Perhaps making one game per decade is a losing strategey.
Edit: I heard a million excuses for that over the years from AAA industry, but my counter is just pointing to Capcom. Why can they keep up both output and quality?
Well no but also yes.
An Atari 2600 was $160 in 1979. Cartridges were $25-40. Adjust for inflation and that’s $738.56 for a console and $115-184 per cartridge.
Also minimum wage was $2.90 ($13.39). Median family income was $19,660 ($90,750.94).
And it was new tech.
So the prices have come down. There are a lot of amazing games that are cheap that you can play basically forever. Minecraft, Dead Cells, Skyrim, etc.
But our expectations have risen while our wages have come down.
So not wrong, but not right for the reasons you’d assume.
An Atari 2600 was $160 in 1979. Cartridges were $25-40. Adjust for inflation and that’s $738.56 for a console and $115-184 per cartridge.
Dunkey, is that you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvPkAYT6B1Q
First time seeing this, watched the whole thing, no lies detected. (Though he didn’t touch on my point about income.)
I have enough that I could go out right now and drop $5k on a new PC build and not have it affect me.
My last mostly full build was in 2016. I’m still on ddr4 ram and just 6 months ago I upgraded my system to a used AMD R 5 5600x processor I got for $150 and an AMD 6600xt GPU I paid $200 for.
I’ll play one of the million older games I haven’t played yet before I ever spend so damned much on a new build or $900 on a console.
These people only care now because it’s actually affecting the bottom line.
Did they care when AAA pricing was lifted to $70 (base) as AAA quality took a nosedive? Did they care when “preordering” turned into “premium”? Did they care when microtransactions made some games into spend-to-win machines?
Hell, most of these clowns don’t even play games. Just more rich people putting on the hat they think they need to get away with a “hello, fellow gamers.”
Maybe the industry has a C-suite crisis.
Why would I pay $70 for shit that’s super watered down to appeal to the lowest common denominator when I could pay $20-40 for something made with real passion?
It’s interesting how people are finally starting to notice after being told for years this will all eventually come to a head.
“People are buying indie games instead and I’m not happy about it”
It’s not: “Gaming is unaffordable.” it’s “People aren’t willing to give us more money.”
Not just indie games, every game. Every new game is in competition with every other game in existence. It’s a battle for recognition and attention, winners take all. Brutal situation.
Same goes for books, movies, TV, music.
I seriously wonder if more competent mobile gaming picks up some of the slack considering the “retro emulator” machines are starting to run PC games via Game Native app. If i didn’t already have a steam deck i would seriously consider one of those devices.
I’m not convinced that we are going to see a renewed push for optimization. I think streaming will be aggressively pushed with low time limits in the forthcoming next gen to “make it affordable.” Xbox was ahead of the curve in that regard.
There’s that passive voice, striking again
Whose decision was it to charge 70-80 usd for a game?
Whose ai investments are buying up all the ram, gpus, and ssds?
Not consumers’…
And don’t forget, everything is digital now, so that $80 game that you’ve completed in 2 weeks can’t be traded for any secondary value.
Seriously. These CEOs need to get their heads out of their asses and open their eyes. My gaming PC is from 2019. My newest machine is lower power than that. A steam deck. And they’ve ruined the steam machine pricing too.
AAA games cost a lot, use basically all the same formulas from the past decade or two, and are expensive to make. They need to target less lofty graphics if they want to sell more copies. Less and less can afford bleeding edge hardware. Now is the time to double down in quality instead of fancy graphics. And this is why they’re losing and indies are thriving.
Still a screamin deal as far as $ per hour of entertainment.
Adjusted for inflation, I paid ~$125.00 CAD for The Legend of Zelda when it launched on NES… For an 8 hr game…
The scale and quality of content delivered today is LIGHT YEARS ahead, and frankly, still the best value proposition in any entertainment media.
That fails to take into account the fact that the gaming was a niche hobby that wasn’t particularly accessible in part due to prices. Given the far far larger market for games and the greater competition for gamer attention you would expect prices to come down.
Prices are set base on what the market is believed to be able to bare however so value per hr or cost to develop are somewhat incidental to the monetisation of a game.
Prices for games have stayed constant for 35 years. Can you think of anything else that has stayed the same price in that time frame?
For real. Nintendo 64 was not a niche hobby, and the games were still 70 to 80 bucks. That’s like $160 in today dollars. It shows, too. We got all this technology, but the care, polish, attention just isn’t there.
That’s sort of my point… Prices are WAY down. Lower than they have EVER been. $125 for an 8 hr. game. What would that cost today?
Yar har fiddle de dee
Paying these prices is bullshit, you see!
They don’t deserve all your hard-earned money!
Come be a pirate!
I mean, unless you play the last four decades of games in emulation… or the couple hundred thousand indie games on steam… or the other few hundred thousand mobile games or…
Oh, you mean your company profits are in crisis. Yeah. Good.
The amount of money the industry blows chasing PR with the tiniest minority of whiny “core gamers” is going to be the downfall of AAA.
The problem is that investors are brain-dead, so Forbes picking up on negative sentiment from 500 neckbeards can legitimately tank a publicly traded publishers stock.
The vast, vast, VAST majority of gamers don’t identify as gamers, don’t play 50 titles a year, and sure as hell don’t engage with gaming media or online discourse about gaming. 95% of games industry revenue is coming from people who don’t give a shit about gamer “hot button topics”.
The problem, like with most industries, is the speculative commodification of the companies themselves instead of just their products.
Well Asha, maybe you should talk to your boss Slopya about that AI problem that’s raising prices on everything.
It’s like they’re catching onto why the urban legend about drug dealers intentionally poisoning their customers is bullshit. Turns out your sales go down when people can’t buy your product.
That CEO has no room to talk about gaming being unaffordable and the industry ignoring the signs, when it’s that very industry that made it unaffordable to begin with.
You can’t claim ignorance of a problem you and your industry directly caused, Asha. You’re as complicit in this as the industry you’re saying is ignoring warning signs.
That’s like if I broke a stick in half in front of a bunch of people, and then tried to say I didn’t break that stick, when everyone saw me break that stick. Stupid analogy, I know, but that’s basically what Asha is trying to pull here.
Hehe “Gaming has become unaffordable”. Continues to buy ram and other component capacity for AI data centers, while actively enshittifying every single game with microtransactions and forced game as a service bullshit. driving customers to increasingly purchase cheaper indie titles that are actually fun.
“Whatever can we do to fix this problem? “ <lays off veteran team so the shareholders can make 5 more Pennie’s a share, causing talent to look at different industries where they aren’t laid off every 2 years, causing every game to be made by devs fresh out of college>.
“This industry isn’t profitable anymore!” <transfers AI investment losses to game division to cover stupid ass speculative investments>
A quick and controversial argument in favor of MTX: MTX allows them to extract more money from those with excess, subsidizing the game for those who can’t afford to pay as much. Sure, when it’s done poorly it’s horrible. It can be a good thing though, like a supporter edition bundle that gives you like an icon next to your name or something.
Budget management should still be the primary option. Does your game need to cost this much to make, such that you have to have insane revenue to make up for it? Could you make something cheaper that’s just as good (if not better, as limitations are the mother of creativity, or however that phrase goes)?
Except it’s a race to the bottom, MTX causes games to be designed around MTX. Instead of rewarding gameplay the design philosophy becomes rewarding purchasing. Which then leads to games designed around gambling triggers. Don’t need to make an entertaining game if you can create an addictive loop.
Which then causes people to give up on gaming and move to other past-times, which means less sales. Which means more aggressive MTX, which leads to the CEO of Microsoft bitching that gaming isn’t profitable enough because of the very problem he himself helped create.
I don’t disagree, when done poorly by industry giants. There are some smaller games that have done it well, as just a way to find development. It isn’t purely bad, and in a world where things are this unaffordable it can be good to keep in mind. Ethical MTX can exist that don’t ruin the experience. It just isn’t what these massive companies want.
Something like the DRG founder’s pack, for example, is pretty good, or the Stationeers DLCs, which add purely optional ways to play that change how things work, which is only really useful to experienced players.
This is it, on so many aspects. And during that they ruined the fun.
It’s like shitting your pants and when everyone calls you out on it, you deny it even though they can all smell it.
Works for the president of the US
I like my ‘breaking a stick’ analogy better, but yeah, that too.
It’s like breaking the stick and then telling the watchers they need more sticks, but they cost too much.
