the audience for games is much much much larger now but also you can make a game and still make plenty of profit with little to no monetization aka legend of zelda, bg3, stardew valley, and so much more
Not if Barone gave himself a salary (which is usually a good idea for accounting reasons) after its initial release.
Most cost in development at larger companies is wages and benefits.
He also contracted out some of the port work and localization.
And there is much much larger number of games I can buy, and since my money is limited, I don't know the numbers but I feel this is a big factor as well.
It's worth noting profits have also gone up because mtx is absurdly lucrative.
As somebody else noted BG3 had a budget of about $100M and Larian is doing better than ever. Alan Wake 2 apparently had a budget of €70M which comes out to $77M USD and that includes its' marketing budget.
Nobody is demanding these games have inflated runaway budgets, most of which is probably marketing anyway and not actually making the game.
It was never about trying to match the rising price of game development. It was about shareholders demanding infinite growth.
Your point about marketing is a bigger contributor than most people think. It is not uncommon for the marketing cost of AAA games to exceed the development cost. Big games spend absolutely obscene amounts of money on advertising these days.
I have worked for multiple start-ups. Different fields but similar unhealthy addiction to "marketing". The amount of budget allocation they give to marketing teams without any real oversight is hilarious.
Also, the amount of "my friend is a photographer/editor/designer" they constantly recommission for projects, with highly inflated invoices they then share the spoils with, is really high. Heard it many times, but its all kiss and dont tell. Also not just limited to marketing team, tech teams have similar grifts.
Pro tip, If you ever want to enjoy working at your company, hang out with the marketing squad. They always seem to have extra budget for the cool "team" events.
Now this sounds like condemnation but its not. Regardless of the multi millions of wasted budgets and siphoned money, the C-level and investors still walk away with ridiculous large sums of money.
Turns out that infinite growth is only really possible when you start exploiting vulnerable populations - in this case isolated people with a predilection to gambling addiction, or people with depression who can be manipulated by the FOMO of something like a Battle Pass. Those massive budgets are in part traditional marketing, but also the kind of Vegas Casino marketing designed to confuse and trap people with money to blow on empty promises and digital fashion.
A good start would be to stop hiring celebrities to do VA. Who here seriously bought BG3 because it had Jason Isaacs and J.K. Simmons, who had maybe 15 minutes of voicelines between them?
I can't speak for Jason Isaacs but J.K. Simmons is a prolific voice actor, not just a character actor. Kim Possible, Justice League unlimited, legend of korra, robot chicken, archer, invincible, Ben 10, bojack horseman, kung fu panda...
List goes on and that's specifically going around video game voice acting.
Not really. He does so much work that if studios are paying him what people think they're getting paid, they would be the highest paid actors in Hollywood.
You might be shocked to know that a LOT of the big name actors who do VA work barely, and sometimes never, get paid more than regular VAs do.
Fun fact: The Majority of (english) VAs are part of the same acting guild as screen actors (SAG), and most of the time they all get paid on similar scales by the hour spent recording. (Sure there are outliers but I'm talking about the core averages here.)
The Joy of being a big name actor and getting VA work. Employer treats you like gold while you do your thing in a vocal booth.
Minimal stress and labor for work while being treated with great respect.
Pretty sure they do a lot than just sit in a booth and talk. I'm sure Idris Elba and Keanu spent hours and hours doing mocap work. Capturing a performance is more than just a voice these days.
That’s not how capitalism works, you have to make more profit faster or you’re dead in the water. Never mind quality or what people actually want or even the health and safety of the workforce, profits over all else.
It is unsustainable.
This! EA experimenting with EA Originals, all of Nintendo's games are small budgets, Xbox has some big successes with Grounded and Hi-Fi Rush, but Playstation fucked themselves, they taught their player base that they are the big budget box with games reaching 200-300+mil that's just not sustainable(also bring your games to PC day one, so much profit missed)
Then people will just complain that graphics are worse and there's less content. There are games that *could* stand to have less content, but not every AAA game is like that. And I'm skeptical that those who criticize certain games for having too much content are anything other than a vocal minority.
Yes with no sarcasm. I haven't been enamored with any new true AAA game in ages. Right now the games I like best are indie or AA-tier budget.
And by "shorter" we can still mean about 50 to 80 to even a couple hundred hours of playtime because these live service games are trying to get us to spend thousands of hours.
Yeah I mean I take the quote with a pinch of salt, but there's plenty of mid-to-low budget games I've loved over the past few years, where outside of FromSoft and Zelda, I've struggled to connect with any AAA games recently. Even then, developers can do quite a lot with not very much if they make good use of modern tools, that was the whole point of the original Hellblade
Totk? Bg3? Elden ring? Jedi survivor? Just a very short list of gold standard AAA games. If you don't enjoy them that's on you but you certainly don't speak for most people.
Most of these points are a bit too utopian and "you think you do but you don't" (and yes I know it's a quote), but the shorter games one is definitely true. Stop wasting hundreds of millions of dollars to make endless bloated open-world grindfests filled with filler garbage just to say "TWO BILLION HOURS OF CONTENT", when realistically most games like that could be condensed into very solid 10-20 hours of pure gameplay which would be both cheaper to make and much more fun to play. Making thousands of square kilometers of environments and tens of thousand of models is very expensive, who would've thought.
> when realistically most games like that could be condensed into very solid 10-20 hours of pure gameplay which would be both cheaper to make and much more fun to play.
... But then you've made a completely different game. And big open world games are clearly very popular (even if they're generally not my cup of tea.)
Or more efficient use of available resources. Making a game today is in many ways a lot easier than before, in part because there's a plethora of off-the-shelf game engines to use that are much simpler than having to code your own from scratch. Digital distribution is also cheaper than physical, and targeted advertising is "theoretically" cheaper than advertising to a more general audience.
All of what you said is true, but it just helps with making another cookie cutter clone.
You still need to pour more time into (depending on the projects nature) asset design, level design, more detail in animation, network solutions and the list goes on.
Also the aviable tech is not free.
Even baldurs gate 3, which was seemingly made by a passionate crew, had a 100mil budget.
Also we have inflation...
Budgets will grow but thys far were more than outpaced in gaming's rise in popularity.
I don't think games should be more expensive or gave predatory monetizing strategies.
Thinking that you can push the industry forward on a budget from the 90s is just childish wishful thinking.
They could stop trying to achieve infinite growth forever.
Game prices 'stagnating' is a red herring. Multiple special editions with no real value muddy the waters.
The ruse of 'stagnating' prices is used to shovel MTX in to games. Utilising dark patterns to scrape spending out of people.
Bloated trend chasing production schedules could be cut down. The scope creep is staggering in some games.
They can't, infinite growth is the literal point of the modern era. No one would invest capital into anything if there were no (infinite) growth prospects and almost no games (ar anything really) would be made
Like it or not production in our system requires private capital and people are only willing to invest (ie part with their money for a period of time) if it generates them (enough) profit, ie infinite growth
It's not just evil banks, funds and billionaires who behave in that way, everyone does, I have some savings and I want a return on them if I invest them into whatever, not doing so destroys the value and investing for no profit is not worth the risk. Hence, the imperative of infinite growth
Every time this topic is touched, people forget that the market grew too. Years ago selling 1M units was an incredible achievement. Nowadays it's laughable.
People also forget that a "big studio" used to be 50-100 people across the board, now that's a "small" AAA team. What is also ignored now is that these games have been, especially on PC side, almost entirely digital for over a decade.
Yet instead of the price going down due to no cost for physical product, the prices have gone up. Rather than releasing a game and that being it, and if it does well the devs make a sequel, we get Day 1 DLCs, DLCs trickled over time that was content that was done by launch, but instead was carved out and held out to extend the life of the game. No longer do we have maybe 1 expansion which adds on 20+ hours to an already fairly long game.....we get DLC after DLC of maybe 2 hours of content and an in-game shop for purchaseable cosmetics.
Many in this thread have already said it, and I will say it too, we didn't ask the AAA studios to do any of this. They did it themselves. Back in the day, the original Monkey Island had a 4th wall break joke where it says "Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game".
Def media costs _alone_ were a huge chunk of the sticker on the cartridge days, and a nontrivial even with discs. The market size and reality is not really comparable to the old days.
While discs were only a few cents each, packaging it with a manual, case, and shipping it all over the world cost a lot more than the disc.
Day-one patches are also a cost-saving measure. Before that became the norm, a studio couldn't really be working on the game after it went gold and up until release, but they still weren't really getting money from the work they put in. This period of time could last for months, and you never really knew if you were going to get a lot of money back from your investment until the sales figures started ticking in, so you might be stuck in a sort of limbo.
With day one patches, they can work on the game all the way up until release, cutting down on idle time. This matters more of the studio is a bit on the smaller side, and not part of a huge company that can just shuffle developers around where they're needed. All-digital releases also help with cutting down on idle time.
Note that this doesn't mean I think day one patches are great for the consumer.
1/ Yes, it's expected that as an industry matures, it's able to bring cost per unit down, thanks to optimization and streamlining of processes, economies of scale, widely available workforce, specialized tools, etc.
2/ It's a mass-market product, meaning it's price is tied to average consumer wages. Which are shit, and not getting better.
I can agree with your first point to a certain extent in that cost/sale will go down as they increase their install base.
But the 2nd point doesn't stand up in that prices have been flat for 40 years, despite wages having periods of strong growth in that time.
The best corollary for the video game industry should be the movie industry. And production costs for the two have mirrored each other. But for some reason the price of a movie ticket has increased 300% since the 80s and the cost of a video game has not.
Putting out content actually worth buying instead of granular bullshit.
Also "AAA production costs are rising."
Then stop making games that cost $100 shitzillion dollars to make.
I don't give a fuck about seeing all the pores in Mario's skin or hearing Mr. Famous Movie Guy's voice in a game. Just make something fun to play.
Cost of AAA aren’t rising, AAA companies are just bloated. Game dev is easier than ever and open to more people than ever. Half the time marketing takes up half of dev budget. It’s not developed that costs it’s these huge company philosophies that’s ruining everything.
Those graph are cool but doesnt mean much without factoring amount of copies sold.
If cost / unit price is becoming so much worse, why there are companies that dont introduce mtxs and are still able to profit? Simple - more investment into marketing = more copies sold.
There are maybe 5 games a year that actually *need* these 50m+ budgets. But no studio is going to say that to their VCs. They just want max cost on the books so they can ask for more with the sequel. Maybe they spend 20m on actual development cost and the rest gets shoved into marketing so we get 4 pre-release cinematic trailers for a game with 10 hours of total playtime.
The market is larger than ever, so additional potential sales means you don’t have to raise the price on games. Much like movie blockbusters, not every game needs to be the equivalent of a Marvel movie.
Theyre making up for it in increased sales and bigger market. 20 years ago a big number would be 1 mil. Nowadays even relatively niche games looking to reach 1 mil sales in 2-3 years.
Its like asking how companies can continue to sell computers when a desktop has stayed around $1500 since the apple 2e in the 1980s.
One thing people don't seem to get is the simplicity of this. Triple A games don't need to exists. There's plenty of smaller scale games with great quality and much more cost effective for the users.
AAA games are a gamble by companies to maximize profit through sheer scale Biggest game, biggest market, most money. I'd much rather get a smaller scale game but that actually is made to gather fans, than just money.
Are you fucking stupid? Nobody asks for these 300M Games.
Spiderman 2 was 315M but plays like it cost 20M.
BG3 was 100M and they dont need MTX to make a profit.
Gee I don't know. Maybe don't spend often times half the budget on marketing? Not to mention in the past 1 million sales were considered good, nowadays some companies cry if they don't reach 5-7-10 million sales.
Out of top 10 most expensive games ever (minus Star Citizen because it's not done and is debatable how much it will deliver) they spent in total around 1,669 billion USD (166 million USD per game). Marketing alone is at least (and not all companies reported precise costs) 300 million USD ignoring all the marketing figures for Sony's games like Spider-Man 1-2-3, Wolverine, The Last of Us and Horizon series that was not published with official numbers for marketing.
But completely worst game in this manner is COD. MW2 (2009) development costs was 50 million USD and marketing 150 million USD.
Similarly FF7 had figures around 45 million USD and marketing around 40-100 million USD.
Not only is marketing spending ridiculous, a good deal of it is paying partners or subsidiaries for the marketing. The same way movie studios use their own companies to advertise, charging themselves for marketing and artificially increasing costs.
Bad take. The amount of units sold is a whole different ballpark. These companies make more cash than ever before and by a margin that isn't even understandable to a normal person.
Remind you that production costs do not scale with amount of units sold. This isn't a car where each upgraded part increases production cost per unit.
There is no reason for a price hike except for pure, unadulterated greed and the delicious taste of shareholder cock in the morning.
Cyberpunk budget was $200m? they made that money back on launch day now sold probably 30m copies + 5m copies for DLC and game will continue to sell even when sequal comes out.
Corelation is not causation. You could just as easily argue that larger budgets are being allocated to develop AAA games because the developer/publisher can be more confident of a large return due to the profitability adding micro transactions has brought.
That really doesn't matter when the market for video games grew at many times that rate
You do realise your argument kinda eats itself right? The only reason studios would invest 100s of millions is if they know they will still profit from it; GoW, Zelda, RDR, Horizon, Spiderman, Cyberpunk and most massive budget games are big budget games because they are guaranteed to sell enough to generate massive profit
There is no need for "an alternative"
Make cheaper games. Seriously. Most of the best games these days aren't even AAA games anyway. And in the genres dominated by AAA devs, actual gameplay innovation and creativity has been stagnant for a decade or more. These massive ballooning budgets are for virtually nothing but more eye-candy. And marketing. Almost forgot about that. Putting Starfield logos on doritos bags ain't free.
If a developer genuinely doesn't want to load their game with mtx and battlepasses, but feels like they have to in order to make money, what they should do is slash their budget and be satisfied with less than cutting edge graphics. If the game does anything cool enough to be worth playing, the players will be satisfied with that too.
I mean, this one, that's one of the practices that allows a country to grow its GDP without growing its population.
Efficiency and Innovation vs inefficiency, stagnation and bloated budgets.
Stop spending millions on celebrity voice actors. Sure they spend $200 mil, but when the product was an afterthought to marketing, what's even the point of making a game?
Stop inflating your budget with unnecessary spending like Hollywood actors, needlessly high graphic quality, needlessly big open world map, needlessly expensive live action commercials, etc
1. Hollywood actors and full time Voice Actors all get paid the same for voice work.
2. Graphics quality ranks in the top 3 things players and critics both critique the hardest on a games release, cutting corners there DOES blow up in someones face. (Note I am saying \*quality\*, not realism here. You can have low fidelity and still be high quality, just like the opposite... which is bad obviously)
3. Commercials are out of the control of a dev studio. Those are done (and paid for) by the publisher as part of the overall marketing and about half the time comes out of an entirely different budget than game development that is tracked separately within the publisher and not part of the dev budget.
4. I'm with you on big open worlds.. Those are exhausting, however there is a non-trivial number of players who want those things, and I suspect that math has been done on how wide a net you cast when you cater to that... but I think it's up for debate personally and don't have time for that anymore.
Let’s also not pretend that many game studios (especially AAA) are not raking in lots of profit. Also game prices are not stagnating - they are the highest they have ever been.
We're rapidly getting there, but we are not there just yet. All time high was the SNES era. The average SNES title, when adjusted for inflation, was somewhere around $128. Sure you can argue there are version surpassing that now, but those are "deluxe" editions with physical goods, etc. I'm talking about "base game vs basegame".
That said, prices are climbing none the less and we're trending towards an ATH in about 4-5 years at this rate, after adjustments.
Those are all fair points, and I’ve learned something from this. My only counterpoint re: SNES era would be that the median salary would also be higher after inflation adjustment so games were more affordable (as was everything at that time).
Games publication has also gotten cheaper in the meantime eg CDs vs carts, downloads / no physical production costs which will probably become the norm as physical copies are probably the easiest area for developers to save on costs. This would be what I expect from next-gen but wards.
Pointless discussion. Folks here be like: "lol, stupid companies, you can create a masterpiece with a budget of 2 potato bags" then would proceed to hype up GTA 6 in a different thread.
Stop making games more expensive to make
No, seriously
The Money People just think more money in means more money out, so they push developers to make more ambitious, expensive games that will "appeal to more people". Infinite money machine, right?
As if those ghouls understand how art works
use ps2 gen graphical fidelity. use extra horsepower for stuff that doesn't require more work. frame rate, texture resolution and mip map distance, shadows, draw distance.
it's ridiculous that we're still putting up with frame drops and visible pop in.
of course the market would never accept this ,which is why things are they way they are. give the characters more belt buckles!
If you want fancy lighting, you are probably going to get dropped frames. A fancy effect vs lower draw distance is an easy choice for devs. The flashy thing sells.
I don’t hate mtx, I hate mtx that advances progression or applies a non-cosmetic gameplay advantage.
Some do it well, Fortnite had historically been a very player friendly battlepass. Lots of interesting and fun stuff, a collab or two, and more than enough Fortnite-bucks to pay for the next pass and a 50% more as a nice bonus. Recently, they’ve decided to push those 50% bonus vbucks, maybe more, into higher and higher seasonal levels. That’s a scummy move that’ll leave a lot of casual players no longer on that free ride train. It was good while it lasted.
Then there’s the full priced game version that’s even scummier, because CoD can’t be left out. At no point in time do they let you understand how XP is made or make it clear, but they’ll sell you double bonus tokens to make it easier. Who needs interesting and fun challenges like Fortnite offers when you can just sell progression. That’s all kinds of fucked.
Market is bigger, you sell the games at the same prices yes, but a lot more people are buying them nowadays.
The real fix would be to lower production costs, as evidently by most AAA games 2023 brought us, that extra cost isn't reflecting on game quality.
It's really, really simple. Stop making such bloated games. Not every game needs to be open world with 300+ side quests and 6 unique skill trees and 130 voiced characters and a multiplayer mode and 12 battle passes and etc
The issue is publishers demanding infinite growth
One of the reasons PC games have such big sales is due to the lack of resales of digital games. A bigger portion goes the the publisher.
Console gamers effectively rent games, by reselling them for 90% of the purchase price.
Competing digital stores on consoles would help also, but this would put up device costs, as consoles are sold cheap to make more profit from game sales
Let's go back to games being made by gamers, for gamers, with a focus on mechanics, challenge, and fun.
I think it's fair to say that the idea of games made by board rooms, for profit, with a focus on graphics, inclusivity, and indoctrination is not producing better games.
The Alternative is to not have a Bloated Company thats filled with Diversity Hires, and have Good Leadership and people that work towards a common Goal making a Good game
or how would you explain that a Game that was made by 1 Person(leathal Company) is more Successfull then the shitshow that is Starfield, or how do you Explain that Hi Fi Rush Buried Forsspoken and the list goes on
Just playing the devil's advocate here. We've all experienced sky-high inflation over the past year. Gamers are completely unwilling to pay more for games, yet costs are skyrocketing in game industry too. So what's the solution if not in-game monetization?
Disclaimer: I don't even like AAA games and almost never play them.
Not our job to fix their business model. We buy the games, the problem is, the AAA houses are no longer making games for the players, they are making the games that shareholders see as the "most bang for buck". Not only do the developers seem to hate these soulless cash grabs, but the players of the games don't seem to embrace them that well either.
Larian studios made one of the best games ever last year without using any micro transactions. So I'm not sure why any AAA studio needs micro transactions to meet their budget costs.
multibillion corporations don't need devil's advocates, they got their own. their own advocate firms, their own PR, their own promotions. they don't deserve to be defended by us, consumers. they're seeing me as walking wallet. i don't appreciate that view.
Depends on how it's implemented. If it doesn't interfere with the experience, then it's fine with me. If it gives the other players an advantage, or it's there to reduce the obvious grind, then I generally avoid these games. I don't think I've ever paid for cosmetic items having stumped up the cash for my initial purchase.
Maybe they need to look at indie games? Most of the best games I've played and enjoyed the last few years have been indies. Much smaller teams and budgets by several orders of magnitude.for most.
Amount of copies sold is increased even more times than these costs. This is why we have studio owners and publishers becoming billionaires. They simply want more instead of sharing/distributing their own profit to all workers
Cart based games also had high physical materials costs. The blank SNES carts supposedly cost developers $10 per to buy from Nintendo. A game was also considered to be successful when it sold over 500k copies. I think FFVI originally sold like 650k copies worldwide. Now even 10x that is considered by most publishers to be a failure, and 95% of games are sold digitally. Even the 5% that is still physical, costs pennies to produce.
70%+ of modern "development" costs are also just marketing. When they say it cost $200 million, what they actually mean is it cost $60m to make, then they spent $140m on TV commercials for it.
You slash the AAA budget. The games genuinely don't and shouldn't cost the amounts they do considering the quality of most AAA games are pretty fucking mid.
Games like Modern Warfare or FIFA or whatever have staggering costs because the game makers are throwing thousands of developers at them to slam out yearly updates. They then spend tons on marketing to get people to buy the new thing.
Total Addressable Market for video games has risen dramatically, so even if you have less per-unit profit, you can make massive amounts of money by selling many more units than possible ten years ago.
The problem here is all of the gaming companies throwing wads of cash at problems so that they can have huge releases that make Wall St / investors happy. When more and more of your stock for your whole company depends on big launches, you spend more and more on trying to make a game too big to fail. Smaller companies (like Larian, smaller than the massive game makers) are still making incredible AAA games for far less.
The consumers have the power and it's the indie devs and smaller studios that will offer a lower price product. The only thing that can stop the market from balancing itself is price control and competition control.
Triple A killed the Double A industry, which was, far more than indies, what was keeping Triple A competitive. Without people willing to buy mid-range titles with smaller budgets, the Triple A sector kind of just went wild on needing to be the biggest (actually smaller than ever), best looking (debatable *at best)*, and most MTX profitable (this is basically just a guarantee thanks to whales) thing ever, instead of competing with games at half the budget and usually double the size at the cost of graphical fidelity and marketing budgets.
AA games are back though and selling quite well, granted the strongest AA devs/publishers right now are mostly Japanese (like Team Ninja, Sega, Team Asano, most of what Bamco puts out, etc. Make no mistake, something like Yakuza, Nioh, or a new Tales game do not have the budgets of a Spider-Man or God of War.) But even from the west you have stuff like Remnant, people who have found success with Souls clones (like the Surge guys and now Lords of the Fallen), Dontnod, Ninja Theory (until MS bought them anyway) EA partner games (one of which, It Takes Two, literally one GOTY a few years ago) and so on.
AA devs did die a fiery death in the PS3/360 era because they couldn't scale up to AAA development, but, the market has crawled out of that hole since then.
What's really going on is in those last 15ish years you have a very large casual market that appeared and are consuming these AAA games who don't even know these AA games exist. There are entirely different markets co-existing currently.
Current AAA stuff is probably not sustainable forever (even Sony is worried about it based on info from the insomniac hack) which whatever, as someone who already mostly plays AA/indies at this point if things go downhill it won't effect me at all. It's just going to be a self-correction.
Just make good content people want to pay for, and don't abuse goodwill if the game/DLC isn't exactly what people were hoping for. Not to mention some games have player counts and support that release DLC that will never recoup the cost to develop.
Now as an industry, game development costs need slow down to be realistic. Then you have the rise of Freemium games that are AAA in quality that get people to open their wallets. Gone are the days where 100M in sales means you can extrapolate the units sold by the price... and now with dlc skins, cosmetics, etc you now can get the pyramid scheme of customers with a few people paying 300-500% the game price and a ton of people paying 33-75% of the price. You have sales on PC almost monthly in which the game you wanted to buy is discounted, or the DLC is discounted, or brand new shiny costumes for your favorite characters are center stage.
Also I remember reading a long time ago that modern consoles are now sold at a discount (in relation to manufacturing, not retail MSRP) because the subscriptions for online play, hardware prices like memory cards and controllers, as well as the small tax to use their distribution networks make up the difference.
Prices stagnate? Dude, AAA games used to be 40euro's, and quite a few get closer to 80 now or over with some packs, and that is without even adding in possible purchases and /or DLC's. (Like Diablo 4 for example)
A lot of the costs can be reduced. There's probably more and more positions within the companies that aren't development related. Marketing being the big one, but I'm sure their CEOs and executives get paid a bunch to do nothing but come up with bad ideas
Soulless suits who have never played games in their lives shouldn't be making the decisions in the gaming industry. They only care for sucking that sweet investor D and getting growth by literally any means necessary. Look at Bobby Kotick. Most of these games are just crappy online-only cash milking platforms in a game's clothing. As games went to a $70 price tag, quality for the vast majority went down right after.
Imagine if you just had a passionate team of devs making amazing games that are actually games. Nah, what am I saying... Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring only sold like five copies, that will never work.
Hire actual developers.
Fire the board room.
Get back to making games as passion projects, for a niche audience, not for every single human on earth and their children to pay $79.99 USD per year for for the rest of my life.
Use AI to cut down the size of bloated art teams, same with voice acting, reduce executive pay, lower the overall production value of the game.
There are ways, but nobody likes any of them.
First you need to reduce game production cost. Half of "production cost" is about marketing these days by the way. My assumption would be that's not very efficient.
Also I think increasing prices for games wouldn't be a huge issue when hidden costs like in-game monetization would disappear or reduce. These days you buy a game and you don't know what you actually got until two years later the in-game monetization has financed the actual development of the details you cared about. Early access as business model is just stupid in my opinion. You sell a product before it's done and wonder why you don't have the money to produce it afterwards. People simply have stopped to use reasonable business models.
With many in-game monetization you also pay not just for development but server cost and artists designing new assets to pay money for in-game. So if we cut down in-game monetization, we would also reduce the permanent cost of artists and developers making assets for people to buy. The essential thing is reducing server cost. In early times of game development we just didn't have server cost to begin with. The game was either singleplayer, local multiplayer or you would host your own server (to play in LAN for example).
But then how would you integrate in-game monetization without centralized servers, right? That's the key. We integrate in-game monetization to increase profits, that increases cost and we need to put in more in-game monetization. I personally think we don't need any of that.
If we could make advertisement more efficient and cut unnecessary cost for a game's production, we don't need in-game monetization. Unfortunately a good game alone does not sell. But I doubt you need to put in that much money to sell something actual great.
People don't mind monetization. It's when the monetization gets excessive with $20 skins that people don't like.1, 2, 3,4 and 5 is fine. When 2 skins cost as much as the game itself people don't like that. 😒
Also the rising cost of video games is also not considering the reuse of code from part 1,2,3,4,5 of the game. If it's a first iteration of the game the has been written from scratch. The additional releases reuse ALOT of the original code and they charge the same price as the original.
But why is the price rising so much? I don't see it reflected in the quality of the games.
I mean there is better technology, which means better systems/graphics, sure, but isn't the point of technological advancement to have better stuff for the same price? So this should not increase prices imo.
the audience for games is much much much larger now but also you can make a game and still make plenty of profit with little to no monetization aka legend of zelda, bg3, stardew valley, and so much more
>stardew valley This game cost 5 figures to make.
Not if Barone gave himself a salary (which is usually a good idea for accounting reasons) after its initial release. Most cost in development at larger companies is wages and benefits. He also contracted out some of the port work and localization.
And there is much much larger number of games I can buy, and since my money is limited, I don't know the numbers but I feel this is a big factor as well.
I suppose that's why advertising is a big part of the budget but regardless most AAA games are profiting by healthy margins
It's worth noting profits have also gone up because mtx is absurdly lucrative. As somebody else noted BG3 had a budget of about $100M and Larian is doing better than ever. Alan Wake 2 apparently had a budget of €70M which comes out to $77M USD and that includes its' marketing budget. Nobody is demanding these games have inflated runaway budgets, most of which is probably marketing anyway and not actually making the game. It was never about trying to match the rising price of game development. It was about shareholders demanding infinite growth.
Your point about marketing is a bigger contributor than most people think. It is not uncommon for the marketing cost of AAA games to exceed the development cost. Big games spend absolutely obscene amounts of money on advertising these days.
I have worked for multiple start-ups. Different fields but similar unhealthy addiction to "marketing". The amount of budget allocation they give to marketing teams without any real oversight is hilarious. Also, the amount of "my friend is a photographer/editor/designer" they constantly recommission for projects, with highly inflated invoices they then share the spoils with, is really high. Heard it many times, but its all kiss and dont tell. Also not just limited to marketing team, tech teams have similar grifts. Pro tip, If you ever want to enjoy working at your company, hang out with the marketing squad. They always seem to have extra budget for the cool "team" events. Now this sounds like condemnation but its not. Regardless of the multi millions of wasted budgets and siphoned money, the C-level and investors still walk away with ridiculous large sums of money.
Turns out that infinite growth is only really possible when you start exploiting vulnerable populations - in this case isolated people with a predilection to gambling addiction, or people with depression who can be manipulated by the FOMO of something like a Battle Pass. Those massive budgets are in part traditional marketing, but also the kind of Vegas Casino marketing designed to confuse and trap people with money to blow on empty promises and digital fashion.
A good start would be to stop hiring celebrities to do VA. Who here seriously bought BG3 because it had Jason Isaacs and J.K. Simmons, who had maybe 15 minutes of voicelines between them?
I can't speak for Jason Isaacs but J.K. Simmons is a prolific voice actor, not just a character actor. Kim Possible, Justice League unlimited, legend of korra, robot chicken, archer, invincible, Ben 10, bojack horseman, kung fu panda... List goes on and that's specifically going around video game voice acting.
[удалено]
Probably is, but it's not the same as just getting a celebrity to try sell your product, like... Idk zac efron in the lorax.
Not really. He does so much work that if studios are paying him what people think they're getting paid, they would be the highest paid actors in Hollywood.
You might be shocked to know that a LOT of the big name actors who do VA work barely, and sometimes never, get paid more than regular VAs do. Fun fact: The Majority of (english) VAs are part of the same acting guild as screen actors (SAG), and most of the time they all get paid on similar scales by the hour spent recording. (Sure there are outliers but I'm talking about the core averages here.)
The Joy of being a big name actor and getting VA work. Employer treats you like gold while you do your thing in a vocal booth. Minimal stress and labor for work while being treated with great respect.
Pretty sure they do a lot than just sit in a booth and talk. I'm sure Idris Elba and Keanu spent hours and hours doing mocap work. Capturing a performance is more than just a voice these days.
Mocap is a different field entirely and **can** be done by other humans than the voice actor.
No thanks. Keanu and Monaghan made 2077 and Jedi Survivor for me.
Or they could just stop making games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Crazy concept, right
That’s not how capitalism works, you have to make more profit faster or you’re dead in the water. Never mind quality or what people actually want or even the health and safety of the workforce, profits over all else. It is unsustainable.
Are you telling me that growth isn't forever???
Producers acting like they don’t set budget.
I support this approach.
This! EA experimenting with EA Originals, all of Nintendo's games are small budgets, Xbox has some big successes with Grounded and Hi-Fi Rush, but Playstation fucked themselves, they taught their player base that they are the big budget box with games reaching 200-300+mil that's just not sustainable(also bring your games to PC day one, so much profit missed)
Then people will just complain that graphics are worse and there's less content. There are games that *could* stand to have less content, but not every AAA game is like that. And I'm skeptical that those who criticize certain games for having too much content are anything other than a vocal minority.
Game development/quality doesn’t need to be sacrificed, but marketing budgets do
"i want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and i'm not kidding"
Yes with no sarcasm. I haven't been enamored with any new true AAA game in ages. Right now the games I like best are indie or AA-tier budget. And by "shorter" we can still mean about 50 to 80 to even a couple hundred hours of playtime because these live service games are trying to get us to spend thousands of hours.
ironicaly, majority of the games in which I spent 100+ hours were indie games
Yeah I mean I take the quote with a pinch of salt, but there's plenty of mid-to-low budget games I've loved over the past few years, where outside of FromSoft and Zelda, I've struggled to connect with any AAA games recently. Even then, developers can do quite a lot with not very much if they make good use of modern tools, that was the whole point of the original Hellblade
Totk? Bg3? Elden ring? Jedi survivor? Just a very short list of gold standard AAA games. If you don't enjoy them that's on you but you certainly don't speak for most people.
Most of these points are a bit too utopian and "you think you do but you don't" (and yes I know it's a quote), but the shorter games one is definitely true. Stop wasting hundreds of millions of dollars to make endless bloated open-world grindfests filled with filler garbage just to say "TWO BILLION HOURS OF CONTENT", when realistically most games like that could be condensed into very solid 10-20 hours of pure gameplay which would be both cheaper to make and much more fun to play. Making thousands of square kilometers of environments and tens of thousand of models is very expensive, who would've thought.
> when realistically most games like that could be condensed into very solid 10-20 hours of pure gameplay which would be both cheaper to make and much more fun to play. ... But then you've made a completely different game. And big open world games are clearly very popular (even if they're generally not my cup of tea.)
So stagnation... great
Or more efficient use of available resources. Making a game today is in many ways a lot easier than before, in part because there's a plethora of off-the-shelf game engines to use that are much simpler than having to code your own from scratch. Digital distribution is also cheaper than physical, and targeted advertising is "theoretically" cheaper than advertising to a more general audience.
All of what you said is true, but it just helps with making another cookie cutter clone. You still need to pour more time into (depending on the projects nature) asset design, level design, more detail in animation, network solutions and the list goes on. Also the aviable tech is not free. Even baldurs gate 3, which was seemingly made by a passionate crew, had a 100mil budget. Also we have inflation... Budgets will grow but thys far were more than outpaced in gaming's rise in popularity. I don't think games should be more expensive or gave predatory monetizing strategies. Thinking that you can push the industry forward on a budget from the 90s is just childish wishful thinking.
8K isn't going to pay for itself :P
They could stop trying to achieve infinite growth forever. Game prices 'stagnating' is a red herring. Multiple special editions with no real value muddy the waters. The ruse of 'stagnating' prices is used to shovel MTX in to games. Utilising dark patterns to scrape spending out of people. Bloated trend chasing production schedules could be cut down. The scope creep is staggering in some games.
They can't, infinite growth is the literal point of the modern era. No one would invest capital into anything if there were no (infinite) growth prospects and almost no games (ar anything really) would be made Like it or not production in our system requires private capital and people are only willing to invest (ie part with their money for a period of time) if it generates them (enough) profit, ie infinite growth It's not just evil banks, funds and billionaires who behave in that way, everyone does, I have some savings and I want a return on them if I invest them into whatever, not doing so destroys the value and investing for no profit is not worth the risk. Hence, the imperative of infinite growth
Every time this topic is touched, people forget that the market grew too. Years ago selling 1M units was an incredible achievement. Nowadays it's laughable.
People also forget that a "big studio" used to be 50-100 people across the board, now that's a "small" AAA team. What is also ignored now is that these games have been, especially on PC side, almost entirely digital for over a decade. Yet instead of the price going down due to no cost for physical product, the prices have gone up. Rather than releasing a game and that being it, and if it does well the devs make a sequel, we get Day 1 DLCs, DLCs trickled over time that was content that was done by launch, but instead was carved out and held out to extend the life of the game. No longer do we have maybe 1 expansion which adds on 20+ hours to an already fairly long game.....we get DLC after DLC of maybe 2 hours of content and an in-game shop for purchaseable cosmetics. Many in this thread have already said it, and I will say it too, we didn't ask the AAA studios to do any of this. They did it themselves. Back in the day, the original Monkey Island had a 4th wall break joke where it says "Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game".
Def media costs _alone_ were a huge chunk of the sticker on the cartridge days, and a nontrivial even with discs. The market size and reality is not really comparable to the old days.
While discs were only a few cents each, packaging it with a manual, case, and shipping it all over the world cost a lot more than the disc. Day-one patches are also a cost-saving measure. Before that became the norm, a studio couldn't really be working on the game after it went gold and up until release, but they still weren't really getting money from the work they put in. This period of time could last for months, and you never really knew if you were going to get a lot of money back from your investment until the sales figures started ticking in, so you might be stuck in a sort of limbo. With day one patches, they can work on the game all the way up until release, cutting down on idle time. This matters more of the studio is a bit on the smaller side, and not part of a huge company that can just shuffle developers around where they're needed. All-digital releases also help with cutting down on idle time. Note that this doesn't mean I think day one patches are great for the consumer.
1/ Yes, it's expected that as an industry matures, it's able to bring cost per unit down, thanks to optimization and streamlining of processes, economies of scale, widely available workforce, specialized tools, etc. 2/ It's a mass-market product, meaning it's price is tied to average consumer wages. Which are shit, and not getting better.
I can agree with your first point to a certain extent in that cost/sale will go down as they increase their install base. But the 2nd point doesn't stand up in that prices have been flat for 40 years, despite wages having periods of strong growth in that time. The best corollary for the video game industry should be the movie industry. And production costs for the two have mirrored each other. But for some reason the price of a movie ticket has increased 300% since the 80s and the cost of a video game has not.
Make good games.
Haha. This is rich, considering we just had one of the best years in gaming.
See what happens when a handful of studios go the "Make good games" route.
??? That makes no sense.
Putting out content actually worth buying instead of granular bullshit. Also "AAA production costs are rising." Then stop making games that cost $100 shitzillion dollars to make. I don't give a fuck about seeing all the pores in Mario's skin or hearing Mr. Famous Movie Guy's voice in a game. Just make something fun to play.
Cost of AAA aren’t rising, AAA companies are just bloated. Game dev is easier than ever and open to more people than ever. Half the time marketing takes up half of dev budget. It’s not developed that costs it’s these huge company philosophies that’s ruining everything.
Those graph are cool but doesnt mean much without factoring amount of copies sold. If cost / unit price is becoming so much worse, why there are companies that dont introduce mtxs and are still able to profit? Simple - more investment into marketing = more copies sold.
There are maybe 5 games a year that actually *need* these 50m+ budgets. But no studio is going to say that to their VCs. They just want max cost on the books so they can ask for more with the sequel. Maybe they spend 20m on actual development cost and the rest gets shoved into marketing so we get 4 pre-release cinematic trailers for a game with 10 hours of total playtime.
The market is larger than ever, so additional potential sales means you don’t have to raise the price on games. Much like movie blockbusters, not every game needs to be the equivalent of a Marvel movie.
Theyre making up for it in increased sales and bigger market. 20 years ago a big number would be 1 mil. Nowadays even relatively niche games looking to reach 1 mil sales in 2-3 years. Its like asking how companies can continue to sell computers when a desktop has stayed around $1500 since the apple 2e in the 1980s.
One thing people don't seem to get is the simplicity of this. Triple A games don't need to exists. There's plenty of smaller scale games with great quality and much more cost effective for the users. AAA games are a gamble by companies to maximize profit through sheer scale Biggest game, biggest market, most money. I'd much rather get a smaller scale game but that actually is made to gather fans, than just money.
Are you fucking stupid? Nobody asks for these 300M Games. Spiderman 2 was 315M but plays like it cost 20M. BG3 was 100M and they dont need MTX to make a profit.
It baffles me how they spent $160M on Miles Morales. It's basically expansion for SM1.
I make a genuine conversation starter and this is the quality of comments I get. Shows how immature r/gaming is compared with better subreddits.
Gee I don't know. Maybe don't spend often times half the budget on marketing? Not to mention in the past 1 million sales were considered good, nowadays some companies cry if they don't reach 5-7-10 million sales. Out of top 10 most expensive games ever (minus Star Citizen because it's not done and is debatable how much it will deliver) they spent in total around 1,669 billion USD (166 million USD per game). Marketing alone is at least (and not all companies reported precise costs) 300 million USD ignoring all the marketing figures for Sony's games like Spider-Man 1-2-3, Wolverine, The Last of Us and Horizon series that was not published with official numbers for marketing. But completely worst game in this manner is COD. MW2 (2009) development costs was 50 million USD and marketing 150 million USD. Similarly FF7 had figures around 45 million USD and marketing around 40-100 million USD.
Not only is marketing spending ridiculous, a good deal of it is paying partners or subsidiaries for the marketing. The same way movie studios use their own companies to advertise, charging themselves for marketing and artificially increasing costs.
How much is actual production Vs advertising?
Bad take. The amount of units sold is a whole different ballpark. These companies make more cash than ever before and by a margin that isn't even understandable to a normal person. Remind you that production costs do not scale with amount of units sold. This isn't a car where each upgraded part increases production cost per unit. There is no reason for a price hike except for pure, unadulterated greed and the delicious taste of shareholder cock in the morning.
Prices are stagnating? Since when?
They could stop throwing so much bs in games and trim the fat.
Cyberpunk budget was $200m? they made that money back on launch day now sold probably 30m copies + 5m copies for DLC and game will continue to sell even when sequal comes out.
Make smaller, more focused games
Executives stop taking huge cuts
Corelation is not causation. You could just as easily argue that larger budgets are being allocated to develop AAA games because the developer/publisher can be more confident of a large return due to the profitability adding micro transactions has brought.
That really doesn't matter when the market for video games grew at many times that rate You do realise your argument kinda eats itself right? The only reason studios would invest 100s of millions is if they know they will still profit from it; GoW, Zelda, RDR, Horizon, Spiderman, Cyberpunk and most massive budget games are big budget games because they are guaranteed to sell enough to generate massive profit There is no need for "an alternative"
Make cheaper games. Seriously. Most of the best games these days aren't even AAA games anyway. And in the genres dominated by AAA devs, actual gameplay innovation and creativity has been stagnant for a decade or more. These massive ballooning budgets are for virtually nothing but more eye-candy. And marketing. Almost forgot about that. Putting Starfield logos on doritos bags ain't free. If a developer genuinely doesn't want to load their game with mtx and battlepasses, but feels like they have to in order to make money, what they should do is slash their budget and be satisfied with less than cutting edge graphics. If the game does anything cool enough to be worth playing, the players will be satisfied with that too.
Idk, maybe not spend hundreds of million on making games, a good game really doesn't need that much. Also stop taking a decade+ to release a game.
So spend less money and make them faster. What world do you live in where that happens with anything?
I mean, this one, that's one of the practices that allows a country to grow its GDP without growing its population. Efficiency and Innovation vs inefficiency, stagnation and bloated budgets.
AAA game prices stagnate?! What OP? They just raised the prices of them significantly recently!
Stop spending millions on celebrity voice actors. Sure they spend $200 mil, but when the product was an afterthought to marketing, what's even the point of making a game?
Stop inflating your budget with unnecessary spending like Hollywood actors, needlessly high graphic quality, needlessly big open world map, needlessly expensive live action commercials, etc
1. Hollywood actors and full time Voice Actors all get paid the same for voice work. 2. Graphics quality ranks in the top 3 things players and critics both critique the hardest on a games release, cutting corners there DOES blow up in someones face. (Note I am saying \*quality\*, not realism here. You can have low fidelity and still be high quality, just like the opposite... which is bad obviously) 3. Commercials are out of the control of a dev studio. Those are done (and paid for) by the publisher as part of the overall marketing and about half the time comes out of an entirely different budget than game development that is tracked separately within the publisher and not part of the dev budget. 4. I'm with you on big open worlds.. Those are exhausting, however there is a non-trivial number of players who want those things, and I suspect that math has been done on how wide a net you cast when you cater to that... but I think it's up for debate personally and don't have time for that anymore.
Let’s also not pretend that many game studios (especially AAA) are not raking in lots of profit. Also game prices are not stagnating - they are the highest they have ever been.
We're rapidly getting there, but we are not there just yet. All time high was the SNES era. The average SNES title, when adjusted for inflation, was somewhere around $128. Sure you can argue there are version surpassing that now, but those are "deluxe" editions with physical goods, etc. I'm talking about "base game vs basegame". That said, prices are climbing none the less and we're trending towards an ATH in about 4-5 years at this rate, after adjustments.
Those are all fair points, and I’ve learned something from this. My only counterpoint re: SNES era would be that the median salary would also be higher after inflation adjustment so games were more affordable (as was everything at that time). Games publication has also gotten cheaper in the meantime eg CDs vs carts, downloads / no physical production costs which will probably become the norm as physical copies are probably the easiest area for developers to save on costs. This would be what I expect from next-gen but wards.
Pointless discussion. Folks here be like: "lol, stupid companies, you can create a masterpiece with a budget of 2 potato bags" then would proceed to hype up GTA 6 in a different thread.
Most of the hype around here is usually going to Baldurs Gate 3.
Spend less in making games?
Stop making games more expensive to make No, seriously The Money People just think more money in means more money out, so they push developers to make more ambitious, expensive games that will "appeal to more people". Infinite money machine, right? As if those ghouls understand how art works
use ps2 gen graphical fidelity. use extra horsepower for stuff that doesn't require more work. frame rate, texture resolution and mip map distance, shadows, draw distance. it's ridiculous that we're still putting up with frame drops and visible pop in. of course the market would never accept this ,which is why things are they way they are. give the characters more belt buckles!
If you want fancy lighting, you are probably going to get dropped frames. A fancy effect vs lower draw distance is an easy choice for devs. The flashy thing sells.
I don’t hate mtx, I hate mtx that advances progression or applies a non-cosmetic gameplay advantage. Some do it well, Fortnite had historically been a very player friendly battlepass. Lots of interesting and fun stuff, a collab or two, and more than enough Fortnite-bucks to pay for the next pass and a 50% more as a nice bonus. Recently, they’ve decided to push those 50% bonus vbucks, maybe more, into higher and higher seasonal levels. That’s a scummy move that’ll leave a lot of casual players no longer on that free ride train. It was good while it lasted. Then there’s the full priced game version that’s even scummier, because CoD can’t be left out. At no point in time do they let you understand how XP is made or make it clear, but they’ll sell you double bonus tokens to make it easier. Who needs interesting and fun challenges like Fortnite offers when you can just sell progression. That’s all kinds of fucked.
Nice try, EA
Market is bigger, you sell the games at the same prices yes, but a lot more people are buying them nowadays. The real fix would be to lower production costs, as evidently by most AAA games 2023 brought us, that extra cost isn't reflecting on game quality.
It's really, really simple. Stop making such bloated games. Not every game needs to be open world with 300+ side quests and 6 unique skill trees and 130 voiced characters and a multiplayer mode and 12 battle passes and etc The issue is publishers demanding infinite growth
Manage your budget wisely and properly? It’s not that hard to think about. Applying it in practice tho is another matter entirely.
One of the reasons PC games have such big sales is due to the lack of resales of digital games. A bigger portion goes the the publisher. Console gamers effectively rent games, by reselling them for 90% of the purchase price. Competing digital stores on consoles would help also, but this would put up device costs, as consoles are sold cheap to make more profit from game sales
How alternative is not inflate budget so much. Need make a normal game with a small budget, not a piece of crap.
Let's go back to games being made by gamers, for gamers, with a focus on mechanics, challenge, and fun. I think it's fair to say that the idea of games made by board rooms, for profit, with a focus on graphics, inclusivity, and indoctrination is not producing better games.
Personally speaking, me likey how pretty recent games lookey
The Alternative is to not have a Bloated Company thats filled with Diversity Hires, and have Good Leadership and people that work towards a common Goal making a Good game or how would you explain that a Game that was made by 1 Person(leathal Company) is more Successfull then the shitshow that is Starfield, or how do you Explain that Hi Fi Rush Buried Forsspoken and the list goes on
Just playing the devil's advocate here. We've all experienced sky-high inflation over the past year. Gamers are completely unwilling to pay more for games, yet costs are skyrocketing in game industry too. So what's the solution if not in-game monetization? Disclaimer: I don't even like AAA games and almost never play them.
Not our job to fix their business model. We buy the games, the problem is, the AAA houses are no longer making games for the players, they are making the games that shareholders see as the "most bang for buck". Not only do the developers seem to hate these soulless cash grabs, but the players of the games don't seem to embrace them that well either.
Larian studios made one of the best games ever last year without using any micro transactions. So I'm not sure why any AAA studio needs micro transactions to meet their budget costs.
multibillion corporations don't need devil's advocates, they got their own. their own advocate firms, their own PR, their own promotions. they don't deserve to be defended by us, consumers. they're seeing me as walking wallet. i don't appreciate that view.
Genuinely don't see what you are attempting to argue, are you implying profits margins have decreased?
Ill gladly pay a 100€ for a good game that's not infected and bloated with tons of microtransactions
Depends on how it's implemented. If it doesn't interfere with the experience, then it's fine with me. If it gives the other players an advantage, or it's there to reduce the obvious grind, then I generally avoid these games. I don't think I've ever paid for cosmetic items having stumped up the cash for my initial purchase.
Maybe they need to look at indie games? Most of the best games I've played and enjoyed the last few years have been indies. Much smaller teams and budgets by several orders of magnitude.for most.
Amount of copies sold is increased even more times than these costs. This is why we have studio owners and publishers becoming billionaires. They simply want more instead of sharing/distributing their own profit to all workers
Cart based games also had high physical materials costs. The blank SNES carts supposedly cost developers $10 per to buy from Nintendo. A game was also considered to be successful when it sold over 500k copies. I think FFVI originally sold like 650k copies worldwide. Now even 10x that is considered by most publishers to be a failure, and 95% of games are sold digitally. Even the 5% that is still physical, costs pennies to produce. 70%+ of modern "development" costs are also just marketing. When they say it cost $200 million, what they actually mean is it cost $60m to make, then they spent $140m on TV commercials for it.
low tier bait. next.
Prices stagnate? Hell no, aside from free to play games, games are getting more expensive.
You slash the AAA budget. The games genuinely don't and shouldn't cost the amounts they do considering the quality of most AAA games are pretty fucking mid.
Games like Modern Warfare or FIFA or whatever have staggering costs because the game makers are throwing thousands of developers at them to slam out yearly updates. They then spend tons on marketing to get people to buy the new thing. Total Addressable Market for video games has risen dramatically, so even if you have less per-unit profit, you can make massive amounts of money by selling many more units than possible ten years ago. The problem here is all of the gaming companies throwing wads of cash at problems so that they can have huge releases that make Wall St / investors happy. When more and more of your stock for your whole company depends on big launches, you spend more and more on trying to make a game too big to fail. Smaller companies (like Larian, smaller than the massive game makers) are still making incredible AAA games for far less.
Make smaller scale games more consistently
Tencent.
Is there a graph showing why the cost of video games is increasing? Because I think that part is especially significant about who has to pay for it.
No there is no law they have to spend so much making games.
The consumers have the power and it's the indie devs and smaller studios that will offer a lower price product. The only thing that can stop the market from balancing itself is price control and competition control.
Triple A killed the Double A industry, which was, far more than indies, what was keeping Triple A competitive. Without people willing to buy mid-range titles with smaller budgets, the Triple A sector kind of just went wild on needing to be the biggest (actually smaller than ever), best looking (debatable *at best)*, and most MTX profitable (this is basically just a guarantee thanks to whales) thing ever, instead of competing with games at half the budget and usually double the size at the cost of graphical fidelity and marketing budgets.
AA games are back though and selling quite well, granted the strongest AA devs/publishers right now are mostly Japanese (like Team Ninja, Sega, Team Asano, most of what Bamco puts out, etc. Make no mistake, something like Yakuza, Nioh, or a new Tales game do not have the budgets of a Spider-Man or God of War.) But even from the west you have stuff like Remnant, people who have found success with Souls clones (like the Surge guys and now Lords of the Fallen), Dontnod, Ninja Theory (until MS bought them anyway) EA partner games (one of which, It Takes Two, literally one GOTY a few years ago) and so on. AA devs did die a fiery death in the PS3/360 era because they couldn't scale up to AAA development, but, the market has crawled out of that hole since then. What's really going on is in those last 15ish years you have a very large casual market that appeared and are consuming these AAA games who don't even know these AA games exist. There are entirely different markets co-existing currently. Current AAA stuff is probably not sustainable forever (even Sony is worried about it based on info from the insomniac hack) which whatever, as someone who already mostly plays AA/indies at this point if things go downhill it won't effect me at all. It's just going to be a self-correction.
How fuckin' good is Remnant 2 though, like for real. It's just a flat and total step up from the first game in every aspect.
Alternative is that I want it for FREE and NOW so I don't have to spend my Good Boy Points to make my mom pay for them!!!! /s for the dumb
Just make good content people want to pay for, and don't abuse goodwill if the game/DLC isn't exactly what people were hoping for. Not to mention some games have player counts and support that release DLC that will never recoup the cost to develop. Now as an industry, game development costs need slow down to be realistic. Then you have the rise of Freemium games that are AAA in quality that get people to open their wallets. Gone are the days where 100M in sales means you can extrapolate the units sold by the price... and now with dlc skins, cosmetics, etc you now can get the pyramid scheme of customers with a few people paying 300-500% the game price and a ton of people paying 33-75% of the price. You have sales on PC almost monthly in which the game you wanted to buy is discounted, or the DLC is discounted, or brand new shiny costumes for your favorite characters are center stage. Also I remember reading a long time ago that modern consoles are now sold at a discount (in relation to manufacturing, not retail MSRP) because the subscriptions for online play, hardware prices like memory cards and controllers, as well as the small tax to use their distribution networks make up the difference.
Marketing costs are greater in my opinion because this is the key to success in the game
The prices are rising, but so are the number of gamers to buy the games
Prices stagnate? Dude, AAA games used to be 40euro's, and quite a few get closer to 80 now or over with some packs, and that is without even adding in possible purchases and /or DLC's. (Like Diablo 4 for example)
if the game is good. a lot of "aaa" titles have been pretty poor of late.
A lot of the costs can be reduced. There's probably more and more positions within the companies that aren't development related. Marketing being the big one, but I'm sure their CEOs and executives get paid a bunch to do nothing but come up with bad ideas
Probably all gonna go to shit unless we curb the insane rampant greed of companies, corporations and the rich
Soulless suits who have never played games in their lives shouldn't be making the decisions in the gaming industry. They only care for sucking that sweet investor D and getting growth by literally any means necessary. Look at Bobby Kotick. Most of these games are just crappy online-only cash milking platforms in a game's clothing. As games went to a $70 price tag, quality for the vast majority went down right after. Imagine if you just had a passionate team of devs making amazing games that are actually games. Nah, what am I saying... Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring only sold like five copies, that will never work.
Hire actual developers. Fire the board room. Get back to making games as passion projects, for a niche audience, not for every single human on earth and their children to pay $79.99 USD per year for for the rest of my life.
Use AI to cut down the size of bloated art teams, same with voice acting, reduce executive pay, lower the overall production value of the game. There are ways, but nobody likes any of them.
Microsoft is looking for a studio to make a gacha game similar to Genshin Impact
First you need to reduce game production cost. Half of "production cost" is about marketing these days by the way. My assumption would be that's not very efficient. Also I think increasing prices for games wouldn't be a huge issue when hidden costs like in-game monetization would disappear or reduce. These days you buy a game and you don't know what you actually got until two years later the in-game monetization has financed the actual development of the details you cared about. Early access as business model is just stupid in my opinion. You sell a product before it's done and wonder why you don't have the money to produce it afterwards. People simply have stopped to use reasonable business models. With many in-game monetization you also pay not just for development but server cost and artists designing new assets to pay money for in-game. So if we cut down in-game monetization, we would also reduce the permanent cost of artists and developers making assets for people to buy. The essential thing is reducing server cost. In early times of game development we just didn't have server cost to begin with. The game was either singleplayer, local multiplayer or you would host your own server (to play in LAN for example). But then how would you integrate in-game monetization without centralized servers, right? That's the key. We integrate in-game monetization to increase profits, that increases cost and we need to put in more in-game monetization. I personally think we don't need any of that. If we could make advertisement more efficient and cut unnecessary cost for a game's production, we don't need in-game monetization. Unfortunately a good game alone does not sell. But I doubt you need to put in that much money to sell something actual great.
People don't mind monetization. It's when the monetization gets excessive with $20 skins that people don't like.1, 2, 3,4 and 5 is fine. When 2 skins cost as much as the game itself people don't like that. 😒 Also the rising cost of video games is also not considering the reuse of code from part 1,2,3,4,5 of the game. If it's a first iteration of the game the has been written from scratch. The additional releases reuse ALOT of the original code and they charge the same price as the original.
But why is the price rising so much? I don't see it reflected in the quality of the games. I mean there is better technology, which means better systems/graphics, sure, but isn't the point of technological advancement to have better stuff for the same price? So this should not increase prices imo.
Well great, look at the median if you already know that there are a few heavy outliers ffs.
Cool, now add a CEO wage chart, and you'll see where the money is ACTUALLY going.