Maybe stop making games that cost so much and pushing open worlds and realism. Indies and Nintendo games shows that games don’t have to keep pushing such over the top graphics and huge open worlds. Just like how not all movies need a Marvel budget of special effects and CGI.
And maybe stop making games only for profits
Nintendo is an interesting example to use, as their games famously don’t decrease in value and honestly often sell for more than original over time.
Nintendo has a few things going for it that other developers don’t, like its relatively long and consistent history and the fact it has sort of transcended video gaming to become a general pop culture icon. It also consistently releases bangers and the occasional flops are usually “creative but flawed” rather than just outright broken or boring. It doesn’t chase market trends to the same degree as its competitors, which gives its games a more timeless appeal. All those factors add up to give Nintendo games more long-term value, either as collector’s items or simply as fun video games.
The fact so much of the games industry has latch to $60 as ‘the price’ for decades is shocking. It’s an unsustainable practice and will increasingly make companies lean more on post launch predatory practices.
That is a good point.
On the flip side, they’re not largely selling something that has any physical finiteness to it anymore, and the sales volumes have increased drastically, resulting in significantly higher profits despite a smaller inflation adjusted unit cost.The cost of a good decreasing as an industry matures feels right. Jello cost 23¢ a box in 1940. Adjusted for inflation it should cost $5.17 a box now, but it’s only $1.59.
When there’s 2 games to buy, they can be justifiably more expensive than when there’s a massive surplus.
The games are different, but it’s not like consumers can’t find a different one they’ll also enjoy if the first one they look at is too expensive.Inflation has made $60 less valuable, but they’re not selling to the same market that they were 30 years ago either.
It’s hard to use inflation to justify raising prices or adding exploitative features when you’re already seeing higher inflation adjusted profits due to a larger more accessible market, lower risk due to reduced publishing overhead, and more options for consumers, which would be expected to bring prices down.They sell more copies.
Fuck off with this zero-dimensional analysis.
Ah yes the easy dev environment of the 1990s, too bad none of our game dev tooling, experts on the subject, cross platform porting difficulty, and physical delivery costs have all stayed EXACTLY the same.
While I generally agree, I think that there are some other ways that one could make games:
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One is to just do games incrementally. Like, you buy a game, it doesn’t have a whole lot of content then buy DLC. That’s not necessarily a terrible way for things to work – it maybe means that games having trouble get cut off earlier, don’t do a Star Citizen. But it means that it’s harder to do a lot of engine development for the first release. Paradox’s games tend to look like this – they just keep putting out hundreds of dollars in expansion content for games, as long as players keep buying it. It also de-risks the game for the publisher – they don’t have so much riding on any one release. I think that that works better for some genres than others.
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Another is live service games. I think that there are certain niches that that works for, but that that has drawbacks and on the whole, too many studios are already fighting for too few live service game players.
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Another is just to scale down the ambition of games. I mean, maybe people don’t want really-high-production-cost games. There are good games out there that some guy made on his lonesome. Maybe people don’t want video cutscenes and such. Balatro’s a pretty good game, IMHO, and it didn’t have a huge budget.
I do think, though, that there are always going to be at least some high-budget games out there. There’s just some stuff that you can’t do as well otherwise. If you want to create a big, open-world game with a lot of human labor involved in production, it’s just going to have a lot of content, going to be expensive to make that content. Even if we figure out how to automate some of that work, do it more-cheaply, there’ll be something new that requires human labor.
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To be honest, I have only bought one or two games at full price. Most of the games I buy are having deep discounts.
Ummm, yeah, me too… Discounts…🏴☠️🦜
Games also sell at a much higher volume than they did back then.
Wages have also not kept up with inflation, which is why games at over 100$ would be out of reach as a casual hobby for most.
I agree with the sentiment on wages keeping up but I think ultimately the price isn’t as important as the value. I’ve bought a games for $60 that I’ve got 2k+ hrs in. That’s about 3 cents an hour, which I like to compare to a $15 dollar movie ticket that’s ~2-3 hrs of entertainment ($5-7.5 hr)
Obviously not everyone, myself included, gets that much out of each game. But if some games costed $140 but did give 2k hrs of gameplay (7 cents per hr) I wouldnt be bothered. To be clear I don’t think disposable AAA should jack up prices, but if the price reflects the value offered I see no issue.
On the volume thing I think we’ll probably start to plateau in the next 30 years w/ % of the total world pop consuming games, and inflation will continue. I only wish to point out that the eternal $60 price tag is something that probably should end in our lifetimes.
It’s easier than ever for anyone to publish games. Not the old days anymore when a few publishers controlled the market of who could and couldn’t sell and would get promoted or not. More competion is going to drive down prices. Being able to charge high prices is more a luxury that would have been possible back in the past when consoles ruled supreme as opposed now with barrier to entry having gotten so low.
Arguing the rich deserve more money is crazy man
That is patently not what I was arguing. If they don’t raise the price past $60 they’ll just be incentivized to get it through predatory micro transactions.
And by arguing a business practice is unsustainable I’m not saying that entire industry pays employees in an equitable way.
Your calculations are severely flawed. First of all not everyone has 2000hrs. to invest in games. Plus I am buying mostly single player games, and the only way to invest more time is if they have quality mods that are worth playing. Usually the main story of the games is 10-20 hours long. The rest are grind generic quests that are not fun. So 150$ divided by 15 is 10$ per hour, which as you can see is above the cinema price.
How is this title allowed to be so misleading?
If anyone reads the article, the guy is arguing for honesty and transparency with video game prices as opposed to the multi-tiered and/or subscription based schemes that are used currently.
"‘I don’t love the artificiality of pricing structures post-retail,’ Douse wrote. ‘Use the inflated base price to upsell a subscription, and use vague content promises to inflate ultimate editions to make the base price look better. It all seems a bit dangerous and disconnected from the community.’
Douse believes games should be priced based on their ‘quality, breadth, and depth’, instead of simply being fitted to established pricing structures."
He’s saying the base price should be higher because there should only be one price.
I think a game should be priced accordingly with its quality, breadth & depth
So… BG3 should be $60 and other games these days should be like $30 or less? I can get behind that. That’s obviously not what he meant though.
Maybe stop inflating the cost of games development by letting them get stuck in development hell, hiring external consultancy firms that add literally zero value to the game, massively overinflating markering budgets, and hiring way too many developers to work on a project? That’s a good start.
This guy is a real dingaling. Especially calling Star Wars Outlaws a “blockbuster” game that isn’t priced correctly? My guy, that game should be free according to its quality and depth.
That’s mostly how it works for me. BG3, Elden Ring? Full price, and maybe more than one platform. Almost anything else? I’m waiting for 50%+ off.
hiring way too many developers to work on a project
Most development companies also destroy their own built up experience after every game. Instead of using the experts (the people who have been making games for you for years) to create your next game, instead they lay those people off and hire new people.
Even better was with Kerbal Space Program 2. They didn’t even allow the KSP2 devs to talk to the KSP1 devs, despite them all still being employed at the same company. The people perfectly positioned to make the next game were not allowed to touch it or even talk to the people touching it. The community roundly rejected KSP2 as it is significantly worse than the first. It didn’t have to be this way.
Going along those lines, treat your people better. Retention is always important, but every role in game creation is inherently a skilled artistic job
You can swap out one cashier or factory worker for another, and after an adjustment period, your revenue won’t change much. You can’t swap out one programmer for another - that’s like changing the artist halfway through building a sculpture
You will not get the initial vision, and you need someone far more skilled to make something good out mid way through
If you treat people better, then how’re you going to be able to get your 5th yacht and your 3rd private jet?
I’d be okay if we downgrade back to 2010 graphics. How much would that save ya?
The 2010 style graphics would also be cheaper today, as you could get away with less optimisations and tweaks.
BLUF: Agreed. Games don’t need realism to be fun. They need fun to be fun.
Aside from obvious genres like simulators, horror, or other niche games, graphics don’t, and shouldn’t be, the main focus of a game.
It could just be plain fun. I’d prefer games with a bunch of sandbox niche mechanics than seeing a tree in 4k upscale. Like Noita or Terraria.
Or a deep story. The original Talos Principle was alright on its graphics at the time, but it prioritized the story and puzzles. It was a fundamental game that shaped many of the philosophies I hold still today.
Graphics can be important, but I’d also prefer stylized over realistic any day. That’s why some of the older games still hold up today, graphically.
Wind Waker, the old 3d mario games, Bioshock, Oblivion (terrain, not people lol)
All had really really solid art. And it still looks good. Because it didn’t try to push the limits on making the game look real.
Back when Modern Warfare 2 released on the 360, I saw little dust clouds, and thought that it was the greatest game for realism ever at the time. The graphics were so good. Going back? Dogwater.
Wanna save money? Cut the pay for executives!
It’s an immediate bump in profits and zero impact on the game’s quality.
Plus if the executive then leaves maybe the next one won’t tell you to just clone whatever success has happened recently to minimize risk.
Wrong premises lead to wrong conclusions. Games are expe sive because publishers that add absolutely no value to the product take a big cut of the revenue. The solution ia not to raise prices and co tinue feeding the parasites, it’s to cut costs. Otherwise, the price increase will simply lead to less people buying the products and even lower profits.
Publishers are kinda useless tbh.
I think there are some exceptions. Like Kitfox publishing Dwarf Fortress. Taking weird little indies and giving them an art / usability budget to become more accessible and, in turn, make the OG devs a bunch of money. Nobody loses.
They provide upfront funding and marketing to projects that otherwise wouldn’t be viable
The mention of GTA 6, out in 2025, reminds me of Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick’s comments from an earnings call last year that industry prices are “very, very low” versus the number of hours of playtime games offer and player perception of their value.
I’d generally agree with that, but perhaps with an asterisk on player perception of their value. I’d much rather have a 20 hour Ubisoft open world game than an 80 hour one filled with mandatory padding, but there is definitely a contingent of their customers that want there to be that padding, because they equate hours with value. The length of games has gone up a lot in the past 20 years (often to their detriment, I’d argue), and the price has moved but only barely. The games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring that are 100 hours long without feeling like they’re padded with busy work and checklists in order to finish them? Those games feel like I made off like a bandit at $60. Then you’ve got Hi-Fi Rush, a quality game I’d have happily paid $60 for, that you can finish in 10-15 hours, and Microsoft only charged $30 for it next to a flop like Redfall or another one of those padded games like Starfield for $70 each.
Also worth noting that lots of people like to throw out how much bigger the gaming audience is compared to back in the day as the reason why prices shouldn’t increase, but while that’s true, most of the oxygen in the room is still sucked up by only a handful of winners, and those are the games like Star Wars Outlaws selling you an ultimate edition for $150 with a season pass, because they know you’ll pay it.
The average AAA game should probably find ways to develop the game leaner and faster while still finding that value for people. I think that’s the nut Judas spent 10 years trying to crack, so we’ll see how they did next year.
Gaming prices should not be increasing. They should be decreasing. Supply is literally infinite thanks to digital distribution and gaming makes so much profit its like, more than the entire music and movie industries combined. The number of people that buy games now is huge, there is no justifiable reason for prices to go up other than corporate greed.
Back in the day, games were $80-$100 USD. But they didn’t have a lot of the advancements that the gaming industry has today. Aside from the number of people buying games being smaller back then, the cost of manufacturing game cartridges and physical copies was a lot higher than today. Digital distribution was not realistically an option for the PC platform, and was literally not an option for consoles. Game development tools were non-existent. Most game development studios had to program their own game engines, or license one from someone that did. A lot of work was done manually, by human hand for quite some time. Compare that with today, where game engines are plentiful and very user-friendly, and other tools come with many automated or assisted features that would previously had to have been done by hand. I mean, game engines had a period where a good user interface was unheard of.
Then you look at other issues. Game studios are too big these days. 500 people is too many people working on a project. Bigger ships are slower to turn, lean out the teams to like less than half of that number. Development cycles are too long. Games used to be developed in a year or two, three at the absolute most. Games didn’t used to be as big, but you know what? They don’t need to. A 10 hour game that is paced well with a good story is infinitely better than an 80 hour game where you wander around a 95% empty world experiencing a disjointed barely existent story. Marketing costs are overinflated. There is no reason so much money should be spent on marketing a game. Games don’t need some random pop song in the trailer to get people to buy it, have the composer/sond designer write the trailer music like in the old days, since that was part of their job.
And as you mention, most of the time there are few hits that sell big. This was always true, and will always be true forever. Games don’t really compete with each other except for one resource: the customer’s time. And people have a finite amount of time. Until people begin to have more free time, and infinite time, it doesnt matter how many games are made, they will still always compete for the customer’s time. It is an immutable fact of the gaming industry.
Supply is literally infinite thanks to digital distribution
Hate to break it to you, but disc space, servers, paying people to ensure servers don’t go down isn’t really cheap. Sure, it means they can effectively sell copies infinitely, and that the costs of distribution are much lower than they were when you had to have a physical product, but that does not make the cost of distribution zero. Valve spends a metric fuckton of money and effort making their service super resilient to downtime and resilient to hackers.
Back in the day, games were $80-$100 USD
DOOM was shareware. Pretty sure it was $30. DOOM was the most widely installed software on the planet. Their small team and lack of real advertising budget is referenced by Gabe Newell as one of the things that got him thinking about digital distribution to begin with.
Newell said: “[id] … didn’t even distribute through retail, it distributed through bulletin boards and other pre-internet mechanisms. To me, that was a lightning bolt. Microsoft was hiring 500-people sales teams and this entire company was 12 people, yet it had created the most widely distributed software in the world. There was a sea change coming.”
Marketing costs are overinflated. There is no reason so much money should be spent on marketing a game.
I mean, we’re not living in 1993 and DOOM isn’t the only game. Every day, hundreds of new games are released. How will you get yours noticed by anyone?
DOOM didn’t have that kind of competition. Indie titles of the modern era do.
Compare that with today, where game engines are plentiful and very user-friendly, and other tools come with many automated or assisted features that would previously had to have been done by hand.
And game engines that you don’t have to build yourself can cost quite a large amount of money to license the use of.
Games didn’t used to be as big, but you know what?
Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall would like to have a chat.
Switching to cheaper media and then digital distribution has reduced costs for distribution, but that’s been eaten entirely and then some by the other problem you call out, which is how much larger the team is and how long the game takes to develop. In order for prices to decrease, that second problem needs to be solved. And sure enough, games made by smaller teams with fewer bells and whistles are cheaper, and there are plenty of those. I’ve played plenty of great ones just this year. By comparison to how many person months go into something like Baldur’s Gate 3 compared to something like Conscript, it’s amazing and perhaps even absurd that it only costs me three times as much as Conscript.
I agree with all of this and it’s nice to see some folks starting to accept that these cost more to make than movies and provide hundreds of hours more content than films, and perhaps its time to start adjusting pricing to match that. Especially with companies like Larian who are doing the right things with things like using Intimacy Coordinators, the lack of which in most of the industry was part of why voice actors went on strike. Larian was just using something Hollywood has used for decades, because there is a modicum of respect for the actors, but they didn’t get to sell their game at a higher price despite doing more to treat their employees well.
I think that’s the nut Judas spent 10 years trying to crack
Do you think so? I kind of figured the ten years was them trying to get the “narrative legos” thing right.
Narrative Legos was a concept to solve that problem. A game like Civilization is built to be systemic, and people can play that base game and be satisfied, and then you’ve got an affordable avenue to add content into the middle of the game and sell people new features that add a lot of content without taking a lot of work, like story-driven DLC typically takes for a game like Mass Effect or BioShock. So, that is a means to reduce costs, long-term, if they nail it. A systemic, story-driven game is one that can afford to be shorter while still demanding $60-$70, since you’re meant to replay it. Then again, it sounds like they steered that game into just being a roguelite eventually, so maybe not every part of the concept worked.
Civilization
Honestly, if you don’t care about all the nice graphics and music and such, Unciv – a reimplementation of Civilization 5 for Android – does demonstrate that the game doesn’t really need all those assets to be perfectly playable.
That being said, I do enjoy the music and the graphics (though the responsiveness of Unciv is nice).
I always read Narrative Legos as Levine’s frustration with the limitations of storytelling in games like System Shock 2/Bioshock (his babies). It seemed like he wanted a way for stories to be able to grow naturally based on choices made (somewhat like BG3, but more organic in nature, happening without having to necessarily be coded as such). Although that’s probably because I’m more interested in the writing games side than programming games side, so my thoughts went to what it meant for writing.
However, I can see what you mean about how that can also impact the cost of development because now you can add more narrative to the game without it having to be such a separate, stand-alone piece (like DLC and Expansion Packs of yesteryear). So, interesting perspective, thank you for sharing it.
He’s called out Civilization and DLC specifically as the inspiration for this experiment, but perhaps I missed another article where it was also intended to solve some limitation. One thing I’m sure of though is that Levine’s criticism of his own work always finds its way into the story of his next game, haha.
Video games are like the one thing that doesn’t cost too much. He’s right.
But it’s gonna stay like it is, or get hardcore capitalismed and balloon way past anything reasonable.
They already sell you games that they can remotely disable after you’ve purchased them, so I’d call that past anything reasonable.
Not all games are like that. BG3 is an example of a game that isn’t like that.
Very true, but in general, it’s a thing that already happens far too often.
So sandbox games become almost free and big blockbuster games with 5 million lines of dialogue and AAA graphics cost 3k?
The sticker price of games is what it is. Micro transactions, subscription models, DLC, and such have all been flawed attempts at remedying this. If they increase the sticker price of games they’ll be subjecting themselves to more critical consumers, more risk averse buyers, and less movable players.
The question they have to ask is, do they feel safe rolling those dice, if their survival might otherwise depend on decreasing a game budget?
How are they not rolling in the dough by now? So much of the market has rolled over to digital, which means no secondary market.
Before you could pay $50 for a game, play it and sell it later for 10-$25 (depending on how quick you are), effectively making the price 25-$40.
The destruction of ownership rights has been profitable, but there isn’t an amount labeled “enough”
Have they tried cutting down on avocado toast?
The high base level costs aren’t due purely to development, I’d wager. How many admin staff, redundant management, petty meetings, and exorbitant costs go to overhead that could be solved with a 20 minute meeting and less triple expressos for the executive team?
Moreover, chances are we could find several issues with the flow of work around the development of the game itself. Poorly optimized communication, for the win.
So every company is getting it wrong, including the one who made one of the highest selling games recently?
Most people here are reacting to the title. The article lays out a different idea, far more nuanced and reasonable.
Apparently we are done giving Larian the benefit of the doubt.
Not sure why heavily leaning to one side or another is so popular nowadays.
Anyway, I don’t know how individual companies do what. I don’t work for them. I don’t have insider knowledge. I do know how companies are typically structured and the traps nearly every company experiences as they grow, both in revenue and often consequently in manpower.
I’m not going to dive into it. This is a pretty easy topic to find on many search engines and Youtube where they’ll probably go more in-depth than I can with a limited attention span and two thumbs.
I have not seen a single post in this thread that implied the poster read the article and understood what the publishing director was trying say.
The post title is ridiculously misleading.
I worked on a DS game back in the day, turns out the marketing budget was twice that of dev + art.
Does he see the shit big publishers have been pumping out for years?
You would have to pay me to play half the AAA slop that comes out.
Not speaking of BG3, I feel nowadays there are too many cooks in the kitchen with big budget games.
With little research I did BG3 has about 450, but compared to COD which has about 3,000 people working on it. I can’t even grasp how to organize that many people to work on a single idea, and for COD I think it shows they don’t either.
