Hey everyone, 2 updates: 1) The projected budgets in the table I made are NOT adjusted for 2024 dollars. Even with that adjustment, there's still a large delta between 1996 - 2024 development costs. 2) As a friendly reminder, I'm not calling out publishers, developers, or us gamers, but there's a lot to unpack here. The purpose of this video is to start a discussion and serve as a platform to express my thoughts on the industry. Hopefully everyone enjoys and realizes how challenging video game development is from the outside looking in. How would you go about "fixing" the industry, or do you think this is natural?
A full industry analysis with actual data, ROI assessments, and sources for all your findings? This is awesome man. Glad to hear an assessment from someone in the M&A industry. Gamers are often so confused by the way acquisitions work in the gaming industry since what gamers want doesn’t always align with what corporate goals are.
100% and thanks for the kind words! This video was originally supposed to be 10 minutes, but I had so much to say and wanted to tackle a lot. I could've gone even more data heavy, but this is TH-cam and I didn't want to lose anyone. You hit on the nail on the head about corporate goal and how they don't always align. The best course of action towards sustainability will inevitabely be some parity between the means of production (studios) and leadership (publsihers). Forcing studios to follow trends and taking no ownership when a project fails is an awful side effect of capitalism and large corporations! Again, thanks for the kind comment. Discussion and comments like these are why I made this channel!
In the UK, games have actually gone up in the last couple of years to £70 for most new titles (around 88 dollars as of writing), now currency has been kinda rough but 10 years ago I remember only paying £40 for brand new triple A titles.
I'm thinking about making a discussion around international pricing because some countries and some currencies are really fucked over my certain pricing and it's very bad. I feel that though. The UK has lowkey had it rough with media and game access at times!
I'm so deep into the indie scene now I don't pay attention to ANYTHING these companies do anymore, I'm so out of the loop. I was done in 2012 which triple A bullshit. All they do is sell you stuff without letting you have any fun. Greedy, best decision I ever made to distance myself from that part of the industry. Business and marketing get too much power and they spend too much money. Crazy to think that almost half of some of these games budgets are just on marketing, not EVEN on the game. Yes marketing is important, but the amount that gets spent on it, absurd leading to these crazy high prices for games. Business people who don't know how to do business.
I don't blame you because your mostly right. AAA game development today is a risk return gamble with the loss being potentially losing your studio. Additionally, like, most AAA games today are derivative and can't risk innovation at the risk of disappearing. It's fucked up.
@@DogmasDomain yeah that's true, luckily in the indie scene it's rampant, but the people aren't there, I've seen loads of awesome projects fall on their face just because the momentum wasn't there. It's for sure more complex than just big bad publishers, there are examples of good and great publishers (New Blood interactive) as well as troublesome devs, maybe some creative who is difficult to work with. It's a complicated issue for sure. Indies is where it's at though! I got Fallen Aces for under £10, it worked day one, got 10 hours of gameplay and it's only the first episode. I'd get the same amount of hours out of some of these £70 games. Whatever it is, they just don't make games that are worth the price tag.
You and I are cut from the same cloth my friend. Everything doesn't need to be a long-bloated experience to be memorable. I still think about transistor, bastion, gone home, what remains of edith finch, signalis, and soooo many other great games!
@@DogmasDomain yea especially since there is so many games to play. Im playin Elden Ring dlc now, and have new games such as Dragons dogma 2 and Gran blue fantasy in my backlog. And when im done with them Stella blade will be on sale.
I paid 60 quid for BG3 and I honestly regret it. I'm probably one of the very few who doesn't understand the hype and feels like it's incredibly boring compared to the old BG1 and 2.
With BG3 you can't not respect what the product, is and what it accomplished, it really does deserve it's hype. SO MANY companies would've charged BG3 at £70/£80 with pre-order bonuses, DLC's just milked for anything it can get and Larian released it as one price, you get everything and that's it. It's really amazing and it's should be noted. Larian is what the industry should be. Making decisions that are within scope of the project. imo any problem people have with BG3 is a matter of taste. It's really an incredible game.
Since banjo kazooie to banjo tooie, we have been seeing the decline of games at the $60 price point. Is $70 enough? In the long term, most likely not. But what we can say for sure with out a doubt is that $40 is absolutely enough for the best dlc of all time FROMSOFTWARE'S ELDEN RING SHADOW OF THE ERDTREE
facts lol just wait 6m-1y until 3 games you want drop to $20, or GameStop has a sale or something, and get 3 games for the price of one. no reason to buy a game full price anymore.
Also lol @ “this is why we tolerate Nintendo’s other bad business practices” 😂😂😂😂 I love you, Nintendo, but also, wtf!!! Brilliant group of idiots sometimes
I think there’s a case to be made for charging more for video games. Not that I’m anxious to pay more than $70 for a game, but if you haven’t seen it, Masahiro Sakurai did a video on his channel about the cost of games. And he makes the argument that on a “dollar per hour” basis of fun you get out of a game, the ratio is far more favorable than most other forms of entertainment. Something to think about
Game budgets have exploded with the industry and overall competition in the space. Hopefully the visuals and the data help articulate that. Nintendo is ran by idiots who develop some of the best games we have. Can you imagine what would happen if they went 3rd party? They'd be printing money even with Valve, Sony, and Microsoft's cuts on their stores! MW3 being one of the best selling game despite critical reception and people making fun of it tells you everything you need to know about the industry. It's sad man. And you're right about Sakurai's comments. He's 100% correct that spending $50 - $70 on a game you play for 40 - 1000 hours is an insane value proposition in the grand scheme of things. I was expecting this video to be more controversial, but it seems like I explained myself well!
Good points but i think you ignored the major reasons- its like youre looking at big releases yearly and not the entire market- wich includes mobile and the big money makers (most of wich were released years ago). The evaluated worth of the gaming industry, those 300bi include those... that means the many gatcha money printers on mobile; That means GTA5(very old), Fortnite and so on... i think it was this year a sony presentation leaked showing how like 10% of the games on playstation make like 80-90% of the revenue. THAT is the problem. Those companies have 1 goal wich is profit- so when they see those kinds of numbers where its clear few golden gooses make the buck of their gains spending millions over 3+ years to get marginally more becomes less and less interesting. Also i bet many of those cases arent even decisions from publishers alone. I bet theres people on studios and publishers who would gadly make those bets as they have been doing... but then they have shareholders. Shareholders that once they see those kinds of reports making it clear what they already suspect make much bigger pressure- so you have to show youre optimizing for profit or you will be fired for someone who will. That logic explains everything. For example Hi-fi rush- was that an title, team or ip with potential to jumping for a bigger AAA game with dlc potential or a big live service? Likely not so its a pick for getting the axe. I mean they tried things like that with bigger and more experienced medium sized studios like ARCANE and it failed terribly like redfall, heck even bioware been failing... so all that creativity and polished singleplayer rythm game doesnt matter that much- sure they can recognize it performed better then expected but that aint a money maker still, and the studio as a whole doesnt seem like one that will. Also in Hifi rush case i suspect the budget and time was higher then desired for what the higher ups may consider a 'small' game that others would do quicker and cheaper. I bet things like this are on a case by case scenario- some studios may accept merging into bigger ones to try tackling the 'big investments' upcoming. IF/when theyre not cutting jobs terminating a studio could as well be a reshuffle (re-hiring most into other studios). Some studios and professionals however arent keen on this kind of thing, get mad- and this time around they were trully axing positions for optics, cutting costs to look more efficient and avoid stock devaluation
Thank you for the comment! You're 100% correct in your analysis. The industry exploded due to mobile market statistically skewing the data. Gacha games, free to play games, battle passes, and other monetization schemes have really inflated that number disproportionately. Also, I'd believe that Sony leak where 10% of games make up 80%-90% of their overall revenue. I'm sure it's always been like this, but this environment where studios disappear for releasing a bad game is absurd and prevents the AAA market from really pushing any innovation. I also agree with your assessment on stockholders and publishers and studio may be closer than we give credit. Logically speaking, Studios and Publishers should be on the same side, but stockholders simply want their shares to appreciate which typically tied to a company's economic health being tied to their share prices. There's a lot to unpack and conversations like these are EXACTLY why I made this video!
Owning games is becoming harder and harder in this DRM era we live in. Ubisoft literally removed The Crew from people's library. A similar thing happened in the anime industry in the US when Funimation got shut down. People had purchased digital copies of shows and movies, and lost everything when it was shut down. We really don't own much nowadays and that should scare more people, but it's cheaper so whatever ig lol
i didn't and i will not pay 70 or more gor a stupid game no matter how cool will be , i payed 35max on forza horizon 5 and i will try not to spend more because i also don't earn 5k to not care about money , i work hard and so i must spend wisely, also prefer to play 1 or 2 years later when the game will be playable and at a discount price
Man there's a lot here. Ok so let's go one point at a time and i'm sorry in advance as I'm sure this is going to be big. First, i'm fairly sure most ppl would be ok with higher prices in game IF said price was actually reflected on the quality of the end product or if they used the extra money to treat their developers better but i'm sure you know that's the exact oposite. The AAA landscape is (specially the west makert) mostly bland and stale, games with a lot meat per say, but no much substance, really bloated experiences that offer close to no replay factor and with generic stories that no one cares about. Not to mention that every other month we hear news of mass layoffs in some random AAA game company. Second. I mean holy hell, look at those numbers, the amount of money these productions need to break even is absurd so this begs the question as to how they're using said budgets and why do they need so much money. Also those number you showed, do they include marketing expences or is it just the budget for the development alone? Being more specific, talking about spiderman 2, why does it needs such an absurd budget? the game is mostly the same as the first one gameplay wise, the story is much shorter and not even that good. I'm a long fan of comic book heroes and pretty much every character has been completelly assassinated in this story, it honestly feels like the story was writen by ppl who don't like spiderman very much and don't understand it's world and characters, probably because it was. Not to get political, but they said it themselves to have hired DEI consultants and those grifters do nothing but bloat the games budget, change the character designs for the worse and censor the game and stifle creativity. Suicide squad they admited that they worked with 12 different writers from their DEI consultants, like, does the game really need that many writers? did that make the game better? certainly not. I know some topics that touch on culture wars are pretty much taboo but it is an active force screwing game devolepment so it needs to be said. All of this is proven btw, nothing here is coming from the voices in my head. Finally there's the point that in my country a AAA game costs 300 and yeah that's more our problem than anything else but still, brazil is the third country most interested in games based on that capcom survey they did a few months ago, so like a AAA game costs 1/5 of minumum wage so for most ppl here the game really needs to be a home run for anyone to consider investing that amount. I almost never pay full price for a game, like once every 2 years max, most of the time I wait for a big 50% sale or nothing. On the other hand i'm far more interest in smaller games because they honestly have a higher chance of actually being satisfying experiences plus by supporting indies i'm sure that the money is going towards the devs intead of some greedy executive. Talking about solution, the best alternative I can think is just to make games with smaller budgets that don't need to sell 5 milion copies to break even, in other worlds AA games. One of my favorite studious is inti creates, they pretty much only make AA games, some original and some by demand, they made the 2 8bit bloodstained games and the 4 zero series games for the gba for example. Their games are amazing, I have much more fun with those and play them for much longer than any most AAA games. They prove that bigger budgets don't translate to better games. Also having smaller budgets means you can take more risks and with that comes more creativity and inovation. Well I told you I could go on a 2 hour rant on this topic and there's much more I wanted to say tbh. anyway i'm just a guy who loves games and is very dissatisfied with the current state of the industry. By paying more we would be just fueling the current AAA system that is very much broken and shouldn't be sustained. EDIT: I removed some parts that seemed a bit too agressive.
Oh I just remembered 2 very important points. 1- the gaming industry has never made so much money as they're making now, activison blizzard for example had their most lucrative period ever, probably because of the mobile diablo if a had to guess, but even so they fired 2000 workers in the last year or so. 2- instead of learning and adapting to the market, some big companies are buying the competition and closing down studios. Microsoft and EA are the most guilty of this. In fact microsoft is trying to gain a monopoly so hard that I think they're in some legal troubles now because of this, not that it matters of course.
Before responding, thanks for watching the video! I agree with you that games, materially, have less content today than they did a decade or two ago. Prices don't reflect the quantity and if it does, it's a Ubisoft game filled with bloat! Prices should be adjusted based on quantity, but that's not a great indicator either as some people spend $60-$70s on a game and get 1000 hours of it. The reason everything is generic is because of budgets, hedging risk, and publisher demands. Game development budgets are both the budget and marketing. Not sure why that's one number, but I don't make the rules. With Spiderman 2, you have to remember these writers are responsible for writing a lot of different properties, so they may not have the time to read a bunch of comics. I'm a comic book and manga fan as well, but they should at least have a baseline understanding of the essence of a character before writing about them. And as someone who worked in the consulting industry, we're mostly useless are too expensive. We can provide an additional perspective on matters, but there gets to be a point where you have too many chefs in the kitchen, right? Diluting a story with too writers, hiring expensive consultants, and tight deadlines / delays REALLY cause budgets to balloon. You know what's funny about Brazil? I was talking about how regional pricing does more damage to people outside of the US than people realize. Regional pricing needs to be adjusted so people can actually afford things outside of the US. It's crazy that if you don't live in the North America, Europe, Eastern Asia, or a developed first world country, you're expected to game on mobile because it's actually accessible. I 100% agree with you and I'm sorry I forgot to include it. Too many Americans forget this. Smaller indie games are where innovation thrive. I'm a huge fan of classic resident evil and have been playing Tormented Souls and been having a great time with it! Indie games are charming and can afford to push the genre forward off the backs of creatives. I have a tremendous amount of respect for them. I'll produce more videos about them in the future if my channel continues to grow (I'm praying it does). I agree that more games should be AA because, like you said earlier, most games are filled with bloat. I think most would be okay if games were shorter and charged less. The problem with that is capitalism is that publishers like to compare games, follow trends, and want to see year over year growth. However, if AA games were the standard, expectations for AA games would rise leading to larger overall budgets. The relationship between developer and publishers need to improve because, like videos I write produce and research, this stuff doesn't just appear out of the ether. Games, media, everything is a product of work that people want to get paid for. Activision blizzard and EA have recorded record profits sure, but that's not the entire industry. Games are selling more, sure, but budgets and game costs have outpaced earnings. That's the main reason publishers are pushing battle passes. You drive active monthly players up, opportunities to monetize, and create a platform you're supposed to game infinitely instead of saying "I'm done with this game." That part that's actually shitty are when you have publishers like WB. WB forced Rocksteady to make Suicide squad kill the justice league. They didn't want to, WB said whatever, the Rocksteady founders leave, the game drops, bricks, and rocksteady's future is uncertain now. This relationship MUST improve if the industry and art want to thrive, however, artist don't always understand economics so it's hard. Yeah, Microsoft buying up the competition is crazy. They're pretty incompetent though. I'm just sad for Tango gameworks and Arkane Austin because Phil promised he wouldn't intervene with the artistic vision... and then closes the studio. I also wonder how sustainable game pass actually is because I'm worried.
@@DogmasDomain adding on the bit about capitalism and how it's not that simple because artists don't always understand economics and how to make profit while on the other side the greedy executies are out of touch with their earning projections. To me that's the main problem, you would think these big companies would understand these things and that's why they're billion dollar companies, but in reality they're quite incompetent like you said so yourself with microsoft's example. If they actually undertood the money game, they would have course corrected a long time ago as this current practice of making games blander with bigger budgets and expecting half the world to play it is quite out of touch. They should also see that making decisions that make not only your developers but also the fans and consumers mad wouldn't exactly translate to more money on the long term. I don't like nintendo as a company because they make so many anti consumer moves, but it's undeniable that they always have made good games and still do to this day (have you seen the trailer for that new zelda game where you actually play zelda? It seems very creative and i'm pretty hyped for that one). So nintendo has the power of a trustworthy brand when it comes down to their end product. But like you said Ubisoft is the oposite, no one in their right mind has any hope of them releasing a game that's actually worth 60 dollars, so what i'm saying here is that longterm this current practice is even worse because it destroyes the trust on the brand and again if these AAA actually knew what they were doing, they would realise that they're slowly destroying their own future. We seem to mostly agree here but I was saying all of this to argue that just paying more for a game will have little to no impact on how the AAA do business, they will just keep balooning the budgets until they implode, of course while having more layoffs, closing down more studios and blamming the fans on the way. That's why paying more for games on the current state of the industry sounds insane to me. On a lighter topic I also played tormented souls and that game is pretty cool, the puzzles especially were some of the best i've seen in the genre, really made me happy. The atmosphere is pretty good too. The voice acting is a bit amateur but honestly considering the inspiration i'd say it fits. Might I recommend "Alisa"? It's another survivor horror inspired by resident evil, even more so than tormented souls, it's one of my favorite indie games, it's in my top 5 for sure. Oh and that game has bad voice acting on purpose. I would also like to recomment that you take a look at "World of Horror", it is in another ballpark completelly but that game is very obscure for how good it is and since you like horror there's a chance you'll enjoy this one too. It's kinda its own thing, a mesh of old computer 2 bit games adventure style with lovecraftian and junji ito horror, tehre's no way to explain that game really. But it's really good and it was made by one dude who used paint to make the graphics. thx for taking the time responding in such detail and i'm rooting for your channel to grow too.
Big games haven't cost 60 bucks for years now. Publishers kept pulling content out and selling it back to you. Anyone believing games even cost 70 are ignorant. What about the Star Wars game? What about every game with a limited edition? Or season pass? The problem is budgeting and investors. Why is valve so successful? Cause they don't have to answer to investors who always wanna see the graph grow and if it doesn't (which will eventually happen) they fire the lowest on the rank which are developers. It's not rocket science. It's fairly simple why the industry is the way it is. Companies always expect growth of an audience that doesn't exist! Why now is Playstation putting its games on pc? On switch? Xbox on PS? The game industry is unsustainable and CEOs, publishers, investors and GREED. The pure greed is the problem.
I agree that publishers are mainly to blame for the industry being that way it is, but I wouldn't oversimplify it either. Yes, year over year growth is expected, but as budgets rose profit margins are reduced which is why games have become smaller and smaller with content that's resold to you. And I agree that investors and leadership are disproportionately paid, but without their capital and decisions, the industry doesn't exist. These millions of dollars don't necessarily always appear out of nowhere, and CEOs and C suite decisions run the risk of creating flops which risks studio closure. C suite and leadership should be held accountable, but they aren't and THAT is a huge problem. Budgeting is tough because of course year over year growth is expected, but developers, marketing, engine licenses, and the works are increasing as well. Lastly, Valve is a privately owned company with the largest DRM service and internal shareholders they have to answer. They've been and expect year over year growth as well, however, to your point, the reason why they're so successful is because they're pro-consumer and listen to their community. They don't rush development of their limited scope of games and acknowledging criticisms instead of calling us stupid. Their business philosophy is great, but all of these other publishers don't have Dota, CS, and Steam to keep them afloat.
@@DogmasDomain I completely disagree on the C suite and leadership not being a huge problem. They are the crux of the problem because it doesn't matter if a game flops or not. If the corpo wants to, they will close you down. Need I bring up Tango? Any studio that fell under EA? What about Ubisoft? Microsoft? If a small indie studio making critically acclaimed games backed by one of the biggest corporations in the world can't make it, there is very little hope for anyone. And yet, many indies are fine. Why? Maybe because they give people what they want? Corpos buy successful, beloved studios, force them to change and then shut them down. Also I do not believe when corporations claim they are losing money because a) no company in the history of the world would keep investing if they made little to no money and b) the industry is worth more than ever and big corporations make literal billions a year. I mean, if your game has to sell millions to be a Succes, maybe start budgeting your games better? Who demanded high end graphics? Individual hair strands? A giant open world with nothing in them? It's not gamers as those games usually end up fine but forgotten. It's focus groups and out of touch big wigs. Did you ever hear about Ubisoft demanding every game be open world? However I would like to add the gamers are at fault too. I am talking about mindless drones who are brand loyal to a fault and let fomo get to them. So what if a new Madden comes out? It's gonna suck and everyone knows it yet they keep buying.
@@DogmasDomain now if you look at Larian Studios. That's how it's supposed to be done. Where did the millions come from? Simple. They made smaller games and took that money to invest in a bigger game. Granted Divinity Original Sin was a make it or break it but they made it. And then DOS2 was also successful. And then they made a game that other developers were jealous of and even made false accusations like saying they had a big budget. They had zero budget. All the money came from profits of previous games. So no. I don't agree that we need corporations to get bigger games either. We already have proof and it is sad to say that it doesn't happen more often. However, it is these studios that will survive whatever form of crash the industry might suffer from. While Microsoft, ubisoft, ea etc were firing people left and right, Larian gave everyone extra pay and bonuses.
@@jordirapper You and I are in agreement man! In my response I literally said C suite has to be held to higher standard because their poor leadership decisions cause studios to crash and burn. And companies losing money while they continue to operate? Amazon for the longest time didn't record a profit on their income statements because they continued to sink their funds into building their infrastructure. While they operated at a loss, investors saw the vision and invested because they knew it'd be profitable. Tesla is another example here. Most of their profit came from regulatory credits back in the day, not sure about today though. The value of the overall industry is derived from annual game sales and forecasted trajectory of growth. We're also talking about traditional Console and PC sales when mobile has become even larger over the past decade. Combine this with more people playing games, the mobile market, publishers owning more and more studios, and IPs that are literally worth millions and sometimes and yeah, it makes sense imo. Also, like, better graphics has been a thing since the start of gaming. Each generation has improved graphically, but today it's so minute that everything is starting to look good by default. Then again, Sony, Microsoft, and all of these publishers have conditioned the majority to prefer graphics, which I think is dumb as well.
@@jordirapper I agree, but here's the thing, most studios, especially indies, don't have the luxury of creating a game like Divinity Original and building themselves up. There's a reason why Larian, Supergiant, and CDPR are the exceptions and not the standards. They correctly built themselves up with smaller projects that eventually grabbed mass appeal through building a brand, but not all indie studios will be able to achieve this luxury. They are blueprints for how other companies should be run though!
I see a big issue with studios going all in on big releases, they need more filler games. Such as when waiting for the new Mario game I can enjoy Mario kart and Party. Insomniac games gave us Mile Morales while we waited for spider man 2 and it was a big success. Add on remaster and they basically paid the budget for their next game. I worry though because their next game is Wolverine then Spiderman 3. Two big budget games back to back seems so unsustainable.
The problem is publishers are constantly chasing the success of other larger games, and a shift in the market imo. Publishers needs to accept everything isn't going to sell 4 million copies and allow creatives to add buffers between big projects. Combine Spiderman 3 probably costing around $400,000,000, with the PS5 not selling as well as the PS4, and half of Sony's audience still on the PS4; and it's not looking good man. Thanks for watching btw!
I'm sorry but this is a dislike from me. The issue are greedy corpos that chase the biggest margin of revenue, the layoff have several reason behind, everyone is getting layed off last few years, gaming companies are only growing. And you can't consider studios 'closing', when they get bought and closed to remove competition. 70$ is enough, they should balance their budget better and pay their CEO a few millions less.
We do NOT need higher budgets. The industry needs to start resigning in budgets. Then again, you made the stupid inflation argument despite talking about how much the industry and audience has grown.
Hey everyone, 2 updates:
1) The projected budgets in the table I made are NOT adjusted for 2024 dollars. Even with that adjustment, there's still a large delta between 1996 - 2024 development costs.
2) As a friendly reminder, I'm not calling out publishers, developers, or us gamers, but there's a lot to unpack here. The purpose of this video is to start a discussion and serve as a platform to express my thoughts on the industry.
Hopefully everyone enjoys and realizes how challenging video game development is from the outside looking in. How would you go about "fixing" the industry, or do you think this is natural?
A full industry analysis with actual data, ROI assessments, and sources for all your findings? This is awesome man. Glad to hear an assessment from someone in the M&A industry. Gamers are often so confused by the way acquisitions work in the gaming industry since what gamers want doesn’t always align with what corporate goals are.
100% and thanks for the kind words! This video was originally supposed to be 10 minutes, but I had so much to say and wanted to tackle a lot. I could've gone even more data heavy, but this is TH-cam and I didn't want to lose anyone.
You hit on the nail on the head about corporate goal and how they don't always align. The best course of action towards sustainability will inevitabely be some parity between the means of production (studios) and leadership (publsihers). Forcing studios to follow trends and taking no ownership when a project fails is an awful side effect of capitalism and large corporations!
Again, thanks for the kind comment. Discussion and comments like these are why I made this channel!
In the UK, games have actually gone up in the last couple of years to £70 for most new titles (around 88 dollars as of writing), now currency has been kinda rough but 10 years ago I remember only paying £40 for brand new triple A titles.
I'm thinking about making a discussion around international pricing because some countries and some currencies are really fucked over my certain pricing and it's very bad. I feel that though. The UK has lowkey had it rough with media and game access at times!
I'm so deep into the indie scene now I don't pay attention to ANYTHING these companies do anymore, I'm so out of the loop. I was done in 2012 which triple A bullshit. All they do is sell you stuff without letting you have any fun. Greedy, best decision I ever made to distance myself from that part of the industry. Business and marketing get too much power and they spend too much money. Crazy to think that almost half of some of these games budgets are just on marketing, not EVEN on the game. Yes marketing is important, but the amount that gets spent on it, absurd leading to these crazy high prices for games. Business people who don't know how to do business.
I don't blame you because your mostly right. AAA game development today is a risk return gamble with the loss being potentially losing your studio. Additionally, like, most AAA games today are derivative and can't risk innovation at the risk of disappearing. It's fucked up.
@@DogmasDomain yeah that's true, luckily in the indie scene it's rampant, but the people aren't there, I've seen loads of awesome projects fall on their face just because the momentum wasn't there.
It's for sure more complex than just big bad publishers, there are examples of good and great publishers (New Blood interactive) as well as troublesome devs, maybe some creative who is difficult to work with. It's a complicated issue for sure. Indies is where it's at though! I got Fallen Aces for under £10, it worked day one, got 10 hours of gameplay and it's only the first episode. I'd get the same amount of hours out of some of these £70 games. Whatever it is, they just don't make games that are worth the price tag.
You and I are cut from the same cloth my friend. Everything doesn't need to be a long-bloated experience to be memorable. I still think about transistor, bastion, gone home, what remains of edith finch, signalis, and soooo many other great games!
@@DogmasDomain yeah man, there's too many to list, we're seriously going through a golden age of entertainment.
I havent bought a 70-80 dollar game yet. I just wait 2 months and its on sale.
That's the strat lowkey
@@DogmasDomain yea especially since there is so many games to play. Im playin Elden Ring dlc now, and have new games such as Dragons dogma 2 and Gran blue fantasy in my backlog. And when im done with them Stella blade will be on sale.
Bro that's the funny thing. People forget about their backlog when a new game releases.
I paid 60 quid for BG3 and I honestly regret it. I'm probably one of the very few who doesn't understand the hype and feels like it's incredibly boring compared to the old BG1 and 2.
I'm sure some people feel the same way about Fallout 1 and 2 when New Vegas, 3, and 4 are brought up
With BG3 you can't not respect what the product, is and what it accomplished, it really does deserve it's hype. SO MANY companies would've charged BG3 at £70/£80 with pre-order bonuses, DLC's just milked for anything it can get and Larian released it as one price, you get everything and that's it. It's really amazing and it's should be noted. Larian is what the industry should be. Making decisions that are within scope of the project.
imo any problem people have with BG3 is a matter of taste. It's really an incredible game.
Since banjo kazooie to banjo tooie, we have been seeing the decline of games at the $60 price point. Is $70 enough? In the long term, most likely not. But what we can say for sure with out a doubt is that $40 is absolutely enough for the best dlc of all time FROMSOFTWARE'S ELDEN RING SHADOW OF THE ERDTREE
Fromsoft my beloved. They deserve all of their success, but you're right. Monetization needs to occur unless we want $100 - $120 games.
@@DogmasDomain I'd pay $100-$1000 for a new Ty the Tasmanian Tiger game
Never bought a game for 70€ and never will. Last month I bought RDR2 for 20€ and I am having a blast. That's how it's done nowadays.
Can't disagree with this strategy
Well i have never bought an aaa game at full price so i dont really care
You're just like me. I buy like one AAA game a year because not a lot of games justify that $70 price point. Hopefully you enjoyed the discussion!
facts lol just wait 6m-1y until 3 games you want drop to $20, or GameStop has a sale or something, and get 3 games for the price of one.
no reason to buy a game full price anymore.
Only 2:30 in and I’m already mindblown. Those sale numbers needed to break even are bananas!!
Also lol @ “this is why we tolerate Nintendo’s other bad business practices” 😂😂😂😂 I love you, Nintendo, but also, wtf!!! Brilliant group of idiots sometimes
Also, the fact MWIII sold *so* well in such a stacked year for video games is genuinely shocking
I think there’s a case to be made for charging more for video games. Not that I’m anxious to pay more than $70 for a game, but if you haven’t seen it, Masahiro Sakurai did a video on his channel about the cost of games. And he makes the argument that on a “dollar per hour” basis of fun you get out of a game, the ratio is far more favorable than most other forms of entertainment. Something to think about
Game budgets have exploded with the industry and overall competition in the space. Hopefully the visuals and the data help articulate that. Nintendo is ran by idiots who develop some of the best games we have. Can you imagine what would happen if they went 3rd party? They'd be printing money even with Valve, Sony, and Microsoft's cuts on their stores!
MW3 being one of the best selling game despite critical reception and people making fun of it tells you everything you need to know about the industry. It's sad man. And you're right about Sakurai's comments. He's 100% correct that spending $50 - $70 on a game you play for 40 - 1000 hours is an insane value proposition in the grand scheme of things. I was expecting this video to be more controversial, but it seems like I explained myself well!
@@DogmasDomain haha we’ll see when more people find it-the nutjobs will come out of the woodwork 🙄
Great video
Glad you enjoyed!
Good points but i think you ignored the major reasons- its like youre looking at big releases yearly and not the entire market- wich includes mobile and the big money makers (most of wich were released years ago). The evaluated worth of the gaming industry, those 300bi include those... that means the many gatcha money printers on mobile; That means GTA5(very old), Fortnite and so on... i think it was this year a sony presentation leaked showing how like 10% of the games on playstation make like 80-90% of the revenue. THAT is the problem.
Those companies have 1 goal wich is profit- so when they see those kinds of numbers where its clear few golden gooses make the buck of their gains spending millions over 3+ years to get marginally more becomes less and less interesting.
Also i bet many of those cases arent even decisions from publishers alone. I bet theres people on studios and publishers who would gadly make those bets as they have been doing... but then they have shareholders. Shareholders that once they see those kinds of reports making it clear what they already suspect make much bigger pressure- so you have to show youre optimizing for profit or you will be fired for someone who will.
That logic explains everything. For example Hi-fi rush- was that an title, team or ip with potential to jumping for a bigger AAA game with dlc potential or a big live service? Likely not so its a pick for getting the axe. I mean they tried things like that with bigger and more experienced medium sized studios like ARCANE and it failed terribly like redfall, heck even bioware been failing... so all that creativity and polished singleplayer rythm game doesnt matter that much- sure they can recognize it performed better then expected but that aint a money maker still, and the studio as a whole doesnt seem like one that will. Also in Hifi rush case i suspect the budget and time was higher then desired for what the higher ups may consider a 'small' game that others would do quicker and cheaper.
I bet things like this are on a case by case scenario- some studios may accept merging into bigger ones to try tackling the 'big investments' upcoming. IF/when theyre not cutting jobs terminating a studio could as well be a reshuffle (re-hiring most into other studios). Some studios and professionals however arent keen on this kind of thing, get mad- and this time around they were trully axing positions for optics, cutting costs to look more efficient and avoid stock devaluation
Thank you for the comment! You're 100% correct in your analysis. The industry exploded due to mobile market statistically skewing the data. Gacha games, free to play games, battle passes, and other monetization schemes have really inflated that number disproportionately. Also, I'd believe that Sony leak where 10% of games make up 80%-90% of their overall revenue. I'm sure it's always been like this, but this environment where studios disappear for releasing a bad game is absurd and prevents the AAA market from really pushing any innovation.
I also agree with your assessment on stockholders and publishers and studio may be closer than we give credit. Logically speaking, Studios and Publishers should be on the same side, but stockholders simply want their shares to appreciate which typically tied to a company's economic health being tied to their share prices.
There's a lot to unpack and conversations like these are EXACTLY why I made this video!
Honestly, I’m fine with paying $70, IF and only IF, I own the game, it doesn’t contain micro transaction or woke DEI BS.
Owning games is becoming harder and harder in this DRM era we live in. Ubisoft literally removed The Crew from people's library. A similar thing happened in the anime industry in the US when Funimation got shut down. People had purchased digital copies of shows and movies, and lost everything when it was shut down. We really don't own much nowadays and that should scare more people, but it's cheaper so whatever ig lol
i didn't and i will not pay 70 or more gor a stupid game no matter how cool will be , i payed 35max on forza horizon 5 and i will try not to spend more because i also don't earn 5k to not care about money , i work hard and so i must spend wisely, also prefer to play 1 or 2 years later when the game will be playable and at a discount price
I pretty much do the same thing. I just wait and grab games on sale because $70 is something else man
Man there's a lot here. Ok so let's go one point at a time and i'm sorry in advance as I'm sure this is going to be big. First, i'm fairly sure most ppl would be ok with higher prices in game IF said price was actually reflected on the quality of the end product or if they used the extra money to treat their developers better but i'm sure you know that's the exact oposite. The AAA landscape is (specially the west makert) mostly bland and stale, games with a lot meat per say, but no much substance, really bloated experiences that offer close to no replay factor and with generic stories that no one cares about. Not to mention that every other month we hear news of mass layoffs in some random AAA game company.
Second. I mean holy hell, look at those numbers, the amount of money these productions need to break even is absurd so this begs the question as to how they're using said budgets and why do they need so much money. Also those number you showed, do they include marketing expences or is it just the budget for the development alone?
Being more specific, talking about spiderman 2, why does it needs such an absurd budget? the game is mostly the same as the first one gameplay wise, the story is much shorter and not even that good. I'm a long fan of comic book heroes and pretty much every character has been completelly assassinated in this story, it honestly feels like the story was writen by ppl who don't like spiderman very much and don't understand it's world and characters, probably because it was. Not to get political, but they said it themselves to have hired DEI consultants and those grifters do nothing but bloat the games budget, change the character designs for the worse and censor the game and stifle creativity. Suicide squad they admited that they worked with 12 different writers from their DEI consultants, like, does the game really need that many writers? did that make the game better? certainly not. I know some topics that touch on culture wars are pretty much taboo but it is an active force screwing game devolepment so it needs to be said. All of this is proven btw, nothing here is coming from the voices in my head.
Finally there's the point that in my country a AAA game costs 300 and yeah that's more our problem than anything else but still, brazil is the third country most interested in games based on that capcom survey they did a few months ago, so like a AAA game costs 1/5 of minumum wage so for most ppl here the game really needs to be a home run for anyone to consider investing that amount.
I almost never pay full price for a game, like once every 2 years max, most of the time I wait for a big 50% sale or nothing. On the other hand i'm far more interest in smaller games because they honestly have a higher chance of actually being satisfying experiences plus by supporting indies i'm sure that the money is going towards the devs intead of some greedy executive.
Talking about solution, the best alternative I can think is just to make games with smaller budgets that don't need to sell 5 milion copies to break even, in other worlds AA games. One of my favorite studious is inti creates, they pretty much only make AA games, some original and some by demand, they made the 2 8bit bloodstained games and the 4 zero series games for the gba for example. Their games are amazing, I have much more fun with those and play them for much longer than any most AAA games. They prove that bigger budgets don't translate to better games. Also having smaller budgets means you can take more risks and with that comes more creativity and inovation.
Well I told you I could go on a 2 hour rant on this topic and there's much more I wanted to say tbh. anyway i'm just a guy who loves games and is very dissatisfied with the current state of the industry. By paying more we would be just fueling the current AAA system that is very much broken and shouldn't be sustained.
EDIT: I removed some parts that seemed a bit too agressive.
Oh I just remembered 2 very important points.
1- the gaming industry has never made so much money as they're making now, activison blizzard for example had their most lucrative period ever, probably because of the mobile diablo if a had to guess, but even so they fired 2000 workers in the last year or so.
2- instead of learning and adapting to the market, some big companies are buying the competition and closing down studios. Microsoft and EA are the most guilty of this. In fact microsoft is trying to gain a monopoly so hard that I think they're in some legal troubles now because of this, not that it matters of course.
Before responding, thanks for watching the video!
I agree with you that games, materially, have less content today than they did a decade or two ago. Prices don't reflect the quantity and if it does, it's a Ubisoft game filled with bloat! Prices should be adjusted based on quantity, but that's not a great indicator either as some people spend $60-$70s on a game and get 1000 hours of it. The reason everything is generic is because of budgets, hedging risk, and publisher demands.
Game development budgets are both the budget and marketing. Not sure why that's one number, but I don't make the rules.
With Spiderman 2, you have to remember these writers are responsible for writing a lot of different properties, so they may not have the time to read a bunch of comics. I'm a comic book and manga fan as well, but they should at least have a baseline understanding of the essence of a character before writing about them. And as someone who worked in the consulting industry, we're mostly useless are too expensive. We can provide an additional perspective on matters, but there gets to be a point where you have too many chefs in the kitchen, right? Diluting a story with too writers, hiring expensive consultants, and tight deadlines / delays REALLY cause budgets to balloon.
You know what's funny about Brazil? I was talking about how regional pricing does more damage to people outside of the US than people realize. Regional pricing needs to be adjusted so people can actually afford things outside of the US. It's crazy that if you don't live in the North America, Europe, Eastern Asia, or a developed first world country, you're expected to game on mobile because it's actually accessible. I 100% agree with you and I'm sorry I forgot to include it. Too many Americans forget this.
Smaller indie games are where innovation thrive. I'm a huge fan of classic resident evil and have been playing Tormented Souls and been having a great time with it! Indie games are charming and can afford to push the genre forward off the backs of creatives. I have a tremendous amount of respect for them. I'll produce more videos about them in the future if my channel continues to grow (I'm praying it does).
I agree that more games should be AA because, like you said earlier, most games are filled with bloat. I think most would be okay if games were shorter and charged less. The problem with that is capitalism is that publishers like to compare games, follow trends, and want to see year over year growth. However, if AA games were the standard, expectations for AA games would rise leading to larger overall budgets. The relationship between developer and publishers need to improve because, like videos I write produce and research, this stuff doesn't just appear out of the ether. Games, media, everything is a product of work that people want to get paid for.
Activision blizzard and EA have recorded record profits sure, but that's not the entire industry. Games are selling more, sure, but budgets and game costs have outpaced earnings. That's the main reason publishers are pushing battle passes. You drive active monthly players up, opportunities to monetize, and create a platform you're supposed to game infinitely instead of saying "I'm done with this game." That part that's actually shitty are when you have publishers like WB. WB forced Rocksteady to make Suicide squad kill the justice league. They didn't want to, WB said whatever, the Rocksteady founders leave, the game drops, bricks, and rocksteady's future is uncertain now. This relationship MUST improve if the industry and art want to thrive, however, artist don't always understand economics so it's hard.
Yeah, Microsoft buying up the competition is crazy. They're pretty incompetent though. I'm just sad for Tango gameworks and Arkane Austin because Phil promised he wouldn't intervene with the artistic vision... and then closes the studio. I also wonder how sustainable game pass actually is because I'm worried.
@@DogmasDomain adding on the bit about capitalism and how it's not that simple because artists don't always understand economics and how to make profit while on the other side the greedy executies are out of touch with their earning projections. To me that's the main problem, you would think these big companies would understand these things and that's why they're billion dollar companies, but in reality they're quite incompetent like you said so yourself with microsoft's example. If they actually undertood the money game, they would have course corrected a long time ago as this current practice of making games blander with bigger budgets and expecting half the world to play it is quite out of touch. They should also see that making decisions that make not only your developers but also the fans and consumers mad wouldn't exactly translate to more money on the long term.
I don't like nintendo as a company because they make so many anti consumer moves, but it's undeniable that they always have made good games and still do to this day (have you seen the trailer for that new zelda game where you actually play zelda? It seems very creative and i'm pretty hyped for that one). So nintendo has the power of a trustworthy brand when it comes down to their end product. But like you said Ubisoft is the oposite, no one in their right mind has any hope of them releasing a game that's actually worth 60 dollars, so what i'm saying here is that longterm this current practice is even worse because it destroyes the trust on the brand and again if these AAA actually knew what they were doing, they would realise that they're slowly destroying their own future.
We seem to mostly agree here but I was saying all of this to argue that just paying more for a game will have little to no impact on how the AAA do business, they will just keep balooning the budgets until they implode, of course while having more layoffs, closing down more studios and blamming the fans on the way. That's why paying more for games on the current state of the industry sounds insane to me.
On a lighter topic I also played tormented souls and that game is pretty cool, the puzzles especially were some of the best i've seen in the genre, really made me happy. The atmosphere is pretty good too. The voice acting is a bit amateur but honestly considering the inspiration i'd say it fits.
Might I recommend "Alisa"? It's another survivor horror inspired by resident evil, even more so than tormented souls, it's one of my favorite indie games, it's in my top 5 for sure. Oh and that game has bad voice acting on purpose.
I would also like to recomment that you take a look at "World of Horror", it is in another ballpark completelly but that game is very obscure for how good it is and since you like horror there's a chance you'll enjoy this one too. It's kinda its own thing, a mesh of old computer 2 bit games adventure style with lovecraftian and junji ito horror, tehre's no way to explain that game really. But it's really good and it was made by one dude who used paint to make the graphics.
thx for taking the time responding in such detail and i'm rooting for your channel to grow too.
I didn't watch the video at all but I pay 60 dollars a year for multiple sports games !!
Yeasir
Big games haven't cost 60 bucks for years now. Publishers kept pulling content out and selling it back to you. Anyone believing games even cost 70 are ignorant. What about the Star Wars game? What about every game with a limited edition? Or season pass?
The problem is budgeting and investors. Why is valve so successful? Cause they don't have to answer to investors who always wanna see the graph grow and if it doesn't (which will eventually happen) they fire the lowest on the rank which are developers.
It's not rocket science. It's fairly simple why the industry is the way it is. Companies always expect growth of an audience that doesn't exist! Why now is Playstation putting its games on pc? On switch? Xbox on PS?
The game industry is unsustainable and CEOs, publishers, investors and GREED. The pure greed is the problem.
I agree that publishers are mainly to blame for the industry being that way it is, but I wouldn't oversimplify it either. Yes, year over year growth is expected, but as budgets rose profit margins are reduced which is why games have become smaller and smaller with content that's resold to you.
And I agree that investors and leadership are disproportionately paid, but without their capital and decisions, the industry doesn't exist. These millions of dollars don't necessarily always appear out of nowhere, and CEOs and C suite decisions run the risk of creating flops which risks studio closure. C suite and leadership should be held accountable, but they aren't and THAT is a huge problem.
Budgeting is tough because of course year over year growth is expected, but developers, marketing, engine licenses, and the works are increasing as well.
Lastly, Valve is a privately owned company with the largest DRM service and internal shareholders they have to answer. They've been and expect year over year growth as well, however, to your point, the reason why they're so successful is because they're pro-consumer and listen to their community. They don't rush development of their limited scope of games and acknowledging criticisms instead of calling us stupid. Their business philosophy is great, but all of these other publishers don't have Dota, CS, and Steam to keep them afloat.
@@DogmasDomain I completely disagree on the C suite and leadership not being a huge problem. They are the crux of the problem because it doesn't matter if a game flops or not. If the corpo wants to, they will close you down. Need I bring up Tango? Any studio that fell under EA? What about Ubisoft? Microsoft? If a small indie studio making critically acclaimed games backed by one of the biggest corporations in the world can't make it, there is very little hope for anyone.
And yet, many indies are fine. Why? Maybe because they give people what they want? Corpos buy successful, beloved studios, force them to change and then shut them down.
Also I do not believe when corporations claim they are losing money because a) no company in the history of the world would keep investing if they made little to no money and b) the industry is worth more than ever and big corporations make literal billions a year.
I mean, if your game has to sell millions to be a Succes, maybe start budgeting your games better? Who demanded high end graphics? Individual hair strands? A giant open world with nothing in them? It's not gamers as those games usually end up fine but forgotten. It's focus groups and out of touch big wigs. Did you ever hear about Ubisoft demanding every game be open world?
However I would like to add the gamers are at fault too. I am talking about mindless drones who are brand loyal to a fault and let fomo get to them. So what if a new Madden comes out? It's gonna suck and everyone knows it yet they keep buying.
@@DogmasDomain now if you look at Larian Studios. That's how it's supposed to be done. Where did the millions come from? Simple. They made smaller games and took that money to invest in a bigger game. Granted Divinity Original Sin was a make it or break it but they made it. And then DOS2 was also successful. And then they made a game that other developers were jealous of and even made false accusations like saying they had a big budget. They had zero budget. All the money came from profits of previous games. So no. I don't agree that we need corporations to get bigger games either. We already have proof and it is sad to say that it doesn't happen more often. However, it is these studios that will survive whatever form of crash the industry might suffer from. While Microsoft, ubisoft, ea etc were firing people left and right, Larian gave everyone extra pay and bonuses.
@@jordirapper You and I are in agreement man! In my response I literally said C suite has to be held to higher standard because their poor leadership decisions cause studios to crash and burn.
And companies losing money while they continue to operate? Amazon for the longest time didn't record a profit on their income statements because they continued to sink their funds into building their infrastructure. While they operated at a loss, investors saw the vision and invested because they knew it'd be profitable. Tesla is another example here. Most of their profit came from regulatory credits back in the day, not sure about today though.
The value of the overall industry is derived from annual game sales and forecasted trajectory of growth. We're also talking about traditional Console and PC sales when mobile has become even larger over the past decade. Combine this with more people playing games, the mobile market, publishers owning more and more studios, and IPs that are literally worth millions and sometimes and yeah, it makes sense imo.
Also, like, better graphics has been a thing since the start of gaming. Each generation has improved graphically, but today it's so minute that everything is starting to look good by default. Then again, Sony, Microsoft, and all of these publishers have conditioned the majority to prefer graphics, which I think is dumb as well.
@@jordirapper I agree, but here's the thing, most studios, especially indies, don't have the luxury of creating a game like Divinity Original and building themselves up. There's a reason why Larian, Supergiant, and CDPR are the exceptions and not the standards. They correctly built themselves up with smaller projects that eventually grabbed mass appeal through building a brand, but not all indie studios will be able to achieve this luxury. They are blueprints for how other companies should be run though!
I see a big issue with studios going all in on big releases, they need more filler games. Such as when waiting for the new Mario game I can enjoy Mario kart and Party.
Insomniac games gave us Mile Morales while we waited for spider man 2 and it was a big success. Add on remaster and they basically paid the budget for their next game. I worry though because their next game is Wolverine then Spiderman 3. Two big budget games back to back seems so unsustainable.
The problem is publishers are constantly chasing the success of other larger games, and a shift in the market imo. Publishers needs to accept everything isn't going to sell 4 million copies and allow creatives to add buffers between big projects.
Combine Spiderman 3 probably costing around $400,000,000, with the PS5 not selling as well as the PS4, and half of Sony's audience still on the PS4; and it's not looking good man. Thanks for watching btw!
I'm sorry but this is a dislike from me. The issue are greedy corpos that chase the biggest margin of revenue, the layoff have several reason behind, everyone is getting layed off last few years, gaming companies are only growing. And you can't consider studios 'closing', when they get bought and closed to remove competition. 70$ is enough, they should balance their budget better and pay their CEO a few millions less.
Which studios were bought and closed? I agree that C suite needs to take a pay cut
We do NOT need higher budgets. The industry needs to start resigning in budgets.
Then again, you made the stupid inflation argument despite talking about how much the industry and audience has grown.
"Stupid inflation argument?" I'm not sure what you're saying
BGs