How is this title allowed to be so misleading?
If anyone reads the article, the guy is arguing for honesty and transparency with video game prices as opposed to the multi-tiered and/or subscription based schemes that are used currently.
"‘I don’t love the artificiality of pricing structures post-retail,’ Douse wrote. ‘Use the inflated base price to upsell a subscription, and use vague content promises to inflate ultimate editions to make the base price look better. It all seems a bit dangerous and disconnected from the community.’
Douse believes games should be priced based on their ‘quality, breadth, and depth’, instead of simply being fitted to established pricing structures."
He’s saying the base price should be higher because there should only be one price.
Wrong premises lead to wrong conclusions. Games are expensive because publishers that add absolutely no value to the product take a big cut of the revenue. The solution is not to raise prices and continue feeding the parasites, it’s to cut costs. Otherwise, the price increase will simply lead to less people buying the products and even lower profits.
Publishers are kinda useless tbh.
I think there are some exceptions. Like Kitfox publishing Dwarf Fortress. Taking weird little indies and giving them an art / usability budget to become more accessible and, in turn, make the OG devs a bunch of money. Nobody loses.
I’m almost never willing to pay current AAA game prices for a game that it’s possible I’ll be bored with after a few hours. I’d much rather spend the same amount on 3 or 4 well-reviewed indie games as the chances are I’ll get at least one game amongst them that I’ll enjoy investing my time into.
So you still haven’t played bg3 huh?
Bg3 is not the game to argue didnt live up to its cost, thats for sure.
I’d be okay if we downgrade back to 2010 graphics. How much would that save ya?
The 2010 style graphics would also be cheaper today, as you could get away with less optimisations and tweaks.
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 high base level costs aren’t due purely to development, I’d wager. How many admin staff, redundant management, petty meetings, and exorbitant costs go to overhead that could be solved with a 20 minute meeting and less triple expressos for the executive team?
Moreover, chances are we could find several issues with the flow of work around the development of the game itself. Poorly optimized communication, for the win.
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?
Most people here are reacting to the title. The article lays out a different idea, far more nuanced and reasonable.
Apparently we are done giving Larian the benefit of the doubt.
Not sure why heavily leaning to one side or another is so popular nowadays.
Anyway, I don’t know how individual companies do what. I don’t work for them. I don’t have insider knowledge. I do know how companies are typically structured and the traps nearly every company experiences as they grow, both in revenue and often consequently in manpower.
I’m not going to dive into it. This is a pretty easy topic to find on many search engines and Youtube where they’ll probably go more in-depth than I can with a limited attention span and two thumbs.
I have not seen a single post in this thread that implied the poster read the article and understood what the publishing director was trying say.
The post title is ridiculously misleading.
Not speaking of BG3, I feel nowadays there are too many cooks in the kitchen with big budget games.
With little research I did BG3 has about 450, but compared to COD which has about 3,000 people working on it. I can’t even grasp how to organize that many people to work on a single idea, and for COD I think it shows they don’t either.
The sticker price of games is what it is. Micro transactions, subscription models, DLC, and such have all been flawed attempts at remedying this. If they increase the sticker price of games they’ll be subjecting themselves to more critical consumers, more risk averse buyers, and less movable players.
The question they have to ask is, do they feel safe rolling those dice, if their survival might otherwise depend on decreasing a game budget?
How are they not rolling in the dough by now? So much of the market has rolled over to digital, which means no secondary market.
Before you could pay $50 for a game, play it and sell it later for 10-$25 (depending on how quick you are), effectively making the price 25-$40.
The destruction of ownership rights has been profitable, but there isn’t an amount labeled “enough”
Does he see the shit big publishers have been pumping out for years?
You would have to pay me to play half the AAA slop that comes out.
Have they tried cutting down on avocado toast?
Looking forward to paying more for the “base” game, and then a bit more for season passes cos why not, and then maybe they could make the season pass not include all the DLC so I can pay more for that too, and maybe they can fill the “base” game with adverts for the DLC, and maybe they can release the “base” game as a shitty buggy mess 🤞
Read the article. The publisher wants higher base costs so that we can get rid of deceptive pricing like subscriptions, micro transactions, and multi-tiered pricing on release.
In that sort of comparison, I also would choose higher base costs. Noones complaining that BG3 was 60$ are they? They follow this structure of one time purchase and most would argue it was worth it.
i can’t read
No worries seems like everyone else had the same problem too!
The mention of GTA 6, out in 2025, reminds me of Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick’s comments from an earnings call last year that industry prices are “very, very low” versus the number of hours of playtime games offer and player perception of their value.
I’d generally agree with that, but perhaps with an asterisk on player perception of their value. I’d much rather have a 20 hour Ubisoft open world game than an 80 hour one filled with mandatory padding, but there is definitely a contingent of their customers that want there to be that padding, because they equate hours with value. The length of games has gone up a lot in the past 20 years (often to their detriment, I’d argue), and the price has moved but only barely. The games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring that are 100 hours long without feeling like they’re padded with busy work and checklists in order to finish them? Those games feel like I made off like a bandit at $60. Then you’ve got Hi-Fi Rush, a quality game I’d have happily paid $60 for, that you can finish in 10-15 hours, and Microsoft only charged $30 for it next to a flop like Redfall or another one of those padded games like Starfield for $70 each.
Also worth noting that lots of people like to throw out how much bigger the gaming audience is compared to back in the day as the reason why prices shouldn’t increase, but while that’s true, most of the oxygen in the room is still sucked up by only a handful of winners, and those are the games like Star Wars Outlaws selling you an ultimate edition for $150 with a season pass, because they know you’ll pay it.
The average AAA game should probably find ways to develop the game leaner and faster while still finding that value for people. I think that’s the nut Judas spent 10 years trying to crack, so we’ll see how they did next year.
Gaming prices should not be increasing. They should be decreasing. Supply is literally infinite thanks to digital distribution and gaming makes so much profit its like, more than the entire music and movie industries combined. The number of people that buy games now is huge, there is no justifiable reason for prices to go up other than corporate greed.
Back in the day, games were $80-$100 USD. But they didn’t have a lot of the advancements that the gaming industry has today. Aside from the number of people buying games being smaller back then, the cost of manufacturing game cartridges and physical copies was a lot higher than today. Digital distribution was not realistically an option for the PC platform, and was literally not an option for consoles. Game development tools were non-existent. Most game development studios had to program their own game engines, or license one from someone that did. A lot of work was done manually, by human hand for quite some time. Compare that with today, where game engines are plentiful and very user-friendly, and other tools come with many automated or assisted features that would previously had to have been done by hand. I mean, game engines had a period where a good user interface was unheard of.
Then you look at other issues. Game studios are too big these days. 500 people is too many people working on a project. Bigger ships are slower to turn, lean out the teams to like less than half of that number. Development cycles are too long. Games used to be developed in a year or two, three at the absolute most. Games didn’t used to be as big, but you know what? They don’t need to. A 10 hour game that is paced well with a good story is infinitely better than an 80 hour game where you wander around a 95% empty world experiencing a disjointed barely existent story. Marketing costs are overinflated. There is no reason so much money should be spent on marketing a game. Games don’t need some random pop song in the trailer to get people to buy it, have the composer/sond designer write the trailer music like in the old days, since that was part of their job.
And as you mention, most of the time there are few hits that sell big. This was always true, and will always be true forever. Games don’t really compete with each other except for one resource: the customer’s time. And people have a finite amount of time. Until people begin to have more free time, and infinite time, it doesnt matter how many games are made, they will still always compete for the customer’s time. It is an immutable fact of the gaming industry.
Switching to cheaper media and then digital distribution has reduced costs for distribution, but that’s been eaten entirely and then some by the other problem you call out, which is how much larger the team is and how long the game takes to develop. In order for prices to decrease, that second problem needs to be solved. And sure enough, games made by smaller teams with fewer bells and whistles are cheaper, and there are plenty of those. I’ve played plenty of great ones just this year. By comparison to how many person months go into something like Baldur’s Gate 3 compared to something like Conscript, it’s amazing and perhaps even absurd that it only costs me three times as much as Conscript.
I think a game should be priced accordingly with its quality, breadth & depth
So… BG3 should be $60 and other games these days should be like $30 or less? I can get behind that. That’s obviously not what he meant though.
Maybe stop inflating the cost of games development by letting them get stuck in development hell, hiring external consultancy firms that add literally zero value to the game, massively overinflating markering budgets, and hiring way too many developers to work on a project? That’s a good start.
This guy is a real dingaling. Especially calling Star Wars Outlaws a “blockbuster” game that isn’t priced correctly? My guy, that game should be free according to its quality and depth.
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.
Going along those lines, treat your people better. Retention is always important, but every role in game creation is inherently a skilled artistic job
You can swap out one cashier or factory worker for another, and after an adjustment period, your revenue won’t change much. You can’t swap out one programmer for another - that’s like changing the artist halfway through building a sculpture
You will not get the initial vision, and you need someone far more skilled to make something good out mid way through
The fact so much of the games industry has latch to $60 as ‘the price’ for decades is shocking. It’s an unsustainable practice and will increasingly make companies lean more on post launch predatory practices.
Games also sell at a much higher volume than they did back then.
Wages have also not kept up with inflation, which is why games at over 100$ 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.
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 $60 they’ll just be incentivized to get it through predatory micro transactions.
And by arguing a business practice is unsustainable I’m not saying that entire industry pays employees in an equitable way.
It’s easier than ever for anyone to publish games. Not the old days anymore when a few publishers controlled the market of who could and couldn’t sell and would get promoted or not. More competion is going to drive down prices. Being able to charge high prices is more a luxury that would have been possible back in the past when consoles ruled supreme as opposed now with barrier to entry having gotten so low.
Eh, apples to oranges.
A 60$ 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.
Person with objective personal financial interest in raising prices says raising prices is necessary
Let’s not pretend this capitalist trash take is a valid point. Yes, games cost more to make now.
Did games also sell over 22 million copies back then? And that’s just Steam BG3 sales, not including literally every other platform.
