Big publishers like EA, Activision, Take Two, etc. All still made/make killer profits on games. Development costs more today, but games are also selling a lot more plus there's other revenue streams like microtransactions and subscriptions. They really aren't struggling for cash.
Nintendo has the right idea. They just basically never drop the price of their games. Whereas most other publisher's reduce prices by 50% within just a month or two. Big games often have long tails.
Dunkey (famous YouTuber) made a pretty interesting short video essay on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvPkAYT6B1Q
His takeaway that video game pricing doesn't make any sense, and never has.
$60 for a beautiful work of art that you'll remember for the rest of your life is the deal of a lifetime, whereas $60 for a forgettable, shameless cash grab is a complete rip-off.
I'm run a retro games business now, and the pricing honestly makes a lot more sense from an economic point of view. $300 for EarthBound is still a better deal than $8 for Final Fantasy XIII-2.
This exactly. I can't remember what I paid for Factorio or Subnautica or Valheim but 100x what I paid still would be amazing value vs 1/100th of what I paid for Fallout 4 would still be too much.
I don't think this is how experiences work. Because you haven't had them in the first place, there's no way whether you'll like it or not. Second thing is, what's the point of the pricing? Covering the expenses of the creator, publisher? Making them have a buffer for a future work? Extracting as much from the people as they can? These yield very different outcomes.
In the end, pricing making sense boils down to one's economic view. If you think about it, it's about the fairness of the compensation, and so, the thinking centers around what's fair, how to ensure fairness, and whom should be included in fairness and to what degree. And so, you get the "let the market decide" people, the "manage it centrally" people, and many other people too of course. And pricing might make sense only in a framework like that. With no framework, it will never make sense.
Lots of titles we know today as timeless classics were like this. They were incredibly anxious about Super Mario Kart and Mario 64. They were so unsure of the entire N64 console that they made a controller with a fallback D-pad for 2D gaming.
Manufacturing, warehousing, shipping, warehousing with distributors and shipping again to stores. Who then hold inventory and sold it was not cheap.
Way more quality game makers
AAA video games haven't actually been $59.99 for over a decade. AAA games for the last decade or so have had an "entry-level" / beginnners plan (at that $59 price point) but content that previously would have been in the base game has been sectioned off into upsells / DLC / add-ons for an extra $15 to $40/ea.
I don't personally care much (indie games have gotten so good, I barely play AAA stuff much anymore) -- but in the interest of honesty, inflation correction has already been happening in gaming this entire time. However, the "add on another extra 15% just for the CEO alone" increase that other industries did in 2021/2022 hadn't happened in gaming yet, and that's what the higher base price is for here.
Tens of millions of dollars funding for log analysis / picture / messaging b2b startups, selling $100/host/month is fine, using mostly off the shelf tools (every part of the stack, even the UI components, nice).
But wanting $60 for a game that you spent $60m+ and 4 years to make, is "corporate greed" and send people into passionate youtube video style opposition. Despite needing to sell over a million copies to break even in a hit-driven business (how many b2b or even b2c businesses here do that?).
I would love to see people try to work with those rough economics (and no, it's not "reduce the price by half and sell 2x as much" when you want to make something AAA with a niche (apparently 1 million is niche) audience. This is why when the price is not allowed to rise, the quality drops: it has to appeal to more people, lowest common denominator). Instead, they are making $300k a year tweaking load balancers for picture, chat, advertisement, and api connector apps, when they arent trying to automate away artists with AI, the only decently paying job artists had being in games.
It is no wonder there's so many "live service" games now. They simply see how much, how predictably, and how risk-averse they can be with the payment of people paying into SaaS-tech is and got inspired.
The scenario you're presented is how this situation worked in the past, but today the industry has changed into something else entirely.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1285658/top-ranked-video...
But DLC->IAP/ads->live service is tempting to de-risk. Sure some behemoth publishers get greedy with it and shove it in games that have no business having those features in there. I just don't see those in and of itself as greedy.
To be fair to the other side of the argument, Hollywood has a similar problem, and have kept prices flat. Though big budget things have to be de-risked in the form of predictable-earning superhero movies (which can be used to fund riskier projects, but don't have to be). I just don't like games becoming too much like Hollywood, dependent on huge brands and celebrities to guarantee enough sales. The budgets and expected quality moat are already approaching it
> AAA video games have been $59.99 for like fifteen years
Be warned, the author/presenter of the following linked video is quite a character, but they do actually make sense:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7kaK2-725w (2020) deals with those BS excuse as the very same trotted out for years, debunked even by quotes from top gaming execs, the corporate financial filings and exposees on the industry.
- $60 has for years just been the shell price with predatory monetization practices raking in more money than ever
- the same excuses have been used a few years ago to justify cramming "micro"-transactions down the collective throat of customers, nickel and diming them for the complete experience after having already paid for the shell price; now it's still being said that games' prices haven't increased in decades, while only the entry prices on the box haven't changed
- the audience size has only gotten larger
- distribution has largely gone digital, saving costs of physical distribution
- wages have been stagnant while inflation rose, even some employees of these very same games companies aren't making enough to eat in that very same company's cafeteria
- tax evasion by the games companies through pretending their IP is registered in empty offices/basements the world over means they gift themselves hundreds of millions of you US taxpayers money every year.
SNES games were $50-60 and that was thirty years ago!
(1) play video games with friends most weeks
(2) buy new games regularly
(3) have not purchased a game over 40 CAD since I was in high school, with the average being closer to 20 CAD.
My friends and I just don't have the appetite to drop 80 CAD on new releases, and just play other games until the big releases go on sale, which usually happens relatively quickly.
I feel like after Cyberpunk and No Man's Sky and Fallout 76 that the "do not buy pre-sales" wisdom is quite well known and regarded. I do wonder if there is some chance that people will increasingly just wait-and-see when it comes to new releases.
Although that's probably just wishful thinking. I just know that I'm happy waiting for sales to play a year old game with all the patch fixes.
Even if the buzz for the game or film turns sour, or you personally hate it, there’s something to enjoy in being a part of a big cultural event in your community. Each launch/opening is as much about the festival as much as it is about the product.
There will always be people willing to pay to attend that festival, and always companies willing to compete for the opportunity to host it.
I totally understand the slow gamer philosophy though, I think it's important that there's people out there doing that. The slow gamer that picks up Elden Ring on sale in 5 years and runs it at 4k60 on equipment half the price of mine will have their own uniquely special experience, not the least because the game will have been changed through patches and the community's understanding of the game will be more fleshed out... And we'll all get to enjoy their excited first time play through posts on the subreddit or wherever, which will be a delight after the game has faded into memory over years.
When you think of all the effort and man-hours that went into making them, and the number of hours of entertainment they'll provide, that pricing is insanely cheap. It's not even that I can't afford to pay more for games - I bought Zelda + Mario Kart at full Nintendo price - but with so many options available for less than $20, does anyone really ever need to?
I've been pricing my own (non-game) software product and I can't see any way to make money unless the sticker price is at least $100, or with cosmetic micro-transactions. I would never in a million years build a game atop MTX, but I'm more open to it for other types of software.
The games industry is just brutal.
Should I expect it go up in price before release?
[1] https://www.jbhifi.com.au/products/nintendo-switch-the-legen...
In any case that makes the argument even stronger - the fact that games are offered free, shows that raising the price isn't as profitable as making games with microtransactions and simply making them free. The revenues are simply in another stratosphere.
And lets not even get into the fact that we're glorified beta tester these days, and require an online connection to get the constant patches to make games playable.
A PS2 costed 3000F, which would be 640€ nowadays, so a lot more than the PS5's 550€.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6llg6z-mw9o/UfMX2SJk8XI/AAAAAAAAA...
From this story outline with spoilers (don't listen to this person, Astro Chicken was the best part):
https://playedbypanthro.blogspot.com/2013/07/space-quest-iii...
Caption: "$59.99?? in 1989?? I surely hope not!"
It was, though :(. There are some "I am rich" editions of games that sell for around $100 now but the base game is still $59.99 (and sometimes all the extras have little to no effect on the game). And sales are generally quicker and deeper now (games are often 50% off or more by the time the most obvious bugs are fixed) and wait a few years and they are often $5 or less.
Games and movies are the two cheapest forms of entertainment. They’re not going to mess with the formula, especially since both these industries do really well in a depression
Nobody is selling indie games for $60/$69.99 (except maybe physical releases to cover manufacturing costs, and collectors edition type stuff).
The barrier for entry may be lower, but AAA game development costs are massively higher now than they were ~10+ years ago.
On the one hand they are expensive compared to standard western fare, but on the other they do look more representative of the kind of money game devs should be getting.