Unions would very likely increase game prices.
I will happily pay more for games in exchange for better conditions for game developers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOrKtZsoy30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL8HfoCzCB0
Both are thoughtfully argued and well worth watching.
Example of a modern non-American union where workers exert control to better the company over management decisions:
Many unions and guilds have codes of professional ethics. A quick google finds this example:
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...
But prices don't exist in a vacuum either. The gaming market has exploded and is vastly larger than it was back in 2006.
Steam found games were typically much more profitable when heavily discounted than when full price in general.
How much of content offered is sort of irrelevant. A better metric would be how many gamers buy these things. I'd guess quite a few since they keep going all in on the model (it's getting worse).
Black ops 4 had one for $40[1]. Can't seem to find historical info about civ6, but I know a "large expansion" was not included in the season pass.
[0]: https://ew.com/article/2016/02/17/fallout-4-season-pass-pric...
[1]: https://www.polygon.com/2018/6/13/17447600/call-of-duty-blac...
I've seen that on Reddit as well, you think companies have a year worth of content and holding onto it ... The content is just not ready / created.
You also have a whole category of "basic" games (like phone games or indy games) that are nominally (unadjusted) cheaper than a retail NES game for the full version. I'm not an expert on this category by any means but I bought a few games from the Switch store that are very comparable to an NES game for $5-20. That's only a max of $9 in 1988 dollars!!
I'd agree that "consumer [un]friendly practices" are still a problem though. (could be a case of a few "whales" making large purchases on stuff like loot boxes subsidizing everyone else)
[1] http://videogamecomicads.blogspot.com/2012/12/sears-nintendo...
DISCLAIMER: I only play single player console games.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2018/05/08/electronic...
I suspect loot boxes decrease the price of a game to the median player. I suspect that in many cases, they've reduced the modal and often even median price to $0.
The probably also increase the mean price, though.
Suppose you have 1 Billion in fixed costs and 1$ in per unit cost and are given two options. The equation is just (number sold) * (unit price - unit costs) and that 1 Billion dollar fixed cost is irrelevant when maximizing profit (or minimizing loss).
What it would do is reduce the number of games created, as the industry becomes slightly less profitable. Which would then spread consumer spending over fewer titles and thus recuperate the burden of a union.
It's not a myth. It just depends on whether the pricing is demand driven or supply driven. Commodity products absolutely have their prices set by costs (labor among them).
I see lots of AAA games loaded down with unnecessary cruft that adds little value to the overall experience and it makes me sad to think a bunch of poor devs probably had to grind through crunch to add it.
I expect it’ll be a little from both columns.
Think of a first-person shooter. You can add the ability to upgrade weapons and armor (a system) and add a fishing minigame to provide resources for upgrades (a new mode of play).
Specifically, look at Just Cause 4. Your basic systems core to the gameplay are shooting things, the grappling hook, the parachute, the wingsuit, and vehicles. The unnecessary cruft is stuff like your ability to upgrade the grappling hook, the deployment of squads to capture territory, and supply drops.
My impression is that AAA studios aren't stupid... they know that these extra systems and modes don't contribute much to the game. But they do contribute to customer's evaluation of whether the game is worth spending $60, and this contribute's to the bottom line. This is the same reason why manufacturers pack needless features into a product and skimp on core functionality. People are more likely to shop on the basis of feature lists than on the quality of core functionality.
This is why I'm skeptical... the unnecessary cruft is there because it drives purchasing decisions, so it's not going away unless you change the way people purchase games.
I think Ubisoft games are the worst at this. Tons of experimental or different game elements that don't contribute to the core game. You can play chess or other board games in the middle of Assassin's Creed III. It does nothing. They had this whole city-building subgame that added nothing. They had an inchoate pirate game in there that was actually engaging enough that they made an entire sequel centered on it, but it added nothing to the actual ACIII game itself.
I can see evidence of all sort of "wouldn't it be cool if. . ." features that really don't need to be there and I can't help but think that if PMs actually had to think through what they're trying to do with their game they wouldn't do this as much. Bioware actually admitted to this after Mass Effect 3, claiming that they had never managed with so many resources at hand before and they couldn't really resist the impulse to bite off more than they can chew. This led to them adding in a bunch of extraneous side-quests and stuff that they didn't really get a chance to put enough time in to do it justice or make it worth anyone's while.
When it comes to AAA games (which is who is really exploiting their employees rather than indies) it sounds like you're picking someone at random, (e.g. "Today's your lucky day Shading Engineer #4, please accept this venmo.")
The unfortunate side-effect is that smaller studios often charge much less for their titles than what they should in an effort to please customers who are conditioned to pay very little, and then can't make up for price in volume.
It's true. A lot of people complain about $60, but that's significantly cheaper than what NES games cost back in their heyday (adjusted for inflation).
And just look at not just team size and effort (probably 50-100x comparing modern AAA games to NES titles), but amount of content: most NES games used difficulty to pad out their length greatly; a gamer who's reasonably skilled at, say, Contra, can beat it in like 30-60 minutes. In comparison, a game these days with a 6 hour campaign is thought of as pretty short, and usually they have other content other than campaign: challenge modes, multiplayer, minigames, etc.
But if you're there to chase teenagers for their parent's money, or even just the lowest common denominator of gamer, you'll probably have a bad time. Those customers want very long campaigns, AAA graphics and as low of a price point as possible.
Last year, EA made over a billion dollars in profits. If they aren't using that money to improve the working conditions of developers, what makes you think the solution is to give them more money?
And that doesn't include any in-game transactions.
That's fairly disingenuous - the last game I bought at full price was Spiderman. A quick Google says the the average user on the default difficulty clears the story in about 20 hours.
Sper metroid came out in 1994 (25 years ago), and the same quick search says that most people will clear it in 8 hours or so.
Single player games today are also regularly putting out free balance patches (nioh), large free content updates(Gran Turismo) and smaller chunks of paid content that rival the size of other games for very reasonable amounts (Witcher 3).
Statistics show that most people never finish the games anyway (I certainly don't) so it's only fair that those people who must really play everything pay extra.
We all say we'll happily pay more for the same product. But those words often aren't backed up by actions.
General software development gets moved overseas and comes back all the time.
Software development is hard. Pushing it to a cheaper third party usually increases costs a lot in the long term due to the increase is development complexity and generally a decrease in worker skill.
A strong union can also prevent companies from moving some jobs overseas.
The Witcher 3 was a pretty good game (Polish developers) - many would call that an understatement. The Uncharted series since 2 or 3 relied heavily on outsourced development (especially for art assets). Arma 3 was developed by Czech devs. These countries probably produce lower budget games on average, and don't have lots of existing infrastructure to leverage. But that makes what they have accomplished all the more impressive given what they were working with.
What makes you so confident in the class that developers in countries with lower costs of living are worse than ones in wealthy countries? Do you think that Polish or Bulgarian developers are on average worse than American ones, and it so do you have something to back up that claim?
General software development also isn't unionized. As soon is it is, moving overseas becomes vastly more attractive.
> Software development is hard. Pushing it to a cheaper third party usually increases costs a lot in the long term due to the increase is development complexity and generally a decrease in worker skill.
What's actually harder about outsourcing is management and quality control. The developers in cheaper countries aren't somehow inherently worse.
Many publishers have studios around the world, working on entire games by themselves. Why keep funding an expensive studio in the US that's getting unionized? That better be high caliber, which most studios aren't.
> A strong union can also prevent companies from moving some jobs overseas.
Maybe in a big monolithic company, but that's not how game publishers operate.
Developers who actually sleep and spend weekends with their families produce a better product than those who just accept dead marches. If managers are aware that they can not get away with those shenanigans it's possible that we'll actually get better games.
The point is, though, many people are willing to put up with that "bullshit" (which, judging by what you say later, mostly revolves around working hours contrary to what you write in this first paragraph). As much as we try to convince ourselves that crunch time and long hours don't work, plenty of studios demonstrate that is does. RDR2 is probably one of the best games of 2018 and it relied on crunch time. At the end of the day, a studio that can't demand crunch time is going to be at a disadvantage compared to those that can.
In an ideal world we'd all have well paying jobs in fields we love that offer good work life balance. But we don't live in the ideal world, we live in the real one. And many game developers are willing to make the sacrifice of long working hours.
What a lot of people don't realize is that unions can also cause wage suppression when they decide that more members working is better than fewer members working at higher pay.
I expect this trend to continue along the lines sketched out by the film industry: smaller core teams with specialized support studios/groups brought onto projects as needed and heavy use of contractors to scale staffing at different points of the project. This works in Hollywood in large part due to the union protections afforded to that temporary workforce, from actors to camera operators to screen writers.
As it stands now, video game development looks a lot like the (film) VFX industry and I think both are in an untenable place for long term sustainability. Something needs to change and I think organizations like SAG are a model for that.