this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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The fact so much of the games industry has latch to $60 as 'the price' for decades is shocking. It's an unsustainable practice and will increasingly make companies lean more on post launch predatory practices.
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.
I agree with the sentiment on wages keeping up but I think ultimately the price isn't as important as the value. I've bought a games for $60 that I've got 2k+ hrs in. That's about 3 cents an hour, which I like to compare to a $15 dollar movie ticket that's ~2-3 hrs of entertainment ($5-7.5 hr)
Obviously not everyone, myself included, gets that much out of each game. But if some games costed $140 but did give 2k hrs of gameplay (7 cents per hr) I wouldnt be bothered. To be clear I don't think disposable AAA should jack up prices, but if the price reflects the value offered I see no issue.
On the volume thing I think we'll probably start to plateau in the next 30 years w/ % of the total world pop consuming games, and inflation will continue. I only wish to point out that the eternal $60 price tag is something that probably should end in our lifetimes.
Your calculations are severely flawed. First of all not everyone has 2000hrs. to invest in games. Plus I am buying mostly single player games, and the only way to invest more time is if they have quality mods that are worth playing. Usually the main story of the games is 10-20 hours long. The rest are grind generic quests that are not fun. So 150$ divided by 15 is 10$ per hour, which as you can see is above the cinema price.
It's easier than ever for anyone to publish games. Not the old days anymore when a few publishers controlled the market of who could and couldn't sell and would get promoted or not. More competion is going to drive down prices. Being able to charge high prices is more a luxury that would have been possible back in the past when consoles ruled supreme as opposed now with barrier to entry having gotten so low.
Arguing the rich deserve more money is crazy man
That is patently not what I was arguing. If they don't raise the price past $60 they'll just be incentivized to get it through predatory micro transactions.
And by arguing a business practice is unsustainable I'm not saying that entire industry pays employees in an equitable way.
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.
Ummm, yeah, me too... 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.