You are correct. I have been gaming since I was a kid. My parents bought me a Sega Megadrive. I just turned 42. I had far more male friends, because we all played games. We would hang out at each others houses, take our consoles and play Tekken, Soul Blade marathons on PS1. Freak each other out playing RE. Good times. All the girls would make fun of me for playing games, instead of doing nothing like them. I didn't care, I had great friends who didn't judge me for stupid reasons.
Publishers price games by what people will pay ... If companies could sell games for 200 USD per copy without losing a sizable market share, they would. Personally, except for rare occasions like BG3 or Cyberpunk 2077, I always buy heavily discounted games at
If a game has a lot of marketing I usually avoid buying it at launch. Let the suckers pay up front and wait a week or two to see what everyone thinks, I'm in no rush. Anything that has millions poured into selling it (ala Diablo 4) immediately sets off red flags for me. As far as pricing goes, I honestly don't mind a $10 price hike for games. It's been a long time since the cost went up, but it's such a relative thing. I've played some 12 hour games I think are worth full AAA price, I've played some 100+ hour games I wouldn't recommend to anyone even if it were free. I'm pretty old school, the first game I ever beat was the original Mario Bros on NES and it was current. The industry has changed so much over the years, seems to have it's ups and downs and right now I'd say it's down. It will come back, it just sucks that it takes 5 - 10 years for that back and forth to happen. At least we are lucky enough to have so much available these days, back in the day you'd buy a game because there was nothing else on the shelf you hadn't played. If it was mediocre you'd put up with it just to kill time.
gotta say, i dont always 100% agree with you on certain topics but this whole thing was right on the money. There are still good games made, but new and "casual" gamers are funneled towards low-quality money mills. its going to be intersting where this takes us in 10 years when the average gamer has spent their whole life in a casino :P
If you want to understand how bloated game development has become just remember: Spider-Man 2, which despite its name was the 3rd game in the series and used heavily assets from prior games, still needed to sell close to 7M copies just to break even.
There is no reason why you should ever pay full price for a single player game. Its not just the price but also the dismal state those games are often released in. Just wait a few months to get a steep discount and a fixed game. I should probably not have a holier than thou attitude considering I put like 20 games on my pile of shame during the autumn sale but hey, one issue at the time.
i'm far too stupid to understand how financial things work but overtime (experiencing changes in gaming) i have developed a set o rules that could serve as a guide for gamers 1. if the game have initial price then anything outside of full game expansion is a scam 2. micro/macro transactions have no place in game with initial price or single player game 3. there should never be any online requirement for single player game (unless it's for installation/update) 4. anything that promises additional content on or shortly after release should be considered a cut content and by extension a scam (preorders and any special editions and so on) 5. if game is promoted mainly by combat and graphics then most likely something is seriously wrong with it (unless entire game is about those things) 6. few bugs on release are to be expected but if the game is released in broken/buggy state then all trust to company should be lost 7. more money=better support for development is absolute lie and anyone who promotes it should be treated with suspicion 8. nostalgia is a powerful weapon so whether it's about game or content creator it's best to watch out for subtle changes and cut connection before being drawn into a cult 9. with reviewers being selected it's best to wait first month after release so that actual gamers get to test product on their own without any NDA 10. if game is weak on release then it's best to wait these few additional years for complete edition (and unofficial patch) 11. NO SPOILER crowd should be ignored since they can just ignore promotional materials while those that don't want to walk in blindly don't have any choice (outside of waiting post release) 12. online cheating is always wrong but single player is your own experience so you should never feel bad for playing on lowest difficulty level or use cheats or mods (play for your own pleasure) that's mostly it and now it's time to sleep
I'm like this as well, but i think that gradually we won't be able to play older games due to Windows and newer devices not supporting them, you think they are idiots? 🤗
I agree I've felt this way for a long time, I rarely ever buy AAA games on release, the only games I have bought in recent memory are Elden Ring and Baldurs Gate 3, they are the only AAA I felt was worth paying full price on release. Every other AAA game I wait for some type of deep discount on Steam usually at 40-50% minimum.
the funny thing is I haven't bought any western AAA in more than 5 years aside from a heavily discounted forza horizon 5, most of the game I play are eastern AAA, and a lot of indies. Also I have enough in my back catalog for a lifetime. Theses steam sales there is a lot of games I was thinking about buying but I won't and I will just buy stuff I would want to play in the minute I do, so next one is Monster hunter wilds and for now I'm finishing pathfinder: Kingmaker.
I’m 3 months into a game development course and i still don’t understand how the can spend literally millions in development while we use 2000 bucks laptops for 90% of what we do
Salaries, rent, power, software, hardware. Just 20 folks on $50k costs more than $1m a year merely in salary. What do licences for Unreal cost, Speedtree, RAD Game tools, 3DStudio etc etc? Ubisoft has 400-500 employees on AssCreed, plus more are outsourced. That's circa $30m in salaries alone per year. And it all has to be paid upfront largely before a penny comes in revenue.
Spot on mate. These days, I am growing weary too, even looking at Alkahest, from a developer with no record, anticipating a rip off based on a glorified tech demo that it so far is... AAA games rarely reach fidelity levels like this as you say, but if they do, they are just shallow, pretty things, you forget about a week later. Thankfully we still have older titles, or companies like Owlcat with hundreds of hours of gameplay in their games, clearly caring for their creations and the people playing those games. With deep systems, replayability, engaging writing and good old bag of just fucking fun. BG3 being Larian, is in the same vein. Space Marine with Saber. On the other side you have this common denominator: large publisher houses and corporations (as you also point out) that should not be at the helm of anything creative. They took over gaming and movies + TV entirely and it all feels samey, full of patronizing ideologies, virtue signaling and politically charged nonsense. They all forgot how to have fun. Instead its a consumer machine aimed at milking the last $$$s for as little as possible to maximize their margins.... Thankfully gamers vote with their wallets. Do not stop calling out their bullshit and raise awareness to all who think of supporting those lame ass titles with their money. Take that away and before long something will change. What that will be remains to be seen of course. Meanwhile, check out classics and renowned games for their quality and stop jumping on ANY hype wagon, because 99% of the cases it will be a loser.
Companies charge more thinking they’ll make more.... But they NEED TO CHARGE LESS 1 million games sold at £70 makes LESS than 3 million at £30... And you can't tell me more people wouldn’t buy more at a lower price.
I haven't enjoyed any AAA games this year, rented the ones I played. My top games I have played this year, have been Indie games on pc. A lot of them were under a tenner. I only got my gaming pc last year, as my bf built himself a new one. I have a ps5 too. Sold my switch and series s (wasn't using them), upgraded the GPU,CPU and PSU. Have bought loads of games in the sales, giving me a massive backlog.
16:00 Avowed's price is not a problem *unless it's a very short game.* This notion needs to end. Game devs can artificially inflate a game's duration by just copy pasting content, adding endless fetch quests, making bosses one hit you, no saves, unskippable dialogue, or other time consuming nonsense. A game's price should not depend on time alone, but also what you're doing during that time. I'd rather pay full price for an 8 hour carefully curated game with amazing level design, than for a repetitive 200 hour Ubisoft game.
RPGs like Avowed need to have enough content (unique, not repetitive like Ubisoft games) in order to justify such price. While I agree that length shouldn't be a factor, RPGs are a specific genre in that regard. Aside from diabloesque games that use repetition, RPGs use progressive story and world that is affected by players actions. 8h RPG just won't cut it in that regard for a game like Avowed as it wouldn't progress enough story and player wise. You need just an hour to level up and then use new strategies and abilities. Imagine if Skyrim, Morrowind or Fallout NV had 8h of content. For games like Metal Gear Solid 1 & 2 8h is more than enough though to justify the full price. Depends on the game and the genre.
I remember new SNES games being $70. I got Chrono Trigger for that price about a year after its release. Then, prices dropped to $50 during the PS2 era. So, paying $70 for a game doesn’t seem too wild. With that said, most games are at their worst at release, so why not go through your backlog and play old games you missed until that new game you want to play has gotten patched and a price cut? Or, if you want to support your fav studios, at least wait to make sure their new game is quality.
My main problem with modern pricing is that the customer is paying and receiving all the risk. Are the servers up? Will the drm authentification work in 10 years? Do they withdraw the licence? What happens if the sale platform is closing? Can I trust them that kernal level anti-cheats are safe and will be removed after unistall? If we would price games, according to the risks the customer has, I think 30-40€ would be a fair price.
Good video. As an outsider looking in, it seems that game development has become massively bloated with things that are in fact NOT game development. I know some of these companies are huge so obviously they need an HR department to handle salaries, hiring, etc. but the rest? If you have a good product and can clearly communicate that it is a good product by showing it off - you have free marketing. Just look at Path of Exile 2 right now. Jonathan Rogers (game director) is pretty much single-handedly doing all the marketing by jumping on interviews with streamers and talking to gaming press all over the world. Gamers are happy to market the game for free because the product they have shown us gamers matches (or even exceeds) our expectations. Like yesterday, Jonathan from GGG even went so far as to reveal how much back-end server infrastructure they had prepared for the initial Early Access release of Path of Exile 2 on Friday. That is unprecedented (I think), but they value transparency and setting the correct expectations with their fans and customers. Most questions asked are answered honestly and without "business speak" bullshittery. GGG doesn't need Megan Fox showing her tits (exaggerating here) to sell their game like Blizzard does. They don't need billboards on bus stops in rural Sweden to reach a broader audience. The product simply speaks for itself. And speaking of "speaking for itself" - that Avowed gameplay running in the background... oh boy it looks rough at times...
@@CurtOntheRadio All true, but different genres and audiences. For a game like PoE to survive, maybe $20M is all they need? The most important metric as I see it is player satisfaction and player retention. PoE has grown slowly but surely all these years and that's kind of impressive taking in mind how inaccessible the game really is for a new player.
@@Patraquashe Oh, for sure. I don't mean to equate size with quality necessarily. Rather just stressing the difference between the vast success of a very few massive titles versus the plethora of others. It's really a different ballgame, that's all I was saying. ;)
I am a big Warhammer 40K fan, I have run a worldwide campaign for over five years now ( # DvrkImperivm40K ) and Our hype for Space Marine 2 was through the roof, but as soon as we heard that it was a short game... we began to be concerned bc it's 70$ which is roughly the cost of a squad of miniatures We each only got about 25 hours out of the game and I was pretty aggravated with the lack of content for such an expensive game - It was my first PS5 game and I still regret buying it in place of Balder's Gate 3
The entire reason games went up in the first place was because it cost more to produce physical copies. Since they are dying out whether people like it or not the price should reflect that. Also regional pricing can really screw people over. Granted not all publishers do this but one is bad enough. The big problem I have personally is most triple A titles as of late have been absolute garbage. So we end up paying for overpriced slop. Outlaws is a good example, I gave Ubisoft a chance on their new title and paid the 1 month for ubisoft premium and I think as a title that cost me 15 bucks it was good. Certainly don't think the same way if I paid full price. So it brings up the ultimate question, if the quality is there are you willing to pay full price? I think we all know that GTA 6 is going to change how games are priced going forward.
With the market pushing for digital and Ubisoft straight up stealing games I see a dark future for digital products. So I only buy these games very cheap. If I really love and want a game right away, I get a physical copy.
Games & game consoles for that matter are on the pricey side now. Would it hurt the economy to lower the price a wee bit? I would say yes because making AAA games is becoming more expensive because the of higher ups trying to make them look & play better. But seriously, I'd be fine if they just stop it with graphics for a while and focus on just making them good.
Black Friday was nice, got kotor 1&2, ori 1&2, jedi fallen order, shenmue 1&2, darkest dungeon, vampyr, and code vein for around 48€. Buying dayone is exceptional for me nowadays, maybe for the new ff, and even, after ffxvi, not so sure anymore... I'll get ac shadows dayone ( haters please relax and breathe😂) possibly because I want my tenchu experience for a long time, and if I buy dayone only once or twice a year, then I feel I'm not too much of a fool😅
It's unfortunate but I can't buy most games that I want to play so I have to buy keys off of websites. That at least takes the sting off of paying the full price for some of these games. It's that or I have to wait at least a while before playing them which sucks in some cases.
70 dollars for Avowed is ridiculous, it looked like a AA game (40h for 100% playthrough is just too short). I think I'll just play it on XGP after I'm done with KCD2 or even MHW.😂
@@mfo6892amen it's sicking. Stalker 2 is Perfect Example of people paying to be beta testers. In Canada where I live a mrw game for the standard Edition is roughly $94 with taxes and any deluxe is $110 CAD and the Ultimate is $160. Imagine that? ... I will probably buy Stalker 2 on a deep, deep sale after the game is actually fixed if they ever fix it. Based on the developers track record they most likely won't fix ans let the modders do it. They learned that from Bethesda.
That's not withstanding the fact that video games themselves are inherently infinitely replicable and therefore valueless products at an objective level. The idea that software must be bought and never copied/traded at the "owners" discretion is bad enough, but the arbitrary price structure on top of that is just insulting. There's an extremely strong ethical and moral argument for piracy beyond this, and an equally strong one for donation-based/crowdfunded game development as the norm. Pricing is defined by speculation and mutual agreement and so as you said, it stands to reason that the market and its participants are at fault here primarily. Good video.
The prime example of what you are speaking here is a game called Monomyth: called to bring back the in-sim/rpg games from before, its an early access and already has destroy majority of those AAA, but how many people are actually buying it, small studios with great ideas has few options, or you make a great game with 0 marketing, or you make a mediocre game with a lot of marketing, dude do you actually know how much cost one minute trailer on the game awards??
Could be but hard to tell and that statement would only work for games like CoD, Fifa, NBA, Football Manager... On the opposite side, indie and a lot of AA developers are underpaid.
Yes - that's the upshot of the redundancies we see: the price of labour will fall. That's normal cyclical stuff? Once the cost of labour falls sufficiently it will get re-employed? There are too many games seeking players that all tend to congregate in the same few places everyone else does. As with social media......
Wtf i posted sth and RUclips deleted it, and this is just a gaming video LOL. 🤗 Anyway, just visit the steam forums and mention that any popular game is overpriced, you're gonna get attacked by numerous accounts almost immediately.
Not worth it at release. You paying more and getting a worse buggy experience. ITs just better to buy after a couple of months when games gets patched up and gets a pricecut.
Oh, come off it? Nobody has to buy annual instalments of games. Up to the customer, isn't it? If it were so simple to provide quality at a low price-point somebody would be doing it. You think nobody is trying to do it? They're all "taking the easy route" instead? Rubbish. What you seem to be missing is that development costs have risen and, as very very few titles attract the vast majority of players, the risks of development have also risen. Get it wrong and you're risking the future of the company and the livelihoods of the staff. Would you front $250m for a game to be developed over five years and which you don't (and can't) know will even gain an audience, let alone turn a profit? This is the main change to the past - the cost (and the vastly increased attendant risk). So there is some change - some reduction in risk-taking, for the obvious reasons. Contrary to your claim game companies don't have vast amounts of cash to burn. Very few games make big money. The risk is huge. 15,000 games released on Steam this year? There's no shortage of games. And versus a movie, for instance, they're still value ($30 was incredibly cheap versus movies). Maybe the biggest change (as in much else) is the citizen/consumer - feeling more entitled than ever and being a complete snowflake at the least disappointment. Like citizens, gamers are becoming impossible to please (if you choose to listen to them whine). My gfx should be cheaper, my games should be better, it all costs ttoo muc - wah wah. As if being a gamer wasn't always a thing of relative privilege. Sheesh.
it seems ppl are finally waking up avowed is going to be the next non buy nary flop :D They cant keep up with this crap for much longer since they are now really starting to lose millions, this is also affecting the entertainment industry
Im not disagreeing but everything you mention is basically conjecture. Your point would be a lot stronger, and the video more interesting if you brought forward some hard data to support your points.
The claims you are making about the games industry and gaming in general, for example when you say that after paying Peter Dinklage there was no money left to develop the new Destiny game. Thats pure conjecture, you arent providing any hard facts to support that. A video mostly based on conjecture and guesses just isnt very persuasive.
@@SeriousPeaches To know exact budget of a company you have to be a higher up in that company. If you have 2 grains of salt in the head you can see where money is going for certain games. Peter Dinklage was hired after massive success of Game of Thrones so he was the priciest at that time. Second, Destiny commercials were everywhere for years. I mean everywhere. Like Cyberpunk. And then the game came out. It was barebones so there's your proof where the money went. It didn't even have lore as they had to write something in later on. Game was trash on the release date. What other proof do you need?
@@rpgdivision I dont doubt that he was paid a lot, but to say that he was paid so much that there was no more money left to deliver a good product is baseless since you dont know how much the total budget was, and how much exactly he was paid. Game being bare bones at release doesnt automatically mean it was a budget constraint - they could have had a short time window to deliver a product, pushed by executives to release something in a given financial quarter to boost share prices. Activision invested a lot of money on Destiny development so it isnt a given that they would have been in financial straits after paying Dink. Again, Im not saying you are unequivocally incorrect, but Im saying that speaking out of speculation doesnt make for compelling evidence to support your point.
@SeriousPeaches I don't need to know exactly what the budget was. Game is all the evidence I need to figure out where the money has gone. Less money wasted on marketing and too expensive hirings, more time could be given to the devs so they can roll out a better game. Unfortunately publishers dictate too much these days so they want to recuperate the costs of marketing and game development by pushing out products. It's simple - less money spent on outside development stuff, more money can be spent on the development and one of the ways is to give the game more time to be done. Does that guarantee that Destiny would be given more time if they hadn't invested so much money into marketing? No but it didn't help, that's for sure.
I've never paid the full price for any game. I got the remastered Mass Effect trilogy for £5. I have around 125 games on GOG, most of them for free, the rest have cost me £200ish in total.
Nope haven't bought a game brand new since the price increase
*That's why i play Jack Sparrow ultimate editions* 💀
Cpt Jack really is the best publisher
@@aFLYER1980 indeed 😏
You are correct. I have been gaming since I was a kid. My parents bought me a Sega Megadrive. I just turned 42. I had far more male friends, because we all played games. We would hang out at each others houses, take our consoles and play Tekken, Soul Blade marathons on PS1. Freak each other out playing RE. Good times. All the girls would make fun of me for playing games, instead of doing nothing like them. I didn't care, I had great friends who didn't judge me for stupid reasons.
Publishers price games by what people will pay ... If companies could sell games for 200 USD per copy without losing a sizable market share, they would.
Personally, except for rare occasions like BG3 or Cyberpunk 2077, I always buy heavily discounted games at
If a game has a lot of marketing I usually avoid buying it at launch. Let the suckers pay up front and wait a week or two to see what everyone thinks, I'm in no rush. Anything that has millions poured into selling it (ala Diablo 4) immediately sets off red flags for me.
As far as pricing goes, I honestly don't mind a $10 price hike for games. It's been a long time since the cost went up, but it's such a relative thing. I've played some 12 hour games I think are worth full AAA price, I've played some 100+ hour games I wouldn't recommend to anyone even if it were free.
I'm pretty old school, the first game I ever beat was the original Mario Bros on NES and it was current. The industry has changed so much over the years, seems to have it's ups and downs and right now I'd say it's down. It will come back, it just sucks that it takes 5 - 10 years for that back and forth to happen. At least we are lucky enough to have so much available these days, back in the day you'd buy a game because there was nothing else on the shelf you hadn't played. If it was mediocre you'd put up with it just to kill time.
gotta say, i dont always 100% agree with you on certain topics but this whole thing was right on the money. There are still good games made, but new and "casual" gamers are funneled towards low-quality money mills. its going to be intersting where this takes us in 10 years when the average gamer has spent their whole life in a casino :P
I guess its indexation. But the real question is "is it worth it?". Sadly nowadays theres more trash than gems.
If you want to understand how bloated game development has become just remember: Spider-Man 2, which despite its name was the 3rd game in the series and used heavily assets from prior games, still needed to sell close to 7M copies just to break even.
90% of the time the answer has been NO since 2016 when they started aggresively "turning players into payers" 🤬🤬
Totally not worth it anymore, way too expensive.
There is no reason why you should ever pay full price for a single player game. Its not just the price but also the dismal state those games are often released in. Just wait a few months to get a steep discount and a fixed game.
I should probably not have a holier than thou attitude considering I put like 20 games on my pile of shame during the autumn sale but hey, one issue at the time.
i'm far too stupid to understand how financial things work but overtime (experiencing changes in gaming) i have developed a set o rules that could serve as a guide for gamers
1. if the game have initial price then anything outside of full game expansion is a scam
2. micro/macro transactions have no place in game with initial price or single player game
3. there should never be any online requirement for single player game (unless it's for installation/update)
4. anything that promises additional content on or shortly after release should be considered a cut content and by extension a scam (preorders and any special editions and so on)
5. if game is promoted mainly by combat and graphics then most likely something is seriously wrong with it (unless entire game is about those things)
6. few bugs on release are to be expected but if the game is released in broken/buggy state then all trust to company should be lost
7. more money=better support for development is absolute lie and anyone who promotes it should be treated with suspicion
8. nostalgia is a powerful weapon so whether it's about game or content creator it's best to watch out for subtle changes and cut connection before being drawn into a cult
9. with reviewers being selected it's best to wait first month after release so that actual gamers get to test product on their own without any NDA
10. if game is weak on release then it's best to wait these few additional years for complete edition (and unofficial patch)
11. NO SPOILER crowd should be ignored since they can just ignore promotional materials while those that don't want to walk in blindly don't have any choice (outside of waiting post release)
12. online cheating is always wrong but single player is your own experience so you should never feel bad for playing on lowest difficulty level or use cheats or mods (play for your own pleasure)
that's mostly it and now it's time to sleep
I rarely buy new games they come out broken day one patches and micro transactions, short games
I'm like this as well, but i think that gradually we won't be able to play older games due to Windows and newer devices not supporting them, you think they are idiots? 🤗
I agree I've felt this way for a long time, I rarely ever buy AAA games on release, the only games I have bought in recent memory are Elden Ring and Baldurs Gate 3, they are the only AAA I felt was worth paying full price on release. Every other AAA game I wait for some type of deep discount on Steam usually at 40-50% minimum.
I always thought Larian are classed as AA?
the funny thing is I haven't bought any western AAA in more than 5 years aside from a heavily discounted forza horizon 5, most of the game I play are eastern AAA, and a lot of indies. Also I have enough in my back catalog for a lifetime.
Theses steam sales there is a lot of games I was thinking about buying but I won't and I will just buy stuff I would want to play in the minute I do, so next one is Monster hunter wilds and for now I'm finishing pathfinder: Kingmaker.
games are pricey for sure on release. but discounts are frequent and aggressive and put prices in a better place quite rapidly.
I’m 3 months into a game development course and i still don’t understand how the can spend literally millions in development while we use 2000 bucks laptops for 90% of what we do
Salaries, rent, power, software, hardware. Just 20 folks on $50k costs more than $1m a year merely in salary. What do licences for Unreal cost, Speedtree, RAD Game tools, 3DStudio etc etc?
Ubisoft has 400-500 employees on AssCreed, plus more are outsourced. That's circa $30m in salaries alone per year. And it all has to be paid upfront largely before a penny comes in revenue.
Spot on mate. These days, I am growing weary too, even looking at Alkahest, from a developer with no record, anticipating a rip off based on a glorified tech demo that it so far is...
AAA games rarely reach fidelity levels like this as you say, but if they do, they are just shallow, pretty things, you forget about a week later. Thankfully we still have older titles, or companies like Owlcat with hundreds of hours of gameplay in their games, clearly caring for their creations and the people playing those games. With deep systems, replayability, engaging writing and good old bag of just fucking fun. BG3 being Larian, is in the same vein. Space Marine with Saber.
On the other side you have this common denominator: large publisher houses and corporations (as you also point out) that should not be at the helm of anything creative. They took over gaming and movies + TV entirely and it all feels samey, full of patronizing ideologies, virtue signaling and politically charged nonsense. They all forgot how to have fun. Instead its a consumer machine aimed at milking the last $$$s for as little as possible to maximize their margins....
Thankfully gamers vote with their wallets. Do not stop calling out their bullshit and raise awareness to all who think of supporting those lame ass titles with their money. Take that away and before long something will change. What that will be remains to be seen of course. Meanwhile, check out classics and renowned games for their quality and stop jumping on ANY hype wagon, because 99% of the cases it will be a loser.
All these games are 50% off within 6 months (often 3 months) on Steam. Just don't play them on release, ever, unless it's an MMO.
Companies charge more thinking they’ll make more.... But they NEED TO CHARGE LESS
1 million games sold at £70 makes LESS than 3 million at £30... And you can't tell me more people wouldn’t buy more at a lower price.
I haven't enjoyed any AAA games this year, rented the ones I played. My top games I have played this year, have been Indie games on pc. A lot of them were under a tenner. I only got my gaming pc last year, as my bf built himself a new one. I have a ps5 too. Sold my switch and series s (wasn't using them), upgraded the GPU,CPU and PSU. Have bought loads of games in the sales, giving me a massive backlog.
16:00 Avowed's price is not a problem *unless it's a very short game.*
This notion needs to end. Game devs can artificially inflate a game's duration by just copy pasting content, adding endless fetch quests, making bosses one hit you, no saves, unskippable dialogue, or other time consuming nonsense.
A game's price should not depend on time alone, but also what you're doing during that time.
I'd rather pay full price for an 8 hour carefully curated game with amazing level design, than for a repetitive 200 hour Ubisoft game.
RPGs like Avowed need to have enough content (unique, not repetitive like Ubisoft games) in order to justify such price. While I agree that length shouldn't be a factor, RPGs are a specific genre in that regard.
Aside from diabloesque games that use repetition, RPGs use progressive story and world that is affected by players actions. 8h RPG just won't cut it in that regard for a game like Avowed as it wouldn't progress enough story and player wise. You need just an hour to level up and then use new strategies and abilities.
Imagine if Skyrim, Morrowind or Fallout NV had 8h of content.
For games like Metal Gear Solid 1 & 2 8h is more than enough though to justify the full price. Depends on the game and the genre.
I remember new SNES games being $70. I got Chrono Trigger for that price about a year after its release. Then, prices dropped to $50 during the PS2 era. So, paying $70 for a game doesn’t seem too wild.
With that said, most games are at their worst at release, so why not go through your backlog and play old games you missed until that new game you want to play has gotten patched and a price cut? Or, if you want to support your fav studios, at least wait to make sure their new game is quality.
I honestly like to wait a year or two after release to buy a game because I just dont have the time and patience for all bugfixes and DLC to release.
AAA games are increasingly more expensive and AAA companies more often than not don't even try to cater to their audience. It's just crazy!
My main problem with modern pricing is that the customer is paying and receiving all the risk.
Are the servers up?
Will the drm authentification work in 10 years?
Do they withdraw the licence?
What happens if the sale platform is closing?
Can I trust them that kernal level anti-cheats are safe and will be removed after unistall?
If we would price games, according to the risks the customer has, I think 30-40€ would be a fair price.
Who fronts the $200m dev costs?
Good video. As an outsider looking in, it seems that game development has become massively bloated with things that are in fact NOT game development. I know some of these companies are huge so obviously they need an HR department to handle salaries, hiring, etc. but the rest? If you have a good product and can clearly communicate that it is a good product by showing it off - you have free marketing.
Just look at Path of Exile 2 right now. Jonathan Rogers (game director) is pretty much single-handedly doing all the marketing by jumping on interviews with streamers and talking to gaming press all over the world. Gamers are happy to market the game for free because the product they have shown us gamers matches (or even exceeds) our expectations. Like yesterday, Jonathan from GGG even went so far as to reveal how much back-end server infrastructure they had prepared for the initial Early Access release of Path of Exile 2 on Friday. That is unprecedented (I think), but they value transparency and setting the correct expectations with their fans and customers. Most questions asked are answered honestly and without "business speak" bullshittery. GGG doesn't need Megan Fox showing her tits (exaggerating here) to sell their game like Blizzard does. They don't need billboards on bus stops in rural Sweden to reach a broader audience. The product simply speaks for itself.
And speaking of "speaking for itself" - that Avowed gameplay running in the background... oh boy it looks rough at times...
PoE makes about £20m profit a year. Fairly small beer? Fortnite is $4000m revenue.
@@CurtOntheRadio All true, but different genres and audiences. For a game like PoE to survive, maybe $20M is all they need? The most important metric as I see it is player satisfaction and player retention. PoE has grown slowly but surely all these years and that's kind of impressive taking in mind how inaccessible the game really is for a new player.
@@Patraquashe Oh, for sure. I don't mean to equate size with quality necessarily. Rather just stressing the difference between the vast success of a very few massive titles versus the plethora of others. It's really a different ballgame, that's all I was saying.
;)
I am a big Warhammer 40K fan, I have run a worldwide campaign for over five years now ( # DvrkImperivm40K ) and Our hype for Space Marine 2 was through the roof, but as soon as we heard that it was a short game... we began to be concerned bc it's 70$ which is roughly the cost of a squad of miniatures
We each only got about 25 hours out of the game and I was pretty aggravated with the lack of content for such an expensive game - It was my first PS5 game and I still regret buying it in place of Balder's Gate 3
The entire reason games went up in the first place was because it cost more to produce physical copies. Since they are dying out whether people like it or not the price should reflect that. Also regional pricing can really screw people over. Granted not all publishers do this but one is bad enough.
The big problem I have personally is most triple A titles as of late have been absolute garbage. So we end up paying for overpriced slop. Outlaws is a good example, I gave Ubisoft a chance on their new title and paid the 1 month for ubisoft premium and I think as a title that cost me 15 bucks it was good. Certainly don't think the same way if I paid full price.
So it brings up the ultimate question, if the quality is there are you willing to pay full price?
I think we all know that GTA 6 is going to change how games are priced going forward.
With the market pushing for digital and Ubisoft straight up stealing games I see a dark future for digital products. So I only buy these games very cheap. If I really love and want a game right away, I get a physical copy.
Gamepass has saved me HUNDREDS of dollars.
Games & game consoles for that matter are on the pricey side now. Would it hurt the economy to lower the price a wee bit? I would say yes because making AAA games is becoming more expensive because the of higher ups trying to make them look & play better. But seriously, I'd be fine if they just stop it with graphics for a while and focus on just making them good.
Black Friday was nice, got kotor 1&2, ori 1&2, jedi fallen order, shenmue 1&2, darkest dungeon, vampyr, and code vein for around 48€. Buying dayone is exceptional for me nowadays, maybe for the new ff, and even, after ffxvi, not so sure anymore... I'll get ac shadows dayone ( haters please relax and breathe😂) possibly because I want my tenchu experience for a long time, and if I buy dayone only once or twice a year, then I feel I'm not too much of a fool😅
It's unfortunate but I can't buy most games that I want to play so I have to buy keys off of websites. That at least takes the sting off of paying the full price for some of these games. It's that or I have to wait at least a while before playing them which sucks in some cases.
Stalker 2 garbage was the last game i pay full price, I swear.
70 dollars for Avowed is ridiculous, it looked like a AA game (40h for 100% playthrough is just too short). I think I'll just play it on XGP after I'm done with KCD2 or even MHW.😂
They are also, releasing games broken & unoptimized. The last New game i bought that ran perfect and wasn't broken was Lies Of P & Atomic Heart.
Great point, why pay beta testers when they can get paid for players to test their games?
@@mfo6892amen it's sicking. Stalker 2 is Perfect Example of people paying to be beta testers. In Canada where I live a mrw game for the standard Edition is roughly $94 with taxes and any deluxe is $110 CAD and the Ultimate is $160. Imagine that? ... I will probably buy Stalker 2 on a deep, deep sale after the game is actually fixed if they ever fix it. Based on the developers track record they most likely won't fix ans let the modders do it. They learned that from Bethesda.
Triple A games don't get the money. Too many issues that the player has to fight through.
That's not withstanding the fact that video games themselves are inherently infinitely replicable and therefore valueless products at an objective level. The idea that software must be bought and never copied/traded at the "owners" discretion is bad enough, but the arbitrary price structure on top of that is just insulting.
There's an extremely strong ethical and moral argument for piracy beyond this, and an equally strong one for donation-based/crowdfunded game development as the norm. Pricing is defined by speculation and mutual agreement and so as you said, it stands to reason that the market and its participants are at fault here primarily. Good video.
The prime example of what you are speaking here is a game called Monomyth: called to bring back the in-sim/rpg games from before, its an early access and already has destroy majority of those AAA, but how many people are actually buying it, small studios with great ideas has few options, or you make a great game with 0 marketing, or you make a mediocre game with a lot of marketing, dude do you actually know how much cost one minute trailer on the game awards??
Good you brought it to my attention. I'll make a video about it.
Theres too many AAA frisbies
Question: If the idea that games are overpriced is true. Wouldn't that mean the developers are overpaid?
Could be but hard to tell and that statement would only work for games like CoD, Fifa, NBA, Football Manager...
On the opposite side, indie and a lot of AA developers are underpaid.
Yes - that's the upshot of the redundancies we see: the price of labour will fall. That's normal cyclical stuff? Once the cost of labour falls sufficiently it will get re-employed?
There are too many games seeking players that all tend to congregate in the same few places everyone else does. As with social media......
greed man
Wtf i posted sth and RUclips deleted it, and this is just a gaming video LOL. 🤗
Anyway, just visit the steam forums and mention that any popular game is overpriced, you're gonna get attacked by numerous accounts almost immediately.
Not worth it at release. You paying more and getting a worse buggy experience.
ITs just better to buy after a couple of months when games gets patched up and gets a pricecut.
Oh, come off it? Nobody has to buy annual instalments of games. Up to the customer, isn't it?
If it were so simple to provide quality at a low price-point somebody would be doing it. You think nobody is trying to do it? They're all "taking the easy route" instead? Rubbish.
What you seem to be missing is that development costs have risen and, as very very few titles attract the vast majority of players, the risks of development have also risen.
Get it wrong and you're risking the future of the company and the livelihoods of the staff.
Would you front $250m for a game to be developed over five years and which you don't (and can't) know will even gain an audience, let alone turn a profit? This is the main change to the past - the cost (and the vastly increased attendant risk). So there is some change - some reduction in risk-taking, for the obvious reasons.
Contrary to your claim game companies don't have vast amounts of cash to burn. Very few games make big money. The risk is huge.
15,000 games released on Steam this year? There's no shortage of games. And versus a movie, for instance, they're still value ($30 was incredibly cheap versus movies).
Maybe the biggest change (as in much else) is the citizen/consumer - feeling more entitled than ever and being a complete snowflake at the least disappointment. Like citizens, gamers are becoming impossible to please (if you choose to listen to them whine). My gfx should be cheaper, my games should be better, it all costs ttoo muc - wah wah. As if being a gamer wasn't always a thing of relative privilege. Sheesh.
it seems ppl are finally waking up avowed is going to be the next non buy nary flop :D
They cant keep up with this crap for much longer since they are now really starting to lose millions, this is also affecting the entertainment industry
Im not disagreeing but everything you mention is basically conjecture. Your point would be a lot stronger, and the video more interesting if you brought forward some hard data to support your points.
Data for what?
The claims you are making about the games industry and gaming in general, for example when you say that after paying Peter Dinklage there was no money left to develop the new Destiny game. Thats pure conjecture, you arent providing any hard facts to support that. A video mostly based on conjecture and guesses just isnt very persuasive.
@@SeriousPeaches
To know exact budget of a company you have to be a higher up in that company.
If you have 2 grains of salt in the head you can see where money is going for certain games.
Peter Dinklage was hired after massive success of Game of Thrones so he was the priciest at that time.
Second, Destiny commercials were everywhere for years. I mean everywhere. Like Cyberpunk.
And then the game came out. It was barebones so there's your proof where the money went. It didn't even have lore as they had to write something in later on. Game was trash on the release date. What other proof do you need?
@@rpgdivision I dont doubt that he was paid a lot, but to say that he was paid so much that there was no more money left to deliver a good product is baseless since you dont know how much the total budget was, and how much exactly he was paid. Game being bare bones at release doesnt automatically mean it was a budget constraint - they could have had a short time window to deliver a product, pushed by executives to release something in a given financial quarter to boost share prices. Activision invested a lot of money on Destiny development so it isnt a given that they would have been in financial straits after paying Dink. Again, Im not saying you are unequivocally incorrect, but Im saying that speaking out of speculation doesnt make for compelling evidence to support your point.
@SeriousPeaches
I don't need to know exactly what the budget was. Game is all the evidence I need to figure out where the money has gone.
Less money wasted on marketing and too expensive hirings, more time could be given to the devs so they can roll out a better game. Unfortunately publishers dictate too much these days so they want to recuperate the costs of marketing and game development by pushing out products.
It's simple - less money spent on outside development stuff, more money can be spent on the development and one of the ways is to give the game more time to be done.
Does that guarantee that Destiny would be given more time if they hadn't invested so much money into marketing? No but it didn't help, that's for sure.
Call me spendthrift but saying “I’ve never payed full price for a game” is not a brag.
It is.
I've never paid the full price for any game. I got the remastered Mass Effect trilogy for £5. I have around 125 games on GOG, most of them for free, the rest have cost me £200ish in total.