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. This culminated with a disaster of a release and the community roundly rejecting KSP2 as it is significantly worse than the first. It didn’t have to be this way.

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.

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.

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.

And maybe stop making games only for profits

You would have to pay me to play half the AAA slop that comes out.

So you still haven’t played bg3 huh?

Publishers are kinda useless tbh.

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.

The 2010 style graphics would also be cheaper today, as you could get away with less optimisations and tweaks.

They already sell you games that they can remotely disable after you’ve purchased them, so I’d call that past anything reasonable.

Read the article. The publisher wants higher base costs so that we can get rid of deceptive pricing like subscriptions, micro transactions, and multi-tiered pricing on release.

In that sort of comparison, I also would choose higher base costs. Noones complaining that BG3 was 60$ are they? They follow this structure of one time purchase and most would argue it was worth it.

I worked on a DS game back in the day, turns out the marketing budget was twice that of dev + art.

So every company is getting it wrong, including the one who made one of the highest selling games recently?

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.

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.

They sell more copies.

Fuck off with this zero-dimensional analysis.

To be honest, I have only bought one or two games at full price. Most of the games I buy are having deep discounts.

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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Eh, apples to oranges.

A 60$ game today is so unlike a 60$ two or three decades ago.

No physical medium. Much larger market and (potential at least) sales volume.

Proliferation of game engines; games don’t need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ each time, or write machine code anymore.

On top of that, there’s many other revenue streams. Not that I think this model is ‘fair and good’, but look at the mobile market, where a sale cost of $0 is king.

Something to be said about ‘lower cost incentivizing bad practices’ (as the article discusses), and yeah, some games could raise their price. But it’s far fron 1-1, as ‘sales volume’ trumps ‘sale price’ in importance.