It feels to me like the closer we get to the Nintendo Switch 2’s June launch and the, apparently, $80 games associated with it, the more people are fighting with themselves over what is and isn’t worth it. But at least Sony veteran and previous head of PlayStation Indies Shuhei Yoshida is free from inner turmoil – he thinks relatively expensive, high quality video games are unequivocally necessary.
“I don’t believe that every game has to be priced the same,” Yoshida continues. "Each game has different value it provides, or the size of budget. I totally believe it’s up to the publisher – or developers self-publishing – decision to price their product to the value that they believe they are bringing in.
Yoshida continues to say that, “In terms of actual price of $70 or $80, for really great games, I think it will still be a steal in terms of the amount of entertainment that the top games, top quality games bring to people compared to other form of entertainment.”
“As long as people choose carefully how they spend their money,” he continues, “I don’t think they should be complaining.”
This is like when the music industry said CD’s should cost 40 to 50 dollars instead of 12 dollars. There was only one good song on most CD’s. Look where CD’s are now. I don’t see how they can justify 80 dollars a game when they don’t even make a physical copy anymore. It’s now just an SD card with a key on it. They’re still downloading the game itself from the internet.
I agree with you about CDs but I’m not sure I understand your point about physical copies. If they’re still buying and shipping a physical SD card, from a production perspective, I’m pretty sure that’s the same cost regardless of whether it’s a key or a full game. And considering that digital copies of games tend to be the same price as physical ones anyways, I think the physical aspect is pretty negligible and doesn’t factor into the price in any real way.
BACK IN MY DAY! The original Nintendo games cost just about 70 to 80 adjusted to today’s inflation. But at least you got a cool instruction booklet you could read on the car ride home, the full bug-free game (most bugs were fun if you found some anyway), and you actually owned the game with no strings attached. You could actually trade the games with your friends. If they started packing goodies with the games like that again on top of owning the game outright without some kind of shady DRM or license agreement, then yes, 80 dollars could probably be justified. That’s where I was going with physical copies.
Well, if i have the entire game on the physical device and it doesn’t come with arbitrary DRM stuff, i can still enjoy it in 20 years on the old console even if all the servers are shut down.
I recently saw that used Gameboy Advance SPs go for the same price like when they were new. Old Gameboy games also go for similar prices like when they were launched. Because no matter where or when. As long as the console and the cartridge themselves are working and there is electricity, the games can be enjoyed.
That is a gigantic difference from a consumer perspective, no matter what the physical production costs are.
yup, “a steal” is a good word for that, but not in the direction they mean
They’re referring to hours of entertainment. People pay $20 to see a 2 hour film. Games give us 50+ hours at times.
That’s not to say games should cost the same as movies in terms of “entertainment hours”.
Quantifying the value of your media in “hours spent consuming it” is an intrinsically poor way to do things
You guys are paying $20 to see a single film at the cinema!?
I do choose carefully, I buy half a dozen indie games on sale instead, and I have nothing to complain about.
This is the way.
I’m carefully spending my money by buying less games, mostly DRM-free indie games.
Oh I will be choosing very carefully.
I’ll be going back and playing all the super Nintendo games I missed out on as a kid I think
You’d be better off getting an Anbernic for that.
Not wrong. You and other AAA studios are not making games worth that price tag though.
He’s not wrong, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a steal for the price it is. “Really great games” do exist and they’re worth their price tag, the problem is the number of AAA games of that caliber are like 1 in 30. We’re lucky to get one in any given year. Meanwhile, there are consistently high quality indie games coming out for less than $40.
Translation: The executives who don’t do anything deserve to get lots of money and you should be happy to pay them for it.
Fuck you.
We know they were an exec of one of the shittest companies around by the way they talk.
but like… if your entire customer base is saying you’re wrong, aren’t you then wrong by definition? the buyers set the prices, in a way.
If the customers still buy it in the end, the publisher was right. We will see over time. Maybe there will be a drop in sales but then GTA6 comes along and no one can resist, opening the path for other games.
Someone on lemmy recently put this into perspective for me. Even like 1% of the population of the USA is 3 million people. If you increase the cost of a product and don’t care about long-term sales, the immediate gain in profit can outweigh the loss of total customers down the line.
I still think cutting off customers and burning good will isn’t a good business model, but I’m not stupid wealthy, so what do I know.
Considering the at least 200+ hours I invested in give or take ten* games throughout my childhood / adolescence / young adult past, then even €100 would’ve been a steal.
I’ve always thought games were expensive until studying game development in college. From programming to 3D modeling, and boy can I confirm that it takes a lot of work to do well. The developers and artists that do it well, and ethically, deserve to be fairly compensated as such, provided no one becomes disproportionately rich.
*Age of Empires 2, MU Online, Unreal Tournament 1999/2004, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1/2/3, Battlefield 1942, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, R.O.S.E. Online, Counter-Strike 1.6, Counter-Strike: Source, Battlefield 2, Insurgency.
The developers and artists absolutely need to be fairly compensated for the highly skilled work they’re doing. The question is, does a good game require 1500-2500 of them? That’s where you need to sell 9 million copies of an $80 game to break even. Particularly in an era where online sales mean you no longer need a distribution partner who will produce hundreds of thousands of discs at a time, and who has existing partnerships with big box retailers, so much of that publishing budget, relationships and supply chain are no longer needed. Even with the standard 30% cut that digital storefronts take, a team of 30 people can spend five years developing a game for $15-20 million, including marketing and localization, sell 500K copies at $50 and break even. This type of scaling back is what’s needed to keep the industry profitable and sustainable. I’m not saying there’s no place for huge budget games, but they don’t need to be the norm that bankrupts developers from one bad release.
Does this mean less expectations for sales numbers too?
80$ is a steal, yeah right…
(Screenshot from isthereanydeal just for simplicity, avoid grey market when possible)
isthereanydeal isn’t grey market and only shows prices from resellers that operate “above board”.
You can find way cheaper than the prices listed there if you’re willing to go grey market.
There is an argument to be made that Expedition 33 was essentially created by a studio with 30 people (though once you add everyone that worked on it the credits do balloon to over 400) with a rather small budget, and meanwhile companies like Rockstar, Sony and Activision have thousands working for years and spending hundreds of millions creating games like GTA 6, CoD and Concord, so naturally they should be a lot more expensive to buy too.
They just shouldn’t be surprised if people don’t buy all the $500 Waguy steak on offer and are perfectly happy with way cheaper options.
There’s also the argument whether games really need that high of a budget. It feels like there’s little correlation between the budget of a game, and its success (or quality).
Sony could’ve invested in five or ten more Helldivers 2 scaled games, instead of wasting it all on the Concord flop.
I would be so excited if more games were made in an n64 or ps1 style. Maybe I’m just huffing nostalgia, but I still enjoy some of those classics. Games don’t have to have amazing graphics or be massive to be fun.
Nobody rightfully complains when Lamborghini sells their luxury car for hundreds of thousands. Gamers have been conditioned for far too long that indie games cost less than 60 and everything else costs 60. This was the fault of the industry to be sure, but it’s clear the barrier is being broken by necessity and expensive-to-make games are going to climb the price ladder and prices for games overall will stratify like many other markets.
Interestingly, that’s all Shuhei is saying here. Pay for the games you think are worth it. Games still provide a significant amount of value for their cost, even at higher price points. This is obviously true as we’ve had a decade of base game $60 and ultimate edition $90-100 with people purchasing ultimate editions and such.
Are you suggesting that AAA games are such premium, high quality products they should only be experienced by a few wealthy individuals who can afford the budget to buy them? Because that is what your analogy suggests.
That is what my analogy suggests and I suppose how you define wealthy matters, but that’s not strictly what I mean. I just mean prices are starting to striate.
AAA game devs are spending more on games every year and then suddenly finding out their market isn’t as wide as they hoped. High upfront cost + low demand sounds like a luxury product then, no? In the before times, they would release for $60 and squeeze hard for money. They can still do that, but now - since the price dam has broken - they can release for $80-100 and get more cash per super fan and then drop price aggressively to catch others who balked at the initial price.
I’ll be clear that the problem is the AAA industry spending too much on games when they don’t need to.
Over 400 seems a bit high to me but the size vs cost argument remains. Those external voice actors, animators, QA testers etc were all paid. Kepler Interactive even gave them money to have known actors for VA (they probably aren’t cheap).
So that’s very probably a several million budget (rumored to be between 5 and 25 mil according to non reliable source, thanks to Kepler and the early Gamepass contract).
Ok that’s not a 500 million budget, rather a 50 mil one (to be very large), but it’s definitely not a 500k budget.
And yet they sell it 45$.
Anyway, it just prove that you can build a Waguy steak alternative for cheaper while keeping the taste and without abusing your workforce.
“412 people (403 professional roles, 9 thanks) with 502 credits.” https://www.mobygames.com/game/241065/clair-obscur-expedition-33/credits/windows/?autoplatform=true
As for those compared budgets, CoD Black Ops Cold War cost $700 million and GTA 6 has already surpassed a billion.
It’s really absurd where budget of those games went to… Big corpo gaming is wasteful as fuck.
Half of those budgets is marketing
That’s even worse part of it. Why tf does game like GTA6 even need marketing? Everyone and their dog will talk about it anyway…
Ah thanks for the link! I was looking for that information but could not find it.
Stealing from the consumer
Why sell multiple games and make more money collectively when you can just sell one and alienate your loyal customers? Art of the deal.
$80? How much is that, like 4 bananas?
