Matthew94 said:
Yeah because games get more expensive each gen.
Oh wait, they don't.
N64 games were £40-50. PS3 games retail for £40 and most pay £30 or less within a few days/weeks.
Do you REALLY think they will price their product outside of the reach of the average consumer? No, it would be suicide.
I'm going to phrase this politely, this time.
What has changed is that it's increasingly common to sell system hardware at a loss. The Nintendo 3DS is now being produced at a signifcant loss on every unit sold, as was the PS3; it still may be, for all I know.
When the PS3 first came out, it was revealed that some of the unfortunate first-run big-name title providers would have to sell two and a half copies of their game for every PS3 that had been purchased at the time.
Take the shallowest of looks around the site, and you will see countless articles and posts about day-one DLC, complaints about piracy, anger about game price increases, industry hatred of the used-game market, the closures of studios whose games "only" sold in the high six- and low seven-figure range, expansion of the independent and "phone games" markets.
All of these articles point to one very simple fact. Games are getting more and more expensive to make, and prices are artificially, unsustainably low.
If you look at a game from the N64 era, you might take a moment to look at the end credits. It may have a couple dozen names. If you look at a similarly priced game from the XBox 360 and PS3 era, the credits will frequently roll on long enough to play all the way through a couple of popular songs.
Every single one of those names has to draw a paycheck. The texture artists, the modelers, the motion-capture guys, the beta-testers, the voice-actors who dubbed the game into German.
Delivering the next-generation experience that justifies customers making the leap simply means
more texture artists, modelers, motion capture guys, etc. etc. For the poor schmucks who spearhead the charge into the next generation, it means fighting with a cumbersome new piece of hardware, more complicated than the last, whose development kits probably haven't had all the bugs ironed out yet. The reward for this struggle is getting to create games that will be sold at full price only to the tiny pool of early adopters, many of whom will probably deride the work as not really taking advantage of the new platform and being too reminiscent of the last generation.
And the hardware side gets to go through another run of manufacturing underruns and production snafus and red-rings-of-death.
These kinds of conditions were hard enough to financially justify when, for example, the Japanese video game market was healthy.
There is a reason why the places the market is expanding right now are in small-team projects like cell phone games and Facebook games. There is a reason why there's an increased consolidation among the groups responsible for producing AAA-titles, and so many subcontracted development teams either get absorbed into bigger companies wholesale or close their doors.
There is a reason the big three haven't been eager to push into a new generation. These developments did not occur in a vacuum.
The fact that you can jump up and down on the edge of a cliff for years singing "Nothing ever changes, la la la la la" does not preclude the possibility that one day your jumping causes the whole thing to give way underneath you. Or as stock traders like to say, "Past performance is not an indicator of future results."
Before you make blithe assumptions about the cliff, take a look at the cracks.
