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.
You might not pay 120 for a football, but unless you're billy no mates or just really like keepy-uppies then I don't think it's a good comparison.
The football is just the equipment, which is why I've certainly payed about that for in and around 20 hours of indoor football, which is probably a better comparison.
Which was great, but I spent 220 hours playing BotW and that cost about half that, so...
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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%)
You might not pay 120 for a football, but unless you're billy no mates or just really like keepy-uppies then I don't think it's a good comparison.
The football is just the equipment, which is why I've certainly payed about that for in and around 20 hours of indoor football, which is probably a better comparison.
Which was great, but I spent 220 hours playing BotW and that cost about half that, so...
This isn't really addressing the main point of the analogy: that evaluating price point strategies based on how much time a consumer can get out of them, rather than by the costs involved in creating the good/service/experience, tends to lead you down the garden path into a very thorny subjective briar bush. Some $60 games are a 10-12 hour single playthrough (with high graphics and interesting physics engines). Others are a game world and mechanics that lend themselves to replayability. And of course you eventually run into the value for money of things like Minecraft or X-COM, or Skyrim (or the original Half-Life) with monumental modding communities.
Also, here's another thing to consider when trying to figure out how much it really takes to break even.
We have the sales figures for Witcher 3 in its first six weeks -- about 6 million. We know the approximate development cost -- $81 million. (Looks like I was mis-remembering or using outdated info before.) We even know the approximate profit it made in those first six weeks -- $62 million.
On the surface, it would seem the formula is clear for that first six weeks -- $81 million dev cost plus $62 million profit equals $143 in revenue. But! Six million in sales times $60 a pop equals $360 million in revenue. That means there's another $217 million in costs that traditional napkin math misses. Which means that $81 million game needed to sell over 4.5 million copies just to break even.
AAA games really do need to sell ludicrous numbers.
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HerrCronIt that wickedly supports taxationRegistered Userregular
You might not pay 120 for a football, but unless you're billy no mates or just really like keepy-uppies then I don't think it's a good comparison.
The football is just the equipment, which is why I've certainly payed about that for in and around 20 hours of indoor football, which is probably a better comparison.
Which was great, but I spent 220 hours playing BotW and that cost about half that, so...
This isn't really addressing the main point of the analogy: that evaluating price point strategies based on how much time a consumer can get out of them, rather than by the costs involved in creating the good/service/experience, tends to lead you down the garden path into a very thorny subjective briar bush. Some $60 games are a 10-12 hour single playthrough (with high graphics and interesting physics engines). Others are a game world and mechanics that lend themselves to replayability. And of course you eventually run into the value for money of things like Minecraft or X-COM, or Skyrim (or the original Half-Life) with monumental modding communities.
And I'm fine with that.
Which is why I'm going to be happy to disagree with the premise that "games are already bit high priced considering the entertainment value they contain", because as far as I'm concerned that's wrong.
I know it's subjective, and i'm not even going to pretend otherwise, because I'm fairly certain that any person who does not agree with me is also knows that.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
On the topic of graphics as a driving force in getting people to buy games, if people really were prioritizing graphics as one of the prime factors for a game purchase, then everybody would be on PC and the console market wouldn't exist. Nintendo games don't even glance at the kind of fidelity something like the AC games keep spending megabux on, yet those Nintendo games still see huge sales.
Considering that the console market is anything but non-existent, graphics are clearly not the major buying influence that publishers want to convince us they are.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
edited February 2018
Horizon: Zero Dawn cost roughly $47 million to make.
Mass Effect: Andromeda cost $100 million Candian, which translates into roughly $80 million USD.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Grand Theft Auto V both cost upwards of $270 million.
Even when we're talking about AAA titles, there's a 5x difference in budget.
Playeruknown's Battlegrounds was literally an unfinished game and has sold so many copies that it had 3 million concurrent users.
Minecraft was basically built by one guy. In a cave! With a box of scraps.
Don't get me started on indie games
The fact of the matter is that video game budgets do not need to be astronomical to ensure high-quality content or amazing ROI. Giving your game a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars only serves to ensure that you must sell tens of millions of copies in order to make your money back.
In terms of customer perception, price has the strongest correlation with expectation, not your game's budget. Those are two completely different things. If you pay $70 for a game you expect it to have amazing graphics and gameplay (particularly in terms of playtime) because you paid $70 for it. If you pay $15 for an indie game in Early Access then you care less about graphics and are OK with something that is fun for 10 hours.
Similarly, for the past several decades Nintendo has basically ignored the push for ever-higher graphics fidelity in favor of focusing their development costs on gameplay. We all know the story of the Wii. Even in the case of Breath of the Wild, which was estimated at $100 million total development cost, although it has a widely-praised aesthetic, those graphics clearly did not cost nearly as much as a game like Andromeda. So it's clear that a greater proportion of that $100 million budget was spent focusing on gameplay design and iteration instead of "realistic mouth movements". Which was then rewarded by the marketplace with 7 million copies sold (at one point there were more BotW sales than actual Switch console sales).
The basic gist of this data dump is that development studios and publishers need to be better at managing their resources before they can complain about "not getting enough money back". There are way too many games that make a reasonable ROI, and even more games who make an astronomical ROI on a tiny budget, to give that argument any credence.
There is also a separate issue that if devs are underpaid and overworked, then they need to be organizing for better wages from the publishers who are still making literally triple-digit profit returns across the board. These two issues are related in a macro sense, yes, but when you look at the actual context there is almost no argument that supports EA charging you $100 for a game or throwing in gambling microtransactions given they are already making money hand over fist without it.
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HerrCronIt that wickedly supports taxationRegistered Userregular
On the topic of graphics as a driving force in getting people to buy games, if people really were prioritizing graphics as one of the prime factors for a game purchase, then everybody would be on PC and the console market wouldn't exist. Nintendo games don't even glance at the kind of fidelity something like the AC games keep spending megabux on, yet those Nintendo games still see huge sales.
Considering that the console market is anything but non-existent, graphics are clearly not the major buying influence that publishers want to convince us they are.
This is silly.
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On the topic of graphics as a driving force in getting people to buy games, if people really were prioritizing graphics as one of the prime factors for a game purchase, then everybody would be on PC and the console market wouldn't exist. Nintendo games don't even glance at the kind of fidelity something like the AC games keep spending megabux on, yet those Nintendo games still see huge sales.
Considering that the console market is anything but non-existent, graphics are clearly not the major buying influence that publishers want to convince us they are.
This is silly.
In fact the modern PC market is starting to heavily favor indies with less graphical muscle than AAA games.
And that's before you get into the convenience factor.
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HerrCronIt that wickedly supports taxationRegistered Userregular
The basic gist of this data dump is that development studios and publishers need to be better at managing their resources before they can complain about "not getting enough money back". There are way too many games that make a reasonable ROI, and even more games who make an astronomical ROI on a tiny budget, to give that argument any credence.
No, not really.
There are a literal handful of right place, right time phenomena that do very well for themselves and that's it.
Deciding that this means that everyone can just do this is about as useful as telling people to "just win the lotto".
Your digital toys take an increasing amount of time and money to make, no amount of "BUT MINECRAFT!" is going to change that.
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The Extra Credits videos are... really biased in what they focus on. They seem to forget that QA for a big studio is often mostly near-minimum wage, for example, and that the management costs are a major part of it - "bonuses" are kind of a big deal. Also that a lot of the marketing stuff is often essentially a huge bonus for the the people involved, as well.
One of the larger factors here, of course, is that software developers are some of the least-screwed-over people outside of roles you need an MBA for these days, though for games they're still kicked in the shin a bit. The costs are growing at a different rate than the market.
Thing is, at no point does this excuse specific practices. Some games should cost more to buy, sure. But using abusive behavior to make up the difference is not acceptable just because it's effective. You can justify a lot of nasty stuff otherwise.
If they want to argue that a given practice is acceptable in and of itself, that's fine, but "this is the only way" is not an acceptable argument because you can just NOT do it instead and make a AA game for a lower budget without exploitative nonsense. Frankly I'm fine with "we just really want to make money!" being the goal instead of "this is the only way" anyway. Just find a way to do it ethically.
I have paid upwards of 100 euros for a triple A games and felt the money well spent.
I've also spent below 60, and felt robbed.
Problem is that with standard pricing, the actual quality of the game, and price asked, have little to nothing to do with each other.
Raise prices across the board, and you will loose customers, because people will not magically have more money to buy games.
On the one hand, I don't know how much it cost to make Star Fox Zero, but boy howdy did it flop and hard. But Nintendo isn't crooning on about how devastated they are from it, or how future games now need to have lootboxes in order to make profit.
And on the other hand, they just produced a pair of games with half the graphical fidelity of the average "high def" game, and laughed their way to the bloody bank.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
On the one hand, I don't know how much it cost to make Star Fox Zero, but boy howdy did it flop and hard. But Nintendo isn't crooning on about how devastated they are from it, or how future games now need to have lootboxes in order to make profit.
And on the other hand, they just produced a pair of games with half the graphical fidelity of the average "high def" game, and laughed their way to the bloody bank.
Part of it is that Nintendo makes a LOT of games. Probably more than any other AAA developer, or even Microsoft and Sony. That way they can absorb the hit of most flops quietly, since they're balanced out by something more successful.
And part of it is this (from a guy from NPD, which studies consumer sales):
I mean, Switch sales are absolutely bananas, and it's all done with very, very little support from the AAA games you'd think would be necessary for success. They're just playing by a different set of rules I don't think the other guys can switch to.
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.
My argument is that a AAA game should cost approximately 1 million * $20 to make and advertise, meaning each copy will make you a healthy profit of $10 after the sellers have taken their cuts. My secondary argument is that the MANY standardized tools, cheap computational power, and close to 'peak' graphical fidelity makes that a far simpler process. That digital distribution makes sales cheaper to make and copies cheaper to distribute. That 'early access' allows for cheaper financing by pre-selling the game to pay for the development costs of the game. Pre-sales are cheaper than loans!
Sure, maybe it's expensive to turn on 8X AAA non-vertical spline bloom anti-aliasing in 6K 3D depth of field occlusion ambient shadow lighting. So just don't bother. If you can't get it done for $15-20 million, then you can't get it done, and noone will care.
Making games is not CHEAP, but making games is absolutely cheaper than it used to be. The reason the market is falling to pieces with $60 million budgets (or more) for games is that enormous amounts of illegitimate revenue can be obtained by producing a well functioning skinner box to rob your customers. A vastly successful skinner box might make a few hundred million in profits, but only a fraction of skinner boxes will be succesful. So game companies are forced into arms races to achieve marginal more chances of becoming the successful skinner box.
10-20 million = Sensible cost for a potentially very fun game
20-100 million = Additional unneeded expenditure designed to move the needle of skinner box success from 10% -> 15%
The profit incentive for skinner boxes is skewing the industry. Games should be made by smaller teams, with longer development windows, targetted 100% at the revenue achieved in sales of the game and 'true' expansion packs (IE, effectively a completely new story/experience using similar art and engine assets)
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
On the topic of graphics as a driving force in getting people to buy games, if people really were prioritizing graphics as one of the prime factors for a game purchase, then everybody would be on PC and the console market wouldn't exist. Nintendo games don't even glance at the kind of fidelity something like the AC games keep spending megabux on, yet those Nintendo games still see huge sales.
Considering that the console market is anything but non-existent, graphics are clearly not the major buying influence that publishers want to convince us they are.
(as an aside, I think graphics as a primary point of marketing may well be somewhat old school thinking at this point, or certainly within the next decade. Not totally irrelevant, of course, but overestimated in importance.
Streaming (or just recording) games has grown significantly, and is going to be a bigger factor in marketing in the future. The reason we've loved graphics for so long in advertising is because traditionally it is a struggle to show gameplay in a 30 second ad. But with more and more games shown in fuller detail with YT/Twitch etc., gamers are getting a better picture of what a game is actually about. Couple that with the general diminishing of physical media and even digital media reviews (most people I know get games based on word of mouth and sometimes particular opinion-formers, not by checking the MetaCritic or even PC Gamer reviews for a game), and I suspect the ability to create compelling bits of gameplay is eventually going to win out.)
...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
Well, Nintendo basically owns the market the sell into, which means they have to put out quality on a regular basis so people will actually want to keep buying their products. They can't go over to gouging with season passes and microtransactions without poisoning their own well, and they don't have anywhere else to go if they do that.
On the one hand, I don't know how much it cost to make Star Fox Zero, but boy howdy did it flop and hard. But Nintendo isn't crooning on about how devastated they are from it, or how future games now need to have lootboxes in order to make profit.
And on the other hand, they just produced a pair of games with half the graphical fidelity of the average "high def" game, and laughed their way to the bloody bank.
Nintendo have been very good at maximising profit margins in other areas. I remember when the DS was developed things like the carts had a production method where they could increase and decrease production quickly and even recycle/reflash carts that don't sell into other games.
Nintendo generally have lower production runs of titles too.
On the one hand, I don't know how much it cost to make Star Fox Zero, but boy howdy did it flop and hard. But Nintendo isn't crooning on about how devastated they are from it, or how future games now need to have lootboxes in order to make profit.
And on the other hand, they just produced a pair of games with half the graphical fidelity of the average "high def" game, and laughed their way to the bloody bank.
Nintendo have been very good at maximising profit margins in other areas. I remember when the DS was developed things like the carts had a production method where they could increase and decrease production quickly and even recycle/reflash carts that don't sell into other games.
Nintendo generally have lower production runs of titles too.
Their games also hold onto their price values for MUCH longer than the AAA average, assuming they're not total flops. It's rare for an AAA game to sell at the full $60 six months in, while it's rare for a Nintendo game to sell less than $60 six months in.
On the one hand, I don't know how much it cost to make Star Fox Zero, but boy howdy did it flop and hard. But Nintendo isn't crooning on about how devastated they are from it, or how future games now need to have lootboxes in order to make profit.
And on the other hand, they just produced a pair of games with half the graphical fidelity of the average "high def" game, and laughed their way to the bloody bank.
Nintendo have been very good at maximising profit margins in other areas. I remember when the DS was developed things like the carts had a production method where they could increase and decrease production quickly and even recycle/reflash carts that don't sell into other games.
Nintendo generally have lower production runs of titles too.
Their games also hold onto their price values for MUCH longer than the AAA average, assuming they're not total flops. It's rare for an AAA game to sell at the full $60 six months in, while it's rare for a Nintendo game to sell less than $60 six months in.
The fact that Nintendo generally releases the entire actual game on the release day is something I would consider to be significant as well. But again, they also own the platforms they sell onto, so there's no reason for them to discount much of anything; nobody can get onto Nintendo platforms and offer alternatives at a lower price, so why would Nintendo need to lower the prices? They control their market, but are restricted to releasing quality content to keep people interested in that market.
And for me, all that season passes do is tell me that I should check back in 8-12 months for the discounted GOTY version which is the actual full release of the game, instead of dropping $60 at release plus another $30 for a drip of additional content every few months. I know a discount and more content will be coming a year after release (which is probably when most of these games should be releasing anyway), so why wouldn't I wait and get the whole bundle for less than the original cost of the weakest version of the game?
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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.
My argument is that a AAA game should cost approximately 1 million * $20 to make and advertise, meaning each copy will make you a healthy profit of $10 after the sellers have taken their cuts. My secondary argument is that the MANY standardized tools, cheap computational power, and close to 'peak' graphical fidelity makes that a far simpler process. That digital distribution makes sales cheaper to make and copies cheaper to distribute. That 'early access' allows for cheaper financing by pre-selling the game to pay for the development costs of the game. Pre-sales are cheaper than loans!
Sure, maybe it's expensive to turn on 8X AAA non-vertical spline bloom anti-aliasing in 6K 3D depth of field occlusion ambient shadow lighting. So just don't bother. If you can't get it done for $15-20 million, then you can't get it done, and noone will care.
Like i said, wishful thinking.
People do care, games looking good is a big draw, and even getting to the level that consumers consider acceptable is a significant investment, and no, it's not going to be offset by "standardized tools and cheap computational power". You still have to pay people all the man hours it takes for them to make this stuff.
This meme of "Gosh, just make it for less money, guyyysssss" isn't really compelling.
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Twenty years ago, I happily dropped ninety bucks on a Super Nintendo game and came out ahead with how much playtime I got out of it. Want to justify a higher price for a game? Make it worth that money instead of slapdashing something together and claiming it's worth the sixty bucks... plus the DLC and season pass.
It just seems like all games are sixty plus DLC because we've been trained to think we shouldn't add DLC into the price of a game because it's not needed to play the base game, and the load of people that buy the games don't do enough research into the products to justify this- they just want to get in, get out, and get the game so Junior will shut up and stop bothering them. Then they see no problem with allowing them to add on another five here, another ten there, until the total investment on a sixty-dollar game is more than twice what it was- and loot crates simply remove the limit of how much that each player could be soaked for, because there's no way to buy everything outright and not leave them with anything else to buy.
The part I laughed at is when the 'cheap AAA game they used for the example' almost cracked the top 10 list of most expensive games ever made (when corrected for inflation)... That really doesn't strike me as a honest argument. If I take the 'cheap AAA game' as an honest example of what the AAA industry considers baseline, then I see is the exact same behaviour that has appeared in both the movie and music industries. Everyone chases the massive AAA payout, but the market only has so much appetite for these types of entertainment products. Therefore, some lose out big time (the list of most expensive games to make has a lot of games you would not expect to see on the list. The industry, being made up of a lot of trend followers like every industry, responds to this by doubling down yet again. This leads in turn to the abandonment of mid-tier games to the degree that something like Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is a noteworthy release rather than a typical example of what is being produced by the majority of the industry. As has happened in the music industry in the 80s and the movie industry as well at various times, when everyone pursues a blockbuster they become much more vulnerable to failures and studios/publishers end up failing or get bought up.
At the end of the day, the decision to produce massive AAA games with huge production and marketing costs, that require huge sales is a business decision. The widespread adoption of short-term solutions like lootboxes that prey on exploitable elements of human psychology that is vulnerable to gambling is in my mind, an attempt to stave off a correction. However, if past events are any indication governments and the public will (are) catch on to the predatory practices and there will either be a public backlash resulting in reduced sales and/or government action to restrict and regulate the predatory practices.
Speaking personally, it's become very obvious to me that most of the AAA games designed in the past several years have not been aimed at creating the best (most entertaining) product they can within their budget/time constraints, but instead are aimed at creating the product the best at extracting the maximum profit from their buyers. I'm not interested in something that preys on weak spots in my psyche and attempts to turn me into a "whale", so I've largely checked out.
Entirely separate from the lootbox/micro-transaction/gambling aspects, there are also a lot of examples where it is clear that the monetization model is about selling the same thing to me multiple times. Annual sports games are the perennial example, but there are many others. For example, sequels frequently does not start development having learned all the lessons of what works, what is popular and what doesn't work at the end point of the first game + post launch development, but instead starts over again at the start. Destiny is an example that is frequently given for this, but other games like the Civilization series are just as guilty.
The Extra Credits videos are... really biased in what they focus on. They seem to forget that QA for a big studio is often mostly near-minimum wage, for example, and that the management costs are a major part of it - "bonuses" are kind of a big deal. Also that a lot of the marketing stuff is often essentially a huge bonus for the the people involved, as well.
One of the larger factors here, of course, is that software developers are some of the least-screwed-over people outside of roles you need an MBA for these days, though for games they're still kicked in the shin a bit. The costs are growing at a different rate than the market.
Thing is, at no point does this excuse specific practices. Some games should cost more to buy, sure. But using abusive behavior to make up the difference is not acceptable just because it's effective. You can justify a lot of nasty stuff otherwise.
If they want to argue that a given practice is acceptable in and of itself, that's fine, but "this is the only way" is not an acceptable argument because you can just NOT do it instead and make a AA game for a lower budget without exploitative nonsense. Frankly I'm fine with "we just really want to make money!" being the goal instead of "this is the only way" anyway. Just find a way to do it ethically.
I think this is kinda the key problem with the "cost of production" argument. "Games cost a lot of money to make" is true, but that does not mean "therefore exploitative lootboxes are the only way forward" is also true. You could just, say, raise the price instead.
Lootboxes aren't necessary, they are just profitable. It's the easiest way to keep making a ton of money off a game for a lot less development effort then making a whole new game. And since, like every big corporation in existence these days, the main concern of game's publishers is higher and higher returns regardless of reality, they jump all over it.
The exploitative lootbox model is so rampant because it's fast and easy money, not because it's necessary.
The Extra Credits videos are... really biased in what they focus on. They seem to forget that QA for a big studio is often mostly near-minimum wage, for example, and that the management costs are a major part of it - "bonuses" are kind of a big deal. Also that a lot of the marketing stuff is often essentially a huge bonus for the the people involved, as well.
One of the larger factors here, of course, is that software developers are some of the least-screwed-over people outside of roles you need an MBA for these days, though for games they're still kicked in the shin a bit. The costs are growing at a different rate than the market.
Thing is, at no point does this excuse specific practices. Some games should cost more to buy, sure. But using abusive behavior to make up the difference is not acceptable just because it's effective. You can justify a lot of nasty stuff otherwise.
If they want to argue that a given practice is acceptable in and of itself, that's fine, but "this is the only way" is not an acceptable argument because you can just NOT do it instead and make a AA game for a lower budget without exploitative nonsense. Frankly I'm fine with "we just really want to make money!" being the goal instead of "this is the only way" anyway. Just find a way to do it ethically.
I think this is kinda the key problem with the "cost of production" argument. "Games cost a lot of money to make" is true, but that does not mean "therefore exploitative lootboxes are the only way forward" is also true. You could just, say, raise the price instead.
Lootboxes aren't necessary, they are just profitable. It's the easiest way to keep making a ton of money off a game for a lot less development effort then making a whole new game. And since, like every big corporation in existence these days, the main concern of game's publishers is higher and higher returns regardless of reality, they jump all over it.
The exploitative lootbox model is so rampant because it's fast and easy money, not because it's necessary.
Specifically, loot boxes allow companies to pursue "whales". A minority of the player base is willing to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a game; an important feature of most loot box designs is the lack of a realistic cap to spending. With DLC, you can have a bunch of skins to increase the price of the complete game to, say, $100. But put those skins in loot crates, add the right design, and you can "allow" people to spend as much as they want on the game. Increasing the base cost of the game does not allow you to do that. See the mobile market for confirmation, and how it has as a rule avoided actually charging for games in preference to systems that allow spending unlimited amounts of money.
The Extra Credits videos are... really biased in what they focus on. They seem to forget that QA for a big studio is often mostly near-minimum wage, for example, and that the management costs are a major part of it - "bonuses" are kind of a big deal. Also that a lot of the marketing stuff is often essentially a huge bonus for the the people involved, as well.
One of the larger factors here, of course, is that software developers are some of the least-screwed-over people outside of roles you need an MBA for these days, though for games they're still kicked in the shin a bit. The costs are growing at a different rate than the market.
Thing is, at no point does this excuse specific practices. Some games should cost more to buy, sure. But using abusive behavior to make up the difference is not acceptable just because it's effective. You can justify a lot of nasty stuff otherwise.
If they want to argue that a given practice is acceptable in and of itself, that's fine, but "this is the only way" is not an acceptable argument because you can just NOT do it instead and make a AA game for a lower budget without exploitative nonsense. Frankly I'm fine with "we just really want to make money!" being the goal instead of "this is the only way" anyway. Just find a way to do it ethically.
I think this is kinda the key problem with the "cost of production" argument. "Games cost a lot of money to make" is true, but that does not mean "therefore exploitative lootboxes are the only way forward" is also true. You could just, say, raise the price instead.
Lootboxes aren't necessary, they are just profitable. It's the easiest way to keep making a ton of money off a game for a lot less development effort then making a whole new game. And since, like every big corporation in existence these days, the main concern of game's publishers is higher and higher returns regardless of reality, they jump all over it.
The exploitative lootbox model is so rampant because it's fast and easy money, not because it's necessary.
Specifically, loot boxes allow companies to pursue "whales". A minority of the player base is willing to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a game; an important feature of most loot box designs is the lack of a realistic cap to spending. With DLC, you can have a bunch of skins to increase the price of the complete game to, say, $100. But put those skins in loot crates, add the right design, and you can "allow" people to spend as much as they want on the game. Increasing the base cost of the game does not allow you to do that. See the mobile market for confirmation, and how it has as a rule avoided actually charging for games in preference to systems that allow spending unlimited amounts of money.
Also, the AAA game space is overcrowded.
It's different for the mobile market because the issue there is avoiding charging money upfront because paying for something on an app store is a HUGE barrier to entry in the mobile space because they've spent like a decade now establishing the idea that apps are free. They more kind of stumbled into the lootbox model and even then the ad-supported model is just as common.
The Extra Credits videos are... really biased in what they focus on. They seem to forget that QA for a big studio is often mostly near-minimum wage, for example, and that the management costs are a major part of it - "bonuses" are kind of a big deal. Also that a lot of the marketing stuff is often essentially a huge bonus for the the people involved, as well.
One of the larger factors here, of course, is that software developers are some of the least-screwed-over people outside of roles you need an MBA for these days, though for games they're still kicked in the shin a bit. The costs are growing at a different rate than the market.
Thing is, at no point does this excuse specific practices. Some games should cost more to buy, sure. But using abusive behavior to make up the difference is not acceptable just because it's effective. You can justify a lot of nasty stuff otherwise.
If they want to argue that a given practice is acceptable in and of itself, that's fine, but "this is the only way" is not an acceptable argument because you can just NOT do it instead and make a AA game for a lower budget without exploitative nonsense. Frankly I'm fine with "we just really want to make money!" being the goal instead of "this is the only way" anyway. Just find a way to do it ethically.
I think this is kinda the key problem with the "cost of production" argument. "Games cost a lot of money to make" is true, but that does not mean "therefore exploitative lootboxes are the only way forward" is also true. You could just, say, raise the price instead.
Lootboxes aren't necessary, they are just profitable. It's the easiest way to keep making a ton of money off a game for a lot less development effort then making a whole new game. And since, like every big corporation in existence these days, the main concern of game's publishers is higher and higher returns regardless of reality, they jump all over it.
The exploitative lootbox model is so rampant because it's fast and easy money, not because it's necessary.
If raising prices causes you to lose enough sales, you may not actually make more money by raising prices.
I would not argue that some exploitative lootbox models are designed just to make more money. But is there such a thing as a non-exploitative lootbox model? And if some games are not profitable at $60 but market forces are creating a ceiling at $60, are alternative revenue streams that hide the real price or distribute it unevenly to people willing to pay more, such as lootboxes, micro-transactions, and DLC acceptable within some reasonable standards?
Battlefront 2 is obviously awful. But I originally found the lootboxes in Overwatch pretty good, but I have soured on them over time. I find the Paradox DLC strategy to be very good, and similarly the Total War approach with Warhammer of faction DLCs has been quite good. What about more micro-transaction but still deterministic models, ie unlocking characters individually and the like?
On the one hand I do think the old model of paying a single up front cost for a game is dead and that's fine by me because it drives continuous improvement like with Paradox and Total War. But I am increasingly thinking that there is no random lootbox model, even ones like Overwatch or DCCGs, that I want to tolerate.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Lootbox systems are essentially always exploitative because that's how you make more money off them. The less exploitative you make it, the less money you make generally. This is basically true right up until you design it in some way that pisses off the playerbase, but that's not necessarily a function of how much it pushes people's gambling addiction buttons and often a function of other design decisions.
A letter sent to ESRB president Patricia Vance by United States senator Maggie Hassan calls on the rating agency to take steps to analyze and curb the proliferation of loot boxes in videogames. In a separate Q&A session with FTC commissioner nominees, the senator also suggested that if the ESRB fails to take action, the government could become directly involved.
In the letter, and in her preamble to the FTC nominees, Hassan praised the ESRB for its effectiveness and value as an age rating board. But she also noted that loot boxes are a relatively new phenomenon, and that the ESRB "must work to keep pace with new gaming trends."
"Recently the World Health Organization classified 'gaming disorder' as a unique condition in its recent draft revision of the 11th International Classification of Diseases," Hassan wrote. "While there is robust debate over whether loot boxes should be considered gambling, the fact that they are both expensive habits and use similar psychological principles suggest loot boxes should be treated with extra scrutiny. At minimum, the rating system should denote when loot boxes are utilized in physical copies of electronic games."
She called on the ESRB to review its rating practices, with a specific eye toward the ethics and transparency of loot boxes, to collect and publish data on the use and prevalence of loot boxes, and to come up with a system of loot box-related "best practices" for developers to give parents more control over what their children are playing, and how.
Her questions to the FTC nominees echoed those sentiments, but concluded on what could be taken as a slightly ominous note. "Do you agree that children are being addicted to gaming and activities like loot boxes that might make them more susceptible to addiction is a problem that merits our attention?" she asked. "And depending on how the ESRB responds to my inquiry, would the FTC be willing to look at loot boxes as an issue independently?"
If legislation does move forward, it could have a dramatically greater effect on videogames than the ESRB. Ars Technica reports that Hawaii, for instance, is now considering a bill that would ban the sale of games with purchasable loot boxes to anyone under 21, essentially the equivalent of an AO rating. Such restrictions would impact games like Overwatch, Call of Duty, and Battlefront 2, to name a few obvious examples. And that bill would impose legal repercussions rather than an industry fine.
I saw a bunch of posts in this thread and assumed everyone was talking about the Hawaiian anti-loot box bills that have been proposed, but I guess not. Their plan is to make it so anything with random loot boxes paid for with real money cannot be sold to anyone younger than 21, must have a label on the box/website indicating that there's loot boxes in the game, and the odds must be displayed. The 21 age limit part threw me for a loop for a moment until I looked it up and discovered gambling is illegal in Hawaii.
I think the major problem with the "games should be $70" argument is the inherent assumption that the people selling the games would then cease predatory lootbox practices, where I think unless you have legislation with teeth to tell them no, it will clearly be a WhyNotBoth.jpg situation.
The Extra Credits videos are... really biased in what they focus on. They seem to forget that QA for a big studio is often mostly near-minimum wage, for example, and that the management costs are a major part of it - "bonuses" are kind of a big deal. Also that a lot of the marketing stuff is often essentially a huge bonus for the the people involved, as well.
One of the larger factors here, of course, is that software developers are some of the least-screwed-over people outside of roles you need an MBA for these days, though for games they're still kicked in the shin a bit. The costs are growing at a different rate than the market.
Thing is, at no point does this excuse specific practices. Some games should cost more to buy, sure. But using abusive behavior to make up the difference is not acceptable just because it's effective. You can justify a lot of nasty stuff otherwise.
If they want to argue that a given practice is acceptable in and of itself, that's fine, but "this is the only way" is not an acceptable argument because you can just NOT do it instead and make a AA game for a lower budget without exploitative nonsense. Frankly I'm fine with "we just really want to make money!" being the goal instead of "this is the only way" anyway. Just find a way to do it ethically.
I think this is kinda the key problem with the "cost of production" argument. "Games cost a lot of money to make" is true, but that does not mean "therefore exploitative lootboxes are the only way forward" is also true. You could just, say, raise the price instead.
Lootboxes aren't necessary, they are just profitable. It's the easiest way to keep making a ton of money off a game for a lot less development effort then making a whole new game. And since, like every big corporation in existence these days, the main concern of game's publishers is higher and higher returns regardless of reality, they jump all over it.
The exploitative lootbox model is so rampant because it's fast and easy money, not because it's necessary.
If raising prices causes you to lose enough sales, you may not actually make more money by raising prices.
I would not argue that some exploitative lootbox models are designed just to make more money. But is there such a thing as a non-exploitative lootbox model? And if some games are not profitable at $60 but market forces are creating a ceiling at $60, are alternative revenue streams that hide the real price or distribute it unevenly to people willing to pay more, such as lootboxes, micro-transactions, and DLC acceptable within some reasonable standards?
Battlefront 2 is obviously awful. But I originally found the lootboxes in Overwatch pretty good, but I have soured on them over time. I find the Paradox DLC strategy to be very good, and similarly the Total War approach with Warhammer of faction DLCs has been quite good. What about more micro-transaction but still deterministic models, ie unlocking characters individually and the like?
On the one hand I do think the old model of paying a single up front cost for a game is dead and that's fine by me because it drives continuous improvement like with Paradox and Total War. But I am increasingly thinking that there is no random lootbox model, even ones like Overwatch or DCCGs, that I want to tolerate.
I don't know. I rather have assurances that the online game I like is still around 5 years from now.
Overwatch is almost 2 years old and is still going strong. It has 5 new vanilla maps, 5 new characters, bunch of new game modes, with their own maps & lot of seasonal event scenarios with their customized maps.
Alternative for that is a game that got stale and near end of its life, because there's no revenue stream to pay for all that.
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The Extra Credits videos are... really biased in what they focus on. They seem to forget that QA for a big studio is often mostly near-minimum wage, for example, and that the management costs are a major part of it - "bonuses" are kind of a big deal. Also that a lot of the marketing stuff is often essentially a huge bonus for the the people involved, as well.
One of the larger factors here, of course, is that software developers are some of the least-screwed-over people outside of roles you need an MBA for these days, though for games they're still kicked in the shin a bit. The costs are growing at a different rate than the market.
Thing is, at no point does this excuse specific practices. Some games should cost more to buy, sure. But using abusive behavior to make up the difference is not acceptable just because it's effective. You can justify a lot of nasty stuff otherwise.
If they want to argue that a given practice is acceptable in and of itself, that's fine, but "this is the only way" is not an acceptable argument because you can just NOT do it instead and make a AA game for a lower budget without exploitative nonsense. Frankly I'm fine with "we just really want to make money!" being the goal instead of "this is the only way" anyway. Just find a way to do it ethically.
I think this is kinda the key problem with the "cost of production" argument. "Games cost a lot of money to make" is true, but that does not mean "therefore exploitative lootboxes are the only way forward" is also true. You could just, say, raise the price instead.
Lootboxes aren't necessary, they are just profitable. It's the easiest way to keep making a ton of money off a game for a lot less development effort then making a whole new game. And since, like every big corporation in existence these days, the main concern of game's publishers is higher and higher returns regardless of reality, they jump all over it.
The exploitative lootbox model is so rampant because it's fast and easy money, not because it's necessary.
If raising prices causes you to lose enough sales, you may not actually make more money by raising prices.
I would not argue that some exploitative lootbox models are designed just to make more money. But is there such a thing as a non-exploitative lootbox model? And if some games are not profitable at $60 but market forces are creating a ceiling at $60, are alternative revenue streams that hide the real price or distribute it unevenly to people willing to pay more, such as lootboxes, micro-transactions, and DLC acceptable within some reasonable standards?
Battlefront 2 is obviously awful. But I originally found the lootboxes in Overwatch pretty good, but I have soured on them over time. I find the Paradox DLC strategy to be very good, and similarly the Total War approach with Warhammer of faction DLCs has been quite good. What about more micro-transaction but still deterministic models, ie unlocking characters individually and the like?
On the one hand I do think the old model of paying a single up front cost for a game is dead and that's fine by me because it drives continuous improvement like with Paradox and Total War. But I am increasingly thinking that there is no random lootbox model, even ones like Overwatch or DCCGs, that I want to tolerate.
I don't know. I rather have assurances that the online game I like is still around 5 years from now.
Overwatch is almost 2 years old and is still going strong. It has 5 new vanilla maps, 5 new characters, bunch of new game modes, with their own maps & lot of seasonal event scenarios with their customized maps.
Alternative for that is a game that got stale and near end of its life, because there's no revenue stream to pay for all that.
They could sell the skins and emotes and whatnot as is, without the loot box gambling aspect.
The Extra Credits videos are... really biased in what they focus on. They seem to forget that QA for a big studio is often mostly near-minimum wage, for example, and that the management costs are a major part of it - "bonuses" are kind of a big deal. Also that a lot of the marketing stuff is often essentially a huge bonus for the the people involved, as well.
One of the larger factors here, of course, is that software developers are some of the least-screwed-over people outside of roles you need an MBA for these days, though for games they're still kicked in the shin a bit. The costs are growing at a different rate than the market.
Thing is, at no point does this excuse specific practices. Some games should cost more to buy, sure. But using abusive behavior to make up the difference is not acceptable just because it's effective. You can justify a lot of nasty stuff otherwise.
If they want to argue that a given practice is acceptable in and of itself, that's fine, but "this is the only way" is not an acceptable argument because you can just NOT do it instead and make a AA game for a lower budget without exploitative nonsense. Frankly I'm fine with "we just really want to make money!" being the goal instead of "this is the only way" anyway. Just find a way to do it ethically.
I think this is kinda the key problem with the "cost of production" argument. "Games cost a lot of money to make" is true, but that does not mean "therefore exploitative lootboxes are the only way forward" is also true. You could just, say, raise the price instead.
Lootboxes aren't necessary, they are just profitable. It's the easiest way to keep making a ton of money off a game for a lot less development effort then making a whole new game. And since, like every big corporation in existence these days, the main concern of game's publishers is higher and higher returns regardless of reality, they jump all over it.
The exploitative lootbox model is so rampant because it's fast and easy money, not because it's necessary.
If raising prices causes you to lose enough sales, you may not actually make more money by raising prices.
I would not argue that some exploitative lootbox models are designed just to make more money. But is there such a thing as a non-exploitative lootbox model? And if some games are not profitable at $60 but market forces are creating a ceiling at $60, are alternative revenue streams that hide the real price or distribute it unevenly to people willing to pay more, such as lootboxes, micro-transactions, and DLC acceptable within some reasonable standards?
Battlefront 2 is obviously awful. But I originally found the lootboxes in Overwatch pretty good, but I have soured on them over time. I find the Paradox DLC strategy to be very good, and similarly the Total War approach with Warhammer of faction DLCs has been quite good. What about more micro-transaction but still deterministic models, ie unlocking characters individually and the like?
On the one hand I do think the old model of paying a single up front cost for a game is dead and that's fine by me because it drives continuous improvement like with Paradox and Total War. But I am increasingly thinking that there is no random lootbox model, even ones like Overwatch or DCCGs, that I want to tolerate.
I don't know. I rather have assurances that the online game I like is still around 5 years from now.
Overwatch is almost 2 years old and is still going strong. It has 5 new vanilla maps, 5 new characters, bunch of new game modes, with their own maps & lot of seasonal event scenarios with their customized maps.
Alternative for that is a game that got stale and near end of its life, because there's no revenue stream to pay for all that.
They could sell the skins and emotes and whatnot as is, without the loot box gambling aspect.
I would vastly prefer this in Overwatch! The only time I've ever gotten the skins I wanted in OW is when I pumped more than the cost of a game into loot box bundles... which is probably why they use that loot box method. Also why I severely cut down the amount of playtime I give to OW. I've spent an embarrassing amount of money on Overwatch loot boxes...
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
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.
As already acknowledged, extremely subjective. Having played both myself (though I played Prey on PC rather than on console), I'd easily say that RoTR, without its DLC, had at least twice the "entertainment value" of Prey--based solely on replay value (the optional content, score attack mode, etc., being all well ahead of Prey, despite both being nonlinear).
(I also think RoTR is fundamentally a better designed game, but that's a separate issue, and more difficult to compare across a first and third person shooter, exploration and nonexploration elements, than their shared qualities).
That being said, I wouldn't have paid $120 for RoTR versus $60 for Prey, for the same reasons you outlined.
The Extra Credits videos are... really biased in what they focus on. They seem to forget that QA for a big studio is often mostly near-minimum wage, for example, and that the management costs are a major part of it - "bonuses" are kind of a big deal. Also that a lot of the marketing stuff is often essentially a huge bonus for the the people involved, as well.
One of the larger factors here, of course, is that software developers are some of the least-screwed-over people outside of roles you need an MBA for these days, though for games they're still kicked in the shin a bit. The costs are growing at a different rate than the market.
Thing is, at no point does this excuse specific practices. Some games should cost more to buy, sure. But using abusive behavior to make up the difference is not acceptable just because it's effective. You can justify a lot of nasty stuff otherwise.
If they want to argue that a given practice is acceptable in and of itself, that's fine, but "this is the only way" is not an acceptable argument because you can just NOT do it instead and make a AA game for a lower budget without exploitative nonsense. Frankly I'm fine with "we just really want to make money!" being the goal instead of "this is the only way" anyway. Just find a way to do it ethically.
I think this is kinda the key problem with the "cost of production" argument. "Games cost a lot of money to make" is true, but that does not mean "therefore exploitative lootboxes are the only way forward" is also true. You could just, say, raise the price instead.
Lootboxes aren't necessary, they are just profitable. It's the easiest way to keep making a ton of money off a game for a lot less development effort then making a whole new game. And since, like every big corporation in existence these days, the main concern of game's publishers is higher and higher returns regardless of reality, they jump all over it.
The exploitative lootbox model is so rampant because it's fast and easy money, not because it's necessary.
If raising prices causes you to lose enough sales, you may not actually make more money by raising prices.
I would not argue that some exploitative lootbox models are designed just to make more money. But is there such a thing as a non-exploitative lootbox model? And if some games are not profitable at $60 but market forces are creating a ceiling at $60, are alternative revenue streams that hide the real price or distribute it unevenly to people willing to pay more, such as lootboxes, micro-transactions, and DLC acceptable within some reasonable standards?
Battlefront 2 is obviously awful. But I originally found the lootboxes in Overwatch pretty good, but I have soured on them over time. I find the Paradox DLC strategy to be very good, and similarly the Total War approach with Warhammer of faction DLCs has been quite good. What about more micro-transaction but still deterministic models, ie unlocking characters individually and the like?
On the one hand I do think the old model of paying a single up front cost for a game is dead and that's fine by me because it drives continuous improvement like with Paradox and Total War. But I am increasingly thinking that there is no random lootbox model, even ones like Overwatch or DCCGs, that I want to tolerate.
I don't know. I rather have assurances that the online game I like is still around 5 years from now.
Overwatch is almost 2 years old and is still going strong. It has 5 new vanilla maps, 5 new characters, bunch of new game modes, with their own maps & lot of seasonal event scenarios with their customized maps.
Alternative for that is a game that got stale and near end of its life, because there's no revenue stream to pay for all that.
They could sell the skins and emotes and whatnot as is, without the loot box gambling aspect.
End result of that would be less art assets made and no new maps.
Maybe new characters for 10 bucks each and they're way overtuned to sell better.
The Extra Credits videos are... really biased in what they focus on. They seem to forget that QA for a big studio is often mostly near-minimum wage, for example, and that the management costs are a major part of it - "bonuses" are kind of a big deal. Also that a lot of the marketing stuff is often essentially a huge bonus for the the people involved, as well.
One of the larger factors here, of course, is that software developers are some of the least-screwed-over people outside of roles you need an MBA for these days, though for games they're still kicked in the shin a bit. The costs are growing at a different rate than the market.
Thing is, at no point does this excuse specific practices. Some games should cost more to buy, sure. But using abusive behavior to make up the difference is not acceptable just because it's effective. You can justify a lot of nasty stuff otherwise.
If they want to argue that a given practice is acceptable in and of itself, that's fine, but "this is the only way" is not an acceptable argument because you can just NOT do it instead and make a AA game for a lower budget without exploitative nonsense. Frankly I'm fine with "we just really want to make money!" being the goal instead of "this is the only way" anyway. Just find a way to do it ethically.
I think this is kinda the key problem with the "cost of production" argument. "Games cost a lot of money to make" is true, but that does not mean "therefore exploitative lootboxes are the only way forward" is also true. You could just, say, raise the price instead.
Lootboxes aren't necessary, they are just profitable. It's the easiest way to keep making a ton of money off a game for a lot less development effort then making a whole new game. And since, like every big corporation in existence these days, the main concern of game's publishers is higher and higher returns regardless of reality, they jump all over it.
The exploitative lootbox model is so rampant because it's fast and easy money, not because it's necessary.
If raising prices causes you to lose enough sales, you may not actually make more money by raising prices.
I would not argue that some exploitative lootbox models are designed just to make more money. But is there such a thing as a non-exploitative lootbox model? And if some games are not profitable at $60 but market forces are creating a ceiling at $60, are alternative revenue streams that hide the real price or distribute it unevenly to people willing to pay more, such as lootboxes, micro-transactions, and DLC acceptable within some reasonable standards?
Battlefront 2 is obviously awful. But I originally found the lootboxes in Overwatch pretty good, but I have soured on them over time. I find the Paradox DLC strategy to be very good, and similarly the Total War approach with Warhammer of faction DLCs has been quite good. What about more micro-transaction but still deterministic models, ie unlocking characters individually and the like?
On the one hand I do think the old model of paying a single up front cost for a game is dead and that's fine by me because it drives continuous improvement like with Paradox and Total War. But I am increasingly thinking that there is no random lootbox model, even ones like Overwatch or DCCGs, that I want to tolerate.
I don't know. I rather have assurances that the online game I like is still around 5 years from now.
Overwatch is almost 2 years old and is still going strong. It has 5 new vanilla maps, 5 new characters, bunch of new game modes, with their own maps & lot of seasonal event scenarios with their customized maps.
Alternative for that is a game that got stale and near end of its life, because there's no revenue stream to pay for all that.
They could sell the skins and emotes and whatnot as is, without the loot box gambling aspect.
End result of that would be less art assets made and no new maps.
Maybe new characters for 10 bucks each and they're way overtuned to sell better.
Blizzard made billions of dollars last year off of lootboxes. Are you claiming that they wouldn't have the money to make art assets and maps if they went to pay-for-product monetization?
Even if they only made 10% of their current revenue, we're still talking over a hundred million dollars. You can continue updating games very comfortably with that amount of money.
Alternatively, if the only way that a game can sustain itself is by preying upon the psychologically vulnerable (because a huge part of the revenue they earn comes from a relatively small number of people), should that game be something we should want to protect?
They don't sell things directly because it makes less money. It's that simple.
You want the perfect example, just look next to Overwatch at Heroes of the Storm. (story time!)
HOTS is Blizzard's MOBA. When it launched Beta, it had a cash shop. Just straight up "Pay X, get this hero or skin or mount". It had bundles and weekly sales and all that good stuff. A year or two after launch, they released what they called Heroes 2.0. Revamped the account-level progression system, added rewards and free currency you earn by playing that gets you stuff and all that kind of thing. It was like 99% really good. But it also added lootboxes. It worked almost exactly like the OW system. Some of the lootboxes were just rewards for leveling. Every X number of games, you'd get a lootbox full of random shit. And that's fine. Duplicates turned into a currency you could use to buy rewards directly at a really bad conversion.
But you could also buy lootboxes. And here's the real telling thing about it all: when they did all this, they removed the cash shop. It's not just that you could buy lootboxes now, it's that you could basically only buy lootboxes now. Cash shop wasn't just not implemented, it was actively stripped out of the game. There are weekly "sales" still, but their main thing is just allowing you to actually buy things with cash (or, rather, with the intermediate cash-purchased in-game currency). The only way to get what you want most of the time is to play the lottery. Buy a ton of lootboxes and eventually either get it randomly or get enough duplicates you can buy craft it.
It's a straightforward demonstration of the strategy and the economics at work here: gambling makes more money then direct purchases. Direct purchases, in fact, actively get in the way of making money on gambling because the golden ticket for a Dev is to funnel people into the lootbox market where they can only get what they want by gambling.
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You might not pay 120 for a football, but unless you're billy no mates or just really like keepy-uppies then I don't think it's a good comparison.
The football is just the equipment, which is why I've certainly payed about that for in and around 20 hours of indoor football, which is probably a better comparison.
Which was great, but I spent 220 hours playing BotW and that cost about half that, so...
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
Very true.
Though in this case it may have been justified, since the game was in heavy development for five years, partially due to mismanagement. What you're reading here is a black hole absorbing the GDP of a decent-sized country. That $40 million rumor is almost certainly wrong.
We have the sales figures for Witcher 3 in its first six weeks -- about 6 million. We know the approximate development cost -- $81 million. (Looks like I was mis-remembering or using outdated info before.) We even know the approximate profit it made in those first six weeks -- $62 million.
On the surface, it would seem the formula is clear for that first six weeks -- $81 million dev cost plus $62 million profit equals $143 in revenue. But! Six million in sales times $60 a pop equals $360 million in revenue. That means there's another $217 million in costs that traditional napkin math misses. Which means that $81 million game needed to sell over 4.5 million copies just to break even.
AAA games really do need to sell ludicrous numbers.
And I'm fine with that.
Which is why I'm going to be happy to disagree with the premise that "games are already bit high priced considering the entertainment value they contain", because as far as I'm concerned that's wrong.
I know it's subjective, and i'm not even going to pretend otherwise, because I'm fairly certain that any person who does not agree with me is also knows that.
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
Considering that the console market is anything but non-existent, graphics are clearly not the major buying influence that publishers want to convince us they are.
Even when we're talking about AAA titles, there's a 5x difference in budget.
The fact of the matter is that video game budgets do not need to be astronomical to ensure high-quality content or amazing ROI. Giving your game a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars only serves to ensure that you must sell tens of millions of copies in order to make your money back.
In terms of customer perception, price has the strongest correlation with expectation, not your game's budget. Those are two completely different things. If you pay $70 for a game you expect it to have amazing graphics and gameplay (particularly in terms of playtime) because you paid $70 for it. If you pay $15 for an indie game in Early Access then you care less about graphics and are OK with something that is fun for 10 hours.
Similarly, for the past several decades Nintendo has basically ignored the push for ever-higher graphics fidelity in favor of focusing their development costs on gameplay. We all know the story of the Wii. Even in the case of Breath of the Wild, which was estimated at $100 million total development cost, although it has a widely-praised aesthetic, those graphics clearly did not cost nearly as much as a game like Andromeda. So it's clear that a greater proportion of that $100 million budget was spent focusing on gameplay design and iteration instead of "realistic mouth movements". Which was then rewarded by the marketplace with 7 million copies sold (at one point there were more BotW sales than actual Switch console sales).
The basic gist of this data dump is that development studios and publishers need to be better at managing their resources before they can complain about "not getting enough money back". There are way too many games that make a reasonable ROI, and even more games who make an astronomical ROI on a tiny budget, to give that argument any credence.
There is also a separate issue that if devs are underpaid and overworked, then they need to be organizing for better wages from the publishers who are still making literally triple-digit profit returns across the board. These two issues are related in a macro sense, yes, but when you look at the actual context there is almost no argument that supports EA charging you $100 for a game or throwing in gambling microtransactions given they are already making money hand over fist without it.
This is silly.
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
In fact the modern PC market is starting to heavily favor indies with less graphical muscle than AAA games.
And that's before you get into the convenience factor.
No, not really.
There are a literal handful of right place, right time phenomena that do very well for themselves and that's it.
Deciding that this means that everyone can just do this is about as useful as telling people to "just win the lotto".
Your digital toys take an increasing amount of time and money to make, no amount of "BUT MINECRAFT!" is going to change that.
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
One of the larger factors here, of course, is that software developers are some of the least-screwed-over people outside of roles you need an MBA for these days, though for games they're still kicked in the shin a bit. The costs are growing at a different rate than the market.
Thing is, at no point does this excuse specific practices. Some games should cost more to buy, sure. But using abusive behavior to make up the difference is not acceptable just because it's effective. You can justify a lot of nasty stuff otherwise.
If they want to argue that a given practice is acceptable in and of itself, that's fine, but "this is the only way" is not an acceptable argument because you can just NOT do it instead and make a AA game for a lower budget without exploitative nonsense. Frankly I'm fine with "we just really want to make money!" being the goal instead of "this is the only way" anyway. Just find a way to do it ethically.
I've also spent below 60, and felt robbed.
Problem is that with standard pricing, the actual quality of the game, and price asked, have little to nothing to do with each other.
Raise prices across the board, and you will loose customers, because people will not magically have more money to buy games.
On the one hand, I don't know how much it cost to make Star Fox Zero, but boy howdy did it flop and hard. But Nintendo isn't crooning on about how devastated they are from it, or how future games now need to have lootboxes in order to make profit.
And on the other hand, they just produced a pair of games with half the graphical fidelity of the average "high def" game, and laughed their way to the bloody bank.
Part of it is that Nintendo makes a LOT of games. Probably more than any other AAA developer, or even Microsoft and Sony. That way they can absorb the hit of most flops quietly, since they're balanced out by something more successful.
And part of it is this (from a guy from NPD, which studies consumer sales):
I mean, Switch sales are absolutely bananas, and it's all done with very, very little support from the AAA games you'd think would be necessary for success. They're just playing by a different set of rules I don't think the other guys can switch to.
My argument is that a AAA game should cost approximately 1 million * $20 to make and advertise, meaning each copy will make you a healthy profit of $10 after the sellers have taken their cuts. My secondary argument is that the MANY standardized tools, cheap computational power, and close to 'peak' graphical fidelity makes that a far simpler process. That digital distribution makes sales cheaper to make and copies cheaper to distribute. That 'early access' allows for cheaper financing by pre-selling the game to pay for the development costs of the game. Pre-sales are cheaper than loans!
Sure, maybe it's expensive to turn on 8X AAA non-vertical spline bloom anti-aliasing in 6K 3D depth of field occlusion ambient shadow lighting. So just don't bother. If you can't get it done for $15-20 million, then you can't get it done, and noone will care.
Making games is not CHEAP, but making games is absolutely cheaper than it used to be. The reason the market is falling to pieces with $60 million budgets (or more) for games is that enormous amounts of illegitimate revenue can be obtained by producing a well functioning skinner box to rob your customers. A vastly successful skinner box might make a few hundred million in profits, but only a fraction of skinner boxes will be succesful. So game companies are forced into arms races to achieve marginal more chances of becoming the successful skinner box.
10-20 million = Sensible cost for a potentially very fun game
20-100 million = Additional unneeded expenditure designed to move the needle of skinner box success from 10% -> 15%
The profit incentive for skinner boxes is skewing the industry. Games should be made by smaller teams, with longer development windows, targetted 100% at the revenue achieved in sales of the game and 'true' expansion packs (IE, effectively a completely new story/experience using similar art and engine assets)
Streaming (or just recording) games has grown significantly, and is going to be a bigger factor in marketing in the future. The reason we've loved graphics for so long in advertising is because traditionally it is a struggle to show gameplay in a 30 second ad. But with more and more games shown in fuller detail with YT/Twitch etc., gamers are getting a better picture of what a game is actually about. Couple that with the general diminishing of physical media and even digital media reviews (most people I know get games based on word of mouth and sometimes particular opinion-formers, not by checking the MetaCritic or even PC Gamer reviews for a game), and I suspect the ability to create compelling bits of gameplay is eventually going to win out.)
Nintendo have been very good at maximising profit margins in other areas. I remember when the DS was developed things like the carts had a production method where they could increase and decrease production quickly and even recycle/reflash carts that don't sell into other games.
Nintendo generally have lower production runs of titles too.
Their games also hold onto their price values for MUCH longer than the AAA average, assuming they're not total flops. It's rare for an AAA game to sell at the full $60 six months in, while it's rare for a Nintendo game to sell less than $60 six months in.
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The fact that Nintendo generally releases the entire actual game on the release day is something I would consider to be significant as well. But again, they also own the platforms they sell onto, so there's no reason for them to discount much of anything; nobody can get onto Nintendo platforms and offer alternatives at a lower price, so why would Nintendo need to lower the prices? They control their market, but are restricted to releasing quality content to keep people interested in that market.
And for me, all that season passes do is tell me that I should check back in 8-12 months for the discounted GOTY version which is the actual full release of the game, instead of dropping $60 at release plus another $30 for a drip of additional content every few months. I know a discount and more content will be coming a year after release (which is probably when most of these games should be releasing anyway), so why wouldn't I wait and get the whole bundle for less than the original cost of the weakest version of the game?
Like i said, wishful thinking.
People do care, games looking good is a big draw, and even getting to the level that consumers consider acceptable is a significant investment, and no, it's not going to be offset by "standardized tools and cheap computational power". You still have to pay people all the man hours it takes for them to make this stuff.
This meme of "Gosh, just make it for less money, guyyysssss" isn't really compelling.
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
It just seems like all games are sixty plus DLC because we've been trained to think we shouldn't add DLC into the price of a game because it's not needed to play the base game, and the load of people that buy the games don't do enough research into the products to justify this- they just want to get in, get out, and get the game so Junior will shut up and stop bothering them. Then they see no problem with allowing them to add on another five here, another ten there, until the total investment on a sixty-dollar game is more than twice what it was- and loot crates simply remove the limit of how much that each player could be soaked for, because there's no way to buy everything outright and not leave them with anything else to buy.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
At the end of the day, the decision to produce massive AAA games with huge production and marketing costs, that require huge sales is a business decision. The widespread adoption of short-term solutions like lootboxes that prey on exploitable elements of human psychology that is vulnerable to gambling is in my mind, an attempt to stave off a correction. However, if past events are any indication governments and the public will (are) catch on to the predatory practices and there will either be a public backlash resulting in reduced sales and/or government action to restrict and regulate the predatory practices.
Speaking personally, it's become very obvious to me that most of the AAA games designed in the past several years have not been aimed at creating the best (most entertaining) product they can within their budget/time constraints, but instead are aimed at creating the product the best at extracting the maximum profit from their buyers. I'm not interested in something that preys on weak spots in my psyche and attempts to turn me into a "whale", so I've largely checked out.
Entirely separate from the lootbox/micro-transaction/gambling aspects, there are also a lot of examples where it is clear that the monetization model is about selling the same thing to me multiple times. Annual sports games are the perennial example, but there are many others. For example, sequels frequently does not start development having learned all the lessons of what works, what is popular and what doesn't work at the end point of the first game + post launch development, but instead starts over again at the start. Destiny is an example that is frequently given for this, but other games like the Civilization series are just as guilty.
I think this is kinda the key problem with the "cost of production" argument. "Games cost a lot of money to make" is true, but that does not mean "therefore exploitative lootboxes are the only way forward" is also true. You could just, say, raise the price instead.
Lootboxes aren't necessary, they are just profitable. It's the easiest way to keep making a ton of money off a game for a lot less development effort then making a whole new game. And since, like every big corporation in existence these days, the main concern of game's publishers is higher and higher returns regardless of reality, they jump all over it.
The exploitative lootbox model is so rampant because it's fast and easy money, not because it's necessary.
Specifically, loot boxes allow companies to pursue "whales". A minority of the player base is willing to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a game; an important feature of most loot box designs is the lack of a realistic cap to spending. With DLC, you can have a bunch of skins to increase the price of the complete game to, say, $100. But put those skins in loot crates, add the right design, and you can "allow" people to spend as much as they want on the game. Increasing the base cost of the game does not allow you to do that. See the mobile market for confirmation, and how it has as a rule avoided actually charging for games in preference to systems that allow spending unlimited amounts of money.
Also, the AAA game space is overcrowded.
It's different for the mobile market because the issue there is avoiding charging money upfront because paying for something on an app store is a HUGE barrier to entry in the mobile space because they've spent like a decade now establishing the idea that apps are free. They more kind of stumbled into the lootbox model and even then the ad-supported model is just as common.
If raising prices causes you to lose enough sales, you may not actually make more money by raising prices.
I would not argue that some exploitative lootbox models are designed just to make more money. But is there such a thing as a non-exploitative lootbox model? And if some games are not profitable at $60 but market forces are creating a ceiling at $60, are alternative revenue streams that hide the real price or distribute it unevenly to people willing to pay more, such as lootboxes, micro-transactions, and DLC acceptable within some reasonable standards?
Battlefront 2 is obviously awful. But I originally found the lootboxes in Overwatch pretty good, but I have soured on them over time. I find the Paradox DLC strategy to be very good, and similarly the Total War approach with Warhammer of faction DLCs has been quite good. What about more micro-transaction but still deterministic models, ie unlocking characters individually and the like?
On the one hand I do think the old model of paying a single up front cost for a game is dead and that's fine by me because it drives continuous improvement like with Paradox and Total War. But I am increasingly thinking that there is no random lootbox model, even ones like Overwatch or DCCGs, that I want to tolerate.
Good.
So, technically no-one sold that game to kids.
I don't know. I rather have assurances that the online game I like is still around 5 years from now.
Overwatch is almost 2 years old and is still going strong. It has 5 new vanilla maps, 5 new characters, bunch of new game modes, with their own maps & lot of seasonal event scenarios with their customized maps.
Alternative for that is a game that got stale and near end of its life, because there's no revenue stream to pay for all that.
They could sell the skins and emotes and whatnot as is, without the loot box gambling aspect.
I would vastly prefer this in Overwatch! The only time I've ever gotten the skins I wanted in OW is when I pumped more than the cost of a game into loot box bundles... which is probably why they use that loot box method. Also why I severely cut down the amount of playtime I give to OW. I've spent an embarrassing amount of money on Overwatch loot boxes...
As already acknowledged, extremely subjective. Having played both myself (though I played Prey on PC rather than on console), I'd easily say that RoTR, without its DLC, had at least twice the "entertainment value" of Prey--based solely on replay value (the optional content, score attack mode, etc., being all well ahead of Prey, despite both being nonlinear).
(I also think RoTR is fundamentally a better designed game, but that's a separate issue, and more difficult to compare across a first and third person shooter, exploration and nonexploration elements, than their shared qualities).
That being said, I wouldn't have paid $120 for RoTR versus $60 for Prey, for the same reasons you outlined.
End result of that would be less art assets made and no new maps.
Maybe new characters for 10 bucks each and they're way overtuned to sell better.
Blizzard made billions of dollars last year off of lootboxes. Are you claiming that they wouldn't have the money to make art assets and maps if they went to pay-for-product monetization?
Even if they only made 10% of their current revenue, we're still talking over a hundred million dollars. You can continue updating games very comfortably with that amount of money.
Alternatively, if the only way that a game can sustain itself is by preying upon the psychologically vulnerable (because a huge part of the revenue they earn comes from a relatively small number of people), should that game be something we should want to protect?
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You want the perfect example, just look next to Overwatch at Heroes of the Storm. (story time!)
HOTS is Blizzard's MOBA. When it launched Beta, it had a cash shop. Just straight up "Pay X, get this hero or skin or mount". It had bundles and weekly sales and all that good stuff. A year or two after launch, they released what they called Heroes 2.0. Revamped the account-level progression system, added rewards and free currency you earn by playing that gets you stuff and all that kind of thing. It was like 99% really good. But it also added lootboxes. It worked almost exactly like the OW system. Some of the lootboxes were just rewards for leveling. Every X number of games, you'd get a lootbox full of random shit. And that's fine. Duplicates turned into a currency you could use to buy rewards directly at a really bad conversion.
But you could also buy lootboxes. And here's the real telling thing about it all: when they did all this, they removed the cash shop. It's not just that you could buy lootboxes now, it's that you could basically only buy lootboxes now. Cash shop wasn't just not implemented, it was actively stripped out of the game. There are weekly "sales" still, but their main thing is just allowing you to actually buy things with cash (or, rather, with the intermediate cash-purchased in-game currency). The only way to get what you want most of the time is to play the lottery. Buy a ton of lootboxes and eventually either get it randomly or get enough duplicates you can buy craft it.
It's a straightforward demonstration of the strategy and the economics at work here: gambling makes more money then direct purchases. Direct purchases, in fact, actively get in the way of making money on gambling because the golden ticket for a Dev is to funnel people into the lootbox market where they can only get what they want by gambling.