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Um.. show us how the salaries of game devs have risen compared with game prices?
“No” -John PlayStation
as well as my salary. but it didnt.
One factor they don't seem to consider is that they are competing for a finite resource: consumer attention.
There has never been so much content to consume: not only games, movies, series, music, books, podcasts, and even old games.
New games have to compete with and stand above all that content to justify the price.
As others have said, purchase power is down, people subscribe to more services (net, mobile, streaming music and video), all that bites into the available budget to buy games.
Bottom line: it's getting hard to justify spending that amount on a game you don't have time to play.
yea, cant justify the orignal switch and shtty swsh games, and then theres the new switch too.
Former PlayStation US boss can go fuck himself!
Shhhh! Nobody tell him about Steam and GOG...
I want to see the Playstation brand implode on itself like the PS3 price shock again, so people move to PC!
XD
Except costs went down when they switched from cartridges to discs, and then again to mostly digital.
So, no. It should not have.
Costs have ballooned, but on the production side, not the distribution side. Perhaps the reduced costs on the distribution side are partially responsible for prices remaining so stable in the face of inflation.
The costs only ballooned because the companies keep bloating themselves. It's gotten cheaper to make games, but more expensive to run giant companies that pay ludicrus amounts of money to executives.
Yes, companies have made very bad decisions in what aspects of production to focus on in the last decade. They're pouring more and more into ever decreasing rates of return on visual fidelity.
Visual fidelity but also the scope of the game in general. Why is Halo open world now? It didn't make the game any better.
Fucking why? These dudes always cite the cost of making games increasing as a reason for this nonsense but they never talk about the many many factors working in their favor already.
First, most people are probably not buying physical games very much if at all anymore. And because of that people don't really buy games used anymore either since used games in general are much rarer. So more people are buying games directly from company storefronts. These same storefronts that also make games stay more expensive for longer periods of time. Not only that but there are literally more people playing and buying games now than have ever done so in the past (at least up until very recently)
All of these factors should be increasing Sony's profit margins. If anything games should be getting cheaper. Not more expensive.
And I don't buy that a ps5 game is significantly more expensive to make than a ps4 game. There's barely a difference between each system's capabilities in terms of graphical detail in the assets a team needs to produce. Most of the benefits of ps5 come in the way of higher resolutions and higher frame rates. I have yet to see a game release on ps5 that couldn't have also been ported to ps4 with lower resolutions and frame rates.
Even the games they said needed the ps5's speed were eventually ported to PC and run on the Steam Deck just fine. (Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart for example)
These statements aren't anything more than a company executive trying to gaslight people into accepting unacceptable pricing strategies.
We make billions, but we want trillions
Don't forget that game development is increasingly shoving the hardware burden onto the consumer by using poorly made tools to streamline development (thus cutting costs) with garbage optimization which is why a gaming rig now has to be powerful enough to simulate a gaming rig from 10 years ago down to the atomic level but the graphics haven't gotten appreciably better.
While thats definitely true for many games it's less relevant for console makers and its hardly true universally; definitely not true for the insomniac games I mentioned.
Plenty of games are coming out that are optimized very well. Unfortunately, UE5 has gotten way too popular and devs often don't seem to really know how to optimize games developed on the engine. Kinda the downfall of having an engine that appeals so much to artists but not so much to engineers. I think the only remotely well optimized game I can think of that was made in UE5 is Hellblade 2. And even as impressive as that game is from a technical standpoint (nothing can fix how boring it is) I still have stuttering problems with it. Though my rapidly aging R5 2600 is not helping things there.
But there are still impressive PC games out there. Recently Doom The Dark Ages, indiana Jones, and Kingdom Come Deliverence 2 come to mind as games that are impressively well optimized on PC. Especially KCD2, that game feels like black magic to me.
I think this is less of an issue of cost cutting by devs and publishers, though it's definitely a factor, and moreso just devs not being as knowledgeable about optimizing games as they used to be.
So should the quality.
And not just graphical quality.
its an inverse situation with games. more expenisve lower quality, they tested how much certain fans will tolerate it, and then go higher.
Unfortunately you get half of the games and the other half is splitted in DLCs, season pass, and pre order bonus.
yup 60-70 for the base game, 10-30ish for DLC, and then more for online play.
Which is to say that prices did increase every generation.
Video game budgets are still lower than film budgets and ticket prices for movies haven't steadily climbed, arent anywhere near $60 a pop, nor have there been all these freaks coming out of the woodworks to say movie tickets should cost more.
Must be nice living somewhere where cinema prices did not climb. I can assure you its been different where I live.
You got to look at it relatively, a movie never cost even close to $60, so why would it end up there. It cost something like less than $10 but now the average is around $16. Games were maybe $60 and now could be $80, so it is actually a very comparable increase.
Edit: to be fully clear, I don't think there should be a comparable increase between those two things. Buying a video game and going to watch a movie are two very different things to do. Just pointing out that movie tickets did in fact get more expensive. There's also the "creative accounting" often being done in the film industry, I don't think that's a thing in the gaming industry. So many differences.
I don't know how universal it is, but movie tickets here have at least tripled since I was a kid, 20 odd years ago.
Meanwhile, me and 4 friends pooled our pocket money together to buy a video game that we could barely afford. Brand new video games are the same price now.
I'm not saying "they should increase their price", but it is wild how somehow they haven't in decades
they haven't increased because the cost of production has drastically dropped. cartridges were expensive as hell to make; the hardware was like half to cost of the game. disks were cheaper but you still had all the extras like bespoke formats, copy protection and manuals. with digital distribution, the production cost is zero. even when you buy a physical release, you get an empty box with an off-the-shelf bluray.
They have if you factor in collector's editions, micro transactions, planned DLC and season passes.
Halo was free to play technically but has had how many seasons now for armor cosmetics?
Wasn't GTA V more expensive than most movies?
That's the thing, a lot of investors almost don't like the idea that video games are low budget. They want to be able to double their funding and quadruple their success, like with a lot of growth properties.
$256 million. Most expensive video game ever made. Since Avatar, there have been dozens of hollywood films that had a budget almost double that.
Our wages too...
There were more sports cars in the parking lot in the PS1 era than there were in the PS4 era
What a struggle. Should we then have tripled the prices so the poor publishers could afford 2 sports cars instead? Or, hear me out, just play indie games that's higher quality and doesn't have a useless middle man.
How many sports cars were in the CEO’s garage during each era though?
how many HOMES or yachts you mean.
This is the fucktard that said he could not understand why people wanted to play old games
https://time.com/4804768/playstation-4-ps4-pro-psvr-sales/
"This looks ancient, why would anyone want to play this....?"
Fuck him
The title should read "Playstation US boss is mad that spending a ton of money making games look slightly closer to real life didn't make people want to spend more to play them"
Not to mention the likely equal spending on advertising
So does piracy
I mean, inflation exists. That said, they just use dlc and other microtransactions to recoup costs (plus in some ways production is cheaper, just not overall).
I like to remind people that they're taking advantage of a thing called consumer surplus. In short, any given person will spend X amount of dollars for a product, be it $60, $30 half off, or $120 collectors edition, etc. Hell, "free" gets the most heads, hence how mobile market works.
Flat $60 (or the shift to $80) will inevitably cut off anyone unwilling to pay that price, which at a certain point is bad for business and why you get sales. Plus, most sales are digital now, so it's not like there's a per unit overhead. Keeping a dynamic pricing structure is simply better in spite of inflation, which obviously this former boss apparently doesn't get.
He’s not wrong since games pricing hasn’t kept up with inflation. If it had we’d be buying $120 games. The problem is wages also haven’t kept up with inflation either. If gaming companies had increased the prices they’d have fucked themselves.
Instead, investors did the fucking, and now here we are.
Sounds like a guy who can eat all of my hair and shit.
The quality of games did not improve, in fact game quality and diversity has deteriorated. The quantity of content has dropped off as well. Graphics fidelity and production costs have skyrocketed though.
Graphics are so superficial when it comes to games anyhow, why would anyone pay more for a pretty waste of time?
Edit: i am talking about AAA games here, obv there has been an extreme proliferation of indie titles
a good case study is swsh, pokemon, starting from that, it lower and lower quality, yet people sitll buy it,.
"Fancy graphics" also doesn't correlate well with how visually appealing a game is. I would take Ori graphics over CoD any day.
Supposed proponent of the "free market" thinks that the market was unfair to massive corporation. More at 11. /s
Someone needs to start cracking Denuvo again.
They have when you factor in DLC.