Why Games Will Only Get Cheaper

[Strazdas]

My only dissent here is that current network infrastructure does not allow rapid installs of games and the actual size of video games are skyrocketing to multiple tens of GBs per game (Uncharted 3 was 40GB and that's on a current gen console). Steam is seriously helping this with a persistent library that allows uninstalling and reinstalling but the fact remains that US internet speeds are too slow and foreign data caps are too low to make this kind of thing viable or convenient. It will be and on that day I'll be cool with it. Until then, this is significantly less convenient for me than driving to a store, buying a disk, driving back, and slapping it into the system to play.

a thing of note here, as you siad, is that US internet speeds are to slow. the rest of the world can already handle these internet installs. and as soon as US decide to catch up. we wont have to worry about internet indrastructure failing.

I really don't like it when people insist that game creators have to do X or Y because "consumers demand it." As somebody who creates things, I can tell you from experience that to remain successful, you've got to give people what they want. Not what they think they want.

Hence why you sohuld never lsiten to forum whiners when designing something. I think the "i'd rather ahve my players annoyed than bored" applies here very well. most people dont really know what they will like from a next game, because they haven though about it. though there is one thing i think i want, and i really do, but our technology is like 100 years till that becomes even a possibility.


P.S. can we cut the crap about our wages being lower than 20 years ago and still being in crysis? because neither of those are true.

 

[Sarge034]

Unless you count the rich pissing on us. >.>

"Trickle-down" economics works as intended, though: it's a philosophy designed to market rich people to poor people.

I would disagree. The business cost cutting side of "trickle-down" economics fails miserably because there is no reason for the company to lower costs when they can simply pocket the extra earnings. I believe the individual side of "trickle-down" economics can be quite effective if implemented smartly. Think of a "stimulus package" type idea that was implemented at the correct time. You can't wait too late into the game to use this or people will simply save that money incase things get even worse. The idea is to provide capital to the market that will actually be circulated. However, this is one of those things that works well in theory, but in practice will probably always come a little too late. There are some other things you can do as well, but the same time sensitivity applies.

 

[Malisteen]

That's less 'trickle down', and more 'rising tide' - an economic philosophy that recognizes that the poor & middle class by necessity spend more and save less than the rich, so giving money to the poor & middle class will spur more activity and fluidity in the markets than giving money to the rich. Corporations and their wealthy owners, shareholders, and executives will still end up with the money in the end, but they'll have to actually make something or provide a service in order to get it, instead of it going straight into their pockets.

It's a philosophy I share. Tax incentives, grants, and the like can make hiring cheap as they want, but if the consumer base doesn't have any disposable income, then a firm still isn't going to hire anybody, because they wouldn't be able to make any more money with the extra productivity those new hires might provide.

 

[the_green_dragon]

You know what grinds my gears? Microsoft (and other people) trying to sell me a digital game at double the boxed price. If they did the right thing and made the digital games cheaper then the boxed product then maybe it wouldn't be a *****.

Simcity 5 with their always online DRM and one use code (no reselling) was selling for full price. HOW DOES THAT WORK?!

 

[xDarc]

Thank you. I couldn't even get past the first page of this article, because the old "games are cheap because inflation hurr durr" BS really pisses me off. Not only are individual copies cheaper to make than they were back then by an order of magnitude, not only are more people buying than ever before -- also by an order of magnitude -- but wages are down compared to inflation. ... (really it's a depression but nobody is willing to admit it), these aren't the boom years of the 90's anymore.

The whole inflation thing puzzled me to; Inflation is measured by tracking the cost of an index of goods/commodities. You can't just slap a number derived from tracking the price of a gallon of gasoline, a pound a bacon, gallon of milk, cup of sugar, etc. and say it applies to video games and video games are therefore cheap.

The reality is that wages have remained stagnant over the past 20+ years; so the average person would work the same amount of hours to buy a 60$ video game in 1993 as they do in 2013.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Yes because less content that's more simplified and broken up into DLC which costs more than ever is somehow better for us all.....

 

[spoonybard.hahs]

Actually you made a fundamental error in your comparison: Sonic 2 may have cost $75 but keep in mind Sonic 2 was a cartridge with integrated memory, and stuff that actually had a an assemble process and shipping of said packaged unit was naturally more expensive. As opposed to say these days where at best games are stamped onto $1 discs. and charged $60.

Games will get cheaper when people stop buying games for $60 or $50 nuff said. What about development costs? what about them. See this is the downside of upping technology. The more high end the console the more specialized labour you need and the more time you need to pay the specialized labour for.

The growing popularity of middleware engines has also helped keep development costs in check, but not enough to compensate for other skyrocketing costs involved in game development.

More and more I think indie devs are going to force big gaming's hand. Games like Super Meat Boy and Minecraft were made on astonishingly low budgets, and yet still manage to make far more money than high-budget games like Tomb Raider, which sold amazingly and still lost money. I think devs are pretty much going to have to start doing two things:

This is true, and keep in mind, there's also the ressurgence of older titles for earlier eras. GoG has mad an impressive business model based on giving people access to bygone classics. Gaming options are widening.

So much goes into things like environments and assets, and I'm sure this could be made more efficient. It baffles me that developers are hardly looking into ways to more quickly and cheaply create assets. Black mesa had a really nifty Face Creation System [http://wiki.blackmesasource.com/Face_Creation_System] which "allows there to be a wide variety of faces with very little work but high visual fidelity." It saved the developers a significant amount of time, and is exactly the sort of tool bigger companies should be looking into making in order to keep development costs from ballooning out of control. The fact of the matter is, so much of the cost of AAA games comes not from the amount of content, but the inefficiency with which that content was made.

Actually that's not as easy as you'd think. See assets aren't always portable between engines and it's not feasible to base all your games on the same engine. There is actually a lot of efficiency but a lot of the time is literally in the polish required. In short, making HD games with motion capture animation and realistic face bump shaders you amd scatter diffuse lighting reqauires money. More or less each feature/layer of tech requires at least 1 extra person and another set of billable man hours.

This is why games are big on DLC these days since it allows thm to scrape cash and reuse the same assets they used in the original.

STill it boils down to. The companies will charge as much as they think they can get away with. if people buy games for $60 on launch day they have no reason to sell in for $40 on launch day. Do they?

Thank you. I couldn't even get past the first page of this article, because the old "games are cheap because inflation hurr durr" BS really pisses me off. Not only are individual copies cheaper to make than they were back then by an order of magnitude, not only are more people buying than ever before -- also by an order of magnitude -- but wages are down compared to inflation. $60 today may buy a smaller amount of goods than it did 20 years ago, but it also accounts for /more/ of an average person's money. We're in the middle of a recession (really it's a depression but nobody is willing to admit it), these aren't the boom years of the 90's anymore.

And you know what? Game budgets are low for what they are. An average blockbuster movie costs between 2 and 4 times what an /expensive/ AAA game costs. Yet they make their money back and then some on much smaller increments of cash, because they're priced low enough that pretty much anyone can afford to buy a DVD or go to the movies. That's how games should be. People occasionally try to excuse it by saying they're a luxury product, but we're not talking a caviar and champagne luxury, we're talking beer and pretzels.

If the rumors are true (and most likely they are), Bioshock Infinite had a total budget just north of $300 million. The same as Avengers. The production costs alone of games have skyrocketed over the last seven years. I still remember people losing their shit at the idea of the first Gears of War having a production cost $10 million.

Oh, and games aren't cheap because of inflation. They're cheap because to stay viable, companies should be charging closer to $100 per unit given their budgets, team sizes, and actual consumer base.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Actually you made a fundamental error in your comparison: Sonic 2 may have cost $75 but keep in mind Sonic 2 was a cartridge with integrated memory, and stuff that actually had a an assemble process and shipping of said packaged unit was naturally more expensive. As opposed to say these days where at best games are stamped onto $1 discs. and charged $60.

Games will get cheaper when people stop buying games for $60 or $50 nuff said. What about development costs? what about them. See this is the downside of upping technology. The more high end the console the more specialized labour you need and the more time you need to pay the specialized labour for.

The growing popularity of middleware engines has also helped keep development costs in check, but not enough to compensate for other skyrocketing costs involved in game development.

More and more I think indie devs are going to force big gaming's hand. Games like Super Meat Boy and Minecraft were made on astonishingly low budgets, and yet still manage to make far more money than high-budget games like Tomb Raider, which sold amazingly and still lost money. I think devs are pretty much going to have to start doing two things:

This is true, and keep in mind, there's also the ressurgence of older titles for earlier eras. GoG has mad an impressive business model based on giving people access to bygone classics. Gaming options are widening.

So much goes into things like environments and assets, and I'm sure this could be made more efficient. It baffles me that developers are hardly looking into ways to more quickly and cheaply create assets. Black mesa had a really nifty Face Creation System [http://wiki.blackmesasource.com/Face_Creation_System] which "allows there to be a wide variety of faces with very little work but high visual fidelity." It saved the developers a significant amount of time, and is exactly the sort of tool bigger companies should be looking into making in order to keep development costs from ballooning out of control. The fact of the matter is, so much of the cost of AAA games comes not from the amount of content, but the inefficiency with which that content was made.

Actually that's not as easy as you'd think. See assets aren't always portable between engines and it's not feasible to base all your games on the same engine. There is actually a lot of efficiency but a lot of the time is literally in the polish required. In short, making HD games with motion capture animation and realistic face bump shaders you amd scatter diffuse lighting reqauires money. More or less each feature/layer of tech requires at least 1 extra person and another set of billable man hours.

This is why games are big on DLC these days since it allows thm to scrape cash and reuse the same assets they used in the original.

STill it boils down to. The companies will charge as much as they think they can get away with. if people buy games for $60 on launch day they have no reason to sell in for $40 on launch day. Do they?

Thank you. I couldn't even get past the first page of this article, because the old "games are cheap because inflation hurr durr" BS really pisses me off. Not only are individual copies cheaper to make than they were back then by an order of magnitude, not only are more people buying than ever before -- also by an order of magnitude -- but wages are down compared to inflation. $60 today may buy a smaller amount of goods than it did 20 years ago, but it also accounts for /more/ of an average person's money. We're in the middle of a recession (really it's a depression but nobody is willing to admit it), these aren't the boom years of the 90's anymore.

And you know what? Game budgets are low for what they are. An average blockbuster movie costs between 2 and 4 times what an /expensive/ AAA game costs. Yet they make their money back and then some on much smaller increments of cash, because they're priced low enough that pretty much anyone can afford to buy a DVD or go to the movies. That's how games should be. People occasionally try to excuse it by saying they're a luxury product, but we're not talking a caviar and champagne luxury, we're talking beer and pretzels.

If the rumors are true (and most likely they are), Bioshock Infinite had a total budget just north of $300 million. The same as Avengers. The production costs alone of games have skyrocketed over the last seven years. I still remember people losing their shit at the idea of the first Gears of War having a production cost $10 million.

Oh, and games aren't cheap because of inflation. They're cheap because to stay viable, companies should be charging closer to $100 per unit given their budgets, team sizes, and actual consumer base.

Yet The Avengers made money hand over fist at $10-$15 a pop. Your logic is flawed, it's totally missing out on the economy of scale. And besides, there's no way Bioshock Infinite actually cost that much. If anything they dropped $50-$100 million on the actual game, and the rest was the marketing budget. If you want to see an out of control cost in the videogame industry, there's your bugbear.

Edit: Yeah, look at this: http://www.destructoid.com/ken-levine-denies-200-million-bioshock-infinite-budget-249339.phtml

Levine was shocked people thought the game had a budget as high as $200 million, $300 million would have had him rolling on the floor with laughter.

Also, who the heck was shocked by Gears of War having a $10 million budget? That was pretty common during the PS2 generation, and it wasn't too crazy during the PS1 generation. Final Fantasy VII cost about $30 million to make, and that came out in 1997. It was exceptionally expensive at the time, but there's some proof that Gears wasn't breaking any new ground if it really did have a $10 million budget.

 

[spoonybard.hahs]

Actually you made a fundamental error in your comparison: Sonic 2 may have cost $75 but keep in mind Sonic 2 was a cartridge with integrated memory, and stuff that actually had a an assemble process and shipping of said packaged unit was naturally more expensive. As opposed to say these days where at best games are stamped onto $1 discs. and charged $60.

Games will get cheaper when people stop buying games for $60 or $50 nuff said. What about development costs? what about them. See this is the downside of upping technology. The more high end the console the more specialized labour you need and the more time you need to pay the specialized labour for.

The growing popularity of middleware engines has also helped keep development costs in check, but not enough to compensate for other skyrocketing costs involved in game development.

More and more I think indie devs are going to force big gaming's hand. Games like Super Meat Boy and Minecraft were made on astonishingly low budgets, and yet still manage to make far more money than high-budget games like Tomb Raider, which sold amazingly and still lost money. I think devs are pretty much going to have to start doing two things:

This is true, and keep in mind, there's also the ressurgence of older titles for earlier eras. GoG has mad an impressive business model based on giving people access to bygone classics. Gaming options are widening.

So much goes into things like environments and assets, and I'm sure this could be made more efficient. It baffles me that developers are hardly looking into ways to more quickly and cheaply create assets. Black mesa had a really nifty Face Creation System [http://wiki.blackmesasource.com/Face_Creation_System] which "allows there to be a wide variety of faces with very little work but high visual fidelity." It saved the developers a significant amount of time, and is exactly the sort of tool bigger companies should be looking into making in order to keep development costs from ballooning out of control. The fact of the matter is, so much of the cost of AAA games comes not from the amount of content, but the inefficiency with which that content was made.

Actually that's not as easy as you'd think. See assets aren't always portable between engines and it's not feasible to base all your games on the same engine. There is actually a lot of efficiency but a lot of the time is literally in the polish required. In short, making HD games with motion capture animation and realistic face bump shaders you amd scatter diffuse lighting reqauires money. More or less each feature/layer of tech requires at least 1 extra person and another set of billable man hours.

This is why games are big on DLC these days since it allows thm to scrape cash and reuse the same assets they used in the original.

STill it boils down to. The companies will charge as much as they think they can get away with. if people buy games for $60 on launch day they have no reason to sell in for $40 on launch day. Do they?

Thank you. I couldn't even get past the first page of this article, because the old "games are cheap because inflation hurr durr" BS really pisses me off. Not only are individual copies cheaper to make than they were back then by an order of magnitude, not only are more people buying than ever before -- also by an order of magnitude -- but wages are down compared to inflation. $60 today may buy a smaller amount of goods than it did 20 years ago, but it also accounts for /more/ of an average person's money. We're in the middle of a recession (really it's a depression but nobody is willing to admit it), these aren't the boom years of the 90's anymore.

And you know what? Game budgets are low for what they are. An average blockbuster movie costs between 2 and 4 times what an /expensive/ AAA game costs. Yet they make their money back and then some on much smaller increments of cash, because they're priced low enough that pretty much anyone can afford to buy a DVD or go to the movies. That's how games should be. People occasionally try to excuse it by saying they're a luxury product, but we're not talking a caviar and champagne luxury, we're talking beer and pretzels.

If the rumors are true (and most likely they are), Bioshock Infinite had a total budget just north of $300 million. The same as Avengers. The production costs alone of games have skyrocketed over the last seven years. I still remember people losing their shit at the idea of the first Gears of War having a production cost $10 million.

Oh, and games aren't cheap because of inflation. They're cheap because to stay viable, companies should be charging closer to $100 per unit given their budgets, team sizes, and actual consumer base.

Yet The Avengers made money hand over fist at $10-$15 a pop. Your logic is flawed, it's totally missing out on the economy of scale. And besides, there's no way Bioshock Infinite actually cost that much. If anything they dropped $50-$100 million on the actual game, and the rest was the marketing budget. If you want to see an out of control cost in the videogame industry, there's your bugbear.

Edit: Yeah, look at this: http://www.destructoid.com/ken-levine-denies-200-million-bioshock-infinite-budget-249339.phtml

Levine was shocked people thought the game had a budget as high as $200 million, $300 million would have had him rolling on the floor with laughter.

Also, who the heck was shocked by Gears of War having a $10 million budget? That was pretty common during the PS2 generation, and it wasn't too crazy during the PS1 generation. Final Fantasy VII cost about $30 million to make, and that came out in 1997. It was exceptionally expensive at the time, but there's some proof that Gears wasn't breaking any new ground if it really did have a $10 million budget.

I have to retract my statement about Bioshock. The way people kept throwing around the original NY Times article, it suggested the production budget was $200 million, not the now standard $100 million. My $300 million estimate was based on that incorrect assumption and adding on $100 million for marketing. You are correct, marketing is a huge driving force behind the rising costs of video games. But that's not the picture the industry is painting (read: they are blaming gamers because we apparently expect too much). However, actual production costs are rising. It might be conservative, or it might be mindbogglingly insane. We will probably never know, since the industry has a policy of lying to the press and public.

Yet, you cannot deny that there is wasteful spending going on when developers pay an outside company to design an engine just for the main character's hair physics.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Actually you made a fundamental error in your comparison: Sonic 2 may have cost $75 but keep in mind Sonic 2 was a cartridge with integrated memory, and stuff that actually had a an assemble process and shipping of said packaged unit was naturally more expensive. As opposed to say these days where at best games are stamped onto $1 discs. and charged $60.

Games will get cheaper when people stop buying games for $60 or $50 nuff said. What about development costs? what about them. See this is the downside of upping technology. The more high end the console the more specialized labour you need and the more time you need to pay the specialized labour for.

The growing popularity of middleware engines has also helped keep development costs in check, but not enough to compensate for other skyrocketing costs involved in game development.

More and more I think indie devs are going to force big gaming's hand. Games like Super Meat Boy and Minecraft were made on astonishingly low budgets, and yet still manage to make far more money than high-budget games like Tomb Raider, which sold amazingly and still lost money. I think devs are pretty much going to have to start doing two things:

This is true, and keep in mind, there's also the ressurgence of older titles for earlier eras. GoG has mad an impressive business model based on giving people access to bygone classics. Gaming options are widening.

So much goes into things like environments and assets, and I'm sure this could be made more efficient. It baffles me that developers are hardly looking into ways to more quickly and cheaply create assets. Black mesa had a really nifty Face Creation System [http://wiki.blackmesasource.com/Face_Creation_System] which "allows there to be a wide variety of faces with very little work but high visual fidelity." It saved the developers a significant amount of time, and is exactly the sort of tool bigger companies should be looking into making in order to keep development costs from ballooning out of control. The fact of the matter is, so much of the cost of AAA games comes not from the amount of content, but the inefficiency with which that content was made.

Actually that's not as easy as you'd think. See assets aren't always portable between engines and it's not feasible to base all your games on the same engine. There is actually a lot of efficiency but a lot of the time is literally in the polish required. In short, making HD games with motion capture animation and realistic face bump shaders you amd scatter diffuse lighting reqauires money. More or less each feature/layer of tech requires at least 1 extra person and another set of billable man hours.

This is why games are big on DLC these days since it allows thm to scrape cash and reuse the same assets they used in the original.

STill it boils down to. The companies will charge as much as they think they can get away with. if people buy games for $60 on launch day they have no reason to sell in for $40 on launch day. Do they?

Thank you. I couldn't even get past the first page of this article, because the old "games are cheap because inflation hurr durr" BS really pisses me off. Not only are individual copies cheaper to make than they were back then by an order of magnitude, not only are more people buying than ever before -- also by an order of magnitude -- but wages are down compared to inflation. $60 today may buy a smaller amount of goods than it did 20 years ago, but it also accounts for /more/ of an average person's money. We're in the middle of a recession (really it's a depression but nobody is willing to admit it), these aren't the boom years of the 90's anymore.

And you know what? Game budgets are low for what they are. An average blockbuster movie costs between 2 and 4 times what an /expensive/ AAA game costs. Yet they make their money back and then some on much smaller increments of cash, because they're priced low enough that pretty much anyone can afford to buy a DVD or go to the movies. That's how games should be. People occasionally try to excuse it by saying they're a luxury product, but we're not talking a caviar and champagne luxury, we're talking beer and pretzels.

If the rumors are true (and most likely they are), Bioshock Infinite had a total budget just north of $300 million. The same as Avengers. The production costs alone of games have skyrocketed over the last seven years. I still remember people losing their shit at the idea of the first Gears of War having a production cost $10 million.

Oh, and games aren't cheap because of inflation. They're cheap because to stay viable, companies should be charging closer to $100 per unit given their budgets, team sizes, and actual consumer base.

Yet The Avengers made money hand over fist at $10-$15 a pop. Your logic is flawed, it's totally missing out on the economy of scale. And besides, there's no way Bioshock Infinite actually cost that much. If anything they dropped $50-$100 million on the actual game, and the rest was the marketing budget. If you want to see an out of control cost in the videogame industry, there's your bugbear.

Edit: Yeah, look at this: http://www.destructoid.com/ken-levine-denies-200-million-bioshock-infinite-budget-249339.phtml

Levine was shocked people thought the game had a budget as high as $200 million, $300 million would have had him rolling on the floor with laughter.

Also, who the heck was shocked by Gears of War having a $10 million budget? That was pretty common during the PS2 generation, and it wasn't too crazy during the PS1 generation. Final Fantasy VII cost about $30 million to make, and that came out in 1997. It was exceptionally expensive at the time, but there's some proof that Gears wasn't breaking any new ground if it really did have a $10 million budget.

I have to retract my statement about Bioshock. The way people kept throwing around the original NY Times article, it suggested the production budget was $200 million, not the now standard $100 million. My $300 million estimate was based on that incorrect assumption and adding on $100 million for marketing. You are correct, marketing is a huge driving force behind the rising costs of video games. But that's not the picture the industry is painting (read: they are blaming gamers because we apparently expect too much). However, actual production costs are rising. It might be conservative, or it might be mindbogglingly insane. We will probably never know, since the industry has a policy of lying to the press and public.

Yet, you cannot deny that there is wasteful spending going on when developers pay an outside company to design an engine just for the main character's hair physics.

Wasteful spending or not, it's not the consumer's job to care. Economics 101, you either find a price that enough people are willing to pay that you make a profit, or you go under. $60 a pop is driving a /lot/ of people away, and with the economy the way it is, it's getting less viable by the day. Actually /raising/ the prices would be suicide, especially since we all know that wouldn't mean paid DLC would go away. The real cost of a game is already over $100 if you pay full price for everything.

 

[spoonybard.hahs]

Actually you made a fundamental error in your comparison: Sonic 2 may have cost $75 but keep in mind Sonic 2 was a cartridge with integrated memory, and stuff that actually had a an assemble process and shipping of said packaged unit was naturally more expensive. As opposed to say these days where at best games are stamped onto $1 discs. and charged $60.

Games will get cheaper when people stop buying games for $60 or $50 nuff said. What about development costs? what about them. See this is the downside of upping technology. The more high end the console the more specialized labour you need and the more time you need to pay the specialized labour for.

The growing popularity of middleware engines has also helped keep development costs in check, but not enough to compensate for other skyrocketing costs involved in game development.

More and more I think indie devs are going to force big gaming's hand. Games like Super Meat Boy and Minecraft were made on astonishingly low budgets, and yet still manage to make far more money than high-budget games like Tomb Raider, which sold amazingly and still lost money. I think devs are pretty much going to have to start doing two things:

This is true, and keep in mind, there's also the ressurgence of older titles for earlier eras. GoG has mad an impressive business model based on giving people access to bygone classics. Gaming options are widening.

So much goes into things like environments and assets, and I'm sure this could be made more efficient. It baffles me that developers are hardly looking into ways to more quickly and cheaply create assets. Black mesa had a really nifty Face Creation System [http://wiki.blackmesasource.com/Face_Creation_System] which "allows there to be a wide variety of faces with very little work but high visual fidelity." It saved the developers a significant amount of time, and is exactly the sort of tool bigger companies should be looking into making in order to keep development costs from ballooning out of control. The fact of the matter is, so much of the cost of AAA games comes not from the amount of content, but the inefficiency with which that content was made.

Actually that's not as easy as you'd think. See assets aren't always portable between engines and it's not feasible to base all your games on the same engine. There is actually a lot of efficiency but a lot of the time is literally in the polish required. In short, making HD games with motion capture animation and realistic face bump shaders you amd scatter diffuse lighting reqauires money. More or less each feature/layer of tech requires at least 1 extra person and another set of billable man hours.

This is why games are big on DLC these days since it allows thm to scrape cash and reuse the same assets they used in the original.

STill it boils down to. The companies will charge as much as they think they can get away with. if people buy games for $60 on launch day they have no reason to sell in for $40 on launch day. Do they?

Thank you. I couldn't even get past the first page of this article, because the old "games are cheap because inflation hurr durr" BS really pisses me off. Not only are individual copies cheaper to make than they were back then by an order of magnitude, not only are more people buying than ever before -- also by an order of magnitude -- but wages are down compared to inflation. $60 today may buy a smaller amount of goods than it did 20 years ago, but it also accounts for /more/ of an average person's money. We're in the middle of a recession (really it's a depression but nobody is willing to admit it), these aren't the boom years of the 90's anymore.

And you know what? Game budgets are low for what they are. An average blockbuster movie costs between 2 and 4 times what an /expensive/ AAA game costs. Yet they make their money back and then some on much smaller increments of cash, because they're priced low enough that pretty much anyone can afford to buy a DVD or go to the movies. That's how games should be. People occasionally try to excuse it by saying they're a luxury product, but we're not talking a caviar and champagne luxury, we're talking beer and pretzels.

If the rumors are true (and most likely they are), Bioshock Infinite had a total budget just north of $300 million. The same as Avengers. The production costs alone of games have skyrocketed over the last seven years. I still remember people losing their shit at the idea of the first Gears of War having a production cost $10 million.

Oh, and games aren't cheap because of inflation. They're cheap because to stay viable, companies should be charging closer to $100 per unit given their budgets, team sizes, and actual consumer base.

Yet The Avengers made money hand over fist at $10-$15 a pop. Your logic is flawed, it's totally missing out on the economy of scale. And besides, there's no way Bioshock Infinite actually cost that much. If anything they dropped $50-$100 million on the actual game, and the rest was the marketing budget. If you want to see an out of control cost in the videogame industry, there's your bugbear.

Edit: Yeah, look at this: http://www.destructoid.com/ken-levine-denies-200-million-bioshock-infinite-budget-249339.phtml

Levine was shocked people thought the game had a budget as high as $200 million, $300 million would have had him rolling on the floor with laughter.

Also, who the heck was shocked by Gears of War having a $10 million budget? That was pretty common during the PS2 generation, and it wasn't too crazy during the PS1 generation. Final Fantasy VII cost about $30 million to make, and that came out in 1997. It was exceptionally expensive at the time, but there's some proof that Gears wasn't breaking any new ground if it really did have a $10 million budget.

I have to retract my statement about Bioshock. The way people kept throwing around the original NY Times article, it suggested the production budget was $200 million, not the now standard $100 million. My $300 million estimate was based on that incorrect assumption and adding on $100 million for marketing. You are correct, marketing is a huge driving force behind the rising costs of video games. But that's not the picture the industry is painting (read: they are blaming gamers because we apparently expect too much). However, actual production costs are rising. It might be conservative, or it might be mindbogglingly insane. We will probably never know, since the industry has a policy of lying to the press and public.

Yet, you cannot deny that there is wasteful spending going on when developers pay an outside company to design an engine just for the main character's hair physics.

Wasteful spending or not, it's not the consumer's job to care. Economics 101, you either find a price that enough people are willing to pay that you make a profit, or you go under. $60 a pop is driving a /lot/ of people away, and with the economy the way it is, it's getting less viable by the day. Actually /raising/ the prices would be suicide, especially since we all know that wouldn't mean paid DLC would go away. The real cost of a game is already over $100 if you pay full price for everything.

Yes games are effectively $100 (or more) if you get the game and the Season Pass/DLC. The hilarious thing is, publishers are doing it because it is making them money. Yet, that $60 or $100 price point isn't driving away as many people as you would think (hope, really). Especially when you consider that many publishers aim for the lowest common denominator of gamers, the Dude-Bro Douche Bag. Who either have something of a disposable income or like to sacrifice monetary stability for the Hot New Thing.

And this idea of "it's not the consumer's job to care" is why companies are getting away with shrink-raying product across the board, while simultaneously raising prices.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Actually you made a fundamental error in your comparison: Sonic 2 may have cost $75 but keep in mind Sonic 2 was a cartridge with integrated memory, and stuff that actually had a an assemble process and shipping of said packaged unit was naturally more expensive. As opposed to say these days where at best games are stamped onto $1 discs. and charged $60.

Games will get cheaper when people stop buying games for $60 or $50 nuff said. What about development costs? what about them. See this is the downside of upping technology. The more high end the console the more specialized labour you need and the more time you need to pay the specialized labour for.

The growing popularity of middleware engines has also helped keep development costs in check, but not enough to compensate for other skyrocketing costs involved in game development.

More and more I think indie devs are going to force big gaming's hand. Games like Super Meat Boy and Minecraft were made on astonishingly low budgets, and yet still manage to make far more money than high-budget games like Tomb Raider, which sold amazingly and still lost money. I think devs are pretty much going to have to start doing two things:

This is true, and keep in mind, there's also the ressurgence of older titles for earlier eras. GoG has mad an impressive business model based on giving people access to bygone classics. Gaming options are widening.

So much goes into things like environments and assets, and I'm sure this could be made more efficient. It baffles me that developers are hardly looking into ways to more quickly and cheaply create assets. Black mesa had a really nifty Face Creation System [http://wiki.blackmesasource.com/Face_Creation_System] which "allows there to be a wide variety of faces with very little work but high visual fidelity." It saved the developers a significant amount of time, and is exactly the sort of tool bigger companies should be looking into making in order to keep development costs from ballooning out of control. The fact of the matter is, so much of the cost of AAA games comes not from the amount of content, but the inefficiency with which that content was made.

Actually that's not as easy as you'd think. See assets aren't always portable between engines and it's not feasible to base all your games on the same engine. There is actually a lot of efficiency but a lot of the time is literally in the polish required. In short, making HD games with motion capture animation and realistic face bump shaders you amd scatter diffuse lighting reqauires money. More or less each feature/layer of tech requires at least 1 extra person and another set of billable man hours.

This is why games are big on DLC these days since it allows thm to scrape cash and reuse the same assets they used in the original.

STill it boils down to. The companies will charge as much as they think they can get away with. if people buy games for $60 on launch day they have no reason to sell in for $40 on launch day. Do they?

Thank you. I couldn't even get past the first page of this article, because the old "games are cheap because inflation hurr durr" BS really pisses me off. Not only are individual copies cheaper to make than they were back then by an order of magnitude, not only are more people buying than ever before -- also by an order of magnitude -- but wages are down compared to inflation. $60 today may buy a smaller amount of goods than it did 20 years ago, but it also accounts for /more/ of an average person's money. We're in the middle of a recession (really it's a depression but nobody is willing to admit it), these aren't the boom years of the 90's anymore.

And you know what? Game budgets are low for what they are. An average blockbuster movie costs between 2 and 4 times what an /expensive/ AAA game costs. Yet they make their money back and then some on much smaller increments of cash, because they're priced low enough that pretty much anyone can afford to buy a DVD or go to the movies. That's how games should be. People occasionally try to excuse it by saying they're a luxury product, but we're not talking a caviar and champagne luxury, we're talking beer and pretzels.

If the rumors are true (and most likely they are), Bioshock Infinite had a total budget just north of $300 million. The same as Avengers. The production costs alone of games have skyrocketed over the last seven years. I still remember people losing their shit at the idea of the first Gears of War having a production cost $10 million.

Oh, and games aren't cheap because of inflation. They're cheap because to stay viable, companies should be charging closer to $100 per unit given their budgets, team sizes, and actual consumer base.

Yet The Avengers made money hand over fist at $10-$15 a pop. Your logic is flawed, it's totally missing out on the economy of scale. And besides, there's no way Bioshock Infinite actually cost that much. If anything they dropped $50-$100 million on the actual game, and the rest was the marketing budget. If you want to see an out of control cost in the videogame industry, there's your bugbear.

Edit: Yeah, look at this: http://www.destructoid.com/ken-levine-denies-200-million-bioshock-infinite-budget-249339.phtml

Levine was shocked people thought the game had a budget as high as $200 million, $300 million would have had him rolling on the floor with laughter.

Also, who the heck was shocked by Gears of War having a $10 million budget? That was pretty common during the PS2 generation, and it wasn't too crazy during the PS1 generation. Final Fantasy VII cost about $30 million to make, and that came out in 1997. It was exceptionally expensive at the time, but there's some proof that Gears wasn't breaking any new ground if it really did have a $10 million budget.

I have to retract my statement about Bioshock. The way people kept throwing around the original NY Times article, it suggested the production budget was $200 million, not the now standard $100 million. My $300 million estimate was based on that incorrect assumption and adding on $100 million for marketing. You are correct, marketing is a huge driving force behind the rising costs of video games. But that's not the picture the industry is painting (read: they are blaming gamers because we apparently expect too much). However, actual production costs are rising. It might be conservative, or it might be mindbogglingly insane. We will probably never know, since the industry has a policy of lying to the press and public.

Yet, you cannot deny that there is wasteful spending going on when developers pay an outside company to design an engine just for the main character's hair physics.

Wasteful spending or not, it's not the consumer's job to care. Economics 101, you either find a price that enough people are willing to pay that you make a profit, or you go under. $60 a pop is driving a /lot/ of people away, and with the economy the way it is, it's getting less viable by the day. Actually /raising/ the prices would be suicide, especially since we all know that wouldn't mean paid DLC would go away. The real cost of a game is already over $100 if you pay full price for everything.

Yes games are effectively $100 (or more) if you get the game and the Season Pass/DLC. The hilarious thing is, publishers are doing it because it is making them money. Yet, that $60 or $100 price point isn't driving away as many people as you would think (hope, really). Especially when you consider that many publishers aim for the lowest common denominator of gamers, the Dude-Bro Douche Bag. Who either have something of a disposable income or like to sacrifice monetary stability for the Hot New Thing.

And this idea of "it's not the consumer's job to care" is why companies are getting away with shrink-raying product across the board, while simultaneously raising prices.

The question is, though, for how much longer can they sustain those profits? The marketing budgets have gotten so far out of control that selling 5 million copies is now considered a failure on major titles. Which would make a certain amount of sense in most industries, but then most industries don't charge $60 for a base unit with a good $40 worth of "optional" extras that aren't really optional. Something's gotta give, at some point in the near future. Because there aren't enough people willing to buy these titles at that price point for them to make the kind of sales figures they supposedly need.

 

[Something Amyss]

Irrelevant. the hobby is cheaper now than it ever was.

That in itself is irrelevant if the purchasing power isn't there. In fact, "cheaper" is completely useless if not weighed to actual factors.

And about talking about facts in a vacuum, it is more expensive by leaps and bounds to make a game than ever and cheaper in real money to buy them than ever.

Gaming reaches millions upon millions and is featuring nearly exponential growth. Since you're so interested in facts. Hmmmm....

You are not making any sense.

You're just not putting thought into it.

Purchasing power is as important as inflation when factoring cost. Making excuses for the supply side (false ones, I might add) is not. Good try, though.

 

[Something Amyss]

I would disagree. The business cost cutting side of "trickle-down" economics fails miserably because there is no reason for the company to lower costs when they can simply pocket the extra earnings. I believe the individual side of "trickle-down" economics can be quite effective if implemented smartly. Think of a "stimulus package" type idea that was implemented at the correct time. You can't wait too late into the game to use this or people will simply save that money incase things get even worse. The idea is to provide capital to the market that will actually be circulated. However, this is one of those things that works well in theory, but in practice will probably always come a little too late. There are some other things you can do as well, but the same time sensitivity applies.

Yes, but that's still assuming it's an honest marketing theory and not a marketing campaign, which is the opposite of what I said.

You're explaining stuff that has nothing to do with my comment.

 

[jklinders]

Irrelevant. the hobby is cheaper now than it ever was.

That in itself is irrelevant if the purchasing power isn't there. In fact, "cheaper" is completely useless if not weighed to actual factors.

And about talking about facts in a vacuum, it is more expensive by leaps and bounds to make a game than ever and cheaper in real money to buy them than ever.

Gaming reaches millions upon millions and is featuring nearly exponential growth. Since you're so interested in facts. Hmmmm....

You are not making any sense.

You're just not putting thought into it.

Purchasing power is as important as inflation when factoring cost. Making excuses for the supply side (false ones, I might add) is not. Good try, though.

*sigh*

If you want to think that there is somehow injustice in how a a non essential to life luxury item is priced then you are free to do so. i'll live on just fine if I can't afford to buy a new game. Who am I to judge if there are some people who feel they can't.

It's cheaper in real world and dollar for dollar terms than ever and you are whining about nothing. Experience some actual poverty before you rail about social injustice kike I have seen you doing on these pages.

 

[Something Amyss]

If you want to think that there is somehow injustice in how a a non essential to life luxury item is priced then you are free to do so. i'll live on just fine if I can't afford to buy a new game.

Oh wow, you can't rebut the actual arguments, so you resort to mocking a strawman. Who are you trying to fool?

 

[oliver.begg]

The growing popularity of middleware engines has also helped keep development costs in check, but not enough to compensate for other skyrocketing costs involved in game development.

More and more I think indie devs are going to force big gaming's hand. Games like Super Meat Boy and Minecraft were made on astonishingly low budgets, and yet still manage to make far more money than high-budget games like Tomb Raider, which sold amazingly and still lost money. I think devs are pretty much going to have to start doing two things:

1. Scaling back their games to save money
2. Finding ways to make the most of the money they do spend

So much goes into things like environments and assets, and I'm sure this could be made more efficient. It baffles me that developers are hardly looking into ways to more quickly and cheaply create assets. Black mesa had a really nifty Face Creation System [http://wiki.blackmesasource.com/Face_Creation_System] which "allows there to be a wide variety of faces with very little work but high visual fidelity." It saved the developers a significant amount of time, and is exactly the sort of tool bigger companies should be looking into making in order to keep development costs from ballooning out of control. The fact of the matter is, so much of the cost of AAA games comes not from the amount of content, but the inefficiency with which that content was made.

P.S. Thanks

sure they can scale back the cost of games development.

but when your triming 50% off of a 20 milion dollar development budget, while your still spending in excess of 100 million for US marketing alone, your wasting your time

 

[jklinders]

If you want to think that there is somehow injustice in how a a non essential to life luxury item is priced then you are free to do so. i'll live on just fine if I can't afford to buy a new game.

Oh wow, you can't rebut the actual arguments, so you resort to mocking a strawman. Who are you trying to fool?

Still waiting for you to rebut mine...which you have not.

There was no strawman. You are railing about some injustice in pricing of a luxury good. What's next, crying about the price of gold? Now THAT was a strawman for your edification.

Let me put this in terms even a child can understand before I put your profile on my ignore list. In stark contrast to every other consumer good known to man in history prices of video games have remained stagnant for nearly 30 years. They only recently started moving upward in the last maybe 5 years but have not covered even one tenth the ground they have lost to inflation. The prices have stayed still because until recently...oh maybe 5 years ago the market was growing. Now that the market has stopped growing have wages stopped growing? License fees? Electricity? Coffee? If you can't reach a wider audience and your costs keep growing guess what? You have 2 choices. Raise your prices or die.

Profit is not a dirty word. It is long past time the spoiled overgrown children who pass as the gaming community came to terms with that.

 

[BrotherRool]

What if we go all digital? Well, we can look at the PC market to see that this has already resulted in huge price cuts. Without boxes and shipping, publishers have the freedom to cut out a lot of the middleman costs and provide the savings to you.

This is incorrect. Retail PC games are almost always the same price or cheaper than Steam. And Amazon physical retail copies are even cheaper.

The reason people make mistakes like this is because PC games don't have to pay Microsoft or Sony a cut and pass that profit along. But if you compare physical to digital products instead of closed platform to steam there's no real evidence that the cost savings of digital games are being passed on

 

[Sarge034]

Yes, but that's still assuming it's an honest marketing theory and not a marketing campaign, which is the opposite of what I said.

You're explaining stuff that has nothing to do with my comment.

Your comment was...

Unless you count the rich pissing on us. >.>

"Trickle-down" economics works as intended, though: it's a philosophy designed to market rich people to poor people.

I then stated my position as being opposite of yours and elaborated on the details. So please, do tell me how I'm explaining stuff that has nothing to do with your comment. Unless, of course, I didn't just fall in line with your line of thought and that is what you are taking offense with.