Sorry for pinging you twice, thought it would just do it once.
The inspection stuff is a hard one. Not that you're suggesting it, but I don't think you can rely on the community except for the most popular games. And as Polaritie mentions, it's a huge hurdle for small companies. I think the verification of pull % might not matter if you can just buy the item straight up though.
I couldn't even imagine having to do code inspection every patch... we've had days where we released two patches and a hotfix. Issue of QA, but yeah, can't expect small companies to do everything right.
Sorry for pinging you twice, thought it would just do it once.
The inspection stuff is a hard one. Not that you're suggesting it, but I don't think you can rely on the community except for the most popular games. And as Polaritie mentions, it's a huge hurdle for small companies. I think the verification of pull % might not matter if you can just buy the item straight up though.
I couldn't even imagine having to do code inspection every patch... we've had days where we released two patches and a hotfix. Issue of QA, but yeah, can't expect small companies to do everything right.
Most regulation is done with random inspection so the random generation code has to be made available for review by the regulating agency on request. I don't think that is a big burden.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
The difference between a traditional CCG / Tabletop game is that the store you buy booster packs from doesn't first require you buy a gift certificate for an amount that isn't quite enough, is non-redeemable for cash and doesn't work anywhere else.
The middle-currency system needs to be outlawed, period. It's a predatory cash swap that is completely immoral and shouldn't ever be legal unless you can cash it out for it's original value.
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syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
Oh man this is exactly a thing Apple, Google, Unity, Unreal, etc. could address.
Build core frameworks for lootbox math with simple input / output options for item scarcity, and provide it for iOS, Unity, Unreal Engine, etc. development as part of the 30% cut or whatever those folks take.
That way, its not on the individual app developer to try and write such an algorithm, the random math is validated by the big guys, there is an easy output for odds, and whatever commission is needed to test the numbers can test at a high level instead of a per-game level.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
The difference between a traditional CCG / Tabletop game is that the store you buy booster packs from doesn't first require you buy a gift certificate for an amount that isn't quite enough, is non-redeemable for cash and doesn't work anywhere else.
The middle-currency system needs to be outlawed, period. It's a predatory cash swap that is completely immoral and shouldn't ever be legal unless you can cash it out for it's original value.
I mostly agree with this, though one thing a lot of f2p games do is allow you to accrue the same currency through gameplay (just slowly), which keeps the regular fish playing (having lots of non-paying players, or players who only buy a little here and there, helps keep the whales playing). That said, there's nothing stopping them from doing this anyways, just have separate options to buy things between that currency and $$$.
Going to a LCG format of selling expansion sets would improve them from consumers perspective. You'd lose the addict money though.
You'd also lose out on specific game modes, like limited and draft though? I heard the Netrunner draft system doesn't work very well; but maybe it could be fixed. But as someone who loved the limited tournament format more than any other, that would definitely harm my enjoyment of the game.
Drafting is the only game mode of TCGs that I feel is worth the randomness of the packs.
Organised Magic drafts, where you pay for like 3 packs for a couple of hours of fun, are of comparable value to other forms of (in real life; Steam sales beat everything) entertainment.
But that's only on a cost basis, and I don't think all the other effects of the business model is worth keeping TCGs around.
As you say. Magic drafts are great fun. They are pretty cheap for a few hours of entertainment, and the cost of entry is flat. Doesn't matter if you have a hundred dollars or a million, you still get three packs. There's no 'trickery' there. And, with physical cards if there are only 6 cards in a set you want, then you can (on day like 7 after the release) go look up your odds of getting those cards and how much it would cost to just buy them. So again, there is always the direct purchase option.
Going to a LCG format of selling expansion sets would improve them from consumers perspective. You'd lose the addict money though.
You'd also lose out on specific game modes, like limited and draft though? I heard the Netrunner draft system doesn't work very well; but maybe it could be fixed. But as someone who loved the limited tournament format more than any other, that would definitely harm my enjoyment of the game.
Drafting is the only game mode of TCGs that I feel is worth the randomness of the packs.
Organised Magic drafts, where you pay for like 3 packs for a couple of hours of fun, are of comparable value to other forms of (in real life; Steam sales beat everything) entertainment.
But that's only on a cost basis, and I don't think all the other effects of the business model is worth keeping TCGs around.
As you say. Magic drafts are great fun. They are pretty cheap for a few hours of entertainment, and the cost of entry is flat. Doesn't matter if you have a hundred dollars or a million, you still get three packs. There's no 'trickery' there. And, with physical cards if there are only 6 cards in a set you want, then you can (on day like 7 after the release) go look up your odds of getting those cards and how much it would cost to just buy them. So again, there is always the direct purchase option.
At this point the frequency of the packs is very well understood and they release full spoilers of set contents like a week ahead of time. With that and the secondary market being as developed as it is you can buy those six cards before the set launches (for delivery after). You'll likely pay a premium, especially if the hype about a card is wrong, but that option exists. It has been a really long time since cracking packs to get a specific card has made much sense. Really the secondary market existing and being developed does a lot to smooth out the issues with Magic style things.
Also, random aside to the thread, magic is by no means the progenitor of the blind box as was implied upthread. Baseball cards (and plenty of other sports collectibles) predate it by decades. I'd have to check but I think the concept of premium special cards in those things also predate Magic and certainly predate Magic adopting that practice.
Going to a LCG format of selling expansion sets would improve them from consumers perspective. You'd lose the addict money though.
You'd also lose out on specific game modes, like limited and draft though? I heard the Netrunner draft system doesn't work very well; but maybe it could be fixed. But as someone who loved the limited tournament format more than any other, that would definitely harm my enjoyment of the game.
Drafting is the only game mode of TCGs that I feel is worth the randomness of the packs.
Organised Magic drafts, where you pay for like 3 packs for a couple of hours of fun, are of comparable value to other forms of (in real life; Steam sales beat everything) entertainment.
But that's only on a cost basis, and I don't think all the other effects of the business model is worth keeping TCGs around.
As you say. Magic drafts are great fun. They are pretty cheap for a few hours of entertainment, and the cost of entry is flat. Doesn't matter if you have a hundred dollars or a million, you still get three packs. There's no 'trickery' there. And, with physical cards if there are only 6 cards in a set you want, then you can (on day like 7 after the release) go look up your odds of getting those cards and how much it would cost to just buy them. So again, there is always the direct purchase option.
At this point the frequency of the packs is very well understood and they release full spoilers of set contents like a week ahead of time. With that and the secondary market being as developed as it is you can buy those six cards before the set launches (for delivery after). You'll likely pay a premium, especially if the hype about a card is wrong, but that option exists. It has been a really long time since cracking packs to get a specific card has made much sense. Really the secondary market existing and being developed does a lot to smooth out the issues with Magic style things.
Also, random aside to the thread, magic is by no means the progenitor of the blind box as was implied upthread. Baseball cards (and plenty of other sports collectibles) predate it by decades. I'd have to check but I think the concept of premium special cards in those things also predate Magic and certainly predate Magic adopting that practice.
I lumped sports cards in with Magic and TCGs when I first brought them up. If the concern is protecting children from gambling problems, they should all go. Along with all of the blind bag/box mini-figures and collectibles that go with things like Harry Potter and Marvel characters and My Little Pony and 8 million other properties these days.
Even when I played Magic, which was a long time ago, there was a strong enough secondary market that you never had to buy packs. But everyone I knew still bought packs, packs and more packs. Because the thrill of opening one and finding that card you needed to complete your deck, or a valuable rare that you could sell for enough money to buy a case or a whole new deck's worth of hard to find cards, was way more exciting than just buying the cards you needed. And that's pretty much the essence of gambling right there. I already knew that rush from years of buying baseball cards and Garbage Pail Kids and Star Wars movie cards and whatever other packs of random cardboard crap I'd loved as a child, before I ever got into Magic.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
Sorry for pinging you twice, thought it would just do it once.
The inspection stuff is a hard one. Not that you're suggesting it, but I don't think you can rely on the community except for the most popular games. And as Polaritie mentions, it's a huge hurdle for small companies. I think the verification of pull % might not matter if you can just buy the item straight up though.
I couldn't even imagine having to do code inspection every patch... we've had days where we released two patches and a hotfix. Issue of QA, but yeah, can't expect small companies to do everything right.
Most regulation is done with random inspection so the random generation code has to be made available for review by the regulating agency on request. I don't think that is a big burden.
Right, the main crux of any regulation would be to make something available for review/audit. Whether that's the underlying code, an API, some way to run Monte Carlo simulations on the stored procedures, etc. would be a question of execution. But allowing developers to say outright that something is "randomly generated" and then not being able to validate that in any way is essentially allowing for them to lie to the consumer.
Which, I mean, we allow in all kinds of ways in America (woo!). But at least we generally know what the lay of the land is (see: "All Natural" being meaningless, nutritional supplements being entirely unregulated). Right now we basically have a Wild West situation and it is rife for outright exploitation.
Oh man this is exactly a thing Apple, Google, Unity, Unreal, etc. could address.
Build core frameworks for lootbox math with simple input / output options for item scarcity, and provide it for iOS, Unity, Unreal Engine, etc. development as part of the 30% cut or whatever those folks take.
That way, its not on the individual app developer to try and write such an algorithm, the random math is validated by the big guys, there is an easy output for odds, and whatever commission is needed to test the numbers can test at a high level instead of a per-game level.
Right. Publicly-available pseudo-RNG has been widely available for decades. It's actually not that hard for a company to be leveraging these tools in some way and then modifying them for their specific uses. In fact, I would be surprised if they aren't doing so already. Having to tell a regulator that they are using X tool and then applying Y transformations to it up front would be a relatively simple way to provide transparency without a significant burden. Allowing regulators to see the underlying code for auditing would be a logical next step that would, similarly, not be a significant burden (especially in comparison to industries like farming and manufacturing).
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MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
Sorry for pinging you twice, thought it would just do it once.
The inspection stuff is a hard one. Not that you're suggesting it, but I don't think you can rely on the community except for the most popular games. And as Polaritie mentions, it's a huge hurdle for small companies. I think the verification of pull % might not matter if you can just buy the item straight up though.
I couldn't even imagine having to do code inspection every patch... we've had days where we released two patches and a hotfix. Issue of QA, but yeah, can't expect small companies to do everything right.
Most regulation is done with random inspection so the random generation code has to be made available for review by the regulating agency on request. I don't think that is a big burden.
Right, the main crux of any regulation would be to make something available for review/audit. Whether that's the underlying code, an API, some way to run Monte Carlo simulations on the stored procedures, etc. would be a question of execution. But allowing developers to say outright that something is "randomly generated" and then not being able to validate that in any way is essentially allowing for them to lie to the consumer.
Which, I mean, we allow in all kinds of ways in America (woo!). But at least we generally know what the lay of the land is (see: "All Natural" being meaningless, nutritional supplements being entirely unregulated). Right now we basically have a Wild West situation and it is rife for outright exploitation.
Oh man this is exactly a thing Apple, Google, Unity, Unreal, etc. could address.
Build core frameworks for lootbox math with simple input / output options for item scarcity, and provide it for iOS, Unity, Unreal Engine, etc. development as part of the 30% cut or whatever those folks take.
That way, its not on the individual app developer to try and write such an algorithm, the random math is validated by the big guys, there is an easy output for odds, and whatever commission is needed to test the numbers can test at a high level instead of a per-game level.
Right. Publicly-available pseudo-RNG has been widely available for decades. It's actually not that hard for a company to be leveraging these tools in some way and then modifying them for their specific uses. In fact, I would be surprised if they aren't doing so already. Having to tell a regulator that they are using X tool and then applying Y transformations to it up front would be a relatively simple way to provide transparency without a significant burden. Allowing regulators to see the underlying code for auditing would be a logical next step that would, similarly, not be a significant burden (especially in comparison to industries like farming and manufacturing).
I knw that the random number generator the company I worked for used was regularly audited. and we ran payout percentages for all the services that used it (and kept the results for some number of years, and had to rerun all of that if the service code was updated)
That got a bit tricky in games where player choice was involved, though legally I think only "optimal play" was required, however that was determined.
But they're blaming people getting mad about loot boxes while ignoring any possible culpability on their part for causing said anger. So I'm not sure they've learned anything other than "try to hide the grift better next time."
So Extra Credits two most recent episodes were about why AAA games cost so much to make and that they should cost more than $60, but companies don't think they can push the sticker price higher so instead you get loot boxes and day one DLC.
While their position is that we just need to push for these additional revenue streams to be done ethically, my conclusion would be that a system where you are selling at a loss is simply not sustainable. But then I am not a consumer of AAA games, by and large.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
So Extra Credits two most recent episodes were about why AAA games cost so much to make and that they should cost more than $60, but companies don't think they can push the sticker price higher so instead you get loot boxes and day one DLC.
While their position is that we just need to push for these additional revenue streams to be done ethically, my conclusion would be that a system where you are selling at a loss is simply not sustainable. But then I am not a consumer of AAA games, by and large.
My personal preference would be for AAA games to stop having a trend towards insanely bloated budgets where anything less than 6-7 millions of copies sold is total failure. This game sold north of 9 million copies despite being a tremendously-obvious ripoff and EA was disappointed with those numbers, which means some truly insane expectations.
Design visuals from the standpoint of good style versus costly high-resolution textures high-poly models. Stop designing games around bilking customers. Stop splintering userbases with absurd amounts of DLC content. Make cheaper games. Hell, make full-featured games as well, and stop crippling content to have something to overcharge for later.
Destiny 2 was the last "big" game I bought and it's a good thing I had somebody to play it with, because it's a perfect example of how the DLC/microtransaction system has straight-up fucked the quality right out of AAA game design. I played the Halo campaigns countless times with my brothers along with a ton of multiplayer, but Destiny 2 was so much more interested in trying to sell me shit than giving me something to play that it's shallowness became obvious much too soon.
Virtually everything else I've bought in the last year or so has been mid- or low-budget games, because they actually bother to be interesting instead of just expensive. And virtually all of those have given me good experiences, because I would rather spend a dozen interesting hours on a twenty-dollar game than a hundred hours on a game that is a blatant treadmill trying to coerce me into dumping another 60-100 bucks into piecemeal content.
AAA devs just need to bite the bullet and raise the purchase price already.
It's like a larger version of the "oh, it's not ten dollars! It's $9.99!" bullshit.
"Oh, it's still a $60 game... plus a bunch of DLC, hats, and random odds and ends that normally might get mostly packaged as an expansion pack for $20-30 a year or so down the road, but we're going to parcel out for about three times as much in the next 0 to 12 months, but if you get the Season Pass it's only twice as much".
Fuck off. Don't tell me that we need to be nickle and dimed (to the tune of $100+ for a full game experience, sometimes up to and including the proper fucking ending) because development costs are up so high while relying on segregating the fanbase and player experience based on what nigh-Kickstarter-Tier people can afford and are willing to buy in at.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
So Extra Credits two most recent episodes were about why AAA games cost so much to make and that they should cost more than $60, but companies don't think they can push the sticker price higher so instead you get loot boxes and day one DLC.
While their position is that we just need to push for these additional revenue streams to be done ethically, my conclusion would be that a system where you are selling at a loss is simply not sustainable. But then I am not a consumer of AAA games, by and large.
My personal preference would be for AAA games to stop having a trend towards insanely bloated budgets where anything less than 6-7 millions of copies sold is total failure. This game sold north of 9 million copies despite being a tremendously-obvious ripoff and EA was disappointed with those numbers, which means some truly insane expectations.
Design visuals from the standpoint of good style versus costly high-resolution textures high-poly models. Stop designing games around bilking customers. Stop splintering userbases with absurd amounts of DLC content. Make cheaper games. Hell, make full-featured games as well, and stop crippling content to have something to overcharge for later.
Destiny 2 was the last "big" game I bought and it's a good thing I had somebody to play it with, because it's a perfect example of how the DLC/microtransaction system has straight-up fucked the quality right out of AAA game design. I played the Halo campaigns countless times with my brothers along with a ton of multiplayer, but Destiny 2 was so much more interested in trying to sell me shit than giving me something to play that it's shallowness became obvious much too soon.
Virtually everything else I've bought in the last year or so has been mid- or low-budget games, because they actually bother to be interesting instead of just expensive. And virtually all of those have given me good experiences, because I would rather spend a dozen interesting hours on a twenty-dollar game than a hundred hours on a game that is a blatant treadmill trying to coerce me into dumping another 60-100 bucks into piecemeal content.
Their argument was that making it cheaper isn't possible. Crazy graphics are needed to compete with all the other AAA games with crazy graphics. So are massive marketing busgets, etc.
Personally I'm not convinced this is true, I would be more interested in a game with innovative mechanics and last gen graphics, but again the last AAA game I bought was Shadow of War when it was on sale. So I'm not really the audience they are selling to.
It also seems like a chicken and egg problem. The budget is massive so you must sell millions of copies, you need to sell millions of copies so you must spend tons of money to compete.
Finally, one point to consider when talking about profit margins is that every successful game has to not only pay for itself but also any unsuccessful games the studio/publisher has had since the last successful game.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
To the last point yes. But that doesn’t make a 40% profit game a loss. EA just has insane profit requirements because every success has to be bigger.
As an example. Andromeda, which had its DLC canceled, did one hundred and ten million dollars of sales (combined PC full game downloads/console sales) as of last July. It cost 40 million to make.
So Extra Credits two most recent episodes were about why AAA games cost so much to make and that they should cost more than $60, but companies don't think they can push the sticker price higher so instead you get loot boxes and day one DLC.
While their position is that we just need to push for these additional revenue streams to be done ethically, my conclusion would be that a system where you are selling at a loss is simply not sustainable. But then I am not a consumer of AAA games, by and large.
My personal preference would be for AAA games to stop having a trend towards insanely bloated budgets where anything less than 6-7 millions of copies sold is total failure. This game sold north of 9 million copies despite being a tremendously-obvious ripoff and EA was disappointed with those numbers, which means some truly insane expectations.
Design visuals from the standpoint of good style versus costly high-resolution textures high-poly models. Stop designing games around bilking customers. Stop splintering userbases with absurd amounts of DLC content. Make cheaper games. Hell, make full-featured games as well, and stop crippling content to have something to overcharge for later.
Destiny 2 was the last "big" game I bought and it's a good thing I had somebody to play it with, because it's a perfect example of how the DLC/microtransaction system has straight-up fucked the quality right out of AAA game design. I played the Halo campaigns countless times with my brothers along with a ton of multiplayer, but Destiny 2 was so much more interested in trying to sell me shit than giving me something to play that it's shallowness became obvious much too soon.
Virtually everything else I've bought in the last year or so has been mid- or low-budget games, because they actually bother to be interesting instead of just expensive. And virtually all of those have given me good experiences, because I would rather spend a dozen interesting hours on a twenty-dollar game than a hundred hours on a game that is a blatant treadmill trying to coerce me into dumping another 60-100 bucks into piecemeal content.
Their argument was that making it cheaper isn't possible. Crazy graphics are needed to compete with all the other AAA games with crazy graphics. So are massive marketing busgets, etc.
Personally I'm not convinced this is true, I would be more interested in a game with innovative mechanics and last gen graphics, but again the last AAA game I bought was Shadow of War when it was on sale. So I'm not really the audience they are selling to.
It also seems like a chicken and egg problem. The budget is massive so you must sell millions of copies, you need to sell millions of copies so you must spend tons of money to compete.
Finally, one point to consider when talking about profit margins is that every successful game has to not only pay for itself but also any unsuccessful games the studio/publisher has had since the last successful game.
I would argue that the argument that making games is getting harder and more expensive is absurd.
1) Tools for artists to convert their visions into 3D models are cheaper, more intuitive and faster than ever
2) We are approaching the, or some would say have exceeded, the level of graphical and items on screen fidelity where people no longer give a crap about it being better
3) Unified tools for game engine building, trigger handling and what not are cheaper, more intuitive and faster than ever
4) People are more accepting than ever of unfinished and poorly functioning product provided the concept is there, and are happy to pay and wait for full function
5) Art assets and stuff can be simple and easily re-used and re-sold for minimal cost using digitally distributed expansion packs
Making profitable games is not harder than it used to be. Making games which can rake in the equivalent profits of an illegal gambling game with imaginary payouts and real cash pay ins is what is hard! And so, the answer is that illegal gambling in gaming needs to be made illegal.
To the last point yes. But that doesn’t make a 40% profit game a loss. EA just has insane profit requirements because every success has to be bigger.
As an example. Andromeda, which had its DLC canceled, did one hundred and ten million dollars of sales (combined PC full game downloads/console sales) as of last July. It cost 40 million to make.
To the last point yes. But that doesn’t make a 40% profit game a loss. EA just has insane profit requirements because every success has to be bigger.
As an example. Andromeda, which had its DLC canceled, did one hundred and ten million dollars of sales (combined PC full game downloads/console sales) as of last July. It cost 40 million to make.
It almost certainly did just fine. In order to break even it would need to hit about $46m worth of revenue (estimated 40m cost plus cost of capital at say, 7% over 5 years at 8m per year, this likely overestimates real cost since development costs are backend heavy and because the reported cost is likely to be a FV cost as it is). Or 1.5M sales to break even if they only got 30 dollars per copy. 60 dollars copy to 40M actual breakeven would have required only 670k sales.
The reason it was considered a failure was because their target sales were 3 million in the first week and 5m in total for a profit margin of 95% to 650% depending on the total actualized revenue from the copies (the low value is 3M@$30 vs 46M total cost the final value is 5M@$60 vs 40M total cost. Which is ridiculous.
To the last point yes. But that doesn’t make a 40% profit game a loss. EA just has insane profit requirements because every success has to be bigger.
As an example. Andromeda, which had its DLC canceled, did one hundred and ten million dollars of sales (combined PC full game downloads/console sales) as of last July. It cost 40 million to make.
It almost certainly did just fine. In order to break even it would need to hit about $46m worth of revenue (estimated 40m cost plus cost of capital at say, 7% over 5 years at 8m per year, this likely overestimates real cost since development costs are backend heavy and because the reported cost is likely to be a FV cost as it is). Or 1.5M sales to break even if they only got 30 dollars per copy. 60 dollars copy to 40M actual breakeven would have required only 670k sales.
The reason it was considered a failure was because their target sales were 3 million in the first week and 5m in total for a profit margin of 95% to 650% depending on the total actualized revenue from the copies (the low value is 3M@$30 vs 46M total cost the final value is 5M@$60 vs 4M total cost. Which is ridiculous.
Quick Google gives 27 dollars as the amount that goes to the publisher (out of 60). Also, does that 40 million include the marketing budget?
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
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HerrCronIt that wickedly supports taxationRegistered Userregular
So Extra Credits two most recent episodes were about why AAA games cost so much to make and that they should cost more than $60, but companies don't think they can push the sticker price higher so instead you get loot boxes and day one DLC.
While their position is that we just need to push for these additional revenue streams to be done ethically, my conclusion would be that a system where you are selling at a loss is simply not sustainable. But then I am not a consumer of AAA games, by and large.
My personal preference would be for AAA games to stop having a trend towards insanely bloated budgets where anything less than 6-7 millions of copies sold is total failure. This game sold north of 9 million copies despite being a tremendously-obvious ripoff and EA was disappointed with those numbers, which means some truly insane expectations.
Design visuals from the standpoint of good style versus costly high-resolution textures high-poly models. Stop designing games around bilking customers. Stop splintering userbases with absurd amounts of DLC content. Make cheaper games. Hell, make full-featured games as well, and stop crippling content to have something to overcharge for later.
Destiny 2 was the last "big" game I bought and it's a good thing I had somebody to play it with, because it's a perfect example of how the DLC/microtransaction system has straight-up fucked the quality right out of AAA game design. I played the Halo campaigns countless times with my brothers along with a ton of multiplayer, but Destiny 2 was so much more interested in trying to sell me shit than giving me something to play that it's shallowness became obvious much too soon.
Virtually everything else I've bought in the last year or so has been mid- or low-budget games, because they actually bother to be interesting instead of just expensive. And virtually all of those have given me good experiences, because I would rather spend a dozen interesting hours on a twenty-dollar game than a hundred hours on a game that is a blatant treadmill trying to coerce me into dumping another 60-100 bucks into piecemeal content.
Their argument was that making it cheaper isn't possible. Crazy graphics are needed to compete with all the other AAA games with crazy graphics. So are massive marketing busgets, etc.
Personally I'm not convinced this is true, I would be more interested in a game with innovative mechanics and last gen graphics, but again the last AAA game I bought was Shadow of War when it was on sale. So I'm not really the audience they are selling to.
It also seems like a chicken and egg problem. The budget is massive so you must sell millions of copies, you need to sell millions of copies so you must spend tons of money to compete.
Finally, one point to consider when talking about profit margins is that every successful game has to not only pay for itself but also any unsuccessful games the studio/publisher has had since the last successful game.
I would argue that the argument that making games is getting harder and more expensive is absurd.
1) Tools for artists to convert their visions into 3D models are cheaper, more intuitive and faster than ever
2) We are approaching the, or some would say have exceeded, the level of graphical and items on screen fidelity where people no longer give a crap about it being better
3) Unified tools for game engine building, trigger handling and what not are cheaper, more intuitive and faster than ever
4) People are more accepting than ever of unfinished and poorly functioning product provided the concept is there, and are happy to pay and wait for full function
5) Art assets and stuff can be simple and easily re-used and re-sold for minimal cost using digitally distributed expansion packs
Making profitable games is not harder than it used to be. Making games which can rake in the equivalent profits of an illegal gambling game with imaginary payouts and real cash pay ins is what is hard! And so, the answer is that illegal gambling in gaming needs to be made illegal.
The continued insistent that AAA games can actually be made for fractions of what it actually costs to make them, if everyone involved just did these simple and obvious things, is just wishful thinking.
AAA devs just need to bite the bullet and raise the purchase price already.
So why haven't they, then?
I'm sure a company like EA or Activision would have at least tried it by now. I mean, they're not charging a mere sixty bucks because they're so very generous.
Kind of wonder if internal customer research divisions or whatever have decided that if they raise the price by X, they stand to lose X+1 in sales because of people refusing to pay the new price, so that's why they're trying to make the extra money somewhere elese.
AAA devs just need to bite the bullet and raise the purchase price already.
So why haven't they, then?
I'm sure a company like EA or Activision would have at least tried it by now. I mean, they're not charging a mere sixty bucks because they're so very generous.
Kind of wonder if internal customer research divisions or whatever have decided that if they raise the price by X, they stand to lose X+1 in sales because of people refusing to pay the new price, so that's why they're trying to make the extra money somewhere elese.
Obviously but I imagine it would be an initial dip that evened put as it became the new normal. But no one wants to be the one to have a game flop because it's $70.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Quick Google gives 27 dollars as the amount that goes to the publisher (out of 60). Also, does that 40 million include the marketing budget?
This number is incorrect for a few reasons
1) It assumes hard copy sales rather than digital distribution. Physical copies have retail warehousing capital costs as well as box costs and distributor costs.
2) Its separating out the publisher and the service royalty house where here they are one and the same.
3) It assumes an actual 60 dollar cost rather than a more accurate 60-90 dollar full sales value
EA for its games is both the publisher, distributor, and platform so on a box sale they would get about 34 dollars(publisher and royalty) and on a digital sale they would get 56 dollars (assuming 4 dollars of distribution cost per digital copy. If you assume that the 7 dollar royalty cost is a digital distribution cost entirely then this becomes 53 dollars. As an aside, if you were wondering why we have a glut of cheap games as well as why games prices haven't increased over the years its because digital distribution services have increased the return to publishers per copy about 2 fold (That is, we're actually paying about twice as much for games relative to what we see when we click "purchase" compared to when we primarily got games in a box store)
I don't know if it includes the marketing budget. But even with 40M spend on marketing the return would not put you at numbers which suggest its particularly likely the weren't successful and the expected return would be hilarious numbers in terms of %
I'm not really sure they can just raise the prices.
60 dollar (and euro) games are already bit high priced considering the entertainment value they contain.
The industry is simply too bloated, too many games aimed at same customers so it makes sense the sales won't be as great as publishers wished they were.
Quick Google gives 27 dollars as the amount that goes to the publisher (out of 60). Also, does that 40 million include the marketing budget?
This number is incorrect for a few reasons
1) It assumes hard copy sales rather than digital distribution. Physical copies have retail warehousing capital costs as well as box costs and distributor costs.
2) Its separating out the publisher and the service royalty house where here they are one and the same.
3) It assumes an actual 60 dollar cost rather than a more accurate 60-90 dollar full sales value
EA for its games is both the publisher, distributor, and platform so on a box sale they would get about 34 dollars(publisher and royalty) and on a digital sale they would get 56 dollars (assuming 4 dollars of distribution cost per digital copy. If you assume that the 7 dollar royalty cost is a digital distribution cost entirely then this becomes 53 dollars. As an aside, if you were wondering why we have a glut of cheap games as well as why games prices haven't increased over the years its because digital distribution services have increased the return to publishers per copy about 2 fold (That is, we're actually paying about twice as much for games relative to what we see when we click "purchase" compared to when we primarily got games in a box store)
I don't know if it includes the marketing budget. But even with 40M spend on marketing the return would not put you at numbers which suggest its particularly likely the weren't successful and the expected return would be hilarious numbers in terms of %
I'm pretty sure EA is not the distributor for console sales which as I understand it is still the main focus of the AAA market.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
So Extra Credits two most recent episodes were about why AAA games cost so much to make and that they should cost more than $60, but companies don't think they can push the sticker price higher so instead you get loot boxes and day one DLC.
While their position is that we just need to push for these additional revenue streams to be done ethically, my conclusion would be that a system where you are selling at a loss is simply not sustainable. But then I am not a consumer of AAA games, by and large.
Both of these eps were seriously questionable.
The first didn't really put forward any arguments, but did have a lot of ifs, maybes and perhaps. The second, when talking about the PC market, tried to compare PUBG to the "100 manhours in Unity" £0.99 games released on Steam, and never really looked at the average sales expectations for AAA(+) games to begin with after listing all the of costs that go into making them.
I have a serious skepticism that AAA titles need to go above $60. It was very iffy when introduced, and is fairly appropriate nowadays, given audience size. I'm certain that they keep it low because it allows the long tail sales with DLC/lootboxes. The pricing schemes (not just sticker price but all other sales prices) have a lot more to do with competing with other studios/publishers for the most revenue to invest in the future than they do with ensuring the audience is paying a 'fair price'.
Because, again, the total cost of buying every bit of lootbox DLC in a seasonal release (in whatever game you want to name; Destiny 2, Overwatch, etc.) is often much higher than the price for an entire AAA game. So unless you're saying that the development cost for skins and cosmetics is higher than the game itself...
...and of course, as always, Kill Hitler.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
So Extra Credits two most recent episodes were about why AAA games cost so much to make and that they should cost more than $60, but companies don't think they can push the sticker price higher so instead you get loot boxes and day one DLC.
While their position is that we just need to push for these additional revenue streams to be done ethically, my conclusion would be that a system where you are selling at a loss is simply not sustainable. But then I am not a consumer of AAA games, by and large.
My personal preference would be for AAA games to stop having a trend towards insanely bloated budgets where anything less than 6-7 millions of copies sold is total failure. This game sold north of 9 million copies despite being a tremendously-obvious ripoff and EA was disappointed with those numbers, which means some truly insane expectations.
Design visuals from the standpoint of good style versus costly high-resolution textures high-poly models. Stop designing games around bilking customers. Stop splintering userbases with absurd amounts of DLC content. Make cheaper games. Hell, make full-featured games as well, and stop crippling content to have something to overcharge for later.
Destiny 2 was the last "big" game I bought and it's a good thing I had somebody to play it with, because it's a perfect example of how the DLC/microtransaction system has straight-up fucked the quality right out of AAA game design. I played the Halo campaigns countless times with my brothers along with a ton of multiplayer, but Destiny 2 was so much more interested in trying to sell me shit than giving me something to play that it's shallowness became obvious much too soon.
Virtually everything else I've bought in the last year or so has been mid- or low-budget games, because they actually bother to be interesting instead of just expensive. And virtually all of those have given me good experiences, because I would rather spend a dozen interesting hours on a twenty-dollar game than a hundred hours on a game that is a blatant treadmill trying to coerce me into dumping another 60-100 bucks into piecemeal content.
Their argument was that making it cheaper isn't possible. Crazy graphics are needed to compete with all the other AAA games with crazy graphics. So are massive marketing busgets, etc.
Personally I'm not convinced this is true, I would be more interested in a game with innovative mechanics and last gen graphics, but again the last AAA game I bought was Shadow of War when it was on sale. So I'm not really the audience they are selling to.
It also seems like a chicken and egg problem. The budget is massive so you must sell millions of copies, you need to sell millions of copies so you must spend tons of money to compete.
Finally, one point to consider when talking about profit margins is that every successful game has to not only pay for itself but also any unsuccessful games the studio/publisher has had since the last successful game.
I would argue that the argument that making games is getting harder and more expensive is absurd.
1) Tools for artists to convert their visions into 3D models are cheaper, more intuitive and faster than ever
2) We are approaching the, or some would say have exceeded, the level of graphical and items on screen fidelity where people no longer give a crap about it being better
3) Unified tools for game engine building, trigger handling and what not are cheaper, more intuitive and faster than ever
4) People are more accepting than ever of unfinished and poorly functioning product provided the concept is there, and are happy to pay and wait for full function
5) Art assets and stuff can be simple and easily re-used and re-sold for minimal cost using digitally distributed expansion packs
Making profitable games is not harder than it used to be. Making games which can rake in the equivalent profits of an illegal gambling game with imaginary payouts and real cash pay ins is what is hard! And so, the answer is that illegal gambling in gaming needs to be made illegal.
The continued insistent that AAA games can actually be made for fractions of what it actually costs to make them, if everyone involved just did these simple and obvious things, is just wishful thinking.
The issue is reasonable cost, not cost that is a fraction of what they claim. In AAA development, huge amounts of money get dumped into making visuals very slightly better than just "good", and for no other reason than publishers stupidly thinking that graphics are the big reason games sell. A lot of money also gets dumped into forcing games out faster by having masses of people developing the game, when slowing the development process down and using fewer people is more efficient (not to mention improves stability because there's more time time for testing, which has been a horrible shortcoming of AAA games for several years now).
So the question isn't whether or not games could be made at a reasonable cost with current tools (which they absolutely can), it's what the publishers are insisting that huge portions of budget be wasted on.
Publishers saying that games are too expensive to make is bullshit, because they're the ones wasting money on stupid priorities just to try and out-compete each other on things that only other publishers think are important. The mid- and low-range budget games are increasingly impressive in what they can offer, and none of those developers are bitching about the competition because they aren't trying to build Skinner boxes with the intent to monopolize the income stream of every player who buys their game (minus basically the entire mobile game market, which is nothing but Skinner boxes).
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HerrCronIt that wickedly supports taxationRegistered Userregular
I'm not really sure they can just raise the prices. 60 dollar (and euro) games are already bit high priced considering the entertainment value they contain.
The industry is simply too bloated, too many games aimed at same customers so it makes sense the sales won't be as great as publishers wished they were.
Yeah, imma disagree really hard on that one.
But regardless, sixty is just what people expect, and people can be really fickle and weird about this nonsense.
I think there have been at least one or two kickstarted games that when they came to steam early access set the pricing at the same as the kickstarter tier that got a key for "alpha" access, which was about 90 dollars. As time went on it'd drop to what the kickstarter tier for "beta" access was (about 60 maybe?) and then finally it'd hit release for about 30 or so.
People went fucking nuts.
And by the same token, if an 'indie' game is anything above about 25/30 dollars or so, people will also freak out.
Apparently we've decided that this is what games cost, and there's just no convincing people otherwise.
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HerrCronIt that wickedly supports taxationRegistered Userregular
So Extra Credits two most recent episodes were about why AAA games cost so much to make and that they should cost more than $60, but companies don't think they can push the sticker price higher so instead you get loot boxes and day one DLC.
While their position is that we just need to push for these additional revenue streams to be done ethically, my conclusion would be that a system where you are selling at a loss is simply not sustainable. But then I am not a consumer of AAA games, by and large.
My personal preference would be for AAA games to stop having a trend towards insanely bloated budgets where anything less than 6-7 millions of copies sold is total failure. This game sold north of 9 million copies despite being a tremendously-obvious ripoff and EA was disappointed with those numbers, which means some truly insane expectations.
Design visuals from the standpoint of good style versus costly high-resolution textures high-poly models. Stop designing games around bilking customers. Stop splintering userbases with absurd amounts of DLC content. Make cheaper games. Hell, make full-featured games as well, and stop crippling content to have something to overcharge for later.
Destiny 2 was the last "big" game I bought and it's a good thing I had somebody to play it with, because it's a perfect example of how the DLC/microtransaction system has straight-up fucked the quality right out of AAA game design. I played the Halo campaigns countless times with my brothers along with a ton of multiplayer, but Destiny 2 was so much more interested in trying to sell me shit than giving me something to play that it's shallowness became obvious much too soon.
Virtually everything else I've bought in the last year or so has been mid- or low-budget games, because they actually bother to be interesting instead of just expensive. And virtually all of those have given me good experiences, because I would rather spend a dozen interesting hours on a twenty-dollar game than a hundred hours on a game that is a blatant treadmill trying to coerce me into dumping another 60-100 bucks into piecemeal content.
Their argument was that making it cheaper isn't possible. Crazy graphics are needed to compete with all the other AAA games with crazy graphics. So are massive marketing busgets, etc.
Personally I'm not convinced this is true, I would be more interested in a game with innovative mechanics and last gen graphics, but again the last AAA game I bought was Shadow of War when it was on sale. So I'm not really the audience they are selling to.
It also seems like a chicken and egg problem. The budget is massive so you must sell millions of copies, you need to sell millions of copies so you must spend tons of money to compete.
Finally, one point to consider when talking about profit margins is that every successful game has to not only pay for itself but also any unsuccessful games the studio/publisher has had since the last successful game.
I would argue that the argument that making games is getting harder and more expensive is absurd.
1) Tools for artists to convert their visions into 3D models are cheaper, more intuitive and faster than ever
2) We are approaching the, or some would say have exceeded, the level of graphical and items on screen fidelity where people no longer give a crap about it being better
3) Unified tools for game engine building, trigger handling and what not are cheaper, more intuitive and faster than ever
4) People are more accepting than ever of unfinished and poorly functioning product provided the concept is there, and are happy to pay and wait for full function
5) Art assets and stuff can be simple and easily re-used and re-sold for minimal cost using digitally distributed expansion packs
Making profitable games is not harder than it used to be. Making games which can rake in the equivalent profits of an illegal gambling game with imaginary payouts and real cash pay ins is what is hard! And so, the answer is that illegal gambling in gaming needs to be made illegal.
The continued insistent that AAA games can actually be made for fractions of what it actually costs to make them, if everyone involved just did these simple and obvious things, is just wishful thinking.
The issue is reasonable cost, not cost that is a fraction of what they claim. In AAA development, huge amounts of money get dumped into making visuals very slightly better than just "good", and for no other reason than publishers stupidly thinking that graphics are the big reason games sell.
That's because they are.
And even if they weren't it still takes a "huge amounts of money" just to hit what we consider the bar of being acceptable right now, let alone this "very slightly better" tier that you're convinced nobody wants but that publishers are chasing regardless.
Nothing about this scenario that people keep pushing measures up in the slightest.
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
I'm not really sure they can just raise the prices. 60 dollar (and euro) games are already bit high priced considering the entertainment value they contain.
The industry is simply too bloated, too many games aimed at same customers so it makes sense the sales won't be as great as publishers wished they were.
Yeah, imma disagree really hard on that one.
I generally think quantifying the $60 in terms of "entertainment value for money & time" has a lot less to do with development standards and more to do game type.
For example, if I were to compare Rise of the Tomb Raider to Prey, both of which I highly enjoyed and were priced the same (at least in my country), Prey wins out on entertainment value by about 3x, because it is highly replayable. You run into the trap the unfortunate analyst who opined "$60 is too low" during the height of the BF2 lootbox fiasco, which is that it's quite hard to put a price on even a simple thing like a football or a yo-yo, if you're doing it by "how many hours of fun you get out of it."
Most of us would not pay £120 for a football, even if it lasted for 70-80 hours of kickabouts.
To the last point yes. But that doesn’t make a 40% profit game a loss. EA just has insane profit requirements because every success has to be bigger.
As an example. Andromeda, which had its DLC canceled, did one hundred and ten million dollars of sales (combined PC full game downloads/console sales) as of last July. It cost 40 million to make.
It almost certainly did just fine. In order to break even it would need to hit about $46m worth of revenue (estimated 40m cost plus cost of capital at say, 7% over 5 years at 8m per year, this likely overestimates real cost since development costs are backend heavy and because the reported cost is likely to be a FV cost as it is). Or 1.5M sales to break even if they only got 30 dollars per copy. 60 dollars copy to 40M actual breakeven would have required only 670k sales.
The reason it was considered a failure was because their target sales were 3 million in the first week and 5m in total for a profit margin of 95% to 650% depending on the total actualized revenue from the copies (the low value is 3M@$30 vs 46M total cost the final value is 5M@$60 vs 40M total cost. Which is ridiculous.
Five million isn't even the break-even point for a lot of AAA games nowadays. You definitely need to check out this video to see just how high costs have gotten:
Edit: On top of that, $40 million is just the rumor. That total is downright miserly for a modern AAA game (Witcher 3's $60 million budget was considered amazingly low), and considering the game's rocky development I suspect it's a light higher.
Because, again, the total cost of buying every bit of lootbox DLC in a seasonal release (in whatever game you want to name; Destiny 2, Overwatch, etc.) is often much higher than the price for an entire AAA game. So unless you're saying that the development cost for skins and cosmetics is higher than the game itself...
1) The argument is that those are still paying for the true original cost of development because the games are selling at a loss.
2) Those are also paying for upkeep (patches, free content, etc)
3) If high quality graphics are a big driver of costs creating more high quality models would be a disproportionate part of the cost?
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
You forget which publisher we're talking about here.
(to go a little longer, there is also actually quite a long list of studios who were either closed or were otherwise financially cut back after releasing games that were successful in terms of revenue. Again, this is not because the games are not turning a profit, but because they are not comparing well to the microtransaction megabucks models of stuff like Fifa Ultimate Team, and from the publisher perspective, why keep funding a studio giving you only 20% RoI when you could try finding another one that gives 300%)
AAA devs just need to bite the bullet and raise the purchase price already.
I disagree. If they raise the prices during an extended period where buying power is flat and not increasing year over year, then they will just price themselves out of the market.
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The inspection stuff is a hard one. Not that you're suggesting it, but I don't think you can rely on the community except for the most popular games. And as Polaritie mentions, it's a huge hurdle for small companies. I think the verification of pull % might not matter if you can just buy the item straight up though.
I couldn't even imagine having to do code inspection every patch... we've had days where we released two patches and a hotfix. Issue of QA, but yeah, can't expect small companies to do everything right.
Most regulation is done with random inspection so the random generation code has to be made available for review by the regulating agency on request. I don't think that is a big burden.
The middle-currency system needs to be outlawed, period. It's a predatory cash swap that is completely immoral and shouldn't ever be legal unless you can cash it out for it's original value.
Build core frameworks for lootbox math with simple input / output options for item scarcity, and provide it for iOS, Unity, Unreal Engine, etc. development as part of the 30% cut or whatever those folks take.
That way, its not on the individual app developer to try and write such an algorithm, the random math is validated by the big guys, there is an easy output for odds, and whatever commission is needed to test the numbers can test at a high level instead of a per-game level.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I mostly agree with this, though one thing a lot of f2p games do is allow you to accrue the same currency through gameplay (just slowly), which keeps the regular fish playing (having lots of non-paying players, or players who only buy a little here and there, helps keep the whales playing). That said, there's nothing stopping them from doing this anyways, just have separate options to buy things between that currency and $$$.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
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PSN: AbEntropy
As you say. Magic drafts are great fun. They are pretty cheap for a few hours of entertainment, and the cost of entry is flat. Doesn't matter if you have a hundred dollars or a million, you still get three packs. There's no 'trickery' there. And, with physical cards if there are only 6 cards in a set you want, then you can (on day like 7 after the release) go look up your odds of getting those cards and how much it would cost to just buy them. So again, there is always the direct purchase option.
At this point the frequency of the packs is very well understood and they release full spoilers of set contents like a week ahead of time. With that and the secondary market being as developed as it is you can buy those six cards before the set launches (for delivery after). You'll likely pay a premium, especially if the hype about a card is wrong, but that option exists. It has been a really long time since cracking packs to get a specific card has made much sense. Really the secondary market existing and being developed does a lot to smooth out the issues with Magic style things.
Also, random aside to the thread, magic is by no means the progenitor of the blind box as was implied upthread. Baseball cards (and plenty of other sports collectibles) predate it by decades. I'd have to check but I think the concept of premium special cards in those things also predate Magic and certainly predate Magic adopting that practice.
I lumped sports cards in with Magic and TCGs when I first brought them up. If the concern is protecting children from gambling problems, they should all go. Along with all of the blind bag/box mini-figures and collectibles that go with things like Harry Potter and Marvel characters and My Little Pony and 8 million other properties these days.
Even when I played Magic, which was a long time ago, there was a strong enough secondary market that you never had to buy packs. But everyone I knew still bought packs, packs and more packs. Because the thrill of opening one and finding that card you needed to complete your deck, or a valuable rare that you could sell for enough money to buy a case or a whole new deck's worth of hard to find cards, was way more exciting than just buying the cards you needed. And that's pretty much the essence of gambling right there. I already knew that rush from years of buying baseball cards and Garbage Pail Kids and Star Wars movie cards and whatever other packs of random cardboard crap I'd loved as a child, before I ever got into Magic.
Right, the main crux of any regulation would be to make something available for review/audit. Whether that's the underlying code, an API, some way to run Monte Carlo simulations on the stored procedures, etc. would be a question of execution. But allowing developers to say outright that something is "randomly generated" and then not being able to validate that in any way is essentially allowing for them to lie to the consumer.
Which, I mean, we allow in all kinds of ways in America (woo!). But at least we generally know what the lay of the land is (see: "All Natural" being meaningless, nutritional supplements being entirely unregulated). Right now we basically have a Wild West situation and it is rife for outright exploitation.
Right. Publicly-available pseudo-RNG has been widely available for decades. It's actually not that hard for a company to be leveraging these tools in some way and then modifying them for their specific uses. In fact, I would be surprised if they aren't doing so already. Having to tell a regulator that they are using X tool and then applying Y transformations to it up front would be a relatively simple way to provide transparency without a significant burden. Allowing regulators to see the underlying code for auditing would be a logical next step that would, similarly, not be a significant burden (especially in comparison to industries like farming and manufacturing).
I knw that the random number generator the company I worked for used was regularly audited. and we ran payout percentages for all the services that used it (and kept the results for some number of years, and had to rerun all of that if the service code was updated)
That got a bit tricky in games where player choice was involved, though legally I think only "optimal play" was required, however that was determined.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
EA specifically blamed Star Wars Battlefront 2 missing its sales target due to people getting pissed about loot boxes.
https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/30/16952396/star-wars-battlefront-2-sales-loot-boxes-returning
But they're blaming people getting mad about loot boxes while ignoring any possible culpability on their part for causing said anger. So I'm not sure they've learned anything other than "try to hide the grift better next time."
Well, they are Technically Correct.
Still, Close but no Cigar.
While their position is that we just need to push for these additional revenue streams to be done ethically, my conclusion would be that a system where you are selling at a loss is simply not sustainable. But then I am not a consumer of AAA games, by and large.
My personal preference would be for AAA games to stop having a trend towards insanely bloated budgets where anything less than 6-7 millions of copies sold is total failure. This game sold north of 9 million copies despite being a tremendously-obvious ripoff and EA was disappointed with those numbers, which means some truly insane expectations.
Design visuals from the standpoint of good style versus costly high-resolution textures high-poly models. Stop designing games around bilking customers. Stop splintering userbases with absurd amounts of DLC content. Make cheaper games. Hell, make full-featured games as well, and stop crippling content to have something to overcharge for later.
Destiny 2 was the last "big" game I bought and it's a good thing I had somebody to play it with, because it's a perfect example of how the DLC/microtransaction system has straight-up fucked the quality right out of AAA game design. I played the Halo campaigns countless times with my brothers along with a ton of multiplayer, but Destiny 2 was so much more interested in trying to sell me shit than giving me something to play that it's shallowness became obvious much too soon.
Virtually everything else I've bought in the last year or so has been mid- or low-budget games, because they actually bother to be interesting instead of just expensive. And virtually all of those have given me good experiences, because I would rather spend a dozen interesting hours on a twenty-dollar game than a hundred hours on a game that is a blatant treadmill trying to coerce me into dumping another 60-100 bucks into piecemeal content.
It's like a larger version of the "oh, it's not ten dollars! It's $9.99!" bullshit.
"Oh, it's still a $60 game... plus a bunch of DLC, hats, and random odds and ends that normally might get mostly packaged as an expansion pack for $20-30 a year or so down the road, but we're going to parcel out for about three times as much in the next 0 to 12 months, but if you get the Season Pass it's only twice as much".
Fuck off. Don't tell me that we need to be nickle and dimed (to the tune of $100+ for a full game experience, sometimes up to and including the proper fucking ending) because development costs are up so high while relying on segregating the fanbase and player experience based on what nigh-Kickstarter-Tier people can afford and are willing to buy in at.
Their argument was that making it cheaper isn't possible. Crazy graphics are needed to compete with all the other AAA games with crazy graphics. So are massive marketing busgets, etc.
Personally I'm not convinced this is true, I would be more interested in a game with innovative mechanics and last gen graphics, but again the last AAA game I bought was Shadow of War when it was on sale. So I'm not really the audience they are selling to.
It also seems like a chicken and egg problem. The budget is massive so you must sell millions of copies, you need to sell millions of copies so you must spend tons of money to compete.
Finally, one point to consider when talking about profit margins is that every successful game has to not only pay for itself but also any unsuccessful games the studio/publisher has had since the last successful game.
As an example. Andromeda, which had its DLC canceled, did one hundred and ten million dollars of sales (combined PC full game downloads/console sales) as of last July. It cost 40 million to make.
I would argue that the argument that making games is getting harder and more expensive is absurd.
1) Tools for artists to convert their visions into 3D models are cheaper, more intuitive and faster than ever
2) We are approaching the, or some would say have exceeded, the level of graphical and items on screen fidelity where people no longer give a crap about it being better
3) Unified tools for game engine building, trigger handling and what not are cheaper, more intuitive and faster than ever
4) People are more accepting than ever of unfinished and poorly functioning product provided the concept is there, and are happy to pay and wait for full function
5) Art assets and stuff can be simple and easily re-used and re-sold for minimal cost using digitally distributed expansion packs
Making profitable games is not harder than it used to be. Making games which can rake in the equivalent profits of an illegal gambling game with imaginary payouts and real cash pay ins is what is hard! And so, the answer is that illegal gambling in gaming needs to be made illegal.
No, that figure is just the amount of total full game download sales EA had in the same quarter ME:A came out, not just ME:A. I can't find anything on the game's actual sales figures, which suggests it wasn't great.
It almost certainly did just fine. In order to break even it would need to hit about $46m worth of revenue (estimated 40m cost plus cost of capital at say, 7% over 5 years at 8m per year, this likely overestimates real cost since development costs are backend heavy and because the reported cost is likely to be a FV cost as it is). Or 1.5M sales to break even if they only got 30 dollars per copy. 60 dollars copy to 40M actual breakeven would have required only 670k sales.
The reason it was considered a failure was because their target sales were 3 million in the first week and 5m in total for a profit margin of 95% to 650% depending on the total actualized revenue from the copies (the low value is 3M@$30 vs 46M total cost the final value is 5M@$60 vs 40M total cost. Which is ridiculous.
Quick Google gives 27 dollars as the amount that goes to the publisher (out of 60). Also, does that 40 million include the marketing budget?
The continued insistent that AAA games can actually be made for fractions of what it actually costs to make them, if everyone involved just did these simple and obvious things, is just wishful thinking.
So why haven't they, then?
I'm sure a company like EA or Activision would have at least tried it by now. I mean, they're not charging a mere sixty bucks because they're so very generous.
Kind of wonder if internal customer research divisions or whatever have decided that if they raise the price by X, they stand to lose X+1 in sales because of people refusing to pay the new price, so that's why they're trying to make the extra money somewhere elese.
Keep in mind their sales target was ten million copies, which is a ludicrous number.
If your game sells seven million copies and you're disappointed, then you're not good at budgeting.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Obviously but I imagine it would be an initial dip that evened put as it became the new normal. But no one wants to be the one to have a game flop because it's $70.
This number is incorrect for a few reasons
1) It assumes hard copy sales rather than digital distribution. Physical copies have retail warehousing capital costs as well as box costs and distributor costs.
2) Its separating out the publisher and the service royalty house where here they are one and the same.
3) It assumes an actual 60 dollar cost rather than a more accurate 60-90 dollar full sales value
EA for its games is both the publisher, distributor, and platform so on a box sale they would get about 34 dollars(publisher and royalty) and on a digital sale they would get 56 dollars (assuming 4 dollars of distribution cost per digital copy. If you assume that the 7 dollar royalty cost is a digital distribution cost entirely then this becomes 53 dollars. As an aside, if you were wondering why we have a glut of cheap games as well as why games prices haven't increased over the years its because digital distribution services have increased the return to publishers per copy about 2 fold (That is, we're actually paying about twice as much for games relative to what we see when we click "purchase" compared to when we primarily got games in a box store)
I don't know if it includes the marketing budget. But even with 40M spend on marketing the return would not put you at numbers which suggest its particularly likely the weren't successful and the expected return would be hilarious numbers in terms of %
60 dollar (and euro) games are already bit high priced considering the entertainment value they contain.
The industry is simply too bloated, too many games aimed at same customers so it makes sense the sales won't be as great as publishers wished they were.
I'm pretty sure EA is not the distributor for console sales which as I understand it is still the main focus of the AAA market.
The first didn't really put forward any arguments, but did have a lot of ifs, maybes and perhaps. The second, when talking about the PC market, tried to compare PUBG to the "100 manhours in Unity" £0.99 games released on Steam, and never really looked at the average sales expectations for AAA(+) games to begin with after listing all the of costs that go into making them.
I have a serious skepticism that AAA titles need to go above $60. It was very iffy when introduced, and is fairly appropriate nowadays, given audience size. I'm certain that they keep it low because it allows the long tail sales with DLC/lootboxes. The pricing schemes (not just sticker price but all other sales prices) have a lot more to do with competing with other studios/publishers for the most revenue to invest in the future than they do with ensuring the audience is paying a 'fair price'.
Because, again, the total cost of buying every bit of lootbox DLC in a seasonal release (in whatever game you want to name; Destiny 2, Overwatch, etc.) is often much higher than the price for an entire AAA game. So unless you're saying that the development cost for skins and cosmetics is higher than the game itself...
The issue is reasonable cost, not cost that is a fraction of what they claim. In AAA development, huge amounts of money get dumped into making visuals very slightly better than just "good", and for no other reason than publishers stupidly thinking that graphics are the big reason games sell. A lot of money also gets dumped into forcing games out faster by having masses of people developing the game, when slowing the development process down and using fewer people is more efficient (not to mention improves stability because there's more time time for testing, which has been a horrible shortcoming of AAA games for several years now).
So the question isn't whether or not games could be made at a reasonable cost with current tools (which they absolutely can), it's what the publishers are insisting that huge portions of budget be wasted on.
Publishers saying that games are too expensive to make is bullshit, because they're the ones wasting money on stupid priorities just to try and out-compete each other on things that only other publishers think are important. The mid- and low-range budget games are increasingly impressive in what they can offer, and none of those developers are bitching about the competition because they aren't trying to build Skinner boxes with the intent to monopolize the income stream of every player who buys their game (minus basically the entire mobile game market, which is nothing but Skinner boxes).
Yeah, imma disagree really hard on that one.
But regardless, sixty is just what people expect, and people can be really fickle and weird about this nonsense.
I think there have been at least one or two kickstarted games that when they came to steam early access set the pricing at the same as the kickstarter tier that got a key for "alpha" access, which was about 90 dollars. As time went on it'd drop to what the kickstarter tier for "beta" access was (about 60 maybe?) and then finally it'd hit release for about 30 or so.
People went fucking nuts.
And by the same token, if an 'indie' game is anything above about 25/30 dollars or so, people will also freak out.
Apparently we've decided that this is what games cost, and there's just no convincing people otherwise.
That's because they are.
And even if they weren't it still takes a "huge amounts of money" just to hit what we consider the bar of being acceptable right now, let alone this "very slightly better" tier that you're convinced nobody wants but that publishers are chasing regardless.
Nothing about this scenario that people keep pushing measures up in the slightest.
For example, if I were to compare Rise of the Tomb Raider to Prey, both of which I highly enjoyed and were priced the same (at least in my country), Prey wins out on entertainment value by about 3x, because it is highly replayable. You run into the trap the unfortunate analyst who opined "$60 is too low" during the height of the BF2 lootbox fiasco, which is that it's quite hard to put a price on even a simple thing like a football or a yo-yo, if you're doing it by "how many hours of fun you get out of it."
Most of us would not pay £120 for a football, even if it lasted for 70-80 hours of kickabouts.
If it did fine, it wouldn't have resulted in the closure of an entire game studio.
Five million isn't even the break-even point for a lot of AAA games nowadays. You definitely need to check out this video to see just how high costs have gotten:
Edit: On top of that, $40 million is just the rumor. That total is downright miserly for a modern AAA game (Witcher 3's $60 million budget was considered amazingly low), and considering the game's rocky development I suspect it's a light higher.
1) The argument is that those are still paying for the true original cost of development because the games are selling at a loss.
2) Those are also paying for upkeep (patches, free content, etc)
3) If high quality graphics are a big driver of costs creating more high quality models would be a disproportionate part of the cost?
(to go a little longer, there is also actually quite a long list of studios who were either closed or were otherwise financially cut back after releasing games that were successful in terms of revenue. Again, this is not because the games are not turning a profit, but because they are not comparing well to the microtransaction megabucks models of stuff like Fifa Ultimate Team, and from the publisher perspective, why keep funding a studio giving you only 20% RoI when you could try finding another one that gives 300%)
I disagree. If they raise the prices during an extended period where buying power is flat and not increasing year over year, then they will just price themselves out of the market.