this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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Gaming prices should not be increasing. They should be decreasing. Supply is literally infinite thanks to digital distribution and gaming makes so much profit its like, more than the entire music and movie industries combined. The number of people that buy games now is huge, there is no justifiable reason for prices to go up other than corporate greed.
Back in the day, games were $80-$100 USD. But they didn't have a lot of the advancements that the gaming industry has today. Aside from the number of people buying games being smaller back then, the cost of manufacturing game cartridges and physical copies was a lot higher than today. Digital distribution was not realistically an option for the PC platform, and was literally not an option for consoles. Game development tools were non-existent. Most game development studios had to program their own game engines, or license one from someone that did. A lot of work was done manually, by human hand for quite some time. Compare that with today, where game engines are plentiful and very user-friendly, and other tools come with many automated or assisted features that would previously had to have been done by hand. I mean, game engines had a period where a good user interface was unheard of.
Then you look at other issues. Game studios are too big these days. 500 people is too many people working on a project. Bigger ships are slower to turn, lean out the teams to like less than half of that number. Development cycles are too long. Games used to be developed in a year or two, three at the absolute most. Games didn't used to be as big, but you know what? They don't need to. A 10 hour game that is paced well with a good story is infinitely better than an 80 hour game where you wander around a 95% empty world experiencing a disjointed barely existent story. Marketing costs are overinflated. There is no reason so much money should be spent on marketing a game. Games don't need some random pop song in the trailer to get people to buy it, have the composer/sond designer write the trailer music like in the old days, since that was part of their job.
And as you mention, most of the time there are few hits that sell big. This was always true, and will always be true forever. Games don't really compete with each other except for one resource: the customer's time. And people have a finite amount of time. Until people begin to have more free time, and infinite time, it doesnt matter how many games are made, they will still always compete for the customer's time. It is an immutable fact of the gaming industry.
Switching to cheaper media and then digital distribution has reduced costs for distribution, but that's been eaten entirely and then some by the other problem you call out, which is how much larger the team is and how long the game takes to develop. In order for prices to decrease, that second problem needs to be solved. And sure enough, games made by smaller teams with fewer bells and whistles are cheaper, and there are plenty of those. I've played plenty of great ones just this year. By comparison to how many person months go into something like Baldur's Gate 3 compared to something like Conscript, it's amazing and perhaps even absurd that it only costs me three times as much as Conscript.
There's a bigger factor at play which I think is barrier to entry. Now you got individuals or small team of devs being able to publish games themselves on places like Steam, and add to the already huge amount of products that are competing with each other for sales. Used to be in the past when barrier was high these large publishers could gate keep, but now they can't. And they have to fight ants too instead of just other few whales.
And these small ants have games that catch hype despite being lower budget and worse graphics. It's a different landscape now. Even reviewers aren't just some few large outlets they can control anymore, but individuals spread across sharing their opinions and discoveries on social media and places like Steam reviews. Much harder now to control products like in the past.
Hate to break it to you, but disc space, servers, paying people to ensure servers don't go down isn't really cheap. Sure, it means they can effectively sell copies infinitely, and that the costs of distribution are much lower than they were when you had to have a physical product, but that does not make the cost of distribution zero. Valve spends a metric fuckton of money and effort making their service super resilient to downtime and resilient to hackers.
DOOM was shareware. Pretty sure it was $30. DOOM was the most widely installed software on the planet. Their small team and lack of real advertising budget is referenced by Gabe Newell as one of the things that got him thinking about digital distribution to begin with.
I mean, we're not living in 1993 and DOOM isn't the only game. Every day, hundreds of new games are released. How will you get yours noticed by anyone?
DOOM didn't have that kind of competition. Indie titles of the modern era do.
And game engines that you don't have to build yourself can cost quite a large amount of money to license the use of.
Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall would like to have a chat.