The cost of games
raphkoster.com
raphkoster.com
This is a prime example of the practice of lying with numbers. There are two very basic "cost" graphs which are notably missing from this narrative, and the addition of "bytes" as a major factor in deciding the value of a game to players.
The two missing graphs are: Cost per unit sold, and revenue per unit sold. As basic as these are to any good cost/benefit analysis, their absence indicates that they do not agree with the narrative that the price of games needs to go up; that companies need to milk more money out of their customers.
As for bytes, the presence or absence of bytes has no practical impact on the value of a game to a consumer. If it did, Duke Nukem Forever would be a game worthy of game of the century, whereas Faster Than Light would be forever consigned to the scrapheap.
Perhaps the most telling in this narrative is EA's own comment to investors that shutting down the sale of lootboxes in Battlefront would not result in them losing money. This indicates that retail sales alone were sufficient to offset the cost of development, licensing, and marketing.
</rant>
I also don't condone piracy, but to imply that we should feel sorry for these companies who are barely scraping by is blatantly dishonest. It is especially dishonest when you consider that the bigger publishers (the ones making the outlier games on all of those cost charts) have annual profits in the billions while (oops, rant didn't end) they prey on those susceptible to gambling addictions.
The game industry is a big place with many different kinds of people in it, all of whom have different motivations.
If you build a picture for yourself wherein everyone is That Guy At EA Who Put Loot Boxes Into Battlefront 2, then that picture will probably get in the way of your understanding what everyone is being said by everyone else in the industry who is not that one guy.
This article is targeted primarily at developers, not at gamers. It is an "oh crap what do we do" article, because believe me, that is a big problem and in general we do not know what to do.
This was not some "cost of games need to go up because blah blah" justification article ... it is a straightforward look at what has been happening and some musings about what we can do about it, with "cost of games will probably rise" thrown in as a 6-word aside near the end (at which time he also points out that nobody wants to do this, which is true).
You're reading the article you want to read, not the article that the author wrote.
What practices do I consider to be questionable?
> "de-emphasize bytes in favor of other types of content"
This, and the rest of the suggestions reads as "don't build a hand-tailored experience, instead build more random permutations of generic content." There's even suggestions to find ways to monetize some of those permutations.
I'll admit it: I'm a gamer, not a professional developer. But these things matter to me. Good, profitable, games do exist - I am playing many of them. What bothers me as a gamer is that all of the suggestions being offered up here will never re-create one of these good games. The games being advocated for describe yet another vehicle for selling lootboxes or skins or weapons.
The whole article closes with the comment "I would love it if these graphs were wrong". Charitably, we can say that the graphs the author displayed are not wrong. However they provide, at a minimum, an incomplete picture. They invite readers to come to a very specific conclusion. That practice is what I'm criticizing with the phrase "lying with numbers" (credit for which goes to "Penn & Teller's Bullshit").
Chess, PUBG, CounterStrike, and soccer fall into this category. It is the art of systemic game design. Saying games should tilt more systemic doesn't mean they get worse. It means they are different.
In the commercial history of the game industry, we've seen entire genres fall out because they stopped making financial sense. Often, they come back later, when the finances make sense again.
I really think you are filtering the entire article through a lens based on your assumption that I am advocating for a world where Uncharted and Edith Finch can't exist, and every game is a lootbox-driven roguelike or something. That world would actually make me very sad.
Not everyone is driven by competition.
The niches which fell into oblivion were driven there by the fact they are niches - their consumers too small a group to justify the investment. Crafted, story-driven games are not niche. They are not running the razors edge of being barely profitable, instead some are becoming profitable well before they're expected like "Hellblade". They are funding future games like "Bastion". They are being held as the pinnacle of a genre considered to be a dead horse like "Horizon: Zero Dawn".
Whether you're sad or no, the practices advocated by your article doesn't include these games, these experiences. Your comment here even condemns them as not making financial sense, being doomed to only be revisited at some point in the future.
And yet, these games are being released today, are being funded by major and minor publishers and developers alike for tomorrow. That, more than anything else, is a compelling argument for the gameplay you recommend is not the only way forward.
And most developers making these kinds of games today fail to make their money back and go out of business.
I was in charge of one of the games you listed, so I know something about this topic.
2. I believe you that the author is a straightforward person and I don't think there's anything malicious here. Still, it's not a good dataset. It's 250 data points collected in an ad hoc way. A single decision like "do we include PUBG or not" can sway every statistic in here. So I don't think it's a good idea to make any conclusions based on this data.
I'd be inclined to say "ignore World of Warcraft" in anything like this, because it's the biggest outlier ever (No MMO comes close, even 14 years later) - but at least there's tons of data around it.
As someone who spent a fair part of my career in gamedev, yes the publishers are taking a large share but the companies that are building the games are barely scraping by.
Most gamedev companies are 2-3 milestone payments away from bankrupcy, which is partially why the publishers have such leverage. Implicitly condoning piracy by saying the publishers make a ton of money still ends up hurting the studios in the process.
But since you brought it up, let's go there.
The primary effect of piracy is the loss of sales, which if big enough would naturally lead to the loss of funding for future projects, leading to a studio being closed down. However, very few studios that make big budget games are closing down because of good games failing to become profitable - they're closing down because of politics or they made a game that people don't like.
Even Bioware Montreal, one of the bigger studios attached to a "flop" this past year wasn't closed down because the game resulted in a loss for EA; "Mass Effect: Andromeda" was, per EA, still quite profitable. Instead, Bioware Montreal was closed due to situations largely caused by mis-management (at least, based on what information we have available to us). Most of the developers were even retained.
Smaller, self-published studios would, of course, feel the pinch of piracy more than larger publisher-backed studios. That said, they're also playing in a very crowded pond, and differentiating between a failure caused by piracy and a failure due to an over-saturated market are going to look ridiculously similar. It would take a crystal ball to tell the difference.
Finally, let's be frank: all game developers big and small are affected by piracy, so it's a mostly even playing field on which they are competing. A studio that fails and blames it on piracy is not looking hard enough.
Sorry, there are some rough words there, but I stand by them. I don't condone piracy, but I also accept that it's simply part of the world in which all game developers exist. Reality is not always nice.
Except the piracy rates for PC is vastly higher than consoles(by nature of barrier of entry to break modern consoles if nothing else).
Since the majority of Indies publish on PC(or publish there first) it is not a level playing field by any means.
The most notable exception to this is the Switch, a platform which has close to 10x the independent content than first party content.
I stand by the "level playing field" comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTL:_Faster_Than_Light
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen_I/O
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Banner_Saga
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_of_the_Endless
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Throne
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goat_Simulator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardew_Valley
All games that were out on the PC 1-2+ years before they made it over to consoles(and only when they became widely successful). For indies piracy is very much a real problem and one that isn't nearly as level of a playing field.
I would be hesitant before throwing out accusations and claims so irresponsibly. Have you done any analysis of game size vs. quality? Two outliers does not destroy a trend. There are arguments for it - only bigger teams with more resources will make large games. It would not surprise me if larger games tend to have higher playtime/better reviews. Consider the sea of small, trash games out there.
Their absence suggests to me that the writer of the piece didn't have access to that information. Wouldn't you need inside information to come up with those numbers?
> Using industry contacts and a bunch of web research, I assembled a data set of over 250 games covering the last several decades.
I would make the reasonable assumption that revenue could be guessed at, if not explicitly uncovered, given the detailed data the author appears to have on the number of sales and costs. Many publishers and dev houses are public companies who release public information about their costs and revenues.
I don't have data on number of sales at all.
Public companies don't break down by title, alas, not customarily.
The fact is, even this data set is highly unusual.
Getting angry over game companies wish to be profitable is too much on the left.
This is literally forum for entrepreneurs trying to earn money on whatever. Why should be game expanses expected to not seek profit here is incomprehensible to me.
First, let me state that this is not some sort of apologia for AAA and its business practices. I don't work for an AAA publisher. I don't derive significant annual revenue from AAA. I am currently an independent designer and consultant, but I have worked in PC gaming, MMO, console, mobile, and social web games over the last couple of decades. I have been writing about games and game industry issues for just about all of that time, and in that time have both attacked and defended many different industry practices. Among other things, I've attacked lootboxes, addictive mechanics, and the ethics of game service operators many many times. Your fight is not with me, and impugning my integrity is uncalled for. Skepticism, yes, of course. But there's no need to accuse me of dishonesty.
To address specific points:
Cost to users per unit sold is not graphed, but it's in the dataset. I had to go find it per title by hand. This is pretty easy; the vast majority of the points on the graph are $50 or $60. Free to play games are excluded from the player price paid for MB because there isn't anywhere enough data out there on LTV for F2P titles. MMOs from when they were in the boom period were baselined at $150, which matches my personal industry experience from that time, and is actually probably a little under.
Cost to publishers per unit sold is simply not available. Units sold for most games aren't available, unfortunately.
Revenue per unit sold is even more confidential than dev costs, and I don't have any figures at all for it. It's very rare for it to come out except in segments that use ARPU, and even then ARPU tends to be baselined on per day not lifetime revenue. Investor calls tend to only announce total revenues, not broken out by title.
"Value of game to a consumer" is utterly subjective, of course. I make no pretense at assessing that. You might highly value Mortal Kombat games; I don't tend to like them. I think Edith Finch was one of the best experiences of the year, you might prefer Zelda or Odyssey or Nidhogg 2. At best we could try for something like hours played, but that's an even less available figure.
So yeah... bytes are a very rough proxy, and far from an ideal one. They are just a (perhaps poor) stand-in for work product. They go some ways towards representing the amount of work that goes into a game these days, which unfortunately many game players seem to be unaware of. They are not a perfect proxy by any means. But part of the point in using them is that we can then look at a highly systemic game with low art costs that still did very well (like FTL, around 180MB, as you mention) and see that it is an outlier on the curve.
It is, unfortunately, incorrect that presence of absence of bytes has no value to a consumer. It's certainly not any sort of direct relationship, and it's not universal. But I think it's pretty fair to say that for a content-driven game, bytes are a pretty noticeable value. Graphics; levels and maps; characters and character choices; number of enemies... these are all things that players can and do use to measure the relative merit of content-driven games and we have all seen it. Not a universal, but common enough that it would be foolhardy to completely dismiss it. Byte expenditure is in many cases basically a marketing tool, as it contributes to art direction in particular. Cool visuals get you noticed. Do cool visuals always correlate to high byte count? No, and that would actually be a trend we would (and do) see as developers seek out cheaper yet well art-directed visuals.
As far as EA or other AAA shops. You can actually go look, they have in fact given percentage figures for incremental digital revenue versus retail, in some investor calls. The key thing is mostly that digital revenue is rising year on year. There is absolutely a debate to be had about "what margin should a publisher make" and "how much upselling is appropriate given that I already paid a retail cost." That's not what this article was about, though. I make no pretense to speak about profitability right now in this article. The point of it is the trendlines.
> bytes are a very rough proxy, and far from an ideal one
I'd go so far as to say it's a useless proxy, frankly. Games in the 80's, 90's, and early 00's were externally limited in the number of bytes that could even be shipped to the customer, so of course it's going to go up with time, even if the effort that goes into producing those bytes were to trend to 0.
> The point of it is the trendlines
So, perhaps we should instead be focusing on how to keep the cost trend-line in line with the available funds trendline, without sacrificing a whole categories of games or finding ways to artificially (and IMO temporarily) increasing the available funds trendline?
After all, to borrow some examples from another thread between us, there are only two successful soccer games at this point in time. Three-ish competitive first person shooters. Two Battle Royale shooters. No real successful chess games (except for Battle Chess. Battle chess rocks). Trying to break into those kinds of long-term entrenched markets is going to be a nightmare, even when you have a good game.
In comparison, how many major contenders for a player's wallet exist for a new choose-your-own-adventure style game? For a open world game with an engaging characters and re-imagined open world tropes? For a new hybrid real time strategy slash turn based strategy game with a kick-ass soundtrack? None. Even the turn-based fantasy RPG market has started to show a vacuum a mere 4 months after the release of "Divinity 2".
Just like some types of games inherently retain better than others, generate more hours played than others, are more competitive than others, appeal to broader audiences than others and so on. They are can all be good games and still vary tremendously in this way.
All I was saying was that therefore the market dynamics will push towards game design approaches that help with the cost problem, and that spells trouble for game design approaches that don't.
To help avoid accusations of not adding anything to the discussion; Jim Sterling is a video games essayist who publishes well researched and presented polemic on the games industry on YouTube.
Jim Sterling provides a viewpoint not commonly shared even among some of the more critical video game reviewers (such as that even cosmetic lootboxes are bad for the consumer), and it's provided a few insights I hadn't thought of previously. And yes, the EA quote is also one of his favorites - it is very telling.
He has created hell of a persona - one hell of an offensive persona - but it hides a lot of really useful insight and sly humor.
Much as I dislike it, trickle out DLC and in-app purchases are one way to try to extract more value out of that massive investment. But it's a tough proposition, going against everything that already exists. I could never buy another game, and have more gameplay available to me than I could ever exhaust in multiple lifetimes.
People will always make games, because they love doing it. But it's not really rational; you've got to be good and catch lightning in a bottle
conflicts with:
Did Nintendo actually sell us a Mario ROM on the Virtual Console?
https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/01/22/nintendo-virtual-co...
Or if you go onto a retro gaming site like GOG you'll see that many of the "extras" are from pirated sources.
Can you give one or two examples of this?
You have to wonder when an artist finds it easier to copy the albums from such sources than from the collection of their own.
I can't find the article I read this from, but a few years ago (back when GoG was 'Good Old Games'), there was an article about how license holders often didn't have any of the actual game material, they just happened to own the license to them through mergers / aquisitions / bankruptcies / whatever. So GoG would have to track down old published copies of games for them (either through second hand shops, or eBay, or the internet) and then restore them (using a combination of internet / open source tools, or their own work), in order to sell them on their store.
Presumably, if the internet 'pirates' had not done the work of backing this software up and preserving it, a number of GoG's titles simply would not exist today in any form, and could no longer be sold (even if the license holders wanted to)
I would imagine downloading a 'pirated' copy of the work is not piracy when you already hold a valid legal license to that work, by definition.
You are not necessarily in the clear; it depends on type of license you have, and whatever personal copy/fair use protections your country has.
https://www.gog.com/forum/general_archive/gog_arcanum_releas...
If you go ahead and use the community header format; of course your rom image will be indistinguishable from a pirated rom -- the header and data should be the same. It's not clear if they downloaded the rom from the internet, read it off a cartridge in their archive (or obtained from employee's collections or the used market), or from a possible archive of all roms they've ever had made.
Given the long life and mass distribution of almost all their titles, there's not a danger of loss of the published material. Certainly, unpublished roms and the occasional title that was not widely produced are in danger of loss if they aren't archived. The source materials are also subject to loss if Nintendo doesn't archive them.
There's some indication that Nintendo may have an archival program after all; Star Fox 2 was recently released on the SNES Classic from a ready for release, but never released or leaked rom; different than the leaked prototype roms. They also add in-memory patches to some roms that run in virtual console and nes/snes classics; I haven't seen anything indicating if they do that based on disassembly of the roms or based on the original sources.
I also think that that datum leads to questionable conclusions. For instance you're paying vastly more for AAA games today than you were in the past. The author is right that the upfront cost is certainly much lower, but we've changed from a model where you're paying for a fully fleshed out game to one where you pay for a stripped down product that is intended to be sold piecemeal. In many cases users are paying to unlock content that is literally already on the disc they purchased. That first $60 you pay is simply your "starter pack." And there are additional 'meta costs' as well. Instead of simply putting the game in and running it you're instead obligated to pay an annual fee to use your own internet connection and then exposed to various advertisements on your way to launching the game and games themselves increasingly even feature more advertisements on their launch screens. These advertisements, in effect, increase the cost to the player if we assume they are effective.
Why not use profit margins? Total revenue / (total development + total marketing)? In either case, it doesn't really matter. Games are like music in that they are self sustaining since people will continue develop them even absent a profit motive. This is even more true today thanks to platforms like Steam removing the necessity of publishers from the entire industry. Seeing the end of 'fee-to-pay' or AAA games would bother me no more than seeing the end of Justin Biebers.
The state of advancement in the fields of human society, technology, and science, at their current rates, is such that around 2500 all of human society will be overturned every week, day, hell, minute or so. Which obviously is nonsensical.
Note also, however, that forecast #2's best-fit line doesn't seem to fit the points very well...
Obviously game cost can’t sustain exponential growth if the market doesn’t grow exponentially (potential buyers times what they are able/willing to pay).
The trend graph here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
Shows little tendency to flatten. What I assume will happen when nVidia wants 10k stream processors on the same lithography as 5k are today, is that they will have to double the die area and struggle with yield instead? (Assuming the die can grow without communication problems)
Link: https://www.biogeosciences.net/3/85/2006/bg-3-85-2006.pdf
The resource usage of all the doubling time periods until the last one would have used up only 50% of the resources available(this could be millions of years, depending on the exponent), and then suddenly the last one would use up all the resources left.
This is repeatedly exemplified in Professor Allen Bartlett's talk "Arithmetic, Population and Energy"(video link at specific point: https://youtu.be/sI1C9DyIi_8?t=1337 transcript: http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populatio...)
Notice how life on earth is plateauing...
So Destiny 2 on 3 year cycle at minimum 300m on dev costs alone, most likely higher.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/7raulk/bungie_has_ab...
https://www.pcgamesn.com/destiny-2/destiny-2-reboot-jason-sc...
What good is employing 800 people and spending 100 million a year to develop a bad final product? If you want to know where the tech industry can be attacked, it's in that massive inefficiency.
How is this different from any large, ambitious project? It's also essentially an art project where you have to make content people enjoy, so engineering resources won't save the day like they can in tech. And you can end up in a place where your lead visionary ended up in a place where they just couldn't deliver on it or it just wasn't the necessary vision, so you have to replace them.
Seems weird to ascribe all this to "tech". Turns out, things are hard. To me, Destiny 2's failure has more in parallel with the fact that most people never finish developing a game nor writing a book.
If your goal is to put out the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster every few years, then that model "works" (or it works for the publisher), but if you want to make a great game, there must be better ways of doing it.
You don't reboot a project of that size a little over a year before release without major management issues (this is not even counting the issues that saw Joe Staten and a lot of the old Bungie team leave in the middle of Destiny 1). By all accounts, Destiny 2 is a step backwards from the original. If you've got a working engine and a lot of artists and virtually unlimited resources (as Bungie did), all you've got to do is not fuck things up. But they did.
There's an inefficiency there that's preventing good games from being made, and it's not just because things are hard, because they did most of the hard stuff 4 years ago.
There is no sure path to making a great game (or a great anything), so corporate entities cannot depend on it - investors demand predictability. What they CAN depend on though is throwing hundreds of people into making a game of unknown quality (probably mediocre) but with amazing assets, and possibly with an outside IP (a Batman game etc.). So far, this strategy seems to be a valid one.
Valve is a very bad example, yes they consistently make above average games, however they don't make many and as a dev studio i'm sure valve is deep in the red, they don't make money on their games, they make money on steam.
The Witness sold at $40 and people bought it anyway.
Good games will sell. But you might not have a good game.
The market doesn't owe you anything.
Also what kind of bogus metric is "price per MB"?
Price per MB seems like an attempt to capture the amount of work that goes into a game, but I agree it's not a great metric. You can decrease price per megabyte just by shipping models and textures with higher resolution, even though they don't cost you anything more to create.
SWG had the misfortune of releasing in 2003, by 2005 EA was trying to compete with WoW and within a few years had nuked the game so much that they ended up canceling it. There is a great emulator out there for it, though the game at this point shows its age.
It takes conscious effort and self discipline to change direction toward creation instead of consumption. The tiny bit of gamification here on HN has me completely hooked, but I cling to the notion that my participation is creating some value (however slight). I look forward to the day when maintaining CRUD web apps is properly gamified, so I can earn money playing games!
PS. There is another opportunity cost of games vs. alternatives which require strenuous physical exertion that cumulatively improve health and conditioning (exercise, sports, etc.).
However cost per hours played... That would be a metric worth exploring. Using some combination of how many people own it, how many hours played on average and cost of game... That would give you the 'value' of each game.
I think back to a game like Manic Miner which was less than 48kB, giving me hours more fun than say Don't Starve (still a good game), which cost me a few bucks on sale and I've played about half an hour... yet comes with a 600Meg install size.