How Much Should Video Games Cost?
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- čas přidán 25. 12. 2023
- How Much Should Video Games Cost?
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Its not that episodic games cant be good. Its when a full game that is completed is divided so that it can be sold 2x. Just imagine playing a game and seeing a door with a sign that says 'comeback in episode 2'.
i would imagine that the story would be in a cliffhanger but stop if they havent bought part 2 but if they had bought part 2 then it would continue as normal and have part 1&2 as a bundle of 100$ but if you buy them separately then it would cost 60$ per part and they would release part 1&2 either the same day or a week apart
@@Meek42069 not even necissarily a plot point door, an in-game item store, a side-quest dungeon, a save point.
Garten of Banban
isnt this just an excuse to make a sequel on the same game without any of the effort.
They are already multiple games. Deux mankind comes to mind. It just ends so abruptly and we have still not gotten a sequel
Don't buy a promise. An episodic release is buying a promise of a conclusion, unless of course each part is a satisfying story in its own right. And each story in its own right has to be worth the price of entry too! And understand that not everybody will be able to pony up the cash for later episodes, or not get as many new players when the later episodes come out and it's no longer a $50 investment but a $200 investment to experience this new story!
Buying any game is 'buying a promise'.
@RippahRooJizah Kind of. Buying any game digitally sort of implies a promise you'll be able to access it at a later time. In general, I do my best to avoid games that aren't complete experiences at launch. That is getting harder and harder to do, but there are still plenty of games releasing on a regular basis that aren't built on some kind of "promise" for content in the future.
Unless of course you're talking about multiplayer games. The ship sailed on those things a long time ago.
@@jameslwjtoler I'm just talking about any form of promise, be it future content, an ongoing story, multiplayer, it being good, future bug fixes, etc.
I remember when Half Life 2 and Sin did episodes and we never got an ending for either 😞
Life Is Strange started strong and ended so weak. Swore off episodic games after that
The problem with episodic gaming is when the final conclusion to the story is never released. Half life 2: Episode 3
Too soon bro. :(
No, Valve can't count to 3, remember? We're gonna have Half Life: 2 Episode 2 Act 2
That really made me stay away from episodic games.
That's an outlier. Consider Telltale's library, or the "Life is Strange" franchise.
The difference would be if a game is designed as a series. The film Industry is going down the same route. People want longer and more engaging and stories because of what games deliver...
Id be willing to pay more for games i felt were made in "good faith". Games like baulders gate are worth 100$ easily, but when a game's goal is to milk me and ruin their aesthetic for cash (cod) then they can f off with their next attempt to milk me
Exactly. I'm willing to pay almost anything for a good game, and i pay 120€ without an issue if the game is good... but this isn't the case at 99% of the AAA games. And don't get me wrong i love Hogwarts legacy, phantom liberty, etc... but as long as i find myself returning to ps2, n64, wiiu games over and over again, and almost never to new "AAA" games... Somewhere around 2013-4 the market decided that they value graphics over gameplay, and most of them cannot be changed...
@@imjustapotatoleavemealone Yeah, I can't be bothered to buy most games, but bought Elden Ring and Cyberpunk and Witcher 3 twice. For PC and Xbox.
I'm with Luke on this.
I think the win is for "games" to stay as full games like they are now, and for successful games to get a series of expansion packs that have ~75-100% of the content of the original game, at ~50% of the price.
That allows the developers to take the tools they made for the base game, and their experience using them, to turn out additional content at an accelerated pace.
And how it used to be done, before publishers decided DLC and Lootboxes were the ways to maximise cash.
The issue is that that is not working with the current price point.
Games on nes used to cost up to 80 dollars.
Back then!
And making cassettes was dirt cheap at that time already.
Then we rolled back to a 49.99 to 59.99 with psone onwards all the way till ps5 came out.
That is over 25 years.
The costs are through the roof and for every GTA V that sells billions upon billions we have hundreds of also expensive games that barely make any money back.
@@wow1371 maybe its due to the changing exchange rates but games were significantly cheaper in the 90s and early 00s than they are now in the UK (I used to spend £30-35 on a brand new game for PC as a kid and they were about £40 when I got a 360 as a teenager vs the £60+ of now, although I have just found a CoD4 release note say $60 so could be just exchange rates).
I also just don't quite believe that it is actually true that a larger % of games don't make money anymore. Costs have gone up, but so have total number of sales through the roof (the switch has sold double the number of units the NES did for example and so many more games are cross platform now).
There are expensive failures, but there were (relatively) expensive failures before as well.
And full games with expansions (which use the same engine, a good portion of the same assets etc. gives plenty of scope for increasing revenue and doesn't rely on trying to artificially bait gamers into buying additonal parts to finish the story).
@@alastairtemple it was the change rate and at the time many companies did not make prices according to local economy.
Otherwise the prices are well documented for US and Japan.
Also while you might not believe it it doesn't change the fact that there are more and more studios shutting down.
A lot of classic studios of 90s and 2000s shut down too because of this fact.
The fact that there are more gamers is not necessarily a good thing, because the surge of mainstream gamers meant more efforts are put into titles perceived to be popular by mainstream crowds and fewer variations in games are made.
This in turn leads to games that are different having a harder time to sell themselves.
Lets not forget the abysmal state of gaming in the 7th gen.
Everything was a mil shooter, or a mil shooter in space or a mil shooter without guns in Ancient times 😂
Games like demon souls, witcher, lots of japanese rpgs they all bombed because these new players were here for either COD/BF or Fifa/Madden
@wow1371 The Witcher series is one of the best selling series of all time! In no way did any of them "bomb". Smaller classic Studios (which also tend to be significantly smaller in terms of employee numbers and costs) have often shut down because they get bought out by the big beasts (e.g. Ubisoft, Microsoft, Activision, EA, etc. or by the likes of Embracer group who bought so many so quickly via borrowing, gave itself too much debt and then had to close a load of stuff as a result, doesn't mean that those that closed were struggling before Embracer bought them, they weren't) who then decide their returns are too small in comparison to the likes of COD, does not mean that they weren't sustainable. The search for ever increasing profits by the big beasts of the sector, and their unwillingness to take risks or game types, does not mean that it is impossible to run a studio at current prices.
A big problem you could run into: A lot of people are just gonna wait for all 3 parts to come out, and then grab all three so they don't have to wait.
Yep. Which is gonna cause them to cancel the later two episodes because the first didn't sell
And if you're good at waiting, you can wait for a sale.
That's what I've been doing for many years now lol. I waited a couple years before getting a new game for the most part as I can't justify the price of a new game when most of them are at least $60-$100+ for some games (Australian pricing).@@CheapBastard1988
People already do this though... Game of the Year editions. I wait for those usually... that plus Steam sale is a easy wait usually.
That's what a do with the movies lol I wait for part 2 ( finale) to come out. Not endgame tho, I was too excited
something to note is that in any series, the first "episode" will generally always be the most watched, paid for, exciting period, and it trails off shockingly fast. the biggest problem for games you split into multiple paid sections for, there are LOT of steps in between planning and game design to the end episodes for anything to go wrong. And oh boy, will things go wrong.
Just look at any steam game with achievements such as 'finish the game'
How many people who have bought the game, have actually finished it? Most games see a shockingly low number on that achievement. (Some will be due to modding, but most wont be) For example, the Portal 2 achievement for finishing the game (Lunacy) has a global percentage of 35.8%. Only a third of portal 2 players have finished the game.
@@escaper59 even the most popular games only have a 20/30% finish rate. Some devs take this the wrong way. E.g. one of the excuses cdpr had for Cyberpunk being much shorter was that only 30% or so finished Witcher 3. But that's the same for every game long or short. Most people don't seem to finish their games. Plenty of people borrow a game from a friend or get it for free and or try it out while being in the midst of another games playthrough etc and thus never finish it.
@@godofchaoskhorne5043 You can't borrow games on Steam.
I also own the Witcher 3 and never finished it.
I usually buy games, such as GTA 5, etc. Then I roam around the world (which is why I don't like the whole leveling aspect in Witcher games, etc - as I just want to freeroam and explore)
I am not really interested in the story.
Never finished Witcher 3, still liked it.
Finished GTA 5 only 300+ hours in, forgot half the story till then but explored the entire map 10 times over.
Never finished Cyberpunk, stuck on last mission as I didn't want to finish it yet.
Exactly, and they'll lose a lot of money from people who either drop the game or buy it and never play it, which is a LARGE chunk of sales nowadays
I think the same thing that applies to books works here too. When you write a series. YOU HAVE TO have a plot arc that gets resolved. The main arc can be a cliffhanger, but there has to be some payoff or fans wont like it.
It also applies to movies. Imagine if you were planning a Star Wars trilogy and shot the first movie without knowing what would happen in the next two. How dumb would you have to be to do that???
@@nicholasvinenAnd yet you just described the god awful sequel trilogy. Ironic, and it kind of does serve as a warning against episodic content for any media if you don’t do it carefully. Bad content is bad content, no matter how you want to economically priced it or roll it out.
There are some big differences, however.
Books started to be divided in series primarily because of printing. Usually 500 pages is the upper limit of what you want in a book to still have decent quality with the standard printing process. So if you plan on a story that has 900 pages in total, doing 2 or 3 parts makes a lot of sense. Also, books are usually complete within themselves, the full story might require extra stuff, but that book in particular will likely have some plot that starts and gets resolved within it's length.
Movies are episodic because you can't really expect people to sit for more than two hours doing nothing, and because for the longest time the primary means of distribution were movie theaters, there was an inherent cost to keeping a room for longer than you should.
TV Shows are episodic for a similar reason, audiences will be engaged for only so long and you have limited time within a day to run all your shows.
Games have none of these issues. Play sessions can last for more than 8 hours easily because games are interactive, and even if they do not, it's customary for people to play, stop and come back regularly. Years ago you'd pay for each play session in arcades, but that only made sense because you were essentially renting a physical machine in an arcade.
The problem isn't that these AAA studios aren't making enough to pay their staff, they're making a conscious decision not to do so or do lay offs to appease shareholders. They want more and more growth not just stable good profits like any publicly traded company, so when they run out of new gamers in the traditional console/PC market to fuel their growth they want to race to the bottom with dlcs (dlcs can be good if they're adding upon the base game, but not if they're just releasing features that should've been there in the first place), microtransactions, 3-4 different release tiers of the same base game, etc.
Yeah dev costs have gone up, but not to the extent that they've to charge like twice or thrice the current prices for a full game, there are cases where episodic games do work but that doesn't mean you can just transplant them for everything.
Why can't it be both? Even with a number of tools to make games easier, it's obvious with how gaming has been the last 2 decades that dev costs have went up massively for certain types of games. And not even just dev costs, but marketing costs as well.
The myth of eternal growth getting workers fired sucks, but if games in the span of 35 years have had maximum team sizes be 10-1000 times larger and take, usually, multiple years of work to come out, it's either questionable reoccurring purchases or tripling the costs of a full game that was going to happen. Or both.
@@RippahRooJizahthe problem is these companys do these cuts while looking for ever more ways to squeeze the cash out of the gamer while also reporting absolute record crushing profits. (not all of them mainly the big ones)
@@RippahRooJizah ? AAA industry wouldn't be throwing multiple development teams and have ever expanding marketing budgets for yearly releases if they weren't making that money back off of the first quarter sales of a game, activision for instance in their Q4 2022 financial report boasts about how well CoD sales are doing with MWII apparently having the best opening quarter sales in the franchise ever, and remember they're taking cost cutting measures while the CEO and top execs get millions of dollars in payouts through bonuses for increased sales.
There's no necessity or inevitability in major publishers having to squeeze more revenue through releasing the game in episodes when they're making enough off game sales, there's no need to go as far as back as the late 80s or 90s, when we had a time in modern gaming during the late 2000s-early 2010s with big budgets, marketing expenditure and large teams before many of the current scummy tactics became widespread.
@@thelakeman2538 You forgot the tax havens companies use to pay fewer taxes.
We're also at a time where if a game isn't making multiple millions of sales it's seen as a failure. You have more games that are more iterative than different and trying to get yearly releases out still. Regardless of where the money is going there's been years of evidence of budget concerns and ways to lower costs or improve profits.
Some games are making their money back, others aren't for whatever reason. Let's not forget the failures because the successes make bank.
yeah this was my issue with this segment. they were talking as if they needed more money to pay developers when they already can, easily. what they actually "need" more money for is appeasing shareholders
I'd point out that Baldur's Gate 3 was in early access for almost 3 years, and most of that time was just act 1.
Not only did they generate significant revenue from the early access sales, but it also meant they had plenty of opportunity to refine parts of the game. For example, escaping the Nautiloid use to be about 4 times longer. They also, post launch, added like 50k words of dialogue.
I think more games should follow this model. This would allow publishers to start making money sooner. And we could get a better game.
@@travisvaught I love idie games for this. You get in early, experience the concept, and the game then grows a community which will help the devs focus on the most important aspects to keep it in line with what people want. The game then expands and gets new content. Much more dynamic and "made for gamers".
Minecraft is in a league of its own, but it began with "early access", and it never stopped expanding, which is why this decade old game is still just as relevant.
GTA Online is actually kind of an example of this too, to some extent.
The thing missing from this conversation is that episodic games like the Walking Dead and that each part was normally cheaper than buying a full game. $50 per part is a lot, when historically they were like $5 to $15.
If it goes higher than 120 $ I will probably never buy another game
All praise the back catalogue.
@@CheapBastard1988And indies.
I cant afford this modern world lol.
Then you would not have been able to buy games in the 80-90ies as well
Adjusted for inflation SNES games were like $150.
We've been so far gone from the concept that an Expansion Pack used to actually expand on the content that came before it. It's wild. That was the traditional way that companies tried to cut costs and deliver a second product. "Hey, you liked this game. We made another campaign, or completely overhauled it as a standalone package. Try it out for half the price of the original". The market is so different from the '00s it's unreal.
I feel like episodic gaming becoming a bigger thing is going to bring the same frustration as the cancelled Netflix series trend.
now it's "pay 90$ for a barebones mess+ another 50 in dlc to actually have some semblance of an experience"
The problem with splitting a game that everyone seems to be missing is it will cause games to feel more shallow. The game can't assume you have both parts so things like side quests would be scaled down. Everyone is focused on the main story. But it's a lot harder to cut the other content in half. Imagine how boring the world of Spider-Man would be with half the city and half the content. The days of roaming around the world to find all the meaningful content are coming to an end.
Well, it depends on the game. It may not make it more shallow, just more obvious that it is part of a larger whole.
It can go very right or very wrong.
the problem i see with this idea of selling a game in parts is that, most players dont even get through the first ten hours of a single player game and its quite visable in the achievements or like the very first achievement in the first 10 minutes ive seen often is only at 60%-80% of players completed. Which may end up causing you to actually lose sales as most players wont buy the second or third part of a game. You gain alot of revenue from the fact many players buy the game and never even start it. if everyone only starts paying 50 bucks instead of the usual price of 60-70 then your simply going to lose money over time as most players wont ever get to a point where they want to spend the next 50 and even the next 50 after that. Plus how does this work with DLC? because DLC kind of already fulfill's this idea as alot of DLC is either cut content that gets finished or on occasion its a brand new thing.
@@GH0STST4RSCR34M Like so many other online service games. This is one of the reason I don't touch those games. Still, can't really compare to a single player game without no need to keep up online infrastructure + constant updates, servers, etc. When a single player game does this, there are so many possible issues. What if the company doesn't finish the game, but leave it 3/5. What parts are released at different platforms, and you can't finish your game without buying a new hardware. There would be so much scummy stuff. No idea what FF VII remake is doing, I'll play it when it's fully done.
i think Destiny 2 is different as its selling expansion packs for an Always Online service. This is more or less talking about mostly singleplayer Titles where you just buy the game and play. plus ill be honest ive never played Destiny so i wouldnt know but isnt Destiny like an MMO? MMO's work very differently then what Single player games do. @@GH0STST4RSCR34M
On the contrary, it means they can sell you the game thrice.
Let's imagine a game will be sold in 3 episodes.
First ep sells for $50 and 100 people buy it. Out of these, only 50 finish it.
Second ep sells for $50, 40 people buy it. Out of these, only 20 finish it.
Then comes the 2 episode bundle for $50. Another 20 people buy it, even if they are never going to play or even make it to the end of part 1.
Third ep sells for $50 again, 10 people buy it.
Now you have the Full Story bundle, another 10 people buy it.
If this was a full game released once, they would sell 100 copies, making 5kUSD.
But by adding together all sales of each episode, they managed to sell 180 copies, making 9800USD
And with careful timing, all those extra editions they already make such as Collector's Edition, Premium, Gold, Extra, Digital, Pre-Order Special, GOTY, they can do one for each episode and then one for the final bundle. All with the cost of one game.
Of course, that in the head of the executives. And of course they can have all the excuses that the "full game is not out yet" to deflect all criticism.
@@ggwp638BC One note, if it was an episode style of release, the sale of the first episode would be way different from a full game release. So many are waiting to get all at once or wouldn't buy expensive multipart games. If the part one was cheap, it could even get way higher numbers, but the content would have to be insanely good to get people buying more expensive part 2 and 3. Easy to sell part 1, but hard to sell anything past that point.
This could also mean that games are designed overall way easier, since if a gamer quits, they can't see the part 2 or 3. For example, Elden Ring was a masterpiece, but a large percentage did quit at semi early. The game was so good that it would be easy to sell those later parts to gamers who really enjoyed it. At the same time, they would cut the potential buyers more than half with the game design/style. Imagine if the part 3 started right after Malenia. Episodes would compromise the game. I'm not saying From Software would do changes, but other larger companies would 100% make everything to push people buying all possible episodes.
Don't kid yourself, the price will rise to 69.99 in no time. They will just claim "Part 1 is basically a full game."
Yeah we are just going back to piracy at this point, I dont even play AAA titles anymore but if I wanted to I am not shelling out that money, meanwhile I have bought over a thousand dollars of indie games that had upwards of 5 people working on them in total, some even by a single person. They were all complete from the day one without weird dark monetization patterns. Go figure!
That is an argument to raise prices even more as piracy back in old days barely existed
@@ligametis what are you talking about, piracy was absolutely rampant until steam got popular
@@ligametis which good old days are we talking about? Pretty much everyone i knew with a pc used to pirate everything ~20 years ago.
@@ItsJoneslike 80s when only cartridges existed
@@someoneelse5005me and my homies hate steam, at least there is now epic as competition. Either way I am talking about pre-2000s cartridge systems. Steam encouraged piracy for me
An interesting example is the latest Hitman trilogy. Each level released as an episode with additional content unlocking between each release, and then once all the levels were out you could get the game as if it was a single release. And on top of that, you can play the previous levels in the following games, with whatever additional unlocks you got.
And it was ❤❤❤❤
That sounds cool
And half the content was timed exclusive, because it was a shallow live service game with the Hitman brand slapped on.
Bro Spider-Man 2 already felt short and they wanna split it up more? Jesus.
I don't think it felt that short, just sort of inline with insomniac games other titles. They are also one of the only studios able to bring out multiple games in 8 year time frames anymore, because they limit it a bit, 10 hour story + 5 hour side stuff feels ok if you are getting a game every 2 years.
If they split up 3 and its 1 a year each one with about 8 hours + 3 hours then I think it would be more a return to ps2 games where they would come out more often because they were smaller/limited.
ok.. why do people always forget the 1 key thing about games these days when they say that games barely cost more than 30 years ago. The audience is 100 times bigger these days. The reach is insane versus in the 1990s. On top of this many modern studios could do with some efficiency training. Having seen fair bit of interviews with seniors in the industry the prevailing theme has been extreme amounts of inefficiency where code that would take an hour suddenly takes days in some instances due to, among other things, bureaucracy and lack of initiative. I'm not paying for that. Then you can pile on the ton of other issues. Basically resources aren't being managed properly in many cases and it's very evident when you see a small team release a stellar indie with not even a 10th of the workforce and the quality is through the roof and the price is 39.99 or 29.99. Time to slim down the frothing beast as it has clearly gaining "a bit" of excess weight.
yeah its like social media companies like twitter had as many employees as spacex and they make rockets that go to space. also the audience is bigger and the machines to make games are way cheaper.
That's a take considering the numerous layoffs in the entire tech sphere, not just gaming, this year along with how game studios are near universally plagued with crunch. For every indie that released that was a hit, there were ten more that were failures and the studio likely closed.
It's apparent that you have no idea how game developement works.
Gameplay quality rarely relate to developement costs. You can get a stellar gameplay even from a one person developing studio if the game scope is set right.
@@JKeemTVbut AAA studios aren’t being funded by 3 guys life savings so how is this relevant?
Games should be cheaper at launch because they treat us as beta testers.
1000% like look at COD it's a joke
You think that would incentivise anyone to NOT buy them early..? As opposed to buying them cheaper after they're fixed..?
Games need to quit pissing away good will. That's the actual problem.
@@Draliseth Pretty much every triple A game has been releasing in a poor state. Ubisoft is trying to get $120 for their "AAAA" games. As you hit the nail on the head that all the goodwill is gone. I think the old DLC system was way better game gets new content and grows to be a way better experience like paradox games. Base game gets cheap and bugs patched and the developers win by selling dlc.
I think Linus is assuming that each game will be a full game in size. In reality, what the studios are likely to do is take a game like BG3 and simply split it into 3 parts, each for 40-50 bucks, and call it a day. 60-70 bucks is already a lot for me for just one game, especially when I can play League of Legends for free or play $15 a month for WoW.
Just stop with the graphics upgrades that takes up 50 percent of the time and money and give people fun gameplay and a decent story
Linus is flat out wrong in is critique in pricing. A simple Google search showing actual images of catalogs shows that the average price of games in the 90s is actually higher than it is today, being that lower tiered games sold for more money while the cap for high AAA tier games being 60-70 dollars. I think the problem today is that more people fall below that threshold of "is 60-70 dollars is worth a AAA gaming experience?". When you think of the fact that a movie ticket costs 10 dollars roughly for 2+/- hours of entertainment, videogames are insanely undervalued in society.
In western society. In third world country its still overvalued.
This is only if you place value on how long it takes you to get through a piece of media. The average movie is several times more expensive to produce than the average video game despite taking less time to "complete". Video games need to stop worrying about how long it takes to complete the game and more about its content. A 5-10 hour masterpiece is much better than a 90 hour slog.
Used to pay £33.99, get a full singleplayer and a multiplayer with continued DLC map packs released over time. Now I have to pay £60+ for a reskin of the last game, £15 for a battlepass for cosmetic items, and weekly DLC to change how my character looks, and pay £30+ for singular DLC maps/modes that get replaced quarterly. "Just dont buy the cosmetics" is the option but the ONLY put out cosmetics and never new content anymore. Greed has ruined every triple A development team.
qnd worse they delist and otherwise render the last one unplayable to try to force you to always buy the new one immediately
I completely avoid any game that requires you to spend extra.
20$ for part one, and the other 2 for 40 each. it's a paid demo.
I already do not buy complete games over $50. $150 for a cut up game? Fuck no!
Indie is the way. AAA only at 50% discount year after release when they actually fix the game
@@FeniksGaming AAA doesn't mean bad necessarily, my friend. Where do you think AAA studios come from? They are the logical step of evolution for Indie studios. And not all AAA games released broken. That's only a trend that's been emerging in the past few years.
@@halomika4973but it’s so trendy that it makes them untrustworthy. I don’t expect a Bethesda or EA or Ubisoft game to be good. They have earned that reputation. And there’s enough others to make you really think that AAA games are just bad
@@daniel7035 Agreed, I was just pointing out that therw are still good ones like Baldur's Gate or Elden Ring for example
There is a major difference over having a truly episodic game and forcing devs to split their games into parts. The only type of parts gaming I'd ever expect to play comes from indie devs and early access; because they (usually) do not have the team needed to accomplish a perfect video game in 1-2 years. Major studios can go [REDACTED] themselves if they're gonna switch to a parts gaming model to milk the consumer more. Organic milk is more worthy of its price over this new business model
Assuming companies do need to make more on a game than $60-70 dollars today, I think it would be fine if it were released all at once. 1: I want to make sure the whole game IS going to be released and the company isn’t going to just cancel a game after 3 parts. 2: It allows people to bounce after 1 part of they don’t like it. 3: Companies aren’t putting in pay to play schemes and microtransactions.
I've played multiple TellTale games (The Walking Dead, Batman, Borderlands) and in each of them I would wait until the story was finished. Not because of a price point issue, but because I, as a player, would forget what happened or what choices I've made.
This is the core issue with episodic gaming. It's a bigger risk than it appears to be as there's a whole segment of people that don't want to wait months to a year for the next part of the story. This puts extra stress on the dev studio since they're missing funding that they were expecting to keep the story going.
What I expect Sony's plan is to do is mostly cut up pieces of the game, say Single player vs Multiplayer, and they'll sell each side separately.
splitting it up like that makes a lot of sense. if you could buy campaign, multiplayer, and extra mode(cod zombies, tf2 mvm, ect) for 20-30$ each players could save money and the game gets more players(that they can sucker into micro-transactions)
There isn't a lot of physical media anymore. I don't understand why game companies don't sell all new pc games for $19.99 each on STEAM. Digital distribution is very cheap on a mass market. They would sell a LOT more copies than at $70 each. I'd buy a mediocre game right away at $20, I won't at $70.
And then you have console players. Who would rather have the game on disc. To conserve it. And not be reliant on a sony or Xbox to exist until eternity.
Or for our pc gamers, Epic Games or Steam (as market places on winshit) nobody can take away your physical games.
Anyone can take away your online shit. Online drm makes it you can't play when the internet is out. I dont have that issue when it's on disc.
@@RedRingOfDead legally you can own a cracked copy if you have the license to the game, so really you can go buy a disk and burn the crack onto it if you really wanted. i have all my favorite games archived and compressed.
@@RedRingOfDead I think the last time I bought a pc game on disk was the original Crysis.
I probably own around 1000 pc games on various market place services like STEAM.
It's only happened a handful of times but if a game I like is pulled out of service then I'll just "crack it". I also highly doubt that disk versions really cost $50 more..
@@waxcutter9813 Server and employee cost a lot of money
I get my free games from epic games. The games that I used to play are no longer on steam and other game libraries. I rather get free digital games or pirate the digital games that way I won't lose any money when the games are no longer available from steam and other game libraries from gog and g2a. With my game consoles, I only buy the consoles that support the physical media. The digital versions are already obsolete when they are no longer supported, they are discontinued and when the digital stores are closed and if the manufacturer chooses not to allow access to the digital games even though the customer already paid the for the digital games like what is already happening between sony and discovery with the digital movies that the customers already paid for and sony won't refund the money that the customers paid for when they supposedly "bought" the digital movies instead of choosing the rent option. I don't like throwing my money with digital products because it's already part of the process of supporting planned obsolescence. The manufacturers might as well as start serializing there consoles and games like how apple already does it with there iPhones and macbooks since the manufacturers already have gotten greedier and stingier every year in order to scree over the customers while making money in the process. Nintendo are assholes when it comes to emulators and roms and will take go far as taken down youtube videos about how to inquiring roms and emulators for the consoles they no longer make sell. Sony are being quiet and won't tell the customers what they are doing instead of being transparent to the customers and make up excuses as to why they are taking there customers money and they try to justify why they can get away with it. Microsoft implements things better for the game consoles like the support for the xbox compared to the support for windows even though microsoft makes and sells the xbox just like they do with windows on pc and the manufacturers give the consumers choices when they go the pc route. I wish microsoft windows pc's have windows support similar to the xbox. For example, the modern xbox has backwards compatibility compared to microsoft windows pc compatibility has certain restrictions since there are less restrictions on the xbox. I bought the xbox series x because I can still play games all the way back to the original xbox and I still have my original xbox and 360 games that are compatible with the series x. I wish I could still play my games that says games for windows on windows 11 on discs. Basically all versions of windows should have backwards compatibility just like the microsoft xbox game consoles. There were games that I downloaded from steam and are only compatible with windows 7 and I have windows 11. I had to contact steam to get my refund for the games that will only work with windows 7 and are not backwards compatibility with windows 11 even though the games were never updated to support windows 11 and only supported windows 7.
My thing with episodic gaming is I feel like its going to go the way stuff like netflix is, I feel like episodic gaming is like a season of a show, where each episode only takes like 20 hours to complete, but you have to wait a year between them, and like Netflix has shown there is no guarantee that good things will actually get a real ending before they get canceled, I have already got to the point that I wont watch shows that are still In Progress, and I really don't want games to go that way, I'm not spending that much just to feel like I have an incomplete story for a year at best, or have spent that money just for it to get canceled and never get a conclusion at all.
Ill wait 3-4 years for the game to be 1/2 price.
Sometimes only a couple months like Starfield
Sometimes not even that long, when a game comes out, and then STEAM has a winter sale a couple months later, as was the case for Sonic Superstars where the entire game plus the DLC goes is on sale for $42 down from $70.
Im pretty sure, if this model works, it will be that standart ,even for some games like COD ,you will pay three times for the same amount of content and also for single player games, you will end up paying for 3 Episodes , 3 times full price and still only get in some games not more then 6h to 8h combined
Itll also naturally progress to games as a service
I have a few thoughts about this. My first is that, personally, I don’t believe AAA games should be the same flat price. Like, GTA 6, I’m sure people would gladly fork out $100 for, but a short 6-8hr story AAA game could go for maybe $30. Why do all AAA games have to be priced the same?
Furthermore, in terms of episodic content, what happens if X game Part 1 is 7hrs longer than X game Part 2? Should both parts be, let’s say $40 each? Even though one is a decent amount smaller in scale/length?
Additionally, as a consumer, I’d rather pay more up front for a complete package than have to wait 6mo - 1y in between episodes of the same game. It also opens the doors for potential tragedies to strike and for talent to pass in between episodes, causing the need to either recast a character, have them die off screen or just end the story before it’s even completed.
I think the idea that "6-8 hours game should be only worth 30$", is incentivizing devs to bloating the game. Assassin Creed Odyssey can have something like 100 hour campaign, it get panned by critics as "over-bloated". Pricing games based on game time length is incentivizing devs to "spread it out" rather than "pack it more" to make it "worth it". Flat pricing is fine, let the market sort it out.
It gets a bit weird to try to make variable prices for AAA games.
I mean, why would an 8 hour game be $30? Most people put far too much value in the quantity of time with little consideration of quality, and as such we have large games with various time sinks that add little to nothing to the game beyond time spent on it.
"Quality" is also subjective. I, personally, would rather spend more on a better, shorter game than less on a longer game that isn't as good. A good long game is good as well but that doesn't always happen.
As for potential issues, those can happen at any time; they aren't exclusive to episodic games.
I've been saying this for ages, and I stand by it:
The idea that "Games' prices haven't gone up/have only gone up a little" is bogus. Publishers have done nothing but find new ways to push the price of games up: day one dlc, microtransactions, battle passes, season passes, special editions of games.
The 59.99/69.99 price that people cite is only the bare minimum price for entry, but for at least a decade it's often provided an incomplete game which will require a few dozen more dollars to finish. Or in the case of some games with piles of cosmetics (which used to be free and grinded with in-game play: Anyone remember the Gold-plated deagle and AK in cod4?), it can take hundreds of dollars to get all the content in the game you already paid for.
Tl;Dr Publishers haven't kept the "price of games" flat for decades because they're so nice and generous. They've kept them flat because they've found more clever ways to make games more expensive without pushing the baseline price of entry.
The problem i have with games going from 40$, to 50$, then to 60$, now to 70$ and god knows whats next, is that in many countries, the average pay barely moved the past 15 years.
For example, the real average pay in my country went from around 18 000- 20 000 to around 22 000- 24 000 (local currency after tax, and that is the 15 years difference), while the rent went from basic 1+1 (40m squared) being 8000 with utilities to 13 000 and you are lucky if you get utilities, so games changing from around 800-900 to being 1500 is massive.
Ultimately it comes down to what people are willing to pay for, but games are already expensive. In Canada games are about $20 more than they are in the U.S., so $70 USD games are $90 CAD, and I know other places have it worse. Sure, people cite prices back in the day for being similar, but you didn't need to spend money on a console + an online service + DLC + microtransactions + a subscription service. The game was one and done, even if it wasn't good.
The AAA industry's prices are bloated as heck and not sustainable. Maybe Sony should try to push for something cheaper than the AAA, photo-realistic, $200 million+ cinematic games that they tend to make. It makes those Last of Us remakes/remasters look like acts of desperation to support Sony's mega AAA spending. Something has to break at some point.
I think the whole of the games industry will be going to more of a subscription model. Wouldn’t surprise me if we end up eventually where it is like music and film/tv where the best majority of content people consume is that from a subscription service and not bought.
Like maybe we will see a ‘gamepass ultimate’ that will be 2-3x the price of normal gamepass but with it you can play ANY Xbox game. Then the revenue can be distributed based on how much time you spend playing each game.
What your describing would kill single player games...
@@red0death1 how would it?
@@red0death1 Unfortunately, unless something changes, AAA single player games are looking less and less profitable as times goes on. That's part of the problem here. Single player games are going to be noticeably smaller scale than multiplayer games going forward. It already is going that way, which is why BG3 was such a surprise and why other game companies rushed to say it was an exceptional case, because they cannot reasonably make single player games profitable enough when they're in such a corporate landscape that requires infinite growth to keep money flowing.
I would only support indie games if that's the case. Games are half a@@ nowadays. Its sad a AAA game needs a 50gig update in the first week. Na, I'm good. Plenty of indie developers to give my money to
That's not entirely horrible because it would incentivize game developers to actually put out good games. On the other hand they could be incentivized to make the game unnecessarily grindy so people spend more time playing it...
dunkey made a good video about this. adjusting for inflation games used to cost the equivalent of 120+ today. selling games in parts will be a delicate issue to solve. It would feel really dumb to make the whole game and everyone knows it's finished then sell it for 3 separate parts. But selling part one after it's finished then selling the next pieces as they finish would go a lot better. Expansion packs are a lot easier to swallow but completely different. Metro exodus released as a large, full game. I could then buy and further explore the stories of the side characters to tie up lose ends, expansions done well. Subnautica did something really cool that I wish I saw more of. Subnautica was a massive project, and was very successful. They then reused a bunch of the work building subnautica with new assets and new story to release a second, "smaller" game to give us more lore to the larger story of subnautica. It could even be considered a part I and II even though the stories are a bit disconnected, they happen on the same planet, at different times.
The idea the pressure to up the sale price has anything to do with the money the developers and publishers pay their employees goes right into the Linus bad take bucket.
I dislike the idea of episodic gaming like parting a complete game into sections to be bought separately. I do see a trend towards subscription based models, that while annoying, seems to be what every type of entertainment is turning to in modern times.
What I think would be my ideal version of this is similar to what Luke describes in either adding extra sections to a complete game or doing something akin to what Nintendo did with Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, where as the studio re-uses the engine, and a lot of the assets and mechanics of the base game to create something new with heavily reduced development cost.
If the structure of the story justifies being split into parts, I’d be ok paying $30 a piece for 3 chapters. I even like the idea of a game with a miniseries structure, 8-10 episodes at $8-$10 a piece. But it would have to be a Naughty Dog level story. Not just “good for a video game”. An actually great story.
I think for the episodic gaming method you would need to announce a schedule like with TV series. Part one will come out this day, part two on this day, etc. This way you will know and anticipate when you will be able to continue the game.
The average game isn’t worth $70, and the games that ARE don’t charge you $70.
This couldn't be more true.
And that's church, yo.
Legit though, most of the games I buy are anywhere from 79 to a hundred bucks. + There's always pay to a win option for the game at like 120 bucks sometimes even more. Cuz that's completely fair, hey you're rich? Well you get to start off with a maxed out gun against people that get garbage with no attachments.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, AAA games that are monetized heavily through microtransactions should not be $70 or even $60.
They should be free.
When it comes to monetization in the game industry, it is never this OR that, it is this AND that. These companies exist to maximize profit above all else and if they can get away with monetizing every aspect of the games they make, they will do it.
Server cost a lot to maintain. If the game was free to play the company would have to put a large part of their revenue to people that dont pay for the game.
I really tend to avoid games with micro transaction either way.
@@daometh well good for call of duty because they rent out amazons
Cut celebrity voice actors, non-gameplay trailers and your left with 60 bucks.
The cost increase inflation is irrelevant. The consumer base has inflated over the cost of a game.
I remember waaaay back in the early 2000’s Gran Turismo 3 was supposed to be released in three parts - a spec, b spec and c spec - but they left it at just a spec.
My guess is that the physical format of Super Mario Bros for the NES contributed greatly to its final sale price
We really need to bring back demos. Want people to pay $70/$80/$90/whatever for a game? Show them that your game is worth that much first, no bait and switch with fake touched up trailers or preorder bonuses only to get a buggy mess on release day. I still think that one of the best things to happen to gaming is not RTX or 4k gaming monitors or VR... it's steam's 2-hour refund policy lol.
A game is worth only how much people are willing to pay
Piracy will end up cancelling this.
"Episodic gaming is a tax on the impatient" While I understand the intention behind that, with games being purely online and servers getting shut down for games daily, that's not always going to be true. I can very easily imagine a day in which a game who's first episode was released long enough ago that the servers for it are shut down before the prices for the full story are discounted to a normal game's price level.
Second tangent off of that.... What if the second part of the story of a trilogy doesn't sell well? Instead of getting a complete story, you're at the mercy of the company to decide to continue the story instead of just cutting their losses. Never leave yourself at the mercy of companies because they will always let you down
Hollowknight is a modern example of this where, when you start the game, the names of the devs appear on the screen during the intro and they can do that because there are like 4 of them
For me, I guess it depends on how much you get out of the game. What I will definitively say is that battle passes, in game currency, and other transactions that make the game p2w should not exist.
its not about having or not having a conclusion , but more about the number of hours of contente the game provides, (ofc not counting recicling content). but you can have 1 game devided by 3 or more parts if the parts are long enough its fine.
Absolutely not.
I'm not gonna pay 3x75 for a game that has as much content in total then what gra San Andreas single player had for 50. And that game was finished when it was released. Unlike games these days.
This is some utter bullshit
So game companies can add filler content to increase the numbers of hours.
@@RedRingOfDead I would disagree, in the sense that parts of a divided game can have the parts fleshed out enough to be worth something closer to full price. But that depends on the game. Final Fantasy 7 Remake is a good example.
@@RippahRooJizah just think about it, do you really think game studios are going to do this? We all know it's about cold hard numbers. And snipping a game in 3 pieces, having the same length as GTA San Andreas total is the way they probably are going to it. Having a game for example being 10hrs total playtime for what would've been 75.
Now you get 5 hrs in the first for 75
3 hours in the second part for 75
And 2 hrs in the third part for 75.
Games will not get better, only more expensive.
@@RedRingOfDead You know very well they would never sell a 2 hour part of a game for 75 dollars, that's unreasonable. The more unscrupulous studios will inflate that number at the very least.
But, yes, I do think some game studios *will* flesh out the parts on good faith if it comes to that, because there is precedent. And I know some won't.
I liked how in Sea of Stars you can accelerate credits so you choose whether you watch all of them carefully in a slow reading pace or you just basically fast forward through them. Especially that it lists all the backers from Kickstarter
Look at INFRA, that is episodic done right, it was made in three parts BUT if you bought the game after it was done it was the full game and if you bought early in dev you got each part as it was done.
It is a true shame, the world we live in requires ever increasing profits year on year for companies. Developers laid off not because of a lack of profits or revenue but due to lack of profit growth. With that in mind, in my opinion where the game industry is going with Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of games is very different to what we experienced with the Last of Us. What I see happening is essentially a fantastic opportunity (for companies not the consumer) to implement shrinkflation in this industry. We see it time and again at our local grocery stores, a packet of chocolate or can of beans is smaller compared to how it was, yet still as expensive if not more. The way the industry is going that will be coming to our games and to some degree has already started. I doubt it will be as obvious, we just have to look at the grocery store items, we don't blink twice about it at all really. Majority of consumers just go about their day. But companies like Activision will in effect create games that have a smaller play time yet price it as what we today consider a full game, and the same for the next part which will also be smaller in size compared to a full game but potentially similar in price. And maybe it won't be the decreasing play time, but maybe the advancement in graphics or whatnot, it'll all be done to a lesser degree with these practices implemented by companies. That's my opinion fleshed out a little bit, let me know what you think
tomb raider 2013 and shadow of the tomb raider was a good example sort of a episodic release and both games stories "concluded" but tomb raider 2013's story was expanded to shadow of the tomb raider. But it should be a wrapped up story in each section with a option to expand story, missions etc in a new realise for example and players dont feel like they got scammed if the studio doesnt end up releasing the next game
And also the games were pretty long
@@Blockbuster2033 true but still good games
The short summary is we'd all like to have a bigger world to enjoy for the games we enjoy.
Don't waste time on a sinking ship, but also don't design a ship that will sink. Design a game that can stand on its own and then spend the next years improving that game because its your flagship.
For armored core 6 if they had a chapter 1.5, 2.5, 3.5 expansion I would buy it.
The problem stems from the fact these big triple A studios believe that a single player game needs a hollywood production crew behind it to mean anything.
In terms of episodic gaming and DLCs and stuff, it should be like The Witcher 3, where you have the main part which is a story you can call closed in it self, and then each DLC just releases new quests or even a new story branch or make it like Cyber Punk 2077, where the DLC is like an aditional route you can take WITHIN the main story. And then, again like The witcher, is each game closed in itself so that you HAVE Part 1, 2 and 3 but you can play all of them individually without even having heard of the others. And each BASE GAME PART is its own FULL AND COMPLETE game so it's obviously full price and the DLCs are way cheaper and don't "complete the story" but instead add to it.
And about pricings, I would say, ANYTHING above 50 bucks for a copy of the main game is way to expensice. 60 is barely aceptable and if you charge me 80 there are better already ALL DLCs and extras included that will ever be released for that game. 100 Bucks and you have the collectors editions with physical extra stuff. But now it's not about the game anymore and therefor a different topic.
Piracy.
Aye, aye captain!!!
That is why developers are gonna start skipping PC ports. Rockstar started the trend.
@@77edwilson More and more devs are making PC ports..not the opposite.
@@77edwilsonisn’t that just shootings themselves in the foot?
Then why they should create games at all?
I remember Back To The Future by TellTale and it was six parts but was just one game - but given the movie franchise it felt like separate smaller games that conclude in the last act
I think Luke is 100% correct here, in *most* cases, this won't be used to deliver complete pieces of content, it'll be used to exploit gamers out of as much money as possible and pay CEOs more while they pay devs less
The big thing is they need to be release in a timely fashion. If the game takes 2 weeks to beat but then they dont release part two for 6 months. i will have lost all interest to continue it most likely.
Even worse in the UK, games have gone from £40 to £70
Yeah but part of that is because of the pound losing so much of it's value compared to the USD. The UK was one of the few markets that Apple raised the prices of one of their recent phones in because of the steep decline of the pound at the time.
How is this "worse"? If you just take the inflation from 1990 to today, games should cost more than double compares to the 90ies. I paid 50$ for civilization 1 in 1992. That would be 120 today. An that does not even take into account that e.G. CIV6 has magnitudes more content.
@@fabianfeilcke7220 You are joking right?
Games are making more profit then ever before.
Back in the day NO ONE could afford games, 99% of kids were lucky for the odd game or 2 a year. Games were at modern prices back then.
Thats why they never went up in price
@@alumlovescake Some games are. Most are not. There is a reason why so many game dev studios go belly up.
@@fabianfeilcke7220 Yeah and its because they either make garbage or don't know how to budget
I've never been against increasing the price of games. Sell it for $100 for I care. If that's what it's worth, then I'm all for it.
I also don't mind having episodic games. However, if a game is going to be sold as episodic, it cannot have a price of a full game per episode.
Game Expansions are also perfectly reasonable.
However, taking a game, cutting it up, and then selling each "part" at full price is a very unreasonable model, imo.
The other problem with episodic gaming is that you now have to re-advertise for each of those parts.
Tbh for a solid gaming experience like GOW or Elden Ring I would pay 140€. But there has to be a commitment by the publisher to not alter the game drastically with micro transactions a few month after launch. Payed DLCs that give value and are not just artificially cut content from the release version are also fine in my opinion.
Nope that’s so fucking expensive. You’d pay half the price of a console for a single game? If games were that expensive I’d be priced out of the hobby
I liked the first life is strange back in the day. Every episode was a cliffhanger that just left you itching for the next one. I recently replayed it and needed a break after the ending of episode 3 because it still hits hard even when I am already expecting it. Back then when we did not know what was next it was insane to have to live with it. It was an experience.
Yeah, episodic can be absolutely amazing. I just don't trust the majority of current devs/corporations to handle it
TLOU isn’t an episodic game series…? “Part 2” is an entirely new game.
It's not episodic. It's literally splitting a full game into pieces to charge you more.
It's been a long time since I've been excited for a game. This year has been wild for having to come to the realization I'll never be the target audience for anything ever again.
Streaming and modern movies? Terrible! Triple A games? Terrible! Honestly the only thing worth doing is reading books anymore. And you can get those from the library without paying lol
You just became old. You will never get as excited again even though the games are objectively better than in the past. Just try playing some of your favorites from back then. You immediately recognise how clunky games were back then
@@fabianfeilcke7220 Lol, games have objectively gotten worse over time. Last I checked a game from 2003 didn't have paid cosmetics up the ass and enough dark patterns to make a crossword puzzle out of.
Everything I hated about episodic games on a large scale is in coming I really really hope folks are smart enough to really tighten their wallets and don't buy in to this shit.
Video games as a market are very broad nowadays, and unfortunately I think the industry has reached a point where it is too big to fail as ordinary people are more than willing to shell out exorbitant sums for games. My friends always buy the early edition of games where they get to play it a few days earlier for $10 extra. This is just the reality of the situation
@@blueshellincident just because your friends are willing to pay to play a game early does not mean the rest of the world is also you have to pre-order as well to get the privilege to be able to pay for early access which has been known to be going down year over year for many titles.
Games in Aus are already getting toward 120, 130 total cost, this will literally price people out of gaming if it gets passed on down here
I like the reverse of this situation where Halo MCC costed less at the beginning when you pre-bought all the games (as opposed to if you bought everything now) since you were buying a promise
Good developers will make it work well, and bad developers will rip off the idea and do it poorly.
Love them or hate them, Sony has some of the best development teams around right now (Insomniac, Santa Monica, Naughty Dog, House Marque, Blue Point, and so on.) If something like this has the potential to work at all, they will find a way. The tricky part IMO will be dividing the games out in a satisfying way where they stand on their own, but also feel like pieces of something bigger. Miles Morales is actually a really good example of something like this. In another dimension, I could absolutely see that as an "Episode 2" for the original Spider-Man game.
If AAA games are going to be 150 dollars, i'll just stop playing AAA games. For that much money you could buy 10 indie games, some of which are better than a AAA game.
Ive already stopped. 70$ for an unfinished buggy mess? No thanks.
I really hope they dont do episodic gaming. Because its never going to be each part is its "own game." Its basically just going to be one game that should be together, split into two or more. Lets have spiderman 2018 for example. The story for the first one was around 18 hours to complete. If they made spiderman 2018 in 2 parts, its not like you would get more content. It basically be stopping at the halfway point, only getting a 9 hour experience, and then paying again for the last 9 hours. That game would have not sold as well as it did if they decided to go with the episodic model. At least I would definitely wait until I get the 2 parts together.
I think we really need to define terms here.
If they're breaking the story up into multiple parts, but each part is a complete package by itself, that's just a sequel. If they release each part on a yearly schedule, that's just making it a yearly release. The only way we're not just talking about sequels is if each part isn't a complete package by itself, in which case we'll just be buying three unfinished games and hoping they add up to more than the sum of their parts.
I bet I haven't spent more than $15 on a game in the past decade, especially for the ones I actually still play. Only exception would be some of my Nintendo discs; and I'll eventually buy some soundtracks, because that's what I'm personally into.
Same for me. All the games I play were either free on Epic, on sale on Steam or official Steam Key websites. Star Wars Battlefront II for $4.79 or Horizon: Zero Dawn Complete Edition for $12.29. The most expensive game I purchased was Space Engineers for $20. I can't pay for a lot of $70+ (or $100 in the near future) games.
Your games were $60 as a kid?? Damn. When I was a kid here in the states, $30 was triple A.
Not at launch. Game of the year edition maybe. Almost all triple a games at release were 60 for a long time.
@@anynigmaSonic the Hedgehog 2 was 54.99 at launch. So you’re totally right on the money. Sometimes games like Baldur’s Gate 2 were $80 if I recall correctly.
Here in the US it depended on the platform as a game back in the 90's on the GameBoy, or Game Gear could be $25 to $40 depending on the game, and where it was bought from, but a game on the Genesis, SNES, 32X, PS1, Saturn, N64, etc.. could be $30 to $80 for a game like Earthbound on the SNES when it came out. Then we get into computers where a simple shareware game could be little as $5 all the way to $100 for a major flight sim title with all the extra goodies. but on average most games were $40 to $60 USD when new across the board for a very long time.
Having said that no way I'd ever pay $150 for a game, and the most I'm willing to pay at the very very top is $80 if it's a really really good game, but I can always wait for an expensive game to drop in price, and play it later on.
an atari cartridge was a lot more than $50, n64 games were $50-70
When they increase prices further, I will buy games used off ebay and when they stop me from doing this, i will no longer be a gamer and they will get nothing at all from me.
3:10 that already happens. With season pass 1, season pass 2, Side quests pack....
Games are not only having to compete with other new games being released.. they have to compete with decades of existing games that are often dirt cheap and on high discount all the time and also games being sold in bundle sites or given away free. Why pat £89 for 1 game when you can get 20 games that are only 5 to 10 years old for that price?
One example would be Halo Infinite vs. the Master Chief Collection and Halo Wars.
You COULD pay 60 bucks for a singular game from today, but you COULD also buy literally every single Halo title up to Halo 4, including the spinoff, for the same price.
@@halomika4973 For fun I created a private browser tab and added to my cart a bunch of game bundles of larger\well known games on steam and set a "budget" of £100 and I was able to make a bundle of 28/31 games(one game was the Spyro remastered trilogy, so 3 for 1) and still had 30p left over. 100s of hours of gameplay in total. If I shopped around harder I could quite easily get an even better deal/bundle.
*massively profitable corporate industry plans to triple prices*
Linus: gawk gawk gawk yes daddy
Star Wars: A New Hope: The Game
Ending with the destruction of the Death Star and Medal Ceremony - Yippie
Ending with the Falcon being tractored into the Death Star - Bantha Poodoo
My favorite jrpg recently is chained echoes. Thanks for introducing me to it. I wish I could have had the game on the harder settings.
when starcraft 2 was split into three games that you had to buy to play the whole thing I decided it wasnt worth the 150 bucks and didnt play it and I still havnt
Id pay 150 for GTA 6 but not for any other. Games like that have to build respect. knowing there will be support for 10 , 15 years on. Its worth it. However a Game like Call of duty it would be a joke as they pump out a new game every year.
Hahhaha pathetic. Imagine if everybody thinks like that. "I'll pay 150 for my favorite game"
This. However call of duty mobile imo has the best model ever. Fully free to play no purchase needed. Buy season for £5 once and each season has enough CP to buy the following season. If you stop playing and skip an entire 2 month season yes you'll have to rebuy for about £7 (only the 1st is £5) but you can finish the season pass in a weekend. Then skins cost £130 to £250 and the 0.01% of players that buy them cover the cost of others. However they aren't directly paying for their game play but they definitely cover costs.
@@Sarackosmo i would and i have stellaris have a really scummy dlc practice but they don't give up on their game and im happy to support the ongoing development. ps i have spent over £200 on that game.
not even close to my favorite game. its a game that will last and be active for 10 plus years. with continuous support.. not alot of games like that out there.
@@Sarackosmo
The discussion seems to be Movies series vs miniseries
Imagine being in the UK where publishers think its okay to sell games at a 1:1 conversion rate between the £ and the $.
Great job with the exceptional underplaying the economy of scale by comparing price points, team sizes and game play from before most people in this space were alive to GTA 5.... Bad takes being aside, this one belongs in the "ran my mouth and am deleting video" pile since someone promised to "do better"...
I'm not sure what the issue is. How was this a 'bad take'?
Because his point completely downplays the economy of scale. Even today GTA 5 sells for between 15 and 30 USD up from launch at what, 55 USD? It sold 190 million units, and that is just downloaded sales, much less anything else, e.g. microtransactions and deals... Do the math, min max that, and figure out how much they made doing that game. Now go talk about super mario whatever from 1990 whatever that sold 1/2 million units... People such at exploitational growth, and here is another bad take explaining that. 1 Million and 1 Billion are so fundamentally different it's hard to understand the scale of it.@@RippahRooJizah
In AUD the games back in the day used to be max AUD$60 and now days it breached the AUD$100 barrier....standard editions et al now AUD$99-110 and deluxe editions close to AUD$200 fellow Aussies, correct me if I'm wrong please.
I want to sit down (usually on holiday break) and play a big juicy game start to finish. I generally don't have the time or interest to pick up a game i played 3-6 months ago just because a DLC dropped. Most of the time i wait for the GOTY or 'complete' edition to release before picking up AAA games.
This does sometimes result in me not playing games i probably would have enjoyed because the Dev's just can't seem to wrap it up. Grim Dawn and Stellaris come to mind.
Episodic gaming, following the baseball example...
You can get out, and never make it home, never get all the parts.
As if the final goal is to create the same game you would have made anyhow, but in parts, you can still have a failure, that kills a company, or gets canned by a publisher.
Starcraft 2 came out in 3 parts, but each campaign had its own storyline focused on each race. They got tied together well so it felt cohesive but the game was complete when it was Wings of Liberty, Heart of the Swarm, or Legacy of the Void. Online got updated even if you never bought the later games as well so competition was still accessible; you just didn't get the campaigns. If that's the model, no problem.
My issue with parts is that part 1 and 3 can be totally different Quality
I mean bg3 act one pretty much released standalone as early acces
I think from software does it best where you get a full complete game and then paid dlc a year or two later