia lose business because the us state finds it annoying in a free market economy?
Why shouldn't they be allowed to sell F22, F35, Himars and the like to Russia and China aswell and everyone else aswell? They are made by a private company, so why should they care? Why should they lose business because the us state finds it annoying in a free market economy?
What is the average price point the market has for games? I am not paying three quarters of a hundred bucks for a game, especially the way so many of them turn out to be dog puke. I still have problems spending 50$
Game prices need to drop the reason sales are falling is rising costs the average consumer cannot afford to pay $70-100 a game. Nearly every $70 game has lost money
The only thing keeping me from dropping cash on bg3 is the price
I have an idea, how about automatically blocking Activision.
Yes. $70 for a *good* game like Dragon's Dogma *could be* is sure. Yes the dev costs overhead is getting higher of time. Of course. However, you best be damned not putting in bull@*#& micro's and we all know the chances of no MTX in AAA's now is snow ball's chances in hell.
After the whole Unity runtime thing got rolled back, when it was attempted as they were busy bleeding money, it was clear the next thing was mass layoffs, and restructuring, so I've been expecting all this.
Every Unity dev should switch to O3DE and better themselves and the community. It's open source, in the Linux foundation and it has the capabilities of blowing the doors off of Unity. I've been working with it for 2 years in my project after I converted it entirely from Unity and I've never been happier. I haven't released or even talked about my project out in the open yet but I can promise you, my project already helped another game release fully and quite successful because I offered them a solution with a tool that I made. A tool I plan to fully release to the community once it is ready.
Looking at what the Lethal company dev had previously done shows he was pretty dialed in to the horror/comedy aspect. It isn't some random success. He's been honing this skill for awhile.
I would totally pay $70 for baldurs gate right now after playing it and after seeing them deliver huge patches every week; fix bugs and improve the game I would happily pay $80, but when I first got the game I had no idea it was that good, I would not have paid 70$ for it back then. I have no problem paying more for a good game but its often a gamble when buying these games you dont really know if its gonna live up to the hype or be a buggy mess.
Oh wow, can't wait for the new blizzard game 'Deeprun tram'-surfers!
8:05 Roku was doing the same thing. I was watching a video on "how to survive the ring" and a popup accrued where it showed me I could buy or rent the movie directly from Roku. Spying on people is a opt out feature now a days apparently and I sold my tv and got a non internet connected sharp.
"Game development costs have gone up a hundred times since Super Mario..."
Seriously, I was once on a chat with a person who stated that games were more profitable than film. I told him flat out. That will not be the case if it costs the same amount of money to make a game. Fast forward around twenty years, games cost just as much as films cost to make, and lo and behold, the CEOs of videogame companies are whining that they need more money. I feel like a prophet.
It's a sign of troubling times when so many companies hire or keep CEO's who's ideas are literally so incompetently horrible that they cost hundreds to thousands of jobs.
Dragon's Dogma 2 looks amazing and something I'd really like to play, on steam in Canada it's $ 94.99.... no. Maybe in a few years on deep deep sale then possibly, $95 Is absolutely unacceptable. They will not make those sales numbers of 45 million. Many People like myself simply cannot justify nearly 100$ for a video game. I've just been playing and enjoying cheaper indy games and while I feel awful for all the capcom employees who are about to be downsized, That is an unacceptable price and an unreasonable goal. I'm sick of corporate greed destroying the things I love for (as Bellular says) the line to go up.
So when I take a 15min break and play a round or two of (insert game here), the publisher of that game should be allowed to have access to company sensitive information on my other screens? Are they on crack or meth over there? I mean sure, in the US personal privacy is at best a joke that google and facbook exacs tell eath other around a campfire, but shit like this ain't gonna fly in most places.
The Activision thing sounds to me like spyware.
While greedy, anti-consumer decision makers should get called out and shamed, the last thing we need is Unity dying because then Epic's UE will become the only game in town and we all know what happens to a company's products when they have no competition.
increasing price may be double edged sword, make more people may unable to afford, and ended up waiting for sale, or even go pirate the game
Specillay in some countries like Brazil.
If Dragon's Dogma has simple, skins-only DLCs at most that are not advertised in-game (even Borderlands 2 goes too far with it's main menu ads), there's no always-online requirement and pawn system is not turned into another monetization scheme, then assuming game isn't also padded for length like DD1 (you think all that running interrupted by boring encounters with annoying but worthless enemies on the roads serves any purpose?) then i guess $70 can be acceptable.
But of course also make sure it runs well on all kinds of machines day one.
I think a rebrand is in Unity's future. In an attempt to distance from the past, market more aggressive pricing, and integrate the technologies they've aquired, Unity will probably rename the company and the engine. Not only do they have to compete with the "instant AAA" (sarcasm) game engine Unreal, but Unity has to compete with Godot and a whole ecosystem of open source tools, too. It's a really tough spot to be in, but maybe leaning into a hyper fast prototyping engine that offers a codeless process can be what sets them apart. (Of course they'd still let you code, but I mean they'd have a codeless event system on top of scripting & coding).
If Godot utilizes their increasing popularity well, I think Unity (or whatever they would potentially rebrand to) is over unless the have something that sets them apart
Here in South Africa, I bought, at launch, Final Fantasy 7 in 1997 (a $50 game) for R400. Metal Gear Solid 4 ($60) in 2008 for R700. Today, a $70 game is R1,379.
CEOs have been collecting increases billions in profits while developers' struggle for rights and we're supposed to believe that production costs have increased?
SF6 is a $70 game that is charging about $50 for alternative costumes. Development costs my @$$!
In other words: Activision want to turn their games into something you do in the background and throw money at while you watch their ads