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MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

so at TGS the head of capcom gave a statement that he feels like AAA needs to raise their prices, noting that game prices haven't kept up with development costs, salary increases etc (In fact they haven't even kept up with inflation).

I'm so torn on this, because there are a bunch of intersecting colliding facts that are all true here:

  1. AAA gamedev is unsustainably expensive
  2. Buy-once has faded in favour of inserting F2P elements into "premium" games because gambling pays the bills and unit purchases at current prices do not
  3. AAA has massively consolidated into way fewer games a year and midtier studios died out because betting the farm on every release in terms of volume sales only works if every game is a megahit

So obviously something needs to change there. But also, he then adds... “Just because there’s a recession doesn’t mean you won’t go to the movie theater or go to your favorite artist’s concert. High-quality games will continue to sell,”

But here's the thing. Can AAA actually go back to 90s-tier game pricing, or higher, and survive? The 90s was an economic boom period - the 90s was a period in which game companies had far less price competition. Right now, if you release a $150 AAA game, you're making a really aggressive bet that people won't just play the hundreds of games on game pass or playstation plus or whatever they bought on deep-discount on steam instead. How far can hype get you? I genuinely suspect the outcome of a decision like this would actually be further industry consolidation until we only have a few AAA games releasing a year, because the fact is that people have limited income and a LOT of options, and they WILL buy fewer games if they get really expensive.

This is all to say: IDK. I continue to strongly feel that AAA needs to bring DOWN dev costs, not bring UP prices, if it wants to be sustainable, no matter how much it upsets platform holders and gamers trained on photorealism. Otherwise AAA games are pretty much destined to become even more of a luxury than they already are. Or maybe just go extinct.


daavpuke
@daavpuke

Hot(-ish) take time. Games are already much more expensive or, at least, the nebulous "gaming experience" around a singular release is. The €60 is more of an entry fee to the club these days, which doesn't include your bar tab and other amenities that complete your trip. Raising the price at the door will absolutely turn people away. More realistically, getting the game you actually want is closer to:

+60 Base release (may or may not work)
+30 Season Pass of ephemeral "content"
+10-20 Downloadable Content (DLC), miscellaneous
+5-50 Costume packs
+25 Battle Pass in a full price game that you also have to work for (AND can buy additional levels for)
+40 A few days of "Early Access" (lol)
+Whatever a company can get away with

Rant continues in Read More 👇


You can count on one hand the kind of game that comes out and isn't sliced to bits or, less nihilistic, isn't pre-planned with an ongoing revenue stream. To the point that 1) that revenue stream is built before the plans for what goes in it are and 2) in the worst case scenario, you might have paid for that promise of more to play in the future and it never materializes. Which is crazy.

There's a reason why so many of my Top 25 games are on the older side, but very specifically hit a point between 2000-2005. It was the pinnacle of where technology, ambition and creativity merged, but before the globalized infrastructure would be able to sell you more at the press of a button. Games have never felt that "complete" again for their price. I utter "they don't make them like this anymore," like some fossil, on a weekly basis. Because they don't! This was the game development peak, before we got hit with online passes for used games and the infamous Horse Armor DLC. We just get genuine Horse Armor now, because the slope keeps sliding downward, so any business measure becomes standard, whether or not it's apprehensible. That complaint about armor got us nowhere. It's more than just an old person yelling at clouds or the best games releasing around your 18 years of age. And I'm tired of entertaining that dismissive thought.

My favorite example of this manifestation is Animal Crossing, which originally released with old NES games inside. Back when Nintendo understood the importance of maintaining a familiarity with its classics towards its audience. And before they had to worry about staying perpetually connected to these fans. Just buy it, enjoy it, repeat your business with us if you're satisfied. Simple and clean. Now, they can just chop that stuff up for you piecemeal. You'll never see that kind of fan service ever again. The closest we come to that is the Yakuza series, because Sega is perpetually on the back foot to maintain its legacy. Nowadays, the complaint for the latest Animal Crossing is that it only feels like a full game if you swallow the expansion pill, either by paying for it or by getting on the online subscription treadmill. And it's even more wild that the second complaint from fans is that they want to buy more updates for that game. That shift will never be me.

Don't worry, I'm aware of my history. Civilization did expansion discs, as did many games in that genre. The difference is not just that the base game stood on its own, where modern Civilization is noticably emptier, but the newer games still do that. Except now, you also get sold dozens upon dozens of tiny packs that just give you 3 additional nations at €5 a pop, which would absolutely be packaged in the other releases before. Thanks, Paradox Interactive.

Fire Emblem Engage announced DLC with throwback characters, something you'd actually want as a fan, before the game was even out. It's insulting to think that they want you on the hook before you can even touch the game. I'll just skip it entirely, thanks. Even Capcom's own Resident Evil just added the Ada Wong arc for 10 bucks, which could've absolutely come with the 17th re-release of the 2005 game that they have resold to you at every opportunity. They didn't have to give it to you, because you'll just pay more. You do. Dark Chronicle in 2003 had fishing, fish breeding and races, golfing, photo mode, crafting and over 100 hours of it. All of that was planned as your main experience. Buy it once. The scope was the scope, no carrot on a stick needed. To top it off, it all fits on the storage space that was available to that platform, instead of selling you a physical installer that requires a download to actually play. It was possible then, so it's foolish to believe that this method isn't doable now. The only difference is in priority.

I also fully agree that development costs need to come down, before that gets lost in the shuffle. There's too little difference in your enjoyment of Hi-Fi Rush or God of War: Ragnarok, however that's even quantified, to justify several hundreds of millions more in budgets. Where did all that Destiny money go to? It certainly didn't go into a good game. I don't think it's controversial to say that you can use some of that money to improve working conditions instead and still come out cheaper in the end. I'm sure that will improve the state of some of these things as well. Cyberpunk is not the best comeback story, sorry. I don't want "shorter games and worse graphics etc," at least not in that quippy blurb sense, as much as I love it. More than anything, I want games to actually be €60 again, no strings attached. You can make them any way you want within that framework. Big, small, perpetual, realistic, surreal; whatever! I'm not even against a sensible DLC expansion here or there. The technology exists for a reason. As long as you're not selling me a monorail.

Oh, and I totally don't go to concerts or even movies anymore, due to their ridiculously inflated prices, soooo get fucked, Capcom :)


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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

(This is absolutely a "yes, and") The problem with bringing down dev costs is that we've been doing that pretty well, except the games keep getting bigger! I optimize UI workflows left and right, but the expectations and demands only keep growing. On the UI side, we now have to deliver screens that scale to any resolution (aspect ratio be damned), every screen should work right-to-left as well as left-to-right, the player can tweak font sizes, and text-to-speech (and speech-to-text) is mandatory if you want to release a game in the US that has chat functionality. On top of that, we now have to deliver more screens than ever, with shop screens on top of battlepass screens inside other shop screens.

I keep wondering if a lot of the stuff you're describing would be standardized in a less-secretive industry, tho, haha. I think about how open source tools in tech etc often serve this role rather than recreating every time.

That's a very good point, yeah. We're actually using a lot of tech from webdev now, but I would love to release what we have as an open-source framework just so I don't have to invent it again for the next project. 😭

mr hands mentioned this in his comment but i also feel that this could be a pretty strong argument for just making AAA games smaller again, which would presumably lower development prices and subsequently make things more profitable, as well as make studios less susceptible to totally financially tanking should a game not sell as well as they'd hoped. granted i also don't really think AAA games are going to shrink in size any time soon (if anything it seems like there are just more larger indies like the games published by devolver that are filling that role), so maybe that's just hopeful thinking

for sure agree that AAA games getting more expensive will ABSOLUTELY start pricing people out though 😬 $70 for totk was already enough to more or less push me out of purchasing it at full price (thank you costco)--if AAA games cost more than they currently do on the reg it definitely would push me into the "buying one maybe once a year or just not at all" territory

It's weird that.. volume of sales seemingly isn't being factored in here at all? (On Tsujimoto's part I mean). Or at least balking points and equilibrium pricing isn't.
Like, the fact is, games (like basically every commodity on the planet) are already priced to maximize profit. Every single publisher releasing at $70 is already making the bet that $70 is what gets them the best per-sale-profit/sales-volume ratio.
My best guess is that this is a discursive attempt at actively moving people's balking points, if it isn't just a dude saying some bullshit he didn't think through

in reply to @daavpuke's post:

totally agreed. As an older fighting game player. I also remember when fighting games had their own version of the expansion model, but it wasn't something that took over the entire gaming industry. I think Capcom has made it particularly worse by adding a season pass to SF6. I also feel like I may not have much of a horse in this race cuz I mostly stick to indies, I think Monster Hunter Rise was the last AAA game I paid near full price for and I ended up not really sticking with it.

Astilibra cost me about $20 and it gave me a good solid 100+ hours of gameplay without any extra gambling BS. Idk. I've found my solution, but I do worry for more mainstream gamers that are more married to the AAA life than I am.

Also this article kinda reminds me of the Days Gone Director/producer that complained about ppl buying games on sale.

The Street Fighter 6 colors/costumes got cut out of this, as I was already rambling, but yeah that trend has definitely gotten real bad there as well. When your audience is mostly die-hard fans, you know you can make them pay for anything/everything.

I play mostly indie stuff as well, but I don't think it's a good enough solution. You need those big blockbusters hits just as much, especially if you're going to appeal to the largest possible audience. You can only strike the kinda lightning that Hades did so many times (and it did so in a budget of millions and by monetizing through Early Access).

That Days Gone dude has said a lot of things that should make people just look the other way. Especially if your claim to fame is Days Gone 😬