My 2 cents. Game prices increased recently and Devs still get fired, shit down, micro transactions take priority. No amount of price increase will ever be enough. The excess income the average person has is being strained so will they make more from extra unit price and less total sales? Customers get screwed over digitally already. No physical costs, same or higher price. Not to mention you don't get the "privilege" of owning the game just a licence. I saw a meme recently saying if buying isn't ownership then piracy isn't stealing. This is a sentiment publishers are only going to further increase.
I second Austin’s point about the experience in a cine-MAH: I saw Infinity War on opening weekend and it felt WILD to be in the theater audience. When Thor showed up in Wakanda and slammed his weapon with a massive AOE, everyone (including myself) cheered their lungs out 🤩
When seemingly every AAA game has microtransactions and a bunch of DLC announced on day 1, maybe we are already effectively paying more than 50 or 60 bucks on average on games, so the complaints about the up front price being too low rings a little hollow to me. It's not like raising the price is gonna stop that practice.
@@M8gnaI don't think that matters. It's the sentiment of the thing. It feels disrespectful to have all of that and still charge $70. Day one dlc is ridiculous. It's not adding more content. It's paywalling content that should just be there in the first place.
I would add an asterik there. Sony always sells a complete experience for their AAA games. No add-on costs. God of War, Last of us, Uncharted, Ghost of Thushima, Death Stranding, Days Gone, Horizon Forbidden West /zero Dawn, ,Astro Bot, Ratchet and Clank
17:54 wait, mike, games do have that, it's called waiting for steam sale bro, this is usually how gamers respond to seemingly overpriced titles "yeah, i'm just gonna wait for a 90% discount on this one"
When you buy a novel, either your a fast reader who reads a book and is done, or your a slow reader who goes back and rereads a book multiple times the price of the book is the same.
Mike taking the "think before you speak"-mantra to new heights. Jokes aside. To hear this story from one of the most wellspoken, thoughtful minds on youtube that i can think of, feels inspiring and made my day. Thank you!
I personally miss the old model, I want high quality story driven rpgs with as many hours the devs are willing to put into it. I miss when we would get like 5-10 hour dlc extension to said stories while waiting on the next game. I really hate the current model of either free to play with shitty content drops or the game and nothing afterwards (no dlc, no expansions, barely any content updates)
"I think this is all just a demonstration that economics is simply a descriptive term for the way in which people interact and how they ascribe value to things" Literally yes. And to disagree with Mike, of course developers decide what to price their game at, just as much as consumers do. Consumers are not price setters in the video game market. While all video games are not substitutes for all other video games and there are smaller markets within the larger one, I'd argue that outside of AAA, the market is extremely competitive.
Some people might counter with the line of "inflation" and if we had to pay the real amount that we should be paying $90 or $100 but the issue with that argument is that the consumer base for games is much larger than it was before. The balance between how much work a game requires today vs how much money that game can make is way skewed to the money side, in the past you could do a lot of work but the amount of money the game could make was a lot more limited. There is also the issue that a lot more of the money that games do earn, end up going to other things that don't affect the quality or length of the game, so expecting players to pay more for the games just to send a large chunk of that to something that has nothing to do with the game just doesn't make sense.
The point is, what can and will people pay. Worth comes only in second. Greatest game of all time, price 120$, only a few people will buy it. It's an act of balance and we can only hope, the very expensive market research agencies know, what they are doing. PS5 digital is 450€, AAA Sony game 80€. The ratio is off.
The point that NEVER gets brought up on these discussions is the publishers: Capcom, since it was mentioned, had a revenue increase of 500% and a profit increase of 700% in the last 10 years. "but games have not risen in price and they cost too much" How are you making THAT much more money if the are so expensive? I love larian but, a producer complaining that their game cost too much? boohoo! Cry me a river. *You* decide the budget, I, the customer, decide how much I want to pay. It is YOUR JOB to fit those two numbers (or your financial team). The problem is that problem was already solved: the crappy f2p mobile genre. Low budget effort with high profitability. The problem is that exists a small portion (really small) that refuses to budge. Us. And publishers don't want to give up on the market share and keep trying to "convert" us to the dark side.
Capcom release DLC (some of which is free) for their games and sell MTX. They’re also really good with putting games on sale so they get more affordable and accessible to more people over time.
The worst part, a patch meant to fix ongoing bugs, may corrupt progress. So you would have to restart with a new save to keep going. The consumer has literally become QA That price tag is insane. No thanks
I quote tweeted a take once about games needing to be shorter, with the stance that i value longer experiences. And i was subsequently inundated with people calling me a dumbass. Its crazy how broad the spectrum is with what people can want from games
I too like long games but on the other hand I rarely finish most games cuz they are too long lol I've put hundreds of hrs into Valhalla and never beat it same with rdr2 and many others.
@Half-CockedG can't speak for valhalla (though I've heard it's obscene), but rdr2 didn't feel particularly long to me, maybe 30-40 hours? Which is a meaty story, but not crazy. That said, I didn't do a lot of the side content. And that's where I think a lot of the hate for longer games comes from: optional side content of varying quality. We probably wouldn't have much complaining on that though if people were able to pull themselves away from doing stuff they don't want to do. Had so many discussions with people about rebirth where they were burning out on the 100 hours of side content no one was forcing them to play haha
I definitely love seeing you guys more than you guys even realize and I’m beginning to save money so I can do the Patreon thing because I definitely want to help this podcast
Ayo. I'm sure they would say the same. If you're just beginning to save money. Actually save your money. You're not in a place where that money is expendable. They're fine. You might get an unexpected car breakdown or something.
I haven't worked in the industry in 10+ years, but back then even programmers were paid little compared to any other industry. A lot of it has to do with competition and passion. There were so many people who wanted the job that they'd be willing to make less for the opportunity. For me, I ended up moving into enterprise software development and not only made much more money, I worked FAR less. If you were to break it down to $ per hour worked, I probably make 5x as much as I would if I stayed in the game industry. I think gaming is very cheap when compared to other forms of entertainment with high production costs. I also think the quality of what you get is significantly better. I'd have no problem with $70 or more per game if I knew it was going to the people who deserve the money. My hope is that more developers see the benefits of staying private, like Larian and Hello Games, that allows them to make the decisions they want and still be very successful, while also not putting the rewards of all that work into the hands of leaders who's only contribution is deceptive marketing and predatory monetization.
Really, the question boils down to, "How much can I charge my consumer base before they decide to go read a book, or play a different game, or just pirate the thing instead of buying my game?" After that, you have to do some - probably quite tricky - calculus to figure a budget for your project.
Finally acknowledgment of the tiers. Has bothered me that when this discussion came up no one seemed to mention the lack of "increase" from $60 only applied to the base version when we have had Deluxe, Gold, Special, Ultra II Turbo Editions of every game for at least a decade now each at increasing price points. And then there's the multiple seasons passes, macrotransactions, battle passes. Sooo unless that money was actually going to the people who make the things, they're too expensive. Also, in my experience the price absolutely increased. Here in this sector of jolly old Angle Land I live, when I was a kid, RRP was £49.99 but most places sold new games at £39.99 and then when everything went digital, it was always at £49.99 until the dawn of 8th Gen when it became £59.99 but a gen later we are on £69.99 for the base version (obviously in regards to Quintuple AAAAAA games. Other things do of course sell for all kinds of prices). For those of us who aren't rich it is just the higher the up front cost the harder it is to justify spending all that money at once on a "non-essential". Plus the price of everything else has increased too (you know like food?) :/
I made a tiktok about this exact quote recently. I think the Baldurs Gate devs are just about the only people I would really hear out on this topic. Most publishers will take that extra profit and still lay off half of their developers anyway.
There exists a dividing line in the video game economy from before the $70 price increase to after it. Everything was booming (and yes right at the tail there was a burst from lock down 2020), but things were still increasing before that. Literal growth every year. Then they increased to $70 and video games immediately experienced their first flat growth year. And then... Chaos. There are so many factors at play, game dev tools have made making games cheaper and more accessible than ever, budgets on high end triple A games have exploded, record profits are still being made by many game companies, free to play games are more popular than ever, etc etc. But we still see that game purchasing has slowed overall. Of course there are always outliers (hello Black Myth Woo Kong), but in general purchasing has slowed and so has uptake on sales. Ultimate at some point the $60 price would need to increase, but you would ideally want to step ladder it by $2 every couple of years. On gaming budgets a great comparison is. The Last of Us part 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2, both games are reported to have very similar budgets. And they are games that share a lot of similarities in gameplay mechanics and style. But RDR2 is a giant open world game, while TLoU2 is more focussed. RDR2 is also a little more janky than TLoU2. A great example is how in RDR2 a lot of the equipment your character wears looks great from the regular behind character third person view, but when you pan around, you can see many of the items like your bandolier hover off the character model in a way that just wouldn't be common in TLoU2. So you can kind of see where the budgets go. That final push for fidelity is seemingly the same amount of budget as bursting out the seams of a Game and making it open world with all the bells and whistles players expect from that. One of those two games is in the top 50 best selling games of all time, the other is not. And while you can't use one game as yard stick, the top 50 best selling games are mostly games that don't have insane fidelity. Fidelity doesn't seem to be the thing that moves the needle on sales as much as studios place value in it. So some of that dev time is being misplaced. Another example, how did Spider-Man 2 have nearly the same budget as Spider-Man 1 but had a significant amount of reused assets and a shorter run time? Especially when a lot of the PS5 upgrade work was already covered in the development of Miles Morales and the PS5 remaster of the first game. Something is going wrong with budgets at some studios and they are trying to side step those issues by blaming the gaming economy and the nature of development. Anyway longest YT comment ever. Thank you to anyone who read it. Personally I won't buy a game till it's $40 or less, and now with the $70 increase it takes longer to get to that price. So I just keep playing Game Pass titles until I get the price I want. Which is great cause I'm drowning in games on that subscription.
For me personally, developers have already lost me as a customer. Here in Australia it’s been around $120-125 AUD for brand new games. 🤢 And that’s just too much for me, so now I just wait until someone throws it up on Facebook Marketplace secondhand for $50 (I’m still die-hard on my physical media). There’s no shortage of people who will buy a game day 1 just to smash it out over the weekend and sell it on. The day that console makers kill the disc completely will be a very sad day for me indeed. And you know they will, because it’s just another way to squeeze us for cash.
I’m always so jazzed to hear about people watching Amadeus for the first time, because they always seem to come away with incredibly positive impressions. It’s easily in my top 10 movies of all time, and I think I DO prefer the Director’s Cut. To Alanah, I also recommend Cinema Paradiso if you haven’t seen it. But the theatrical NOT Director’s Cut. I’m not sure why but I often pair these two films in my head among my favorites.
I feel the primary driver of longer games was games media. I don’t remember gamers complaining about short games, but I definitely remember when the reviewers of games started making it a significant factor in the review. Even today, as that they start to shift a way from letting it impact the review score, they still “warn” you if the game is 10 hours. Now, it’s absolutely clear that many gamers seem to value the length of a game. Even if they didn’t initiate, I think the media is largely to blame for widely held idea that longer games are better games.
In addition to what Austin already said about profit being a modifier on future risk, in the ideal capitalist system it is also MEANT to represent the value that the population has decided that your product has added to the world above the material costs that go into making it. It's the economic representation of the "greater than the sum of its parts" effect. Obviously, there are valid criticisms of how people chase profit out of greed and artificially inflate it, but it's so low resolution whenever anyone just hates the idea of profit and acts like it's the root of evil.
หลายเดือนก่อน +1
I think game devs should be paid more, suits less and games not get more expensive. But I guess you can't have it all. Most people I know mainly buy games a while after release at a discount because they're a bit too expensive ($70). Increasing prices would probably limit the amount of people buying them which would defeat the purpose. Actual numbers from within the industry may differ from my experience though 🤷
Regarding you guys discussing the plummeting price and growing size of projects... Especially as compared to NES game pricing... Its super important to remember the significant growth of audience in that time... for a product that is so easily reproducable (as software). At the time of the nes original release the vast VAST majority of the worlds population wouldn't glance twice at one. Now, I would guess over 50% of the worlds entire population has now played some kind of videogame, between phone games and wii's. Including developing nations.
Something Mike got right was that, indeed, indefinite hours of play are monetized by microtransactions, though something he missed is that you can choose the price you wanna pay for a game by waiting for a sale or waiting for the price to crater over a few years. Also, do these executives want us to pay every time we reread a book? Now, not a day goes by that I don’t think we need another Committee of Public Safety, mais Le Deuxieme Montagne, maintenant!
Something that I can’t wrap my head around is that some directors like Scorsese, have been making movies that didn’t even recouped their budget in their theatrical run for the past decade, but in the games industry which seemingly makes more money than Hollywood, we don’t have an equivalent to it that would work, like Druckmann would be able to make a game for 200 mill and only make 150 back. He would not be able to make another game with that kinda budget again, while “prestige” directors like Tarantino & Scorsese could do it over and over.
As you have said this is a really complex issue. As someone who has been gaming since original Tomb Raider I begrudge devs/publishers removing aspects from games to charge for them, like colour and outfit customisation. I'm willing to pay £70 for a single player, story focused game but for most devs the trust is gone. I'm not going to gamble on spending that kind of money for a badly optimised, buggy game that ends up never being fixed. I want expansions to be more popular again. I know Larian have moved on, but i would pay hundreds to get more content for that game, the same way I have bought every DLC and expansion for dragon age and mass effect. I would also appreciate shorter games again, but I think there is a sweet spot there. If a game is going to be £60-£70 I think it needs be be around the 10-30 hour mark. Less than 10 hours is when you get backlash, because that is what we expect from cheaper indie games.
AAA games cost too much to make partly cuz nowadays half of them are multi hundred million $ "live service" projects that go on to fail immediately and cost the publishers a shitton while having to be taken down completely. Atleast single player games can be sold for a long time...
The thing is as a canadian i already have to pay 90-100$ on a new game so if companies turn around and raise prices by 10$ might i still buy it, probably but there are definitely games that have come out in recent years that i see and go that looks interesting maybe i'll try it in a few years when it goes on sale for like 50%. the funny thing with BG3 is i bought it on launch for ps5 and over the past year have gone back to it a few times and put in almost 600 hours, but had they been like hey our game was expensive to make and so we're charging 150$ for it there is a good chance i and alot of other people wouldn't have bought it and it might not have exploded like it did because it was too expensive.
I have a receipt for the retail purchase of The Bard's Tale III in 1988. It was $79.95 here in Canada. $79.95 is the price I pay for new games today. Everything else has gone up in price, why haven't games?
For my money, the only way that games are 'too expensive' is that I just can't afford many games on what I'm getting paid currently. That's on bills and food/drink etc though. I still remember back around 1998-2000 happily paying upwards of $100 for a copy of Vandal Hearts on PS1. I'd played it on a friend's PS1 and bought it before I even had my own PS1 because I loved it that much. And from memory, games haven't really changed in price a great deal since then. It's not really games that have gotten too expensive, it's everything else that eats into our entertainment/leisure budgets. That being said, there are a lot of shitty games out there that sell for far too much (see Hede's games on Steam for a great example) so that could be skewing people's perspectives a bit.
I almost always wait for a sale. My whole PS wishlist is of new games. Certain publishers I do spend that $70 bc I know the game is worth my money & I will replay it multiple times. CDPR, RGG, Rockstar. I would be okay with a price increase if the people actually making my games get a bigger cut which I know won’t happen.
One of the reasons I didnt buy Star Wars Outlaws was because of the high prices starting at £70 to £120. Apart from that, its a Ubisoft game, and they have a past of putting out dodgy games. As its is now, when a person buys a AAA game, it is a gamble to the consumer as to the quality and performance of the game at release. You might get a polished game, that runs near perfect and bug free, or you may get a buggy mess that runs at 20 fps. Who wants to pay £100 for a game that runs at 20 fps and is full of bugs? I think if game prices go up any significant amount, I think the only way consumers are going to have any confidence in the game, or industry in general, is if they can play the game as a demo for say 2 hours to see how it runs and plays and if they can see if there are things like microtransactions in the game. I think consumers have to have hands on experience as, I think confidence in youtube and games influencer reviews has fallen. The One reason I bought Final Fantasy 16, was cause I played a playable demo. I had no interest at all in the game, before I played the demo. I also played Baldurs Gate 3 demo, and thought it wasnt for me.
Too many people simply do not have disposable income anymore. Sure, I believe that the costs of making shinier and shinier things keep going up. And inflation surely keeps the costs of everything going up. But costs of living (groceries, rent/housing, healthcare) keep going up, too, and often from artificial manipulation, while wages have been stagnant for decades. People are struggling and don't have enough money to buy the games they want. Could you justify increasing prices for AAA games and blockbuster films on the industry end? I'm sure, but consumers are increasingly unable to justify paying for them, whether they go up in price or not. So many can't afford to house themselves or support a family even on multiple incomes. Our wealth has been extracted and hoarded by a very small number of people, so we cannot spend it. It's unsustainable. The tide must rise to lift all the boats.
I am old (50) , i have been gaming since i was 6 years old (atari) i think compared with the old games actual ones are cheaper but there are much more so the chance of failure is higher
Videogames should be and are cheaper, devs already sell games at a good price for other countries where buying them at the US/EU price would be crazy. So mostly they charge a bunch because they can. Like they said "waiting for GTA to do it so we can"
I was a supporter of buying games at launch. But the quality of the AAA games on launch has gone down, in my perception. Corporate suits and investors get the money and the money doesn’t go into new projects or to the actual devs of the games. So, that is why I stopped buying games at full price. Also, additional monetization is everywhere.
I know it's all relative but I'd love for games to be 60- 70. In Canada, AAA games are priced at 80..with Ontario tax its 90. So with the ps5 games (and totk) having gotten a price increase, it's literally 100 per game.. Which is why as much as I want to support devs, almost all my first parry games are on a steep sale or used.
The question that is usually on my mind a lot is which part of game dev spending takes the most amount of money production wise (minus marketing)? Is it salaries? Does someone know a rough percentage?
There are a bunch of free to play games on the market, so if the cost of games keeps going up I will just stick to playing those instead of buying games...
give a chance to WARFRAME, Alanah Thousands of hours of AAA quality and yet free content, still going strong after 11 years. Mike would appreciate the narative and dozens of different gameplay mechanics and Austin would get a kick out of the soundtrack too
While the discussion here is good, the numbers seem... just wrong, at least as a Finn playing on Playstation. Quite a few new AAA games are near 80€ already. Veilguard, AC: Shadows, and the rest are 70€, Space Marine, Astro Bot, Wukong, etc. Then there's the 110€ deluxe super special editions. I think, Baldur's Gate 3 last year was one of the rare 60€ games. So either the prices you discuss are on PC and/or in US, because otherwise none of this makes sense haha.
Maybe in a future podcast you can discuss the necessity for a global release time on games. I.e I took the day off for space marines 2 today with a friend and it doesn't go live digitally until 5pm. Meanwhile the US it will be noon. Why can't it just go live at noon regionally. The game is pre downloaded. Physical copies will be playable immediately whenever you buy it that morning.
I mean this one is fairly simple: so people don’t feel the need to change the time zone on their console or make alt accounts to play games earlier in their regions. I don’t think this could warrant a podcast discussion.
The only rich person I can think of making a game of his own was Curt Schilling. And if I remember right the game was okay but it failed massively and the hole thing went down in a massive pile of debt and lawsuits. Probably one of many reasons he still isn't in the Hall of Fame for baseball.
You also can't compare indies or small games that blew up vs bigger games because of inherent salaries. No dev who makes a stable income would risk making a stardew while making peanuts, hoping it to blow up. I can guarantee they rather want to make madden, more stable income on a series that will go on forever.
Personal opinion: Rockstar might be one of the only game studios who could charge $100 for a game and still be fine. People will pitch a fit over it but they’ll still pay it. For other studios with less trust, it’ll hurt the full price sales a lot because even at $60 or $70, I don’t feel the need to commit to many games on day 1, and certainly not ones that aren’t receiving near universal acclaim.
So I think this is a weird ouroboros of a problem. Publishers may be absolutely right that AAA games have astronomical costs and that games have been inflation proof for more than a quarter century. But, the flip side is that at the AAA price point, the rising costs have made the industry more and more risk averse and less innovative and inspiring, and as such, they fail to meet expectations that comes associated with the premium price point an alarming percentage of the time. When you are failing to meet or betraying those expectations (with practices like day one DLC, bad/buggy launches, yearslong Early Access launches etc.) it is nigh impossible to have the discussion about needing to raise the upfront price point, because humans are very binary in their value analyses of entertainment purchases. You either got your money's worth (and I think the gaming audience would do well to remember when they're effusive about this particular point, the publishing director for Larian is right -- Baldur's Gate III is an experience well worth $100 and we need to be able to admit that for this discussion to have the nuance it needs) or you got fleeced out of the entire sum. No one plays a marginally bad to mediocre AAA game and goes "Well okay, I got 31 dollars out of this, so I overpaid by 29 dollars." They throw their hands up in frustration and despair and shout "I got screwed!" in their thinking, they just set fire to 60 dollars with zero value extraction. Im lucky, I can more or less afford the price increase without any impact, so on a personal level I'd like to encourage the shift because I know how little game developers make and I want to support that endeavor. But I haven't forgotten what it was like to scrimp and save for months at a time to purchase one of two potential N64 cartridges and then come away feeling despondent when the coin flip didn't go my way (This is where we all glower at Superman 64). Furthermore I also know that the price increase wouldn't go to the rank and file. It won't reduce crunch. It'll go towards shareholder value. So I don't know what to do as a consumer. I am absolutely 100% willing to spend more on video games that are fun to play, work right out of the box and don't engage in duplicitous practices like child gambling or selling my data as a secondary revenue stream. I am 100% willing to spend $70 or $80 or even $100 on a premium game that is made under conditions that don't erode the physical and mental health of the thousands of passionate creatives that made it a reality. But I am absolutely 100% not willing to agree to that price change until the corporate behaviors improve first, because they will only ever do the bare minimum of what I let them get away with.
I think studio teams should be fighting their bosses to make smaller scale shorter games that are a tighter experience that you can beat in well under 20 hours. Hell, maybe that should part of union negotiations. I think people want that more and more anyway. Everyone's getting burned out on open world live Service garbage the execs keep insisting is good. It's always the execs insisting on making everything bigger and drawn out for more and more money, and games only really sustain their play time in the 100's of hours by making your repeat tasks, and that burns out anyway eventually. Ultimately it's the upper echelons of companies and their shareholders who are squeezing people from both sides, and it's gotta give eventually.
I dont make a lot of money and its a huge investment to pay 70 dollars for a game for a game for me especially if I don't end up liking it so I buy like 1 or 2 AAA full price games a year and I wish that me paying more meant devs would get better pay and working conditions but that doesn't seem to be the case most of the time so it feels like im just inflating the value of a publisher and that sucks
Companies have been devaluing games for years. I played through Outlaws and paid €18 for it. Why would I ever pay full price for a Ubisoft game again. The same goes for Xbox. But I paid 70€ for Astro Bot. Yeah, I don't own those games, but you can't own games on PC anyway (except on GOG).
I questioned the price of £70 for The Last of Us Part 1 Remake was too much. But if you say a cinema ticket is £10 for a standard seat, w hours a film on average, that’s £5 an hour. Considering TLOU takes around 13 hours to complete the story on, it’s about the same price as a £5/hour cinema ticket, which to me is fair. Now if you spend 40 hours to complete the Platinum Trophy and enjoy that experience, it’s even better value. Sure, now gamers will argue about companies making millions off micro transactions and games should be cheaper because of that, but what are cinema snacks if not micro transactions to enhance your experience? Theatres don’t deduct money off your ticket because you bought snacks and a drink, and I don’t think games should either. That said, in both industries, the top of the triangles take the largest rewards and the lowest risk to the job security, which is wrong. That needs balancing. For the games industry in particular though, each title needs to find that balance of the right retail price to be accessible, profitable and provide the best sustainability for their staff.
The video game not expensive enough argument has always been nonsense. More people buy games now than ever before. Sure the costs have gone up but so has the revenues. Back in the day the biggest selling games could barely get to a couple of million dollars. Nowadays an average selling one can hit 10s to 100s millions with great blockbusters hitting a billion. Not to mention the live service juggernauts are hitting billions every quarter. Insanity. Gaming companies are making more money than ever before. The real problem is that AAA publishers cannot afford to make bad games anymore. They loss is very large if your game flops and oh how they are flopping recently. The problem isn't that the game cost too much the problem is they keep making bad games. Its not a subjective/preference thing either. AAA publishers have forgotten the basic first rule of making a product. Who is it for, who is your target market. They say its everybody and when a product is for everybody its for no one. Concord is the most recent example of it. Wtf is that game for. For contrast look at BG3. That game is not for everyone. It is for a very niche market. But almost everyone in that target market bought it. Seeing that even people not in the target market became curious and was like hey let me try it out I might like it. Some did and some didn't and there's nothing wrong with than. Now if they made bg3 for Everyone or the mass greater audience, half the people in the original target market would not have bought it. Because its would not be a game they wanted anymore. And no one in the greater market would care.
If GTA 6 is $100 most people will still buy it, and parents will be nagged into getting it for their children. If people cant afford it or decide not to get it, they would just save their money until they could afford it, or the hype gets to a point where they feel the NEED to buy it. Depending on the game, the financial figure of $70 for example is a arbitrary. If you really want something, you will get it regardless.
I know it was a joke and you guys would never do a partnership for NFT's but the thought of the nft monkey version of you 3... I would both laugh and it would break my heart into a thousand pieces lol
Hi, It's a complicated situation. Clearly clouded in various shades of gray. We should probably stop trying to reduce it to binary answers of yes/no. Any reliable answers will only be found with a thorough unbiased investigation of the question. Which seems unlikely as talking about games has become gamers vs devs vs journalist's. Instead of bipartisan discussions that would likely benefit us all. Take care & have a good one
I’m a big advocate for shorter games. I love a highly curated 10-20 hour experience rather than 100 hours of fetch quest after collector-ton. Baulder’s Gate 3/Witcher 3 being exceptions.
If GTA costs more than $70 at launch then I'm definitely not buying it at launch. I wasn't a big GTAV fan anyway, never beat it, and Take Two is going to make so much money on that game without my money just from the onliine alone in the next ten years. And say it does cost more and others follow suit, then I can just buy less games at launch. I've already learned that I don't have wait long if I want to get Ubisoft games at a discounted price when they're still fairly new, and earlier this year I bought Persona 3 Reload for $40 a month after it released. I've got plenty in my backlog. However, I do say that and still won't wait for a new Final Fantasy, among others. So I guess in the end I'll still be a sucker, but only for some things. Go me?
If a game sells so many units why doesn’t some of that money trickle back to the programmers and the writers just like it does in movies when a movie makes a certain level of money. It should be the same concept that way something trickles back to the programmers and the writers.
It's a bit apples and oranges. Movies are not made by salaried employees. Basically everyone is a freelancer. Some royalties are negotiated, including some which are union-required for applicable projects (like SAG and WGA, etc). In contrast, at many (most?) game devs, the employees have salaries, benefits, and not only are there fairly common sales bonuses for employees (at least at bigger companies) but also bear in mind that those profits fund the salaries for upcoming projects. So huge windfalls are worth job security which, in a world of mass layoffs, would seemingly be very valuable. This is a simplification of course, but they are very different business models.
Gacha games. 99% of the game is free. You pay in hours or money depending of what you as a player choose. Genshin Impact, Wuthering Waves, Tower of Fantasy, Blue Protocol. All these are technically mobile games but no ads. Thousands to hundreds of thousands of people play these game for free, while others are willing to spend hundreds for a single character. This in the form of virtual “Gacha” machines to pull for characters and weapons to play as. In the most successful gacha games you can obtain 99% of the game for free if you choose to play regularly, and it’s only the “whales” that are essentially paying for the game for all of us. I mainly put this here because I’ve never heard it brought up on the podcast before. I would be very interested in what everyone thinks of this
I think all of this is only relevant to people who buy games on release. It's been years since a game came out I'd be willing to buy on release, even an indie game. I always wait for a decent sale, even though I could afford the release date price.
I remember way back in 2003 asking my step dad to buy me Knights of the Old Republic, it cost $120 (NZD) for a game that I could fully complete in about 35hrs. Twenty years later I could buy the latest bioware RPG, with 6x the context, infinitely better visuals, better performance, the music's probably of the same quality, but there's more of it, and all the quality of life features of the modern age, for the same price!
!["สนธิ" ห่วงมีขบวนการปกป้อง "ทนายตั้ม" : [THE MESSAGE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/2GQNp3EoMc0/mqdefault.jpg)
I know when I've watched too much PWL when Mike says, "Surely this has come up on the show" and I say "No! Talk about your childhood speech problems!"
I always wondered about the incongruity of his leftist politics and posh accent, makes more sense now!
My 2 cents. Game prices increased recently and Devs still get fired, shit down, micro transactions take priority. No amount of price increase will ever be enough.
The excess income the average person has is being strained so will they make more from extra unit price and less total sales?
Customers get screwed over digitally already. No physical costs, same or higher price. Not to mention you don't get the "privilege" of owning the game just a licence. I saw a meme recently saying if buying isn't ownership then piracy isn't stealing. This is a sentiment publishers are only going to further increase.
I second Austin’s point about the experience in a cine-MAH: I saw Infinity War on opening weekend and it felt WILD to be in the theater audience. When Thor showed up in Wakanda and slammed his weapon with a massive AOE, everyone (including myself) cheered their lungs out 🤩
When seemingly every AAA game has microtransactions and a bunch of DLC announced on day 1, maybe we are already effectively paying more than 50 or 60 bucks on average on games, so the complaints about the up front price being too low rings a little hollow to me. It's not like raising the price is gonna stop that practice.
The overwhelming majority of players do not buy most DLCs.
@@M8gnaI don't think that matters. It's the sentiment of the thing. It feels disrespectful to have all of that and still charge $70. Day one dlc is ridiculous. It's not adding more content. It's paywalling content that should just be there in the first place.
I would add an asterik there. Sony always sells a complete experience for their AAA games. No add-on costs. God of War, Last of us, Uncharted, Ghost of Thushima, Death Stranding, Days Gone, Horizon Forbidden West /zero Dawn, ,Astro Bot, Ratchet and Clank
17:54 wait, mike, games do have that, it's called waiting for steam sale bro, this is usually how gamers respond to seemingly overpriced titles "yeah, i'm just gonna wait for a 90% discount on this one"
When you buy a novel, either your a fast reader who reads a book and is done, or your a slow reader who goes back and rereads a book multiple times the price of the book is the same.
Good to see Troy back on the cast 😆
Mike taking the "think before you speak"-mantra to new heights.
Jokes aside.
To hear this story from one of the most wellspoken, thoughtful minds on youtube that i can think of, feels inspiring and made my day.
Thank you!
I personally miss the old model, I want high quality story driven rpgs with as many hours the devs are willing to put into it. I miss when we would get like 5-10 hour dlc extension to said stories while waiting on the next game. I really hate the current model of either free to play with shitty content drops or the game and nothing afterwards (no dlc, no expansions, barely any content updates)
A new episode of PWL is always a good day. Great topic, too.
"I think this is all just a demonstration that economics is simply a descriptive term for the way in which people interact and how they ascribe value to things"
Literally yes.
And to disagree with Mike, of course developers decide what to price their game at, just as much as consumers do. Consumers are not price setters in the video game market. While all video games are not substitutes for all other video games and there are smaller markets within the larger one, I'd argue that outside of AAA, the market is extremely competitive.
One of my favorite podcasts. I hope they continue this forever!
Some people might counter with the line of "inflation" and if we had to pay the real amount that we should be paying $90 or $100 but the issue with that argument is that the consumer base for games is much larger than it was before. The balance between how much work a game requires today vs how much money that game can make is way skewed to the money side, in the past you could do a lot of work but the amount of money the game could make was a lot more limited.
There is also the issue that a lot more of the money that games do earn, end up going to other things that don't affect the quality or length of the game, so expecting players to pay more for the games just to send a large chunk of that to something that has nothing to do with the game just doesn't make sense.
i love this podcast so much
Sadly if they go deeper into the $120 AUD for base games here in Australia .. i'll be put off buying a lot more games in future.
The point is, what can and will people pay. Worth comes only in second. Greatest game of all time, price 120$, only a few people will buy it. It's an act of balance and we can only hope, the very expensive market research agencies know, what they are doing. PS5 digital is 450€, AAA Sony game 80€. The ratio is off.
The point that NEVER gets brought up on these discussions is the publishers: Capcom, since it was mentioned, had a revenue increase of 500% and a profit increase of 700% in the last 10 years. "but games have not risen in price and they cost too much" How are you making THAT much more money if the are so expensive?
I love larian but, a producer complaining that their game cost too much? boohoo! Cry me a river. *You* decide the budget, I, the customer, decide how much I want to pay. It is YOUR JOB to fit those two numbers (or your financial team).
The problem is that problem was already solved: the crappy f2p mobile genre. Low budget effort with high profitability. The problem is that exists a small portion (really small) that refuses to budge. Us. And publishers don't want to give up on the market share and keep trying to "convert" us to the dark side.
Capcom release DLC (some of which is free) for their games and sell MTX. They’re also really good with putting games on sale so they get more affordable and accessible to more people over time.
ok
@@17Haru17 Capcom itself was *not* the point. Pick any publisher: for the vast majority of them the situation is very similar.
The pillow... the pillow!
Srsly, what's with the pillow?!
Guessing she doesn't know he's a cat abuser.
@@HugoRodallega20 who is it?
Forgot his name Hasbulla I think. Was big awhile ago because he looks like a kid but he's a man.
@@HugoRodallega20 thanks, yeah it looks like him and the cat video sucks.
Yeah the price of starwars outlaws is completely fucked 89.99 Cad and the gold is 144$ what the fuck lol
The worst part, a patch meant to fix ongoing bugs, may corrupt progress. So you would have to restart with a new save to keep going.
The consumer has literally become QA
That price tag is insane. No thanks
That $20-30 or whatever for "early access" to a game is highway robbery. And it's being done EVERYWHERE now.
I quote tweeted a take once about games needing to be shorter, with the stance that i value longer experiences. And i was subsequently inundated with people calling me a dumbass. Its crazy how broad the spectrum is with what people can want from games
I too like long games but on the other hand I rarely finish most games cuz they are too long lol I've put hundreds of hrs into Valhalla and never beat it same with rdr2 and many others.
@Half-CockedG can't speak for valhalla (though I've heard it's obscene), but rdr2 didn't feel particularly long to me, maybe 30-40 hours? Which is a meaty story, but not crazy. That said, I didn't do a lot of the side content. And that's where I think a lot of the hate for longer games comes from: optional side content of varying quality. We probably wouldn't have much complaining on that though if people were able to pull themselves away from doing stuff they don't want to do. Had so many discussions with people about rebirth where they were burning out on the 100 hours of side content no one was forcing them to play haha
Now I want to hear Mike say "Leviosa!"
I definitely love seeing you guys more than you guys even realize and I’m beginning to save money so I can do the Patreon thing because I definitely want to help this podcast
Ayo. I'm sure they would say the same. If you're just beginning to save money. Actually save your money. You're not in a place where that money is expendable. They're fine. You might get an unexpected car breakdown or something.
Great episode. Very interesting topic and surprisingly about video games. Look forward to the next one.
Excellent episode as always, gang. Feel like I learned at least 13 new things during this conversation.
Im surprised Mike didnt say anything when Austin kept saying Nitch instead of Niché. Since he is so perfect with Cinemaaa 😂
I haven't worked in the industry in 10+ years, but back then even programmers were paid little compared to any other industry. A lot of it has to do with competition and passion. There were so many people who wanted the job that they'd be willing to make less for the opportunity. For me, I ended up moving into enterprise software development and not only made much more money, I worked FAR less. If you were to break it down to $ per hour worked, I probably make 5x as much as I would if I stayed in the game industry.
I think gaming is very cheap when compared to other forms of entertainment with high production costs. I also think the quality of what you get is significantly better. I'd have no problem with $70 or more per game if I knew it was going to the people who deserve the money.
My hope is that more developers see the benefits of staying private, like Larian and Hello Games, that allows them to make the decisions they want and still be very successful, while also not putting the rewards of all that work into the hands of leaders who's only contribution is deceptive marketing and predatory monetization.
Preach.
Really, the question boils down to, "How much can I charge my consumer base before they decide to go read a book, or play a different game, or just pirate the thing instead of buying my game?"
After that, you have to do some - probably quite tricky - calculus to figure a budget for your project.
Finally acknowledgment of the tiers. Has bothered me that when this discussion came up no one seemed to mention the lack of "increase" from $60 only applied to the base version when we have had Deluxe, Gold, Special, Ultra II Turbo Editions of every game for at least a decade now each at increasing price points. And then there's the multiple seasons passes, macrotransactions, battle passes. Sooo unless that money was actually going to the people who make the things, they're too expensive.
Also, in my experience the price absolutely increased. Here in this sector of jolly old Angle Land I live, when I was a kid, RRP was £49.99 but most places sold new games at £39.99 and then when everything went digital, it was always at £49.99 until the dawn of 8th Gen when it became £59.99 but a gen later we are on £69.99 for the base version (obviously in regards to Quintuple AAAAAA games. Other things do of course sell for all kinds of prices).
For those of us who aren't rich it is just the higher the up front cost the harder it is to justify spending all that money at once on a "non-essential". Plus the price of everything else has increased too (you know like food?) :/
the cinema ticket comparison sounds more like an argument to make tickets cheaper
I made a tiktok about this exact quote recently. I think the Baldurs Gate devs are just about the only people I would really hear out on this topic. Most publishers will take that extra profit and still lay off half of their developers anyway.
There exists a dividing line in the video game economy from before the $70 price increase to after it. Everything was booming (and yes right at the tail there was a burst from lock down 2020), but things were still increasing before that. Literal growth every year. Then they increased to $70 and video games immediately experienced their first flat growth year. And then... Chaos. There are so many factors at play, game dev tools have made making games cheaper and more accessible than ever, budgets on high end triple A games have exploded, record profits are still being made by many game companies, free to play games are more popular than ever, etc etc. But we still see that game purchasing has slowed overall. Of course there are always outliers (hello Black Myth Woo Kong), but in general purchasing has slowed and so has uptake on sales. Ultimate at some point the $60 price would need to increase, but you would ideally want to step ladder it by $2 every couple of years.
On gaming budgets a great comparison is. The Last of Us part 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2, both games are reported to have very similar budgets. And they are games that share a lot of similarities in gameplay mechanics and style. But RDR2 is a giant open world game, while TLoU2 is more focussed. RDR2 is also a little more janky than TLoU2. A great example is how in RDR2 a lot of the equipment your character wears looks great from the regular behind character third person view, but when you pan around, you can see many of the items like your bandolier hover off the character model in a way that just wouldn't be common in TLoU2. So you can kind of see where the budgets go. That final push for fidelity is seemingly the same amount of budget as bursting out the seams of a Game and making it open world with all the bells and whistles players expect from that. One of those two games is in the top 50 best selling games of all time, the other is not. And while you can't use one game as yard stick, the top 50 best selling games are mostly games that don't have insane fidelity. Fidelity doesn't seem to be the thing that moves the needle on sales as much as studios place value in it. So some of that dev time is being misplaced. Another example, how did Spider-Man 2 have nearly the same budget as Spider-Man 1 but had a significant amount of reused assets and a shorter run time? Especially when a lot of the PS5 upgrade work was already covered in the development of Miles Morales and the PS5 remaster of the first game. Something is going wrong with budgets at some studios and they are trying to side step those issues by blaming the gaming economy and the nature of development.
Anyway longest YT comment ever. Thank you to anyone who read it. Personally I won't buy a game till it's $40 or less, and now with the $70 increase it takes longer to get to that price. So I just keep playing Game Pass titles until I get the price I want. Which is great cause I'm drowning in games on that subscription.
For me personally, developers have already lost me as a customer. Here in Australia it’s been around $120-125 AUD for brand new games. 🤢 And that’s just too much for me, so now I just wait until someone throws it up on Facebook Marketplace secondhand for $50 (I’m still die-hard on my physical media). There’s no shortage of people who will buy a game day 1 just to smash it out over the weekend and sell it on.
The day that console makers kill the disc completely will be a very sad day for me indeed. And you know they will, because it’s just another way to squeeze us for cash.
I’m always so jazzed to hear about people watching Amadeus for the first time, because they always seem to come away with incredibly positive impressions. It’s easily in my top 10 movies of all time, and I think I DO prefer the Director’s Cut. To Alanah, I also recommend Cinema Paradiso if you haven’t seen it. But the theatrical NOT Director’s Cut. I’m not sure why but I often pair these two films in my head among my favorites.
I feel the primary driver of longer games was games media. I don’t remember gamers complaining about short games, but I definitely remember when the reviewers of games started making it a significant factor in the review. Even today, as that they start to shift a way from letting it impact the review score, they still “warn” you if the game is 10 hours. Now, it’s absolutely clear that many gamers seem to value the length of a game. Even if they didn’t initiate, I think the media is largely to blame for widely held idea that longer games are better games.
In addition to what Austin already said about profit being a modifier on future risk, in the ideal capitalist system it is also MEANT to represent the value that the population has decided that your product has added to the world above the material costs that go into making it. It's the economic representation of the "greater than the sum of its parts" effect.
Obviously, there are valid criticisms of how people chase profit out of greed and artificially inflate it, but it's so low resolution whenever anyone just hates the idea of profit and acts like it's the root of evil.
I think game devs should be paid more, suits less and games not get more expensive. But I guess you can't have it all. Most people I know mainly buy games a while after release at a discount because they're a bit too expensive ($70). Increasing prices would probably limit the amount of people buying them which would defeat the purpose.
Actual numbers from within the industry may differ from my experience though 🤷
Regarding you guys discussing the plummeting price and growing size of projects... Especially as compared to NES game pricing... Its super important to remember the significant growth of audience in that time... for a product that is so easily reproducable (as software). At the time of the nes original release the vast VAST majority of the worlds population wouldn't glance twice at one. Now, I would guess over 50% of the worlds entire population has now played some kind of videogame, between phone games and wii's. Including developing nations.
Something Mike got right was that, indeed, indefinite hours of play are monetized by microtransactions, though something he missed is that you can choose the price you wanna pay for a game by waiting for a sale or waiting for the price to crater over a few years.
Also, do these executives want us to pay every time we reread a book?
Now, not a day goes by that I don’t think we need another Committee of Public Safety, mais Le Deuxieme Montagne, maintenant!
Something that I can’t wrap my head around is that some directors like Scorsese, have been making movies that didn’t even recouped their budget in their theatrical run for the past decade, but in the games industry which seemingly makes more money than Hollywood, we don’t have an equivalent to it that would work, like Druckmann would be able to make a game for 200 mill and only make 150 back. He would not be able to make another game with that kinda budget again, while “prestige” directors like Tarantino & Scorsese could do it over and over.
As you have said this is a really complex issue. As someone who has been gaming since original Tomb Raider I begrudge devs/publishers removing aspects from games to charge for them, like colour and outfit customisation.
I'm willing to pay £70 for a single player, story focused game but for most devs the trust is gone. I'm not going to gamble on spending that kind of money for a badly optimised, buggy game that ends up never being fixed.
I want expansions to be more popular again. I know Larian have moved on, but i would pay hundreds to get more content for that game, the same way I have bought every DLC and expansion for dragon age and mass effect.
I would also appreciate shorter games again, but I think there is a sweet spot there. If a game is going to be £60-£70 I think it needs be be around the 10-30 hour mark. Less than 10 hours is when you get backlash, because that is what we expect from cheaper indie games.
AAA games cost too much to make partly cuz nowadays half of them are multi hundred million $ "live service" projects that go on to fail immediately and cost the publishers a shitton while having to be taken down completely. Atleast single player games can be sold for a long time...
The thing is as a canadian i already have to pay 90-100$ on a new game so if companies turn around and raise prices by 10$ might i still buy it, probably but there are definitely games that have come out in recent years that i see and go that looks interesting maybe i'll try it in a few years when it goes on sale for like 50%. the funny thing with BG3 is i bought it on launch for ps5 and over the past year have gone back to it a few times and put in almost 600 hours, but had they been like hey our game was expensive to make and so we're charging 150$ for it there is a good chance i and alot of other people wouldn't have bought it and it might not have exploded like it did because it was too expensive.
I have a receipt for the retail purchase of The Bard's Tale III in 1988. It was $79.95 here in Canada. $79.95 is the price I pay for new games today. Everything else has gone up in price, why haven't games?
For my money, the only way that games are 'too expensive' is that I just can't afford many games on what I'm getting paid currently. That's on bills and food/drink etc though. I still remember back around 1998-2000 happily paying upwards of $100 for a copy of Vandal Hearts on PS1. I'd played it on a friend's PS1 and bought it before I even had my own PS1 because I loved it that much. And from memory, games haven't really changed in price a great deal since then. It's not really games that have gotten too expensive, it's everything else that eats into our entertainment/leisure budgets.
That being said, there are a lot of shitty games out there that sell for far too much (see Hede's games on Steam for a great example) so that could be skewing people's perspectives a bit.
Thank you guys for making my insomnia cool
I almost always wait for a sale. My whole PS wishlist is of new games. Certain publishers I do spend that $70 bc I know the game is worth my money & I will replay it multiple times. CDPR, RGG, Rockstar. I would be okay with a price increase if the people actually making my games get a bigger cut which I know won’t happen.
Economics is a human science not a financial one, according to my favourite economics lecture at university
One of the reasons I didnt buy Star Wars Outlaws was because of the high prices starting at £70 to £120. Apart from that, its a Ubisoft game, and they have a past of putting out dodgy games. As its is now, when a person buys a AAA game, it is a gamble to the consumer as to the quality and performance of the game at release. You might get a polished game, that runs near perfect and bug free, or you may get a buggy mess that runs at 20 fps. Who wants to pay £100 for a game that runs at 20 fps and is full of bugs?
I think if game prices go up any significant amount, I think the only way consumers are going to have any confidence in the game, or industry in general, is if they can play the game as a demo for say 2 hours to see how it runs and plays and if they can see if there are things like microtransactions in the game. I think consumers have to have hands on experience as, I think confidence in youtube and games influencer reviews has fallen.
The One reason I bought Final Fantasy 16, was cause I played a playable demo. I had no interest at all in the game, before I played the demo. I also played Baldurs Gate 3 demo, and thought it wasnt for me.
Too many people simply do not have disposable income anymore. Sure, I believe that the costs of making shinier and shinier things keep going up. And inflation surely keeps the costs of everything going up. But costs of living (groceries, rent/housing, healthcare) keep going up, too, and often from artificial manipulation, while wages have been stagnant for decades.
People are struggling and don't have enough money to buy the games they want. Could you justify increasing prices for AAA games and blockbuster films on the industry end? I'm sure, but consumers are increasingly unable to justify paying for them, whether they go up in price or not. So many can't afford to house themselves or support a family even on multiple incomes. Our wealth has been extracted and hoarded by a very small number of people, so we cannot spend it. It's unsustainable. The tide must rise to lift all the boats.
we need an AAA Studio CFO simulator with competitive multiplayer where fake live services battle each other
Can the Troy pillow get it's own Camera and box on the screen? :)
I am old (50) , i have been gaming since i was 6 years old (atari) i think compared with the old games actual ones are cheaper but there are much more so the chance of failure is higher
I see new P,W,L i click like because me likey. *The following is said in a Jim Carrey voice*: I like it a lot.
Videogames should be and are cheaper, devs already sell games at a good price for other countries where buying them at the US/EU price would be crazy.
So mostly they charge a bunch because they can. Like they said "waiting for GTA to do it so we can"
Yes as you say a specific type of game is way too expensive already imo.
I was a supporter of buying games at launch. But the quality of the AAA games on launch has gone down, in my perception. Corporate suits and investors get the money and the money doesn’t go into new projects or to the actual devs of the games. So, that is why I stopped buying games at full price. Also, additional monetization is everywhere.
I know it's all relative but I'd love for games to be 60- 70.
In Canada, AAA games are priced at 80..with Ontario tax its 90. So with the ps5 games (and totk) having gotten a price increase, it's literally 100 per game..
Which is why as much as I want to support devs, almost all my first parry games are on a steep sale or used.
The question that is usually on my mind a lot is which part of game dev spending takes the most amount of money production wise (minus marketing)? Is it salaries? Does someone know a rough percentage?
Have you watched 'Bridging The Rift'? It's a behind the scenes documentary of Arcane and it is almost as gripping as the show itself!
In short. The audience and developers are often (not always) at odds when it comes to cost and content value. …and qualify.
Yes that is well known in economics though
I only talk shit about Rockstar constantly releasing content for GTA Online because I want content for RDR Online. 😭
There are a bunch of free to play games on the market, so if the cost of games keeps going up I will just stick to playing those instead of buying games...
give a chance to WARFRAME, Alanah
Thousands of hours of AAA quality and yet free content, still going strong after 11 years.
Mike would appreciate the narative and dozens of different gameplay mechanics and Austin would get a kick out of the soundtrack too
While the discussion here is good, the numbers seem... just wrong, at least as a Finn playing on Playstation. Quite a few new AAA games are near 80€ already. Veilguard, AC: Shadows, and the rest are 70€, Space Marine, Astro Bot, Wukong, etc. Then there's the 110€ deluxe super special editions.
I think, Baldur's Gate 3 last year was one of the rare 60€ games. So either the prices you discuss are on PC and/or in US, because otherwise none of this makes sense haha.
Damn. And here I thought all the many editions now a day were done just for fun.
City builder where you have to navigate planning permissions in realtime. You can't even start the game in the next 10 years.
Maybe in a future podcast you can discuss the necessity for a global release time on games. I.e I took the day off for space marines 2 today with a friend and it doesn't go live digitally until 5pm. Meanwhile the US it will be noon. Why can't it just go live at noon regionally.
The game is pre downloaded. Physical copies will be playable immediately whenever you buy it that morning.
I mean this one is fairly simple: so people don’t feel the need to change the time zone on their console or make alt accounts to play games earlier in their regions. I don’t think this could warrant a podcast discussion.
The only rich person I can think of making a game of his own was Curt Schilling. And if I remember right the game was okay but it failed massively and the hole thing went down in a massive pile of debt and lawsuits. Probably one of many reasons he still isn't in the Hall of Fame for baseball.
Personally paying £60 is far from enough for me. Luckily a few drop off the price from £69.99 to around £60.
You also can't compare indies or small games that blew up vs bigger games because of inherent salaries. No dev who makes a stable income would risk making a stardew while making peanuts, hoping it to blow up. I can guarantee they rather want to make madden, more stable income on a series that will go on forever.
Personal opinion: Rockstar might be one of the only game studios who could charge $100 for a game and still be fine. People will pitch a fit over it but they’ll still pay it. For other studios with less trust, it’ll hurt the full price sales a lot because even at $60 or $70, I don’t feel the need to commit to many games on day 1, and certainly not ones that aren’t receiving near universal acclaim.
DA BOI! HASBULLA!
So I think this is a weird ouroboros of a problem. Publishers may be absolutely right that AAA games have astronomical costs and that games have been inflation proof for more than a quarter century. But, the flip side is that at the AAA price point, the rising costs have made the industry more and more risk averse and less innovative and inspiring, and as such, they fail to meet expectations that comes associated with the premium price point an alarming percentage of the time. When you are failing to meet or betraying those expectations (with practices like day one DLC, bad/buggy launches, yearslong Early Access launches etc.) it is nigh impossible to have the discussion about needing to raise the upfront price point, because humans are very binary in their value analyses of entertainment purchases. You either got your money's worth (and I think the gaming audience would do well to remember when they're effusive about this particular point, the publishing director for Larian is right -- Baldur's Gate III is an experience well worth $100 and we need to be able to admit that for this discussion to have the nuance it needs) or you got fleeced out of the entire sum. No one plays a marginally bad to mediocre AAA game and goes "Well okay, I got 31 dollars out of this, so I overpaid by 29 dollars." They throw their hands up in frustration and despair and shout "I got screwed!" in their thinking, they just set fire to 60 dollars with zero value extraction.
Im lucky, I can more or less afford the price increase without any impact, so on a personal level I'd like to encourage the shift because I know how little game developers make and I want to support that endeavor. But I haven't forgotten what it was like to scrimp and save for months at a time to purchase one of two potential N64 cartridges and then come away feeling despondent when the coin flip didn't go my way (This is where we all glower at Superman 64).
Furthermore I also know that the price increase wouldn't go to the rank and file. It won't reduce crunch. It'll go towards shareholder value. So I don't know what to do as a consumer. I am absolutely 100% willing to spend more on video games that are fun to play, work right out of the box and don't engage in duplicitous practices like child gambling or selling my data as a secondary revenue stream. I am 100% willing to spend $70 or $80 or even $100 on a premium game that is made under conditions that don't erode the physical and mental health of the thousands of passionate creatives that made it a reality. But I am absolutely 100% not willing to agree to that price change until the corporate behaviors improve first, because they will only ever do the bare minimum of what I let them get away with.
such a well behaved and happy baby.
Me game “ games should be cheaper “
Also me gamer “ BG3 is my bottom line now for video game quality “
This should be called the GTA podcast >.> I'm nauseous of hearing about Rockstar...
I think studio teams should be fighting their bosses to make smaller scale shorter games that are a tighter experience that you can beat in well under 20 hours. Hell, maybe that should part of union negotiations. I think people want that more and more anyway. Everyone's getting burned out on open world live Service garbage the execs keep insisting is good. It's always the execs insisting on making everything bigger and drawn out for more and more money, and games only really sustain their play time in the 100's of hours by making your repeat tasks, and that burns out anyway eventually.
Ultimately it's the upper echelons of companies and their shareholders who are squeezing people from both sides, and it's gotta give eventually.
I dont make a lot of money and its a huge investment to pay 70 dollars for a game for a game for me especially if I don't end up liking it so I buy like 1 or 2 AAA full price games a year and I wish that me paying more meant devs would get better pay and working conditions but that doesn't seem to be the case most of the time so it feels like im just inflating the value of a publisher and that sucks
Companies have been devaluing games for years. I played through Outlaws and paid €18 for it. Why would I ever pay full price for a Ubisoft game again. The same goes for Xbox. But I paid 70€ for Astro Bot.
Yeah, I don't own those games, but you can't own games on PC anyway (except on GOG).
22:10 would the applied term for patron be patronised?
I questioned the price of £70 for The Last of Us Part 1 Remake was too much. But if you say a cinema ticket is £10 for a standard seat, w hours a film on average, that’s £5 an hour. Considering TLOU takes around 13 hours to complete the story on, it’s about the same price as a £5/hour cinema ticket, which to me is fair. Now if you spend 40 hours to complete the Platinum Trophy and enjoy that experience, it’s even better value.
Sure, now gamers will argue about companies making millions off micro transactions and games should be cheaper because of that, but what are cinema snacks if not micro transactions to enhance your experience? Theatres don’t deduct money off your ticket because you bought snacks and a drink, and I don’t think games should either.
That said, in both industries, the top of the triangles take the largest rewards and the lowest risk to the job security, which is wrong. That needs balancing. For the games industry in particular though, each title needs to find that balance of the right retail price to be accessible, profitable and provide the best sustainability for their staff.
Day 1 of any economics class: something is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it.
The video game not expensive enough argument has always been nonsense. More people buy games now than ever before. Sure the costs have gone up but so has the revenues. Back in the day the biggest selling games could barely get to a couple of million dollars. Nowadays an average selling one can hit 10s to 100s millions with great blockbusters hitting a billion. Not to mention the live service juggernauts are hitting billions every quarter. Insanity. Gaming companies are making more money than ever before.
The real problem is that AAA publishers cannot afford to make bad games anymore. They loss is very large if your game flops and oh how they are flopping recently. The problem isn't that the game cost too much the problem is they keep making bad games. Its not a subjective/preference thing either. AAA publishers have forgotten the basic first rule of making a product. Who is it for, who is your target market. They say its everybody and when a product is for everybody its for no one. Concord is the most recent example of it. Wtf is that game for.
For contrast look at BG3. That game is not for everyone. It is for a very niche market. But almost everyone in that target market bought it. Seeing that even people not in the target market became curious and was like hey let me try it out I might like it. Some did and some didn't and there's nothing wrong with than. Now if they made bg3 for Everyone or the mass greater audience, half the people in the original target market would not have bought it. Because its would not be a game they wanted anymore. And no one in the greater market would care.
If GTA 6 is $100 most people will still buy it, and parents will be nagged into getting it for their children. If people cant afford it or decide not to get it, they would just save their money until they could afford it, or the hype gets to a point where they feel the NEED to buy it. Depending on the game, the financial figure of $70 for example is a arbitrary. If you really want something, you will get it regardless.
Yes.
I know it was a joke and you guys would never do a partnership for NFT's but the thought of the nft monkey version of you 3... I would both laugh and it would break my heart into a thousand pieces lol
Hi,
It's a complicated situation. Clearly clouded in various shades of gray. We should probably stop trying to reduce it to binary answers of yes/no. Any reliable answers will only be found with a thorough unbiased investigation of the question. Which seems unlikely as talking about games has become gamers vs devs vs journalist's. Instead of bipartisan discussions that would likely benefit us all.
Take care & have a good one
If gta6 is similar to gta5 but more story and it has a significantly bigger map, I'd pay $70 for it.
I’m a big advocate for shorter games. I love a highly curated 10-20 hour experience rather than 100 hours of fetch quest after collector-ton. Baulder’s Gate 3/Witcher 3 being exceptions.
If GTA costs more than $70 at launch then I'm definitely not buying it at launch. I wasn't a big GTAV fan anyway, never beat it, and Take Two is going to make so much money on that game without my money just from the onliine alone in the next ten years.
And say it does cost more and others follow suit, then I can just buy less games at launch. I've already learned that I don't have wait long if I want to get Ubisoft games at a discounted price when they're still fairly new, and earlier this year I bought Persona 3 Reload for $40 a month after it released. I've got plenty in my backlog. However, I do say that and still won't wait for a new Final Fantasy, among others. So I guess in the end I'll still be a sucker, but only for some things. Go me?
If a game sells so many units why doesn’t some of that money trickle back to the programmers and the writers just like it does in movies when a movie makes a certain level of money. It should be the same concept that way something trickles back to the programmers and the writers.
Lack of unions, most likely. That and corporate greed.
It's a bit apples and oranges. Movies are not made by salaried employees. Basically everyone is a freelancer. Some royalties are negotiated, including some which are union-required for applicable projects (like SAG and WGA, etc).
In contrast, at many (most?) game devs, the employees have salaries, benefits, and not only are there fairly common sales bonuses for employees (at least at bigger companies) but also bear in mind that those profits fund the salaries for upcoming projects. So huge windfalls are worth job security which, in a world of mass layoffs, would seemingly be very valuable.
This is a simplification of course, but they are very different business models.
Super relevant after the ps5 pro blunder
I really did just assume it was Rahul.
Gacha games. 99% of the game is free. You pay in hours or money depending of what you as a player choose. Genshin Impact, Wuthering Waves, Tower of Fantasy, Blue Protocol. All these are technically mobile games but no ads. Thousands to hundreds of thousands of people play these game for free, while others are willing to spend hundreds for a single character. This in the form of virtual “Gacha” machines to pull for characters and weapons to play as. In the most successful gacha games you can obtain 99% of the game for free if you choose to play regularly, and it’s only the “whales” that are essentially paying for the game for all of us.
I mainly put this here because I’ve never heard it brought up on the podcast before. I would be very interested in what everyone thinks of this
Ask Troy if the audience/haters will be okay with NFT's. :P
I think all of this is only relevant to people who buy games on release. It's been years since a game came out I'd be willing to buy on release, even an indie game. I always wait for a decent sale, even though I could afford the release date price.
I remember way back in 2003 asking my step dad to buy me Knights of the Old Republic, it cost $120 (NZD) for a game that I could fully complete in about 35hrs.
Twenty years later I could buy the latest bioware RPG, with 6x the context, infinitely better visuals, better performance, the music's probably of the same quality, but there's more of it, and all the quality of life features of the modern age, for the same price!
I’d feel better paying more for a game if I had some assurance it was going to work release day.
Release day is relative
1:03:13 *other than Mike...
Most Brits pronounces Cinema as “Cinemar”. It is weird now that I think about it.
I don't I'm British I say "er" , it's a posh accent thing.
How do they pronounce Arabia, aribica or cola? Why is cinema different?