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- cross-posted to:
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Capcom president Harushiro Tsujimoto claims that the prices of video games need to increase to meet ballooning development costs.
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Gamers worldwide think game prices are already too high.
Unfortunately considering how many of these gamers are willing to pay extra $30€ just to get 1 week earlier access to a game, I’m afraid you are wrong in this regard and we’re going to see prices go up even more. Piracy is also dying, either because of groups disbanding or getting sued, or because of DRM getting better and more widespread, and once that is gone it’s going to let publishers jack the price even higher up.
I’m pretty much resigned to just play indie and AA games at this point, there’s no way I’m paying 60 or more for these broken, bloated and often overpriced products. There are few exceptions but even they will be driven to higher prices eventually.
I pretty much exclusively buy AA at this point, with the rare AAA nintendo 1st party title that I’m happy to pay $60 for. Most AAA games though just aren’t worth it. Some of those games coming out you couldn’t pay me to play.
I appreciate the candid reply. Any stand-out AA or indie titles out there that really stuck with you?
There are so many tbh, really depends on what type of games you’re interested in. I’ve really enjoyed remnant 1 and 2, owlcat pathfinder games, VRising, Riftbreaker, Timberborn, Against the Storm for example. All made by good dedicated studios that deserve your money more than EA, bioware, actiblizz or other corpos like that. Of the older titles, FTL, Into the Breach, Stardew Valley, Hollow Knight, Factorio, Project Zomboid etc are classics - polished games made with love that put pretty much every AAA title to shame in comparison.
Fucking hell, I finished God of War 4 and I was considering getting Ragnarok but SEVENTY-NINE EURO. Fuck that.
Won’t you please think of the shareholders!
Baldur’s Gate 3 made 350 million dollars within a month after launch.
Good games make their money back without question. Game prices are actually too expensive.
They’re right that retail prices of AAA games are too low to make a profit. Which is why they’ve turned to microtransactions and dlc. However, the price of such games is too high, which means the budgets and profit expectations are too high. With the quality of games coming out lately, even $60 is too high. I can’t imagine spending $70 or even $80 on a game.
To be fair to Capcom, I think that an ideal world for them would be not having to compete against games whose expectations and ideations are out-of-wack with the price point and requires huge sales numbers to even be profitable.
For example, SF6 has a full single player mode that exceeds any of the output of previous games. While the quality of this single player mode is sub-par, it’s still very ambitious compared to their old method of releasing fighting games (Arcade mode and Versus mode, with some mini games – that’s all!) and it finds itself having to compete with other 60 dollar titles whose scope is often outlandish while knowing full well that a fighting game can never move FPS game figures, for example.
The 60 dollar game made a lot more sense in the era of the PS2 where games were often linear experiences, sometimes lightly to heavily cinematic. A game that was made like MGS2 could be sold today for 60 dollars and it would have a very hard time competing against huge blockbusters like Starfield, with some probably scoffing at the idea of paying 60 dollars for that experience. (See Armored Core 6 – a good example of this that actually happened.)
They should just get rid of the expectations of sales numbers like what current AAA get. If we want better games, less people will buy them, because a good game isn’t for everyone.
Well, I think gaming standards are too low, Harushiro Tsujimoto.
Here’s the deal, we keep the game costs where they are, but you need to stop pulling unrealistic ideals to match up to. And you need to stop shitting out bad games just to keep the trademarks alive and other copyrights. Give us GOOD Megaman games, not whatever Megaman Dive is.
We need to go back to the model of where making good games was a key priority. Why have you forgotten this?
Honestly, he’s right. Game prices are the same 60-70 dollars they’ve been for 30 years, but nothing else has stayed the same price that long. With inflation, a game should be around 200 dollars.
Super Mario Bros 3 came out in the last half of 1988 and costed $50 dollars, or around 127 dollars. It also costed about $800,000 to develop, which is about $2 million today.
Nowadays, it costs around $80 million (about 40x) on average to make a AAA title that costs $60 (about half). This is why all these games have cash shops and battle passes and paid dlc and whatnot: they need to make up that extra cost somewhere.
https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/finance/highlights.HTML Capcom had $340 million in profit in 2022. They are doing pretty well. Don’t believe their complaining, it is just greed.
I can understand woth this information companies wanting to charge more, but I feel like standards need to be higher and refunds guaranteed. They can’t ask us to spend 100’s of dollars on half-complete, buggy messes of games AND also want to charge for DLC and have micro-transactions.
And don’t forget it’s just a rental of the game, at any time they could shut off the game or license servers because they don’t want to sell or keep that game anymore.
Super Mario Bros also only sold about 2.5 million units in the first several month after release. Baldur’s Gate, for example, sold almost 6 million in 2 weeks. The NES sold 2.5 million units in its first year. The Switch sold 13 million. Even the worst selling modern console, the Xbox Series X sold 8 million in the first year. While individual game prices have not risen, the total number of sales has dramatically increased. So pardon me if I don’t think the cost of games not rising has been a problem for publishers and developers of AAA titles. Their real problem has been putting out good content that enough gamers want.
While i agree that prices have been stagnant, its also a game of companies wanting to reduce risk. You have unicorn examples like Baldurs Gate 3 which took its time to develop a game, and has stated they dont plan on making paid expansion content, meaning where they at they see the game as profitable, despite spending 5 years in development for it.
Part of the reason why some games have balooned cost is because of improper spending of the money. Many spend a lot of money on marketing which tends to have an overly inflated cost on its own, due to the fact that people have a preference to play whats familliar, however its been shown that also actually making a good game with little marketing also works, and a lot of dev studios havent gotten to that point yet.
I buy games that release for $40 and $50. They don’t have dlc. They don’t have microtransactions. They don’t have cash shops. They don’t have battle passes. I just pay my $40/$50, get my physical copy, often with a bundled goodie like cards or keychains, and play and enjoy my 40hr game.
It’s absolutely possible because the companies that release these titles are pumping out several per year. You just… have to stop spec racing and obsessing over 200hr playtimes and top of the line graphics and actually focus on making a decent, mid-sized game, with realistic expectations.
Distribution is getting easier and cheaper, the available talented workforce is larger than ever, tools are getting better and faster with every day and despite “no large increase in costs”, the gaming industry has grown to be one of the largest and most profitable industries in the entire world and everyone wants a piece of that cake.
$60 is fine and anything above that is pure greed.